{"title":"“Man needs it so”: Roman Catholicism in The Blithedale Romance","authors":"Nancy F. Sweet","doi":"10.5325/nathhawtrevi.48.2.0195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/nathhawtrevi.48.2.0195","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance abounds with allusions to Roman Catholicism, which signal the novel’s engagement with the nineteenth-century Catholic-Protestant theological debate, especially as pertains to private judgment, communitarianism, and redemption. Written a decade after Hawthorne’s experience at Brook Farm, a utopian community where residents discoursed earnestly on Catholicism, The Blithedale Romance explores Protestant characters’ conceptualizations of Catholicism and its forms, but also their commitment to Protestant private judgment and individualism. Nearly six years after publication of Blithedale, Hawthorne would offer his most direct reflections on Roman Catholicism in the notebooks he composed during his first and only visit to Italy. By placing Hawthorne’s discussion of Catholic architecture, sacrament, and liturgy in his French and Italian Notebooks alongside his allusions to Catholic forms in The Blithedale Romance, we find Hawthorne’s vision of a latent, organic Catholicism haunting Americans spiritually adrift in a post-Reformation world.","PeriodicalId":261601,"journal":{"name":"Nathaniel Hawthorne Review","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131516407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Visible Saints and Sinners: Witness and Spiritual Uncertainty in “Young Goodman Brown”","authors":"Benjamin Crawford","doi":"10.5325/nathhawtrevi.48.2.0175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/nathhawtrevi.48.2.0175","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” tells the story of a young Puritan who attends a satanic ceremony and ends up permanently afflicted with doubt. This essay analyzes Hawthorne’s use of the idea of witnessing throughout the tale, and the scriptural bases on which this spiritual discipline is built. Both aural and visual witnesses inspire spiritual uncertainty in “Young Goodman Brown”, an uncertainty that ends in his “dying hour of gloom.” Building on the insights of other scholars, including Edmund Morgan’s work on the visible church and Michael Colacurcio’s work on visible sanctity, this essay examines Hawthorne’s use of witnessing as a spiritual discipline and his complex use of scriptural ideas throughout the story.","PeriodicalId":261601,"journal":{"name":"Nathaniel Hawthorne Review","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124869505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Marble Faun in a Secular Age","authors":"Anamaria Seglie Clawson","doi":"10.5325/nathhawtrevi.48.2.0130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/nathhawtrevi.48.2.0130","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay examines Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun as an early expression of (post)secular imagining. Scholars have tended to frame Hawthorne’s engagement with religion as yet another example of the ambivalence that drives much of his writing. On the one hand, they identify the persistence of religious critique in his novels—his criticism of Puritanism in The Scarlet Letter or Transcendentalism in The Blithedale Romance, for example. On the other hand, they have noted his fascination with such traditions, offering readings that uncover the historical specificity of his Puritan sources and his temporary investment in Transcendentalism. Rich as they are, such readings tend to focus on his engagement with these specific religious traditions rather than note his novels’ oscillation between enchantment and disenchantment. This essay takes up this charge by examining The Marble Faun’s depiction of Catholicism, a depiction that critics have similarly read in terms of Hawthorne’s admiration or criticism of Catholicism. This essay suggests, instead, that both impulses represent Hawthorne’s lasting search for what secular studies philosopher Charles Taylor calls “a third way”; that is, a space between orthodoxy and unbelief. Rather than locate The Marble Faun as another instance of Hawthorne’s chronic ambiguity, then, this essay locates it as a prime example of the spiritual tensions marking our “secular age.”","PeriodicalId":261601,"journal":{"name":"Nathaniel Hawthorne Review","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128661665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“The Safe Secrecy of the Confessional” Catholic Sacramentals and Performativity in Hawthorne’s Writings","authors":"Amy Oatis","doi":"10.5325/nathhawtrevi.48.2.0151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/nathhawtrevi.48.2.0151","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay explores how Hawthorne’s exploration of Catholic sacramentals, documented in The French and Italian Notebooks, built upon his long-held interests in the intersections of sin, secrets, and confession. Hawthorne drew on these notebooks to construct the confessional scene in The Marble Faun, which reflects his speculation on how the performance of confession could impact a person’s identity. Using “The Custom-House” sketch in The Scarlet Letter to connect his American writings on confession with his European writings on confession, this essay demonstrates that Hawthorne’s writings served as his own performative acts of confession, though his obstructed observations of Catholic confessionals in Europe prevented Hawthorne from fulfilling the spiritual yearnings that he somewhat secretly confessed in his French and Italian Notebooks.","PeriodicalId":261601,"journal":{"name":"Nathaniel Hawthorne Review","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116770352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Along the Wayside, Fall 2022","authors":"","doi":"10.5325/nathhawtrevi.48.2.0229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/nathhawtrevi.48.2.0229","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":261601,"journal":{"name":"Nathaniel Hawthorne Review","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129930445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hawthorne’s Histories, Hawthorne’s World: From Salem to Somewhere Else","authors":"Michael S. Martin","doi":"10.5325/nathhawtrevi.48.2.0222","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/nathhawtrevi.48.2.0222","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":261601,"journal":{"name":"Nathaniel Hawthorne Review","volume":"709 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115022867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Hermeneutics of Implication and Inference: Actor-Network Theory, The Scarlet Letter, and the Hawthorne Digital Archive","authors":"Gale Temple","doi":"10.5325/nathhawtrevi.48.1.0067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/nathhawtrevi.48.1.0067","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay suggests that viewing “The Custom House” and The Scarlet Letter through the lens of actor-network theory allows us to better understand Hawthorne’s view of the social contract. Hawthorne’s novels both model and perform an uncanny form of sympathetic community-making that relies on the power of implied depth—expressed in passages, symbols, gestures, and subtle hints—to generate affective bonds. This Hawthornean model for social networking offers a potentially liberating and creatively inspiring example for thinking about the connections we make between literary interpretation and digital resources, and it also offers a model for how reading and interpretation—of texts, other people, and even ourselves—can lead to increasingly open-ended and ethically responsible relationships between self and other.","PeriodicalId":261601,"journal":{"name":"Nathaniel Hawthorne Review","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133149933","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Meaning Apart from Its Indistinguishable Words","authors":"Erik Fredner","doi":"10.5325/nathhawtrevi.48.1.0082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/nathhawtrevi.48.1.0082","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 What difference did Hawthorne make in nineteenth-century US fiction? An unanswerable question, yet one that we can begin to address in a surprisingly literal way by using word embeddings to analyze the large corpora of nineteenth-century US fiction now available. To specify this question, how does a corpus of nineteenth-century US fiction including Hawthorne differ from one wherein his work is experimentally excluded? Using this approach, I show how Hawthorne’s work changed the vector semantics of US fiction. Readers of Hawthorne will be pleased if unsurprised to find his characteristic ambivalence reaffirmed by quantitative methods. More novel is the new evidence this method provides for measuring the ways in which Hawthorne distinctively differs from his peers. Because the model reveals which words Hawthorne embedded most similarly and most dissimilarly from his contemporaries, we can take these quantitative and qualitative differences in word usage as starting-points from which to address the question that began this abstract. The article concludes with a reading of Hawthorne’s distinctive use of the word “likewise,” focusing on how it advances the satire of “The Procession of Life.”","PeriodicalId":261601,"journal":{"name":"Nathaniel Hawthorne Review","volume":"122 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132161945","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}