HAWTHORNE
in his prelapsarian Eden. He vacillates between trusting the
human heart's intuitions as good and advancing his conviction
that the heart is a "foul cavern" which must be destroyed to
be
purified.
Hawthorne's ambivalence about guilt and innocence can be
seen as a lodestone that draws into its magnetic field other
problems of human life. He writes of innocents initiated into
shrewdness; secret sin and isolation; compulsive rituals of
atonement and sacrifice; self-righteousness becoming fanaticism;
science confronting original sin; witchcraft and devil worship;
carnal knowledge and guiltless love; the search for a home,
a father, a self-in short, man's dark odyssey in an alien world.
The ambiguity in Hawthorne's stories is at once his triumph
and, for some literalist critics, his failure. The tension it creates
is a dramatic asset. Many of the tales or romances as he thought
of them, are multi-leveled, ironic explorations of the human
psyche--capable of endless extensions of meaning and of stimu–
lating repeated analysis and interpretation.
333
Comparing the two views of Hawthorne, that of James and the
established modern view which Professor Donohue summarizes, we
must, in all humility, feel that ours is the right one, or at least, for us,
the inevitable one. It recommends itself on its face. No doubt James's
ironical entertainer makes a graceful and charming figure as he amuses
himself with the toys strewn over the playground of a disused morality.
But how can any member of the literary community fail to conclude
that there is an intrinsic superiority in the grave, complex, and difficult
Hawthorne we have learned to possess, the Hawthorne who represents
"man's dark odyssey in an alien world"?
It
is,
of course, fair to remember that Hawthorne's view of himself
was ostensibly more in accord with James's view of him than with ours.
"The sketches are not, it is hardly necessary to say, profound; it is
rather more remarkable that they so seldom,
if
ever, show any design
on the writer's part to make them so. They have none of the abstruse–
ness of idea, or obscurity of expression, which mark the written com–
munications of a solitary mind with itself. They never need translation.
. . . Every :!entence, so far as it embodies thought and sensibility, may
be understood and felt by anybody who will give himself the trouble
to read
it,
and will take up the book in a proper mood."
