Hawthorne's Wakefield

One literary critic says of Hawthorne's tale Wakefield that "It has a brooding, emotionally upsetting Kafkaesque quality," (Nathaniel 2004, 6). By this the critic is discussing the isolation and existential fate suffered by the husband known only as "Wakefield" in the story. The narration does not provide us with any subjective reasons for why the narrator has chosen to do as he does in the story, leaving his wife life alone for two decades until he reunites with her when he is near death. However, the narrator does provide us with a moral about Wakefield and his life experiences. In a world of adjusted routine, expectations and systems, an individual who chooses an alternative path must live outside society and becomes alienated even from himself.

Wakefield is a newly married man who impulsively decides to leave his wife, moving into his own apartment on a street across from where he lived with his wife. His whereabouts and fate are unknown to his wife, who basically becomes a widow in what becomes his prolonged absence. Though he often attempts to keep tabs on his wife by spying on her from afar, he always resists the temptation to cross the threshold of their home. He spends his days and nights in virtual isolation in his new quarters, unnoticed even when he does chance going out into the city. At one point he even meets his wife by chance in a crowd, but she does not recognize him in his altered condition. Eventually he recognizes

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Category: Literature - H