We do not think of Hawthorne as a gracious host like Irving, who tells charming stories before his hearth fire. Hawthorne was reared by a widowed mother who for forty years shut herself completely from normal contacts with the world, even refusing to take her meals with her children. From his mother he inherited a love of solitude and a habit of meditation that made him a stranger to the easy sociability of the world. In the pursuance of his resolution to be an author he shut himself up in a seclusion known to no other American writer. He rarely left his room except for an occasional solitary walk; he ate by himself in his room; he made no friends or acquaintances; he brooded and wrote alone. He published his first stories anonymously and once characterized himself as "the obscurest man of letters in America."

Later, encouraged by his wife, whose belief in his genius was genuine and heartening, he gradually assumed a more normal, natural contact with his fellows. Finally came full recognition of his genius as a novelist. An appointment as consul to Liverpool by President Franklin Pierce, a college friend, gave him an opportunity for foreign travel, and his life ended with four happy years in his home, "The Wayside," at Concord.

Hawthorne was a profound thinker; he had probed deep into the impulses of the human heart. His stories have depth of thought, moral values, compactness, climax, and power. Notice how in this story he plunges immediately into its main situation, how the action rolls rapidly and without digressions toward its climax, and how it stops when the climax has been reached. Observe the almost poetic quality of the sentences. In this story Hawthorne is not skimming the surface of human nature; he is conveying a profound truth that is almost awful in its implication; namely that we cannot hope to know each other's true selves. The ministers black veil is a symbol; something the writer uses to stand for the insurmountable barrier between all human souls. Hawthorne is trying to make us feel that each of us, too, wears his own"black veil." Emerson expresses the same awesome thought in his essay "Friendship." Although this story was written in 1836, it has a significance that has not diminished through its century of life.

Reasons for Hawthorne's Current Popularity

1. One of the most modern of writers, Hawthorne is relevant in theme and attitude. According to H. H. Waggoner, Hawthorne's attitudes use irony, ambiguity, and paradox.

2. Hawthorne rounds off the puritan cycle in American writing &emdash;belief in the existence of an active evil (the devil) and in a sense of determinism (the concept of predestination).

3. Hawthorne's use of psychological analysis (pre-Freudian) is of interest today.

4. In themes and style, Hawthorne's writings look ahead to Henry James, William Faulkner, and Robert Penn Warren.

Major Themes in Hawthorne's Fiction

1. Alienation--a character is in a state of isolation because of self-cause, or societal cause, or a combination of both.

2. Initiation -- involves the attempts of an alienated character to get rid of his isolated condition.

3. Problem of Guilt--a character's sense of guilt forced by the puritanical heritage or by society; also guilt vs. innocence.

4. Pride -- Hawthorne treats pride as evil. He illustrates the following aspects of pride in various characters: physical pride, spiritual pride, and intellectual pride.

5. Puritan New England -- used as a background and setting in many tales.

6. Italian background -- especially in The Marble Faun.

7. Allegory -- Hawthorne's writing is allegorical, didactic and moralistic.

8. Other themes include individual vs. society, self-fulfillment vs. accommodation or frustration, hypocrisy vs. integrity, love vs. hate, exploitation vs. hurting, and fate vs. free will.

Influences on Hawthorne

1. Salem -- early childhood, later work at the Custom House.

2. Puritan family background -- one of his forefathers was Judge Hathorne, who presided over the Salem witchcraft trials, 1692.

3. Belief in the existence of the devil.

4. Belief in determinism.

Hawthorne as a Literary Artist

1. First professional writer -- college educated, familiar with the great European writers, and influenced by puritan writers like Cotton Mather.

2. Hawthorne displayed a love for allegory and symbol. He dealt with tensions involving: light versus dark; warmth versus cold; faith versus doubt; heart versus mind; internal versus external worlds.

3. His writing is representative of 19th century, and, thus, in the mainstream due to his use of nature, its primitiveness, and as a source of inspiration; also in his use of the exotic, the gothic, and the antiquarian.

The Novel vs. the Romance

According to Stanley Bank, Hawthorne may stand as the symbol of the 19th Century American author and his predicament. Europe could afford the luxury of romanticizing its past and finding its ideal in the pastoral. But America's past was too close. Yet America's literature was in need of tradition in which literature could flourish. Hawthorne struggled with the problem of relevance of the artist to the world and the meaning of art to America. The American Romanticists created a form that, at first glance, seems ancient and traditional; they borrowed from classical romance, adapted pastoral themes, and incorporated Gothic elements. Was there anything unique about the American shape of prose fiction, or was it merely an amalgam of long and fixed genres? It can be shown that romance, as practiced in America, was a departure from each of the genres, although related to them. Gilbert Highet, in The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature lists the main elements of classical romance:

1. separated lovers who remain true to each other, while the woman's chastity is preserved;

2. an intricate plot, including stories within stories;

3. exciting and unexpected chance events;

4. travel to faraway settings;

5. hidden and mistaken identity; and

6. written in an elaborate and elegant style.

Classical romance, Highet noted, is "escape" literature; American romance brings the reader closer to truth, not further from it. The pastoral is a literary form in which happy country life is portrayed as a contrast to the complexity and anxiety of the urban society. Such a contrast may be seen in the American romancers' use of the frontier, Indian society, Arcadian communities, Puritan villages, and shipboard societies. Few of the characters are strictly outside the urban society to which they provide contrast. It is clearly related to Hawthorne's creation of "a theater, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their phantasmagoric antics, without exposing them to too close a comparison with the actual events of real lives," and to his calling for a "license with regard to everyday probability." But if the American romancer created arcadias, they are arcadias that invite criticism and redirected that criticism to the society in which the American romancers lived. Many gothicisms have been incorporated into American romances. Typical are the manuscript, the castle, the crime, religion, deformity, ghosts, magic, blood, etc. In the gothic novel these characteristics are used as the basis and end of a tale of terror. In the work of American romancers, they are used not as the object itself, but to serve the work.

"I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spirit and mechanism of the fairyland should be combined with the characters and manners of familiar life." -- N. Hawthorne

"When a writer calls his work a romance, he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a novel." -- N. Hawthorne

"The word 'romance' must signify, besides the more obvious qualities of the picturesque and the heroic, an assumed freedom from the ordinary novelistic requirements of verisimilitude, development and continuity; a tendency towards melodrama and idyll; a more or less formal abstractness and, on the other hand, a tendency to plunge into the underside of consciousness; a willingness to abandon moral questions or to ignore the spectacle of man in society, or to consider these things only indirectly or abstractly." -- Richard Chase

(from Stanley Bank, ed. American Romanticism: A Shape for Fiction, 1969)