ABSTRACT
Some of this “otherness” problem appears in Hawthorne as well. Quite a lot, in fact. Early on it seems moral and religious: can Dorcas Bourne ever know exactly what it was like for her lover to leave her father Roger Malvin behind, alone in the woods”? Can Goodman Brown ever know whether, at the moment he resisted the Devil, his pretty little wife did so as well? Can Elizabeth, the betrothed of a certain veil-donning Parson Hooper, ever understand his commitment to some (Melvillean) power of blackness? But then, in a pair of tales which lead us from what we can call “The Puritan Origins of the American Self” to the question of whether post-Cartesian (and Transcendentalist) selfhood is any more sound and sane as an originary posit, a guilt-ridden man is said, in “Egotism; Or, the Bosom Serpent,” to be cured of his puritanic self-obsession by forgetting himself in, oddly, the “idea of another.” Cured or not, he then tells, in “The Christmas Banquet,” the tale of another man to whom reality is entirely a matter of ideas, in the modern, epistemological sense; indeed, it’s all like “shadows flickering on a wall.” Had we not known that Plato had undone so many? And was the Emersonian cure any better than the disease?
