Four Readings of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales
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- 1 See Préher, Gérald, ed. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales. Paris: Ellipses, 2024; Cottet, Hélène. “Now fo (...)
- 2 Edgar Allan Poe reviewed Twice-Told Tales in Graham’s Magazine in April 1842 and May 1842, and agai (...)
- 3 See Pfister, Joel. The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthor (...)
1The articles featured in this section stem from a symposium convened by the research unit CECILLE and held in January 2025 at Lille University. We invited early career and more experienced Hawthorne scholars to offer readings of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales to an audience composed of scholars and candidates of the agrégation, which is the French competitive exam to become an English teacher in secondary schools. Hawthorne’s tales were on its reading list, fostering a resurgence of scholarly interest in the writer’s short fiction in France1 and providing new opportunities to grapple with his texts. His importance to the definition and practice of the modern form of the short story cannot be overestimated; after all, it is in his famous review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales that Edgar Allan Poe set up the theory and standards of the form he still called “tale,” even if his dictates applied better to his own practice than to Hawthorne’s.2 Hawthorne’s short fiction actually runs counter to Poe’s principle of tight closure. His stories are marked by uncertainty, his endings are irresolute, and the reader is left wondering as to the reality of the events that have been told by an elusive, hard-to-identify narrative voice. Furthermore, the activity of interpretation is featured in the texts themselves, as are acts of perception—a process of “allegorization”3 dramatized inside the tale that tends to disrupt any stable allegory. All four of the readings included in this issue foreground these strategies of elusion. They attend to lights, dreams, the illusion of life in artifacts, and small, unyielding, perplexing pieces of cloth. They all ask how meaning is produced in Hawthorne’s short fiction, reckoning not with “a certain unique or single effect” (Poe), but with the production of crucial alternatives inside the tales.
2In “Nathaniel Hawthorne by Gaslight: The Illumination of Romance,” Matthew Redmond complements the usual association of fire with hell in Hawthorne’s tales to provide an original examination of its modern avatar: gaslight. He shows that the technological innovation that dramatically modified the cityscape of the beginning of the nineteenth century is marked by the same ambivalence as its more elemental counterpart and qualifies as a similarly complex symbol within the economy of the Hawthornian literary experimentation. Gaslight is a particularly appropriate motif to probe the interplay between light and darkness, daytime and nighttime, lucidity and blindness, creation and destruction. The short stories, Redmond claims, turn to gaslight again and again in an effort to assess its specific nature and its effects on human perception. If “The Birthmark” and “The Celestial Railroad” contrast natural light with fabricated radiance in what seems to be allegorical transparency, the article proposes a more nuanced reading. Alongside these stories, the article draws on several entries from the Notebooks which show Hawthorne tentatively assessing gaslight as a potent, if elusive, symbol, possibly pointing to the complexities of modern urban experience.
3In her article “The Ironic Oneiric in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales,” Isabelle Boof-Vermesse offers yet another incursion in Hawthorne’s night-time visions by looking at dreams inside his tales. Ontologically unstable, they are viewed here as crucial instruments of Hawthorne’s irony. This is made especially clear when the author takes us back to the German Romantics’ definitions of dreamwork and traces the importance of their writings on Hawthorne. Retrieving these conceptions of dreams as gateways to the supernatural, the irrational, the poetic, Boof-Vermesse brings them to bear on a select number of Hawthorne’s tales. Through close readings of “The Haunted Mind,” “Young Goodman Brown,” “Wakefield,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and “The Wives of the Dead,” she calls attention to the ways dreams enhance fictionality, and the interpretive games which ensue. With special attention given to the aesthetics of dreams and to effects of composition (embedding and symmetry), we are led to see that the exact “perimeter” of dreams is often unclear, giving way to the multiplication of narrative levels and to the twists and turns of irony that ensure we are never done reading Hawthorne’s tales.
4Bruno Monfort also addresses a form of Romantic irony (or self-reflexive dimension) by turning to agalmata, or artefacts that project a semblance of life, in “Drowne’s Wooden Image” and “Feathertop.” He shows that the two stories are not quite rewritings of the Pygmalion myth celebrating the power of art, but engage rather in its parodic deconstruction. In “Feathertop,” a “it-narrative” centered on a non-human protagonist, what comes alive is not a statue made by an artist, but a grotesque scarecrow, the assemblage of humble odds and ends put together by a witch, and his status as a fine gentleman is short-lived. Lifelikeness is eventually defeated intradiegetically, and the tale thus sardonically exposes its own limitations, even as a gullible reader might have started to believe in “Feathertop.” Monfort shows that when Hawthorne focuses on artistic creation as a life-giving analogue in a story, as is for example the case in “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” the illusion can only be laid bare and killed instead of being enhanced. If the woodcarver, a mere craftsman, does achieve artistic status, the miracle does not last for long. The American Michelangelo does reveal the creature hidden in inert matter by sculpting her out of the wood in which she was resting, but the figurehead turned woman walks out on him with the sea captain that commissioned the sculpture, ironically displaying the autonomy of the artwork. Monfort shows that narrative technique is loaded with irony and ambivalence as to what or who comes first, the statue or the woman: the story of the carved figurehead is given before the account of its flesh and blood avatar promenading about town, thus either vindicating the precedence of art or undermining it by sardonically endorsing the captain’s carefully staged show.
5In “Nathaniel Hawhtorne’s ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’: Hooper’s Hieroglyphics,” Romain Wong takes up another hermeneutic challenge by focusing on “The Minister’s Black Veil” and its long-standing enigma. Reprising the concept of the “hieroglyph,” the article aligns it with that of the “crypt” to account for the deferral of meaning in the tale: while the hieroglyph is meant to be deciphered, the crypt is a secret that is sealed off. The veil as hieroglyph operates as that other piece of cloth, the “A” of The Scarlet Letter, or as “The Birthmark”—“a bodily detail [that] becomes a hieroglyphic site of anxiety, overdetermined by the hermeneutic projections of those who behold it.” But the veil is also a crypt, as its main effect is to conceal or shut away the Reverend’s face, again keeping us guessing and frustrated. Such frustration performs very tangible effects, as Wong demonstrates by closely following the reactions of the congregation—not least of which is the exile imposed on the Reverend. The social interactions witnessed inside the tale do indeed configure the veil as a sign: a stigma, working inside a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that ties the Reverend’s fate not only to Hester Prynne’s but to that of “Young Goodman Brown.” To the reader, it extends a different invitation: “to remain in suspension, to inhabit the very tension between opacity and sense,” following the very oscillations Wong has charted for us.
Notes
1 See Préher, Gérald, ed. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales. Paris: Ellipses, 2024; Cottet, Hélène. “Now for a scene!” – “Wakefield” and the Drama of Narration in Hawthorne’s Tales.” Études Anglaises 77.3 (2024): 305-17; Constantinesco, Thomas; Caroline Hildebrandt, Édouard Marsoin, and Cécile Roudeau, eds. Hawthorne Inside Out. Nanterre: PU de Paris Nanterre, 2025.
2 Edgar Allan Poe reviewed Twice-Told Tales in Graham’s Magazine in April 1842 and May 1842, and again in Godey’s Lady’s Book in November 1847, together with Mosses from an Old Manse. See Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews. Ed. G. R. Thompson. New York: The Library of America, 1984, 568-88.
3 See Pfister, Joel. The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne’s Fiction. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991.
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Isabelle Boof-Vermesse et Hélène Cottet, « Four Readings of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales », Journal of the Short Story in English, 85 | 2025, 157-160.
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Isabelle Boof-Vermesse et Hélène Cottet, « Four Readings of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales », Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 85 | Automn 2025, mis en ligne le 08 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4834
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