| Many see Hawthorne's sketches as slight productions, written to satisfy readers' demands for innocuous descriptive fiction. I argue that the sketches are not less than the dramatic fictions to which they are implicitly contrasted--they are different in purpose and method. Where the tales dramatize the effects of historical conditions on individual psychology and behavior, the sketches survey the meaning of cultural implication from the viewpoint of the artist or moral historian whose task is to guide the reader to imaginative comprehension of her historically-conditioned identity. The understanding that individuals cannot free themselves from their culture is common to both narrative and sketch, but the lens for viewing the relationship is different. Because the sketch is weighted toward social dynamics, its thrust is more abstract, conceptual, and satiric than that of the tale.;I challenge anachronistic ways of approaching these texts. Hawthorne's work speaks in the rhetoric of its time. We have grouped his early work into generic clusters, thinking of it as a body of great stories and an undefined number of other pieces, less highly valued, that we term "allegories," "moral fictions," or "sketches." In fact, there are few clear-cut generic divisions in the Hawthorne canon; his fiction occupies a continuum of narrative technique, and distinguishing tale from sketch is a problematic activity. The nascent literary market of Hawthorne's day did not draw our sharp distinctions among kinds and functions of literature. To see Hawthorne in the context of his contemporaries is to take a new sight of all his work.;In these abbreviated works where interactions of structure, character, style, and theme are necessarily compressed, Hawthorne builds intricate constructions that play in myriad ways upon reader expectations. In order to point out how even the slightest of Hawthorne's sketches does its work, I must cover a large ground. For this reason I have not attempted to analyze every sketch he wrote, but have restricted my inquiry to texts originally published between 1830 and 1838 that best demonstrate Hawthorne's range of narrative techniques and subject matter during his seminal period. |
