Preamble
This is a repost of a review initially published on Medium in 2021.
Review (4 out of 5)
In general, I find Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) a bit of a bore. I say this up front because I think he makes a great example of how authors vary in quality and across genres. While I find his novels a bit of a didactic trudge (e.g. The Marble Faun), his short stories really stay with you, and his 1846 collection, Mosses from an Old Manse, has some of my favourites akin to some of Edgar Allan Poe’s spooky stories.
I first sat down and read the whole of this collection when I was planning for my PhD, looking at the treatment of paintings, sculptures and other art objects in literature. I didn’t end up including Hawthorne in it for time period reasons, but Mosses has a few great stories the look at the seductive (and destructive) power of beauty and art over our lives, including ‘The Birthmark’, ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’, and ‘Drowne’s Wooden Image’. A number of Hawthorne’s stories focus on the obsession with female beauty no matter the cost, including ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ and ‘The Birthmark’, with resemblances to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’ (originally ‘Life in Death’), Arthur Machen’s ‘The Great God Pan’, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Parasite’.
I came back to Mosses recently while putting together a talk on statues that exact divine retribution (for the Romancing the Gothic project), as Hawthorne’s stories are part of a broader tradition of destructive made images/creatures. ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ in particular has stayed with me from reading Mosses, and it has a lot to say in juxtaposition with contemporary eco-gothic story telling, a genre that I really enjoy.
The dominant theme in Mosses is the fatal futility of pursuing perfection, suggesting that the flaw in the beautiful is its true core. Not all of the stories have tragic endings, although many do. For example, ‘Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent’, which reverses the gender of the bearer of the flaw and the person seeking to cure them, has a restorative conclusion of the flaw being overcome. ‘Egotism’, as well as some others here and elsewhere in Hawthorne’s œuvre, has the tone of an ironically told fable, not dissimilar to some of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s leyendas (you can read El beso (The Kiss)and La ajorca de oro (The Golden Bracelet) in translation on my Substack) or other nineteenth-century gatherings of older folktales.
Hawthorne himself says he began to feel lost in the themes of these stories, struggling to recall what message he had been trying to convey when he’d set down to write them. For a reader, that lends a frisson of interest to the collection as a whole, beyond the amusement of each individual story. The collection grapples with the aspiration to achieve perfection-the sort of hard work and sacrifice often valorised-and the damage that aspiration does. It courts the supernatural and the fantastic, but remains firmly grounded in its uncertainty about what to do for the best.
If you like Mosses and his short stories, there’s plenty of Hawthorne freely available online. Twice-Told Tales is an earlier, but longer collection with some similar themes (although many people think Mosses the better of the two). And there is, of course, Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic stories to explore too, and Bécquer’s folktales, linked to above. Plus, you might also be interested in some of the work by Hawthorne’s son, Julian, including several novels and a set of detective stories.
Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies: preorder now!
Dominique Gracia 
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