The Inward Turn of the Transcendentalists: Hawthorne’s Inscapes Into the Person

• In Event: Literature, Persons, and Modern Politics

Abstract

Hawthorne’s stories are regarded as deep burrowings ‘into the depths of our common nature.’ In The Scarlet Letter, for instance, we can catch a glimpse of Hawthorne’s ‘inscapes’ into the reality of the person both in their isolation and interdependence. At the heart of Hawthorne’s work is the multidimensional reality of the ‘human person.’ The issue of freedom and responsibility emerges quite clearly within his literary creations. Are human persons limited by forces beyond their control or are they freely acting self-determining agents in the human drama? In Hawthorne’s writings we discover also a thoroughgoing critique of those in society who uphold codes that crush human freedom and dignity. Transcendentalism communicates the view, especially in literature, that ‘even in a world of objective knowledge, the subjective consciousness and the conscious subject can never be left out of the reckoning.’ As Ralph Waldo Emerson describes this, ‘you think me the child of my circumstances: [but] I make my circumstances,’ so assisting us in passing ‘out of this Iceland of negations.’ Writing to Robert Heilman, Eric Voegelin observed how works of art, poetry and philosophy only make sense if conducted as an inquiry into the nature of the human person. In this paper I will therefore specifically explore Hawthorne’s latent ‘personalism’ reflecting on the reality and ‘inscapes’ of the often ‘unknown person at the threshold.’

Author

• John McNerney, Catholic University of America