“These things have wakened a warlike fire”: Sonic Warfare in Hawthorne’s “Sights from A Steeple” and Crane’s “On the desert” 

            Hawthorne did not fight in the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, but war nonetheless permeated his short fiction. Specifically, the sounds of war in Hawthorne’s fiction created a sonic warscape that critiqued American attitudes toward war in the nineteenth century. Though many scholars discuss Hawthorne’s direct relationship to the Civil War as a war correspondent, there is little attention paid to how Hawthorne’s anti-war soundscape, established more than two decades prior, influenced authors through the end of the Gilded Age. In “Sights from A Steeple” (1837), Hawthorne portrays the sonic qualities of war from the homefront and explores the rousing effects soundscapes of war have on civilian listeners. An adaptation of Hawthorne’s sonic warscape appears decades later in Stephen Crane’s poem “On the desert” (1895), where Crane adapts similar sonic strategies as Hawthorne to demonstrate the effects of war propaganda on young soldiers. Though Crane lived decades after the Civil War, his distaste for the brutality of war and the false glory the sonic warscape portrays is Hawthornian, as evidenced through the sonic parallels between the two authors’ work. I propose that Hawthorne’s soundscape in “Sights from A Steeple” contemplates the manipulative nature of sonic warscapes and pioneered the construction of American perceptions of war that reverberated into the twentieth century.

            In “Sights from A Steeple”, the narrator hears both the thunderous war in heaven and the loud war procession on earth. In both cases, the soundscape of war is an intrusion; thunderous war in the heavens disrupts the sunny day and the cacophonous war procession below disrupts grieving families on the homefront. Where the heavenly war inspires awe, the lively procession below corrupts, stirring a “warlike fire” within the otherwise peaceful narrator (Hawthorne). Simultaneously, the narrator hears young boys stomping and cheering alongside the soldiers, adding to the noise. Hawthorne thus explores how the enticing and manipulative sonic warscape corrupts the narrator’s peaceful nature and entices young men to enlist, almost hypnotizing them to march to their graves. 

Similarly, Crane’s “On the desert” employs many of Hawthorne’s strategies and shares a negative view of war and the mythos of glory in battle. In the poem, a serpent warrior goddess hypnotizes snakes through the sounds of battle, enticing them to join the hissing and accompany her on the battlefield. Hawthorne’s influence is clearly seen here: the sonic warscape intrudes upon the homefront and hypnotizes future soldiers into willingly sacrificing their lives to achieve glory in war. Thus, Hawthorne’s sonic warscape predated Gilded Age portrayals of war and complicated American perceptions of war from the homefront. 

Before one of the most impactful wars in American history occurred, Hawthorne raised questions about America’s relationship to war. As the nineteenth century progressed, later authors resonated with Hawthorne’s soundscape and adapted it to reckon with who America was becoming during its post-bellum identity crisis.