Hawthorne’s Gothic Secularism

ABSTRACT This article traces the Gothic tension that evolves across Hawthorne’s work and reads it alongside the rise of secularism in American culture. Hawthorne’s interest in a literary theory of romance and realism that comes through in his prefaces is directly related to an interest in what would eventually come to be recognized as secularism, and over time, his writing comes to reflect secularism’s quiet insurgency over the principles of the modern world and of the power of the literary text. The shifting place of the Gothic in Hawthorne’s writing seems attuned to an understanding of the genre’s political power. Hawthorne’s use of the narrator, which shifts from third- to first-person, suggests a formal response to the dynamic transformation of the public and private spheres according to secularist principles, resulting in the ultimate horror for Hawthorne: the romance novel relegated to the private sphere and the romance author no longer a voice in public discourse.