Images of the artist as God : Puritan and Transcendental doctrine in Hawthorne's developing aesthetic

This dissertation explores a rather conventional topic in Hawthorne studies: that is, Hawthorne's aesthetic. Furthermore, it concentrates on a rather conventional theme: the conception of the artist as one who, in creating an artistic world, becomes a god-like figure. In contrast to previous critical analyses, however, this dissertation explores the development of Hawthorne's aesthetic over the three decades in which he wrote short stories in order to understand the growth of that aesthetic. Thus, my analysis uses a great deal of historical, cultural, and biographical background in order to set up the different manifestations of the theme of the artist as god that Hawthorne reacted against.

In the early part of his career, marked as the early 1830s before Transcendentalism, Hawthorne struggled primarily with a Puritan conception of art, very often suggesting that the artistic act might indeed be an immoral and blasphemous act as the Puritans believed. In the middle of his career, during the 1840s, Hawthorne came to accept the imaginative faculty largely because of the liberating effects of the "new philosophy." But while Transcendentalism reveled in the artist's use of the imagination to figure forth the unity of the universe, Hawthorne feared the loss of the artist's individuality in this creative process. Such a fear was translated, in Hawthorne's works of the 1840s, into a discussion of the relationship between the artist and a woman, ultimately leading Hawthorne to define a type of "love" that would allow the artist to create an artistic world even while remaining thoroughly human— thus abrogating the depiction, negative or positive, of the artist as god.

The special relationship that exists between the artist and the community that surrounds him, represented in the love that exists between the artist and a woman, allows the artist, according to Hawthorne, to remain in touch with the real world while engaged with the ideal world, and thus to remain thoroughly human in the creative act My dissertation concludes with an analysis of the way in which Hawthorne's definition of this relationship lies at the heart of his formulation of the Romance in the prefaces to his longer works of the 1850s.