Hawthorne and Melville, an Inquiry Log A germinous seed In the two weeks that I was home for Christmas break, I saw a number of teachers from my high school. One night the last week I was home, I was having dinner with an English teacher. After discussing the semester that had just ended, I told him what classes I was taking this semester, including the course on Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville.
He told me something that I found incredibly interesting. I hadn't known that. The idea of the Berkshires years ago intrigues me, and the idea that all of these people were here makes it even more interesting. American literature had never seemed much more personal to me than European literature; that is, until coming here I never felt any closer associations to American literature because of the setting since I didn't consider the setting of American literature particularly relevant to me in the Virgin Islands.
Suddenly Hawthorne and Melville seemed more accessible to me. Immediately I could see the forest scenes in The Scarlet Letter as taking place in woods I knew by Simon's Rock; the babbling brook became something bearing striking resemblance to Green River. As to Hawthorne and Melville being friends, I had many questions: How and when did they meet? How close to each other were they? Did they influence each other's writing? How much of a record of their relationship had been recorded?
Did they write about each other? Did they remain friends for all of their lives? I had found not just a topic for a paper, but questions that I wanted answered. Not too surprisingly, I didn't give the topic much thought for the next few weeks. The semester hadn't even started yet. And then on the first day of class I learned that we were expected to write a non-traditional research paper and that Hawthorne and Melville had met picnicking on Monument Mountain. Hearing about their first encounter, I had an incredibly silly image in my head.
I saw two men, carrying copies of The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick , getting rather intoxicated while a bunch of children around them were playing laser tag. An absolutely absurd image, as laser tag in the 's would have been quite a trick. But the point of the image was clear: The Berkshires, the place where I am now, is a place full of legend and history.
