Dr. Heidegger's Experiment

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, to Puritan ancestors who had emigrated from England. His great-great-grandfather was a judge in the Salem witch trials of the 17th century. After his father’s death, young Nathaniel, his sisters, and his stepmother moved to live with relatives in Salem for 10 years. Hawthorne graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825 and published his first novel, Fanshawe: A Tale, in 1828. Thereafter, he published several short stories in periodicals and collected them in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. Later, Hawthorne joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, and married Sophia Peabody, an American painter and illustrator, in 1842, with whom he had three children. In 1836, Hawthorne served for a time as the editor of the short-lived American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge. He began work in the Boston Custom House in 1839. During his later years, he toured France and Italy with his family and wrote about the American Civil War after traveling to Washington DC, where he met Abraham Lincoln and other notable figures. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864.

Hawthorne published in a variety of genres: eight novels, numerous short stories and essays, travelogues, and a biography of Franklin Pierce, who would later become president. “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” appeared in Twice-Told Tales in 1837, but it was The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, that initiated Hawthorne’s most profitable period as a writer. Hawthorne’s work explores issues of morality, sin, and shame, but also the symbolism of nature and the power of imagination to transform reality. In “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” the four guests, who had squandered their youth and reputations by committing sins such as greed, pride, lust, and vanity, are transformed by the elixir into their young selves; they are still endowed, presumably, with the wisdom of their years. However, they recommit the same mistakes they had committed when they were young.

Hawthorne’s short stories were influenced by those of Washington Irving, whose tales often feature improbable or fantastic occurrences and are set in an American past that is heavily mythologized (“Rip Van Winkle,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”). Hawthorne himself, when speaking of his full-length fiction, elaborated a distinction between novels and romances that is useful for understanding his short stories, too. The novel, he says, goes for an element of reality, while the romance, ultimately derived from medieval stories of fantastic and chivalrous adventure and represented in Hawthorne’s day by the historical adventures of Sir Walter Scott, includes elements of the fanciful that the novel disdains.

Hawthorne’s distinctive approach to the romance was to turn it toward the exploration of themes of inwardness rather than adventure. He also innovated the exploration of dark themes, and his works are sometimes called “dark romance.” Writers like Edgar Allan Poe would pick up on this in Hawthorne’s wake. In fact, Poe wrote a book review of Twice-Told Tales in which he singled out “Dr. Heidegger's Experiment” for special praise.