A Select Party

A Select Party is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s allegorical sketches, originally published in his 1846 collection Mosses from an Old Manse. The piece is a fantasy in the mode that Hawthorne worked in across many of his shorter pieces, where a single conceit is developed with the kind of slow unfolding moral and intellectual weight that distinguishes his work from the more straightforwardly entertaining sketches of his contemporaries.

The premise is built on the idea of a man who has decided to host a select party in a castle in the air. He sends invitations to all of the people whose qualities he most admires. The Master Genius. The Oldest Inhabitant. The Wandering Jew. The man with the Gift of Discriminating Friends. Posterity. The Best Man and the Best Woman. And other figures who exist as ideals or as legendary types rather than as actual people the host could meet in his ordinary life. The party itself becomes the occasion for Hawthorne to develop a long meditation on what kinds of human qualities are actually available in the real world and what kinds remain forever in the realm of the imaginary.

What makes the sketch interesting beyond its initial conceit is what it reveals about Hawthorne as a moralist and as an observer of his own era. The various ideal figures who attend the party are characters that nineteenth century American culture had been conjuring for itself, and Hawthorne’s slow examination of what each of them actually amounts to becomes a kind of cultural diagnosis. The piece is more affectionate than satirical, with Hawthorne taking his impossible figures seriously rather than mocking them, but the implicit critique of the gap between American ideals and American realities is unmistakable.

Readers coming to Hawthorne through The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables may find the sketch slighter than they expect, but the allegorical mode is one Hawthorne worked in throughout his career, and pieces like A Select Party are part of the continuous body of work that the major novels grew out of. For students of nineteenth century American literature, of the development of the American short story, or of Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, the sketch is worth knowing. It is short enough to read in twenty minutes and rewards the time.