The Wakefield mystery: Some thoughts on the meaning of Hawthorne's famous story

Easy to underestimate Nathaniel Hawthorne because the sometimes quaint, sometimes overly folksy style - he was I think self-consciously antique even in his day, both in his style and often in his subject matter - but his best stories completely stand up to the test of time - maybe their antique nature has insulated them from time a little bit; they are of no particular age - and they have about them a weirdness and creepiness that opened the doorway to Poe, Lovecraft, King et al. Take Wakefield, one of his justly most famous stories; I hadn't read it for many years and was surprised, coming back to it (I've been reading an old Vintage pb Nathaniel Hawthorne Selected Stories) that he tells the whole plot in the first paragraph - a man walks out of his married life, moves into an apartment on the next street (in London), observes his house and wife daily , and then walks in the front door again 20 years later and resumes his married life. Hawthorne sets up this frame - a true story, he alleges - and then fills in the "blanks," imagining Wakefield's thoughts, actions, and behavior over this 20-year span. It's extremely weird to think of Wakefield's behavior in literal terms: the complete social perversity of abandoning a family, allowing oneself to literally be declared dead and mourned, to silently observe the life and the suffering of another. Hawthorne of course uses this trope as a venue for remaking on the indifference of modern urban society - how easy it is to blend in and be unnoticed and forgotten. He also recognizes the mania within Wakefield, but cannot exactly explain it nor does he try to; he does imagine that the decision to abandon his home and his life is in a sense a decision he makes every day - he didn't set out to be apart for 20 years. He finally calls Wakefield the Outcast of Society, but is that true? Society did not cast him out; he's a self-exile. Obviously Melville's Bartleby is an echo of Wakefield - both stories about a loner, an outsider, fixated and obsessed - and both are vivid and early examples of the essential American short story, which tends to focus on loners and outsiders, separating from society rather than joining society. Could there be a Wakefield today, or even then? Would be much more difficult than Hawthorne's account allows, esp today, to exist without leaving an electronic footprint. Even then: Where did his funds come from? And could he really live a block away without ever being recognized? Well, it's not meant to be an entirely realistic story; in some way, it's a story about the art of fiction: Isn't Wakefield, the silent observer, much like the writer, like Hawthorne himself - unseen, and watching others?