Historical contexts such as religion and race are common to American literary studies, and three
recent works illustrate how critics vary in their literary approach to the American romantic
tradition. Jason Charles Courtmanche takes a structuralist approach to examine how Hawthorne
uses the metaphor of the Fall throughout his four major novels. James Frank Walter's more
psychoanalytic approach examines how memory is a driving force that unites throughout the
American romantic tradition. Though Courtmanche and Walter are more specific in genre and
scope, respectively, Theo Davis's book is provocative because it challenges critics to
contextualize the meaning of experience in nineteenth- century terms and to take a more
formalistic approach to American literary classics. Furthermore, Davis's study is the most
distinguishing of the aforementioned studies because it prompts critics to reconsider the makeup
of American literature and culture.
The Fall, according to How Nathaniel Hawthorne's Narratives are Shaped by Sin, is a myth
common to Nathaniel Hawthorne's four major novels, yet Courtmanche struggles to fit original
sin into a strict typological package with his discussions of The Scarlet Letter and The House of
the Seven Gables. In the introduction, however, Courtmanche does clearly explain the
significance of Moses as an inspirational figure to Puritans, who believed there was a direct
correlation between Moses freeing the Israelites from the Pharaoh's oppression and Puritans
escaping the tyranny of the Anglican church. Hawthorne distinguished himself from the tradition
of Moses as a mythical figure and looked to the Fall of man for his new American myth. With
his sights set on creating an "unorthodox typology" Courtmanche purposes that Hawthorne
creates "five main character types," Adam, Even, and Satan, before the Fall, and eventually the
New Adam and Eve after the Fall (9). The chapter also briefly outlines Hawthorne's other
typologies of plot, setting, symbol, and hermeneutics, which help readers follow how
Courtmanche will apply these specific categories to Hawthorne's four major novels.
Out of The Scarlet Letter came one of Hawthorne's categorizations of characters into Eve, Hester
Prynne; Adam, Arthur Dimmesdale; Satan, Roger Chillingworth; and a new Eve, Pearl, and this
is the subject of Courtmanche's first chapter. Much of Hawthorne's typology is, however, still
grounded not only in Puritan mythology but its history. Ann Hutchinson, for instance, is a basis
for Hester Prynne's character because she, like Hester, challenged Puritan officials and their
perceptions of morality. This discussion was short, however, considering how critics such as
Michael Colacurcio label Hester Prynne as a "version of the sexual reformer" (468), who was
Hutchinson. Hutchinson and Hester Prynne have much in common as Eve figures because both
women question authority figures and are banished from their communities. Hutchinson was put
on trial for claiming Puritan ministers misinterpreted Calvinist doctrines and was eventually
expelled from her Puritan community. Hester, much like Hutchinson, challenged Puritan leaders
in The Scarlet Letter and was ostracized for having an illegitimate child. Hutchinson, therefore,
provides Hawthorne with much historical material for his fictional character of Hester.
Courtmanche moves to The House of the Seven Gables in the next chapter, and notes that the
New Adam and Eve figures of America, Holgrave and Phoebe, echo sentiments of Hawthorne's
words in The Scarlet Letter to "provide nineteenth-century readers with prototypes of how to live
a life characterized by 'sacred love' and a 'relation[ship] between man and woman [based] on a
surer ground of mutual happiness'" (91). The characters of Holgrave and Phoebe undoubtedly
represent a New Adam and Eve by the end of the novel because they represent a man and woman
starting anew. Though Judge Pyncheon in his tyrannical abuse of the remaining members of the
Pyncheon family is a satanic figure, Hepzibah and Clifford vaguely resemble Adam and Eve
because there is no clear Fall for the Adam and Eve characters in this novel-Hepzibah is not
sexualized by Hawthorne and Clifford is an innocent, almost child-like man.
Hawthorne's last two major novels fit Courtmanche's typology of sin more clearly and in The
Blithedale Romance, Adam and Eve are Zenobia and Holligsworth. Zenobia is a fallen woman
because of her sexualized character, and Holligsworth, Courtmanche astutely observes, is
outwardly sinless, but "[b]ecause he locates the origin of sin outside the self, Holligsworth also
believes himself to be without sin" (123). The figure of Satan, Westervelt, is clearly defined, and
more importantly, contextualized as evil by nineteenthcentury standards; he represents America's
rejection of faith and adoption of what Courtmanche defines as "sham religion and pseudoscience" (128). The book's New Adam and Eve figures, Coverdale and Priscilla, unlike in The
House of the Seven Gables, are destined to an uncertain fate, which is a reflection of
Hawthorne's attitude about American culture during his stay at Brook Farm, a communal
community in which the author lived before writing The Blithedale Romance. The last novel
Courtmanche examines, The Marble Faun, is "the most allegorical" (156) of the four novels, but
at the expense of Hawthorne creating characters that are "near-abstractions" (157). Donatello and
Miriam are Adam and Eve, Kenyon and Hilda are the New Adam and Eve, and Antonio is Satan,
and these characters are exemplary of Courtmanche's definition of the five categories of
Hawthorne's characters, I argue, because in The Marble Faun, Hawthorne creates caricatures
rather than characters.
The final chapter of the study considers some of Hawthorne's final literary works such as "Elixir
of Life" where there was no clear distinction of a typology of sin because Hawthorne had been
away from America, and Hawthorne's outlook on America's future, the few years before his
death in 1864, was too bleak to create New Adam and Eve characters. Courtmanche concludes
with a discussion of how Hawthorne's typology of sin was adopted by future authors such as
Henry James, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner.
Davis's study, in a sense, is the antithesis of Courtmanche's as she explains how New Critical
approaches are not appropriate for studying nineteenthcentury texts which emphasize experience.
Applying early-American culture to the study of its literature during this century is also
complicated, however, as there was no clear definition of an American identity up to this era.
The process of creating a national identity is the topic of the book, a process that is best
demonstrated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott's emphasis on questioning in the
following chapter. Davis directly asks the reader: "What would you have to believe about both
literature and experience to think it would be so hard to write about upstate New York, Boston,
or Virginia?" (1). Because of a lack of a cohesive national identity during the nineteenth-century,
Davis explains that an examination of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Harriet Beecher Stowe
demonstrates "a literature of experience, both personal and national: in Hawthorne's exploration
of sexual, psychological, and national identity; Emerson's declaration of the self-reliance of both
the individual and the nation; and Stowe's demand that a commitment to emancipation come
from shared sorrow over the destruction of the family" (3). Davis also includes two lesserknown
authors of the time in the study, Alcott and John Neal, because of their unique approach to the
American experience of their time.
Davis examines how Scottish "Common Sense" philosophers in the first chapter "define mental
conceptions, particularly imaginary ideas but also abstractions and possibles, as degraded forms
of the actual" (31). Such "abstractions," Davis argues, allow readers to come to their own
interpretation of a text. Neal portrays abstract moral truths through an ordinary character in
Rachel Dyer, where a plain looking woman is a heroine because this author wishes to "make
ordinary Americans serve talismanic functions" (57). Rachel Dyer is physically unattractive, but
Neal's talent is making her reflect heroic, internal characteristics, her "impeccably moral, pious,
and kind heart to her exterior" (57). Neal's unique character-making process has much to do with
how an emphasis on moral-uprightness was part of the American experience, especially during
the sentimental era of fiction following the American Revolution.
The second chapter is a discussion of how Hawthorne's writing is an exercise in "emblemmaking," as Hawthorne uses such "emblems" as a black veil in "The Minister's Black Veil" to
"underscore a moral lesson" (75), which served as a warning against self-righteousness such as is
demonstrated by the reverent Hooper's character. Examining how Hawthorne uses images to
incite an individual experience from his audience to help us evaluate the author's text is a prime
example of Davis's overall argument: as critics we must imitate the author's writing process
when we evaluate the text. Davis concludes that "Hawthorne shares with the Renaissance
emblem tradition a tendency to produce around the image an explication of its rationale that is
also an indication of how one should interpret it" (81). The idea of examining an author's
individual writing process to understand the text carries on to Emersonian self-reliance.
Davis, in the next chapter, argues that Emerson is not concerned with getting at the answers, or
universal experience, but rather she contends that "if we could get that hermeneutic question
right-we would know what American individualism is" (121). True to Emerson's emphasis on
experience, the study considers his process of instruction through questioning. Alcott applied
Emerson's ideas to teach skill-based learning to children during the nineteenth century by
teaching his students to ask the right questions rather than give correct answers. Alcott believed
that "instantaneous contact of idea and image" (130) is a skill based on learning how to ask
questions. Davis's study examines how Emerson and Alcott emphasize asking the right questions
about a text rather than having the right answers, and she argues that critics should ask the right
questions about the Transcendentalists. Davis concludes the chapter by considering how New
Criticism and historical approaches cannot be applied to Transcendentalism, since
Transcendentalism "is rather an interest in the abstract and the universal" (137) than a concrete
experience.
Davis ends the book by considering how Stowe made her readers not only feel, but react to
inhumane laws that separated African-American families. Davis considers Stowe's use of
second-person narration not to oversentimentalize her text, but to universalize it so a reader
"would probably feel and act as Eliza does in her situation" (139). Davis claims that critics
mistakenly label Stowe's fiction as sentimental. A sentimental writer would tell readers how to
feel about the cruelty of slavery, but Stowe also asks us to think about how illogical slave laws
were. Davis, however, concludes that Stowe's emotional intentions are clear, which makes "the
novel somewhat hermetic- notwithstanding its effects in the outside world-because potential
responses to it are already incorporated into it" (148). The American experience, then, is not
clearly defined by any of these authors since these authors elicit diverse logical and emotional
reactions from their audience but put into question whether "thinking all of our subjective
experience counts or thinking nothing but the meaning counts" (162). The American experience,
therefore, varies among early American authors as should our critical approach to it.
Courtmanche asks readers to look at patterns inside a text, Davis considers various nineteenthcentury experiences, and Frank's study is a continuation of the aforementioned studies as he
explores how romance and memories unite authors from Hawthorne to Toni Morrison in the
romantic American tradition.
Walter's Reading Marriage in the American Romance examines how authors create characters
who are isolated by their own moral flaws, and it is only through their memory of romantic
relationships that they demonstrate to readers the importance of psychological insight in finding
romance. Memory is what grounds novels from Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables to
Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain in the American romantic tradition. Walter prefaces his study
by outlining how memory in these novels moves the narrative literally and metaphorically
through a physical and psychological journey. He astutely compares such a journey of memories
to that undertaken by Odysseus, who changes from warrior to lover by the end of the poem.
Similarly, the male protagonists Walter examines in his study change to romantic love when they
link the past and present through their memory of a romantic love affair. Ultimately, marriage,
Walters claims, is "the sign of the return of subjective experience to objective perception" (xv).
Although Walter's choice of novels clearly demonstrates how memory is an integral part of
romance in American literature, the study lacked a chapter on an important literary figure who
wrote prolifically on contemporary American relationships, John Updike. Updike would have
been a perfect example of American marriage, and ending the study with an analysis of Updike's
"Separating" where Richard and Joan tell their children they are going to separate, and the
narrator describes Richard as "a crystalline heap of splinters and memories" (1488) would have
been thematically poignant. Such an ending, though not as uplifting as the memories of marriage
in Cold Mountain, would have allowed readers a more realistic account of a contemporary
American marriage.
The theme of classical examples of memories of a lost love continues into the first chapter where
Walter considers how philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and Aristotle connect individuals
romantically to one another. Hobbes's perception of such a connection is "self-preserving and
self-contained" and we link ourselves romantically to another "solely on the basis of selfinterest" (7). Although Walter gives clear illustrations of romantic perceptions of love from
classical figures to contemporary thinkers such as Bakhtin, who claims we base ideas of
marriage on myths, he never develops his own definition of romance. He calls romance "a force
either to invigorate or destroy whatever it draws into its sphere" (1), but such an abstract
characterization of the word romance is confusing to readers when we apply it to the romantic
era of American literature. The word romance applies to the literary genre Walter explores in the
second chapter, and a novel Hawthorne classifies as a "romance," The House of the Seven
Gables, which is part of the romantic American literary tradition.
Chapters 2 and 3 examine the relationship between Holgrave and Phoebe as it outwardly relates
to American history. Their marriage, Walter predicts, will eventually become "a responsibility to
fulfill the best of motives and desires that have endured over generations" (24). Marriage
ultimately becomes a union of the past, along with its memories and sins. Walter explains that
Hawthorne, through his representation of romantic love throughout several generations,
illustrates to his readers historical instances of "democratic and aristocratic prejudices" so that
we, along with Hawthorne's characters, may learn to make significant connections with others.
Walter, through the image of posies in the Pyncheon garden, turns his study toward "an inward
experience joining together lovers who are destines to go out into their world and act responsibly
in it" (70) in the third chapter. Walter examines how Hawthorne applies the relationship of
Holgrave and Phoebe to the changing structure of the American family in the nineteenth century.
Women in a democratic nation, such as Phoebe, who works in a cent-shop, were moving to the
public sphere and away from a traditional domestic environment where they had previously
remained in the home. The dynamic of the romantic relationship became more democratic as
well; Holgrave and Phoebe work together, as equals, to build a more equal and just American
society by the end of Hawthorne's romance.
Henry James's John Marcher in "The Beast in the Jungle" considers his friendship with May
Bartram. His inner-demon is personified as a beast, and this beast is, according to Walter,
"evidence of his success in guarding much and risking little in his relationship with May" (77).
Vanity isolates John Marcher as he is unable to form an intimate bond in memory even with
May, so his beast becomes a lonely life at the end of the story. James warns us against such
isolation as John's character is ultimately reduced to a "life that was so scattered among
moments, dissimulations, provocations, alternations, and appearances that never coalesced in
some sense of destiny or real communion" (97). Though Walter hints at the idea that James never
allows us closure at the end of the novel, Walter may have overtly stated that the author did so
perhaps because readers would be forced to internalize this feeling of incompleteness and
perhaps learn to find a sense of resolution on their own. James's emphasis on psychological
themes in his novels would support such a reading of the book.
Where John Marcher is left alone with his memories at the end of "The Beast in the Jungle,"
memories of Sweet Home and a dark past unite Sethe and Paul D in Morrison's Beloved, the
subject of the fifth chapter. The haunting of the house by the ghost of an infant where Sethe,
Denver, and Paul D reside is similar to how American culture is "a concentration of pieces of
memory including past horrors, debasements, and guilt experience by four generations of women
slaves" (102). As the characters remember the past, they recognize their psychological turmoil
and begin to heal through their common bond. Much like Hawthorne wished us to acknowledge
the prejudice in our nation's past in The House of the Seven Gables, Walter claims that Morrison
similarly "moves us to think, also, about current attitudes, assumptions, and modes of thinking
that obstruct our recognizing our common interiority that needs the nourishment of an
authentically human culture" (132). Following James's novella and its inconclusive ending with
the union of Sethe and Paul D in Beloved helps us juxtapose two diverse approaches by James
and Morrison that point readers toward learning how to resolve inner conflict that comes from
sharing memories of the past.
The discussion moves from America's past turmoil to a single character's analysis of his failed
marriages in Walker Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome. Again, Walter examines how a character's
moral flaw-in Tom's case his "continued alcoholic narcissism, his abuse of his professional
position, his emotional abandonment of Ellen, and his failure to act as a father to their two
children" (138)-keeps him from having a meaningful union with another soul. It is not until Tom
is forced to face his subconscious fears through his dreams that he realizes that Ellen, Walter
claims, "has been an important source of the memories that surfaces in his dreams to cast light on
his present state" (150). Walter perceptively illustrates how memories are part of Tom's healing
process and how his dreams allow him insight into his subconscious, where he again discovers
romantic love for Ellen.
The last chapter looks at Cold Mountain, where Inman's "readiness of imaginative memory to
rescue a soul in a hopeless time concretize not just personal endurance but also the role and
importance of cultural memory" during times of peril such as the American Civil War (190).
Cold Mountain brings us further in America's past than Hawthorne from the seventeenth through
mid-nineteenth century and Morrison from pre-Civil War to 1873. Since Frazier's novel is set a
few years prior to the Civil War until 1874, this chapter would have worked better following
Walter's analysis of Beloved. This study of Cold Mountain literally makes readers consider
psychological turmoil through war and would have been a catharsis to Walter's survey of
romance in America's past. Walter does, however, provide readers with the most romantic
illustration of memory in Cold Mountain; he notes how ten years after Inman's death, Ida,
"making a coda of themes from the body of the romance, chaste in its simplicity, surveys simple
patterns of life" which are truly romantic images, such as "marriage, children's play, passing
time, a family dining together," which all emphasize the importance of marriage in the American
romance (209). Walter ends his study on a light note, but thematically this chapter should have
preceded his discussion on The Thanatos Syndrome. Walter does, however, give readers a larger
context for the American romance than the other two studies.
These three critical studies not only illustrate structural, psychoanalytical, and formalistic
approaches to American literature, but they also vary in complexity. Although Davis's study
would not be as accessible to a neophyte in American literary studies, her question of whether
authors are responsible for constructing modern American identity is provocative. The American
experience, Davis claims, is not clearly defined by any of these authors since they all elicit not
only diverse logical and emotional reactions from their audience, but also put into question
whether "thinking all of our subjective experience counts or thinking nothing but the meaning
counts" (162). The American experience is perhaps, as Emerson theorizes, learning to ask the
right questions regarding our national identity. Courtmanche would be of best use to a newcomer
of Hawthorne studies to help students examine the author's use of literary devices, while Walter
would put Hawthorne's fiction into a broader context of the American romantic tradition. Davis's
work is the most comprehensive of the three studies since she considers how the battle between
structuralism and formalism has created our perception of American literature.