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Tag: The Wives of the Dead

The Wives of the Dead – Analysis

Posted on April 2, 2020April 2, 2020 by JL Admin

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

Posted on April 2, 2020April 2, 2020 by JL Admin

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

Posted on April 1, 2020April 1, 2020 by JL Admin

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

Posted on April 1, 2020April 1, 2020 by JL Admin

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…

The Wives of the Dead – Characters

Posted on April 1, 2020April 1, 2020 by JL Admin

Margaret  Along with her sister-in-law, Mary, Margaret is one of the wives referred to in the title. Both are “recent brides,” and still “young and comely”; that is, attractive. She has a “lively and irritable temperament,” and is bitter, virtually inconsolable, about her husband’s death. She declines eating the meal Mary offers her, saying, in…

The Wives of the Dead – Summary

Posted on April 1, 2020April 1, 2020 by JL Admin

Part One  In the first part of “The Wives of the Dead,” the narrator assures readers his tale is “scarcely worth relating,” then proceeds to tell it in detail. A hundred years ago, in the early eighteenth century, two “young and comely” (attractive) women in a Massachusetts seaport town married brothers and set up house…

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