Abstract
“Egotism, Or The Bosom Serpent” may be set over against Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis in this regard: that both works profess to be symbolic in technique, and that both appear concerned with a kind of perverted totemism. The effect of drawing the comparison, with respect to technique, is to throw some light upon a perplexing side of Hawthorne’s art, about which a great deal has been said, but very little in the language of close analysis.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes To Chapter Two
“The Metamorphosis,” in The Penal Colony (New York, 1948), 67-133.
In her Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago, 1947), passim. It strikes me that the fundamental weakness of historical relativism as a method lies in the ease with which it allows the critic to sidestep what still seems to me, perhaps naively, his fundamental job: that of making judgments. What if, in making them, he is adopting a personal viewpoint? So far as I can see, the critical act is still a normative one, and as such not yet amenable to scientific treatment. I would add that I earnestly hope it never is. I would not deny (as this study ought to show) that a knowledge of the historical matrix of a work of art can be of inestimable assistance to the promulgation of rational judgments about it; but if the work of art is being treated as a work of art, the historical knowledge cannot be of much significance in itself, but only as a means. If it is regarded as an end, then what is being studied is not art, but something else; which, for the avoidance of intellectual chaos, ought to be clearly held apart. Cf. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York, 1947), 197-225.
Complete Works, II, 105.
Ibid., I, 25.
Ibid., III, 496-98.
English Notebooks, 550-56 passim.
Ibid., 556. See also Leland Schubert, Hawthorne, The Artist (Chapel Hill, 1944), 3-5.
American Notebooks, 93; Passages From The American Notebooks (Complete Works, IX, 34).
Ibid., II, 303-304.
Ibid., I, 202. See also ?. ?. Foster, “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Literary Theory,” (PMLA, LVII (1942), 241-54).
For the general history of this problem, see, e.g., F. B. Blanshard, Retreat From Likeness In the Theory Of Painting (rev. ed., New York, 1949), esp. ch. ii.
English Notebooks, 523.
American Notebooks, 102-105; English Notebooks, 546-47.
Quoted in Jonathan Edwards, Images Or Shadows Of Divine Things (New Haven, 1948), 27.
Ibid., 43.
“Nature,” in Complete Works (Boston, 1883), I, 31.
Complete Works, III, 359.
Quoted in Edward H. Davidson, Hawthorne’s Last Phase (New Haven, 1949), 56.
Complete Works, II, 86.
American Notebooks, 101.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1955 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
von Abele, R. (1955). Hawthorne’s Bosom Serpent. In: The Death of the Artist. International Scholars Forum, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9471-6_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9471-6_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-011-8673-5
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-9471-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive