Volume 28, Number 4 · March 19, 1981
On Hawthorne's Mind
By John Updike
What did Hawthorne believe? The author of our classic novel of religious conscience and religious suffering, and of works imbued throughout with religious concerns and religious language, boasted of not being a churchgoer. His baptism, if it occurred, left no trace on the records. His mother, who became a widowed recluse when Nathaniel was only four, did take the boy and his sisters to services at the East Meeting House in Salem, where the Hathornes (the 'w' was added by our subject, after college) had had a pew for 170 years—'the old wooden meetinghouse,' Hawthorne was to write, 'which used, on wintry Sabbaths, to be the frozen purgatory of my childhood.' At Bowdoin College, he jested of 'Sunday sickness' and was frequently fined for missing chapel. From there he wrote his mother, 'The being a Minister is of course out of the question. I shall not think that even you could desire me to choose so dull a way of life.'
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