Wakefield the Watcher

There’s definitely a dark side to Nathaniel Hawthorne, manifest in many of his works. After browsing through a recent bilingual edition of his short story “Wakefield”, included in the first edition of Twice-Told Tales in 1837, I think that would be my candidate for most haunted Hawthorne tale. It’s not just that the story–about a London husband who walks away from his wife and home only to take a flat one street over from which he can stalk (or “haunt” in Hawthorne’s words) her for twenty years–is a bit eerie, the illustrations in this particular edition are extremely evocative. They are the work of Spanish illustrator and artist Ana Juan, whose award-winning work has graced books for both juvenile and adult audiences as well as more than twenty covers of The New Yorker.

Juan’s images accentuate the creepiness of the story but you can only grasp Wakefield’s self-imposed alienation–Hawthorne calls him the “Outcast of the Universe” –by reading the text, which is very short, more of a sketch than a story. It would be nice if we could “see” things from Wakefield’s perspective (outside the home, just as Juan gives us a view of his impact inside the home), but Hawthorne won’t go there: the outcast is just wandering around, apparently unmotivated, except when he spies on his “widowed” wife. Consequently he emerges as a soul-less Peeping Tom, “spell-bound” in Hawthorne’s estimation, essentially a ghost as “the dead have nearly as much chance or revisiting their earthly homes as the self-banished Wakefield”. But in a completely “unpremeditated moment” Wakefield does decide to return home (probably because he’s standing outside in the rain and it looks warm inside) and we are robbed of his reception: I wish that either the author or the illustrator had show us that, but Hawthorne proclaims that “we shall not follow our friend across the threshold”.