Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Romance of the Orient

Book excerpt: This volume argues that by focusing on British and American backgrounds, readers have underestimated the impact of Asia and "the East" on American novelist and short story writer Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804-1864) writing. The central force in Hawthorne's intellectual development was New England Puritanism. It fascinated even when it sometimes repelled him. It exercised a pull on his imagination which a lifetime of varied experience did not loosen. The author recreates Hawthorne's heritage and examine his readings in material dealing with the East; he examines three of Hawthorne's "early tales" that were all written before 1830; and he looks at Hawthorne's "The Story Teller", the two-volume book of sketches and tales Hawthorne unsuccessfully tried to publish in 1834 and issued piecemeal thereafter in periodicals as annuals. The author also evaluates the role of the Eastern world in Hawthorne's view of Romance and studies some of Hawthorne's "remarkable" heroines -- Beatrice Rapaccini, Hester, Zenobia, and Miriam in particular. The author maintains that the Puritan element in Hawthorne's ancestry has been overstressed and that insufficient attention has been paid to the equally important travel-adventure-exploration aspect of Hawthorne's heritage and craft.