The Fall 2023 issue of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review has an interesting array of essays, several of them connecting thematically. All the essays focus on a type of revolutionary attitude not usually attributed to Hawthorne as well as Hawthorne’s changing views about nature, politics, art, women’s rights, religion, and war.
In the first essay, “The Forest Cannot Hide It: The Maritime and the Revolutionary in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter,” Schuyler Chapman does a timely analysis of the manner in which nature figures in Hawthorne’s most important novel. Chapman argues that Hawthorne prefers the vast oceanic unknown realm over the conventional national green of the nation in the author’s attempts to show possibilities of social amelioration and political progress. Following Chapman’s essay are two essays about empowered females in The Marble Faun. Anna De Biasio, in “Killing the Angel in the House: The Marble Faun and the Imagination of...
