FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON HAWTHORNE
Hours in a Library, Leslie Stephen (1874); Study of Hawthorne, George Parsons Lathrop (1876); Life, in the English Men of Letters series, Henry James (1880); Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, Julian Hawthorne (1885); Life, in the Great Writers series, Moncure D. Conway (1890); Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Horatio Bridge (1893); Memories of Hawthorne, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1897); Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anne Fields (1899); Life, in the American Men of Letters series, George Edward Woodberry (1902).
THE WHITE OLD MAID
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Introduction of setting, giving atmosphere of story.
The moonbeams came through two deep and narrow windows, and showed a spacious chamber richly furnished in an antique fashion. From one lattice the shadow of the diamond panes was thrown upon the floor; the ghostly light, through the other, slept upon a bed, falling between the heavy silken curtains, and illuminating the face of a young man.First Plot Situation. But, how quietly the slumberer lay! how pale his features! and how like a shroud the sheet was wound about his frame! Yes; it was a corpse, in its burial clothes.
This uncertainty strikes the tone of the story, which trembles constantly between the real and the fancied, the physical and the spirit world, keeping the reader in doubt as to whether he is witnessing a manifestation of the supernatural or is deceived by the mysterious atmosphere of the unusual.
2. Suddenly, the fixed features seemed to move with dark emotion. Strange fantasy! It was but the shadow of the fringed curtain waving betwixt the dead face and the moonlight, as the door of the chamber opened and a girl stole softly to the bedside. Was there delusion in the moonbeams, or did her gesture and her eye betray a gleam of triumph, as she bent over the pale corpse—pale as itself—and pressed her living lips to the cold ones of the dead? As she drew back from that long kiss, her features writhed as if a proud heart were fighting with its anguish. Again it seemed that the features of the corpse had moved responsive to her own. Still an illusion! The silken curtain had waved, a second time, betwixt the dead face and the moonlight, as another fair young girl unclosed the door, and glided, ghostlike, to the bedside. Two main characters introduced.There the two maidens stood, both beautiful, with the pale beauty of the dead between them. But she who had first entered was proud and stately, and the other a soft and fragile thing.
Note the archaic, formal language, which sets the period in the long ago.
3. “Away!” cried the lofty one. “Thou hadst him living! The dead is mine!”