"Feeling out of Place: Affective History, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Civil War" (original) (raw)
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“A for Abolition”: Hawthorne's Bond-servant and the Shadow of Slavery
Journal of American Studies, 1991
In the essay "Chiefly about War-Matters" Hawthorne, in the guise of "a Peaceable Man," devotes as much of his attention to the plight of poor Southern whites as he does to the immediate motive for war: the condition of enslaved blacks. In fact, he writes that "[t]he present war is so well justified by no other consideration as by the probability that it will free this class of Southern whites from a thraldom in which they scarcely begin to be responsible beings." 1 The Civil War is represented as a sign of the imminent regeneration of the entire brutalized Southern race and, further, as ushering in the long-promised age of genuine American democracy. This essay, in which Hawthorne's sentiments are so deeply buried beneath layers of irony, signifies unambiguously, if nothing else, the pervasiveness of a pro-slavery mentality that has little to do with the geographical division of North and South. The "Peaceable Man" takes pains to establish the historical status of American slavery as a phenomenon of very long standing and so makes us privy to "an historical circumstance, known to a few, that connects the children of the Puritans with these Africans of Virginia, in a very singular way":
“That One Congenial Friend:” Hawthorne’s Search for a Careful Reader
The Eagle Feather, 2012
In the prefaces to his novels and short stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne explores the conflicts that surface when political leader utilized tyranny to force consensus in antebellum American state. His prefaces introduce these conflicts and act as guides on how to read what follows. Under threat of termination by his coworkers and representatives in government, he transforms his writing style so that its implicit message can only be understood by a select audience. Hawthorne, I will argue, is determined to enlighten his readers to the hypocrisies and civil violations that occur in spite of the protections the constitution guarantees. He also takes issue with the growing power of political factions in the decade leading up to the America Civil War by taking a classical republican stance for civic virtue over private interests. In his stories, Hawthorne heightens the significance of these issues through characters who meet tragic circumstances. Through the settings of his stories-often in the years of America's infancy-Hawthorne uses allegorical connections to comment on the dilemmas of his present. In this way he is, perhaps, advocating a revision of the sociopolitical state of antebellum New England and indirectly promoting an agenda that will be capable of bringing the faults of his country to light.
Letters Turned to Gold: Hawthorne, Authorship, and Slavery
Studies in American Fiction, 2001
In her "Cuba Journal," a series of letters written home about her daily life on a Cuban coffee plantation, where she traveled for a rest cure in 1 833, Sophia Peabody describes Cuba as a realm of romance imbued by moonlight. Recounting an evening when she joined King Salvador, one of the plantation's slaves and a former African king, in conversation about his "former kingdom & subjects," she writes: I think the splendor of that evening surpassed anything I have yet seen in Cuba. The air was soft as the down of a dove's breast and delicately perfumed with the jessamine fragrance of the coffee blossom & the moon was so dazzling that to look straight at it gave me a shooting pain through the head-like that caused by the sun's direct rays. ... It does indeed seem palpable & like an intelligent presence-Every object looked as if the heavens had snowed pearls & diamonds___ Even the ordinary share in the royal profusion & magnificence of beauty which showers down, & are for the time [en]folded and robed in loveliness as in a mantle. The "disembodied spirit" of the moonlight, coupled with the fragrance of coffee blossoms, transforms the actual into the imaginary-simple objects into things of wealth, magnificence, and beauty, slaves into kings. Cautioned by her sister Elizabeth Peabody in an earlier letter to "drive slavery from [her] thoughts," Sophia mystifies the slave economy: she masks the power dynamic between master and slave behind polite conversation and detaches the labor of slavery, as figured by coffee, from its political and economic meanings by transforming it into a picturesque backdrop. Sophia's moonlit evening depends upon, even as it obscures, the economy of slavery.1 The "magic moonshine" that produces Hawthorne's realm of romance in "The Custom-House" has much in common with Sophia's moonlit evening.2 It also "spiritualize[s]" (CE 1 :35) the everyday objects of domestic life, converting them into "things of intellect" (CE 1:35) and "snow-images" (CE 1:26). By translating the actual into the imaginary, Hawthorne's moonlight aestheticizes everyday life and transports it to the literary realm of romance. Like Sophia's description of Cuba, Hawthorne's formulation of romance converts a material economy into a symbolic one. Despite his efforts to obscure the relationship between these two economies, in order to establish his romance as separate from the commercial marketplace, Hawthorne recognizes their intimate relationship: he insists upon the "coal-fire" as an "essential influence in producing" the moonlight's effect (CE 1:36) and he repeatedly 50Teresa A. Goddu describes the scarlet letter as a "rag" (CE 1:31), thereby emphasizing its relation to the raw materials of the writer's trade in the 185Os-paper made of reconstituted cotton fibers (CE 1:25).3 The traces of "gold embroidery" in the letter' s "fine red cloth" figure Hawthorne' s art in both aesthetic and economic terms: the golden needlework is meant to earn him cultural as well as commercial capital, a literary reputation as well as a livelihood (CE 1:31). Similarly, Hawthorne seeks to mystify the economics of his authorship in order to claim cultural prestige in an increasingly commodified and professionalized literary marketplace. Through the fiction of his early obscurity and the persona of the withdrawn writer, Hawthorne attempts, as Meredith McGiIl argues, to situate his authorship as free of the marketplace. Yet, as McGiIl shows, this withdrawal from the market is itself a market strategy, the way he "renegotiates a relation to the reading public" and redeems his minor fiction "by the success of his later work."4 Hawthorne finds his place in the literary marketplace by standing apart from it. He manipulates the literary marketplace even as he veils his commercial affiliations to it. While a number of critics have begun to disentangle the fictions of Hawthorne's authorial self-construction from the economic realities of his authorship, I want to pay particular attention to how the slave economy operates in Hawthorne's understanding of-and place within-the literary marketplace.5 Although Hawthorne never wrote the novel about slavery in Cuba from Sophia' s journal that Mary Peabody proposed, he did fashion his authorial persona and his theory of romance in relation to a marketplace that he knew to be inextricably intertwined with the economy of slavery. Not only did Hawthorne imagine that he would "make a great many stories"6 from Sophia's "Cuba Journal," but he sustained his authorship by taking political jobs that placed him in commercial ports-Boston, Salem, Liverpool-historically linked to the slave trade and, when his own career was unprofitable, by editing literary works that take slavery and its commerce as their theme:
JOURNAL OF AWARENESS, 2023
Distracted by the contesting political debates between aristocratic republicanism of the Revolutionary era and democratic republicanism of the Antebellum; Nathaniel Hawthorne's narrative tone in his prologue, "The Custom-House" carries out the ideological assets of nineteenth-century American historicism in accord with which he laid ahistorical fictional elements failing to portray the entirety of early colonial New England in his 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter. In this respect, "The Custom-House" portrays Nathaniel Hawthorne's Romantic projections aimed at consoling the contemporaneous polarization on the futurity of the nation as much as his redemptive quest for his ancestral past in colonial Salem. Thus, as the dean of American Renaissance authors and a fervent Romantic, Nathaniel Hawthorne's concern for an absolute-oriented moral vision, his apologetic perspective of the past, and his affirmative tone for the futurity of American democracy are most out loud in his writing. This study aims to focus on Hawthorne's apologetic and futurist projections of nineteenth-century American historicism in his prologue, "The Custom-House" for his 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter, concerning his responses to the anxieties of Antebellum America.
"'This Small Man of Yesterday': A Neohistorical Perusal of Nathaniel Hawthorne"
With his literary work, and notably with The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne always endorsed a clear idea pertaining to the achievement of the New English national unity. A vivid Biblical imagery, or sometimes even the ingrained Puritan prejudices that were still held by most of the New Englanders of Hawthorne’s period, were used to accomplish this purpose. Hawthorne believed that only togetherness could save the Union in crucial political moments, and thus he was ready to forgive his compatriots many costly mistakes that were made during their common history. In what was often referred to as America’s “promised land, ” exactly this hereditary trait of Hawthorne’s generosity was paternally demonstrated in many cases. It also empowered Hawthorne to be the prime torchbearer of Joseph Conrad’s grandiose but slightly diabolical scheme of one’s “heart of darkness” existent in still not gingerly explored and densely populated New England of his times. To Hawthorne, a new “chosen people” has started to wage a bitter struggle for the assurance of its survival therein while permeating it with its all-pervading gloom.