The Haunted Mind

The Haunted Mind is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter pieces, originally published in his 1837 collection Twice Told Tales. The sketch is one of his most psychologically interior pieces, taking the reader into the consciousness of a person who has woken in the middle of the night and is experiencing the strange in between state when the conscious mind has not fully gathered itself but is no longer asleep either. Hawthorne uses this transitional psychological state as the framework for a long meditation on the various thoughts, memories, and imaginative figures that crowd the mind in the middle of the night.

The sketch is one of the more psychologically experimental pieces in Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, with the careful attention to interior consciousness anticipating some of the modernist literary techniques that would emerge in the early twentieth century. The various thoughts and memories that the narrator describes range across past regrets, future anxieties, ghostly imagined presences, and the wider sense of strangeness that the middle of the night state can produce in the conscious mind.

Hawthorne’s prose throughout the sketch is at his most carefully attentive to the small movements of consciousness, with the slow pacing and the careful observation of the interior states matching the actual quality of the experience that the sketch is rendering. For readers interested in the psychological dimensions of Hawthorne’s writing, The Haunted Mind shows him at his most directly engaged with the kind of consciousness that his major fiction also worked through in different forms.

For students of nineteenth century American literature, of the development of psychological realism in fiction, or of Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, The Haunted Mind is essential. The sketch is brief and well suited to a single reading.