amily Resemblances: Hawthorne’s Extended Bloodlines”

MLA, Guaranteed Panel

MLA Conference, Toronto, 8-11 January 2026

Hawthorne’s fiction and nonfiction often pivots on family structures and climactic moments of family epiphanies, whether in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” or, with the budding cousinship of Hepzibah, Clifford, and Phoebe in The House of the Seven Gables. Character epiphanies are often aligned with awareness of inter or intra-familial symmetry or resemblances. Family bloodlines are like tendrils in Hawthorne’s fiction, finding new branches of relations along the way. Hawthorne’s families often are unconventional — comprising strange pairs (eg Chillingworth and Dimmesdale or Chillingworth and Pearl; Hepzibah and Clifford; Zenobia and Priscilla) and harrowing interactions. Even conventional families seem always to be hemmed-in somehow by some cruel force, scientific experiment, or haunted house, as in “The Birthmark” and “Rappachini’s Daughter.”In Hawthorne’s own life, his sister, Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne, was one, much like Hawthorne’s protagonists, who “always seems to avoid capture,” according to Margaret B Moore. Hawthorne’s family structures are often elusive, complicated, or unresolved, but remain crucial to developments within his fiction. As Lois A. Cuddy has noted in The Scarlet Letter, “The mother and child appear together in just about every scene in the novel, especially in those situations in which Hester must deal with other members of the community” (110). Family members, whether known or unknown in relations, come into focus especially within the public sphere, as in The Scarlet Letter or “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” Many of Hawthorne’s histories, like The Whole Histories of Grandfather’s Chair, and his children’s stories, like  “Little Annie’s Rambles,” have implied or stated family relations at the center of their storytelling. The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society welcomes 250-300-word proposals on family relations, family resemblances, and bloodlines within Hawthorne’s corpus for this guaranteed session at MLA 2026. Mail to: ariel.silver@svu.edu.