Customer Reviews

Hawthorne's Short Stories

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In your face, obvious, and heavy-handedly allegorical, still Hawthorne manages to pique my interest and hammer home his point. Switching from historically based stories ("The Gray Champion" and "Endicott and the Red Cross") to spiritual allegories ("The Bosom Serpent" and "The Celestial Railroad"), Hawthorne continually chips away at the danger of isolation. Although he clearly believed in the fallibility and evil of the human heart--particularly pointing out the religious hypocrites--he also believed that one must continue to risk and be a part of the community. In stories such as "Young Goodman Brown" and "Wakefield", we see the gloom that comes over certain men who pull away.

Hawthorne, like Poe, uses graphic and surreal imagery, sometimes repetitively, to set a mood and draw a picture. His characters and scenes are alive and psychological consistent with his tales, and he manages to wring a moral out of nearly every page.

Heavy-handed? Yes, but he aims to state a message, and he states it clearly: The moral nature must never be sacrificed for intellectual pursuits (Ethan Brand). In a world of cheap commercialism and mindless brain fodder, at least Hawthorne has something to say.

Like most of us, Hawthorne was hot and cold. He is responsible for a few of the best American short stories, and a few of the very worst. But the bad ones - read "The Bosom Serpent" carefully, for example - are hilariously bad!

I read this author a bit at a time. You need to have a very good knowledge of everyday life in Hawthornes' time to fully understand what he describes.

It's easy for our contemporaries to accuse Hawthorne of being formulaic or using timeworn themes. It must be remembered that in Hawthorne's own day, the many of the "timeworn" ideas represented a truly novel vision, and it was appropriate to use many different stories to convey its fullness. Just remember, if you think it's a "cliche," it's probably because you've read a lot of post-Hawthorne "wannabes"!

I read these short stories in a haphazard fashion rather than sequentially and unknowingly saved the worst two for last. A few days ago I was ready to give the collection five stars but the egregiously macabre "Ethan Brand" and "The Old White Maid" caused it a few points. These two tales are out of place among Hawthorne's other gems; they seem more suitable to Edgar Allen Poe on a night when he was feeling exceedingly gruesome.

Among the highlights is "Feathertop" an eccentric piece about a witch whose magic pipe gives life to her scarecrow. "The Prophetic Pictures," allegedly based on a true incident, is an intriguing yarn of a painter whose portrait accurately predicted his subject's forthcoming madness. "The Gray Champion," a patriotic tale, must have been a hit with Hawthorne's good friends President and Mrs. Franklin Pierce. A recurring theme through Hawthorne's works is the individual's perpetual battle with character flaws-a motif that makes them suitable to our modern age and indeed timeless. Many of the allegorical elements including the notorious "A," Hawthorne immortalized in "The Scarlet Letter" are scattered throughout these works.

The proem by Newton Arvin offers an interesting biographical summary of the author's life. Much has been written about Nathaniel Hawthorne-unquestionably one of America's finest and most beloved authors, and there is little I can add to voluminous evaluations. However, to anyone interested in building his or her vocabulary, Hawthorne's writing offers a cyclopean lagniappe to dulcify sesquipedalian pursuits. For me that aspect was as beneficial as the enjoyable vignettes.

Nathaniel Hawthorne is supposed to be an author that everybody likes. Well, guess what? I can't stand his writing style. I can see that is a decent writer, but why does he have to make his message so blatant? Zippy the Chimp could see the obvious symbolism in Hawthorne's stories. He (Hawthorne, not Zippy) is basically beating us over the head with symbolism. Why can't he let the reader find out the meaning on his own? Another thing I noticed is that a large majority of his stories have the same exact theme. The only differences between some of the stories is that the characters' names are different. It's like Hawthorne was playing adlibs when he wrote the stories. He just fills in the setting, and the characters names, and then the story unfolds the same way as any other one in the book. His stories are extremely redundant and boring: once you've read one, you've read them all. How many times can he use the "all mankind is bonded by original sin" theme? It just gets so old. I'm sorry if I'm being "un-American"or something by not liking this "great"author, but I just think he is completely overrated.