On Conscience & Kittens: BY ALIDA ORZECHOWSKI
If you were asked to supply a few words describing the American gothic fiction author Nathaniel Hawthorne, it’s probably safe to assume ‘funny’ would not be among them. Known for his dark romances full of guilt, torment, suffering, and sin, with nary a happy ending to be found, it seems quite improbable that anything even remotely humorous could emerge from this brooding cobbler of words. The fact that Hawthorne spent the better part of twelve years holed up in his bedroom like a moody teenager, scribbling madly in his notebooks certainly didn’t help to normalize his relationship with the world. If you’ve ever seen the movie Beetlejuice where Wynona Rider, dressed entirely in black, is composing a dramatic goodbye letter in which she declares, “I am utterly… alone!”, it probably looked a little bit like that. Or, as Philip McFarland explains in Hawthorne in Concord, during those twelve years in his bedroom, “Hawthorne was thinking about those who are different than others, alienated, tormented, have secrets, must confess. He brooded on cruelty, suffering, and guilt, on decay, and death, on loneliness.” It’s no wonder even Nathaniel seems concerned by his solitary weirdness, as he writes in an 1837 letter to his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “I seldom venture abroad till after dark. By some witchcraft 42
Discover CONCORD
| Fall 2020
Nathaniel were married on July 9th, 1842 and moved immediately to the Old Manse in Concord to continue their utter aloneness with each other. From this moment forward, Hawthorne’s journals undergo a radical transformation. He was always a keen observer, but suddenly all is light, and sweetness, and beauty, as he proclaims their new home Paradise, and themselves, Adam and Eve. Into these blissful musings is woven a gently sardonic humor, rarely seen in his early journals, such as when he chides lesser humans for the unforgivable sin of interrupting their honeymoon. “One rash mortal, on the second Sunday after our arrival, obtruded himself upon us in a gig. There have since been three or four callers, who preposterously think that the courtesies of the lower world are to be responded to by people whose home is in Paradise…” As if the mere idea of visitors was not insulting enough, it appears Nathaniel Hawthorne circa 1848 there was some sort of problem with the water at the Old Manse or other - for I really cannot assign any reasonable why and wherefore - I have been upon their arrival there. Hawthorne feels this is decidedly unacceptable for Heavenly carried apart from the main current of life, residents, and he takes up his grievance and find it impossible to get back again...I directly with the great Landlord in the sky. have put me into a dungeon; and now, I “…it is one of the drawbacks upon our cannot find the key to let myself out…” Paradise, that it contains no water fit either The key to his timely escape would turn to drink or bathe in; so that the showers out to be the equally strange and lonely of Heaven have become, in good truth, a little soul of Sophia Peabody, introduced godsend. I wonder why Providence does not to Hawthorne by her sister, Elizabeth. cause a clear, cold fountain to bubble up In a meeting of true minds, Sophia and
Photo by John Adams Whipple, Boston, Peabody Essex Museum, Public Domain, commons.wikimedia.org
I
The Two Minds of Nathaniel Hawthorne
