Nathaniel Hawthorne by Gaslight: The Illumination of Romance

This article considers the significance of gas-powered lighting in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short fiction. It was during Hawthorne’s youth that inflammable gas became the nineteenth century’s preeminent fuel for lighting, and his stories and notes demonstrate a concerted effort to fold inflammable gas and its light into the romantic imagination—to ascribe symbolism and moralizing potential to this new and increasingly pervasive discovery. Studying Hawthorne’s highly strategic and varying use of gaslight in his short fiction, we gain a more nuanced understanding of how Anglo-American Romanticism, far from holding to a restrictive repertoire of symbols, absorbed major technological and scientific developments of the period and unlocked their different potentialities through a kind of literary experimentation.