POE, HAWTHORNE, MELVILLE
Whether the kind of maladjustments with which Poe, Hawthorne
and Melville were concerned can be regarded as typical of the society
of their time we have no means of knowing. Since all sensitive indi–
viduals are, in some degree, atypical, and since in America the writer
in particular is likely to be a social misfit, it would be hazardous to
argue that their portrayal of the American character had any general
application. In the twentieth century, however, we begin to find cor–
roborative evidence. The American of the eighteen-forties may have
been usually well-adjusted. But as a whole generation of psychiatrists
and sociologists have insisted, the American of the nineteen-forties
is
often unhappy, inhibited and insecure; and the form which his
maladjustments take is very likely to fit in with the general pattern
defined by the writers of a hundred years ago. Concerned not with
society but with their own conflicts and frustrations, Poe, Hawthorne
and Melville may not have been social observers, but they appear to
have been valid social prophets. For what is foreshadowed in their
books,
in Poe's search for individual security through power, in Haw–
thorne's distrust of anything which separates the individual from the
average level, in Melville's pervasive sense of conflict and chaos, and
in
the sexual fears and infantilisms of all three men,
is
the neurotic
personality of the twentieth century.
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