Abstract
Going further back in time and adopting a self-reflexive loop structure, this chapter concludes this monograph by addressing a pre-Poesque text describing another interesting “urban castaway”: “Wakefield.” In this short story, Hawthorne introduces a protagonist who is both a failed incarnation of the flâneur and an archetype of the missing person, ultimately embodying an urban quest for one’s identity. This story perfectly serves as a non-conclusion to this book since Wakefield’s quest does not gratify him with the rewards of interpretation or knowledge nor does it prevent him from becoming a universal “outcast.” Like Poe’s “Man of the Crowd,” he is a detective, criminal, and victim in one, searching for his identity and “murdering” his former self under the not less guilty and inquisitive gaze of the narrator and the readers.
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Notes
- 1.
Many chapters of this book already contain references to Hawthorne’s story.
- 2.
Hawthorne, like Poe, certainly chose London as a scenery for his narration because it symbolized, in the same way Paris did, the archetype of an oversized and cosmopolitan city not yet to be found in the USA, as the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” comments: “so vast a difference is there between a London populace and that of the most frequented American city” (Poe 1975, 479).
- 3.
Brand interestingly adds that “[n]ewspapers make it possible to watch what is of interest to oneself, while escaping the surveillance of others” (1991, 117), making of the narrator a voyeur who does not assume his curiosity.
- 4.
This fictionalization is further complicated since the narrator seems, on the one hand, only to remember certain elements of the story when, on the other hand, he also, at times, has access to Wakefield’s thoughts.
- 5.
This statement also implies that the narrator himself is writing for a magazine or newspaper, once more undermining the legitimacy of a possible source since he could, in fact, be the author of the anecdote in the first place. For a possible analysis of the different sources that Hawthorne might have had at the time, see Ruth Perry’s article (1978).
- 6.
This argument is reminiscent of the importance attributed by Poe, in his “Philosophy of Composition,” to the notion of dénouement .
- 7.
In the same way, the narrator of “Bartleby ” sees himself as “an eminently safe man” (Melville 1856, 19).
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Dechêne, A. (2018). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield”. In: Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94469-2_12
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