| Nathaniel Hawthorne has long reigned as one of the prominent creators of the American romantic short story genre that developed during the first half of the nineteenth century. Beginning with his contemporary critics and still true to this day, Hawthorne has notoriously presented a veritable conundrum for those scholars who attempt to understand just who he was, both as an author and a man, and the underlying message(s) of his stories. As early as 1850, reviewer Anne W. Abbott wrote that Hawthorne's "style may be compared to a sheet of transparent water...while in its clear yet mysterious depths we espy rarer and stranger things, which we must dive for, if we would examine." While Hawthorne's writing is precise, eloquent, and stylized, the deeper meanings of his stories often exist in the unreachable, mysterious and indefinable depths of the human condition and its values. Many critics rely on the literary criticism popular in their own time (ex. Deconstruction, New Criticism, Feminism, etc.) as the sole framework to use in interpreting and understanding Hawthorne's stories. While the merits of these criticisms are not to be discredited by any means, a more all-encompassing approach to understanding Hawthorne is well overdue.;This thesis uses a combination of psychoanalytic and new historic frameworks to argue that Hawthorne's character's function, significance, perception and reception changes over the period of time exhibited in each story (like that of history itself). By combining the new historical lens with the psychoanalytic lens, the changes within each character as they navigate through their complicated journeys are thus exhibited with greater clarity. First, the historical backdrop will be analyzed, followed by a new historic analysis of the story, based significantly upon textual resonance and Hawthorne's use of historical interpretation.;This thesis then explores the journey toward liminality, as well as the effects of existing within a liminal understanding of self and community. The focus is upon three of the protagonists from Hawthorne's short stories: Robin Molineux from "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," Goodman Brown from "Young Goodman Brown," and Reuben Bourne from "Roger Malvin's Burial." Robin and Brown are initially presented as obtuse and overconfident characters who, throughout their respective journeys find themselves by the end of the stories existing wholly outside of the clearly defined structures that were in place at the beginning of the stories. While the focus of Robin and Brown's journeys is upon the change, the focus of Reuben's journey is more upon the exploration of the effects of liminality upon the understanding of self. In all three stories, this liminality outwardly appears to leave the characters in a state of ambiguity, but it is just this undefined "outsiderness" that reveals or uncovers a newly defined or understood set of values for the character. |
