Reality In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Wives Of The Dead

Mind Tricks of Reality or Dreams One of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s less notable pieces of literature is “The Wives of the Dead,” an interesting tale published early in his career. The story takes place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the eighteenth century, while wars are being fought between Great Britain and France over the control of Canada. There are two main characters, Margaret and Mary, who are recent brides of brothers, one a sailor and one a landsman. The tale starts off detailing the unfortunate deaths of their husbands within two successive days in the war. Hawthorne uses drawn-out visual metaphors to create a figurative and nearly supernatural background. If one reads the story quickly and without much thought, one thinks that it is simply catering to the women’s grief following the loss of their husbands. Because of the detail Hawthorne puts into his descriptions in “The Wives of the Dead,” one can see that he provokes the question of if something is truly realistic or simply a dream. As with all of Hawthorne’s literature, “The Wives of the Dead” is written in third person. From the third person viewpoint, the story is told with an almost godlike perception. Perceptions that Margaret and Mary may not realize are easily understood by the reader. This helps by pointing out what can be happening …show more content…
Hawthorne chooses to keep the reader hanging on his every word in “The Wives of the Dead” because of his third person storytelling and his play of emotions from each wife. Margaret and Mary are awakened during the middle of the night by a significant character with news about the survival of their husbands. The characters of Goodman Parker and Stephen show the reader that, consequently, the news may not be reality. Whether the news of the brothers’ survival is truth or a vivid dream is left up to the reader’s imagination as one is never told the