The outcasts of the universe: longing and belonging in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s and Edgar Allan Poe’s London tales

The aim of this essay is to analyze the myth of London as revisited in mid- nineteenth century American literature, focusing on the ambiguous figure found in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wakefield (1835) and the anonymous “man of the crowd” in Edgar Allan Poe’s eponymous tale (1840). Both characters represent the dilemmas of displacement, movement and alienation raised by the dissolution of the traditional paradigms of identity and, at the same time, the emergence of new social patterns. Poe’s “perfect stranger” does not belong anywhere; he is forced to move from one event to another, living in an eternal present with no connections to the past, while Hawthorne’s “outcast of the universe” acts like a post- modern tourist, choosing a self- imposed exile from his own home that lasts for twenty years. Thus, in different ways, the labyrinthine streets of London become, for the American authors, an existential metaphor, or rather the imaginary space where the modern subject experiences the estrangement of the familiar and the disturbing presence of Otherness.