Hawthorne

Abstract We have already encountered Hawthorne’s work, albeit via the unpleasant comments of Poe. It is little surprising that Poe would accuse Hawthorne of plagiarism, for the two authors share a great deal. Above all, for our purposes, the work of both features many of the various currents of Western esotericism. Whereas Poe’s use of esoteric themes is relatively unexplored, however, Hawthorne’s is much more well known and has been discussed in much more scholarly detail. One of the most useful books for understanding Hawthorne’s use of some esoteric themes is William Bysshe Stein’s Hawthorne’s Faust (1953), which as its title suggests, is essentially about the Faust archetype as central to much of Hawthorne’s work. The Faust archetype is revealing here because it suggests much about the particular way Hawthorne drew upon many of the same esoteric currents as Poe or the Transcendentalists.