Hawthorne’S “Artist Of The Beautiful”

Hawthorne’s “Artist of the Beautiful”

Throughout literature, we have come to know many characters who baffle us with

their unusual personalities to the point where branding them as delusional is the easiest

approach to understanding their nature. In other cases we ask ourselves whether or not

the character is living in a dream and perhaps out of touch with reality. We ask

ourselves, what would drive a person to walk into the night with a stranger when all logic

says not to? Why would a person laugh after watching his compatriot suffer public

humiliation? Nathaniel Hawthorne, without a doubt, is notorious for creating strange

characters who puzzle the reader when trying to understand them but of all of

Hawthorne's characters Owen Warland must be the most difficult to analyze. The

troubled young artist in search of the beautiful has become the object of ongoing

criticism as to whether he is living a dream or simply delusional. In any case, it would be

easy for us to dismiss the matter by saying he is a little of both, a hopeless dreamer

who goes mad when people fail to understand him. On the other hand, claiming that he

is neither dreaming nor delusional is a far more difficult view to support. Nevertheless,

understanding Owen demands a closer look at "The Artist of the Beautiful".

Owen Warland, seeker of the beautiful, is the lowly watchmaker around whom

this story takes place. He lives in a small village in which he is an object of peculiarity.

"What can Owen Warland be about?"(Hawthorne 447). Old Peter Hovenden may be

speaking for almost the whole town, except for his daughter Annie, to whom he is

addressing the question. Peter thinks Owen to be a dreamer and completely out of

touch with reality. Robert Danforth also does not think very much of Owen, his school

chum from prior days. Robert does not see much reward in what Owen does. When

speaking with Owen, he goes so far as to say: "I put more main strength into one blow

of my hammer, than all that you have expended since you were a 'prentice"(Hawthorne

453). So what is it about Owen that puzzles the characters that surround him? What

makes him so different? Surely it is not his profession; Hovenden himself was once a

watchmaker, not to mention the fact that he was Owen's teacher. Perhaps it is how he

spends his days, always in solitude and preoccupied with things that most people found

to be a waste of time or the fact that "he found amusement in chasing butterflies, or

watching the motions of water insects"(Hawthorne 457). Apparently, as time goes on,

Owen gains a reputation for his fascination with and search for the beautiful. As the

story progresses we hear more about "The Beautiful" and his quest to achieve

it. Owen's search for the beautiful comes in the shape of a butterfly but not just any

butterfly, one built by his own hands.

The butterfly becomes the object of Owen's toil and the reason why he shuts

everyone out of his life. At the first glance it would appear that the butterfly is just an

object of fascination for Owen but by taking a closer look one is able to see just how

much the two have in common. Both the butterfly and Owen are fragile creatures and

susceptible to injury in their environments. Both are usually taken for granted and seen

as insignificant. However the real significance of the butterfly, the most likely reason for

Hawthorne choosing it, is the way it lives its life. The stages in the life of the butterfly are

closely related to the ordeals that Owen faces throughout the story.

Butterflies undergo a complete metamorphosis, that is, "their life consists of four

stages, each entirely different from the other three"(Sandved 55). "In the first stage, the

insect is concealed within the egg, which after fertilization, is deposited on a leaf" (Bassil

5). After five days or so, the caterpillar emerges in its larval stage. It spends the next

two weeks feeding and increasing its weight by as much as 30,000 times. "To

accommodate such rapid growth and the increasingly visible insect, the caterpillar

sheds its skin five times; these instars, as they are called, provide important and

sometimes fantastic camouflage" (Bassil 5). After shedding the fifth and final skin, the

butterfly forms its chrysalis shell. During the next two weeks the butterfly goes through a

complete transformation and emerges as a fully developed butterfly. "In addition