Novalis and Hawthorne: A New Look at Hawthorne's German Influences

German influences on Nathaniel Hawthorne, in particular, those of Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann, have been well argued and examined, leading William Crisman to state that this discussion seems to produce an article, anthologized essay, or part of a chapter roughly once a decade (53). My essay considers yet another work--Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen--as a possible source for Hawthorne's Rappaccini's Daughter: I examine how Hawthorne might have rewritten the German Romantic novella. Tough it is not mentioned a single time in Hawthorne's fiction or prose, Novalis's unfinished novella, published posthumously in 1802, is organized around a young man's relationship to a flower. Attention to the relations between America and Germany, played out in reviews on the pages of magazines and periodicals, suggest that Hawthorne indeed had some exposure to Novalis, who wrote under the pen name of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg. Novalis's novella would give German Romanticism its decisive symbol, die blaue Blume, the blue flower, while recasting the contemporary moment of Romantic Germany through the legendary medieval poet, the eponymous Heinrich von Ofterdingen. At first glance, these works appear to have little in common, and it is impossible to ascertain precisely if Hawthorne read Novalis. My study, then, remains highly speculative at best. But the evidence marshaled here re-introduces questions about Hawthorne's originality and influences, this time in relation to Heinrich von Ofterdingen. This study reveals more, however, about Novalis than it does about Hawthorne, and suggests that Novalis demands careful reexamination in the history of nineteenth-century American culture and beyond. From early on, Hawthorne had to defend himself against reviewers who claimed his work was not very original and who pointed out obvious similarities to German Romantic writers. Edgar Allan Poe issued the following now famous commentary: The fact is, that if Mr. Hawthorne were really original, he could not fail of making himself felt by the public. But the fact is, he is not original in any sense. Those who speak of him as original, mean nothing more than that he differs in his manner or tone, and in his choice of subjects, from any author of their acquaintance--their acquaintance not extending to the German Tieck, whose manner, in some of his works, is absolutely identical with that habitual to Hawthorne ... These points properly understood, it will be seen that the critic (unacquainted with Tieck) who reads a single tale or essay by Hawthorne, may be justified in thinking him original ... [then] the critic will abandon his first design of calling him 'original,' and content himself with styling him 'peculiar.' (26-7) What has come to be called criticism of Hawthorne--actually two separate reviews from 1842 and 1847, that are often collapsed and considered one--just barely avoids the charge of plagiarism. While not the first of its kind, Poe's review set the tone for comparative investigations of the sources of Hawthorne's works even well into the twentieth century, and asked what is original, if anything, in Hawthorne's tales and romances.1 In uncovering Hawthorne's possible literary borrowings, as H. Arlin Turner calls them, critics have demonstrated that Hawthorne was well versed in both classic and contemporary world literature and used his knowledge of other texts as the basis for his tales and sketches, but with a twist. Twice-Told Tales, the title of Hawthorne's 1837 collection, which he then expanded in 1842 and which occasioned Poe's first review, thus puns on his method of (re)telling. Most likely occasioned by Poe's comments, which, according to Turner (558), Hawthorne was sure to have read, Hawthorne likened his own method of storytelling to E. T. A. Hoffmann's and Tieck's in the fourth chapter of his 1860 novel The Marble Faun. …