Wakefield (Hawthorne)

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Wakefield is an 1835 short story by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864).

It is about a man who one day for no apparent reason leaves his house in London, his wife and his friends, rents a room just one street away and from here watched life go on without him for over twenty years . This story, which was only seven pages long when first published, has gained some fame and has given rise to diverse interpretations since Jorge Luis Borges called it Hawthorne's most moving work in 1952 and established its closeness to Franz Kafka's world, a world of "puzzling punishments and inexplicable debts." Paul Auster made them (alongside Henry David Thoreau's Walden ) the basis of his novel Ghosts (1987).

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The plot of Wakefield takes place entirely in the imagination of a nameless first-person narrator. He recalls an allegedly true anecdote he once read in an old newspaper: In London, a man once left his wife for apparently no reason and rented an apartment just one street from his house. For more than twenty years he observed his home and his wife at close range, only to come back one evening through the door, "indifferently, as if he had only been away for a day, and became a loving husband until his death." This strange occurrence paints itself the The narrator gives the man a name - "let's call him Wakefield" - and imagines how Wakefield may have fared in his quiet chamber over the last twenty years. In the end, the narrator believes he can see the moral of his self-made story:

Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another, and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were, the Outcast of the Universe.

“In the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, the individuals are so well adapted to a particular system and the systems again to each other and into a common whole that a man who emerges from it for even a moment exposes himself to the terrible danger, his place for always to lose. Like Wakefield, it can happen to him that he becomes, so to speak, an outcast of the universe. "

Work context

Nathaniel Hawthorne - painting by Charles Osgood , 1840

Wakefield first appeared in the May issue of New England Magazine in 1835 and, like all of Hawthorne's works before 1837, initially anonymously, but here with the note that the story was by the same author as The Gray Champion , which had appeared in the same magazine in January. In 1837 Hawthorne published it in the first volume of his Twice-Told Tales collection , which is also his first publication with a name.

Actually, however , Wakefield was intended with some certainty for the story-teller cycle (written between 1832 and 1834), which, however, never appeared in its entirety and can only be partially reconstructed; Although New England Magazine began serial printing of this work in 1834, it broke it off after two issues and from 1835 onwards only included a few individual stories and other fragments regardless of the original context. The Story Teller is a series of short stories that are embedded in a general framework narrative. The first-person narrator and at the same time the protagonist of the framework plot is a storyteller named " Oberon " (named after the character in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night 's Dream ) who wanders through New England and New York . The action places many individual stories of the storytellers can be the basis of content references some fragments of the frame assigned to Hawthorne later declared as " sketches " ( sketches ), but as yet unpublished. Wakefield seems to be out of line with Hawthorne's other stories from this period, as the story does not take place in New England, but in London. Hawthorne may have written them years before the other stories in the Story Teller and only added them to this narrative cycle afterwards. Lea Bertani Vozar Newman thinks it possible that Hawthorne wrote the story shortly after graduating from Bowdoin College in 1825; in this case it was one of his earliest literary exercises.

Alfred Weber suspects that in Story Teller , Wakefield followed the first few paragraphs of a travel sketch Hawthorne published as The Canal Boat in December 1835 . Oberon travels here on a steamship on the Erie Canal towards Niagara . When the weather was bad, the bored passengers retired to the cabin deck, including an eccentric English tourist who silently but attentively observed the fellow passengers and made entries in a notebook, presumably, Oberon speculates, in order to collect material for a disrespectful travel report he intends to publish in England. So Oberon observes an observer (until their eyes meet in a mirror) just as he "looks" at Wakefield in his internal story and tries to fathom his innermost thoughts, and the English tourist for his part shows some similarities with the character of Wakefield: both are Outsiders, distant observers of a society that does not arouse a feeling of sympathy in them, but merely an analytical curiosity.

swell

The anecdote alluded to by Hawthorne's narrator can be found in the Political and Literary Anecdotes of His Own Times by the English writer William King (1685–1763), published in 1818 ; Hawthorne probably got to know her through a print in Gentleman's Magazine or some other magazine. King reports here about an acquaintance named Howe, a wealthy and sensible young man from London who, after the same years of happy marriage, left his house one morning and informed his wife that he would be in Holland for three weeks on business. but only reappeared after seventeen years. In the meantime he had rented an apartment not far away in Westminster, bought a wig, assumed a false name and a new identity. Ten years later, he once used his disguise to gain access to his old home to look around, but did not reveal himself. For the following years he watched his wife go to church every Sunday and finally one day, much to his wife's amazement, he stepped back in through the door. King reports that after his return, Mr. Howe never revealed the reason for his astonishing behavior to even his closest friends, if there was a reason at all: After he returned home, he never would confess, even to his most intimate friends, what was the real cause of such a singular conduct; apparently there was none: but whatever it was, he was certainly ashamed to own it .

Another source is Washington Irving's genre-defining short story Rip Van Winkle (1819), the protagonist of which falls into a magical sleep and, like Wakefield, only returns home after twenty years - where, to his great relief, he finds that his unloved wife, Dame van Winkle, is different in the meantime. Another American forerunner is William Austin's haunted story Peter Rugg, The Missing Man (1824), a variation on the saga of the Flying Dutchman ; Rugg is excluded from human society and condemned to drive his carriage through wind and weather on the country lanes of New England forever, but never to reach his hometown of Boston .

Hawthorne's ostentatious choice of name ( let us call him Wakefield , comparable to Melville's Call me Ishmael ) suggests that there is an allusion here and has given rise to some speculation. John Gatta refers to a certain William Wake, who was on trial in Hawthorne's hometown of Salem in 1651 because he had apparently abandoned his wife and emigrated to America alone out of annoyance with his marital duties. Michael J. Colacurcio suspects an allusion to the Unitarian tract writer Gilbert Wakefield (1756-1801), who in 1792 in his Inquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public Worship condemned every form of communal prayer and every religious assembly as unchristian and quietly condemned it Inwardness from all church services and congregational meetings.

Contemporary reception

In depictions of American literary history, Wakefield is often placed alongside Edgar Allan Poe's The Man of the Crowd (1840) and Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener (1853), both of which point beyond Romanticism and address the alienation of " modern " people, especially urban people . Wakefield may have been the direct model for both tales. This may be particularly true in the case of Poe, who Wakefield highlighted as particularly successful in his famous review of the Twice-Told Tales for Graham's Magazine in 1842 :

“ It would be a matter of some difficulty to designate the best of these tales; we repeat that, without exception, they are beautiful. 'Wakefield' is remarkable for the skill with which an old idea - a well-known incident - is worked up or discussed. A man of whims conceives the purpose of quitting his wife and residing incognito, for twenty years, in her immediate neighborhood. Something of this kind actually happened in London. The force of Mr. Hawthorne's tale lies in the analysis of the motives which must or might have impelled the husband to such folly, in the first instance, with the possible causes of his perseverance. Upon this thesis a sketch of singular power has been constructed. "

In The Man of the Crowd , the parallel to Wakefield becomes particularly clear in the loss of individuality in the anonymity of the big city, against which Hawthorne's narrator warns: We must hurry after him along the street, ere he lose his individuality, and melt into the great mass of London life. It would be vain searching for him there. Poe's story is also set in London, and its narrator equally follows the heels of an enigmatic-looking passer-by to uncover his secret - but it seems that he (like Ahasver, the "Eternal Jew" ) is doomed to do so To keep walking through the streets of the city with no destination. “This old man,” the narrator finally said to himself, “is the embodiment, is the spirit of the crime. He can't be alone. He's the man in the crowd. It would be in vain to pursue him any further, because I wouldn't find out anything about him, nothing about his actions. "

Melville indirectly mentions Wakefield in a letter to Hawthorne dated August 13, 1852, the so-called "Agatha Letter." In it, Melville reports on his trip to the island of Nantucket a few weeks earlier, where he was referring to a lawyer from New Bedford ( John H. Clifford ) told the story of a certain Agatha from Duxbury , whose husband had disappeared for seventeen years and had long since been believed dead, and only reappeared when she was about to marry another man. Melville wrote to Hawthorne that this strange incident reminded him of his "London husband" ( "I am reminded of your London husband" ), and not only suggested that he make a story out of it, but sent him in the same letter apparently also the relevant trial files on the case. Hawthorne apparently did not respond to this suggestion, so Melville apparently worked on the material himself - it is probably the story of the Isle of the Cross, which has not survived . But even Bartleby , probably written at the same time and published anonymously in 1853, shows clear parallels to Hawthorne's Wakefield ; In both narratives, the motive for the protagonists' unheard-of refusal to exist remains unfathomable.

A direct influence from Wakefield is also assumed for Henry James ' novella The Beast in the Jungle (1903).

literature

expenditure

A digitized version of the initial publication can be found on the Cornell University Library website:

  • Wakefield . In: The New-England Magazine 8: 5, May 1835, pp. 341-347.

The first edition of the Twice-Told Tales can be found digitized on the website of the Internet Archive :

The modern standard edition of Hawthorne's works is The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (edited by William Charvat, Roy Harvey Pearce et al., Ohio State University Press, Columbus OH 1962-1997; 23 volumes). Wakefield can be found here 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:

An e-text can be found on the pages of Wikisource :

Wikisource: Wakefield  - Sources and full texts (English)

There are several translations into German:

  • A man named Wakefield . German by Franz Blei . In: Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Man Called Wakefield and Other Tales . Edited by Hans Hennecke. Müller & Kiepenheuer, Bergen / Obb. 1949.
  • Wakefield . German by Günter Steinig. In: Nathaniel Hawthorne: The great carbuncle. Fantastic stories . Safari-Verlag, Berlin 1959.
  • Wakefield . German by Hannelore Neves:
    • in: Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Pastor's Black Veil: Eerie Tales . Winkler, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-538-06584-5 .
    • in: Nathaniel Hawthorne: The great stone face . Edited and with a foreword by Jorge Luis Borges . Edition Büchergilde, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 3940111090 (= The Library of Babel , Vol. 9).
  • Wakefield . Translated from the American and edited. by Joachim Kalka . Friedenauer Presse, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-932109-31-7 .

Secondary literature

  • Karen Alkalay-Gut: The Man Who Escaped from the Plot: An Alternate Reading of Hawthorne's Wakefield . In: Revista canaria de estudios ingleses 7, 1983. pp. 95-8.
  • Jorge Luis Borges : Nathaniel Hawthorne . In: Jorge Luis Borges: Otras inquisiciones . Sur, Buenos Aires 1952, pp. 221-240. German edition: Inquisitions: Essays 1941-1952 . Translated by Karl August Horst and Gisbert Haefs. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 978-3-596-10583-0 .
  • Robert L. Chibka: Hawthorne's Tale Told Twice: A Reading of Wakefield . In: ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 28: 4, 1982. pp. 220-32.
  • Stephen C. Enniss: Told as Truth: Wakefield as Archetypal Experience . In: The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 14: 2, 1988. pp. 7-9.
  • John Gatta, Jr .: Busy and Selfish London: The Urban Figure in Hawthorne's Wakefield . In: ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 23, 1977. pp. 164-72.
  • Angela M. Kelsey: Mrs. Wakefield's Gaze: Femininity and Dominance in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Wakefield . In: American Transcendental Quarterly 8: 1, 1994. pp. 17-31.
  • Markus Manfred: Nathaniel Hawthorne: Wakefield . In: Klaus Lubbers (ed.): The English and American short story . Scientific Book Society Darmstadt 1990, pp. 28-40.
  • Robert E. Morsberger: Wakefield in the Twilight Zone . In: American Transcendental Quarterly 14, 1972. pp. 6-8.
  • Richard R. O'Keefe: The Gratuitous Act in Wakefield: A Note on Hawthorne's Modernism . In: The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 17: 1, 1991. pp. 17-19.
  • Laura Laffrado: Far and Momentary Glimpses: Hawthorne's Treatment of Mrs. Wakefield . In: Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (Eds.): New Interpretations of American Literature (= Bucknell Review 31: 2). Bucknell University Press, Bucknell PA 1988, ISBN 083875127X , pp. 34-44.
  • Loren Logsdon: Hawthorne's 'Wakefield': The Teaching Potential of a Flawed Story . In: Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction 7, 2006, pp. 108–119.
  • Anne Lounsbery: Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 2007.
  • Herbert Perluck: The Artist as 'crafty nincompoop': Hawthorne's 'indescribable obliquity of gait' in Wakefield . In: The Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal
  • Ruth Perry: The Solitude of Hawthorne's Wakefield . In: American Literature 49, 1978. pp. 613-19.
  • Chapel Louise Petty: A Comparison of Hawthorne's 'Wakefield' and Nabokov's 'The Leonardo': Narrative Commentary and the Struggle of the Literary Artist . In: Modern Fiction Studies 25, 1979. pp. 499-507.
  • Ed Piacentino: Fictionalizing as Moral Rationalization: The Function of the Narrator in Hawthorne's Wakefield . In: Studies in Popular Culture 20: 2, 1997, pp. 71-84.
  • Noel Polk: Welty, Hawthorne, and Poe: Men of the Crowd and the Landscape of Alienation . In: Mississippi Quarterly 50: 4, 1997, pp. 553-66.
  • Andrew Schiller: The Moment and the Endless Voyage: A Study of Hawthorne's Wakefield . In: Diameter 1, 1951, pp. 7-12. Also in: Agnes McNeill Donohue (Ed.): A Casebook on the Hawthorne Question . Crowell, New York 1963, pp. 111-116.
  • Michael Sperber: Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Wakefield”: Sleepwalker in a Mental Jail . In: Michael Sperber: Dostoyevsky's Stalker and Other Essays on Psychopathology and the Arts . University Press of America, Lanham MD 2010, pp. 89-97, ISBN 978-0761849933 .
  • Richard Swope: Approaching the Threshold (s) in Postmodern Detective Fiction: Hawthorne's “Wakefield” and Other Missing Persons . In: Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 39: 3, 1998, pp. 207-227.
  • Thomas J. Walsh, Jr .: "Wakefield" and Hawthorne's Illustrated Ideas: A Study in Form . In: Emerson Society Quarterly 25: 3, 1961, pp. 29-35.
  • Ellen Weinauer: Perilous Proximities: The Meanings of Marriage in Wakefield . In: The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 39: 1, 2013, pp. 94-115.
  • Arnold Weinstein: Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo . Oxford University Press, New York 1993, ISBN 0195074939 .
  • Roberta F. Weldon: Wakefield's Second Journey . In: Studies in Short Fiction 14, 1977. pp. 69-74.
  • Deborah West and Michael West: The Psychological Dynamics of Hawthorne's Wakefield . In: Archives for the Study of Modern Languages ​​and Literatures 220: 1, 1983. pp. 62–74.
  • Ellen E. Westbrook: Exposing the Verisimilar: Hawthorne's "Wakefield" and "Feathertop" . In: Arizona Quarterly 45: 4, 1989, pp. 1-23.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jorge Luis Borges: Nathaniel Hawthorne , in: Inquisitions: Essays 1941-1952 , p. 72.
  2. ^ Alfred Weber: The development of the framework narratives Nathaniel Hawthornes , p. 183 ff.
  3. ^ Lea Bertani Vozar Newman: A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne , pp. 311-312.
  4. ^ Alfred Weber: The development of the framework narratives Nathaniel Hawthornes , pp. 223-227.
  5. ↑ Ruth Perry: The Solitude of Hawthorne's Wakefield , pp. 613f.
  6. ^ William King: Political and Literary Anecdotes of His Own Times . John Murray, London 1818, p. 244.
  7. ↑ Moncure D. Conway: Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne . Scribner & Welford, New York 1890, pp. 69-71.
  8. ↑ Michael J. Colacurcio: The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales . Duke University Press, Durham NC 1996, p. 652.
  9. ^ Edgar Allan Poe: Review [the Twice-Told Tales ]. In: Graham's Magazine , May 1842, pp. 298-300.
  10. ↑ Stephen Matterson: Melville: Fashioning in Modernity . Bloomsbury, London and New York 2014, pp. 12ff.
  11. ^ Hershel Parker, Herman Melville's The Isle of the Cross: A Survey and a Chronology . In: American Literature 62: 1, 1990, pp. 1-16.