This paper examines the connections between Hawthorne's travels, his early writing, and antebellum culture by drawing attention to the professional status fictive accounts of travel could confer in the nascent American literary market. By the 1830's Washington Irving's critical and financial success had become an enduring model for young American writers. In The Itinerant Storyteller and in Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Across the Sea (1835), both Hawthorne and Longfellow stake their claim to literary authority on works that borrow from Irving's Sketch Book the organizing structure of the tour and the touristic perspective of the narrator. Adoption of the trope of travel and the conventions of travel-writing promises Hawthorne and Longfellow access to a growing American market for representations of tourism.
In 1832, following the failure of his first three literary efforts, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to Franklin Pierce expressing his intention to pursue this promise by embarking on the American Grand Tour from New York City to Niagara Falls and back via Montreal, Vermont, and the White Moutains. "I am very desirous of making this journey," Hawthorne wrote, "on account of a book by which I intend to acquire an (undoubtedly immense) literary reputation, but which I cannot hope to commence writing till I have visited Canada." Like other travel-writers, Hawthorne's literary plans precede the development of his itinerary. He travels "on account of" his career aspirations and to complete a previously conceived imaginative project--The Itinerant Storyteller (finished in 1834 but never published in whole). The literary status Hawthorne sought depended upon his engagement with what Richard Brodhead calls the touristic aesthetic: a step-sister of the visual and literary arts that emerged in the 1820's as the practices of American tourists, writers, and landscape painters began to converge.
I begin my consideration of Hawthorne and the touristic aesthetic with a brief analysis of Irving's "Author's Account of Himself" and Hazlitt's critique of The Sketch Book: together these pieces offer a telling model of the tourist and the structure of the touristic aesthetic. With this model in mind, I turn to the frame-narrative of The Itinerant Storyteller and compare Hawthorne's version of the artist-as-tourist, Oberon, with Irving's portrait of Crayon. Significantly, Hawthorne's Oberon is a domestic traveler, struggling to find an independent career and an individual vision at home rather than abroad. To demonstrate the consequences of this difference, I consider Hawthorne's travel-sketch, "My Visit to Niagara Falls." This sketch extends and revises the antebellum model of the tourist and presents a shrewd analysis of the aesthetic that motivates travel and travel literature. In closing, I suggest that Hawthorne's decision, early in his career, to represent himself as tourist resonates throughout his later work -- from The Blithedale Romance to The Marble Faun -- as he conducts a sustained exploration of the touristic aesthetic and develops a topic and a career pattern that writers as different as James, Howells, and Twain will later follow.
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