Rappaccini's Son

Abstract:This essay considers the biographical speculations about Nathaniel Hawthorne's history of sexual abuse as an exemplary instance of insufficient archival evidence. It contemplates the implications of such insufficient evidence for the practices of truth telling in nineteenth-century Americanist historiography and literary criticism more generally. It argues for the possibility of accuracy without precision as an ethical alternative to dismissing insufficient evidence, and in elaborating this idea the essay identifies some of the urgency for taking up these questions at the present.