Bruno Monfort

Hawthorne au musée : le savoir et la forme de l’oeuvre dans « A Virtuoso’s Collection »

This paper explores the textual and narrative strategies devised by Hawthorne to subvert the assumption underlying the conception of the past as an object to be reconstructed by historical knowledge. In a museum historically arranged, the succession of events through time can be duplicated as a succession of objects. Hawthorne s tale represents the museum as a convenient fallacy, and offers the collection as the more adequate paradigm for the way in which we actually come into contact with the past, through memory and imagination combined. Moreover, the collection provides a pattern after which Hawthorne s own career as a writer can be conceived.