...setting found in Poe's work as well as his general reputation as an author of the macabre. It is not Poe, however, but rather his literary contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne whose work is most heavily steeped in such references. This tendency to employ headstones and graveyards--often real ones, or at the very least clearly derived from and closely modeled upon actual sources--as focal elements in imagery, symbolism, setting, and plot structure is present throughout Hawthorne's literary career from his earliest juvenile efforts to his last unpublished novels. And paralleling the fictional instances are the vast number of references found in the author's American Notebooks, which cover the years 1835-1853. The reasons for Hawthorne's fascination--some might choose to call it obsession--with such matters are several, the chief of which most probably stems from the early impressions on his imagination fostered by his birthplace and hometown of Salem, Massachusetts. Beyond this, however, it seems clear that something within him resonated with these burial sites and artifacts in a manner surpassing even that of his average contemporaries, who, one might note, as a whole were considerably more comfortable with the physical trappings of death than are most persons in our own time. And, though his own life span was relatively brief--he died just short of his sixtieth birthday--Nathaniel Hawthorne would witness firsthand, and to a certain degree incorporate within his works, what was without doubt the most important historical shift ever to occur in American material commemoration.

Amongst the first extant literary efforts by the young Nathaniel Hawthorne are a number of rather awkwardly phrased poems such as the following, written at around the age of 15 or 16:

Go to the grave where friends are laid, And learn how quickly mortals fade, Learn how the fairest flower must droop, Learn how the strongest form must stoop, Learn that we are but dust and clay, The short-liv'd creatures of a day. (Poems 9)

Graveyard settings frame a surprising number of these examples of juvenilia, and they display the influence not only of the British pre-Romantic "graveyard school" of poetry but also, even more tellingly, of an Americanized Puritan mind-set all too well-known to Hawthorne even at this early age. Indeed, they are most strongly reminiscent of the sixteenth--and seventeenth-century memento mori gravestone epitaphs found throughout New England, the most famous of which, found in countless variants, speaks directly to its readers (George and Nelson 85). The lesson is clearly spelled out: profit by the example set before you:

Behold my friends as you pass by As you are now so once was I As I am now, so you must be Prepare for Death and follow me (Wallis 85)

This memento mori theme, which, as David Watters has noted, "is endemic to the Puritan mind," is quite intentionally instructive in nature (22). From their earliest formalized exposure to the Puritan worldview in the verses of the New England Primer to the visual emblems and written inscriptions they read upon the tombstones in every village graveyard, members of this culture were continuously encouraged not only to anticipate death but to see everywhere in the world about them the visible reminders of its imminence (Benes 33).

Growing up as he did in Salem, a place with which he maintained a lifelong love-hate relationship, the young author was constantly surrounded by the material reminders of the town's Puritan past and of his own family's connection to that heritage (Moore 1-2; Miller xiii-xiv). Central to both was the Charter Street Burial Ground, final resting place of eight Hathorne ancestors, including Nathaniel's great-great grandfather, Colonel John Hathorne, who served on the court that examined those accused of witchcraft during the hysteria of 1692. This was a site where Hawthorne often played as a child (Hoeltje 244; Miller 80). And, as we shall shortly see, it would become a focal element in a significant number of the author's novels and tales as well as one of the centerpiece entries in his American Notebooks.

Hawthorne soon realized that poetry was not his medium and began to explore the types of fiction upon which his fame would ultimately rest. Salem and its old graveyard would, as noted above, reappear frequently in his literary works, even as his own world expanded outward to include other locales--including burial sites--in New England and Europe. Of the powerful influence this place held upon his imagination he himself was only too well aware, dwelling upon it at length in "The Custom-House," his introduction to The Scarlet Letter (Novels 125-28), and concluding that "This long connection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or moral circumstances that surround him" (128).

LITERARY WORKS UNRELATED DIRECTLY TO THE AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS

Many of Nathaniel Hawthorne's most interesting uses of burial grounds and gravestones in his fiction--and his most extensive reliance on real examples--are, as we shall explore in the next section, directly related to specific entries he made in his American Notebooks. Nonetheless, a large number exist outside this frame of reference and are important in their own right, stemming as they do from the observations and imagination of an individual who remained fascinated with such matters throughout his life. Descriptions of funerals and burial services, a related subgenre of interest, appear to greater or lesser degree in a number of tales and sketches--notably "The Hollow of the Three Hills" (Tales and Sketches 10-11), "Sights from a Steeple" (45-46), "Old News" (255), and "A Bell's Biography" (485)--and the device is used essentially to frame one of the author's best-known stories, "Roger Malvin's Burial" (88-107). A reference to the funeral procession of the Reverend Ezra Ripley--Ralph Waldo Emerson's stepgrandfather and the last inhabitant of the home in Concord, Massachusetts, that Nathaniel and his recent bride, Sophia, moved to in 1842--occurs near the beginning of "The Old Manse" (1123), the sketch which served as the author's preface to his 1846 collection of stories and sketches, Mosses from an Old Manse, and a particularly moving description of the burial of Zenobia occurs at the opening of chapter 28 of The Blithedale Romance (Novels 840).

Direct references to burial grounds and gravestones occur in "An Old Woman's Tale" (Tales and Sketches 33), "The White Old Maid" (316), "The Wedding Knell" (352), and "Edward Fane's Rosebud" (505). These may not rank amongst Hawthorne's most prized works, to be sure, but consider that "Young Goodman Brown" ("they carved no hopeful verse upon his tomb-stone; for his dying hour was gloom" [289]), "The Gentle Boy" (138), and "The Minister's Black Veil" (384) all conclude with descriptions of the protagonists' respective grave sites, as does, of course, The Scarlet Letter (Novels 345). Indeed, the references to Ilbrahim's "green and sunken grave" ("The Gentle Boy" 138) and the Reverend Mister Hooper's resting place--"The grass of many years has sprung up and withered on that grave, the burial-stone is moss-grown" ("The Minister's Black Veil" 384)--foreshadow the powerful image of Arthur Dimmesdale's "old and sunken grave" at the conclusion of The Scarlet Letter (345). "The Minister's Black Veil" also contains one of Hawthorne's most effective metaphorical uses of graveyard imagery when he informs us that the now aged Reverend Hooper "had one congregation in the church, and a more crowded one in the church-yard" (381). Finally, a fairly realistic description in "The Old Manse" of the graves of two British soldiers killed during the Battle of Lexington and Concord and placed near the North Bridge monument--a site visible to Hawthorne from the windows of his study--leads the author to a somewhat whimsical exploration of a local legend concerning the fate of one of these two soldiers (1127-29).

A more elaborate use of funerary elements is found in the early semi-allegorical tale, "The Ambitious Guest" (1835). The story may, as has been argued, reflect the author's insecurities and obsession with fame at this early stage of his literary career (Wineapple 66). In a broader sense, however, it is a statement about mutability, thus linking Hawthorne to a major philosophical concern of Romanticism as well as those of even earlier literary periods. And, like many prior examples which explore this theme, the essential paradox in "The Ambitious Guest" is cast in the form of an expressed desire for permanence as symbolized by a monument of some sort and the (often ironic) quashing of that desire through decay, obliteration, or the inability to create any lasting memorial to begin with. In the tale, a young stranger--the "ambitious guest" of the title--is welcomed for the night by a family living in a remote, mountainous area of northern New England. Following dinner, the stranger--a loner, but highly ambitious and with a desire "not to be forgotten in the grave" (301)--engages the family in conversation, the tenor of which quickly becomes philosophical as they ruminate upon fame, mortality and remembrance. The father expresses his memorial needs in simple terms: "A slate grave-stone would suit me as well as a marble one with just my name and age, and a verse of a hymn, and something to let people know, that I lived an honest man and died a Christian" (303).

The contrast of slate with marble is significant here, as it is in several other instances in Hawthorne's fiction where the two are mentioned side by side. By the time he wrote this tale, a strong movement was underway in American funerary taste whereby marble was rapidly displacing slate as the dominant material of choice for gravestones. A number of factors account for this shift, some economic, some spiritual, but two elements in particular...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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