Hawthorne, a Pilgrimage to Salem, and the Poetics of Literary Tourism

Abstract

From the 1830s to the end of his career, Nathaniel Hawthorne used the tropes of aesthetic tourism to call out, or interpellate, the reader as a literary tourist. In many cases, Hawthorne’s focalizing persona points to the picturesque or sentimental qualities of a scene: in some cases, he transports readers to a past made visitable through the stories he recounts; in others, he serves as both guide and object of the tour. This article examines the “touristic poetics” that animate Hawthorne’s work by bringing together Hawthorne’s “Alice Doane’s Appeal” with a contemporaneous sketch by an anonymous reader. While the frame narrative of “Alice Doane’s Appeal” makes explicit the call to the literary tour, “A Day of Disappointment in Salem” represents a literary pilgrimage by a Southern tourist who is so moved by reading Twice-Told Tales that he decides to call on the author at his home. Together these works illustrate the textual poetics that helped shape literary production, reception, and tourism in the period and, at the same time, fostered the canonization of Hawthorne and his homes.