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Everyone loves a good story. Lovers of literary history
often encounter writers who engage ten-dollar words to give their works an air
of pomposity and those writers who inject every sentence with often redundant
phrases designed to demonstrate their piety, lofty social position, superior
intellect, and/or nationalistic fervor. Add to those difficulties in reading
long, tedious paragraphs that ramble on for pages. Can we wonder that the
average American shows little interest in literature or history?
Nathaniel Hawthorne broke the grip of self-indulgence in
literature. The writer following Hawthorne was now free to hide from the
reader, and the reader was free to enjoy reading without lecture or
condescension by the writer. Hawthorne’s stories entertained without frivolity,
enlightened without thunderous imperative, and instructed without tedious
detail. Even his moral tales used complex allegory rather than a sermon to drive
them. His style was so revolutionary that his works went through rejection by public resistance to change and harsh criticism by literary wags, followed by
gradual acceptance through word-of-mouth advertising, on to celebrity cult
status, and finally into the celestial sphere of literary immortality.
The common reader in his workaday world had little time for
moral instruction or dry narrative. The Industrial Revolution had begun.
Social, political, and economic changes accelerated daily, and the pastoral and
historical Classical Romanticism of Europe had no place in a country with no
ancient past to glorify through the romance novel, and the new spirit of
opportunity was clouded by economic inequality, drudgery, and a breakdown in
traditional values. Optimistic novels and short stories filled with sunny
characters made for easy escapism, but they did not reflect the reality of the
“man on the street.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe introduced “Dark
Romanticism” in reaction to the Transcendentalist thesis that man is inherently
good and need only to follow moral teachings to lead a rich and fulfilling
life. Not so, said the Dark Romanticist; man is born of sin and gives himself
to evil through his nature. His readers knew of evil—they saw it in the
factory, slaughterhouse, and mine bosses. The public found works that delved
into their characters’ psychological motives and inner lives, traits that the
reader shared. No longer need heroes be heroic: “The greatest
obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove
one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the
profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be
obeyed.” (The Blithedale Romance, Ch. 2.)
As students of literature move farther away from a language
they see in classical literature as stifling and anachronistic, they will yet
fix on Hawthorne and see in him a writer who can speak to them from the past
and continue to speak to their technology-shortened attention span. For the
contemporary common man, history and literature sprang to life with Hawthorne,
following a long period of literature unreadable in the present time with its
twenty-first-century language, a language as undecipherable to the
seventeenth-century writer as theirs is to us.
Readers today too often see a gap of several millennia
between the exciting stories of Homer’s Achilles and Ulysses and the renewal of
readable literature from Hawthorne and Poe, and down to us through Stephen
Crane, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Ernest
Hemingway. Lovers of the straight-forward tale, unembellished with linguistic
fog and self-indulgence, owe a nod to Nathaniel Hawthorne for stripping the
story to its essentials, and for revealing to the reader his own dark nature.
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