288 Chapter 10 The Making of Middle-Class America
his father died and his grief-stricken mother became a
recluse. Left largely to his own devices, he grew to be
a lonely, introspective person. Wandering about New
England by himself in summertime, he soaked up
local lore, which he drew on in writing short stories.
Hawthorne’s early stories, originally published in
magazines, were brought together in Twice-Told
Tales (1837). They made excellent use of New
England culture and history for background but
were concerned chiefly with the struggles of individ-
uals with sin, guilt, and especially the pride and isola-
tion that often afflict those who place too much
reliance on their own judgment. His greatest works
were two novels written after the Whigs turned him
out of his government job in 1849. The Scarlet Letter
(1850), a grim yet sympathetic analysis of adultery,
condemned not the woman, Hester Prynne, but the
people who presumed to judge her. The House of the
Seven Gables(1851) was a gripping account of the
decay of an old New England family brought on by
the guilt feelings of the current owners of the house,
caused by the way their ancestors had cheated the
original owners of the property.
Like Poe, Hawthorne was appre-
ciated in his own day and widely read;
unlike Poe, he made a modest amount
of money from his work. Yet he was
never very comfortable in the society
he inhabited. He had no patience with
the second-rate. And despite his suc-
cess in creating word pictures of a
somber, mysterious world, he consid-
ered America too prosaic a country to
inspire good literature. “There is no
shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no
picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor
anything but a commonplace prosper-
ity,” he complained.Herman Melville
In 1850, while Hawthorne was writ-
ingThe House of the Seven Gables, his
publisher introduced him to another
writer who was in the midst of a
novel. The writer was Herman
Melville and the book, Moby-Dick.
Hawthorne and Melville became
good friends at once, for despite their
dissimilar backgrounds, they had a
great deal in common. Melville was a
New Yorker, born in 1819, one of
eight children of a merchant of distin-
guished lineage. His father, however,
lost all his money and died when the
boy was twelve. Herman left school at fifteen, worked
briefly as a bank clerk, and in 1837 went to sea. For
eighteen months, in 1841 and 1842, he was crewman
on the whaler Acushnet. Then he jumped ship in the
South Seas. For a time he lived among a tribe of canni-
bals in the Marquesas; later he made his way to Tahiti,
where he idled away nearly a year. After another year at
sea he returned to America in the fall of 1844.
Although he had never before attempted serious
writing, in 1846 he publishedTypee, an account of his
life in the Marquesas. The book was a great success,
for Melville had visited a part of the world almost
unknown to Americans, and his descriptions of his
bizarre experiences suited the taste of a romantic age.
Success inspired him to write a sequel,Omoo(1847);
other books followed quickly.
Experience made Melville too aware of the evil in
the world to be a transcendentalist. His dark view of
human nature culminated inMoby-Dick(1851). This
book, Melville said, was “broiled in hellfire.” Against
the background of a whaling voyage (no better
account of whaling has ever been written), he dealt
subtly and symbolically with the problems of goodThe House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, on which Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
novel was based. The house symbolized the past’s stranglehold on the present: “If each
generation were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that single change... would
imply almost every reform which society is now suffering for.” Love, Hawthorne suggested,
was a means to break the fetters of the past.