ABSTRACT
Nathaniel Hawthorne, as Jennifer Mason has recently noted, “of all the traditionally canonized male authors of mid-nineteenth century American literature . . . has long been considered the least interested in nature” (52). But while Hawthorne’s romances render the nonhuman a seemingly abstract, often ambiguous backdrop to human longings, they are formally centred around representations of claims to landed be longing and appropriations of the nonhuman as signs of an inherently unsettled, and unsettling, legacy of colonial erotics. European desire for land and for the Indigenous, dehumanized subject uncannily settling that land structures both the plots of Hawthorne’s fictions and his conceptualization of the romance as an aspirational, transformative, and haunted form for fiction. Spanning a tumultuous decade during which the United States moved from tenuous compromises on the status of slavery to Civil War, against a background of incremental agricultural settlement of the West and expulsion of Indigenous peoples, Hawthorne’s romances trace contesting genealogies of colonial desire that produced and continued to be shaped by America’s various national fantasies about nature, wilderness, and nativeness in the mid-nineteenth century. While one could chart transnational, ecological, and erotic accounts of the appropriation of land through a range of Hawthorne’s works, this chapter argues for the particular significance of such an interwoven approach to genealogy, space, and sexuality for his first and final complete romances: The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The Marble Faun (1860). 1 Hawthorne’s romances frame American experiences of space, place, and the nonhuman as emerging from conflicting transatlantic narratives and as constructed and contested by human desires; as such they invite overlapping critical approaches – ecocritical, transatlantic, queer – even as they encourage reflection on the limits of overlap between these theoretical accounts of the text.
