Hawthorne: The Tension Between Individual and Community
The 19th century American author Nathaniel Hawthorne's most famous literary work is The Scarlet Letter, which dramatically illustrates the tensions between the individual's desire for love which is in opposition to the community's social constraints and faith-based ideals. But Hawthorne's short stories like "Wakefield" and "The Ambitious Guest" also highlight this tension. In these short stories, Hawthorne suggests that all individuals have a desire for independence and to some extent to live outside of social constraints but there is also always a simultaneous desire for community and companionship that cannot be overcome. Of the ambitious guest it is said: "The secret of the young man's character was a high and abstracted ambition. He could have borne to live an undistinguished life, but not to be forgotten in the grave" (Hawthorne 300). Ultimately, both Wakefield and the ambitious guest strive for individualistic lives marked by distinctions but end their existences in futile, thwarted ways.
The story of "Wakefield" is actually told as a speculative tale in which Hawthorne as the unnamed narrator wonders how possibly the imagined figure of Wakefield could have created a subterfuge during which he would live near his wife but not see her: "The man, under presence of going a journey, took lodgings in the next street to his own house, and there, unheard of by his wife or friends, and without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment, dwelt upwards of twenty years" (Hawthorne 1). The narrator imagines the character and the motivation of the man: "He was now in the meridian of life; his matrimonial affections, never violent, were sobered into a calm, habitual sentiment; of all husbands, he was likely to be the most constant, because a certain sluggishness would keep his heart at rest, wherever it might be placed" (Hawthorne 1) In other words, the desire to be unfaithful to Mrs. Wakefield was not part of his motivation.
The narrator takes the voice of conventional morality, calling Wakefield a fundamentally foolish man: "The crafty nincompoop takes to his heels, scared with the idea, that, among a thousand such atoms of mortality, her eye must have detected him. Right glad is his heart, though his brain be somewhat dizzy, when he finds himself by the coal-fire of his lodgings" (Hawthorne 2). However, by identifying with him, he also suggests that there is a common resistance within all human beings to the conventional boundaries of their existence. Wakefield clearly desires a way out of his marriage, but he is not brave enough to actually leave it and instead dwells in a kind of in-between world.
Wakefield's motivations are never explained. This gives the story an eerie, almost mysterious quality that it would otherwise lack, if Wakefield simply abandoned his wife due to a mistress. He also does not seem to be testing her in any manner and watches her suffering from a distance with a kind of detached fascination. Once again, this illustrates Wakefield's complex motivations and desires: he wishes to be a part of society yet also to retain his individualism and to stand outside of it. He also seems to wish to be married and not to be married simultaneously. Wakefield's feelings about his plight are more ambiguous than that of "The Ambitious Guest," who simply desires fame, but both protagonists clearly want an escape from their present circumstances and are unsure about how to secure it.
Hawthorne also suggests Mrs. Wakefield herself at times doubts whether her husband is dead, indicating that she herself might have perceived trouble in the marriage "But, long afterwards, when she has been more years a widow than a wife, that smile recurs, and flickers across all her reminiscences of Wakefield's visage" (Hawthorne 2). Just as her husband engages in a fantasy life, so does she: "In her many musings, she surrounds the original smile with a multitude of fantasies, which make it strange and awful; as, for instance, if she imagines him in a coffin, that parting look is frozen on his pale features; or, if she dreams of him in Heaven, still his blessed spirit wears a quiet and crafty smile" (Hawthorne 2). The divide between the husband and wife is dramatically and compellingly illustrated in this exchange: the wife and the husband both seem to be having relationships with people whom are not there; the wife...
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