Editing Nathaniel Hawthorne (section)

===Literary style and themes===
{{Further|Romance (literary fiction)}}

Hawthorne's works belong to [[romanticism]] or, more specifically, [[dark romanticism]],<ref>Reynolds, David S. ''Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville''. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988: 524. {{ISBN|0674065654}}</ref> cautionary tales that suggest that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent natural qualities of humanity.<ref>Wayne, Tiffany K. "Nathaniel Hawthorne", ''Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism''. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2006: 140. {{ISBN|0816056269}}.</ref> Many of his works are inspired by Puritan [[New England]],<ref>Bell, Michael Davitt. ''Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England''. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980: 173. {{ISBN|069106136X}}</ref> combining historical romance loaded with symbolism and deep psychological themes, bordering on surrealism.<ref>Howe, Daniel Walker. ''What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848''. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007: 633. {{ISBN|978-0195078947}}.</ref> His depictions of the past are a version of historical fiction used only as a vehicle to express common themes of ancestral sin, guilt and retribution.<ref>Crews, 28–29</ref> His later writings also reflect his negative view of the [[Transcendentalism]] movement.<ref>Galens, David, ed. ''Literary Movements for Students'', Vol. 1. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2002: 319. {{ISBN|0787665177}}</ref>

Hawthorne was predominantly a short story writer in his early career. Upon publishing ''Twice-Told Tales'', however, he noted, "I do not think much of them," and he expected little response from the public.<ref>Miller, 104</ref> His four major [[Novel#19th-century novels|romances]] were written between 1850 and 1860: ''[[The Scarlet Letter]]'' (1850), ''[[The House of the Seven Gables]]'' (1851), ''[[The Blithedale Romance]]'' (1852) and ''[[The Marble Faun]]'' (1860). Another novel-length romance, ''[[Fanshawe (novel)|Fanshawe]]'', was published anonymously in 1828. Hawthorne defined a romance as being radically different from a novel by not being concerned with the possible or probable course of ordinary experience.<ref>Porte, 95</ref> In the preface to ''The House of the Seven Gables'', Hawthorne describes his romance-writing as using "atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture".<ref>Wineapple, 237</ref> The picture, Daniel Hoffman found, was one of "the primitive energies of fecundity and creation."<ref>Hoffman, 356</ref>

Critics have applied [[Feminist literary criticism|feminist perspectives]] and [[Historicism|historicist approaches]] to Hawthorne's depictions of women. Feminist scholars are interested particularly in [[Hester Prynne]]: they recognize that while she herself could not be the "destined prophetess" of the future, the "angel and apostle of the coming revelation" must nevertheless "be a woman."<ref>''The Scarlet Letter'' Ch XXIV "Conclusion"</ref>  [[Camille Paglia]] saw Hester as mystical, "a wandering goddess still bearing the mark of her Asiatic origins&nbsp;... moving serenely in the magic circle of her sexual nature".<ref>Paglia, ''Sexual Personae'', 581, 583</ref> Lauren Berlant termed  Hester "the citizen as woman [personifying] love as a quality of the body that contains the purest light of nature," her resulting "traitorous political theory" a "Female Symbolic" literalization of futile Puritan metaphors.<ref>Berlant, ''The Anatomy of National Fantasy'', 94, 148, 175</ref> Historicists view Hester as a [[protofeminist]] and avatar of the self-reliance and responsibility that led to women's suffrage and sometime-reproductive emancipation. Anthony Splendora found her literary genealogy among other archetypally fallen but redeemed women, both historic and mythic. As examples, he offers [[Cupid and Psyche|Psyche]] of ancient legend; [[Héloïse (abbess)|Heloise]] of twelfth-century France's tragedy involving world-renowned philosopher [[Peter Abelard]]; [[Anne Hutchinson]] (America's first heretic, circa 1636), and Hawthorne family friend [[Margaret Fuller]].<ref>Splendora, "Psyche and Hester", 2, 5, 18</ref> In Hester's first appearance, Hawthorne likens her, "infant at her bosom", to Mary, Mother of Jesus, "the image of Divine Maternity". In her study of Victorian literature, in which such "galvanic outcasts" as Hester feature prominently, [[Nina Auerbach]] went so far as to name Hester's fall and subsequent redemption, "the novel's one unequivocally religious activity".<ref>Auerbach, ''Woman and the Demon'', 150, 166</ref> Regarding Hester as a deity figure, Meredith A. Powers found in Hester's characterization "the earliest in American fiction that the archetypal Goddess appears quite graphically," like a Goddess "not the wife of traditional marriage, permanently subject to a male overlord"; Powers noted "her syncretism, her flexibility, her inherent ability to alter and so avoid the defeat of secondary status in a goal-oriented civilization".<ref>Powers, ''The Heroine in Western Literature,''  144</ref>

Aside from Hester Prynne, the model women of Hawthorne's other novels—from Ellen Langton of ''Fanshawe'' to Zenobia and Priscilla of ''The Blithedale Romance,'' Hilda and Miriam of ''The Marble Faun'' and Phoebe and Hepzibah of ''The House of the Seven Gables''—are more fully realized than his male characters, who merely orbit them.<ref>Splendora, "Psyche and Hester", 12</ref> This observation is equally true of his short-stories, in which central females serve as allegorical figures: Rappaccini's beautiful but life-altering, garden-bound, daughter; almost-perfect Georgiana of "[[The Birth-Mark]]"; the sinned-against (abandoned) Ester of "Ethan Brand"; and [[goodwife]] Faith Brown, linchpin of Young Goodman Brown's very belief in God. "My Faith is gone!" Brown exclaims in despair upon seeing his wife at the Witches' Sabbath.{{citation needed|date=May 2016}} Perhaps the most sweeping statement of Hawthorne's impetus comes from [[Mark Van Doren]]: "Somewhere, if not in the New England of his time, Hawthorne unearthed the image of a goddess supreme in beauty and power."<ref>Van Doren 19</ref>

Hawthorne also wrote nonfiction. In 2008, the [[Library of America]] selected Hawthorne's "A show of wax-figures" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.<ref>[https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2019/06/a-show-of-wax-figures.html True Crime: An American Anthology], Library of America website</ref>