ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter we followed Hawthorne into the artist’s studio. I turn now to pieces in which he “ushers” us into his own study, as he puts it in the sketch that prefaces the collection Mosses from an Old Manse, “The Old Manse” (Tales and Sketches, 1149). These sketches are Hawthorne’s literary equivalent of the artistin-his-studio painting: he uses the sketch as a work that manifests his own artistic procedure, making that process of intrinsic interest and not merely evidence of the early stages of an end product. In his journal, Emerson famously objected that Hawthorne “invites the reader too much into his study, opens the process before him, as if the confectioner should say to his customers, now let us make the cake.”3 Perhaps Emerson’s complaint derived partly from the fact that at the time Hawthorne was using his study during his stay at the Old Manse,4 or perhaps Emerson felt uncomfortable at the unmasculine self-exposure in Hawthorne’s prefaces. But in many of the shorter pieces, Hawthorne’s self-reflexive remarks and motifs that draw attention to the process of creating a work of literature become their raison d’être; the plot seems perfunctory, as if the story were merely an excuse for the acts of composing and then reflecting on that process.
