We live in an age where conspiracy has virtually usurped the political mainstream. “Conspiracy is our theme,” exclaims a character in Don DeLillo’s Running Dog (1989), “Connections, links, secret associations.” In “In His Volleys, Trump Echoes A Provocateur,” Jim Rutenberg tells us of the radio host Alex Jones, in Austin, Texas, who not only believes that 9/11 was an inside job but “that the Sandy Hook school shooting was ‘completely fake’ and that the phony Clinton child-sex trafficking scandal known as Pizzagate warranted serious investigation (which one Facebook fan took upon himself to do, armed with an AR-15).” Jones told Rutenberg that his “audience … is ‘the teeth of the Trump organization on the ground – the information-warfare, organic internal resistance’.”

At the turn of the twentieth century, psychology as the new science, based almost solely on Freud's descriptions of the Oedipal complex, social repression, and the unending battle between eros (love/sex) and thanatos (death), permeated the popular American consciousness so that “repression” became the buzzword of the 1920s. The impressionistic, genteel biographies and critiques of Hawthorne by his heirs, Julian (1884) and Rose (1897), and by such writers as Moncure D. Conway (1890), George E. Woodberry (1902), Frank Preston Stearns (1906), and Carl Van Doren (1921), gave way to the more deeply psychological portraits of a solitary and tormented Hawthorne as conjured up by Paul Elmore More in “The Solitude of Nathaniel Hawthorne” in the Atlantic Monthly of November 1901, and especially Newton Arvin's Hawthorne in 1929. This view of Hawthorne is still with us in the later critical biographies by Frederick Crews (1966), Gloria C. Erlich (1984), and Edward Haviland Miller (1991), culminating in T. Walter Herbert's presentation of the Hawthornes' middle-class marriage as a psychological battle of wills (1993).

Despite the several attempts to humanize Hawthorne and present him as both a genteel and pragmatic soul, the vision of solitude and strangeness did not so easily disappear. It lay at the heart of the notion of the solitary artist, the New England proto-Puritan with his basic Yankee reticence and diffidence. Even though More did “not wonder that his family, in their printed memoirs, should have endeavored in every way to set forth the social and sunny side of his character and should have published the Note-Books with the avowed purpose of dispelling the often expressed opinion that Mr. Hawthorne was gloomy and morbid … The predominant trait of Hawthorne’s work [remains] the penalty of solitude laid upon the human soul … and by right found its deepest expression in the New England heart.” The Hawthorne image, however questioned and interrogated, remained intact, underscored yet again by his regional background.

Despite radical changes in American culture and society since Hawthorne's day, he has managed to remain at the top of the list of American literature's classic writers. In fact over the years he has never been displaced. Through psychological criticism and the study of symbols, myth criticism and deconstruction, linguistic, Marxist and feminist analysis, he has managed to stay in place in the American canon. Jane Tompkins tried in 1985 to undermine his position or at least expose it as the result of a cabal led by the champions of Dead White Males and New England elitists to keep him in the forefront of the concept of a newly emerging American literature in the 1850s and beyond:

From the New Criticism to Ideological Criticism

In the 1960s and 1970s deconstruction, which undermined not only the various dualisms that seemed permanently attached to the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century critical approaches to Hawthorne as man and artist but also the assumptions and strategies of the New Criticism and psychological approaches of the mid-twentieth century, was not the only critical revolution that occurred. Feminist criticism also flourished, as did other perspectives that included those of African American writers and critics and those of Marxist critics with their concerns of class and ideology. In general these can be seen as part of a tendency toward a thorough exploration of the traditional American literary canon and how it was constructed. The roles seen to have been played by women in Hawthorne's life — Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Elizabeth Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller and others — underwent a significant shift from spouse and/or acquaintance to collaborator and subject. The New Critical obeisance to unity broke down, as texts revealed fissures and inconsistencies, as well as traces from previous texts. Cultural compulsions were unearthed and exposed that shaped Hawthorne's idea of women, African Americans, the male role in a capitalist society, and the stratification of class both of the Puritan era and of Hawthorne's own.

The overall difference in critical approaches to Hawthorne's work emerges most clearly when we compare Lionel Trilling's famous essay of 1964, “Our Hawthorne,” to Gordon Hutner's “Whose Hawthorne?” of 2004. Trilling’s essay all but announces the end of the New Critical era. He upbraids Henry James for denying “the darkness of Hawthorne’s mind” (431) and at the same time praises Hawthorne’s strategy of ambiguity as the core of humanity’s moral nature. He recognizes that Hawthorne’s rise as the subject of critical study coincided with the rise of the New Criticism influenced as it was by T. S. Eliot’s notion that literature casts primal spells and is itself “an expression of belief in the magical force and authority of words and their arrangement” (436).

Different eras of literary criticism and biography always overlap and interact with one another, complicit in each other's confrontational positions or interpretations, but we can still detect important shifts in emphasis and method as we move forward chronologically from the nineteenth century into the twentieth century, with its focus on texts as aesthetic objects to be “de-coded” and meticulously analyzed in the New Criticism and its interest in psychological patterns and paradigms, the ambiguities implicit in Hawthorne's style, the mythic overtones and resonance of many of his plots, and the religious underpinnings of much of his vision. Until the turn of the twentieth century criticism tended to be impressionistic, spasmodic, and scattered. Critics interwove a writer's life with his or her art as if one easily explained and reflected the other and pursued various tangents, depending whatever seemed to arise as long as the general narrative followed the overall trajectory of the writer's life. From a contemporary perspective, such criticism looks blurred and diffuse, meandering and aimless as it veers from the life to the art in no rigorous or carefully constructed manner. Much of it is maddening for one trying to track down a critic's position or stance. Much of it proclaims the critic's point of view and ideological stance in no uncertain terms, doggedly and repetitiously, yet wading through Hawthorne criticism and biography in the last half of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century is by and large a thankless task, searching for nuggets of insight and perspective that are often difficult to locate.

On June 22, 2006, an illustrated invitation arrived via email. It showed two women, one with a high starched collar and white bow, the other in the foreground, a nun, her face shrouded in a nun's habit in all of its whiteness with the black wimple curtaining it. The invitation read:

Preceding pages offered oval portraits of Sophia, Una, and Nathaniel Hawthorne to honor the memory of Sophia, Hawthorne's wife, and Una, their older daughter, “on the historic day of their re-interment alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Their original graves in Kensal Green Cemetery, the oldest English cemetery still in operation in London, had fallen into disrepair over the years when a hawthorn tree, oddly enough, had fallen and damaged the original cemetery markers, knocking over Una's headstone. Sophia had been buried there in 1871 at sixty-two. Una had followed in 1877 at thirty-three. The Dominican nuns, a Catholic order established by Rose Hawthorne, Sophia and Nathaniel's younger daughter, to care for dying cancer patients in what was one of the first hospices of its kind, had taken care of the graves and had tried for many years to raise funds to move the remains to Concord. In 2003, Rose Hawthorne had been proposed as a candidate for sainthood.

The nineteenth century declared that Hawthorne was a genius, as if that resolved everything about him and his work, and scattered impressions this way and that about his vision of solitude and isolation, his morbid mind and his solitary ways, his fixation on guilt and sin, sorrow and sympathy, all in an atmosphere of proclaiming the birth of a genuine American literature to counteract the British hold on American culture and fiction. But the man himself managed to evade all would-be critics and scattershot analysts, presenting himself to the world in his prefaces as a pale Romantic fellow, haunted in haunted rooms, and troubled by his fascination with allegory as if it were small recompense for his inability to grapple with the real world that lay around him, opaque, dense, and indecipherable.

Yet another dualism or polarity haunts every Hawthorne biography: how was one to relate the “morbidity” of his vision to the elegant gentility of his style? Was the latter used to disguise the former? Was the vision itself so dark that Hawthorne could only approach it instead of descending into it? How could such a life be lived with this nearly schizophrenic division between the dark romancer who buried himself in solitude in his study and the practical man who worked to obtain political appointments? Biographers would shift back and forth from one to the other, from periods in which the dark romancer took over the center of the tale to the reinstatement of the practical man of letters.

We begin to see in the literary criticism of the late 1960s and 1970s the “linguistic turn” and the deconstructionist perspective that originated at that time in the criticism of French philosophers and social critics such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Francois Lyotard and was explored by critics such as Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller. While Derrida dealt explicitly with language and texts and Lyotard with the demise of metanarraritives, those overarching cultural myths of progress and value, Barthes dismantled and deconstructed the idea that an author's intentions could be discovered in a text (in proclaiming the death of the author), Foucault undermined hierarchical concepts of power (he saw power dispersed everywhere and in everyone, even in discourse itself), while de Man and Miller refined Derrida's original ideas. Each of these critics, whom we can label “deconstructionist” in opposition to the more traditional critics with their New Critical perspectives and backgrounds, attacked conventional concepts such as language's transparency and connection to the world at large, the author's individual intentions in regard to her text, and power as a simple hierarchy to which individuals are subject as citizens to states.

From the deconstructionist point of view, everything becomes a text, a discourse. All the symbolic, psychological, and mythic patterns that the New Critics championed are the creation of language, which in many ways becomes, in Fredric Jameson's phrase, its own prison house, its own code that is separated from the world at large. All dualisms and polarities break down and collapse inward upon themselves as if into a black hole. Representation becomes suspect; words feed only upon themselves in their sense of difference and deferral and do not lead the reader to any world beyond the text. Everything becomes a signifier of something else, never a signified. All is metonymy, parts of an imagined but forever deferred nonexistent whole. We can know only disruption, dispersion, and disconnection, however much language tries to convince us otherwise. Language speaks us rather than the other way around, and we are victims of such cultural codes and conventions as we become aware of such linguistic structures and patterns and how they operate within and around us. As we become more aware of such conventions, we recognize more clearly our own victimization in relation to them.

When the opportunity arose to write about Hawthorne once again, how could I refuse? I had critically wrestled with his work in In Hawthorne's Shadow: American Romance from Melville to Mailer (1985) and Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance (1998). While the first book traces the thematic influences and images of Hawthorne's Manichean vision on the many writers who came after him, and the second explores the effects of mesmerism on his fiction, not just thematically but structurally in terms of how he described the American romance, in this book I have produced a critical overview of critics who have written about Hawthorne and his work from as far back as the 1830s up to 2010.

This new book is meant to be a survey of Hawthorne's critics, an introduction to their work, which offers many perspectives, and will explore their strengths and weaknesses, providing an overall view of the development of Hawthorne criticism over the span of more than a hundred and fifty years. The book, therefore, attempts not to produce some new perspective on Hawthorne's fiction, although I will suggest a new way of regarding it, but to investigate and scrutinize the field of Hawthorne studies from the mid-nineteenth-century up to the present day. Its organization depends both on chronological and topical points of view, with individual chapters that deal with nineteenth-century, twentieth-century and early-twenty-first century biographies and criticism as well as the developing critical assumptions that underlie them.