“WHITE SLEEP”: HAWTHORNE’S THOREAU, HOREAU’S HAWTHORNE

Abstract

This essay discusses the relationship between the Transcendentalist author and This essay discusses the relationship between the Transcendentalist author and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, and his sometime Concord neighbor and author of tales and romances, Nathaniel Hawthorne. It argues that while Thoreau and Hawthorne differed on many points, they found these differences useful and productive defining their own work. For his part, Hawthorne respected Thoreau’s scholarship, knowledge of nature and history, and deep integrity but found his intransigent manner boorish and disagreed with his politics. However, as his career went on he continued to dwell on Thoreau and thought to append a sketch of his life to his last, uncompleted romance, Septimius Felton. For his part, Thoreau recorded in his Journal a series of entries that are central to his understanding of the nature of his own labor, artistic activity, and life. In these passages he subtly addresses Hawthorne’s work (“The Minister’s Black Veil”) and career (Hawthorne’s consulship to Liverpool in the 1850s) in ways that become utterly central to his own natural, literary and Transcendentalist praxis. To demonstrate this thesis and its subtleties, the essay makes use of letters and passages from Hawthorne’s published writings and Thoreau’s Journal.

Keywords

• Authorship
• Commercialism
• Concord
• Hawthorne
• Transcendentalism
• Thoreau
• Value