SOURCE: "Brotherly Love," in The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes, Oxford University Press, 1966, pp. 44-60.

In the following essay, Crews argues that Hawthorne's short story "Alice Doane's Appeal" manifests a narrative tone that reflects simultaneous fascination with and repugnance toward the issue of incest.

"Incest is, like many other incorrect things, a very poetical circumstance."

—Shelley

At the very beginning and very end of his career Hawthorne produced halting, fragmentary works of fiction which are of peculiar interest for their revelation of essential themes. What is subtle and even problematical in his more polished writing leaps plainly into view in these otherwise incoherent works; we can watch him first trying to subdue, and later trying to fend away from consciousness, obsessive attitudes that are successfully sublimated elsewhere. In a psychologically oriented study we must ask the reader to be more patient with such works than their...