Reading Hawthorne's "Failure" at the Wayside: The Uncanny Architecture of Septimius (Essay‪)‬

Thoreau first told me about this predecessor of mine; though, I think he knew nothing of his character and history, nor anything but the singular fact, that here, in this simple old house, at the foot of the hill, and so close to the Lexington Road that I call it the Wayside (partly for that, and partly because I never feel as if I were more permanently located than the traveller who sits down to rest by the road which he is plodding along) here dwelt, in some long-past time, this man who was resolved never to die. ("Study 1," 13:499) In the initial "studies" for what became Septimius Felton, Hawthorne wrote that he should "Begin, with a reference to a certain room in my house, which I hint to be haunted" (13: 504). (1) "It is strange," he begins another such study, "how these familiar places are haunted. We think it is only by old memories; but my belief is that it is by ghosts of those who once dwelt here, and whose spirits took such hold of the spots, the dwellings, that they cannot easily be disjoined with them, when they would fain be so" (13: 498-99). From its first conception, it seems that Hawthorne's Septimius revolved around a consideration for the spirit of a place--of The Wayside, on Lexington Road, in Concord, Massachusetts. This residence, the only one that Hawthorne ever owned, has a vital role in the composition of Hawthorne's so-called "failed" romance, so much so that in a sense, my reading of the Septimius narrative as a paradoxical success relies upon a reading of the house itself, as Hawthorne wrote that house and its given name into his texts. For not only is The Wayside house mythologized by "Thoreau's legend of the man who would not die" (13: 504), the legend that provided the basis for Septimius, but it also serves as the haunted architectural backdrop where Hawthorne confronts a shadowy protagonist, who is obsessed by the certainty of death.