"In some old magazine or newspaper I recollect a story, told as truth, if a man- let us call him Wakefield- who absented himself for a long time from his wife. The fact, thus abstractly stated, is not very uncommon... Howbeit, this, though far from the most aggravated, is perhaps the strangest instance on record of marital delinquency, and, moreover, as remarkable a freak as may be found in the whole list of human oddities." - Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice Told Tales
In Nathaniel Hawthorne's excellent book of short stories Twice Told Tales, there are numerous remarkable stories. In particular though, I found the queer and sometimes comic tale, "Wakefield" one of the most compelling. "Wakefield" centers around its eponymous hero, Mr. Wakefield, a resident of London; a lazy and somewhat absentminded man who, on a lark, decides to run away from his wife and take up residence a street away. What he intends as a brief jaunt he proceeds to extend for twenty years, living only a street away from his own home in rented lodgings and having only occasional near encounters with his wife. As absurd as this story is, it somehow leaves one with a disconcerting air of veracity. For the resident of a modern city, this account seems all too easy to believe, and the flimsiness of the excuse for the abandonment is likewise well within the bounds of credibility. It has some merit as an urban legend, and as Hawthorne suggests it would be good to consider in some detail the possible meaning or lessons of such a story.
Wakefield is not, in Hawthorne's musing, a bad man, nor necessarily a negligent husband. The author comments that his singular flaw is his exaggerated view of himself. He thinks a great commotion will ensue by his absence, that his friends will be distraught, or his wife will have London turned inside out. He ventures out cautiously, thinking his passage marked by many eyes, for, "there were footsteps that seemed to tread behind his own, distinct from the multitudinous tramp around him, and anon he heard a voice shouting afar and fancied that it called his name. Doubtless a dozen busybodies had been watching him and told his wife the whole affair." Hawthorne replies disparagingly, "Poor Wakefield! little knowest thou thine own insignificance in this great world. No mortal eye but mine has traced thee." He leaves his own home on a whim to satisfy the demand of his ego and further he desires that the world stop for his absence! But it goes on.
He is almost drawn back in by his wife's illness. The stress of his absence seemingly affects her health. He draws near. But he holds back for fear of exacerbating her condition through shock. Again, Wakefield's self-importance interferes and he withholds his presence from her who would be most benefited by it. She recovers, and Hawthorne poignantly shows the treacherous thoughts which linger in many a soul; "her heart is sad, perhaps, but quiet, and, let him return soon or late, it will never be feverish for him again. Such ideas glimmer through the mist of Wakefield's mind and render him indistinctly conscious that an almost impassable gulf divides his hired apartment from his former home." Wakefield is not elated by his wife's recovery. In fact he seems vaguely disappointed. She doesn't die for the want of him. This unsettling realization disturbs the fantasy of Wakefield's own importance.
The flimsy charade lasts for years. Hawthorne imagines that he changes his dress and begins wearing a tattered disguise from "a Jew's dirty old clothes bag." One is tempted to allegorize this image, and to say it is materialistic, tawdry living he has adorned! Hawthorne comments that Wakefield is always thinking to himself that he is only a street away and may return when he wishes. The author cries out "Fool! You are in another world!" And indeed he is; he is in the world of petty amusement where he is really important, and where his whim is king. Only when age has made him stiff does he return home to acknowledge his own place, yet even here after his "sojourn of twenty years," he returns as and when he pleases.
This strange story, as I have already alluded to briefly, has much to offer the modern urbanite, or for that matter the hidden throngs with which the internet teems.
Wakefield's new mode of life, spurred on by a fit of pure pique, is an intensely transient life. He has moved from the place where he is important to the periphery of the world, in a sense. He is living in rented lodgings and false clothes, and he avoids his old acquaintances becoming a permanent stranger. Yet he thinks that his importance at his old home should remain static, and that his actions need have no consequences. He lingers on in this way for years, losing much of the prime of his, and his family's, life. He has squandered his potential. Hawthorne implies he ran the risk of losing his place entirely, saying, "[i]t is perilous to make a chasm in human affections- not that they gape so long and wide, but so quickly close again."
The modern mega-city common in America, Europe, and across the globe is certainly an environment in which this scenario does not seem entirely unlikely. People come and go in our lives, and the majority of the people we cross paths with daily are not people we will interact with regularly for long periods of time. They are permanent strangers who will not mark our passing. The phenomenon of the bystander effect is similarly well known. Many crimes are committed in full sight of many witnesses who don't act because they rely on one of the throng to act.
This anonymity is also apparent on the internet, where social media both exposes people more than ever to one another, while also leaving the whole world permanent voyeurs and bystanders to the multitude of fabricated "intimacies" of social media. This two phenomena, the megalopolis and social media, have produced the needed criteria for each person to both absurdly overestimate their importance in the eyes of others, and to be practically isolated and abandoned by the whole world. Millions are now precisely living in "another world."
There are likely millions of Wakefields in the world today who squander themselves in ephemera. The modern urban cyber-scape lacks even the corporeality of previous forms of dissipation and abandonment. Technology has allowed the phenomenon of the social-suicide, the recluse known as a "neet" to develop. These are persons whose entire existence is mediated through the internet and various online hobbies, social media relationships, and vices.
Wakefield's dissipation provides food for thought to the contemporary reader. When we see around us the many transient relationships we have taken on, the many false pleasures and empty joys, we can see in ourselves the sulky and mischievous fool of Hawthorne's story. We have taken a walk away from our own life and fecundity of being. It is tempting to remain a child and to play children's pranks, and then to continue them out of shame. Such temptations have to be abandoned if we wish to find ourselves before we, like Wakefield, have become gray with age and our passions and energies grown cold. Before we stiffen with the years it is important that we take up our lives and most especially our responsibilities. We have a duty to take up our place in the world, and not to abandon those to whom we are responsible. The more we develop relationships and occupations based not merely on sentiment or pleasure but on duty and stability, the more we will become able to cross the gulf that stands between ourselves, and home.
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