Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 177thought, or of anyone or any movement that claimed to have solved the mystery and
resolved the contradictions of life. That included the two major historical movements
associated with his native New England of which he had intimate experience:
Puritanism and Transcendentalism. He was someone who managed to make great
art, not so much out of bewilderment, as out of ambiguity, irresolution – a refusal to
close off debate or the search for truth. His friend and great contemporary, Herman
Melville, spoke admiringly of Hawthorne’s ability to “say no in thunder” to the
fixities and definites of life; his great disciple, Henry James, declared that Hawthorne
“had a cat-like faculty of seeing in the dark.” Hawthorne was undoubtedly a moralist,
concerned in particular with the moral errors of egotism and pride, separation from
what he called “the magnetic chain of humanity.” But he was a moralist who was
acutely aware of just how complex the human character and human relations are,
just how subtle and nicely adjusted to the particulars of the case moral judgments
consequently have to be – and how moral judgment does not, in any event, preclude
imaginative understanding, even sympathy. He was also someone who had inherited
from his Puritan ancestors what he termed his “inveterate love of allegory.” But his
alertness to the dualities of experience, his sense that the world was at once intractably
material and irresolvably mysterious, meant that, in his hands, allegory passed into
symbolism: an object or event assumed multiple possible significances, rather than
correspondence with one, divinely ordained idea. Finally, Hawthorne was, he
confessed in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, an author of romances
rather than novels. “When a writer calls his work a Romance,” he pointed out, “it
need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude”; he asks to be
allowed to deviate, rather more than usual, from the illusion of reality and to cloak
his subject in “some ... legendary mist.” But, for Hawthorne, that greater imaginative
freedom was a means, not an end. His aim, and achievement, was to maneuver the
romance form so as to unravel the secrets of personality and history: “the truth of
the human heart,” as Hawthorne himself put it, and the puzzling question of whether
the present is an echo or repetition of the past, a separate world “disjoined by time,”
or a mixture somehow of both.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, to Nathaniel and
Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne: the author was later to add the “w” to his name
in a curious, but entirely characteristic, act of disengagement from but deferral to the
past – in the sense that he did not drop the family name, but added to it. Both his
parents were descended from prominent New England families. On his mother’s
side, the Mannings had migrated from England in 1679. And on his father’s side,
Hawthorne’s earliest American ancestor, William, had arrived in Massachusetts in- “The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and
dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remem-
ber,” Hawthorne was later to say in “The Custom House,” the introductory essay to
his greatest novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850). “He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was
a ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil.” Hawthorne
could not help feeling involved with his New England homeplace and ancestry. New
England was, in fact, to become the setting for most of his stories; and the burden of
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