Germinous Seeds: Hawthorne’s Creative Influence on Melville

Given its transformative impact on his fiction beginning with Moby-Dick and extending to his later work as a poet, Melville’s friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne and concomitant reading of his writings has long elicited critical scrutiny. Following a review of Hawthorne’s extended influence on Melville’s fiction and poetry, this article explores the nature of that influence by means of an analysis of Melville’s markings in Hawthorne’s fiction based on the metaphor of the “germinous seeds” that Melville felt implanted by his reading of Hawthorne, as expressed in his well-known review of Mosses from an Old Manse. Resources newly added and in development at Melville’s Marginalia Online facilitate study of his reading, as illustrated in the present essay by bar plots and term frequencies. In addition to examining the significance of selected evidence in his marking of fiction he read after Mosses, the analysis focuses on a single frequency in Melville’s marginalia: the binary of head and heart long familiar to critics from the review and correspondence, but originally prompted by Melville’s exuberant reading of Mosses. Melville’s conception of the trope informed the metaphysical character of his letters to Hawthorne and, briefly, affirmed his fraternal and spiritual bond with the older writer.