Robert Milder. Hawthorne's Habitations: A Literary Life

Robert Milder. Hawthorne's Habitations: Literary Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 295 pp., cloth, $39.95. A Treacle of Mythiness The Hawthorne that soon takes shape Robert Milder's book Hawthorne's Habitations is Hawthorne familiar within specific strain of Hawthorne criticism: timorous if sneakily titillated sex, exasperated his failure to achieve form of realist fiction that his work approached but forever deferred, obsessed with binding power of sin even within largely secular approach to religion and world at large, sympathetic to his female characters only insofar as they serve function of expressing and negotiating his own conflicted views towards women, gender, and body, and so forth. In short, Milder gives us distilled essence of several decades of this particular view of repressed Puritan Hawthorne, man of great gifts and narrow range, ultimately stymied his own pervasive sense of failure. Milder is an exceedingly intelligent, probing critic and consummate writer, and he has written compelling and indeed an invaluable book on Hawthorne. It is, end, invaluable as best version yet print of this highly specific, determined view of Hawthorne as writer whose aims, ambitions, and personal attitudes were incommensurate with his achievement, something of necessary and fascinating failure. Along way, Milder offers Americanists number of extremely thoughtful, succinct, crystalline insights into antebellum literary culture and valences among writings of American Romanticists and nineteenth-century philosophers such as Nietzsche, while renewing critical interest seemingly moribund topic of transition from romance to realism. Of this last, Hawthorne that Milder presents is an interesting test case for blurring of these major literary modes period; even if I am not agreement with Milder on his overall sense of Hawthorne as failed realist (my assessment of Milder's position, not his own phrase), I find his analysis of these modes and their significance as well as their relationship to one another stimulating. His analysis of certain aspects of Hawthorne's work, such as writer's attitudes towards Nature and hoary question of sin, greatly adds to our understanding of Hawthorne's art. I will have occasion to note, I part company with Milder on question of Hawthorne's relationship to gender and sexuality and their literary representation, which are key components of Hawthorne's oeuvre. Milder's Hawthorne pursued romance by positive choice and increasingly against thrust of his life experience (x). As skeptical empiricist, he could not help looking ironically at Ethan Brand; as would-be religionist lacking faith of religion, he cultivated romance and Ethan Brandized himself, all while proceeding from inchoate understanding of 'as if quality of post-Christian allegorical mimesis (11). Milder makes point early on, chapter 1, Two Hawthornes, that writer was always drawn to realist mode even within heart of his life as romancer. Despite its famous preface, critic observes of The House of Seven Gables, the book has 'more literal actuality' to it, as Henry James noted, than either of Hawthorne's other American romances (14). Milder goes much further than James, whose controversial study Hawthorne--which, much like Milder's book, teems with astute observations while maintaining limited view of its subject's limitations--looms large as an implicit model here. 'Romance,' as Milder ventriloquizes what he presents as Hawthorne's view (the free indirect discourse of critic), in The House of Seven Gables is not sustained midworld between 'the Actual and Imaginary' (1:36), as it had been The Scarlet Letter; it is treacle of mythiness intermittently poured over plain cake of realism, and Milder even goes so far as to liken Hawthorne's early depiction of his awkward heroine Hepzibah to a toddler taking his first wobbly steps (15). …