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Nathaniel Hawthorne by Gaslight: The Illumination of Romance

Matthew Redmond
p. 161-174

Résumés

Cet article examine l’importance de l’éclairage au gaz dans les nouvelles de Nathaniel Hawthorne. C’est durant la jeunesse de l’écrivain que le gaz inflammable est devenu le principal combustible d’éclairage du xixe siècle, et ses récits comme ses notes témoignent d’un effort soutenu pour intégrer ce gaz et sa lumière dans l’imaginaire romantique – pour leur attribuer une portée symbolique et morale. En étudiant l’usage hautement stratégique et variable qu’Hawthorne fait de l’éclairage au gaz dans ses nouvelles, on parvient à une compréhension plus nuancée de la manière dont le romantisme anglo-américain, loin de se cantonner à un répertoire restreint de symboles, a absorbé les grandes avancées technologiques et scientifiques de l’époque, en explorant leurs potentialités à travers une forme d’expérimentation littéraire.

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1As “Young Goodman Brown” reaches its fiery crescendo, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s title character frantically tears his way through the forest in search of Faith, suddenly believing her to be lost forever. “Thus sped the demoniac on his course,” says the narrator, “until, quivering among the trees, he saw a red light before him, as when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been set on fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of midnight” (Tales 92). What follows is a pyromaniacal display seldom rivaled in the pages of Hawthorne’s short fiction. Surrounding an altar of stone are “four blazing pines, their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting. The mass of foliage that had overgrown the summit of the rock was all on fire, blazing high into the night and fitfully illuminating the whole field. Each pendent twig and leafy festoon was in a blaze” (92). Still further on, we are told that members of an assembly gather, “flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame” (94), their faces aglow with sinister smiles. Hawthorne shows us a people of fire stepping forward to worship destruction itself.

2The tale’s towering inferno, like others in Hawthorne’s corpus, can become oddly invisible to readers familiar with his style. Here and elsewhere, it seems that fire volunteers itself all too generously for a certain kind of rather predictable interpretation, one that all of us anticipate at a glance: they are the fires of hell, a blazing damnation to which Hawthorne’s stranger, the Devil, lures unsuspecting travelers in the woodland of our mortality. Fire expresses the consummation of wrongdoing, and the consumption of the soul. It does other things, of course. There are plenty of comfortable hearths and firesides in his tales, such as “The Ambitious Guest,” “Little Annie’s Ramble,” and “The Gentle Boy”; and while Hawthorne does not share Charles Dickens’s fascination with fire gazers, his hearths can be as warm and inviting as anyone’s. In “The Great Carbuncle,” the lord De Vere dreamily imagines his coveted treasure “flam[ing] for ages, making a noonday of midnight . . . and keeping bright the memory of heroes” (Short Stories 77). In “The Golden Fleece,” there are repeated references to fire-breathing bulls and flashing fires from enraged eyes. In “Feathertop,” the titular scarecrow remains alive only as long as his pipe burns, his animation linked to combustion in a manner that intriguingly anticipates the first literary robots (a full sixteen years before Edward S. Ellis published “The Steam Man of the Prairies”). Yet all these other, less dramatic uses of fire seem overshadowed by the damning pyrotechnical displays in which so many tales culminate. Staring too long at those final pages, the reader is left blind to the nuance and variety of what Hawthorne achieves by playing with fire across the full length of his incandescent corpus.

3If a doctoral degree in literature sometimes raises the mocking question of what medical emergency its holder is qualified to spring forward and redress, here, finally, is an answer. After all, when a metaphor lies on the cusp of death, who better than a literary critic to apply the defibrillator? Carolyn Dinshaw does as much in an excellent chapter about Rip Van Winkle. She considers how casually we often talk about the “timestream,” seemingly with almost no awareness that we are using a metaphor, and how that word tends to evoke images of time flowing in a neat and continuous and orderly fashion. Drawing on her experience living in woodlands of the northeastern United States, Dinshaw attests that actual streams are not the least bit orderly or straightforward or predictable: on the contrary, they are violent, unruly, unpredictable forces of nature that erode soil, fell trees, and otherwise permanently alter the landscapes they traverse. When we hold this fact about streams in mind while speaking about a “timestream,” the vehicle of metaphor suddenly becomes equipped to convey new and more complicated perceptions of our own being-in-time. There is hermeneutical value, Dinshaw teaches us, in rediscovering the violent heart of even the most domesticated figurative language (187).

4This essay attempts a similar intervention. My purpose is to uncouple Hawthorne’s fires from their ready-made association with eternal punishment, and then re-embed fire itself in other kinds of historical context, the better to understand Hawthorne’s deceptively complicated and shifting relationship with this generous image. Specifically, I propose reading certain fiery tales through the lens of a particular transatlantic controversy that spread far and wide during his youth: the advent of gas-powered lighting. Like so many innovations, gaslight was varyingly regarded as a wonder and a threat, a new source of truthful illumination and a symbol of brazen falsehood. By analyzing those moments when his characters create, nurture, and are bathed in “unnatural light” fueled by inflammable gas, I hope to give Hawthorne’s fictive fires a little more oxygen, allowing them to spread in new directions and cast light on aspects of his creative sensibilities that would otherwise remain invisible. Studying Hawthorne’s use of gaslight, the most strategic and compelling examples of which are found in his short fiction, we gain a more nuanced understanding of how Anglo-American Romanticism, far from holding to a restrictive repertoire of symbols, absorbed major technological and scientific developments of the period and unlocked their different potentialities through a kind of literary experimentation.

A History of Light

5In recent decades, several critics have eloquently told the story of inflammable gas’s emergence as a source of light in Britain and America. Appropriately foregrounded in most of these narratives is the fact that gaslight softened and blurred what had seemed a hard distinction between day and night, and, by extension, between behaviors and impulses associated with each. “Gas bore witness to night scenes, to aspects of the city that were hidden by day,” says Lynda Nead. “Street lamps represented the intrusion of daytime order and the rational space of the improved city into the darkness of the city at night” (83). Nighttime, according to Roger Ekirch, had previously stood as a “sanctuary from ordinary existence” during which people could express themselves and “realise repressed desires” in ways inaccessible during the daytime (91). Indeed, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, nocturnal urban landscapes were mostly pitch black and populated by those agents whose work most benefitted from the cover of untroubled night. Gaslight invaded this sanctuary, eroding cities’ permissive darknesses with an earthbound constellation of steadily burning lights. Erosion may be the wrong metaphor, given how quickly this transformation came about. It was in 1802 that William Murdoch threw gas-powered light onto the exterior of the Soho Foundry in Birmingham, as a bold demonstration of the new light source’s power. By 1810, the London and Westminster Gas Light and Coke Company had been incorporated. Two years later, the company was granted a Royal Charter and began building the first gasworks along the banks of the Thames, laying thirty miles of gas lines by 1815.

6Widely recognized from its inception as cheaper and more efficient than such past sources of artificial light as the candle, gaslight quickly became, as Richard Leahy attests, “the dominant artificial light of the nineteenth century,” from whose supremacy three massive “ideas” spring forth: “the value of modern industry and technological development; the growth of the metropolitan public space; and the evolution of visual society and culture” (92-93). It soon changed labor relations by stretching the workday to formerly inaccessible lengths, a fact on which nineteenth-century essayists, even those of widely contrasting political and social situations, commented almost with a shared sense of wonderment and concern. Gaslight was a modern marvel, but what exactly did it cost? William Hazlitt’s essay “On Londoners and Country People” seems conceived and written in the steady glow of gaslight, especially in those moments when he fetishizes the natural sunlight that is common to country people but elusive to those who live and work in cities. Whether speaking of a man “shut up all his life in a shop” until he finally escapes “the thorny mazes of the world” to emerge in the clear morning light, or while contrasting the sunlight of a city dweller’s youth with “the blaze of vanity, the glitter of metropolis,” Hazlitt seems to accord natural light a particular nostalgia and reverence that is possible only after the emergence of a pervasive artificial light powered by gas (173, 176). Moreover, in most spaces where streetlamps were introduced, the change often precipitated complaints both of “too much light” and of a certain uncomfortable harshness in the light itself, when compared with what was increasingly called natural light—the birth of light pollution following all too swiftly on the heels of this new artificial illumination.

7A vivid sign of the impression that gaslight made on the Victorian imagination is found in Drawing the Retorts at the Great Gas Establishment Brick Lane, which served as the frontispiece of The Monthly Magazine’s February issue in 1821. This painting shows a small army of workers straining on a dark night to syphon off the crude gas generated in containers called retorts, where materials such as coal are heated in ducts and channels for the purpose of manufacturing inflammable gas. Over these proceedings the artist drapes a crimson hue, rendering this industrial milieu as a modern underworld and its workers as so many ruined souls. Like Milton’s fallen angels tearing ribs of gold from the earth to create their council hall of Pandemonium, these reddened workmen, flanked by fire, seem engaged in an inherently transgressive form of labor. The frontispiece, while capturing the raw power of contemporary industry, also clothes that power in in an aura of unholiness.

8In the United States, gaslight first appeared in 1816, in Baltimore, thanks to the Peale brothers, Rembrandt and Rubens, who used it to illuminate their museum, emulating the techniques they had encountered during a recent European sojourn. Their company soon flourished, and by the 1830s, they were supplying gas to three thousand domestic customers and one hundred streetlamps. Companies in other cities soon followed, among them Boston Gas Light in 1822, and New York Gas Light Company in 1825. A gas works was built in Philadelphia in 1836. One Baltimore resident, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” bears witness to the aesthetic effect of gas power on America’s urban landscape, as the narrator remarks toward sundown that “the rays of the gas-lamps, feeble at first in their struggle with the dying day, had now at length gained ascendancy, and threw over every thing a fitful garish lustre” (417). Americans shared with their transatlantic counterparts an unease about gas power’s effect on society and the individual souls of which it is comprised: how they see, how they are seen, and how they relate to one another. Helpful and destructive, naturally occurring and synthetic, inflammable gas defied easy categorization and seemed a source of abiding mystery even as its proliferation became impossible to ignore.

Unnatural Light in “The Birthmark”

9Hawthorne’s eye is sensitive to gaslight. Several of his longer fictions stage significant encounters under the glow of gas-powered flame, whether real or imagined. In The Marble Faun, it is the flaring light of a gas lamp that reveals the face of Miriam, glancing out a carriage window, to Donatello while the latter pursues his winding course through “a complication of narrow streets” (450). Chapter Three of The House of the Seven Gables shows Hepzibah Pyncheon absently tending to her shop when a man in blue cotton intrudes on her fretful reflections, his pipe filling her establishment with “the hot odor of strong drink, not only exhaled in the torrid atmosphere of his breath, but oozing out of his entire system, like an inflammable gas” (38). His smoke, like his “brutal” demeanor, represent in prim Hepzibah’s eyes the violent intrusion of modern ideas and comportment on the aristocratic world that she knew. For Hawthorne, inflammable gas can enable communion or alienation, clarity of perception or the most oppressive obscurity. Serving admirably in both roles, it is hampered by neither.

10Still, it is in the shorter fictions that Hawthorne’s most rigorous experiments with the construction and representation of gaslight take place. Like one of his own fictional men of science, he returns to the subject with almost obsessive regularity, trying to establish definitively what its true properties are. Indeed, his tales becomes so many differently equipped laboratories where tests are conducted to determine, among other things, what the discovery of gaslight fundamentally signifies within the world of romance. No two of these experiments are exactly alike, the stakes and approach always shifting between them. Hawthorne’s mistrust of this artificial light finds its sharpest expression in “The Birthmark.” His narrator quickly establishes an emphasis on illumination as both a symbol and a product of modern scientific discovery by setting this tale “[i]n those days when the comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other kindred mysteries of Nature seemed to open paths into the region of miracle” (Tales 152). There may be no more crucial word in that sentence than “seemed,” signaling as it does that the bright future suggested by these scientific breakthroughs may prove illusory—or else unendurably bright, blinding to the human eye, like the streetlamps of Covent Garden were sometimes said to be. Long before the horrible consequences of Aylmer’s experiment are laid bare, Hawthorne amplifies these concerns using the language of light and fire. The first time Aylmer’s private laboratory is described, it is through his wife’s eyes, with considerable attention paid to the sources of light:

The walls were hung with gorgeous curtains, which imparted the combination of grandeur and grace that no other species of adornment can achieve; and as they fell from the ceiling to the floor, their rich and ponderous folds, concealing all angles and straight lines, appeared to shut in the scene from infinite space. For aught Georgiana knew, it might be a pavilion among the clouds. And Aylmer, excluding the sunshine, which would have interfered with his chemical processes, had supplied its place with perfumed lamps, emitting flames of various hue, but all uniting in a soft, impurpled radiance. (157)

How different from the blazing pines of “Young Goodman Brown.” It would be difficult to find anywhere in Hawthorne’s tales a more lush, ornamental, or decadent experience of fire. Besides inviting us to conflate Aylmer’s science with religious worship, as Robert Heilman would point out, both the odor and the color of this “impurpled flame” announce to the reader Aylmer’s preference for beautiful artifice over natural truth (480). In its excessive beauty, Aylmer’s artificial fire seems suspicious. Reading backward through the conclusion of the story, we can only infer that he is horribly wrong to prefer the light he makes himself to the natural alternative of the sun. Indeed, in its seductiveness, the fires of his laboratory seem to carry an almost incestuous connotation, as though he were choosing them over his wife and conspiring with them against her. Conspire: the world means literally to breathe with someone. The beguiling gas-powered light that showers purplish death on Georgiana is always more Aylmer’s partner than she.

11“The Birthmark” is certainly not without more grandiose examples of Hawthornian heat and light. When finally Georgiana ventures into the bowels of Aylmer’s laboratory, she is confronted by a scene of infernal industry: “The first thing that struck her eye was the furnace, that hot and feverish worker, with the intense glow of its fire, which by the quantities of soot clustered above it seemed to have been burning for ages. There was a distilling apparatus in full operation” (Tales 162). The appearance of having burned for ages marks this fire as unnatural, as much a product of Aylmer’s obsession as his perfumed firelight. Modern experiments are driven relentlessly onward by modern, unquenchable, mysterious fires that either dull the senses or overwhelm them. In a way, this vision of the furnace feels reminiscent of Margaret Fuller’s essay, “The Great Britain,” first published just two years after “The Birthmark,” in which she tours the inside of a “vast steam-ship.” After marveling at its “heart and lungs,” Fuller professes that “if Man is no longer a giant, he is at least the creator of giants” (207). Hawthorne’s story seems as disturbed by this prospect as Fuller’s essay is heartened by it. Significantly, if the gaslight and the furnace are both fixtures of Aylmer’s laboratory, only the latter image announces its threatening nature at a glance, with its “intense glow.” Gaslight’s many-colored hue seems harmless at first, its latent dangers easy to ignore until the fire has already burned much too long.

12In the end, Hawthorne reserves for natural light the privilege of exposing Aylmer’s folly. When finally Georgiana accepts the potion and has fallen asleep, Aylmer “[draws] aside the window curtain and [suffers] the light of natural day to fall into the room and rest upon her cheek.” The light exposes both the disappearance of the birthmark and the death of his subject, both processes having unfolded in the stinging hue of Aylmer’s insidious, fabricated light. The “parting breath” that escapes Georgiana’s lips, meanwhile, is a natural vapor set up in opposition to the unnatural gas that has enabled these lethal experiments (Tales 165). Natural light in this story is wedded to natural feeling, and artificial light to deception and destruction. Hawthorne’s tale reflects the anxiety of his era regarding light’s too-easy production through chemical processes, suggesting that illumination, like virtue, can be dangerous when counterfeited and carried to excess.

Celestial Gas

13In “The Celestial Rail-road,” Hawthorne’s narrator passes through the “gates of dream” and embarks on a Bunyanesque journey toward the Celestial City (Tales 166). Yet the allegorical realm through which he travels, like the real world, has changed a great deal since John Bunyan’s time. No sooner has the narrator reached the Slough of Despond than the tale begins unfolding a slew of “wonderful improvement[s]” that have made this perilous journey of the soul less perilous—and thus, it would appear, less meaningful—than ever before (Tales 171). This sense of diminishing returns is perhaps nowhere more apparent than at that late juncture of the tale where Hawthorne’s little omnibus of pilgrims reaches the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The narrator describes how “the defect of cheerful sunshine” has been overcome by collecting “the inflammable gas which exudes plentifully from the soil,” and which is then “communicated” to a quadruple row of streetlamps. In this way, says the narrator,

a radiance has been created even out of the fiery and sulphurous curse that rests forever upon the Valley; a radiance hurtful, however, to the eyes, and somewhat bewildering, as I discovered by the changes which it wrought in the visages of my companions. In this respect, as compared with natural daylight, there is the same difference as between truth and falsehood, but if the reader have ever travelled through the Dark Valley, he will have learned to be thankful for any light that he could get; if not from the sky above, then from the blasted soil beneath. Such was the red brilliancy of these lamps that they appeared to build walls of fire on both sides of the track, between which we held our course at lightning-speed, while a reverberating thunder filled the Valley with its echoes. (172)

In a tale mostly satisfied to deliver its satiric thrusts from behind a veil of naïve approbation (why not fill the Valley of Humiliation and save oneself the hassle of passing through it!), this judgment on gaslight is one of the few instances where Hawthorne’s narrator admits that some things are lesser for having been improved. Gas-powered lights, for all their convenience, are firmly connected in this tale with inauthenticity, and treated as a poor excuse for the “genuine” light of the sun. Like innumerable British pedestrians passing through Covent Garden, the narrator is struck by how harshly this artificial light touches one’s cheek, in contrast with the caresses of the natural alternative. But harshness is not the only problem. One of the notable and yet easily ignored aspects of this light in Hawthorne’s story is that, for all intents and purposes, it does not illuminate anything: the narrator acknowledges the light itself but describes nothing (except the “blasted soil beneath”) that has been made visible because of it. From the reader’s standpoint, the valley might as well have remained in darkness. For Hawthorne’s pilgrim’s, meanwhile, this harsh and rather purposeless illumination has come at the cost of insight without which any journey toward Heaven becomes a doomed errand. Too much light, we are encouraged to infer, blinds the seeker to their own defects and the possibility of true repentance. For Hawthorne, light pollution is a spiritual problem.

14Most arrestingly, perhaps, these gas-powered lamps, with their “red brilliancy,” seem to build “walls of fire” on either side of the pilgrim’s path, narrowing this valley into a kind of garish highway. Just as the narrator would pass over the threshold of the Celestial City, the bottom falls out from underneath his dream-pilgrimage when Smooth-it-away reveals himself to be a more devilishly self-interested figure than we knew. The tale ends with repeated blasts of hellfire not unlike those that conclude “Young Goodman Brown”: “And then did my excellent friend Mr. Smooth-it-away laugh outright; in the midst of which cachinnation a smoke-wreath issued from his mouth and nostrils; while a twinkle of lurid flame darted out of either eye, proving indubitably that his heart was all of a red blaze. The impudent Fiend! To deny the existence of Tophet, when he felt its fiery tortures raging within his breast!” (181). If this pilgrimage was a sham from the outset, it is because the rough-hewn road to salvation has seen its edges smoothed away by modern conveniences, including the gas-powered lights that illuminate reaches where darkness once tried pilgrim souls. The forces of Hell, Hawthorne’s tale implies, are sociable with the inventive energies of humankind, one gaining strength and opportunity from the other. If Hawthorne’s tales express a mistrust of artificial light that was common among Romantics of his day (many of whom preferred more traditional light imagery in their works about genius, inspiration, and depths of feeling), his viewpoint, like these perfumed fires, may have more nuance than the eye can perceive all at once.

The Light of Allegory

15It is hardly a favorable image of gaslight that materializes across these two tales. “The Birthmark” links gas-powered light in seemingly inextricable fashion to the unnatural excesses of Aylmer’s improving mind—an obsession with beauty that suffocates its most cherished object. This artificial light becomes the tool of artificial desires in their struggle against more natural impulses of love and humanity. In “The Celestial Rail-road,” gaslight reveals nothing and takes everything of value to an earnest seeker of truth. By improving the landscape in one sense, through added illumination, those powers that shape the Valley of the Shadow of Death have deprived pilgrims of a more essential and timeless improvement: that of their own mortal souls. Taken together, these tales suggest an author turning over in his mind a new symbol whose drawbacks and dangers far outweigh its every purported benefit. But Hawthorne is not an artist to indulge in absolutes without at least undermining them somewhere. If Hawthorne’s inflammable gas can fuel fictions of obsession and suffering, what other sorts of narrative thought experiments can it propel?

16Here, as in so many other questions about Hawthorne’s poetics, his surviving notebooks provide a valuable insight. Entries that run from October 17 to December 6, 1837, find Hawthorne working actively to discern what moral and allegorical potentialities gaslight possesses as a literary device, which meanings it provisions and which it disqualifies. He does this by pitching to himself various scenarios involving gas-powered lights and then questioning what significance lies beneath:

A description of the various classes of hotels and taverns, and the prominent personages in each. There should be some story connected with it,—as of a person commencing with boarding at a great hotel, and gradually, as his means grew less, descending in life, till he got below ground into a cellar.

A person to be in the possession of something as perfect as mortal man has a right to demand; he tries to make it better, and ruins it entirely.

A person to spend all his life and splendid talents in trying to achieve something naturally impossible,—as to make a conquest over Nature.

Meditations about the main gas-pipe of a great city,—if the supply were to be stopped, what would happen? How many different scenes it sheds light on? It might be made emblematical of something. (Note-Books 97-98)

If part of the thrill of reading Hawthorne’s notebooks is, of course, having a cross-section of his thought process before our eyes, that excitement surely spikes whenever we find anything that so much as sounds like a forerunner of a tale that we know. In this case, it is difficult to imagine a pithier summary of “The Birthmark” than the sentence that forms this second paragraph. The ruin of the surpassingly beautiful Georgiana by her perfection-obsessed husband feels like a natural outgrowth from Hawthorne’s highly concentrated pitch. Having stated this premise, he more or less restates it, this time as the labor of a talented man to overcome the proper limitations of nature. And what follows next is the image of the “main gas-pipe” supplying a city with artificial illumination—until it does not. Sounding more like a scientist than ever, Hawthorne wonders “what would happen” if one change—the failure of the all-important natural gas supply—were introduced to the controlled environment of the city. The task of the writer is to document as scrupulously as possible what effect this stimulus would have on a variety of test subjects who presumably differ in such factors as age, background, and worldview. Aside from the question of its moral uses in literature, gaslight seems to encourage in Hawthorne an almost empirical attitude toward his characters, an increased emphasis on precise, even clinical methodology and dispassionate observation.

17Pages later, Hawthorne returns to the image of gas power, but from another direction. From the scale of an entire city, his scope contracts to that of a single establishment, while his labor of interpretation become only more evident. An entry from December 6, 1837 describes:

A house to be built over a natural spring of inflammable gas, and to be constantly illuminated therewith. What moral could be drawn from this? It is carburetted [sic] hydrogen gas, and is cooled from a soft shale or slate, which is sometimes bituminous, and contains more or less carbonate of lime. It appears in the vicinity of Lockport and Niagara Falls, and elsewhere in New York. I believe it indicates coal. At Fredonia, the whole village is lighted by it. Elsewhere, a farm-house was lighted by it, and no other fuel used in the coldest weather. (98)

Here we observe Hawthorne digging more deeply into both the literal and figurative nature of inflammable gas. The phrase “constantly illuminated” suggests an unceasing, excessive brilliancy—a house that never knows the shade of which Hawthorne’s narrators are so often ringingly appreciative. The open-ended question of “[w]hat moral could be drawn” from a spring of inflammable gas echoes Hawthorne’s earlier intuition that many houses deprived of gas from a common source “might be emblematical of something.” In both cases, Hawthorne forbears even to suggest what the actual moral or emblem might be. Gas power requires a different approach from the wildfires of “Young Goodman Brown” and “Earth’s Holocaust”; it is not a source of pure hellish compromise, as the Monthly Magazine frontispiece might tend to imply, but rather a nexus point between creation and destruction—an innovation capable of giving and of taking away. With this latter moment, no sooner do his reflections briefly crane themselves upward toward a spiritual interpretation of natural gas before tumbling into an extended recitation of this spring’s literal properties.

18Interestingly, in seeking the intersection of real and allegorical frames of reference, Hawthorne deploys a particular anecdote from the annals of gas power. The small village of Fredonia, located in Chautauqua County, New York, became among the first towns in the United States to adopt natural gas illumination in the 1820s. While the village thus became a pioneer in using natural gas for lighting, its early success was short-lived. Over time, the natural gas springs in Fredonia became depleted, and by the late 1830s, the town was no longer able to rely on this free, natural gas source. The gas wells were essentially exhausted, and Fredonia had to look for alternative sources of lighting. However, Fredonia’s experiment remained an important milestone in the history of energy use in the United States. It was one of the first practical uses of natural gas as an energy source and helped pave the way for the development of more advanced gas lighting systems in cities like New York and Philadelphia in the decades to come. While Hawthorne could not anticipate what lay ahead for Fredonia, his reference in the notebook speaks to the excitement and the precarity of their position at the forefront of an energy revolution whose future no one in the 1830s could possibly predict. Perhaps most suggestive of all is the qualifier in this excerpt: it is a “natural spring of inflammable gas” that Hawthorne places at the center of his tale-in-waiting. By contrast, in those finished productions that we have already observed, Hawthorne is scrupulous about keeping gas power separate from all things avowedly natural.

19In the note-taking stage of his creative process, then, Hawthorne does not seem at all committed to the assumption that inflammable gas, or the illumination that it supplies, must itself be cast in a negative light. On the contrary, he treats the notebooks as yet another laboratory, one where even more ambitious experiments can be conducted than those that drive many of his gas-powered tales. Hawthorne’s imagination is open to the development of a gas-powered poetics that comprehends both its value (as a source of light to an entire estate, or even an entire city) and its pitfalls (excessive dependence on one light source might leave one hopelessly in the dark). And even if the stories, at a glance, seem to strike a condemnatory note when speaking of inflammable gas and the light it enables, there is also an acknowledgement that gas power might allow new kinds of access to the themes of interiority, mutual dependence, faith, and self-discovery that so define his artistic priorities. Hawthorne uses gaslight to signal the growing interdependence of anonymous souls inhabiting urban space together. These are effects far different from that of the enormous blaze of “Young Goodman Brown.” For Hawthorne, not all fires burn alike, and what fuels them can determine what we discern in their light.

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Matthew Redmond, « Nathaniel Hawthorne by Gaslight: The Illumination of Romance »Journal of the Short Story in English, 85 | 2025, 161-174.

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Matthew Redmond, « Nathaniel Hawthorne by Gaslight: The Illumination of Romance »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/4848

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Matthew Redmond

Université de Lille

Matthew Redmond is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Université de Lille. He holds a PhD from Stanford University (Living Too Long: The Politics of Lifespan in American Literature). His research primarily explores the intersection of narrative form and existential condition of being. He has published in English Literary History, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and ESQ, among other journals.

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