The Symbolism and The Hidden Self In “The Haunted Mind” By Nathaniel Hawthrone
Abstract
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Haunted Mind” (1837) stages a liminal cognitive state situated between sleep and waking in which perception, memory, and imagination fail to stabilize into unified consciousness. This article argues that the text does not merely represent psychological haunting but formally simulates transitional cognition, a condition in which perceptual binding, temporal continuity, and affective regulation temporarily collapse. Departing from Romantic-symbolic and psychoanalytic interpretations, the study proposes a cognitive-formal reading in which Hawthorne’s prose anticipates modern theories of distributed and discontinuous consciousness. Through close reading and theoretical synthesis, the article demonstrates how syntactic compression, temporal fragmentation, and affective externalization collectively produce a literary model of perceptual instability that challenges classical Romantic notions of unified subjectivity.