A goodly number of Hawthorne's short stories may be considered as marriage tales.

This instructive and amusing literary form has, at least since the time of Chaucer and Boccaccio (the fourteenth century), delighted popular audiences with the endless possibilities of two-part harmony and/or domestic discord. Best known perhaps for his novel of Puritan life in which a May and December union is rent asunder by adultery, The Scarlet Letter (1850), Hawthorne produced his marriage tales during the 1830s and 1840s. More often than not, presided over by a nemesis, they make for a strange assortment.

The author's vision of marriage as some kind of fearful trauma occurs early in his fiction, in "The Wives of the Dead" (1832), an atypical story whose plot has no end in sight unless the reader supplies it. In the Massachusetts Bay Province, two "recent brides of two brothers, a sailor and...