“Only a Light Wreath of The New-Fallen Snow”?: Ecogothic Tropes and the Diffractive Gaze in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Snow-Image”

Abstract

In the article I discuss Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ecological imagination as problematized in his lesser-known short story “The Snow-Image: A Childish Miracle” (1849). Although Hawthorne wrote the story for children, it carries a darker gothic undertone, illustrating the problematic aspect of the Romantic nature/culture division. The focus of my inquiry are the potential ecological implications. The analytical framework is taken from Andrew Smith and William Hughes’ edited collection Ecogothic (2013), in which several scholars work towards a definition of an environmentally conscious variety of the gothic genre. Using some of their findings and concepts along with selected ecocritical and New Materialist theories, I interrogate Hawthorne’s highly ambiguous and shifting tropes of nature which reveal the correlation between the crisis of the imagination and that of the environment. I argue that the central trope of the snow-child and the trajectory of the narrative conceal a Frankensteinesque subplot employed to critically rethink nature as a transcendental experience.