Hawthorne and the Problem of New england Robert Milder Regions are not only concrete geographic domains but also con- ceptual places. Joseph A.Conforti,Imagining New England Responding in 1957 to a question about his fictional subject, William Faulkner insisted that he did not write about the South and southern civilization save as they constituted the particular “country'that he knew;his interest was“the human heart'”(IO). Hawthorne spoke similarly when he described himself as "burrow- ing...into the depths of our common nature,for the purposes of psychological romance"(XI:4).Faulkner and Hawthorne did write about their regions,past and present,explicitly and on levels available to conscious control,but they also wrote from their regions insofar as their notions of "the heart"were inflected by their personal and cultural relationship to a distinctively local world and by the sense of life they introjected,half-unconsciously, from its ethos. Some writers (Melville,for one)are imaginable apart from their birthplace and authorial homes;Hawthorne is not.Over the course of his career,Hawthorne had four major "habitations"that were the scene and literal or figurative subject of his writing: Salem,MA,his ancestral home and ingrained point of reference; Concord,MA,where he lived from 1842 to 1845 (and again in 1852-53 and after 1860)and came into contact with the Adamic Robert Milder,Professor of English at Washington University in St.Louis,is the author of Reimagining Thoreau(1995)and Exiled Royalties:Melville and the Life We Imagine (2006).Along with Randall Fuller,he recently co-edited The Business of Reflection:Hawthorne in His Notebooks (2009).He is currently writing a book on Hawthorne titled"Hawthorne's Habitations." doi:10.1093/alh/ajp020 Advance Access publication May 9,2009 The Author 2009.Published by Oxford University Press.All rights reserved. For permissions,please e-mail:journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org This content downloaded from 202.120.14.172 on Fri,10 Nov 2017 17:39:07 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/termsHawthorne and the Problem of New England Robert Milder Regions are not only concrete geographic domains but also con ceptual places. Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England Responding in 1957 to a question about his fictional subject, William Faulkner insisted that he did not write about the South and southern civilization save as they constituted the particular "country" that he knew; his interest was "the human heart" (10). Hawthorne spoke similarly when he described himself as "burrow ing ... into the depths of our common nature, for the purposes of psychological romance" (XI: 4).1 Faulkner and Hawthorne did write about their regions, past and present, explicitly and on levels available to conscious control, but they also wrote from their regions insofar as their notions of "the heart" were inflected by their personal and cultural relationship to a distinctively local world and by the sense of life they introjected, half-unconsciously, from its ethos. Some writers (Melville, for one) are imaginable apart from their birthplace and authorial homes; Hawthorne is not. Over the course of his career, Hawthorne had four major "habitations" that were the scene and literal or figurative subject of his writing: Salem, MA, his ancestral home and ingrained point of reference; Concord, MA, where he lived from 1842 to 1845 (and again in 1852-53 and after 1860) and came into contact with the Adamic Robert Milder, Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, is the author of Reimagining Thoreau (1995) and Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine (2006). Along with Randall Fuller, he recently co-edited The Business of Reflection: Hawthorne in His Notebooks (2009). He is currently writing a book on Hawthorne titled "Hawthorne's Habitations." doi:10.1093/alh/ajp020 Advance Access publication May 9, 2009 ? The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: joumals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org This content downloaded from 202.120.14.172 on Fri, 10 Nov 2017 17:39:07 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms