Rappacini's Daughter's Friend

Hawthorne's fiction dramatizes the difficulty of processing information in literature. Readers jump to conclusions and do not correct them; they make wrongful inferences and statements unsupported by evidence. This is achieved through simple but effective methods—appeals to prejudice and self-righteousness, repeated assertion, insinuation, and basic unreliability—and through complex designs that require more explanation. These include setting equally important messages at odds with each other at the level of evidence, wrapping up plots in a way that encourages inferential forfeiture, and experimenting with near-identicality and confounding similarity. This essay recreates how this happens in Hawthorne's short stories "Rappaccini's Daughter," "Young Goodman Brown," "Alice Doane's Appeal," and "Wives of the Dead," and his novels The Scarlet Letter and House of the Seven Gables . It also pieces together Hawthorne's general interest in these difficulties from lesser-known works including Tanglewood Tales , his personal and family history, and the unique way he continued the project of Puritanism.