From the Editor’s Gable

The Fall 2024 issue includes an interesting array of articles, some of which connect thematically, which is always nice to observe. In the first article, “‘Hester at Her Needle’: Textile Production and the ‘Work’ of The Scarlet Letter,” Mary McAleer Balkun sees Hawthorne’s contemporary times inspiring him to explore the life of the seamstress in his depiction of Hester and the changing roles of working women. Her reevaluation of the novel in terms of shifting views of women’s social class and domestic duties in the mid-nineteenth century allows us to see Hester as a woman of Hawthorne’s time rather than the traditionally held view of Hester as Puritan woman. In “The Gothic, The Marble Faun, and Felix Culpa,” Rachel Bodnariuc revisits the theme of the fortunate fall in Hawthorne’s final novel, The Marble Faun. Bodnariuc points out that Gothic typically implies a general pessimistic world view, but that bringing in Calvinist theological elements of hopefulness renders the atmosphere less gloomy than many critics have attributed to the book. “Hawthorne’s Gothic Secularism,” by Sarah Buchmeier, shows that the Gothic mode is preempted by the secular or public sphere overriding any terrifying elements of psychological Gothic. A tension emerges between a Realist approach and a more Romantic view by Hawthorne’s narrators, with the realist view ultimately winning in The Scarlet Letter, “Young Goodman Brown,” and The Blithedale Romance, and with the horror (for Hawthorne) being that the romance writer would no longer have much say in public discourse. Elias Acuna, in “Decentering Ecophobia in ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” also approaches Hawthorne from a Gothic perspective, but his focus is more an ecogothic point of view. Hawthorne’s forest setting in “Young Goodman Brown” shows the conflict between man and nature, and Acuna explains how the negative aspects of ecophobia in this story emanate from the anxieties of the Anthropocene. It is clear that the Gothic approach to Hawthorne is very much alive, as we have also seen in the Spring 2024 Hawthorne Review special issue of Hawthorne’s Gothic. I am sorry to announce that with this Fall 2024 issue of the Hawthorne Review, Alexis Grainger, my former graduate student, will be stepping down as bibliographer after four years of dedicated work. She has done a wonderful and thorough job, and she will be missed. Looking forward: The Spring 2025 special issue, which is coedited by me and Andrew Loman, is devoted to Hawthorne’s utopian novels and stories.We hope to see many of you at the international Poe/Hawthorne conference this July in Paris!