Stuart Burrows is Professor of English at Brown University, where he teaches classes on nineteenth and twentieth century fiction and poetry, film, and literary theory. He is the author of two books: A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2008, and Henry James and the Promise of Fiction, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023, as well as numerous essays in journals such as American Literary History, boundary 2, and J19. He is currently working on a book on cinema, featuring chapters on Varda, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, and Kiarostami.

“Hawthorne’s Confessions”

My paper attempts to understand not just why Hawthorne was so interested in the act of confession, but why confessing takes such strange forms in his work. Confession supplies much of the drama in The Scarlet Letter, organizes the closing moments in The House of the Seven Gables, and provides the subject matter for any number of Hawthorne’s short stories, from “The Minister’s Black Veil” to “Ethan Brand.” The critic Laurence Davies notes that the act of confession held “an ambivalent fascination” for the resolutely Protestant Hawthorne, borne out by a remark in his French and Italian Notebooks: “What an institution that is! Man needs it so, that it seems as if God must have ordained it.” Yet Hawthorne never actually entered what he called « the safe secrecy of the confessional.” And although there are many confessions in his work, they almost never concern the acts of the people who make them. In contradistinction to Michel Foucault’s insistence that the person who confesses “obligates himself to being … the one who did such and such a thing, who feels such and such a sentiment,” Hawthorne introduces a fissure between the person confessing and the act confessed. Hester, for example, is repeatedly pressed to confess not what she has done—the fact that she has a child who is not her husband’s makes her sin clear to all, let alone the fact that she wears the scarlet letter—but the person with whom she did it. Parson Hooper and Ethan Brand, meanwhile, confess not to a particular sin, but to the very existence of sin itself. “Hawthorne’s Confessions” reads Hawthorne’s fiction as imagining the entire world as one open-air confessional, in which every supposed secret is known from the beginning, and thus has no need to be confessed. I argue that Hawthorne’s fiction both confirms and challenges D. A. Miller’s classic definition of the nineteenth century novel in terms of an “open secret.”