IT II: The Beloved Remix

My imaginary readers (hey, let's be optimistic on this sunny but not that warm late December Thursday in Chiba) will no doubt recall last week's not-quite-Intertextual Thursday post linking The Scarlet Letter and Beloved, in which I listed a bunch of SL quotes and hinted at how I think Morrison was making use of them in B. Well, given how little time I have to blog this morning, I'll just throw a few B quotes at you and offer a few sketchy comments. Maybe by next Thursday I'll be ready for a real intertextual post!

Last week, I suggested that Morrison was magically realizing Hawthorne's gothic and romantic tropes and figures, not to mention re-racializing some contexts Hawthorne had effectively de-racialized. Consider, as one example, the different views of the ghost that is haunting 124 Bluestone Road, on the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio, for much of the Reconstruction years. Is this house, "palsied by the baby's fury at having its throat cut," haunted by a ghost that is "too little to understand," as Sethe puts it? Or is Denver right that "Maybe she don't want to understand"? Is Paul D's properly Puritan question upon entering Sethe's house for the first time in 1873 and walking "straight into a pool of red and undulating light that locked him where he stood"--"Good god.... What kind of evil you got in here?"--to the point, in its unknowing evocation of the legendarily "lurid gleam" said to be cast by the scarlet letter? Or is Sethe's response--"It's not evil, just sad. Come on. Just step through," verified in part by Paul D's acknowledgment, "She was right. It was sad. Walking through it, a wave of grief soaked him so thoroughly he wanted to cry"--more on target? Or is Denver's countercharge, that the ghost is "Rebuked. Lonely and rebuked," more than adolescent projection of her own feelings onto the ghost? When Paul D exorcises the ghost, does she return in the body of a young woman known only as Beloved? The novel exists, in part, to raise questions like these, even if, Hawthorne-like, Morrison refuses to give definite answers in it.

But to return to Denver, as another example, it's worth noting that she has a Pearl-like awareness of the subtexts of her and her mother's isolation from the free black community of Cincinnati, even if, like Pearl, she lacks the knowledge of their causes. Not long after Paul D enters 124, Denver cries out:

"I can't no more. I can't no more."

"Can't what? What can't you?"

"I can't live here. I don't know where to go or what to do, but I can't live here. Nobody speaks to us. Nobody comes by. Boys don't like me. Girls don't either."

"Honey, honey."

"What's she talking 'bout nobody speaks to you?" asked Paul D.

"It's the house. People don't--"

"It's not! It's not the house. It's us! And it's you!"

"Denver!"

Denver's outburst is reminiscent of Pearl's demand that Hester put the scarlet letter back on in the famous forest scene of SL, with Denver's longing for "a sign of spite from the baby ghost" the counterpart of Pearl's demand. Yet Paul D's response initiates an extended parallel between him and the Hester of the forest scene. He suggests, "Maybe you all ought to move"--unknowingly echoing Sethe's earlier suggestion to her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, whose reply, "What'd be the point?... Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief," is somewhat reminiscent of The Scarlet Letter's narrator's hints at the haunting nature of sin and guilt--but Sethe's response to Paul D is more like the Hester at the beginning and end of the novel:

No moving. No leaving. It's all right the way it is.... I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running--from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much Now sit down and eat with us or leave us be.

Yet despite her resolve not to be moved, Sethe is running in a certain Dimmesdale-like sense--from her haunting memories of slavery, her escape from it, and after.

As for the rest, she worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe. Unfortunately her brain was devious. She might be hurrying across a field, running practically, to get to the pump quickly and rinse the chamomile sap from her legs. Nothing else would be in her mind.... The smething. The plash of the water, the sight of her shows and stocking awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet ome rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her--remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that.

Sethe's literally "terrible memory," as the narrator puts it, is linked to her belief that "the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay," as the narrator also puts it: "The 'better life' she believed that she and Denver were living was simply not that other one." Thus, Paul D's staying with Sethe and Denver, in an odd way, puts Hester in the role of Dimmesdale, striving to avoid repeating a traumatic past, and Paul D in the role of Hester in the forest scene in SL:

Sethe, if I'm here with you, with Denver, you can go anywhere you want. Jump, if you want to, 'cause I'll catch you, girl. I'll catch you 'fore you fall. Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out.... We can make a life, girl. A life.

It's one of Beloved's dark ironies that Sethe ends the novel like Baby Suggs and Arthur Dimmesdale before her, in danger of failing to heed Hester's advice to Dimmesdale: "Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down and die!"

Without jumping that far ahead, let me simply close this post by noting that Sethe and Paul D's reunion, after 18 years apart, is not unlike Hester's and Dimmesdale's meeting after a separation of 7 years. I'll put the two conversations side-by-side, so to speak, and let you draw the conclusions:

He made a step nigher, and discovered the scarlet letter.

"Hester! Hester Prynne!" said he. "Is it thou? Art thou in life?"

"Even so!" she answered. "In such life as has been mine these seven years past!"

As if to punish her further for her terrible memory, sitting on the porch, not forty feet away, was Paul D, the last of the Sweet Home men. And although she could never mistake his face for another's, she said, "Is that you?"

"What's left."

Little-Known Hawthorne Fact

It's a little-known fact about Hawthorne that he was unutterably opposed to blogging on a sunny day in the mid-60s in late December, especially when it comes the day after the worst winter typhoon to hit Japan in 34 years, and particularly when the imoto is turning 8 months old. I believe "unforgivable sin" was the phrase he used when advising against doing anything but taking the kids outside to enjoy a day like this! [Update: Actually, it was "unpardonable sin"--I blame the mistake on the unexpectedly good weather!]

CRT II: The Scarlet Letter Remix

Since I don't have time to do a good close reading this Tuesday, I'll settle for a second-worst one. Hopefully.

"Look your last on the scarlet letter and its wearer!"--the people's victim and life-long bond-slave, as they fancied her, might say to them. "Yet a little while, and she will be beyond your reach! A few hours longer, and the deep, mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever the symbol which ye have caused to burn upon her bosom!"

This quotation comes at a key moment in The Scarlet Letter, before Dimmesdale has begun his Election Day sermon and before Hester discovers that Chillingworth has booked passage on the same "questionable vessel" on which she and Dimmesdale have resolved to flee Boston for Europe with Pearl. The narrator is trying to convey her emotions upon wearing the scarlet letter for what she believes will be the last time in Boston, and perhaps ever. In this passage, he invents an internal monologue for her ("might say") and embeds within it a curious interjection. What I am interested in is the reference to Hester as "the people's victim and life-long bond-slave"--and how qualified it is, for immediately the narrator concedes, "as they fancied her." This is both a reference to her intended escape and an acknowledgement of the game he's been playing throughout the romance in using the iconography of the female slave and, here, the fugitive slave to dramatize Hester's relationship with her community. As this is ground that Jean Fagan Yellin and Jennifer Fleischner, among others, have covered thoroughly, I'm going to focus on an aspect of Hester's "social death" that has not to my knowledge been discussed before, and, in so doing, pick up where my not-very-intertextual Intertextual Thursday left off last week.

For this passage is a culmination of sorts of a consistent motif in The Scarlet Letter: the idea that the scarlet letter imposes a kind of social death upon Hester. This is the reason for all the ghostly imagery the narrator uses when attempting to identify Hester's place in the Boston Puritan community. As I (barely) discussed last Thursday, Hester could have been sentenced to death for her adultery and hence the letter is a kind of suspended death sentence; Hester is consistently portrayed as banished from the community yet still haunting it; the figure of the ghost is an apt figure for her there-but-not-quite-there, not-there-but-not-quite-not-there presence/absence. In a certain sense, then, the "social death" Hester suffers in Boston is not so different from being a "life-long bond-slave," for her condition satisfies key parts of Orlando Patterson's classic definition of slavery in his Slavery and Social Death. She is enduring a kind of social death that involves both "dishonor" and "natal alienation" (she is completely separated from her ancestors and disavowed by her husband); her "enslavement" takes place at a time in 17th-century British America when slavery was becoming racialized (the first Africans in the English-speaking New World were, like poor whites, indentured servants--it took most of the century for temporary indentured servitude to be limited to non-Africans); her daughter Pearl is, in a certain sense, following the condition of her mother; both, like some 19th-century black colonizationists or fugitive slaves, are attempting to leave North America for "the old world" (in their case, Africa; in hers, Europe) in a kind of reverse middle passage.

But at the same time as he invokes these associations of slavery, the narrator stresses the differences. Hester is, after all, only wearing a symbol, one she hopes "the deep, mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever," rather than being branded as many African-American slaves were. She is allowed to keep her daughter, unlike most African-American slaves--her natal alienation has limits theirs didn't. In fact, in the scene in Governor Bellingham's mansion where she successfully argues her case, her status is contrasted with that of a recently-arrived indentured servant of the governor. More on that scene next Tuesday, for it can be linked to another key motif in The Scarlet Letter--heraldry. But my older daughter--who on this blog will go only by the names onechan, or Gohan Girl, or "Uh oh Diva Girl"--had the shortest nap ever, and it's back to daddy duty for CitizenSE.

Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future in "The Custom-House"

Phew, Blogger wasn't exactly in the Christmas spirit for awhile there, was it? I was shut out for the entire weekend. Just kidding, I only tried today. But I was shut out for hours.

Anyway, in honor of Dickens, I'm posting a short list of ghosts in "The Custom-House," in the order in which they appear, while the musume futari are sleeping.

1. The "figure of that first ancestor," who was "present to my boyish imagination" and "still haunts me."

2. The "ghosts of bygone meals," which appear to the Inspector of the Custom-House, "not in anger or retribution, but as if grateful for his former appreciation, and seeking to reduplicate an endless series of enjoyment, at once shadowy and sensual."

3. "The past," which "was not dead": that is, "the thoughts, that had seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so quietly, revived again," which is to say the urge to write creative fiction.

4. Surveyor Pue's ghost:

It impressed me as if the ancient Surveyor, in his garb of a hundred years gone by, and wearing his immortal wig,--which was buried with him, but did not perish in the grave,--had met me in the deserted chamber of the Custom-House.... With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to me the scarlet symbol, and the little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own ghostly voice, he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him,--who might reasonably regard himself as my official ancestor,--to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public. "Do this," said the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically nodding the head that looked so imposing within its memorable wig, "do this, and the profit shall be all your own! You will shortly need it; for it is not in your days as it was in mine, when a man's office was a life-lease, and oftentimes an heirloom. But, I charge you, in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give to your predecessor's memory the credit which will rightfully be its due!" And I said to the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue,--"I will!"

5. The "characters of the narrative," who "would not be warmed and rendered malleable, by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance."

6. A "form, beloved, but gone hence," that is "now sitting quietly in a streak of magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside."

7. A "suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away," something which is "any thing but agreeable to be haunted" by.

8. Hawthorne's "figurative self," that of a "politically dead man," whose "own head was the first to fall" upon the Whig electoral victory, and who was kept "careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like Irving's Headless Horseman, ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried."

9. The narrator of "The Custom-House," "a gentleman who writes from beyond the grave," and whose essay and romance "may be considered as the POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR."

Did I miss any?

[Update (12/28/06): D'oh! First sentence: "It is a little remarkable, that--though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends--an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me." Let's call it number 0.]

Oh, and for your holiday gift, o ghostly reader(s), k-punk has been doing some serious ghost blogging the past few weeks, so go check out the holiday hauntology!

McFawn on Exhuming Hawthorne

Given the themes of death and hauntings and the disproportionate number of appearances of ghosts and cemeteries on this blog, this post from a mysterious blogger known only as McFawn, called Exhuming Hawthorne, from the blog The Vacant Post of the God of Appreciation, is quite appropriate for my second post in my now-ongoing Weirdest Hawthorne Link CitizenSE Can Find in 15 Minutes series, and first to actually fall on a Friday.

Special first Friday WHLCSECFi15M bonus link (more troubling than weird): check out Digby's "Scarlet Barcode" piece from Hullabaloo.

Off to Chiba in a few hours. Time to get some rest! Enjoy!

Not Half Bad Intertextual Thursday Kick-Off Post

As promised, I'm moving into Hawthorne-Morrison blogging today and hopefully Saturday, as well, although we may not be settled into Chiba-de tsuma-no ryoushin-no uchi-wa (yup, just finished my final exam in Intro to Japanese today) well enough for me to blog that day, so don't hold your breath, O hypothetical reader (it would be too optimistic to make that plural).

Let me start off by observing that it's totally unoriginal to link Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter to Morrison's Beloved. (In my manuscript, which I'll discuss Saturday [with luck], I focus on "specter evidence" in "Young Goodman Brown" and Beloved, which may actually still be original almost ten years after I first came up with the idea [can I really be that lucky?], as part of a larger argument that puts The House of the Seven Gables and Song of Solomon alongside each other [presence of the past] and The Blithedale Romance and Paradise together [failed utopias] in order to read some pregnant silences in Morrison's "Unspeakable Things Unspoken" and Playing in the Dark and make some points about race and American literature.) But since I'm not going for originality on this blog so much as stream of consciousness "free write"-style quick-hit readings--on the theory that nothing focuses the mind like knowing you have to finish what you're writing in no more than, say, 30 minutes from now--let me boldly restate the obvious on my way to hopefully less-than-obvious points.

Obvious Point I: How can anyone today read the following from "The Custom-House" and not think of Beloved?

Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly,--making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility,--is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the book-case; the picture on the wall; all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child's shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse;--whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of strangeness or remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here, without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form, beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.

While that last sentence especially is resonating in your head, let me drop a few quotes from The Scarlet Letter to link it to one key image cluster in Hawthorne's representations of Hester Prynne, Pearl, and Arthur Dimmesdale:

"What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown, or the flesh of her forehead?" cried another female, the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these self-constructed judges. "This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not law for it? Truly there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book...."

But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer,--so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time,--was that SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and inclosing her in a sphere by herself.

In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of human kind. She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the household joy, nor mourn with the kindred sorrow; or, should it succeed in manifesting its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and horrible repugnance.

Brooding over all these matters, the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the master-word that should control this new and incomprehensible intelligence.

Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants. Nothing was more remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed, with which the child comprehended her loneliness; the destiny that had drawn an inviolable circle round about her; the whole peculiarity, in short, of her position in respect to other children.

Once, this freakish, elfish cast came into the child's eyes, while Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; and suddenly,--for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered with unaccountable delusions,--she fancied that she beheld, not her own miniature portrait, but another face in the small black mirror of Pearl's eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that she had known full well, though seldom with a smile, and never with malice in them. It was as if an evil spirit possessed the child, and had just then peeped forth in mockery.

Thus, Hester Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and healthy throb, wandered without a clew in the dark labyrinth of mind; now turned aside by an insurmountable precipice; now starting back from a deep chasm. There was wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort nowhere. At times, a fearful doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it were not better to send Pearl at once to heaven, and go herself to such futurity as Eternal Justice should provide.

The scarlet letter had not done its office.

"Hester! Hester Prynne!" said he. "Is it thou? Art thou in life?"

"Even so!" she answered. "In such life as has been mine these seven years past! And thou, Arthur Dimmesdale, dost thou yet live?"

It is no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet, in the dim wood, that it was like the first encounter, in the world beyond the grave, of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering, in mutual dread; as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost. They were awe-stricken likewise at themselves; because the crisis flung back to them their consciousness, and revealed to each heart its history and experience, as life never does, except at such breathless epochs. The soul beheld its features in the mirror of the passing moment.

Her face, so long familiar to the townspeople, showed the marble quietude which they were accustomed to behold there. It was like a mask; or rather, like the frozen calmness of a dead woman's features; owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was actually dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had departed out of the world with which she still seemed to mingle.

"Look your last on the scarlet letter and its wearer!"--the people's victim and life-long bond-slave, as they fancied her, might say to them. "Yet a little while, and she will be beyond your reach! A few hours longer, and the deep, mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever the symbol which ye have caused to burn upon her bosom!"

OK, so as you've been reading you've probably been thinking something like the following (besides "when is he going to stop with the quotations?! enough already!" that is): hmm, doesn't it seem as if Morrison takes many of Hawthorne's metaphors and, if not literalizes them, magically realizes them? I guess that romance/gothic/magical realism connection all the kewl kidz have been talking about makes a lot of sense! isn't the Hester/Pearl/Dimmesdale relationship (to each other and between them and their community) something of an interesting model for the Sethe/Denver/Beloved/Paul D relationship, especially when differences as well as similarities are taken into account?

Yes, dear imaginary reader, it's as if you are reading my mind. It's almost like Morrison was talking with Jean Fagan Yellin, who wrote one of the most comprehensive examinations of this social death/bond-slave theme in The Scarlet Letter back in 1989, the same year as Morrison's "Unspeakable Things Unspoken" essay on race and American literature, while both were working on their projects. Or better, that Morrison and Yellin, working independently, came to similar conclusions (beating people like Jennifer Fleischner and Sacvan Bercovitch to the punch, so to speak).

My argument, which I'll pick up next Thursday, is that you don't need to go to Morrison's later critical work to find in its claims and ornate absences evidence that she was reading and thinking carefully about race and Hawthorne--all you need to do is look in Beloved for the evidence, as critics from Jan Stryz and Caroline Woidat to Charles Lewis and Emily Miller Budick have done, or as careful historical readers of Hawthorne like Teresa Goddu and Arthur Riss have all but done. This much is, by now, quite obvious. What I'll give you next week is a string of Hawthornesque Beloved quotations to match this string of Morrisonesque Scarlet Letter passages. Hopefully then we'll all be in a position to move a few steps beyond the obvious.

Gotta post this before I turn into a pumpkin, but a quick question for my hypothetical reader(s) before I go: when could you tell the title of this premiere Intertextual Thursday post (not to be confused with a premier post) was a joke? Of course this is the "worst evah"!

CitizenSE's Top Ten Hawthorne Tales/Sketches

A Japanese literature scholar recently asked me to send him my personal top 10 list of favorite Hawthorne tales and sketches. For this post, I decided to divide it into separate top 10s for historical tales, non-historical tales, and sketches, because I'm just that decisive. I'm ranking them in order of interest to me, not necessarily from "best" down. I'd be happy to explain my choices in the comments area, should someone actually post a comment....

CitizenSE's Top 10 Historical Hawthorne Tales

1. Young Goodman Brown
2. Roger Malvin's Burial
3. My Kinsman, Major Molineux
4. The May-pole of Merry Mount
5. The Gentle Boy
6. The Minister's Black Veil
7. Endicott and the Red Cross
8. The Gray Champion
9. Alice Doane's Appeal
10. Drowne's Wooden Image

Honorable Mention: "The Great Carbuncle," "The Man of Adamant," "Legends of the Province-House," "The Wives of the Dead," "Wakefield," various tales from The Whole History of Grandfather's Chair

CitizenSE's Top 10 Non-Historical Hawthorne Tales

1. The Birth-mark
2. Rappaccini's Daughter
3. Egotism, or the Bosom-Serpent
4. Ethan Brand
5. The Celestial Rail-road
6. The Artist of the Beautiful
7. Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe
8. The New Adam and Eve
9. The Christmas Banquet
10. The Great Stone Face

Honorable Mention: "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," "Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure," "The Snow-Image," "The White Old Maid"

CitizenSE's Top 10 Hawthorne Sketches

1. Earth's Holocaust
2. The Procession of Life
3. Old News
4. Main-street
5. A Bell's Biography
6. The Hall of Fantasy
7. The Intelligence Office
8. Time's Portraiture
9. The Sister Years
10. A Virtuoso's Collection

Honorable Mention: "The Village Uncle," "A Rill from the Town Pump," "P's Correspondence," "Fire-Worship," "Fancy's Show Box," "The Haunted Mind," "Monsieur du Miroir," "Foot-prints on the Sea-shore," various biographical sketches of colonial figures

The upshot: buy the Library of America edition of Hawthorne's Tales and Sketches! If you only know him by his three novels from 1850-1852, you're missing out on his previous 20 years of literary output. And check out what Michael Colacurcio, Joel Pfister, Allison Easton, Neal Frank Doubleday, G.R. Thompson, Michael Dunne, Richard Millington, and other good readers of Hawthorne's shorter works (such as those in Hawthorne and the Real: Bicentennial Essays and The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne) have to say about them. It's time well spent!