Hawthorne's Habitations
A Literary Life
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- $79.99
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- $79.99
Publisher Description
The first literary/biographical study of Hawthorne's full career in almost forty years, Hawthorne's Habitations presents a self-divided man and writer strongly attracted to reality for its own sake and remarkably adept at rendering it yet fearful of the nothingness he intuited at its heart.
Making extensive use of Hawthorne's notebooks and letters as well as nearly all of his important fiction, Robert Milder's superb intellectual biography distinguishes between "two Hawthornes," then maps them onto the physical and cultural locales that were formative for Hawthorne's character and work: Salem, Massachusetts, Hawthorne's ancestral home and ingrained point of reference; Concord, Massachusetts, where came into contact with Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller and absorbed the Adamic spirit of the American Renaissance; England, where he served for five years as consul in Liverpool, incorporating an element of Englishness; and Italy, where he found himself, like Henry James's expatriate Americans, confronted by an older, denser civilization morally and culturally at variance with his own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Milder's intriguing study of the intersection between Nathanial Hawthorne's life and work is a biography that's equal parts close reading and psychological portrait. Drawing heavily on the Scarlet Letter author's notebooks, as well as his published writings and third-person primary sources, the book relentlessly presents both the author's mind and work as hotbeds of unresolved dichotomies. Caught between the tendencies of a naturalist observer and a romantic who must impose moral meaning on what he sees, Hawthorne remained stuck, unable to either abandon the energies of the world around him or to fully believe in a higher power that would allow him to transcend them. Milder takes us through his subject's life, focusing on and ascribing symbolic meaning to the different places (Salem and Concord, Mass.; England; Italy) in which Hawthorne lived. He uses discrepancies between the notebooks and published writings to show Hawthorne's need to self-censor his pleasure in the baser enjoyments of reality. While Milder's own need to present every aspect of his subject's life as a duality tends to add an unnecessary schematicism to his otherwise enlightening study, and his presumptive academic audience presupposes familiarity with Hawthorne, the book is a welcome addition to the body of writing on one of America's great novelists.
