SOURCE: Siebers, Tobin. “Hawthorne's Appeal and Romanticism.” In The American Renaissance: New Dimensions, edited by Harry R. Garvin and Peter C. Carafiol, pp. 100-117. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1983.

In the following essay, Siebers maintains that Hawthorne utilizes the literary traditions of Gothicism and Romanticism in his stories in order to critique New England's history of witch trials.

Great literature expresses history, that is, explicates it. Yet part of the literary expression of history may be contingent upon history's capacity to explicate itself. One domain in which this capacity reveals itself concerns the role of the fantastic or the supernatural in art and society.¹ In the eighteenth century, the Rationalists work to demystify all forms of supernatural representation, religious and magical, because they associate it with the violence of ideological persecution. Their attempt to eradicate such victimization, however, is only partially successful insofar as they maintain an...