7 page introduction to longer reconsideration of Hawthorne’s career in terms of his conflicted engagements with Patronage Discourse, emerging historiography, and the intersection of electro-magnetics, fashion, and artistic production.

As is usual in such things, argues that everyone else has read something wrong, the something here being primarily “The Custom House” and The Scarlet Letter, but with occasional romps and digressions into all manner of Hawthorne texts and the occasional recipe for yellow starch or major social transgression of Sophia Peabody.