This essay examines how Nathaniel Hawthorne narrativizes the interlocking questions of population, individual, and literature in his early short fiction, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” The text, I claim, thematizes what Alexis de Tocqueville and Michel Foucault fail to explain in their respective discussion of population and autonomy, the paradox of subjectivity as a correlative of population. By focusing on this paradox, Hawthorne depicts how an individual constitutes his subjectivity by means of his involvement in the formation of collective identity of population which consists of heterogeneous individualities and desires. This involvement registers his contagion with and immunization against the homogenizing effect of population, which, I suggest, captures the way in which the reader recognizes the paradoxical mechanism of subjectivization in experiencing the contagious effect of the literary text.