Wakefield

Wakefield is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in the New England Magazine in May 1835 and collected in Twice Told Tales two years later. It is one of his strangest and most often discussed stories, and one that has continued to fascinate readers and critics across nearly two centuries.

The story is presented as a meditation on a newspaper item Hawthorne claims to have read about a London man who left his wife under apparently normal circumstances and then took lodgings in the next street, where he lived for twenty years without ever telling her where he was. After two decades he simply walked back into his old house and resumed his life as if nothing had happened. Hawthorne uses this premise as the starting point for a long imagined reconstruction of what such a man might have been thinking through those twenty years, why he might have left, what he might have done with himself, and what he was finally returning to.

The story has no plot in the conventional sense. It is essentially an extended speculation by the narrator on the psychological possibilities of the situation. Hawthorne moves from one possible explanation to another, each plausible and each finally inadequate. The figure of Wakefield himself is kept deliberately blurry, a man who could be any man and whose specific motives are less important than the general possibility of the situation he has created.

What has kept readers coming back to the story is the question it raises about the fragility of an ordinary life. Wakefield steps out of his life for what seems at first like a few days and finds, twenty years later, that the step was permanent in ways he never intended. The story is one of the earliest serious treatments in American literature of what we would now call alienation, the slow drift of a person out of his own life by small choices that accumulate into something irreversible.

The story is short, perhaps fifteen pages, and works as a single sitting read. For readers interested in the strange side of Hawthorne, this is one of the essential pieces. It pairs naturally with Young Goodman Brown and with The Minister’s Black Veil, two other Twice Told Tales pieces that work in similar psychological territory.