Hawthorne's Ephemeral Genius: The Septimius Manuscripts As a Defense of Jacksonian Authorship (Essay‪)‬

"I do abhor an Indian story," announces the narrator of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1835 sketch "Our Evening Party among the Mountains" (10: 429). (1) "Abhor" is a strong word, and Hawthorne adhered to it by almost completely excluding non-white characters from his literary productions for the next twenty-five years. (2) Anna Brickhouse attributes this aversion to his desire to construct himself "as an aspiring national author, capable of competing on the European literary scene, rather than a parochial writer limited to indigenous American topics." (3) Yet this argument that Hawthorne rejected the "writer" to become an "author" runs into difficulty when we consider his final novel, which is an Indian story. Between 1861 and 1863, he produced two drafts of a romance about a part-Indian protagonist's wrong-headed quest for immortality. (4) Septimius Felton and Septimius Norton, as modern editors have titled the manuscripts, force us to ask: If Hawthorne rejected the Indian story in a bid for literary greatness, why did he spend the last years of his life drafting hundreds of pages of just such a narrative--precisely when his position as a great "national author" was being solidified? To be sure, the existence of Septimius supports Brickhouse's contention that Hawthorne theorized his literary project in relation to the Indian story, but it also contradicts the paradigm of authorship that sustains her conclusions about that relationship. From contemporary criticism to the most recent monographs, scholarship has depicted Hawthorne as an apolitical "romantic rebel" bent on transcending rather than merely reflecting the American public--an author, not a writer. (5) At the same time, critics have either overlooked his final romance (even when it would seem directly applicable to their arguments, as with Brickhouse), or they have dismissed it as a puzzling aberration caused by the Civil War, illness, or anxiety about his own canonization. (6) Hawthorne admittedly experienced profound dislocation in the 1860s: The Democratic Party (and the patronage that had supported him throughout his adulthood) finally collapsed under the weight of sectional tensions, and a previously fluid American literary culture consolidated into a "strong canon," centered on Hawthorne the "national author." (7) I would argue, however, that Septimius's emergence from these convulsions makes it less an anomaly than an interpretive key. If, as Brickhouse argues, Hawthorne used the Indian story to conceptualize his authorship, then his decision to take up the genre in 1861 indicates that he was rearticulating his literary project's tacit principles in the face of national and personal transformations.