CitizenSE Teaching Manifesto, Part II: Looking Forward to Teaching Obama's Speech in the Fall

Thanks to Jennifer at Mixed Race America for posting the video (and text) of Barack Obama's speech in its entirety.

Thanks to all the awesome history bloggers Ralph Luker linked to at Cliopatria, who convinced me to watch it in the middle of the night this week (and put off reading for my classes for another 40 minutes).

Thanks to Jennifer again for her follow-up questions, and to Annalee Newitz at io9 for her observations.

Thanks to Chris Clarke at Creek Running North for articulating some of the (to my mind, calculated, on which more in a second) blind spots of Obama's speech. And to N Pepperell at Rough Theory for his reflection on Obama's theorizing of affect and politics.

But thanks most of all to my chair and associate chair for giving me yet another chance to teach Introduction to African American Literature and Culture next semester. Because Obama's speech is going right in the middle of the course's "Nation" unit in the fall, not long after Election Day. (And thanks to Kenny Mostern, one of my favorite former academics, from whom I borrowed the country/city/nation/world structure of my course!)

Why am I going to teach Obama's speech? Because of its supple invocation of and subtle response to the classic debates over American and black nationalism that go back centuries in African-American political discourse. Because it'll help my students understand race and nationalism in more complex and interesting ways. Because it'll enable me to contrast Obama's rhetoric with Wright's jeremiad and draw my students into a consideration of the nationalistic uses of the jeremiad (as analyzed most famously by Perry Miller, Sacvan Bercovitch, and Emory Elliott on the Puritans and David Howard-Pitney in the African-American grain, but also more recently by Edward Blum, Ralph Luker, and Kim Pearson). Because it'll help my students understand the full force of Obama's invocation of Faulkner's line from Intruder in the Dust Requiem for a Nun (thanks to former student Charlie Wesley for the correction!) that "The past is not never dead. It's not even past" (and maybe even wonder why he added "and buried" to the first sentence, or why the punctuation linking the two thoughts vacillates between a period, semi-colon, and comma even when it's scholars doing the quoting--for more on this line and Obama, see Scott Horton). And see why that invocation was no accident, that for Obama to invoke the founders and slavery in the ways he did is to invoke Emerson, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Twain as much as Walker, Douglass, Du Bois, and King.

Among the things the speech itself and the responses to it have made me wonder about are the limits on political speech in this country--what traditions, conventions, and myths you have to invoke (and hopefully rework) and avoid (or avoid questioning) if you wish to be considered "presidential" today. Take Obama's starting with the Constitutional Convention--the literal founding of the U.S.--rather than, say, the Declaration or the founding of Jamestown or the first landing of Columbus in the Caribbean. I've already blogged a bit on the complexities of Hawthorne's relation to the founders in "The Custom-House," so forgive the self-quoting here (and the long parenthetical statement within the self-quotation):

it's not exactly right to put "The Custom-House" unproblematically in the tradition of Jeffersonian democracy (with its "tree of liberty nourished by blood of tyrants" strains), unless you see that tradition as itself problematized and strained. (After all, Jefferson blamed King George for blocking efforts by the colonists to end the slave trade yet also signalled his intent to defend American slavery by condemning the king's version of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation; Jefferson affirmed the "self-evident" truth that "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence yet called in Notes on the State of Virginia for scientific investigations to confirm his suspicions of the racial inequality of African Americans; Jefferson condemned slavery in part for its corrupting tendencies on masters yet continued to hold slaves and do more than hold Sally Hemings; Jefferson denounced "merciless Indian savages" who fought with England in the Declaration of Independence, praised American Indians in Notes on the State of Virginia, and saw them as an obstacle to the expansion of the American "empire of liberty" that he helped engineer with the Louisiana Purchase.)

Sure, Obama invoked some of this complexity and these contradictions in his speech, but his central axis for riffing on race was black and white. Although he began to problematize whiteness by reaching out to the white working-class descendants of immigrants, his references to other racially/ethnically marked groups always felt like an addendum to his core "America in black and white" focus. This seems to me to distort American history and American society, almost as much the "nation of immigrants" discourse it competes with, which, as Werner Sollors rightly pointed out, is itself a rearticulation of the "Puritan origins of the American self" thesis. "Manifest destiny" is not an add-on to these other dominant narratives of what makes the U.S. America, as I tried to make clear to my students in Japan last academic year, and as I've been trying to do with my American students, before and since. (I've blogged on some of this here and there [and there and there and there and there and there and there--and, damn, did I leave a lot of loose threads hanging on this blog toward the end of that Fulbright year!].)

The history of American Studies and American historiography bears me out. After proponents of one or another account of the origins of American exceptionalism (whether based on the Puritans, the frontier, or liberty--that is, the North[east], the [South]West, or the South) competed for much of the first half of the 20th C, attention to the blindspots in all three accounts--or, to use a metaphor I worked to death in Japan, an exploration of the shadowy areas that their jostling over the narrow-focus spotlight cast into darkness or only fitfully illuminated (namely, Indian removals, expansionist wars, and slavery)--continued for much of its second half. But rather than repeat their predecessors' competition, these scholars increasingly came to question American exceptionalism, to look for ways of broadening the spotlight's focus, to attempt to remap America and put it in a global frame.

What I'd like to see from the politician who eventually comes to replace George W. Bush as the most recognizable and representative American to the rest of the world is an overt acknowledgment of the full range of American complexities and contradictions. I'll give Obama credit for going as far as he did and for responding to the most personal and prevalent and perhaps pressing of them so brilliantly in his speech. And I'll trust that were he to become President he'd go further, that the exigencies of his speech delineated its scope in advance.

What I'd like my students to recognize and analyze, then, is the rhetoric, intertextuality, context, framing, and reception of Obama's speech. I'd like them to be able to assess its strengths and weaknesses, to respond to its call for a sustained and critical conversation on the meaning of race and ethnicity in American public and private life, and hence to participate in the (re)making of America.

[Update 1 4/3/08: Plus I get to teach Toni Morrison and Alice Walker on Obama!]

[Update 2 11/6/08: Not to mention Rob MacDougall!]

Why We Should Sit in on Each Other's Classes More Often

Not content with sitting in on 6 of my new colleagues' classes this semester as their mentor, I also subbed for my chair the first day her class discussed Amitava Kumar's Passport Photos a couple of weeks ago and decided to sit in on the last day today. Talk about productive, for all of us. From the students' descriptions of it that first day, Kumar's book reminded me of a few passages from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, which I mentioned to the chair, who then passed them along to her students today. In the course of the discussion, a student pointed us to Kumar's response to Arundhati Roy's "banner of writerly protest": "If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and anti-national, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic" (170-171).

A writer can do this. Declare that she is a nation unto herself! Even invite others. We're now open to immigration! The reason these bold declarations don't diminish my sense of alienation, and, in fact, only enhance it, is the quick realization that I'm not utterly mobile in history. There are miles of barbed wire. Of all sorts. And this becomes clear most of all when Roy rightly says: "However many garlands we heap on our scientists, however many medals we pin to their chests, the truth is that it's far easier to make a bomb than to educate four hundred million people." If I secede, if Roy secedes, we secede also from that difficulty. To put it differently, to secede is as easy as to make a bomb.

The real task, even for those who as diasporics think of seceding, is to contemplate that difficulty. Of how in our minds we allow ourselves to believe that it was ever possible to find a space of withdrawal. It is, also, inevitably, the problem of a collectivity, far beyond individual issues or even nations. Neither writers nor scientists can save the world by themselves. Or escape it entirely. That is the plain truth of the nuclear bomb. When it explodes, it finishes us wherever we reside in our mobile republic. (171)

Pretty useful stuff for starting to teach "The Custom-House" today. (And, for that matter, for plugging the WAAGNFNP.) Not to mention that the "Nationality" chapter from which this passage comes opens with a mini-reading of "Douloti the Bountiful," which I just taught last week in Postcolonial Hawthorne. Or that the "Date of Birth" chapter is particularly relevant for Hawthorne, who was, after all, born on the 4th of July. Or that the "Identifying Marks" chapter may prove crucial to my research on the picturesque, colonialism, and race. Or that the "Profession" chapter is perfect for the graduate course on professional development I'll be teaching next spring. All this from a guy who hasn't read Moby-Dick. Not bad.

We Take Requests Here at CitizenSE

A Japanese colleague of mine whom I've responded to here before recently asked me what I had on the sketch "The Intelligence Office." I emailed him back with some quick ideas and promised an update here. This is it (or maybe the first part if I can't finish it between classes today!).

As you can see here, the only time I've previously blogged on "The Intelligence Office" is to link it to Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen in an aborted larger argument aiming to show Hawthorne's intimate knowledge of the importance of international trade (including the slave trade) on the fortunes of Salem, colonial New England, and the northeastern United States. The narrator's comment, "Judging from its description, it was beautiful enough to vanish like a dream, yet substantial enough to endure for centuries," could apply to the idea of America as easily as it could to the estate of the "man of deplorable success." And indeed there are several sharp ripostes at American politics and imperialism sprinkled throughout the sketch.

But as you can see from the following excerpt from my email response to my colleague--

I think "The Intelligence Office" is a very interesting sketch. If you have time, I strongly recommend Kristie Hamilton's arguments on the importance of Hawthorne's sketches in general, in The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2004) or in her book America's Sketchbook (1998).

My own interest in the sketch is different from her emphasis on Hawthorne's anticipation of modernist (and even postmodernist) aesthetic and social issues. I'm interested in the 19th C and earlier resonances of his emphasis on "proper place" (which I use to investigate Hawthorne's ideas on race, class, and gender politics).

--what I am most interested in is the way "The Intelligence Office" provides evidence that Hawthorne in the early 1840s was engaging his culture's interests in the relations between the external and the internal, the material and the spiritual, the physical and the psychological, the real and the symbolic, between manners and morals, appearances and essences, in everything from transcendentalism and romanticism to phrenology and physiognomy to the American School of Ethnography. If you read the sketch alongside such earlier meditations on these subjects as "Fancy's Show Box," "Roger Malvin's Burial," and "Young Goodman Brown," you'll see it reworking that earlier interest in the relations between thoughts and actions. And if you read it alongside contemporary or later tales and sketches like "A Virtuoso's Collection," "The Procession of Life," "The Birth-mark," "Rappaccini's Daughter," "The Christmas Banquet," "Earth's Holocaust," and "The Custom House"--or novels like The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun--you'll see Hawthorne's abiding interest in classification schemes of all kinds.

The scholarly work I'd most recommend for understanding the context for Hawthorne's engagement of these issues is Samuel Otter's brilliant study Melville's Anatomies--I can't think of a better evocation of the times or investigation of an author's engagement with them than any other recent work except Eduardo Cadava's Emerson and the Climates of History, and Otter more systematically analyzes the various attempts to know (human) nature in the antebellum period than Cadava.

As for myself, I find Hawthorne's suggestion at the beginning of the story and confirmation at the end that the agent of the sketch's "Central Intelligence Office" to be the "Recording Spirit" a fascinating anticipation of Destiny in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series of comics and graphic novels. Certainly Hawthorne is engaging religious themes that energized the Puritans--the difficulty of reconciling God's omniscience, omnipotence, and benevolence--when he has the agent reveal

"My agency in worldly action--my connection with the press, tumult, and intermingling, and development of human affairs--is merely delusive. The desire of man's heart does for him whatever I seem to do. I am no minister of action, but the Recording Spirit!"

Thus the opening simile--"He looked like the spirit of a record--the soul of his own great volume--made visible in mortal shape"--and the intermediate elaboration of the book of life metaphor within it--

Human character in its individual developments--human nature in the mass--may best be studied in its wishes; and this was the record of them all.... It would be an instructive employment for a student of mankind, perusing this volume carefully, and comparing its record with men's perfected designs, as expressed in their deeds and daily life, to ascertain how far the one accorded with the other. Undoubtedly, in most cases, the correspondence would be found remote. The holy and generous wish, that rises like incense from a pure heart toward heaven, often lavishes its sweet perfume on the blast of evil times. The foul, selfish, murderous wish, that steams forth from a corrupted heart, often passes into the spiritual atmosphere, without being concreted into an earthly deed. Yet this volume is probably truer, as a representation of the human heart, than is the living drama of action, as it evolves around us. There is more of good and more of evil in it; more redeeming points of the bad, and more errors of the virtuous; higher up-soarings, and baser degradation of the soul; in short, a more perplexing amalgamation of vice and virtue, than we witness in the outward world. Decency, and external conscience, often produce a far fairer outside, than is warranted by the stains within. And be it owned, on the other hand, that a man seldom repeats to his nearest friend, any more than he realizes in act, the purest wishes, which, at some blessed time or other, have arisen from the depths of his nature, and witnessed for him in this volume. Yet there is enough, on every leaf, to make the good man shudder for his own wild and idle wishes, as well as for the sinner, whose whole life is the incarnation of a wicked desire.

--allows the story to be read as a gloss on abstract, even universal problems of theology and ethics. But I think even this version of the sketch is an interesting anticipation of Gaiman's Endless.

Now, the classic take on the sketch is Melville's claim in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" that the seeker after Truth is Hawthorne's own self-portrait, although I wonder whether the person the narrator jokes is "invariably out of place" and who cries in anguish--

"I want my place!--my own place!--my true place in the world!--my proper sphere!--my thing to do, which nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought, all my lifetime! Whether it be a footman's duty, or a king's, is of little consequence, so it be naturally mine."

--might be an ironically distanced sketch of a younger self. Of course, it's also possible to see in the figure of the Recording Spirit himself Hawthorne's own wishes for his art, or to argue that Hawthorne dispersed his own wishes and desires throughout a range of characters, so I'm not sure how productive this line of argument ends up being. The seeker after Truth's comment to the Recording Spirit could well be Hawthorne's commentary on the sketch itself:

"And what are you?" said he. "It will not satisfy me to point to this fantastic show of an Intelligence Office, and this mockery of business. Tell me what is beneath it, and what your real agency in life, and your influence upon mankind?"

So the sketch could just as easily be linked with Hawthorne's exploration of various writer analogues--whether artist or scientist--in his fictions of the 1840s and 1850s, and thus be autobiographical at a remove, in the sense of exploring the functions and powers of literary texts and the roles of authors in the antebellum U.S.

In the end, though, I would emphasize that Hawthorne's idea of the Intelligence Office is connected to the Herald's Office that runs throughout his writings in this same period. I've blogged on heraldry in Hawthorne's and others' fiction a little bit here already, so I won't say too much more right now. But it would be both interesting and informative to explore the ways the Intelligence Office discloses Hawthorne's interests in subjectivity (a la Pfister, Gilmore, Goddu, and others who look at the emergence of the middle class and domestic/affective life in this period) and the Herald's Office in genealogy (a la Bentley, Yellin, Carton, and others who look at the emergence of whiteness and classification schemes/racial sciences in this period).

"I Will Choose Free Will"

As it's going to be awhile before I "have to" start not-quite-live-blogging the final round of the Masters at Mostly Harmless, as my working Monday will be quite busy tying up loose ends before the start of my spring semester at Kyushu U, Seinan Gakuin U, and Fukuoka U (you know, like finally posting my course syllabi and copying my handouts for Tuesday's and Wednesday's classes), as I'm rather surprisingly on a bit of a Hawthorne roll tonight, and as Hug the Shoggoth is sending me down memory lane, I'll start today's post with a question and a story.

Gall writes, in response to a comment of mine,

“The Custom House” seems like a playful and suave (and quite humorous, at times) vindication of his own artistic freedom, re-publishing it into the face of the audience even though, as he finds in these first few paragraphs, there may be complaints. That, this self-determination, made me wonder about that “evil star”-thing, in the first place--does he, the artist, have the means to escape/disable that destiny which keeps the other custom officers in that mouldy custom shack?

He's referring to this passage from "The Custom-House," by the way:

In the first place, my coadjutors were not invariably old; there were men among them in their strength and prime, of marked ability and energy, and altogether superior to the sluggish and dependent mode of life on which their evil stars had cast them.

So I didn't quite answer his question in the comment that is still awaiting moderation at the moment, and I'm not going to yet, because I have that story to tell. It's about my Mostly Harmless co-author whose book I recommended here (in comments). Back in the early '90s, he had discovered a copy of Melville's marginalia of Milton's Paradise Lost and was working on what I thought was a fantastic reading of Moby-Dick and other works in light of it, so of course we were talking about fate and free will a lot. He once shared lyrics of a response to a well-known Rush song (the key line of which supplies the title of this post) he wrote in his undergraduate days. Now, if I was a good storyteller, I'd share those lyrics with you, but you see I have this terrible memory (and I'm not talking about Sethe's). So you'll have to wait and see if "Sloucho" will visit the comments to this post to get to the climax of this little anecdote. Sorry.

In any case, my point in not-quite-telling the story is to explain my title, the irony (probably unintended on Rush's part, or at least I hope so because then it would be the same kind of irony that the only thing ironic about Alanis Morisette's "Ironic" is its title) of which I hope is clear by now. Which now allows me to get back to some kind of answer.

This is by way of Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize speech, "The Bird in Our Hand: Is It Living or Dead?" (1993), and her essay "Home" from The House That Race Built (1997)--two of her best pieces of writing, IMHO, and worth a read or reread right now. In these two meditations on language and stories (and everything they limn), Morrison suggests that the feelings of freedom a writer experiences while writing may be illusions masking a greater dependency--on the one hand, to oppressive conventions and structures, and on the other, to the reader's response. She counsels writers and critics to break with the former and embrace the latter. I think it's good advice, but I don't think Hawthorne took the first half of it. I think the declaration of independence from Salem that is "The Custom-House" is prey to all the problems with the U.S. Declaration of Independence. I think the pledge of allegiance to the republic of letters that is "The Custom-House" reproduces some of the same problems as the colonization of the Americas and the founding of the United States. So as much as he's trying to write himself into a different story-line in "The Custom-House" than the people he satirizes in it, I think he is as trapped by the national narrative as they are. In this, I differ from Lauren Berlant and others who try to find something hopeful in Hawthorne's "citizen of somewhere else".... And I'm leaning toward that being a choice of his rather than a destiny.

I'm purposely leaving all those "I think"s in the previous paragraph--something I always tell undergraduates to strike (either the "I think" or the entire sentence)--to mark my dissatisfaction with these summary statements. But I'm too tired to think straight now and too eager to see what's happening in the Masters to continue, so look for a late-day update to this start to a post--or later, if I'm inefficient at work today.

Jee Yoon Lee on the Oriental Hester

Gotta love the synchronicity--just about the time I was blogging on Salem and "the Orient" here at CitizenSE, Jee Yoon Lee of the University of Michigan published "'The Rude Contact of Some Actual Circumstance': Hawthorne and Salem's East India Marine Museum" in ELH 73 (2006) 949-973. As they say in these here parts of blogoramaville, read that gosh darn thing in its entirety. But if you want my summary and reactions, read on.

Picking up where Charles Goodspeed left off in 1945 and Luther Luedtke did in 1989, Lee argues that "Hawthorne's literary imagination is powerfully grounded in the material objects from the Orient," that "the letter A becomes the icon, the index, and the symbol of the material culture displayed in Salem's East India Maritime Museum," that the narrator of the novel "accentuates the story of the Puritan Hester into a figure, a symbol Orientalized by contact with the material circumstances of Salem's East India trade," and concludes:

If Hester's letter A figures her as a woman, composed in part by words referring to her Oriental characteristics, then the things that grant her or the A she wears "a positive, a relative, and a composite meaning" are those things that can be found in the visual narratives of Salem's East India Marine Museum. In The Scarlet Letter, a distinct communal culture takes shape as Hawthorne transfigures the material culture of the Orient into a letter in the shape of a Salem Oriental Hester Prynne.

Along the way, Lee brings together scholarship on material culture, visual culture, and icons, images, and symbols; historicizes Salem's India trade, its museum commemorating the trade for 19th C visitors, and needlework in 19th as well as 17th C New England; provides good readings of three scenes from The Scarlet Letter--"Hester at her needle, at the Governor's Hall, and upon her death"--that "illustrate the commingling of the material culture of the East India Marine Museum and the writing materials of the Orient"; and cites the obligatory big names in Hawthorne scholarship (Bell, Bercovitch, Berlant, Colacurcio, Luedtke, Ryskamp, and Tompkins) along with a couple of surprises (Crain, Goodyear). I learned a lot from every section of the essay and several times kicked myself for not noticing things Lee points out on my own. The best moment in the essay for me is when "Hester catches a glimpse of herself in the Governor's armor, and sees herself as if she were a spoil from a foreign war"; here, Lee emphasizes the museum-like qualities of Bellingham's hall, juxtaposes them with the display of "the dried head of a Fijian displayed in the East India Marine Museum," and concludes that "Hester emerges as an object bejeweled by her embroidery, defined by her expression of an Oriental nature, a fictive equivalent of the exotic material things displayed at the East India Marine Museum."

Of course, any essay necessarily has roads not taken, but it was disappointing to me that even here, in the strongest and most original moment in the essay, Lee doesn't link violence against Fijians with the literal historical referent in the armor reflection scene--the Pequod War--or address the way in which the Governor's bond-servant--"a free-born Englishman, but now a seven years' slave"--who ushers Hester into the mansion, impressed by her letter and her airs, frames the entire scene with a slavery/indentured servitude reference. Lee's readings could have been enriched by pursuing these and other links between the multiple "others" of the Puritans in The Scarlet Letter. But even within the parameters of her essay's chosen focus, some troubling problems emerge.

The biggest problem is the essay's repeatedly raising "and then...?" and "so what?" questions without adequately pursuing answers to them--or at least answers Hawthorne specialists would find particularly original. "The presence of the Orient in [Hawthorne's] daily life" matters because it "gives credence to the idea of an Oriental Hester"--which is important because...? Hawthorne "re-imagine[s] Hester within the context of the Oriental influences of his times"--to what ends? with what effects? As I noted here around the same time this essay came out, Hawthorne revealingly shifts from undeveloped reveries of the height of Salem's Oriental trade, "when India was a new region, and only Salem knew the way thither," to the (invented) discovery of the scarlet letter, which sparks his imagination and inspires his novel (or so he claims)--yet Lee never mentions this moment. Nor did Lee or ELH's readers or editors catch an error, when she attributes a line from "The Custom-House" in which the narrator discusses his imagined characters' resistance--figured revealingly as "the tribe of unrealities"--as a description of the scarlet letter itself. In avoiding engagement with Berlant's actual arguments about Hester's needlework, or (ahem) my arguments about Mukherjee's revisions of The Scarlet Letter in The Holder of the World (which she could have built on as well as criticized on solid grounds), Lee reveals the thinness of her engagement with Hawthorne scholarship relevant to her main argument and misses an opportunity to develop its implications and stakes. What is Hawthorne's relation with his protagonist and his narrator? To what ends does he Orientalize Hester? How do Lee's findings impact debates over Hawthorne's depictions of racism, sexism, and colonialism in his fiction?

From a quick google search, this essay looks to be one of Lee's first published pieces from her dissertation. From the little that I've seen of her other work on race and Hawthorne, I think Lee is well on her way to a promising Hawthorne section of an impressive book manuscript. If she can find a way to make her work on The House of the Seven Gables reflect back on her revisions of this chapter-to-be on The Scarlet Letter, she'll be in a great position to follow through on the achievements of and the potential revealed in this essay.

More on McCall and CitizenSE

From Dan McCall's Citizens of Somewhere Else, which I began writing on last week:

I don't really care about what Hawthorne said in his campaign biography of Franklin Pierce; his political convictions are not what I read him for. To me, the essential Hawthorne, the valuable Hawthorne, is his anguished cry to Longfellow, "For the last ten years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living." What interests me is his painful complaint to Horatio Bridge, "I detest this town so much that I hate to go into the streets or to have people see me." What a thing to say! And it is a shock to read his growl, during those "lonely chamber" years, "We do not even live at our house!" If Hawthorne's is a "national voice," it is the voice of introspection, claustrophobia, unbearable loneliness.

You might expect the author of The Race for Hawthorne to come out with a fiery condemnation of McCall's declaration of interests--"this minimizes the significance of Hawthorne's racism"; "this is an unabashed attempt to change the subject"; "this is a perfect example of the 'race-aversive' school of Hawthorne criticism I wrote the dissertation to refute." But wait. Consider where McCall's take takes us:

In "The Custom-House" and the dark tale that follows it, Hawthorne's manner and subject proceed from his sense of how the American community fails and frustrates the impulses of creative people by forcing them back too much upon themselves. We can, then, immediately feel the isolation of Hester Prynne: we have lived through the progressive stages of it in her author's life. In "The Custom-House" Hawthorne authenticates the physical, historical reality of Hester's story just as he authenticates the physical, historical reality when he discovers the scarlet A....

The personal record and the historical romance together show that Hawthorne is too stern to accept the values of his fellow citizens, too stern, even, to dismiss them easily. Although he had grave reservations about making passage to "the realm of quiet," he was impelled to stand, in 1850, absolutely there.

This may seem at first like the usual "individual vs. society"/"alienation of the artist" stuff. But wait.

He felt that art should "spiritualize reality."

....Hawthorne's aim as an artist is based, first of all, on an ideal of refinement, refinement that seeks a purity in which physical and material things literally fade out of the picture. Yet Hawthorne is oddly reluctant to stand by that ideal and continually goes back on it in irony, saying (to quote the most famous example) that if you open a book of his in strong sunlight it will appear to be only blank pages....

For Hawthorne, art was associated with insidious force....

Hawthorne was working in this realm [Frye's definition of romance from The Anatomy of Criticism] of "subjective intensity" imperfectly contained and defined by the "suggestion of allegory" on its fringes, a world that sparked with something untamable. It was a world that violated his theory of art as prim refinement.

This may seem like another tired variation on the perennial "Hawthorne problem." But wait.

He wrote to Sophia that we are shadows until the heart is touched: "that touch creates us--then we begin to be." But he could not tolerate much more than that one touch. There is an intimate connection between his aesthetic ideal of how art should "spiritualize" life and his responses to women.

Getting closer! In fact, McCall gives many examples of Hawthorne's female characters, from Ellen of Fanshawe and Priscilla of The Blithedale Romance, contrasting them with the reactions of a "reserved and literary man responding to a richly luxuriant woman, as in Coverdale to Zenobia, Dimmesdale to Hester, Giovanni to Rappaccini's Daughter." This is not just the standard light lady/dark lady thing. Nor is it simply the psychoanalyzing the author thing, as a claim like this might make you think: "He was divided between profound responses to full-bodied sexuality and an intense need to repress those responses, a writer who felt compelled to work, as Frye's definition of The Romance suggests, in a medium where strange and unnatural forces were his subject, but was equally compelled in his prefatory remarks to deny his legitimate province." No, consider McCall's key example of Hawthorne's ambivalent relation to his art:

He writes in his notebooks that his "eyes were most drawn to a young lady who sat nearly opposite me, across the table." He then devotes a full page to her beauty: "Her hair...was a wonderful deep, raven black, black as night, black as death; not raven black, for that has a shiny gloss, and hers had not; but it was hair never to be painted, nor described--wonderful hair...all her features were so fine that sculpture seemed a despicable art beside her." And while she makes him fly for comparisons to Rachel and Judith and Bathsheba and Eve, he concludes, "I never should have thought of touching her, nor desired to touch her; for, whether owing to distinctness of race, my sense that she was a Jewess, or whatever else, I felt a sort of repugnance, simultaneously with my perception that she was an admirable creature."

The retreat to "cloud land" becomes clearer.

Now we can see why I don't have to condemn McCall. His own argument leads directly back to the relevance of race to Hawthorne's emotions, aesthetics, intellect, imagination, and craft. The young woman Hawthorne reacts to is not simply "richly luxuriant" or representative of "full-bodied sexuality" or symbolic of the kind of art Hawthorne was attracted to yet repelled by; McCall's own euphemisms and abstractions get the better of him when reading this notebook entry. Was it the woman's "distinctness of race" itself that caused Hawthorne's deeply ambivalent reaction? Was it instead his "sense that she was a Jewess"? Is race real or socially constructed? Why do his feelings and his perceptions clash? Why do aesthetics and affect not correspond? Race itself becomes one of the "strange and unnatural forces" at work in this passage, for it is not the woman herself but Hawthorne's reaction to her that is "strange and unnatural."

And that's why a passage like this is so disappointing:

when he attempts to speak to a general public about matters of social concern, his voice seems drastically unsure. He hated the institution of slavery, and early in his life went on record against it. But in his Life of Franklin Pierce, he saw slavery as "one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivances, but which, in its own good time, by some means impossible to be anticipated...it causes to vanish like a dream."

For a critic as capable of providing new insights into such often-interpreted writers as Hawthorne, James, Dickinson, Emerson, and Lowell--and particularly on the relations between their texts and projects--as McCall is in Citizens of Somewhere Else, his hesitancy over whether to characterize Hawthorne as "drastically unsure" (in this early passage) or possessed of regrettable but jettisonable "political convictions" (in the later passage that I opened this post with) when it comes to matters of race is revealing. How could he not have tried to put Hawthorne's deployment of Providence here alongside both abolitionists' (from David Walker to Frances E.W. Harper) and Emerson's (in "Fate," for instance, which both Eduardo Cadava and Kris Fresonke have brilliantly read in the years since McCall's book came out)? How could he not have linked the image of slavery "vanish[ing] like a dream" to the repeated readings in his book of dream imagery and aesthetics and the urge to refinement in Hawthorne's received conception of art? How could he not have been aware of--or refused to acknowledge--the rich body of criticism from the 1990s that explored the relation between Hawthorne's The Marble Faun and "Chiefly About War Matters," which both racialize "faun" imagery? How could he not have linked Hawthorne's loss of his "great gift" as a writer at "making representative selections" in the last years of his life with the history that he was living through at the time, which includes the Civil War?

The point I'm leading up to here is that racial politics entail more than an individual author's "political convictions" or uncertainties. And that reading them should be done with as much care as we read other aspects of an author's fiction. Granting McCall's insights into Hawthorne's relations with his art and his audience leads us straight back to Hawthorne's feelings about citizenship and slavery. To declare oneself a "citizen of somewhere else" in 1850 means something different in the midst of the Civil War--and Hawthorne's letters from that period deserve to be read in relation to his failed and unfinished romances, in relation to The Marble Faun and its preface, and in relation to "Chiefly About War Matters." McCall's own book demonstrates that to stop at claiming that what makes Hawthorne interesting is his own internal civil war is to miss a major opportunity to gain insight into the actual Civil War.

What's most valuable about McCall's Citizens of Somewhere Else is its sensitive exploration of Hawthorne's insights into and unconscious revelations of how it feels to be a citizen of somewhere else. In previous "Why CitizenSE?" posts, I have argued that Hawthorne's "The Custom-House" amounts to a Declaration of Independence from Salem and a pledge of allegiance to what I have called "the republic of letters"; McCall's book rightly reveals this "somewhere else" to be a divided and highly charged realm. McCall's smart study of Hawthorne and James points the way toward tracking the relations between it and antebellum American racial politics, without actually doing so. As he makes clear throughout the book, this is not what he is interested in or cares about. That is certainly his right. But what I object to is his pose when promoting his book that those who are interested in and do care about such a project can't possibly be as good readers as he is because their motives are impure. McCall's specific critiques of particular readings of Hawthorne and James are often perceptive and sometimes devastating. But his overall polemic is unconvincing. To show why in more depth, next week I'll start comparing McCall's take on "citizen of somewhere else" with Lauren Berlant's in The Anatomy of National Fantasy.

[Update: And by "next week," I mean, "sometime in March."]

[Update: Perhaps in April, then?]

On Dan McCall and CitizenSE

I found Dan McCall's Citizens of Somewhere Else in the Seinan Gakuin library earlier this month, and I've had a chance to read it and begin to digest it. If you want a taste of the book and don't have access to a university library or online account, you can go to Cornell's 1999 profile of McCall or check out the views Google Books or amazon.com offer you of it. What I have time to do today is respond to McCall's characterization of his project from the Cornell link:

Citizens of Somewhere Else draws on McCall's own expertise and that of major 20th century critics such as F.W. Dupee and F.O. Matthiessen--and it draws a pointed bead on more recent criticism from the post-modern, post-Freudian schools. McCall has little patience for psycho-babble from critics with a political ax to grind.

"Their political agenda controls everything," he said. "Now if you believe the literary critics, up means down, yes means no, you turn the text inside out. And these aren't just weird little people in obscure journals, they're anthologized all over the place."

McCall's own "agenda" is to stay focused on the author's intent, not what baggage critics bring to the text. This in part accounts for the deliberately conversational tone of the book.

"I want to reach anybody who loves literature. Maybe my tone is too chatty. My voice on the page is my voice in the classroom, that's the way I teach; you don't have to learn some new abstruse vocabulary. So I guess [the way I wrote the book] is a political gesture. It's meant to challenge...the modish modern critics."

Now, there's a chance McCall was misquoted. After all, the author of the profile, Franklin Crawford, misquotes his reading from "The Custom-House"--"As an accomplished orator, McCall still has plenty of flint in his hammer and he recites, with an undulating cadence, the melancholy passage from Hawthorne's preface : '"I am a citizen of somewhere else, I dwell in the realm of quiet..."'"--so there's a chance he got the above quotation wrong, too (it's not a good sign that he needed to insert both a bracketed clarifying paraphrase and an ellipsis to indicate he skipped some of McCall's words). But assuming Crawford at least got the gist of it right, I want to respond to it here today.

As I am trying to reach multiple audiences with this blog, within and outside the academy, I'm also going for a "deliberately conversational," even "chatty" tone, drawing on my years of teaching of Hawthorne and other authors, and prioritizing close readings of individual passages and intertextual relations between authors and texts here. So I have a lot in common with McCall's approach in his book. But I don't see the need to diss "modish modern critics" "with a political ax to grind" while doing my thing. Like Hawthorne in "The Custom-House," McCall here identifies the political with the guillotine in order to differentiate his project from it. Unlike Hawthorne in the preface to the second edition of The Scarlet Letter, McCall admits this move has a politics to it, calling the style of Citizens of Somewhere Else "a political gesture." This blog--and my book project--definitely has a politics, as well, but I'm going to avoid the kinds of cross-generational jostling you can see in McCall's rhetoric (not to mention the fallout from Alan Wolfe's 2003 "Anti-American Studies" TNR essay, which even Leo Marx joined in on). There's good and bad in any critic's work, much less any generation's, and having a chance to examine the ways in which Hawthorne's critics have read race in his works from the 1850s on hopefully gives me some perspective.

Now, if you go back and read my earlier posts on "The Custom-House," you'll see that I agree with McCall to a perhaps surprising extent when he argues that Hawthorne and James "defined themselves as living to some extent in the land of writing itself, the foster home of the imagination" (175) and that both made "a heroic effort to locate some America, some New-Found-Land whose spokesmen they so wanted to be" (185). Next Monday I'll explore in more detail McCall's reading of Hawthorne's "citizen of somewhere else" passage and its connection with other significant moments in his book. Then I'll turn to Lauren Berlant's The Anatomy of National Fantasy and suggest that there are more correspondences between their readings of "citizen of somewhere else" than Crawford's profile of McCall might lead you to believe.

Racial Science, Evolution, and "Fitness" Bleg

One reason to blog is to make the world--or that portion of it which chooses to read your blog and respond to your request--your research assistant. It's an inefficient and unreliable method, but you get what you pay for. So here's my first official bleg (I'm counting as unofficial its predecessors).

I'm looking for input from people who know something about the evolution of evolutionary discourse. Obviously Darwin published The Origin of Species too late to have an influence on any but Hawthorne's last works. Yet Hawthorne used the term "fitted" or "fitness" throughout his career. So, beyond what the OED may tell us, I'm interested in sources and perspectives on the genealogy of this concept and its relation to the racial science that emerged in the early 19th C, almost as if Jefferson's Notes of the State of Virginia summoned it into existence.

What prompted this bleg is the recognition (I'm sure an old and forgotten one recalled as if it were new, but it sure feels new to me right now), that "The Custom-House" is saturated with antebellum discourses of race, in its invocations of nativity, traits of nature, descent, inheritance, family trees, roots, transplantation, heraldry, and destiny. And that Hawthorne seems to be transposing his own time period's conceptions with 17th-C American Puritans', as he spends some time in The Scarlet Letter on characters' and the narrator's speculations on Pearl's nature, the possibility of prenatal influences on her character, the influences of heredity and environment, and the question of her being a "monstrous birth," a demonic offspring, or an elf-human hybrid. If you've read Evan Carton on The House of the Seven Gables The Marble Faun, you'll have noted that these concerns continue into Hawthorne's next novel, published the next year in 1851 last published novel.

But the specific passages that prompted my attention this time are of a much more trivial nature. Three times in "The Custom-House," Hawthorne uses the discourse of "fitness" or "adaptation," and each time it sums up his character sketch of the three individuals he focuses on in the essay:

...of all men I have ever known, ths individual was fittest to be a Custom-House officer.

If, in our country, valor were rewarded by heraldic honor, this phrase-which it seems so easy to speak,--but which only he, with such a task of danger and glory before him, has ever spoken,--would be the best and fittest of all mottoes for the General's shield of arms.

Here, in a word,--and it is a rare instance in my life,--I had met with a person thoroughly adapted to the situation which he held.

My interest in these passages stems from my interest in two rather obscure sketches, "Old News" from the 1830s and "The Intelligence Office" from the 1840s. "Old News" makes the link to race and slavery most explicit, so I'll end with a passage from the first part of it, where the narrator is perusing and reflecting upon newspapers from the 1720s:

But the slaves, we suspect, were the merriest part of the population--since it was their gift to be merry in the worst of circumstances; and they endured, comparatively, few hardships, under the domestic sway of our fathers. There seems to have been a great trade in these human commodities. No advertisements are more frequent than those of 'a negro fellow, fit for almost any household work;' 'a negro woman, honest, healthy, and capable;' 'a young negro wench, of many desirable qualities;' 'a negro man, very fit for a taylor.' We know not in what this natural fitness for a taylor consisted, unless it were some peculiarity of conformation that enabled him to sit cross-legged.

I've devoted an entire chapter in my dissertation to "Old News" (which Hawthorne collected for the first time in The Snow-Image in 1851 with small but highly significant revisions) and (once I finish the conference paper that is sadly behind schedule) am looking forward to returning to revising it for my manuscript, so I obviously believe there's a lot to say about this sketch. Suffice to say for now that this sketch made its way into print first within a year of the founding of the first Salem abolitionist society (and second in the nation) and later within a year of the controversy over the Fugitive Slave Act.

But what I'm interested in right now is the relation between the moral, social, and biological aspects of "fit(ted)ness" you can spot in all the quoted passages in this post. And what you make of the joke that closes this opening part of a much longer passage on slavery in early 18th-C New England (and implicitly elsewhere). It's part of a larger issue of what you (and I) make of the narrator's intentions in this sketch--and Hawthorne's perspective on them. But for that, more later!

What Would Hawthorne Say About Blogging?

From the opening of "The Custom-House":

It is a little remarkable, that--though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends--an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me. The first time was three or four years since, when I favored the reader--inexcusably, and for no earthly reason, that either the indulgent reader or the intrusive author could imagine--with a description of my way of life in the deep quietude of the Old Manse. And now--because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough to find a listener or two on the former occasion--I again seize the public by the button, and talk of my three years' experience in a Custom-House. The example of the famous "P.P., Clerk of this Parish," was never more faithfully followed. The truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than most of his schoolmates and lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But--as thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience--it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind the veil. To this extent, methinks, an author may be autobiographical, without violating either the reader's rights or his own.

So what do you think? How would Hawthorne have reacted to the predominance of personal blogs in blogoramaville circa 2006? What about the controversies over pseudonymous bloggers? And over outing them? Over sprezzatura-like sock puppetry?

You could make an argument Hawthorne was doing the equivalent of blogging in his time when he published the range of his tales and sketches in the relatively established and newer American magazines and gift books of the 1830s and 1840s, that his editing of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge in the 1830s was the equivalent of our blog portaling or link-heavy blogging, that his overtly political writing and editing (such as his editing of his friend Horatio Bridge's Journals of an African Cruiser, his infamous "Custom-House" sketch, his presidential campaign biography for his friend Franklin Pierce, his essay "Chiefly About War Matters," as well as his political correspondence, both official from Boston, Salem, and Liverpool, and personal with Democratic Party friends and allies) was the political blogging of his day, and that his experiments with narratorial perspective in his short stories and with authorial personae in his prefaces to his books prefigure various pseudonymous bloggers' experiments with voice and style today. And you'd probably have a pretty good argument.

When I think of a sketch like "Old News," in which he praises old newspapers for their ability to convey a vivid sense of the past (I'll spare you the quotation for now, only b/c I left my Tales and Sketches Library of America edition in Fukuoka, not out of any abandonment of the value of heavy quotation on my part!), and when you consider newspapers were the new media of his time, I think we'd end up agreeing that despite Hawthorne's critiques of reformers, his skepticism toward Enlightenment notions of progress, and his portraits of new technologies doing more harm than good (in "Fire-Worship" and "The Celestial Rail-road" as much as in the better-known "Rappaccini's Daughter" and "The Birth-mark"), he wouldn't be against blogging simply b/c of its newness, its politicization, or its reliance on technology.

So those of you who blog, whom do you imagine as your audience? What do you hope to accomplish by blogging? What's at stake in blogging for you? What is your sense of your rights as an author, and of your readers' rights? How autobiographical do you get in your blogging, and why? How much do you experiment with voice and style? Are you more confessional or more veiled? What does the opening of "The Custom-House" make you think and ask?

[Update: Turns out John Updike would probably disagree with my take on Hawthorne (h/t: Amardeep Singh).]

Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future in "The Custom-House"

Phew, Blogger wasn't exactly in the Christmas spirit for awhile there, was it? I was shut out for the entire weekend. Just kidding, I only tried today. But I was shut out for hours.

Anyway, in honor of Dickens, I'm posting a short list of ghosts in "The Custom-House," in the order in which they appear, while the musume futari are sleeping.

1. The "figure of that first ancestor," who was "present to my boyish imagination" and "still haunts me."

2. The "ghosts of bygone meals," which appear to the Inspector of the Custom-House, "not in anger or retribution, but as if grateful for his former appreciation, and seeking to reduplicate an endless series of enjoyment, at once shadowy and sensual."

3. "The past," which "was not dead": that is, "the thoughts, that had seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so quietly, revived again," which is to say the urge to write creative fiction.

4. Surveyor Pue's ghost:

It impressed me as if the ancient Surveyor, in his garb of a hundred years gone by, and wearing his immortal wig,--which was buried with him, but did not perish in the grave,--had met me in the deserted chamber of the Custom-House.... With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to me the scarlet symbol, and the little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own ghostly voice, he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him,--who might reasonably regard himself as my official ancestor,--to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public. "Do this," said the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically nodding the head that looked so imposing within its memorable wig, "do this, and the profit shall be all your own! You will shortly need it; for it is not in your days as it was in mine, when a man's office was a life-lease, and oftentimes an heirloom. But, I charge you, in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give to your predecessor's memory the credit which will rightfully be its due!" And I said to the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue,--"I will!"

5. The "characters of the narrative," who "would not be warmed and rendered malleable, by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance."

6. A "form, beloved, but gone hence," that is "now sitting quietly in a streak of magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside."

7. A "suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away," something which is "any thing but agreeable to be haunted" by.

8. Hawthorne's "figurative self," that of a "politically dead man," whose "own head was the first to fall" upon the Whig electoral victory, and who was kept "careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like Irving's Headless Horseman, ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried."

9. The narrator of "The Custom-House," "a gentleman who writes from beyond the grave," and whose essay and romance "may be considered as the POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR."

Did I miss any?

[Update (12/28/06): D'oh! First sentence: "It is a little remarkable, that--though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends--an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me." Let's call it number 0.]

Oh, and for your holiday gift, o ghostly reader(s), k-punk has been doing some serious ghost blogging the past few weeks, so go check out the holiday hauntology!

Not Half Bad Intertextual Thursday Kick-Off Post

As promised, I'm moving into Hawthorne-Morrison blogging today and hopefully Saturday, as well, although we may not be settled into Chiba-de tsuma-no ryoushin-no uchi-wa (yup, just finished my final exam in Intro to Japanese today) well enough for me to blog that day, so don't hold your breath, O hypothetical reader (it would be too optimistic to make that plural).

Let me start off by observing that it's totally unoriginal to link Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter to Morrison's Beloved. (In my manuscript, which I'll discuss Saturday [with luck], I focus on "specter evidence" in "Young Goodman Brown" and Beloved, which may actually still be original almost ten years after I first came up with the idea [can I really be that lucky?], as part of a larger argument that puts The House of the Seven Gables and Song of Solomon alongside each other [presence of the past] and The Blithedale Romance and Paradise together [failed utopias] in order to read some pregnant silences in Morrison's "Unspeakable Things Unspoken" and Playing in the Dark and make some points about race and American literature.) But since I'm not going for originality on this blog so much as stream of consciousness "free write"-style quick-hit readings--on the theory that nothing focuses the mind like knowing you have to finish what you're writing in no more than, say, 30 minutes from now--let me boldly restate the obvious on my way to hopefully less-than-obvious points.

Obvious Point I: How can anyone today read the following from "The Custom-House" and not think of Beloved?

Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly,--making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility,--is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the book-case; the picture on the wall; all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child's shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse;--whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of strangeness or remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here, without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form, beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.

While that last sentence especially is resonating in your head, let me drop a few quotes from The Scarlet Letter to link it to one key image cluster in Hawthorne's representations of Hester Prynne, Pearl, and Arthur Dimmesdale:

"What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown, or the flesh of her forehead?" cried another female, the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these self-constructed judges. "This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not law for it? Truly there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book...."

But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer,--so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time,--was that SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and inclosing her in a sphere by herself.

In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of human kind. She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the household joy, nor mourn with the kindred sorrow; or, should it succeed in manifesting its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and horrible repugnance.

Brooding over all these matters, the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the master-word that should control this new and incomprehensible intelligence.

Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants. Nothing was more remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed, with which the child comprehended her loneliness; the destiny that had drawn an inviolable circle round about her; the whole peculiarity, in short, of her position in respect to other children.

Once, this freakish, elfish cast came into the child's eyes, while Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; and suddenly,--for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered with unaccountable delusions,--she fancied that she beheld, not her own miniature portrait, but another face in the small black mirror of Pearl's eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that she had known full well, though seldom with a smile, and never with malice in them. It was as if an evil spirit possessed the child, and had just then peeped forth in mockery.

Thus, Hester Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and healthy throb, wandered without a clew in the dark labyrinth of mind; now turned aside by an insurmountable precipice; now starting back from a deep chasm. There was wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort nowhere. At times, a fearful doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it were not better to send Pearl at once to heaven, and go herself to such futurity as Eternal Justice should provide.

The scarlet letter had not done its office.

"Hester! Hester Prynne!" said he. "Is it thou? Art thou in life?"

"Even so!" she answered. "In such life as has been mine these seven years past! And thou, Arthur Dimmesdale, dost thou yet live?"

It is no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet, in the dim wood, that it was like the first encounter, in the world beyond the grave, of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering, in mutual dread; as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost. They were awe-stricken likewise at themselves; because the crisis flung back to them their consciousness, and revealed to each heart its history and experience, as life never does, except at such breathless epochs. The soul beheld its features in the mirror of the passing moment.

Her face, so long familiar to the townspeople, showed the marble quietude which they were accustomed to behold there. It was like a mask; or rather, like the frozen calmness of a dead woman's features; owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was actually dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had departed out of the world with which she still seemed to mingle.

"Look your last on the scarlet letter and its wearer!"--the people's victim and life-long bond-slave, as they fancied her, might say to them. "Yet a little while, and she will be beyond your reach! A few hours longer, and the deep, mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever the symbol which ye have caused to burn upon her bosom!"

OK, so as you've been reading you've probably been thinking something like the following (besides "when is he going to stop with the quotations?! enough already!" that is): hmm, doesn't it seem as if Morrison takes many of Hawthorne's metaphors and, if not literalizes them, magically realizes them? I guess that romance/gothic/magical realism connection all the kewl kidz have been talking about makes a lot of sense! isn't the Hester/Pearl/Dimmesdale relationship (to each other and between them and their community) something of an interesting model for the Sethe/Denver/Beloved/Paul D relationship, especially when differences as well as similarities are taken into account?

Yes, dear imaginary reader, it's as if you are reading my mind. It's almost like Morrison was talking with Jean Fagan Yellin, who wrote one of the most comprehensive examinations of this social death/bond-slave theme in The Scarlet Letter back in 1989, the same year as Morrison's "Unspeakable Things Unspoken" essay on race and American literature, while both were working on their projects. Or better, that Morrison and Yellin, working independently, came to similar conclusions (beating people like Jennifer Fleischner and Sacvan Bercovitch to the punch, so to speak).

My argument, which I'll pick up next Thursday, is that you don't need to go to Morrison's later critical work to find in its claims and ornate absences evidence that she was reading and thinking carefully about race and Hawthorne--all you need to do is look in Beloved for the evidence, as critics from Jan Stryz and Caroline Woidat to Charles Lewis and Emily Miller Budick have done, or as careful historical readers of Hawthorne like Teresa Goddu and Arthur Riss have all but done. This much is, by now, quite obvious. What I'll give you next week is a string of Hawthornesque Beloved quotations to match this string of Morrisonesque Scarlet Letter passages. Hopefully then we'll all be in a position to move a few steps beyond the obvious.

Gotta post this before I turn into a pumpkin, but a quick question for my hypothetical reader(s) before I go: when could you tell the title of this premiere Intertextual Thursday post (not to be confused with a premier post) was a joke? Of course this is the "worst evah"!

Worst Close Reading Tuesday Post Evah!

The first has to be the worst, so let's go set the bar low. From "The Custom-House":

While thus perplexed,--and cogitating, among other hypotheses, whether the letter might not have been one of those decorations which the white men used to contrive, in order to take the eyes of the Indians,--I happened to place it on my breast. It seemed to me,--the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word,--it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat; and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.

Who's speaking? It's in the first person, and it's autobiographical, but it's not exactly Hawthorne himself (at least not the "inmost Me" who remains "behind the veil," as he puts it early in the essay). Instead, it's the speaker formerly known as the "Loco-foco Surveyor," the "I" who refers to "The Custom-House" and The Scarlet Letter as "POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR." It's a ghostly voice speaking "from the realm of quiet" as a "citizen of somewhere else."

What adds another level of complexity to the question is the fact that the highly dramatic "discovery" of the scarlet letter and Surveyor Pue's six-page document outlining the "life and conversation of one Hester Prynne" (which this passage transitions between), not to mention the remains of the letter and the document themselves, are inventions on Hawthorne's part. The reader, it seems, is bound to do more than smile or doubt the speaker's word, but also to smile at and doubt the speaker himself, in some sense. The speaker's later claim that "the main facts of the story [of The Scarlet Letter] are authorized and authenticated by the document of Mr. Surveyor Pue" is highly ironic (and funny), as Hawthorne was in fact founding his romance on an imaginary source "discovered" by a fictionalized version of himself.

What's He Talking About? While trying to solve the "riddle" of a "certain" "much worn and faded" "affair of fine red cloth" with "greatly frayed and faded" "traces of gold embroidery" upon it--"how it was to be worn, or what rank, honor, and dignity, in by-past times, were signified by it"--or otherwise arrive at the "deep meaning, most worthy of interpretation," of "the mystic symbol" that was "subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind," the speaker tries it on. In a highly qualified passage--"it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat; and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron"--the speaker implies that he almost felt as if he were being branded by the letter. So he "involuntarily" drops the letter and turns his attention to the document--and never refers to the letter itself in the rest of "The Custom-House."

So What Is Going On Here? This is going to have to be very telegraphed, but I see this passage as encapsulating what makes Hawthorne so interesting (at least to me). The explicit reference to Indians and implicit reference to the branding of slaves in the midst of an entirely fictional explanation of "how a large part of the following pages came into my possession" that "offers proofs of the authenticity of the narrative therein contained" (lines that never fail to remind me of white abolitionists' editorial or authenticating prefaces to slave narratives), one preceded by an admitted failure to imagine a time "when India was a new region, and only Salem knew the way thither," narrated by this fictionalized and ghostly autobiographical persona hits all my formalist, intertextualist, historicist, and comparativist buttons at the same time. And don't get me started on what other Hawthornists have done with this passage! Is Hawthorne identifying with Hester? Seared by her sin? Admitting he can't take the heat she withstands? Allegorizing his relationship with antebellum feminism? Appropriating the experience of (especially female) slaves? The possibilities, if not endless in themselves, are endlessly debate-able.

Work calls, so maybe I'd better pick up this stream of consciousness on Intertextual Thursday by linking the "scarlet letter as social death" argument I made in my dissertation with my yet-to-be-finished manuscript's treatment of Morrison's rearticulation of The Scarlet Letter in Beloved. That way if travel prevents me from doing CitizenSE's Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea on Saturday (going back to Chiba, Chiba, Chiba....), at least I'll have laid the groundwork for the following Saturday's entry.

"Why CitizenSE" IV

OK, so far in my "Why CitizenSE" posts I've reviewed some of the contexts of Hawthorne's "citizen of somewhere else" line from the end of "The Custom-House," and read it as a kind of declaration of independence from Salem and a pledge of allegiance to the republic of letters. But declaring independence necessitates severing already-existing ties. And, in order for Hawthorne to have something to pledge allegiance to, he needs to distinguish a republic of letters from the realms of politics, economics, and religion. He accomplishes both these goals by linking his feelings toward Salem to his feelings for his ancestors.

So why did Hawthorne return to Salem? Let's skip to his most direct (and deceptive) answer:

On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly [a] strange, indolent, unjoyous attachment for my native town, that brought me to fill a place in Uncle Sam's brick edifice, when I might as well, or better, have gone somewhere else. My doom was upon me. It was not the first time, nor the second, that I had gone away,--as it seemed, permanently,--but yet returned, like the bad half-penny; or as if Salem were for me the inevitable centre of the universe.

In fact, throughout "The Custom-House," Hawthorne resorts to multiple metaphors when trying to convey his feelings upon returning to Salem, after having lived in Concord from 1842 to 1846, to take up his new post, an appointment by President James Polk as "chief executive officer" of the Salem Custom-House. In part, these metaphors serve to minimize and obscure his connections with the Democratic Party. But only in part. As many Hawthorne critics have pointed out, they introduce themes and problematics that structure The Scarlet Letter and connect Hawthorne to his main characters. Putting that topic aside for the moment, let's examine Hawthorne's acknowledgement that Salem "possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here.... [T]hough invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content to call affection." And while noting in passing his association of happiness and "elsewhere," and his highly qualified statement of affection for "old Salem," which together foreshadow his closing "citizen of somewhere else" declaration, let's focus instead on his discontent with "affection" to describe Salem's forceful hold on his feelings. Why does he keep returning to metaphors of "instinct," "curse," "spell," "destiny," and "doom" when discussing Salem? Because his feelings are complex, despite his efforts to look objectively at Salem or think rationally about it.

There are many such "objective" descriptions scattered throughout "The Custom-House," but as realistic as they are, they are saturated with Hawthorne's emotions. In his first sentence mentioning Salem, for instance, even though he is trying to get to a description of the Salem Custom-House itself, he sounds practically Faulknerian:

In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf,--but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig half-way down in melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood,--at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of a row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass,--here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick.

Note in particular the extended contrast between past and present and the way the description seems to perpetuate itself, seemingly against the author's wishes, with its multiple dashes, dependent clauses, and editorializing adjectives. The next extended description of Salem continues these rhetorical practices and draws the logical conclusion:

Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty,--its irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame,--its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the alms-house at the other,--such being the features of my native town, it would be quite as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged checkerboard.

Yet the attachment persists, and its strength is such that Hawthorne's declaration of independence again returns to "objective" description of Salem, this time embedded in an exended metaphor, in order to achieve the separation he desires:

Soon, likewise, my old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a mist brooding over and around it; as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth, it ceases to be a reality in my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else.

I've already discussed this passage in the context of Hawthorne's ideas about romance and the imagination, but my point here is that Hawthorne's "objective" descriptions in "The Custom-House" read like an attempt to exorcise a haunting connection to Salem.

In trying to explain this connection, Hawthorne turns to a language of soil and roots, death and inheritance, but only to identify its limitations:

It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and forest-bordered settlement, which has since become a city. And here his descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their earthy substance with the soil; until no small portion of it must be necessarily akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to know.

Even though he dismisses the "mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust" here, he returns to it a few paragraphs later, only to end on a more emphatic conclusion in favor of "transplantation":

This long connection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or moral circumstances that surround him. It is not love, but instinct. The new inhabitant--who came from a foreign land, or whose father or grandfather came--has little claim to be called a Salemite; he has no conception of the oyster-like tenacity with which an old settler, over whom his third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his successive generations have been imbedded. It is no matter that the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and dust, the dead level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chillest of social atmospheres;--all these, and whatever faults besides he may see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise. So it has been in my case. I felt it almost as a destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of features and cast of character which had all along been familiar here--ever, as one representative of the race lay down in his grave, another assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the Main-Street--might still in his day be seen and recognized in the old twn. Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence that the connection, which has become an unhealthy one, should at last be severed. Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed soil.

Hawthorne's invocation of racialized discourses--of soil, roots, planting, replanting, and transplanting; of family and inheritance; of the features and character of one's "natal spot" that create an instinctive "kindred between the human being and the locality"; of spell, destiny, and doom--helps provide a context for his dismissal of those who can trace their ancestry back a mere three generations at most as having "little claim to be called a Salemite," as well as his earlier overview of Salem geography "with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the alms-house at the other," for New Guinea was a neighborhood where immigrants and free blacks lived. But Gallows Hill and the alms-house suggest that Hawthorne saw inheritance in more than physical terms. Indeed, he links Gallows Hill with his ancestors and the alms-house with the Custom-House, with his distant and recent past.

Let's look first at the ways in which Hawthorne describes how the distant past--his family history--connects him to Salem through strong and complex feelings:

But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned progenitor,--who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trod the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man of war and peace,--a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known.

Here, the haunting "figure of that first ancestor" provides Hawthorne with a "stronger claim to residence" in Salem than his own efforts and "induces a home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the town." Yet the "moral quality" produced by his knowledge of ancestry and "family tradition" is ambivalent at best:

He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Chuch; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was a likewise a bitter persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity towards a woman of their sect which will last longer, it is to be feared, than any record of his better deeds, although these were many. His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry bones, in the Charter Street burial ground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to dust! I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them--as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist--may be now and henceforth removed.

Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins, that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim, that I have ever cherished, would they recognize as laudable; no success of mine--if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success--would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. "What is he?" murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. "A writer of story-books! What kind of business in life,--what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation,--may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!" Such are the compliments between my great-grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time! And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine.

Here, Hawthorne suggests simultaneously how tenuous his connection to Salem is--if his distant ancestors provide his strongest claim to citizenship and residence in Salem, he is in danger of beng disinherited by them as a worthless, disgraceful, degenerate idler--and how strongly he identifies with the republic of letters. To the extent that he has inherited their "spirit" and "traits," it is to condemn them for their "cruelties" and take shame upon himself for their "sins" against Quakers and the martyred victims of the Salem witch trials; despite their "scorn" for his most "cherished" aims, the entire purpose of "The Custom-House" is to explain his return to literary life, to vindicate the "writer of story-books" as fulfilling a serious and valued "business in life."

Of course, this return to literary life is a resurrection from political death and job-induced lethargy. But Hawthorne's repeated invocations of a kind of "culture of poverty" argument to describe the enervating effects of appointment to a political office--such as in his initial description of his Custom-House co-workers as being characterized by "that lack of energy that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labor, or any thing else but their own independent exertions"--are framed by two key metaphors. Consider Uncle Sam:

An effect--which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every individual who has occupied the position--is, that, while he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness of force of his original nature, the capability of self-support.... He usually keeps his ground just long enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath of life as he may.... His pervading and continual hope--a hallucination, which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of impossibilities, haunts him while he lives and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief space after death--is, that, finally, and in no long time, he shall be restored to office.... Why should he toil and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him? Why should he work for his living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so soon to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of glittering coin out of his Uncle's pocket? It is sadly curious to observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow with this singular disease. Uncle Sam's gold--meaning no disrespect to the worthy old gentleman--has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment like the devil's wages. Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to manly character.

"Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the road to Paradise," indeed. Instead, Uncle Sam's gold is the carrier of a cholera-like disease that can bring irreparable damage to body, character, and perhaps soul. In part this rhetoric is a parody of "repentance of the evil and corrupt practices, into which, as a matter of course, every Custom-House officer must be supposed to fall"--and of which Hawthorne himself was accused by those seeking to unseat him--and part of the series of puns on the word "custom" that run throughout the essay. Indeed, Hawthorne references "the received code" that it was his duty upon appointment to bring all his Whig subordinates to the "axe of the guillotine" and the "established rule" even they recognized to be replaced by "younger men, more orthodox in politics, and altogether fitter than themselves to serve our common Uncle," so as to emphasize his kindness in not firing all of them, whatever "discredit" and "detriment to [his] official conscience" this decision was supposed to bring. However, even more important than distinguishing himself from the Whigs who guillotined him--thereby giving in to one of the "ugli[est] traits of human nature...to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of giving harm"--Hawthorne uses the figure of Uncle Sam to imply the value of the literary realm over the political, not just in the self-reliant way it enables him to regain his vigor and support his family, but in a moral sense, as well.

Consider the other federal metaphor Hawthorne uses in "The Custom-House," the "enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw," that hovers over the entrance to the Custom-House:

With the customary infirmity of temperament that characterizes this unhappy fowl, she appears by the fierceness of her beak and eye and the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens, careful of their safety, against intruding on the premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle, imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later,--oftener sooner than late,--is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.

Lauren Berlant has done an excellent reading of this passage that I will discuss in a future post, for her book The Anatomy of National Fantasy has many important and provocative readings of Hawthorne's "citizen of somewhere else" line. But for now let me just emphasize that Hawthorne links Uncle Sam and the federal eagle with the worst traits of his ancestors in his distant past and political opponents in his recent past.

I'll close with one last quote to illustrate how the republic of letters emerges from the realms of politics, religion, and commerce in "The Custom-House"--this time a reflection on how the "Surveyor of the Revenue" is seen by Hawthorne's "fellow-officers, and the merchants and sea-captains with whom my official duties brought me into any manner of connection":

It is a good lesson--though it may often be a hard one--for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.

As both girls are crying and today is the day we're celebrating onechan's third birthday, I'll have to draw the conclusion of this post next week. But for now note how the language of claims and aims and fame echoes the language Hawthorne uses when discussing his ancestors and the ties that bind him to Salem--and which he breaks in "The Custom-House."