The Ambitious Guest

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The Ambitious Guest is a strong allegorical tale by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in 1835 . There are two translations into German: The glorious stranger ( Lore Krüger , 1979) and The honorable guest (Vera Pagin, 1985).

Based on a historical event - the fate of the Willey family, which was wiped out in a landslide in 1826 - it tells the story of an unnamed young man who strives for immortal fame, but dies in the natural disaster along with his host family without a trace To leave earth behind. For most commentators, it illustrates the truism that arrogance comes before the fall, without major intellectual complications, even if it is externally appealing. The doubts and ambiguous blurring typical of Hawthorne's most famous works can hardly be recognized by this rather moralistic tale. It is therefore one of his seldom read short stories and has so far only encouraged a few literary scholars to undertake a more detailed analysis. Some of them shed light on the literary and cultural-historical context in which the story came about and, against their background, address the transfiguration of the bourgeois family in the 19th century or the romanticism's understanding of nature. Other interpretations deal with theological aspects, in particular with the question of whether and how the worldview and understanding of God of Puritanism , as in many of Hawthorne's works, also continue to have an effect here.

content

The action takes place on a stormy September night in a small guest house run by a family on a mountain pass in the "White Mountains". Mother, father, the children and the grandmother crowd around the warm fireplace. Occasionally they are startled by the noise of falling boulders. Finally, they are pleased to hear the footsteps of an approaching visitor. It is a young man with a "melancholy expression," whose expression, however, brightens when he is warmly welcomed and takes his place in the familiar chimney. He soon speaks frankly of his innermost desires: his goal is to achieve something great for which posterity will admire him. He accepts to remain completely unnoticed during his lifetime, but he finally wants to have “created a monument for himself.” However, it has not yet been completed: “Should I disappear from the earth tomorrow, no one would know as much about me as you [ …] But I cannot die sooner than I have fulfilled my fate. Then, death, may you come! "

In the presence of the ambitious young man, the seventeen-year-old daughter feels the budding “seed of love”, but contradicts him quietly: “It is better to sit here by this fire and to be comfortable and content, even if nobody is thinks of us. ”But ambition now seems to have taken hold of the otherwise frugal family: The father confesses that he would like to have a farm in a more homely place, the grandmother at least wishes that her corpse in the coffin would one day be dressed up nicely and even the small children "outbid each other with confused wishes and childish plans." The mother has no good feelings about all of this: "They say that it is a sign of something when the thoughts wander around like this."

Meanwhile, the storm outside is getting more and more violent and takes on "a deeper and more desolate tone," as if a funeral were passing by. "Finally the whole house trembles, yes," the foundations of the earth seemed to shake, "and the family and the guest rush out of the house to get away from the rockslide. The avalanche buries them, however - “their corpses were never found.” But the house remained unscathed, the next morning it seems “as if the residents just stepped outside the door.” The story ends with a question: “Who felt the anguish at the moment of death? "

Work context

The Ambitious Guest first appeared in the June 1835 issue of New England Magazine and, like all of Hawthorne's works before 1837, initially anonymously, but here with the note that it was from the same pen as The Gray Champion previously published in the paper . In 1842 Hawthorne took the story in the second volume of his short prose collection Twice-Told Tales and thus publicly acknowledged his authorship.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - painting by Charles Osgood , 1840

Originally, however, it was very likely part of a larger work, The Story Teller , which he wrote between 1832 and 1834, but which never appeared in its entirety. Hawthorne had previously written the two narrative cycles Seven Tales of My Native Land (1826–1827) and Provincial Tales (around 1828–1830), but ultimately found no publisher, so that ultimately only a few individual stories appeared in various publications. The story teller fared similarly - the first parts appeared in New England Magazine in November and December 1834 as planned , but after the magazine changed hands, publication did not proceed as planned. The new editor, Park Benjamin , only printed a few individual stories in the months that followed, regardless of the original chronology, and Hawthorne eventually sold a few others to other magazines. At least with The Ambitious Guest , the original work context can be largely reconstructed.

The Story Teller is a series of narratives that are embedded in an overarching framework narrative. This frame construction is often found in romantic literature; in Hawthorne's time, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre (1821/1829) in particular had a defining influence on the genre, and Washington Irving's Sketch Book (1819–1820) had previously been in American literature . First-person narrator and at the same time the protagonist of the framework narration of Story Teller is a dreamer and storyteller named " Oberon " (based on the character in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night 's Dream ) wandering through New England . The scenes of action of many individual stories of the Storyteller can thereby conclusively those of some fragments of the frame assigned to Hawthorne later declared as " sketches " (sketches) , but as yet unpublished. The Ambitious Guest is one of two extant stories that are located in the White Mountains and is likely his place have been between the frame fragments Hawthorne as the Notch in addition to some other "sketches" in the November issue 1835 under the collective title from Sketches Memory published and 1854 when The Notch of the White Mountains also included Mosses from an Old Manse in the expanded edition of its collection .

In The Notch , Oberon is just passing the narrowest point of the "Notch" on his hike through New Hampshire, the site of the now famous landslide, like the "ambitious guest" he is on the road in September. The Ambitious Guest will probably have started after the second paragraph of this sketch (i.e. after the word omnipotence ); In the first publication in 1835 this point is still marked with five asterisks , which suggest an editorial intervention, i.e. an omission. Whether parts of the original frame narrative for the publication of The Notch in New England Magazine were edited or omitted entirely, as Alfred Weber suspects for the sequel to The Notch , cannot be said. This is important because The Ambitious Guest and the other internal narratives are not hermetically sealed, but in many ways are in dialogue with the framework and with each other. The Great Carbuncle , for example , which is probably the next single narrative following a further frame insert, shows conspicuous thematic overlaps with the story of the "ambitious guest" and is in a sense its life-affirming counterpart. It is about a young couple who like many other treasure hunters in the White Mountains hopes to find the "great carbuncle", a legendary gemstone of immeasurable value. When the two finally see its threatening, glaring light, they decide to return home empty-handed and to accept their modest but happy lot.

Interpretations

Historical background

View of Crawford Notch - painting by Thomas Cole , 1839.
The dead trees all around illustrate the precarious location of human habitation in the mountain gorge.

Hawthorne's tale is based on a historically documented event, the tragic fate of the Willey family, who died in a landslide in 1826 . Samuel Willey had built a house for himself and his family on Crawford Notch , a mountain gorge through which a mountain pass of the " White Mountains " of the state of New Hampshire leads. Far away from neighbors, they did some farming and earned extra income by taking in overnight guests. They believed they were immune to the frequent rockfalls at this point and had built a special shelter in which the whole family could find shelter in an emergency. When they tried to reach this safe place on the night of August 28, 1826, startled by the noise of a rock fall, they were seized by the debris; Samuel Willey, his wife Polly, their five children and two day laborers staying with them died in the accident. The rescue teams found the inn completely intact - shortly before the avalanche had split into two streams and spared the house.

The event caused dismay throughout New England and for years afterwards it was described over and over again in edifying sermons, melodramatic poems and more or less sensational newspaper articles. The Willeys' house soon became a tourist attraction. Hawthorne, who visited the scene himself in September 1832, could be sure when writing his short story that his audience knew the events and would think of the Willeys, even if he did not mention their names in the story. He changed the factual circumstances in a few points; the day laborers do not appear at Hawthorne's, but the nameless guest is just as much Hawthorne's invention as the grandmother. He also does not mention that some of the bodies could be recovered.

Genre, subject, style

As in many stories of Hawthorne are also found in The Ambitious Guest clear echoes of the English lurid literature (Gothic fiction) of the late 18th and early 19th century, which in American literature in the " dark romance continued," and between 1830 and Peaked in the works of Poes , Melville, and Hawthorne in 1860 . Hawthorne is very cautious in dealing with the supernatural, which only comes to light indirectly in comparisons or in the imagination of the protagonists. The guest at the fireplace notices that the storm sounds “like the tune of a choir of the storm spirits who lived in these mountains in ancient Indian times;” to the narrator, he sounds “as if a funeral is passing by.” A striking stylistic device that for The constant personification of the mountain contributes to the eerie , gloomy mood - this is how the landlord says after the first tremors: “The old mountain has thrown a stone at us [...] sometimes it nods its head and threatens to come down; but we are old neighbors and all in all we get on quite well ”. This passage is at the same time one of numerous epic foreshadows which Hawthorne makes too abundant use of in this narrative for the taste of no less critics.

With classical horror literature and many contemporary works, The Ambitious Guest shares a downright morbid fascination with the transience of everything earthly in general and ruins and tombs in particular. Since Napoleon's Egyptian expedition at the latest, the reading public in Europe and America has been fascinated by the fall of entire civilizations; one of the bestsellers of 1834 in the United States was Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel The Last Days of Pompeii , which, as it were, depicts a natural disaster falls upon a human community. The destructive force of the forces of nature was also a frequent topic in German Romanticism, which was received intensely in the USA after 1820; James E. Devlin, for example, points to striking parallels between The Ambitious Guest and Gustav Schwab's ballad Das Gewitter (1829), in which a family is struck by lightning (“They don't hear it, they don't see it / The room flames like loud light / Ancestor, grandmother, mother and child / met by the ray ... “). In The Ambitious Guest in particular, the entertaining horror of horror literature is combined with an overwhelming awe of the greatness and power of untamed nature, which, especially in Romanticism, is fundamental for the philosophy and aesthetics of the sublime .

While the English horror literature dealt with the old castles, palaces and monasteries of feudal Europe, Hawthorne took up American material with the Willey tragedy and set the plot in a world of experience familiar and tangible to his readers. In terms of literary history, he followed the example of Washington Irving , who in Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1819–1820) relocated European myths to locations in New York and linked them to events in American history, not to mention romantic ones as an American writer To have to forego indulging in bygone worlds. Hawthorne made his settled here Short Stories (next to The Ambitious Guest and The Great Carbuncle also the 1850 published story The Great Stone Face ) for the White Mountains, which Irving above for the Catskills had managed: the faceless wilderness into a "storied landscape" to transform, a culturally understood, humanly designed and imagined landscape . Hawthorne found his material for the most famous of his short stories and novels in the Puritan colonial days of New England (especially in Massachusetts), but the Willey tragedy, which had happened only a few years earlier, also contained all the qualities of a time-honored legend . So it says towards the end of the story:

" Who has not heard their name? The story has been told far and wide, and will forever be a legend of these mountains. Poets have sung their fate. "

“Who doesn't know their names? The story has been told near and far and will always be a legend of these mountains. Poets have sung their fate. "

The Ambitious Guest can therefore not only be read as a romantic, but especially as a national romantic story, as a contribution to the project to establish a specifically American national literature that differs from the English .

Narrative situation

Rebecca Harshman Belcher reads the story as an exemplary implementation of the understanding of fiction that Hawthorne later formulated in the forewords to his novels The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Hawthorne distinguished the actual novel (novel) from his own works, which he attributed to the genre of romance . In a famous formulation, the author asks himself a “ certain latitude ” to exceed the strict limits of truthfulness and probability that the novel and historiography must adhere to in order to bring the reader closer to the “truth of the Heart ”to lead. This border crossing is obvious in The Ambitious Guest , because the narrator describes an event that none of the participants survived, so nobody can know about the course of events. Belcher recognizes the technical implementation of Hawthorne's romantic poetology in the unsteady narrative attitude and perspective. If it initially seems as if the story has a “conventional,” omniscient authorial narrator , then in the further course creeping changes in the diegetic level become noticeable. Finally, the young man's dreams and thoughts are portrayed from a personal perspective that seems almost modernist . At various points the narrator also leaves his neutral position and comments on the event - Belcher points out that many of these objections are formulated as questions to the reader. The narrative appears to her as an exceptionally open text that leaves many things in the dark, not only encourages the reader to participate and interpret, but compels them.

It is uncertain whether Oberon, the protagonist and first-person narrator of the story teller's frame narration , is identical to the narrator character of The Ambitious Guest , because it is unclear whether the frame parts obtained are complete. He is at least accompanied and on various occasions he tells his companions stories, but lets them have their say (following the example of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales ). Alfred Weber notes, however, that Oberon himself has some noticeable similarities with the “ambitious guest” in terms of travel route, biography and temperament, and so the framework events are reflected in the internal narrative in a strange way. In the overall context of the Story Teller, The Ambitious Guest is an uncanny foreshadowing of Oberon's early death and thus of the narrator himself.

The motive of ambition

The narrator himself gives a guideline for interpretation by letting the story end with a question: "Who felt the anguish of the soul at the moment of death?" (Whose was the agony of that death-moment?) . The answer to the question seems obvious, because all the ironies are directed at the guest who strives for immortal fame but dies without leaving any trace on earth:

" Woe for the high-souled youth, with his dream of Earthly Immortality! His name and person utterly unknown; his history, his way of life, his plans, a mystery never to be solved, his death and his existence equally a doubt! "

“Woe to the generous youth with his dreams of earthly immortality! His name and person completely unknown; his story, his way of life, his plans a secret that will never be revealed; his death and his existence equally doubtful! "

So is The Ambitious Guest often be quite unambiguous parable as an allegory was understood of ambition, a representation of human arrogance, to invariably a punitive Nemesis follows. That the subject of ambition and the danger of failure was an intense concern of Hawthorne is testified not only by his work itself, but also by his reading, which can be traced back to the time when the story was written thanks to the loan records of the Salem Athenæum . On this basis, various reference texts have been proposed that may have influenced the presentation of the subject in The Ambitious Guest : in particular William Godwin's novel St. Leon , whose initially hopeful protagonist fails over the length of four volumes at just about everything, although he both the stone of the ways and has an elixir; in addition, Mark Aurel's “self-contemplations” on the ambitio , which Hawthorne read in 1831, are considered.

Several interpreters see in the figure of the guest a model of the well-read, but alienated idealist, whom Randall Stewart describes as the defining type of the stories and novels of Hawthorne par excellence - the guest would thus not only stand in a row with Pastor Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter , the Faustian scientists in The Birthmark or Rappacini's Daughter, and above all with the numerous artistic figures who populate his work. What they all have in common is that they have surrendered to abstraction and perhaps have acquired a deeper knowledge, but have to accept a painful isolation from the rest of humanity, like the young guest, who only rested with the family, “to make him feel of loneliness. ”In Hawthorne's work, artists are often unhappy or they are harbingers of bad luck. Often his ambivalent relationship to his own art becomes clear; He sometimes seems to understand the artistic act of creation as a sin, just as his Puritan ancestors did, as idolatry, vanity and presumption. With Hawthorne, literature in particular often brings to light a kind of forbidden knowledge that, as in the case of the ambitious guest, often plunges not only the reader but also the writer into disaster or at least into loneliness. John F. Sears also points out that the relationship to fame in The Ambitious Guest looks very ambiguous in view of Hawthorne's biography. When the story appeared in 1835, Hawthorne had been struggling as a writer for over ten years, but published his works anonymously until 1837, thus preventing the possibility of a literary reputation.

Domestic life as an alternative

C. Hobart Edgren and other performers, on the other hand, have emphasized that the focus of the story is less the guest than the family and suggested that they may have felt the "fear of the soul" more than he did at the moment of their death. The family and their home appear in Hawthorne's tale as symbols of unity and harmony, a human community that creates meaning and peace of mind. Here, The Ambitious Guest is similar to many earlier depictions in which the Willeys are portrayed as an exemplary American family. The Transfiguration of the home and the family just took the middle of the 19th century in the social discourse and thus in contemporary American literature such proportions that the cultural studies of a "cult of domesticity" today ( cult of domesticity ) speaks; John F. Sears, for example, reads the story in this context. While the retreat into private life in Germany during the Biedermeier period was also a reaction to the political stasis and the powerlessness of the bourgeoisie, the glorification of domesticity in democratic America was a reaction to the rapid social upheaval. According to the tenor of countless women's magazines such as Godey's Lady's Book , the home offered protection and consolation from the turbulence of politics and the competition of economic life. This notion is also evident in Hawthorne:

" The family, too, though so kind and hospitable, had that consciousness of unity among themselves, and separation from the world at large, which, in every domestic circle, should still keep a holy place where no stranger may intrude. "

"Even the family, as warm and hospitable as they were, had this awareness of belonging to one another and of being separated from the world as such, which should still preserve a sacred place in every domestic circle, into which no stranger may enter."

The guest penetrates this “holy place” and appears at least as a harbinger of the misfortune, if not as the cause. With his arrival the mood of the story darkens noticeably. The family members as the "embodiment of happiness," cheerful and cheerful, contrast noticeably with the description of the stranger who asks for admission, "so that the feeling of loneliness does not completely overwhelm him." His lofty, "abstract" ambition (high and abstracted ambition ) gradually captured the otherwise modest family in the course of the conversation. "Oh! they had left their safety and had fled straight into the path of ruin, ”it says towards the end of the story; however, as Edgren notes, the ruin began as soon as the guest entered. Thomas Friedmann sees in the ambitious young man a model of a typical Hawthorn character: the stranger who inevitably, if often unwillingly, brings destruction and suffering with it, comparable to Dominicus Pike in Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe , the fortune teller in The Hollow of the Three Hills or the unnamed visitor in The Prophetic Pictures . All these figures are messengers of a destructive revelation . In the case of the “ambitious guest”, according to Friedmann, the pernicious knowledge that the guest brings with him is of a sexual nature. Several commentators have pointed out that Hawthorne made the Willeys' daughter five years older in its story in order to make her interesting to the nameless guest. During the conversation, the young man grabs the hand of this "mountain maid" (who then blushes violently), and his advances are welcomed by the family. “Isn't the relationship through the same fate,” the narrator asks at one point, “a closer bond than through birth?” The reader tends to answer this question in the affirmative, but according to Friedmann the outcome of the story makes it clear that this love affair is not only the “innocence” of the daughter, but the unity of the family as a whole endangered. He already identifies indications of their dissolution on the semantic level: He points out that at the beginning there is always talk of the "daughter", after the guest has entered, however, only the "girl". The mountain, which is always personified, can psychoanalytically be interpreted as a punishing father or as the embodiment of the superego .

One of the many ironies of the story is that the Willeys became a legend through their fate and thus achieved in their own way the immortality that the nameless guest so dearly longed for. John F. Sears dares an interpretation that goes beyond that, which ultimately makes the tragic story appear confident. When the family took him in, the guest found a way out of his self-chosen social isolation, so he too found happiness at least at the end of his short life , or even experienced a kind of redemption in the Christian sense .

God and the world

Like many of Hawthorne's stories, The Ambitious Guest raises questions that seem to call for a theological answer. Such an interpretation is already suggested by the later separately published passage of the frame, which immediately precedes the narrative in the original conception of the Story Teller : In the first part of the corresponding sketch (The Notch of the White Mountains) , the narrator Oberon approaches the fateful place of the landslide, and in view of the sight of this "symbolic scenery" he thinks he can feel the omnipotence , if not comprehend ('it is one of those symbolic scenes which lead the mind to the sentiment, though not to the conception, of Omnipotence' ) .

Theological interpretations focus on the problem of evil and the inexplicability of providence . Kenneth Walter Cameron compares the story with Thornton Wilder's novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), which also explores the question of how and why “innocent” people fall victim to an accident. The fact that such an exemplary family as the Willeys fell victim to an accident raises the question of whether they have succumbed to divine punishment. Hardly any of the contemporary representations of the Willey tragedy even hinted at this possibility, nevertheless it was understood as the will of an almighty God who, as the book of Job teaches, must be accepted, even if it remains incomprehensible. In terms of mentality and intellectual history, New England in Hawthorne's time was still shaped by the puritanism of the colonial era, which is also the scene of numerous stories by Hawthorne. Characteristic of the Puritan view of the world is, among other things, a pronounced tendency to see indications of the progress of salvation history in natural phenomena and worldly events , that is, signs of the work of Divine Providence here and in the present; the difficulty of correctly interpreting these presumed signs is again a recurring theme in Hawthorne's work.

Direct biblical quotations cannot be made out in the story, but John F. Sears sees the description of the rock fall echoes of the description of the Flood in Genesis . Several Puritan writings have been suggested as possible sources for The Ambitious Guest . Cameron refers in particular to Increase Mather's Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (1684), which Hawthorne borrowed several times from the library of the Salem Athenæum between 1827 and 1834 and which deals, among other things, with the salvation-historical significance of natural disasters such as earthquakes, storms and floods . ML D'Avanzo, on the other hand, believes that Jonathan Edwards ' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), the most famous sermon of the Great Awakening , was the basis for Hawthorne's tale in diction, structure and content - the family and the guest would accordingly thoroughly punished by an angry God for their arrogance.

Other interpreters see in Hawthorne's description of the landscape of the White Mountains less the strict God of Calvinism than the aesthetics of the sublime at work, whereby the understanding of nature of American Romanticism (including transcendentalism ) certainly draws from both of these sources. Even in the romantic feeling, the irrepressible nature resides a quasi divine power, which man is often helpless and powerless to face. Ian Marshall's ecological interpretation of the story , on the other hand, is completely profane : for him it simply illustrates the consequences of an unfavorable choice of habitat .

literature

expenditure

In the authoritative edition of the work, the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Ohio State University Press, Columbus OH 1962ff.), The Ambitious Guest can be found in Volume IX ( Twice-Told Tales , 1974) edited by Fredson Bowers and J. Donald Crowley ). Numerous edited volumes of Hawthorne's short stories contain the story; A popular reading edition based on the Centenary Edition is:

A digitized version of this edition of the story can be found on the Library of America website at [1]

There are two translations into German:

  • The honorable guest . German by Vera Pagin. In: Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Pastor's Black Veil: Eerie Tales . Winkler, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-538-06584-5
  • The glorious stranger . German by Lore Krüger . In: Nathaniel Hawthorne: Mr. Higginbotham's Doom. Selected stories . Edited by Heinz Förster. Insel, Leipzig 1979.

Secondary literature

  • Kenneth Walter Cameron: Genesis of Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest . Transcendental Books, Hartford CN 1955.
  • B. Bernard Cohen: The Sources of Hawthorne's 'The Ambitious Guest' . In: Boston Public Library Quarterly IV, October 1952. pp. 221-4.
  • ML D'Avanzo: The Ambitious Guest in the Hands of an Angry God . In: English Language Notes 14: 1, 1976. pp. 38-42.
  • James E. Devlin: A German Analogue for 'The Ambitious Guest' . In: American Transcendental Quarterly 17, 1973. pp. 71-74.
  • Thomas Friedmann: Strangers Kill: A Reading of Hawthorne's 'The Ambitious Guest' . In: Cuyahoga Review 1: 2, 1983. pp. 129-140.
  • Rebecca Harshman Belcher: Narrative Authority in Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest . In: Tennessee Philological Bulletin 45, 2008. pp. 17-25.
  • C. Hobart Edgren: Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest": An Interpretation . In: Nineteenth-Century Fiction 10, 1955. pp. 151-6.
  • Ian Marshall: Reading the Willey Disaster: An Evolutionary Approach to Environmental Aesthetics in Cole's Notch of the White Mountains and Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest . " In: The Journal of Ecocriticism 3: 2, 2011. pp. 1-15.
  • Sidney P. Moss: The Mountain God of Hawthorne's 'The Ambitious Guest' . In: Emerson Society Quarterly 47: 2, 1967. pp. 74-75.
  • Vernon L. Plambeck: Hearth Imagery and the Element of Home in Hawthorne's 'The Ambitious Guest' . In: Platte Valley Review 9: 1, 1981. pp. 68-71.
  • John F. Sears: Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest" and the Significance of the Willey Disaster . In: American Literature 54: 3, 1982. pp. 354-367.
  • Alfred Weber : The development of the framework narratives Nathaniel Hawthorne . Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1973. ISBN 3-503-00714-8

Web links

Wikisource: The Ambitious Guest  - Sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ This is the critical tenor according to John F. Sears: Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest" and the Significance of the Willey Disaster , p. 355.
  2. ↑ All quotations in the following after the translation by Vera Pagin.
  3. ↑ On the history of the publication and the reconstruction of the Story Teller see Alfred Weber: The development of the framework narratives Nathaniel Hawthornes , pp. 145ff.
  4. ↑ Alfred Weber: The development of the framework narratives Nathaniel Hawthornes , S. 183ff.
  5. ↑ Sketches from Memory including The Notch of the White Mountains can be found in the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne in Volume X (Mosses from and Old Manse) , Ohio State University Press, Columbus 1974. The edition of Roy Harvey Pearce Tales and Sketches , on the other hand, sorts chronologically according to the date of first publication, Sketches from Memory can be found here on pages 338–351.
  6. ^ Alfred Weber: The development of the framework narratives Nathaniel Hawthornes , p. 193.
  7. ^ Alfred Weber: The development of the framework narratives Nathaniel Hawthornes , p. 194.
  8. ↑ Alfred Weber: The development of the framework narratives Nathaniel Hawthornes , p. 205.
  9. ↑ On Cole's various representations of the Crawford Notch, see Ian Marshall: Reading the Willey Disaster , pp. 2–4, pp. 7ff.
  10. ↑ A variety of contemporary representations can be found in: Kenneth Walter Cameron: Genesis of Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest , pp. 3–22.
  11. ↑ Hawthorne reports on his stay at Crawford Notch in a short letter to his mother dated September 16, 1832: Nathaniel Hawthorne: The American Notebooks , ed. by Randall Stewart. Yale University Press, New Haven 1932. p. 283.
  12. ↑ Kenneth Walter Cameron: Genesis of Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest , p. 2.
  13. ^ Rebecca Harshman Belcher: Narrative Authority in Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest , p. 20.
  14. ^ For example, James R. Mellow: Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times . Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1980. p. 52.
  15. ↑ Kenneth Walter Cameron: Genesis of Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest , p. 23; John F. Sears: Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest" and the Significance of the Willey Disaster , p. 359
  16. ↑ Kenneth Walter Cameron: Genesis of Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest , p. 27
  17. ↑ James E Devlin: A German Analogue for 'The Ambitious Guest' , pp. 71-74.
  18. ^ Leo B. Levy: Hawthorne and the Sublime . In: American Literature 37: 4, 1966, pp. 392ff.
  19. ↑ John F. Sears: Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest" and the Significance of the Willey Disaster , pp. 358-359
  20. ↑ Michael J. Colacurcio: The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales . Duke University Press, Durham NC 1996. p. 513.
  21. ^ Ian Marshall: Reading the Willey Disaster , p. 7.
  22. ^ Rebecca Harshman Belcher: Narrative Authority in Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest , p. 19.
  23. ^ Rebecca Harshman Belcher: Narrative Authority in Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest , p. 22.
  24. ^ Rebecca Harshman Belcher: Narrative Authority in Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest , pp. 21-22.
  25. ↑ Alfred Weber: The development of the framework narratives Nathaniel Hawthornes , pp. 196-197.
  26. ^ Marion L. Kesselring: Hawthorne's Reading, 1828-1850 . In: Bulletin of the New York Public Library 53, 1949. pp. 55-71, pp. 121-138 and pp. 173-194.
  27. ↑ Kenneth Walter Cameron: Genesis of Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest , p. 23.
  28. ↑ Kenneth Walter Cameron: Genesis of Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest , p. 26.
  29. ↑ Quoted in Kenneth Walter Cameron: Genesis of Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest , p. 24.
  30. ↑ Thomas Friedmann: Strangers Kill , pp. 137-138
  31. ^ John F. Sears: Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest" and the Significance of the Willey Disaster , p. 365.
  32. ^ C. Hobart Edgren: Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest," p. 151.
  33. ↑ John F. Sears: Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest" and the Significance of the Willey Disaster , pp. 361-364.
  34. ↑ C. Hobart Edgren: Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest" , pp. 152-153; Thomas Friedmann: Strangers Kill , pp. 131-132.
  35. ^ C. Hobart Edgren: Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest," 155.
  36. ↑ Thomas Friedmann: Strangers Kill , pp. 130-131.
  37. ^ Thomas Friedmann: Strangers Kill , p. 132ff.
  38. Jump up ↑ B. Bernard Cohen: The Sources of Hawthorne's 'The Ambitious Guest' , p. 222.
  39. ^ Thomas Friedmann: Strangers Kill , pp. 133-134.
  40. ^ Thomas Friedmann: Strangers Kill , p. 136.
  41. ^ Thomas Friedmann: Strangers Kill , p. 137.
  42. ^ John F. Sears: Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest" and the Significance of the Willey Disaster , p. 365.
  43. ^ Alfred Weber: The development of the framework narratives Nathaniel Hawthornes , p. 197; Michael J. Colacurcio: The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales . Duke University Press, Durham NC 1996. p. 509.
  44. ↑ Kenneth Walter Cameron: Genesis of Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest , p. 27.
  45. ↑ Kenneth Walter Cameron: Genesis of Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest , p. 28.
  46. ^ John F. Sears: Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest" and the Significance of the Willey Disaster , p. 357.
  47. ^ John F. Sears: Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest" and the Significance of the Willey Disaster , pp. 356-358.
  48. ^ John F. Sears: Hawthorne's "The Ambitious Guest" and the Significance of the Willey Disaster , p. 360
  49. ↑ Kenneth Walter Cameron: Genesis of Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest , p. 25; the full title of Mather's tract is An essay for the recording of illustrious providences: wherein, an account is given of many remarkable and very memorable events, which have happened in this last age; especially in New England.
  50. ^ ML D'Avanzo: The Ambitious Guest in the Hands of an Angry God . In: English Language Notes 14: 1, 1976. pp. 38ff.
  51. ↑ On the Puritan legacy of American Romanticism in general, see the classic essay by: Perry Miller : From Edwards to Emerson. In: Perry Miller: Errand into the Wilderness. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 1956.
  52. ^ Ian Marshall: Reading the Willey Disaster , p. 7.
This article was added to the list of articles worth reading on January 17, 2013 in this version .