178 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865the past, the problem of inherited guilt overshadowing the present, was to become a
major theme because it was an integral part of his own experience. The sense of guilt
was especially strong because John Hathorne, the son of that “first ancestor,” had
been a judge at the Salem witchcraft trials. A family tradition even had it that John
had been cursed by one of his victims, declaring, “if you take away my life, God will
give you blood to drink.” Hawthorne was later to use that curse as the basis for his
second novel. And, long before that, he was inclined to attribute the subsequent
decline of the Hathorne family, more than half-seriously, to this chilling event.
For decline the Hathorne family certainly did. To make matters worse, Hawthorne’s
father, a sea captain, died when Hawthorne was only 4, leaving his widow to mourn
him in a long life of eccentric seclusion. As a boy, he was already acquiring what he
would call his “cursed habit of solitude.” He did go to college for a while, where he
began a lifelong friendship with a future poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and a
future president, Franklin Pierce. But, on returning to his mother’s house, he spent
the next twelve years in what he called his “chamber under the eaves,” reading and
writing. Hawthorne’s attitude to this solitude was characteristically ambivalent. On
the one hand, he could admit, in a letter to Longfellow, that he felt “carried apart
from the main current of life.” On the other hand, as he sensed, he was learning his
craft. And he was also discovering his subject since, repeatedly in his fiction, he
concentrates on people who seem to be outside of life, set apart by pride, or egotism,
or innocence, or guilt. The four major characters in The Scarlet Letter, for instance,
are all like this; each, for quite different reasons, seems to be cut off from ordinary
humanity. So, for that matter, are the protagonists in many of his tales. In “The
Minister’s Black Veil” (1837), it is Parson Hooper’s obsession with guilt that severs
him from the human community: viewing the world through the veil of his own
guilt, he thinks he sees a black veil on every face around him. In “Wakefield” (1837)
it is the eponymous hero’s disengagement. A cold-hearted, selfish, vain, crafty, and
strange man, Wakefield leaves his wife and home one day and does not return for
twenty years; he little realizes that, “by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes
himself to the fearful risk of losing his place forever,” to “become, as it were, the
Outcast of the Universe.” And in “Ethan Brand” (1851) it is Brand’s intellectual
egotism, his cold detachment. Seeking to find “The Unpardonable Sin,” he discovers
that what he seeks is what he himself has committed: in the course of his search,
separating intellect from feeling, he becomes “no longer a brother man,” he realizes,
but “a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at
length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling the wires to such
degrees of crime as were demanded from his study.”
In 1828 Hawthorne published his first novel, Fanshawe: A Tale, anonymously and
at his own expense. An autobiographical work, it went unnoticed. But it did attract
the attention of its publisher, Samuel Goodrich, who then published many of
Hawthorne’s short stories in his periodical, The Token. Eventually, these were reprinted
in a volume, Twice-Told Tales, in 1837, then in a larger version in 1842. In a
characteristically modest and self-critical preface, Hawthorne referred to his tales as
having “the pale tint of flowers blossomed in too retired a shade.” They do, however,GGray_c02.indd 178ray_c 02 .indd 178 8 8/1/2011 7:54:42 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 42 AM