Sunday At Home

Sunday at Home is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter pieces, originally published in his Twice Told Tales collection. The sketch is a brief reflective essay built around the experience of a Sunday morning spent at home rather than at church, with the narrator observing his neighbors going to and from religious services through the window of his own house.

The sketch captures the kind of slightly displaced observational position that Hawthorne’s shorter pieces often worked with, where the narrator is neither fully inside nor fully outside the wider community he is observing. The Sunday observance was the central organizing event of nineteenth century New England small town life, and the narrator’s position of staying home rather than attending services places him at a particular oblique angle to the community he is observing.

Hawthorne uses the situation to develop the kind of gentle reflection on religious community, on the relationship between formal worship and personal spirituality, and on the wider question of what church attendance actually represents in the lives of those who participate. The sketch is reflective rather than polemical, with Hawthorne’s characteristic prose style giving the piece its careful weight.

For students of nineteenth century American literature, of New England regional writing, or of Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, Sunday at Home is worth knowing.