Nathaniel Hawthorne's Secret Garden

Abstract

ABSTRACTBraiding a literary archeology of Nathaniel Hawthorne's writings with cultural contexts, biography, and ecocritical approaches, this article first seeks to recover Hawthorne's rich and throughgoing fascination with vegetable life; it then goes on, with pivotal focus on The House of the Seven Gables, to explore how this pervasive plant-mindedness operates in his work—how it informed his very idea of literary production and commerce, in ways that illuminate a shared concept of literary ecology among his contemporaries.