In our OLLI short story group this Thursday we are reading a less-known tale by the nineteenth century master Nathaniel Hawthorne. Maybe you had to read Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter in high school.
“Wives of the Dead” was presumably written about 1829 when Hawthorne was twenty-five years old and had recently published his first novel, Fanshawe. The novel had not been well-received, so when he sent a group of tales to the publisher Goodrich at the end of the year, they were not published right away. The Wives of the Dead was first published in 1831 in a periodical called The Token, a holiday annual, without Hawthorne’s name. The story was not published in a collection under his name until it appeared in his third story collection, The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales, in 1852. Library of America. Story of the Week. April 30, 2010.
One critic has written that Hawthorne presents American History as “a remote and shadowy meeting ground for the merger of the actual with the imaginary.” Hawthorne’s ancestors were involved in the Salem witch trials, a pretty shady meeting ground of law and the imaginary.
The story is a developed anecdote, more concept than narrative.
It features a parallel structure with two main characters, sister-in-laws whose husbands have both been recently reported dead.
Each wife:
- is sleeping restlessly
- is awakened by someone outside
- stops herself from waking the other.
We can say there is dramatic irony in the story because we know things that the characters do not know. The story transcends the perceptions of the characters.
Questions of interpretation:
Are the events only a dream?
Are the reports of the husbands’ survival illusion?
The lamp serves as a symbol of human sympathy.
The ending was unusual in a story of the 1820s in that it allows the reader to construct the ending and interpretation.
A possible theme is the precariousness of human happiness.
