Obsession: Hawthorne's psychological caveat for the twentieth century, 1978

This research is intended to explore obsession as a technique of character-portrayal in selected Hawthorne short stories. Comprised of an introduction, four chapters and a selected bibliography, the study discusses and analyses the tragic monomania of characters in the following Hawthorne tales: The Shaker Bridal, The Gentle Boy, Young Goodman Brown, Ethan Brand, The Birthmark, Rappaccini's Daughter, Dr. Heidegger's Experiment, The Prophetic Pictures and The Artist of the Beautiful. The Introduction states the writer's rationale for making the study and Hawthorne's relevance for the twentieth century; it also surveys the obsessive personal life and literary achievement of Hawthorne. Chapter I, The Central Point of All, analyzes and categorizes the obsessions of the characters into three categories. Additionally,Chapter II The Price of Obsession, discusses the tragic and three-dimensional effects of obsession. Chapter III, Obsession: A Mirror of the Incompleteness of Modern Life, points out the personal and societal deficiencies inherent in Hawthorne's obsessed characters. Finally, Chapter IV, Obsession: A Message for the Twentieth Century, discusses Hawthorne's admonitory warnings for the twentieth century as revealed in the obsessed character-type. The chapter also shows that, although the novelist's obsessed characters were of the nineteenth century, they are distinctly harbingers of character-types of contemporary American and world literatures