By almost all accounts, The Marble Faun is the most obscure of Hawthorne's four full-length romances. Not only does it break stride with the other long romances and most of the short fiction by being set outside the United States ( “Rappaccini's Daughter,” the notable exception, is also set in Italy), but it seems even to violate Hawthorne's own carefully specified definition of romance fiction. This is the definition put forth in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, in which Hawthorne establishes the basic features of what becomes an influential, perhaps definitive American genre:

Describing the forest scene in The Scarlet Letter in which Hester and Dimmesdale “recognize that, in spite of all their open and secret misery, they are still lovers, and capable of claiming for the very body of their sin a species of justification,” novelist William Dean Howells writes, “There is greatness in this scene unmatched, I think, in the book, and I was almost ready to say, out of it.”The emotional climax in a book of many memorable scenes, Hester's and Dimmesdale's reunion in the forest has captured readers' imaginations for generations. Despite the importance of the love story of which that scene is a part, however, some of the best recent political readings of the novel have diverted our attention from or downplayed its significance.

For instance, in “The Politics of The Scarlet Letter” Jonathan Arac argues that the novel’s famous ambiguity needs to be understood in relation to the politics of inaction on the issue of slavery as expressed in Hawthorne’s campaign biography of President Franklin Pierce. As groundbreaking as this essay was, its major mention of the love story comes when Arac notes that “ ‘adulterer’ (or ‘adultery’?) is nowhere spelled out in Hawthorne’s text, just as ‘slavery’ is nowhere present in the Declaration or the Constitution.” Similarly, Sacvan Bercovitch asserts that the love scene Howells praises “is a lovers’ reunion, a pledge of mutual dependence, and no doubt readers have sometimes responded in these terms, if only by association with other texts. But in this text the focus of our response is the individual, not the couple (or the family).”

In 1802, less than thirty-one weeks after her wedding, Elizabeth Manning Hathorne gave birth to her first child, Elizabeth. Nathaniel Hawthorne the writer, her second child, was born two years later. Interestingly, there are only two things we can say with certainty about this bridal pregnancy. First, we do not know how Hawthorne's parents, their families or indeed Hawthorne himself regarded it. Second, the reason that we cannot infer their responses is that, while one in three brides were pregnant in the last third of the eighteenth century, by 1850 when Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter bridal pregnancies had become infrequent and completely unacceptable.

When sexual codes alter thus much and so quickly, something much wider is happening in society. This late eighteenth-century incidence of premarital sex was “a product of profound social disequilibrium,” and disappeared once familial, social, and economic situations changed yet again. Hawthorne’s lifetime (1804–64) spans a period of great and rapid change when, in little over half a century, America transformed itself politically, economically, and in its social arrangements. Hawthorne grew up surrounded by family and townspeople born around or before the Revolution. As he reached adulthood, the Early Republic was metamorphosing into Jacksonian America as the onset of industrial capitalism reinforced an ethos of individualism. He married in 1842 at a time when the so-called middling classes were consolidating, not without difficulty, into a new bourgeoisie in an urbanizing and industrializing northeast. Spending much of the troubled 1850s in Europe, he nonetheless returned to America in time for the Civil War. Furthermore, these enormous changes were contested and uneven in spread.

“Our” Hawthorne

As the afterword to the Hawthorne Centenary volume of essays, Lionel Trilling contributed “Our Hawthorne,” an essay he later republished as “Hawthorne in Our Time.” Although Hawthorne specialists have never been particularly enamored of it, the essay is one of the most important studies of the author during the 1960s, not because it introduces any new scholarship or because it offers some methodological advance. Instead, its interest lies in the way it crystallizes a way of thinking about Hawthorne, his importance to US society as well as to academic values. Trilling's second title may have improved over the first, since it minimizes the issue of ownership and insists, however gently, on the historicity of reception. The first title, however, resonates aptly, evoking as it does how much a generation's reading of Hawthorne, or, indeed, any classic author, lays claim to possession, i.e., the owning of critical rights. “Our” moment, for Trilling, was the post-war era of New Critical predominance, the generation whose Hawthorne has given us the one that the post-1980s generations have needed to overturn or recast.

This sense of critical proprietorship is usually disclosed in scholarly skirmishes through questions of propriety – the protocols of interpretation. Generally claims of possession are made by individuals or by societies, perhaps keepers of the flame who may be outraged by some new revisionist. Trilling’s title reminds us that possession is more nuanced and that a generation, even a whole literary culture, can have a great deal invested in seeing an author in a particular light, perhaps in the way that the post-World War II generation had so much invested in Ernest Hemingway, a veteran of World War I, whose example filled a romantic need to exalt the author as both virile and sensitive.

For a participant in a reform association that aspires to regenerate society, Miles Coverdale, the first-person narrator of Hawthorne's third novel, The Blithedale Romance (1852), spends very little time actually doing the work of social reform. Instead, he seems content simply to look at people, imagine their private circumstances, and fantasize about their sexual proclivities and histories. Does this mean that the narrator of Hawthorne's novel of social reform is merely a voyeur whose only true commitment is to the pleasures of his private imagination? In a key moment about two-thirds into the novel, Coverdale offers his own reflections on his moral imagination just after dreaming that Hollingsworth and Zenobia are kissing over his bed while Priscilla shrinks away, and just before he peers through the boarding-house window where he discovers Zenobia, Priscilla, and Westervelt together for some mysterious purpose. Initially he judges his imagination in negative terms, proclaiming, “That cold tendency, between instinct and intellect, which made me pry with a speculative interest into people’s passions and impulses, appeared to have gone far towards unhumanizing my heart.” But then he rejects that negative assessment, declaring that his voyeuristic tendencies have everything to do with what he regards as the excess of his sympathetic imagination: “But a man cannot always decide for himself whether his own heart is cold or warm. It now impresses me, that, if I erred at all, in regard to Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla, it was through too much sympathy, rather than too little” (iii: 154). Sympathy is the key word here.

Item one. In the “College” episode of the brilliant HBO series The Sopranos, mobster Tony Soprano finds himself sitting in a hallway at Bowdoin College, waiting for his daughter Meadow to complete her admissions interview. We have just watched Soprano set aside his role as bourgeois dad while he garrotes a gangster-turned-informer he has discovered in a nearby town. The camera then shows us the inscription chiseled into the wall above his head: “No man can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.” The author, of course, is identified as Hawthorne, and as the scene ends an undergraduate walks by, informing Tony that “He's our most famous alumnus.”

Item two. Dr. Leon R. Kass, the head of President George Bush’s Council on Bioethics, assigns the members of the council – a body established to advise the President and the National Institutes of Health on the moral questions raised by controversial research initiatives like cloning – to read Hawthorne’s story “The Birth-Mark,” and opens the council’s first meeting with a discussion of that tale of a scientific enthusiasm gone perversely awry.

Item three. “The Connection,” a call-in program on National Public Radio in the US, devotes a show, featuring a panel of Hawthorne scholars, to a discussion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Scarlet Letter. They take a call from Carolyn, in Boise, Idaho: “I would just like to say that I identified with the book because I was an adulteress, I was a single mother, and I had to raise my children by myself. I make no excuses for that, but because I not only had the shame but the children, I had to become more able, stronger, better at other things . . .

This scene of a grown man entering the public sphere hand in hand with a young child is repeated throughout Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction. Most often it serves as an introductory scene, as in the evening stroll of Peter Hovenden and his daughter Annie that begins “The Artist of the Beautiful,” but sometimes too, as when Dimmesdale takes Pearl's hand in the marketplace, it can suggest a kind of resolution. Hawthorne's self-presentation as a writer who wishes to make public on the streets of the town or the pages of a book his connection with childhood, provides important insights into his conception of authorship: much of Hawthorne's authorial persona and cultural legacy are rooted in the “pride” and “delight”with which he claims for himself a mind that goes “hand in hand with the mind of a sinless child.” This chapter is concerned with how for Hawthorne childhood enables not only publicity but authorship itself.

Hawthorne wrote more pieces directly aimed at a juvenile audience than any other canonical male author of the antebellum period. In this way, as in so many others, his literary work is strikingly similar to that of the “scribbling women” he so famously damned. Thus his role as a writer of children’s books does much to illuminate the gender politics of his authorship.

In “Hawthorne and the Twilight of Romance,”Roy Harvey Pearce claims that “in The Marble Faun . . . the sketch becomes the structural core of the novel itself and dominates its form.” This is not, however, a felicitous development in Pearce's view, for he has just described the author as having been subject throughout his career to the “danger”of falling prey to the genre that “so charmed Hawthorne's age.” For Pearce, this seduction story represents the ruin of an author who succumbs in Italy to what he has long flirted with - the “easy way”: the “semi-melodramatic,” “quasiphilosophical” form in which “the writer takes no definite stand.” Since it was first published in 1948, Pearce's essay has remained one of the most influential standard interpretations of The Marble Faun and, though garnering less attention, one of the more fully developed discussions of a constitutive relationship between Hawthorne's literary sketches and his romances. The literary-historical narrative Pearce fashions emerges from his effort to pinpoint the difference between what he perceives to be the successful projects of the first three romances and the “inadequacy and failure” of The Marble Faun. Unlike the earlier romances and “great tales,” in which “form, materials, and meaning cohere, each implicating and demanding the other,” The Marble Faun ends “with ‘half-developed hints’ – apparently the more desirable because half-developed.”

The governing paradox

Hawthorne lived out the classic story of masculine success in America, overcoming early hardship to achieve wealth and fame. Orphaned by the death of his father when he was four years old, he was reared in the household of his mother's family, and lived in near-poverty for most of his life: only at age forty-eight was he able to afford a home of his own. College life at Bowdoin gave Hawthorne friendships with some of the most prominent men of his time, notably Franklin Pierce and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, but did not prepare him for the profession he chose. Becoming a writer was a long struggle, requiring Hawthorne to surmount recurrent frustration and periods of acute self-doubt, as well as severe financial hardship. But at the end of his life, in 1864, Hawthorne was well-to-do and his writings were counted among the masterpieces of world literature. Hawthorne's intimate friends and relations hailed him as an exemplar of true manliness, distinguished by the “military self-command” that had seen him through the hardships and yielded so spectacular a triumph.

Yet a desolating sense of unreality plagued Hawthorne throughout this classic American success-story: “If you know anything of me,” he wrote in his last years, “you know how I sprang out of mystery, akin to none, a thing concocted out of the elements, without visible agency – how, all through my boyhood, I was alone; how I grew up without a root, yet continually longing for one – longing to be connected with somebody – and never feeling myself so” (xii: 257).

Over the past couple of decades, many scholars have reread American authors and their literature as complicit carriers of capitalist, imperialist, nationalist, class, gender, ethnoracial, and sexual ideologies. This critical emphasis on literature's ideological relations to the reproduction of social contradictions has placed literary studies in a more provocative dialogue with cultural theory. In developing this dialogue, it is equally important to recognize that American authors have from the get-go been among America's most complex, self-reflexive, daring, and artful cultural theorists. When critics grant many of these authors and their fictions the credit they deserve, it is easier to see that their creative insights contribute much to modern understandings of the workings - and political possibilities - of culture.

I owe a special debt to Nathaniel Hawthorne for inspiring me to think about such matters, for my earliest readings of his work led me to value American literature as a theoretical resource.1 In his “Custom House” preface to The Scarlet Letter (1850) Hawthorne punned on “customs” when he portrayed himself as a Surveyor of Customs. The term describes not only the government post he held in the Salem Custom House, but also a key aspect of his role as a writer who critically surveyed his culture’s customs, habits of seeing and feeling, and patterns of making significance. Hawthorne learned – and unlearned – much through his narratives, allegories, and anti-allegories of culture, contradiction, and meaning production. To clarify my appreciation of Hawthorne’s power as a cultural theorist, I offer here some brief analyses of his fictions. What I consider, however, is partial – by no means the whole story, or stories.