There are different ways to appreciate a story like Hawthorne’s ‘‘Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.’’ It is often read as a story about growing old gracefully, a message that is buoyed up by the creepy elements that make the story interesting. On the other hand, the fact that it is written by one of the great names…
Tag: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment – Setting – Dark Romanticism
Dark Romanticism Hawthorne came at the end of the literary movement called romanticism, when the American version had evolved in several different directions. In Hawthorne, and in his contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe, the ideals of romanticism came to manifest themselves as an offshoot that literary critics refer to as ‘‘dark romanticism.’’ The romantic movement developed…
Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment – Literary Devices – Narrator – Gothic Elements
First-Person Narrator This story is told with a first-person narrator who refers to himself or herself as ‘‘I’’ several times. This technically makes the narrator a character in the story, even though readers are never given any details about who this person might be. The narrator can, for the sake of simplicity, be identified with…
Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment – Themes
Aging The four people called to Dr. Heidegger’s study have known one another for more than fifty years. Each has been successful in some field of endeavor, but their successes were long ago. Now they are failures. Colonel Killigrew, whose title indicates that he rose in the ranks of the military, is a physical wreck….
Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment – Characters
Mr. Gascoigne Mr. Gascoigne is one of the three former suitors of the Widow Wycherly to be summoned to Dr. Heidegger’s house to participate in the doctor’s experiment. When he was young, Mr. Gascoigne was a politician, but he had lost any prospects he had in politics. First, he acquired a bad reputation, though Hawthorne…
Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment – Summary
‘‘Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment’’ begins Dr. Heidegger has four old acquaintances meet him in the study of his home. They are Mr. Medbourne, a once-prosperous merchant who has lost his fortune; Colonel Killigrew, who ruined his body with food and drink; Mr. Gascoigne, a former politician who has fallen into obscurity; and the Widow Wycherly, who…
The Wives of the Dead – Analysis
Although “The Wives of the Dead” is a story about events surrounding two widows in early eighteenth century colonial America, it is the narrator who sets the tone of the story and filters information in such a way as to shape the reader’s understanding of events. The narrator is not Hawthorne but a persona created…
The Wives of the Dead – Setting
Eighteenth-Century Newspapers Hawthorne sets his story in the early eighteenth century in Massachusetts’ Bay Province, and his two principle characters, Margaret and Mary, learn of their husbands’ fate through men who visit them at their home. As one can imagine, news traveled slowly more than three hundred and fifty years ago. British censors kept a…
The Wives of the Dead – Imagery – Literary Devices
Romance “The Wives of the Dead” is an American romance. The term “romance” emerged during the Middle Ages and often referred to stories with farfetched plots and exotic settings, involving knights and their quests, and chivalric behavior. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term became synonymous with stories emphasizing emotion and subjective experience. Classical…
The Wives of the Dead – Central Ideas – Themes
Loss Hawthorne’s story illustrates how a person’s response to death and loss reveals true character. Both women mourn the loss of their husbands. However, Mary’s “mild, quiet, yet not feeble character” and her faith enable her to endure the emotional torment of her husband’s death with more equanimity than Margaret. She prepares a meal and…