Language in Hawthorne

[Jute]

I just finished reading "The Birthmark" and I felt I would have had a deeper understanding of the story if I could completely understand the writing.

English is my native language so it's not that, but sentences like "Such a union accordingly took place, and was attended with truly remarkable consequences and a deeply impressive moral." make me feel as if complete understanding is elusive.

[Seawood]

It is a bit convoluted. And to be honest, even as a native speaker it's not even that easy because it presumes knowledge modern readers may not have.

I found Poe a bit easier to get a handle on, myself.

[Joyce]

Some of it is the style of writing at the time, and some, I think, is Hawthorne trying to be obtuse. We're used to writers coming right out and saying "They got married and it worked out well." In addition, there are words that have come to mean very differnt things than what they meant back then, words like 'attend'. I noticed this in all of our readings so far.

[Seawood]

It's interesting isn't it - I thought we'd be doing more modern works by now. That said, I do think this has all been worthwhile. I started Princess of Mars this morning and bing, spotted the Jesus parallels right on the first page. I don't think I'd have picked that up straightaway otherwise. I'm really looking forward to seeing whether the same sort of ideas are present in Little Brother too.