“Wakefield”: Hawthorne’s Existential Experiment as a Romance Writer

Abstract

Since its publication in 1835, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “Wakefield,” has posed a serious challenge to literary critics because of its unusual thematic concerns and plot development. Regarding the significance of the protagonist’s self-exile from his domestic life for twenty years, some critics have suggested that Wakefield can be read as Hawthorne’s attempt to justify his vocation as a storyteller in mid-nineteenth-century America where writers were losing ground. Though these critics’ contextualization of the story offers significant insights into the story, they fail to consider one important facet of Hawthorne’s identity: Hawthorne was not simply a story writer but a romance writer. Examining Wakefield’s enigmatic behavior and life in light of Hawthorne’s concepts of romance presented in the prefaces to his major works, I contend that the parallels between Wakefield the protagonist as a seeker of a “neutral territory” and Hawthorne as a romance writer illuminate the issues Hawthorne wrestled with throughout his writing career: the worth of storytelling, the license and restrictions of romance writers, and writers’ raison d’être. Just as Wakefield does not fully control the course of his actions, Hawthorne is not entirely free to shape out Wakefield’s life in spite of his advocacy of a certain latitude for romances, because once the storytelling begins, his characters’ life begin to develop on their own terms, as is reflected in the narrator’s frequent, and futile, interference with Wakefield’s course of actions. More importantly, just as Wakefield leaves his everyday life to test his self-worth and create a new self free from all sorts of conventions and regulations, Hawthorne wants to assert his reason of being as a writer and test his ability to explore a new territory despite his awareness that doing so causes him to risk losing the interest of his readers accustomed to didactic or sentimental literature. While Hawthorne’s awareness of the limited amount of latitude makes him struggle to maintain a precarious balance between an appealing, well-accepted writer and an Outcast of the Universe, Hawthorne is fated to endeavor to open an intercourse with the world through his unpopular stories.