Winter is at Hand: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Winter

BY ROB VELELLA

To Hawthorne, winter is a symbol of change and an opportunity for reflection. Winter, like death, is something that unnerves people. As he also writes in “Snowflakes:”

“There is snow in yonder cold gray sky of the morning! And, through the partially frosted window-panes, I love to watch the gradual beginning of the storm.” So writes Nathaniel Hawthorne in his sketch “Snowflakes,” one of many where the author takes his readers into the winter season. First published in 1838 and collected in the second volume of his Twice-Told Tales in 1842, the sketch describes everything from a winter storm (“reverently welcomed by me, her true-born son, be New England’s winter”) to a children’s snowball fight (“What pitched battles worthy to be chanted in Homeric strains!”) to the gloom of a winter burial (“Oh how dreary is a burial in winter, when the bosom of Mother Earth has no warmth for her poor child!”). No matter the season, it seems, Hawthorne’s thoughts were never too far from the grave.

Photograph of Hawthorne by John Adams Whipple, c. 1853

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

How does Winter herald his approach? By the shrieking blast of latter autumn which is Nature’s cry of lamentation as the destroyer rushes among the shivering groves where she has lingered and scatters the sear leaves upon the tempest. When that cry is heard, the people wrap themselves in cloaks and shake their heads disconsolately, saying, “Winter is at hand.”

Though not as noted for his interest in nature and its seasons as his Concord neighbors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Hawthorne was a keen observer of New England’s changes from month to month.

In an oft-quoted passage, Hawthorne’s wife Sophia Peabody recorded the three men’s attempt at ice skating in a particularly frosty Concord winter. As she wrote in December 1842, “Henry Thoreau is an experienced skater, and was figuring dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice—very remarkable, but very ugly methought. Next him followed Mr. Hawthorne who, wrapped in his cloak, moved like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave. Mr. Emerson closed the line, evidently too weary to hold himself erect, pitching headforemost, half lying on the air.” That day of entertainment pairs well with a more subdued one not long after. Mrs. Hawthorne looked out the window with the couple’s first child, a daughter named Una, and saw the trees outside covered in ice. Her observation remains etched into the glass of a windowpane at the Old Manse: “Una Hawthorne stood on this window sill January 22d, 1845 while the trees were all glass chandeliers – a goodly show which she liked much tho’ only ten months old.”

The Wayside

Library of Congress

In typical Hawthorne fashion, too, he found moral lessons in winter and snow. In “The Ambitious Guest,” collected in his 1837 volume of Twice-Told Tales, the titular character expresses his fear of being forgotten after his death to a family overseeing an inn. As they huddle around the hearth for warmth, they are visited by nature’s wrath in the form of a tremendous rockslide. Ironically, in their attempt to find shelter, they are killed by falling debris and the guest, with no record of his visit, is forgotten.

Perhaps even more heavy-handed in its lesson is Hawthorne’s tale “The Snow-Image: A Childish Miracle,” which lent its name to Hawthorne’s collection The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales (1851). The story, clearly influenced by his own role as a father, features two children whose faith in the magic of winter somehow fulfills their wishes and brings to life a “snow image” (today’s “snowman”). Their mother at first believes that the joyful white figure playing with her children, Violet and Peony, is the daughter of one of the neighbors. But she begins to question that assumption the longer she looks from the window: “Indeed, she almost doubted whether it was a real child after all, or only a light wreath of the new-fallen snow, blown hither and thither about the garden by the intensely cold west-wind.

An illustration for “The Snow-Image” by Marcus Watterman, 1864

archive.org

There was certainly something very singular in the aspect of the little stranger.” Her children seem sincere in explaining that their new friend is made of snow brought to life by their love. Violet explains to her mother, “I have told you truly who she is. It is our little snow-image, which Peony and I have been making.”

Their father, Mr. Lindsey, soon returns home. A hard-working, practical man, he is described by Hawthorne as a “good, honest father” and a “kind-hearted man” with “the best intentions in the world.” Wryly, Hawthorne also describes him three times as a “common-sensible” man, unlike the rest of his family, who show a “childlike simplicity and faith.” Mr. Lindsey does not have the same belief in the magic of a winter wish, and he insists the children bring their new friend indoors to warm herself by the fire. Alas, that fire is her undoing and Mr. Lindsey demands that his wife explain to him what happened to the strange child. “She found no trace of the little white maiden, unless it were the remains of a heap of snow, which, while she was gazing at it, melted quite away upon the hearth-rug.” Yet, the common-sensible father still does not see the magic of which he has brought to ruin. “After all, there is no teaching anything to wise men of good Mr. Lindsey’s stamp. They know everything, — oh, to be sure! — everything that has been, and everything that is, and everything that, by any future possibility, can be. And, should some phenomenon of nature or providence transcend their system, they will not recognize it, even if it come to pass under their very noses.” Indeed, Mr. Lindsey merely orders that someone clean up the puddle of melting snow that his children have apparently brought into their home.

Hawthorne himself was certainly not as unimaginative as the father figure in “The Snow-Image,” though he too often had difficulty finding the wonder in the world amidst all its tragedies. As he wrote in his sketch “The Vision of the Fountain,” first published in New-England Magazine in August 1835: “Let me hope,” thought I, “or my heart will be as icy as the fountain, and the whole world as desolate as this snowy hill.”

Some of Hawthorne’s Winter Tales “The Haunted Mind” (1835) “The Devil in Manuscript” (1835) “The Ambitious Guest” (1835) “Snowflakes” (1838) “The Christmas Banquet” (1844) “The Snow-Image: A Childish Miracle” (1850)

Rob Velella is an independent literary historian, a former New Englander, and a former living history performer who portrayed Nathaniel Hawthorne for more than a decade.