Hawthorne, Melville, and Emersonian Character

Abstract

This essay proposes that Melville’s sketch of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in chapters 36–41 of The Confidence-Man (1857) was written, in great part, for his estranged friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. The chapters, it argues, respond to Hawthorne’s thoughts about Emerson’s character theory, expressed in “The Great Stone Face” (1850) and in conversations the two men shared in the Berkshires in 1850 and 1851.