Brenda Wineapple,
author of the new biography, Hawthorne: A
Life, will talk on “Hawthorne and the Politics of Writing” on Monday, Nov.
3, at 7 p.m. in the Nott Memorial.
Wineapple's new book has been
widely reviewed, and the author has had a number of interviews. She is scheduled
to appear shortly on C-SPAN's Booknotes.
Wineapple, who joined the Union
faculty in 1976, holds a Ph.D. from the University
of Wisconsin. She has written two
other biographies: Genêt, about New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner,
and Sister Brother, about the
relationship of Gertrude and Leo Stein.
Despite the fact that Hawthorne
was one of America's
most famous writers, by the time of his death in 1864 he sensed that history
had passed him by. With massive armies mobilized in a civil war that he
strongly opposed, his many stories and novels set in the distant past seemed
beside the point. His close friendship with a widely discredited former U.S.
president, Franklin Pierce, only seemed to confirm his irrelevancy.
Hawthorne, a descendant of a 17th-century
Salem magistrate who hanged accused
witches by the score, has much to tell us about the terror-spawning religious
fanaticism of our own time, according to Wineapple.
“No one conveys better than Hawthorne
how religion and ideology can induce hysteria, violence, and cruelty,” she
says.
The first female biographer of
Hawthorne, Prof. Wineapple was attracted to him initially because he was the
first major American writer to make women central figures in his novels. His
contempt for women writers notwithstanding, “I knew the creator of Hester
Prynne had to be a feminist…and wanted to be the first to plumb his
relationships with the many women who were important to him.”