Hawthorne's unfinished window: Romance and symbolic fiction in his late work.
Item
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Title
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Hawthorne's unfinished window: Romance and symbolic fiction in his late work.
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Identifier
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AAI9732914
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identifier
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9732914
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Creator
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Edge, Teresa Barberio.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Felicia Bonaparte
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American
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Abstract
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Nathaniel Hawthorne's late works include two long, unfinished manuscripts that occupied him for more than a decade before his death. Sometimes written in the first-person, these works hold great autobiographical interest and also suggest something more. Taken together, they represent an extended review of his past themes and concerns; they help to put his last years in perspective; and they recast the work of his entire career in a clearer light.;As a pilgrimage over past ground, these fragmentary manuscripts reexamine such themes as estrangement, mysticism, and a deep distrust of art, putting these now into a final context. Gothic structures, deep moral questioning, and a symbolic ancestral home that is beyond reach are eloquent reminders of the "power of blackness" that Melville discovered in Hawthorne's tales. The resulting work is a kind of prose poetry that assimilates romance. As Henry James may be understood, through Hawthorne's influence, to assimilate romance and realism toward psychological realism, here we see Hawthorne attempting to assimilate romance and realism toward a kind of romantic idealism and symbolic truth.;It is the inner mind rather than the outside world that Hawthorne is writing about in these pieces. Like Fanshawe, Hawthorne's first fictional hero, Septimius, his last, is unable to participate in the world. Withdrawn and pale, he is contrasted with society's standard, with, in Fanshawe, for example, the Edward Walcotts or, in the Septimius stories, the Robert Hagburns of this world.;Hawthorne's voice is personal in these final works. It expresses a tragic modernism; and although his use of third-person narrative allows him a degree of detachment, we feel his presence and the suggestion of his approaching death as he goes over and over old themes and struggles to put them into a final order. He is, however, until the very end, the observer that James found him.;The direction of the unfinished works is toward transformation. They are part of the artist's process of imagination, and their reality lies as much in Hawthorne's imagining and reimagining them as in the final works themselves.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
