The Ironic Oneiric in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales

The present article examines the influence of German Romanticism on Hawthorne’s treatment of dreamwork—more specifically embedded dreams—in his tales. The interest of the Jena Circle for the unconscious and its relation to creativity, their aesthetics of “objective subjectivity” and the by-passing of contradictions through irony, were theories that could have influenced Hawthorne’s use of the oneiric as ironic, that is, as pointing towards a superior dimension that is less metaphysical than it is metafictional. The intense receptivity that ignores logic and moral discipline in the night side is that of the conscious artist as well as that of the unconscious dreamer. The article addresses “The Haunted Mind,” “The Birthmark,” “Young Goodman Brown,” “Wakefield,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and “The Wives of the Dead.” It focuses on explicit hypodiegetic dreams or dreams within the tale, as opposed to the general dreaminess often associated with Hawthorne’s universe.