Hawthorne’s Last Days: Grappling with Immortality

Abstract

This paper deals with Hawthorne’s last unfinished romances he struggled to complete after his return to America in 1860. He could not complete any of them, and its causes can be attributed to various causes. Due to their incompleteness, those manuscripts have been unfairly neglected and underestimated despite their potential artistic and literary values. The views of the major critics on them have been split, but more recent criticism has been favorable to Hawthorne’s unfinished romances and recognized their potential artistic values. In his last years, Hawthorne was plagued by various dilemmas of his failing health, the transcending literary currents towards realism, and the harrowing contemporary issues of slavery and the Civil War. Inherently pessimistic and skeptic about human nature and optimistic results of compulsive social reforms, he reserved his judgment on man’s rosy future and expressed his frustration through his final drafts. Hawthorne’s biographical facts are quoted here to link them to his painstaking endeavor and failure to produce his final romances in adverse circumstances. While his earlier works just after his return to America concern an American’s lost lineage, secret heritage and his endeavor to regain it, his themes in later drafts move to aging, death and immortality, which finally leads to his serious adhesion to the theme of elixir in The Elixir of Life Manuscripts. Examining his repeated return to the theme of elixir and quoting various critics who analyze the author’s artistic intentions and their acceptability, this paper tries to identify Hawthorne’s aborted but eager attempt to express his final views on man and society and the potential artistic values of them.