Hawthorne/Izumi Update

Ah, the wonders of teh internets! Not to mention the kindness of strangers and the generosity of friends! Since I last wrote on a possible Hawthorne/Izumi connection--Izumi perhaps using the crisis of faith and epistemology in "Young Goodman Brown" to add some interesting resonances to his meditation on dreams and reality, life and death in "One Day in Spring"--I've heard back from Charles Shiro Inouye and Susan Napier at Tufts and my friend Koichi Fujino at Seinan Gakuin University in Fukuoka. The bottom line: there's no definitive evidence either way on whether Izumi could have read "Young Goodman Brown" before 1906. In fact, they know of no work in English or Japanese that takes on the question directly.

The Full Metal Archivist approached the question from an oblique angle that may well prove to be helpful. She noted that Izumi's mentor--おざき こうよう Kouyou Ozaki--read a good deal of literature in English and was a huge influence on Izumi in his literary and wider life. So it's possible that Izumi heard about "Young Goodman Brown" from his mentor. Another line of research to pursue.

What makes this very specific empirical question of perhaps wider interest is that it points to a more general problem: when an intertextual reading isolates structural homologies, what ought we to do with them? I speculated with my students in class Friday on any number of directions we might go in to pursue everything from the meaning and significance to the implications and stakes of the structural homologies, should they actually turn out to be intentional allusions on Izumi's part. Clarifying the conditions of possibility for an actual case of translinguistic/transcultural influence/revision can do more than establish a factual base for an interpretive reading; it can also help reveal pathways for transnational communication at the turn into the 20th century.

Using Hawthorne in Meiji Japan

Waiting for the day when I can research the following topic in the middle of the night from the comforts of home to my satisfaction: could Kyoka Izumi have been consciously alluding to Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" at the end of the first part of "One Day in Spring" (1906)? The answer is most likely "no." Not only does the standard list of conscious Japanese Hawthorne-alluders start in 1908 (with the exception of one 1887 novel by Kososhi Miyazaki), but Izumi would also most likely had to have read Hawthorne's tale in English, as it wasn't a favorite of his early Japanese translators. Still, there are enough textual (journey into woods, bizarre encounters, possible dream, chilling effects) and generic (gothic, fantastic, romanticism) parallels to warrant further investigation. Charles Shiro Inouye mentions in his critical biography The Similitude of Blossoms that Izumi read Hawthorne's Peter Parley's Universal History, so it's at least possible he could have read Hawthorne's short stories before 1906. Looks like I'll also be interlibrary-loaning Susan Napier's The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature.

When I get onto campus in a few hours, it'll be a nice break from grading to check out the MLA Bibliography and email Inouye and Napier. I'll let you all know what I dig up.

Speaking of Storytelling...

What kind of mental state do you have to be in to believe that the consequences of doing this won't be worse than just taking the damn test?

Maybe I should be assigning "Fancy's Show Box" in my Postcolonial Hawthorne class to help my students deal with the trauma of getting an afternoon off on a nice sunny day. We've already read "Young Goodman Brown," which seems relevant in a different way.

Colonial, Antebellum, Postbellum Hauntings

In my Haunting America course, we're starting off with a fast tour through landmarks in the history of literary hauntings and possessions in and near the U.S.: after a look at Dickinson the first two weeks of the semester, early narratives on the Salem Witch Trials and the Virgin of Guadalupe started off our historical survey, followed quickly by views of Young Goodman Brown, La Llorona, and La Malinche, visits to Irving's Sleepy Hollow and Poe's House of Usher, and considerations of the structures of Stowe's and Chesnutt's haunted rooms and narratives. Our aim has been to identify similarities and differences in the uses of ghosts and spirits in colonial, antebellum and postbellum American literature as much as it has been to test out different approaches to reading hauntings--and in the coming weeks we'll look at works by Ambrose Bierce and Lafcadio Hearn to refine our initial ideas and methods. Here I'll recap some of the results of this tour and mention some specific juxtapositions and divergences worth exploring further.

The basic idea I've been trying to get across to the students to this point in the course is the difference the Enlightenment makes in the ways in which hauntings are treated in American literatures. Before the Enlightenment, the narrators of the stories of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the specters tormenting Salem Village residents take great pains to establish the reality and truth of the hauntings they represent. Although they differ in associating the hauntings with God and the Devil, they coincide in acknowledging yet attempting to overcome skeptics and doubters who look for other than supernatural explanations for the events they represent. Juan Diego, the protagonist of the Virgin of Guadalupe narrative, has to convince the colonial authorities in Mexico City to build a shrine to the Virgin in the mountains and after three visits he finally does (with the help of some well-timed miracles). Cotton Mather, although acknowledging the argument that specter evidence could be faked by the Devil or his agents ("who's to say whether the images of Scott Eric Kaufman and Joseph Kugelmass doing those unspeakable things to those texts over there are really their specters, or that they really sent them over there to do that?"), works to justify the Salem Witch Trial verdicts--and executions. These kinds of colonial narrators show up as protagonists in Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," and Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," but now they are framed by Enlightenment-era narrators who cast Ichabod Crane's, Goodman Brown's, and Roderick Usher's susceptibility to belief in the reality of ghosts as irrationality (in the modes of humor, irony, and horror, respectively). Irving's anthropological emphasis, Hawthorne's historical allusions, and Poe's symbolic methods are used not to dismiss the irrational but instead to examine it, its effects, and its consequences. Antebellum literary hauntings, that is, stage the encounter between pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment modes of dealing with ghosts.

This basic distinction allowed me to frame the various uses of the gothic in Dickinson and Stowe as well as in Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe--by linking the explained or rational gothic and the supernatural gothic to Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment modes of thinking, I was able to help my students track the function of ghosts in their works and specify their related but distinctive fascinations with the shadows, blind spots, and nightmares of the Enlightenment. Before going into a few examples from Poe, Stowe, and Chesnutt, let me mention that these commonplaces in American literary history and Western intellectual history seemed to fascinate my students, who have interesting and complex relationships to the various religious traditions and beliefs about ghosts, spirits, and demons in Japan (I chose Hearn to end the "Postbellum Hauntings" unit precisely so we could revisit our earlier discussion of cultural assumptions in and about Western and Eastern hauntings).

What I think is so effective about Poe's use of the rationalistic narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher" is not only the way that his narration leads the reader to expect the story to end one way, heightening the surprise and horror of the actual ending, but also the way in which his mistake about Roderick Usher at the end of the story raises the possibility that he might be mistaken in his earlier dismissals of Usher's beliefs. Without deviating from the explained Gothic at all--no ghosts, no spirits, no supernatural phenomena of any kind--Poe's story succeeds on aesthetic (his relation to Irving is kind of like Ringu's relation to Scream) and philosophical levels (he pushes Enlightenment-era ontologies and epistemologies to the point when you wonder if all our senses were as sensitive as Usher's whether we, too, would be overcome with horror and fear--wonder if his idea that an evil sentience pervades his ancestral grounds may well be entirely rational). The narrator's own reactions to the landscape and architecture of the House of Usher and to his repeated conversations with Usher point to the idea that a place can have an effect on your mind without any visible or sensible causes.

Decades later, at the end of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe attempts to politicize Poe's achievements. Critics have rightly focused on her adroit mixing of popular antebellum genres to account for the success of her novel--drawing everything from the novel of sentiment to the slave narrative, Stowe attempts to make her readers feel the evils and injustices of slavery, not just understand them conceptually. I haven't read enough Stowe criticism to see if scholars have been paying attention to her use of the gothic and the ghost story, but it is crucial to her novel's mediation of Enlightenment and Christian attacks on slavery--her linking of appeals to violations of rights to life, liberty, and property to the notions that slavery is a sin and that true Christians can neither hold slaves nor tolerate the existence of slavery. When Cassy and Emmeline conspire to manipulate Simon Legree into believing the garret in his mansion is haunted by the spirit of a slave woman he tortured, raped, and killed, they are participating in one of the classic conventions of the explained Gothic--but instead of the vulnerable protagonist being tormented by a conspiracy out to make her believe she is being haunted, here the vulnerable female slaves are the ones who are protecting themselves by making the garret the safest place for them to hide from the slave catchers trying to hunt them down after they are seen trying to escape the plantation. Stowe takes us behind the scenes to see how Cassy stages all the supposedly supernatural events that heighten Legree's guilt, horror, and fear--this is the explained Gothic with a vengeance--and asserts that it is Legree's atheism that makes him particularly susceptible to her manipulations. In so doing, she echoes Poe's language--and provides some imagery that Dickinson may well be responding to in her Civil War-era poem #670 (the revolver that is no protection against spirits, the locked door that is no protection against your own internal haunting)--in a way that mixes their philosophical and psychological emphases with her own social and political projects. Cassy's staging of an "authentic ghost story," as one late chapter title proclaims it to be, enables her and Emmeline to escape the fate of the tortured and murdered slave woman--and the martyrdom of Uncle Tom by Legree that is framed by the narrative of their escape--even as it shows the consequences on Legree of his own actions. Stowe's hauntings emphasize the horrors of slavery and install the metaphor of the slaveholder haunted by his sins and the nation haunted by the peculiar institution.

Oops, imoto just woke up. More on Chesnutt later!

The Problem of Narratorial Tone in Hawthorne's Early Short Fiction

In my Postcolonial Hawthorne course at Seinan Gakuin University, we've been wrestling with the problem of narratorial tone in such passages as these:

One of the few incidents of Indian warfare naturally susceptible of the moonlight of romance, was that expedition, undertaken, for the defence of the frontiers, in the year 1725, which resulted in the well-remembered 'Lovell's Fight.' Imagination, by casting certain circumstances judiciously into the shade, may see much to admire in the heroism of a little band, who gave battle to twice their number in the heart of the enemy's country. The open bravery displayed by both parties was in accordance with civilized ideas of valor, and chivalry itself might not blush to record the deeds of one or two individuals. The battle, though so fatal to those who fought, was not unfortunate in its consequences to the country; for it broke the strength of a tribe, and conduced to the peace which subsisted during several ensuing years. History and tradition are unusually minute in their memorials of this affair; and the captain of a scouting party of frontier-men has acquired as actual a military renown, as many a victorious leader of thousands. Some of the incidents contained in the following pages will be recognized, not withstanding the substitution of fictitious names, by such as have heard, from old men's lips, the fate of the few combatants who were in a condition to retreat, after 'Lovell's Fight.'

Then Reuben's heart was stricken, and the tears gushed out like water from a rock. The vow that the wounded youth had made, the blighted man had come to redeem. His sin was expiated, the curse was gone from him; and, in the hour, when he had shed blood dearer to him than his own, a prayer, the first for years, went up to Heaven from the lips of Reuben Bourne

With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose.

Thither came also the slender form of a veiled female, led between Goody Cloyse, that pious teacher of the catechism, and Martha Carrier, who had received the devil's promise to be queen of hell. A rampant hag was she!

There is an admirable foundation for a philosophic romance, in the curious history of the early settlement of Mount Wollaston, or Merry Mount. In the slight sketch here attempted, the facts, recorded on the grave pages of our New England annalists, have wrought themselves, almost spontaneously, into a sort of allegory. The masques, mummeries, and festive customs, described in the text, are in accordance with the manners of the age. Authority on these points may be found in Strutt's Book of English Sports and Pastimes.

Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire.... The future complexion of New England was involved in this important quarrel. Should the grisly saints establish their jurisdiction over the gay sinners, then would their spirits darken all the clime, and make it a land of clouded visages, of hard toil, of sermon and psalm, forever. But should the banner-staff of Merry Mount be fortunate, sunshine would break upon the hills, and flowers would beautify the forest, and late posterity do homage to the May-Pole!

Unfortunately, there were men in the new world, of a sterner faith than these May-Pole worshippers. Not far from Merry Mount was a settlement of Puritans, most dismal wretches, who said their prayers before daylight, and then wrought in the forest or the cornfield, till evening made it prayer time again. Their weapons were always at hand, to shoot down the straggling savage. When they met in conclave, it was never to keep up the old English mirth, but to hear sermons three hours long, or to proclaim bounties on the heads of wolves and the scalps of Indians. Their festivals were fast-days, and their chief pastime the singing of psalms. Woe to the youth or maiden, who did but dream of a dance! The selectman nodded to the constable; and there sat the light-heeled reprobate in the stocks; or, if he danced, it was round the whipping-post, which might be termed the Puritan May-Pole.

Whether it's dry and heavily-qualified author's notes or stark narratorial descriptions and judgments, we've had a lot of trouble narrowing down the range of possible meanings of these and other passages. Depending on the tone of voice in which you read them, you can imply almost any shade of irony to almost any of the "claims" put forward by the narrator. Should our goal be to figure out the narrator's intentions and attitudes toward the characters and situations depicted in his storytelling? Or, rather than nailing them down, should we be seeking out more and more possibilities for meaning and polysemy?

I put these questions to the Blogging While Academic ghetto of Blogoramaville in particular, but really anyone can weigh in in comments with their own readings of any or all of the above passages or perspectives on the theoretical/pedagogical issues the questions raise. More of my own takes on them later.

Colonial Spaces in Three Early Hawthorne Tales

If you're less interested in my readings of the wilderness and the desert in "Roger Malvin's Burial," "Wakefield," and "Young Goodman Brown," head on over to WAAGNFNP for my readings of figures for global capitalism in Subcomandante Marcos's "The Southeast in Two Winds: A Storm and a Prophecy" and William Greider's One World, Ready or Not. If not, check out these passages--bonus points to those who can identify the stories from which each comes before I do.

And the boy dashed one tear-drop from his eye, and thought of the adventurous pleasures of the untrodden forest. Oh! who, in the enthusiasm of a day-dream, has not wished that he were a wanderer in a world of summer wilderness, with one fair and gentle being hanging lightly on his arm? In youth, his free and exulting step would know no barrier but the rolling ocean or the snow-topt mountains; calmer manhood would choose a home, where Nature had strewn a double wealth, in the vale of some transparent stream; and when hoary age, after long, long years of that pure life, stole on and found him there, it would find him the father of a race, the patriarch of a people, the founder of a mighty nation yet to be. When death, like the sweet sleep which we welcome after a day of happiness, came over him, his far descendants would mourn over the venerated dust. Enveloped by tradition in mysterious attributes, the men of future generations would call him godlike; and remote posterity would see him standing, dimly glorious, far up the valley of a hundred centuries!

He had contrived, or rather he had happened, to dissever himself from the world--to vanish--to give up his place and privileges with living men, without being admitted among the dead.... It was [his] unprecedented fate, to retain his original share of human sympathies, and to still be involved in human interests, while he had lost his reciprocal influence on them. It would be a most curious speculation, to trace out the effect of such circumstances on his heart and intellect, separately, and in unison.... Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another, and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.

He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him onward, and heard the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly from a distance, with the weight of many voices. He knew the tune; it was a familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The verse died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices, but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness, pealing in awful harmony together. [He] cried out; and his cry was lost to his own ear, by its unison with the cry of the desert.

If you guessed that I'd stick to alphabetical (and chronological) order--or if you recognized the passages as Cyrus's daydream not long before his father, Reuben Bourne, accidentally shoots him dead at the same place he left his father-in-law, Roger Malvin, to die decades earlier after a battle with Indians left them both wounded; the narrator's musings on Wakefield, a Londoner who decided one day not to return home to his wife, moved to new dwellings a few blocks away, and stayed there for twenty years before finally returning home; and Young Goodman Brown's arrival at what he takes to be the witches' coven that he had set out into the wilderness to avoid going to, until he was deceived by the devil's illusions into losing faith in his wife Faith--well, good for you.

The reason I collect them here is that they are key moments in Hawthorne's representation of colonial spaces. Later, I'll share my readings of how David Levin, Michael Colacurcio, and Manfred Mackenzie read "Roger Malvin's Burial," how Robert Martin reads "Wakefield," and how Renee Bergland reads "Young Goodman Brown," but for now I want to simply note that Hawthorne consistently represents the new world wilderness in terms colonial Puritans would have been quite familiar with. The narrator in RMB refers to "a region, of which savage beasts and savage men were as yet sole possessors" and calls each of the four main characters of the tale "pilgrims"; both Malvin and Bourne refer to the "howling wilderness." The narator in YGB describes Goodman Brown's journey into the woods as an "errand" and describes the wilderness as "heathen," "dark," "benighted," and "unconverted"; Goodman Brown himself worries that "There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree," he describes himself as having "kept covenant by meeting thee here" when addressing a figure he believes to be the devil and claims, "My father never went into the woods on such a errand, nor his father before him." Even Wakefield's sojourn of a few blocks in London echoes the kind of identity-transforming experiences of Bourne, Brown, Chillingworth, and Hester. I'll pick up where this intro to a close reading leaves off next Tuesday--I've run out of time today!

What Would Hawthorne Say About the Mooninite Invasion of Boston?

Besides my AP Chemistry final project--a science fiction/detective story set on one of the moons of Jupiter--and a brief Far Side-induced cartooning stint in high school and college that went by the name of The Gray Area, I have little to show in the area of creative endeavors and less potential. So rather than risk Seiglering any of Hawthorne's tales, I'm offering "shorter" versions here for your reading pleasure, because, as you know, CitizenSE is nothing if not a small finger taking the pulse of the American Dream. And, no, it's not the same finger that Ignignokt uses.

Shorter "My Kinsman, Major Molineux": One of Ted Turner's younger relatives comes to Boston and, after some enigmatic encounters with various natives, witnesses him being paraded through town "in tar-and-feathery dignity"; a "shrewd youth," he eventually follows an onlooker's advice to "rise in the world, without the help of your kinsman."

Shorter "Little Annie's Ramble": Young girl wanders through the streets of Boston oblivious to the panic and gridlock caused by authorities' overreaction to a guerrilla marketing campaign for an animated movie, is announced as kidnapped by a terrorist cell on Fox News, but soon returns home unharmed.

Shorter "The Gray Champion": A mysterious old man rescues the city of Boston from Mooninite invaders ("With this night, thy power is ended--to-morrow, the prison!--back, lest I foretell the scaffold!"), for "whenever the descendants of the Puritans are to show the spirit of their sires, the old man appears again."

Shorter "Fancy's Show Box": Hawthorne's inquiry into the nature of guilt and guilty thoughts, now applied to the case of those who authorized the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie guerrilla marketing campaign, and, indeed, created the Mooninites in the first place.

Shorter "Endicott and the Red Cross": Boston Mayor Thomas Menino personally rips Mooninite Lite Brite displays from various public places and pledges to extraordinarily render Err and Ignognikt.

Shorter "Young Goodman Brown": Boston Mayor Thomas Menino is tempted to believe the spectral images Ted Turner shows him of his city subjugated to the depradations of Mooninite invaders, decides to trust no one, and calls on Homeland Security.

[Gong sounds; big hook drags me offstage. Boston Chief of Police appears and says, "Move it along, people. Nothing to see here."]

But What About the Black Ribbon in Beloved?

Before getting further into Morrison's characterization of Baby Suggs and her relations with both Young Goodman Brown and Dimmesdale, it's worth fleshing out her portrait of Stamp Paid still further. For the red ribbon he finds in the Licking River is exhausting not only because of the racialized violence of slavery and Reconstruction, but because it also serves as a reminder of another ribbon, a black ribbon, that has a much more personal meaning to him. Reading this ribbon leads to the recognition that Morrison is linking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in Beloved.

Stamp Paid tells Paul D at the very end of Book 2, "'Let me tell you how I got my name.... They called me Joshua,' he said. 'I renamed myself,' he said, 'and I'm going to tell you why I did it,' and he told him about Vashti." Flash back 50 pages to get the outline of the story:

Born Joshua, he renamed himself when he handed over his wife to his master's son. Handed her over in the sense that he did not kill anybody, thereby himself, because his wife demanded he stay alive. Otherwise, she reasoned, where and to whom could she return when the boy was through? With that gift, he decided that he didn't owe anybody anything. Whatever his obligations were, that act paid them off. He thought it would make him rambunctious, renegade--a drunkard even, the debtlessness, and in a way it did. But there was nothing to do with it.... It didn't seem much of a way to live and it brought him no satisfaction. So he extended this debtlessness to other people by helping them pay out and off whatever they owed in misery. Beaten runaways? He ferried them and rendered them paid for; gave them their own bill of sale, so to speak. "You paid it; now life owes you."

But of course Stamp Paid spends all of Book 2 feeling he owes Sethe, Denver, and Paul D something. His attempt to repay his debt was rebuffed for most of Book 2, but it is not at its end--and the story he tells Paul D is his currency:

"I never touched her all that time. Not once. Almost a year. We was planting when it started and picking when it stopped. Seemed longer. I should have killed him. She said no, but I should have. I didn't have the patience that I got now, but I figured maybe somebody else didn't have much patience either--his own wife. Took it in my head to see if she was taking it any better than I was. Vashti and me was in the fields together in the day and every now and then she be gone all night. I never touched her and damn me if I spoke three words to her a day. I took any chance I had to get near the great house to see her, the young master's wife. Nothing but a boy. Seventeen, twenty maybe."

After he does eventually convey his message to her (which I'd quote if I had time), he tells Paul D,

"She got rosy then and I knowed she knowed. He give Vashti that to wear. A cameo on a black ribbon. She used to put it on every time she went to him.... I thought it would give me more satisfaction than it did. I also thought she might stop it, but it went right on. Till one morning Vashti came in and sat by the window. A Sunday. We worked our own patches on Sunday. She sat by the window looking out of it. 'I'm back,' she said. 'I'm back, Josh.' I looked at the back of her neck. She had a real small neck. I decided to break it. You know, like a twig--just snap it. I been low but that was as low as I ever got."

The resonances with The Scarlet Letter and "Young Goodman Brown" are multiple: Joshua is at once Chillingworth and Goodman Brown, faced with an instance of adultery closer to the writings of Harriet Jacobs than Nathaniel Hawthorne. Morrison's Vashti here makes the all-too-human choice not to resist, unlike Frances E.W. Harper's Vashti, the Queen of Persia, who gives up her crown "And left the palace of the King,/ Proud of her spotless name--/ A woman who could bend to grief,/ But would not bow to shame." Harper's focus on Vashti rather than Esther could be read in multiple ways, particularly in light of dialogues among Jewish traditions--as an implicit critique of Esther, as an acknowledgement that one's social positioning plays a large role in shaping avenues for resistance and their costs, or as an explicit critique of the king. Her earlier poem, "The Contrast," harshly criqitues the sexual double standard where "They scorned her for her sinning,/ Spoke harshly of her fall" while "None scorned him for his sinning,/ Few saw it through his gold;/ His crimes were only foibles,/ And these were gently told."

But Intertextual Thursday is almost over, so I'll return to the significance of Morrison's decision to tell Stamp Paid's side of the story and its relation to "Young Goodman Brown" on Saturday.

What Would Hawthorne Say about "Young Goodman Bush"?

OK, so first go read Trevor Seigler's "Young Goodman Bush" (21 Sept. 2004)--I'll wait.

Now, skip this disclaimer. I don't know Trevor Seigler. "YGB" is the only thing of his I've read--although if you want to read more, and more recent, go here or here, or just go straight to his blog, Surf Wax America. I don't read Democratic Underground. When I want to survey what Left Blogistan is thinking about, I'll visit Hullabaloo, TomDispatch, Glenn Greenwald, the talking dog, Orcinus, Pandagon, and firedoglake. More often, I get my political fix through the stylings of The Poor Man Institute, Sadly, No!, Happy Furry Puppy Story Time, Jesus' General, Opinions You Should Have, and (although "often" is not quite the right word) fafblog!. Since I've started CitizenSE, I've been reading its blogroll more regularly than anything else. But I know from experience how tough writing quality political humor is. So I'm sympathetic to what I can see of Seigler's overall project, and I understand "YGB" is one of his earlier efforts at satire, but...but...but...it's so bad that I can't keep trying to ignore it.

OK, forget that "Young Goodman Bush" is terribly written. Or that its plot is a thin and incoherent excuse for making bad jokes about Bush's Yale and Texas years. Or that casting Laura Bush as Faith and Dick Cheney as the Black Man leads nowhere but the obvious, and pointless, literalization of "infidelity." Or that Hawthorne's 1862 essay, "Chiefly About War Matters," with its satirical portrait of Lincoln, may have been a better literary model. No, what's worst about "Young Goodman Bush" is its failure to do anything with its Hawthorne allusions.

Not that it's easy to connect "Young Goodman Brown" to George W. Bush. You have to take your readers away from the Brown of the end of the tale: "A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man" whose "dying hour was gloom" is not the first description of Bush that would spring to one's readers' minds less than two months before the election (unless you were hoping to predict his psychology after a loss to Kerry). You also have to make sure your readers don't think about Brown's despairing comment--'My Faith is gone!' cried he, after one stupefied moment. 'There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil! for to thee is this world given.'--for Bush himself would repudiate this kind of moral relativism. Moreover, the entire problem of specter evidence needs to be dealt with in some way: the devil's words have to contain some truth, but overall be deceptive and manipulative; Bush's reactions have to lead to a radical doubt as to everyone else's capacity to resist the devil's temptations. So if "Young Goodman Brown" is a story about how and where someone goes wrong, the choice of situations to put Bush in is quite crucial. Seigler's story is an object lesson in what not to do.

His first mistake was making Cheney the devil. The devil should be the devil, and Bush, like Hawthorne's Goodman Brown, should be going into the forest in order to face him, repudiate him, and return to Faith, so that, like Hawthorne's narrator, you could condemn Bush's simplistic notions of good and evil at the start of the war on terror (when your cause is just, the ends justify the means; doing evil to fight evil is justified because we're so good and they're so bad that we can never become evil like them): "With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose."

Similarly, following the initial plot of Hawthorne's story provides opportunities for making serious accusations about the Bush family and its allies' past and present actions (both Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud and Kevin Phillips's American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush had been out for months when "Young Goodman Bush" was written, so it's not like there was a shortage of material): think especially of the devil's "I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem. And it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip's war."

But where the devil needs to go for the Brown-Bush analogy to really work is to cast his net wider than the Republican Party and insinuate that the Democrats and the American people, like al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, are on his side (you know, where Greater Wingnuttia has been since 9/11). To really be like Goodman Brown, Bush has to be tempted to despair that everyone else has lost faith in America.

This is why Seigler's decision to cast Laura Bush as Faith was so mistaken. Faith needs to be the American people or the American way of life or American traditions. Bush needs to drink the devil's kool aid and really believe everyone's out to get us, even us--or rather, spend the rest of his life doubting whether we are really out to get us or are sufficiently vigilant against the threat we pose to us. This is the only way I can see to make the Brown of the end of Hawthorne's tale relevant to a satire of the Bush administration, although doing so would require more overt attention to the consequences of his administration's profound distrust of American institutions, traditions, and people than Hawthorne gives to Brown's actions at the end of his tale.

So in the end, I don't know if Seigler's story is salvageable, or if the Brown-Bush analogy is really worth trying to establish, but I would be curious to see what a rewrite would look like. Anyone want to take a shot at it? Or offer pointers on doing so?

From Hawthorne's Wilderness Field to Morrison's Jungle Clearing

On Thursday, I ran out of time before I could explain how Morrison's changing Hawthorne's Puritans' encroaching and racialized wilderness into the "new whitefolks' jungle," the "secret spread" of which was "hidden, secret, except once in a while when you could hear its mumbling in places like 124," connects to the voices Young Goodman Brown and Stamp Paid hear. Well, it seems to me Morrison is linking Hawthorne's concern with the problem of evil during the 17th C to her own explorations of the problem in the 19th C. The Black Man preaches in "Young Goodman Brown," 'Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped, that virtue were not all a dream. Now ye are undeceived! Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome, again, my children, to the communion of your race!' Morrison takes lines like these and uses them to address the temptation to believe that whites are devils or inherently evil that spans black intellectual history from Olaudah Equiano to Malcolm X and beyond. If you think I'm exaggerating, check out the figure of Baby Suggs, who does her own preaching in a forest clearing but who ends her life a Goodman Brown-esque figure of gloom and despair.

Among the voices Stamp Paid hears when he approaches 124 is Baby Suggs's; his discovery of the young girl's ribbon in the Licking River exhausted his marrow in a way that lead him to believe he understood her better than he did while he was trying to argue her out of the deep depression that lead her to take to her bed and contemplate colors, searching for something harmless in the world.

Fingering a ribbon and smelling skin, Stamp Paid approaches 124 again.

"My marrow is tired," he thought. "I been tired all my days, bone-tired, but now it's in the marrow. Must be what Baby Suggs felt when she lay down and thought abut color for the rest of her life." When she told him what her aim was, he thought she was ashamed and too shamed to say so. Her authority in the pulpit, her dance in the Clearing, her powerful Call (she didn't deliver sermons or preach--insisting she was too ignorant for that--she called and the hearing heard)--all that had been mocked and rebuked by the bloodspill in her backyard. God puzzled her and she was too ashamed of Him to say so.

Consider their argument, which echoes in Stamp Paid's ears long after Baby Suggs's death:

"You blaming God," he said. "That's what you are doing."

"No, Stamp, I ain't."

"You saying the whitefolks won? That what you saying?"

"I'm saying they came in my yard."

"You saying nothing counts."

"I'm saying they came in my yard."

"Sethe's the one did it."

"And if she hadn't?"

"You saying God give up? Nothing left for us but to pour out our own blood?"

"I'm saying they came in my yard."

"You punishing Him, ain't you."

"Not like He punish me."

"You can't do that, Baby. It ain't right."

"Was a time I knew what that was."

"You still know."

"What I know is what I see a nigger woman hauling shoes."

But Morrison, like Hawthorne, links the theological and the psychological, the political and the personal:

Now, eight years after her contentious funeral and eighteen years after the Misery, he changed his mind. Her marrow was tired and it was a testimony to the heart that fed it that it took eight years to meet finally the color she was hankering after. The onslaught of her fatigue, like his, was sudden, but lasted for years. After sixty years of losing children to the people who chewed up her life and spit it out like a fish bone; after five years of freedom given to her by her last child, who bought her future with his, exchanged it, so to speak, so she could have one whether he did or not--to lose him too; to acquire a daughter and grandchildren and see that daughter slay the children (or try to); to belong to a community of other free Negroes--to love and be loved by them, to counsel and be counseled, protect and be protected, feed and fed--and then to have that community step back and hold itself at a distance--well, it could wear out even a Baby Suggs, holy....

Trying to get to 124 for the second time now, he regretted that conversation: the high tone he took; his refusal to see the effect of marrow weariness in a woman he believed was a mountain. Now, too late, he understood her. The heart that pumped out love, the mouth that spoke the Word, didn't count. They came in her yard anyway and she could not approve or condemn Sethe's rough choice. One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed. The whitefolks had tired her out at last.

Well, once again I've run out of time, so this will have to suffice as a quotation dump if not actually an idea. More Thursday!

"Young Goodman Brown" Link-o-rama

Although I've attempted to keep the scholarly apparatus on this blog to a bare minimum and treat it as a place to think through passages and parallels that matter to my book project--a mix of formalist, intertextualist, and historicist pre-draft "free" writing--anyone who's already published on the topics I'm addressing will recognize their influence on my arguments and methods and/or my abject failure to show an awareness or appreciation of their work. As I get more into the revision-of-existing-chapters part of the writing process (there's a big pile of books and articles on the picturesque and nationalism, colonialism, and ethnicity/race waiting for me to finish grading, for instance), I'll do more overt positioning of my project in relation to traditions of scholarship on Hawthorne, antebellum American literature, and African-American, American, and Postcolonial studies.

Too much scholarly work, however, is trapped behind commercial firewalls, available only through online services like Project Muse that charge libraries to make their collections available to their university's or college's faculty and students. Although I can download .pdf files from them, I'm not going to undermine the university presses by posting links to them here. Still, I wish more presses would see the value of at least making their back issues (say, from ten years ago on) available to all for free. Until that happens, there's a proliferating host of online journals that you can find through a simple google or google scholar search. As I've been writing on "Young Goodman Brown," I've been looking around to see what others have been saying about it that overlaps with my concerns. Here are two examples of what I've found that I'd like to recommend:

Scott Harshbarger, "National Demons: Robert Burns, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Folk in the Forest," Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism, eds. Lance Newman, Chris Koenig-Woodyard, and Joel Pace, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (November 2006).

John S. Bak, "Suddenly Last Supper: Religious Acts and Race Relations in Tennessee Williams's 'Desire,'" The Journal of Religion and Theatre 4.2 (Fall 2005).

I meant to take some time to comment on them today, but family and work make that impossible. It's worth thinking, however, about the kinds of formalist, intertextualist, and historicist moves Harshbarger and Bak make and similarities and differences between their online writing and those who Blog While Academic and talk about or share their research.

Young Goodman Brown and Stamp Paid Hear Voices

At the opening of Book 2 of Beloved, the house at 124 Bluestone Road is no longer "spiteful," as its haunting by the ghost of Sethe's slain infant daughter made it, but "loud" with what is described as "a conflagration of hasty voices." Stamp Paid, who comes repeatedly to the door of 124, red ribbon in hand and pocket, to apologize to Sethe for revealing to Paul D the circumstances of her infant's death, hears these voices as "loud, urgent, all speaking at once so he could not make out what they were talking about or to whom. The speech wasn't nonsensical, exactly, nor was it tongues. But something was wrong with the order of the words and he couldn't describe or cipher it to save his life. All he could make out was the word mine. The rest of it stayed outside his mind's reach." Earlier here I've begun reading his ribbon and ciphering the voices of 124 and I plan to continue doing so today. Like the monumentalized A at the end of The Scarlet Letter, which "the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the purport," these textual details are significant--and, like many moments in Hawthorne's novel--they point directly to Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown." So, unlike the "men of rank and dignity" at the final scaffold scene when Dimmesdale invites Hester and Pearl to join him--who "were so taken by surprised, and so perplexed as to the purport of what they saw--unable to receive the explanation which most readily presented itself, or to imagine any other--that they remained silent and inactive spectators"--I won't hesitate to draw the most obvious conclusions from this intertextual dialogue between Morrison and Hawthorne.

"Young Goodman Brown" has some well-known voices in it. What's the relation between those voices and the voices of 124? What do Morrison's voices imply about Hawthorne's? It's unlikely I'll have the time today to fully answer these questions, so without further ado let's go to the quotations! The voices Goodman Brown hears--which may be real, figments of his waking or sleeping imagination, or part of the devil's multimedia array of specter evidence designed to deceive our protagonist--emerge from "a black mass of cloud" which was "sweeping swiftly northward" although the sky was blue and "no wind was stirring":

Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the cloud, came a confused and doubtful sound of voices. Once, the listener fancied that he could distinguish the accents of town's-people of his own, men and women, both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had met at the communion-table, and had seen others rioting at the tavern. The next moment, so indistinct were the sounds, he doubted whether he had heard aught but the murmur of the old forest, whispering without a wind. Then came a stronger swell of those familiar voices, heard daily in the sunshine, at Salem Village, but never, until now, from a cloud of night. There was one voice, of a young woman, uttering lamentations, yet with an uncertain sorrow, and entreating for some favor, which, perhaps, would grieve her to obtain. And all the unseen multitude, both saints and sinners, seemed to encourage her onward.

Note how Goodman Brown's doubt at the reality of the voices disappears when he hears what he takes to be Faith's voice, which prepares him to take up his earlier doubt "whether there really was a Heaven above him" that he had previously been able to keep at bay with the cry, "With Heaven above, and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!" As I discussed before, it's the discovery of what appears to be Faith's ribbon that sets Goodman Brown on the path toward joining the voices of the black cloud. Let's listen to the soundtrack of his flight "along the forest-path" into "the heart of the dark wilderness":

The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds; the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while, sometimes, the wind tolled like a distant church-bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.

'Ha! ha! ha!' roared Goodman Brown, when the wind laughed at him. 'Let us hear which will laugh loudest! Think not to frighten me with your deviltry! Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powow, come devil himself! and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he fears you!'

In truth, all through the haunted forest, there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown. On he flew, among the black pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied gestures, now giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now shouting forth such laughter, as set all echoes of the forest laughing like demons around him. The fiend in his own shape is less hideous, than when he rages in the breast of man. Thus sped the demoniac on his course, until, quivering among the trees, he saw a red light before him, as when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been set on fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of midnight. He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him onward, and heard the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly from a distance, with the weight of many voices. He knew the tune; it was a familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The verse died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices, but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness, pealing in awful harmony together. Goodman Brown cried out; and his cry was lost to his own ear, by its unison with the cry of the desert.

Let's review, shall we? Goodman Brown--who summoned the devil himself when, walking alone in woods so thick that he "may yet be passing through an unseen multitude," remarks to himself, 'There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree. What if the devil himself should be at my very elbow!'--is now the most frightful figure in the forest. Goodman Brown--who at the beginning of his "errand" tells himself he'll return to Faith and immediately "felt himself justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose," yet first begins to doubt himself when the devil claims that "I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem. And it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip's war"--now finds his voice in "unison with the cry of the desert." What seems to be at stake in "Young Goodman Brown" is not only the status of specter evidence in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 or the problem of visible sanctity in the Half-Way Covenant of 1662, it is the entire 17th C American Puritan "errand into the wilderness." Have the Puritans been doing the devil's work--particularly in their demonizing of Native Americans--when they thought they were doing God's? Is the entire American Puritan errand damning evidence of their failure to reach the promised land, of their exodus remaining stranded in the desert?

It is questions like these, I believe, that haunt Goodman Brown after he has repudiated the devil in the climax of the story, not simply his radical doubt that anyone else, including Faith, did the same. 'Look up to Heaven and resist the Wicked One!' he implores her, but "Whether Faith obeyed, he knew not." His dying hour--and indeed the rest of his life--"was gloom," because of the doubt and despair that led him to become "A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man." His desperation stems as much from his fear that everything about the American Puritan errand that he used to believe may be wrong--that the saints may be sinners, that the godly may be ungodly, that the errand itself not only failed to change the "unconverted wilderness" but may also have brought its wildness (and in his mind its "deviltry") into the Puritans' own hearts. After all, if he is unsure of the choices his fellow-Puritans made, how can he be sure that God would honor his climactic repudiation of the Black Man? Like Dimmesdale at the close of The Scarlet Letter, he believes he goes to his God for judgement, knowing fully well that it is only grace that has the power to save his soul. It is in this sense that David Levin and Michael Colacurcio, among others, have suggested that Goodman Brown may well be representative of Puritans' internal struggles with theological and epistemological problems with specter evidence and visible sanctity--my own small contribution so far has been to highlight how the "Young Goodman Brown" has another layer of representativity, where the very attempt to civilize the wilderness and Christianize the savages is difficult to discern from the devil's work.

So, briefly now, because I only have ten minutes to go, Morrison works and plays with these voices and their larger implications in many ways. I won't discuss here the ways in which Baby Suggs and her preaching in the clearing is a counter to Goodman Brown, Dimmesdale, and the Black Man's actions and words in Hawthorne's wilderness, but her story is linked to Stamp Paid's in ways I will get to later. It's what Stamp Paid comes to believe about the voices of 124 and the ways in which he is like and unlike Goodman Brown that I want to end on here.

So, in spite of his exhausted marrow, he kept on through the voices of 124. This time, although he couldn't cipher but one word, he believed he knew who spoke them. The people of the broken necks, of fire-cooked blood and black girls who had lost their ribbons.

What a roaring.

Stamp Paid's own crisis is his doubt over the capacity of whites to repudiate the violence, exploitation, oppression, lynchings, rapes, and murders of the slavery and Reconstruction eras: "What are these people?" he asks. "You tell me, Jesus. What are they?" But Stamp Paid (aided by the narrator's use of free indirect discourse) adds a further dimension to this crisis by linking it to the history of racialization in the Americas:

The day Stamp Paid saw the two backs through the window and then hurried down the steps, he believed the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed, like Baby Suggs, and none that he knew of, including Baby, had lived a livable life. Even the educated colored: the long-school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the whole weight of the race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made them. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.

Meanwhile, the secret spread of this new kind of whitefolks' jungle was hidden, silent, except once in a while when you could hear its mumbling in places like 124.

Yeesh, it's been 25 minutes. Not good. More on Saturday!

More Beloved-"Young Goodman Brown" Connections, Courtesy of George William Curtis

Hey, my office computer has been reconnected to the intertubes (helps to have a physics professor as your faculty mentor) and a .pdf version of my Hawaii paper and handouts is available here. But this is Unexpected Hawthorne Wednesday, and I'm rarin' to go on the Beloved-"Young Goodman Brown" connection, so here are some excerpts from George William Curtis's "The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne," North American Review 99 (1864), which Carmen Joseph Dello Buono has kindly reprinted in Rare Early Essays on Nathaniel Hawthorne. Read the whole thing, as they say! Why? Not only is it a great essay in itself--showing that it's not presentist at all to look into Hawthorne's views on race, slavery, and abolition (a friendly but intense argument I kept having with my grandfather while he was still around to discuss the progress of my dissertation with me)--but I have strong textual evidence that Toni Morrison knew of it when she was composing Beloved. So let's go, italicizing Curtis's prose for emphasis along the way:

Curtis:

[T]he pictures of our poet have more than the shadows of Rembrandt. If you listen to his story, the lonely pastures and dull towns of our dear old homely New England shall become suddenly as radiant with grace and terrible with tragedy as any country and any time. The waning afternoon in Concord, in which the blue-frocked farmers are reaping and hoeing, shall set in pensive glory. The woods will forever after be haunted with strange forms. You will hear whispers and music "i' the air." In the softest morning you will suspect sadness; in the most fervent noon a nameless terror. It is because the imagination of our author treads the almost imperceptible line between the natural and the supernatural. We are all conscious of striking it sometimes. But we avoid it. We recoil and hurry away, nor dare to glance over our shoulders lest we should see phantoms.... [Hawthorne's tales] converse with that dreadful realm as with our real world. The light of our sun is poured by genius upon the phantoms we did not dare to contemplate, and lo! they are ourselves, unmasked, and playing many parts. An unutterable sadness seizes the reader as the inevitable black thread appears. For here genius assures us what we trembled to suspect, but could not avoid suspecting, that the black thread is interwoven with all forms of life, with all development of character.

Salem village was a famous place in the Puritan annals. The tragedy of the witchcraft tortures and murders has cast upon it a ghostly spell, from which it seems never to have escaped; and even the sojourner of today, as he loiters along the shore, in the sunniest morning of June, will sometimes feel an icy breath in the air, chilling the very marrow of his bones. Nor is he consoled by being told that it is only the east wind; for he cannot help believing that an invisible host of Puritan spectres have breathed upon him, revengeful, as he poached upon their ancient haunts.

Morrison:

They forgot her like a bad dream. After they made up their tales, shaped and decorated them, those that saw her that day on the porch quickly and deliberately forgot her. It took longer for those who had spoken to her, lived with her, fallen in love with her, to forget, until they realized that they couldn't remember or repeat a single thing she said, and began to believe that, other than what they themselves were thinking, she hadn't said anything at all. So, in the end, they forgot her too. Remembering seemed unwise.

So they forgot her. Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep. Occasionally, however, the rustle of a skirt hushes when they wake, and the knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep seem to belong to the sleeper. Sometimes the photograph of a close friend or relative--looked at too long--shifts, and something more familiar than the dear face itself moves there. They can touch it if they like, but they don't, because they know things will never be the same if they do.

Down by the stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there.

By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss.

Beloved.

To make some obvious observations: it certainly seems as if Morrison has transformed Curtis's revengeful Puritan spectres into the beloved but revengeful figure of "the disremembered and unaccounted for" that is Beloved; as if Morrison yoked Curtis's romantic/gothic evocations of natural/supernatural boundaries and crossings in Hawthorne's fictions to the history of racialized violence in the middle passage, slavery, and Reconstruction; as if Morrison were trying to put her surviving characters and living readers in the same position as Curtis suggested Hawthorne's tales put his readers; as if Morrison created a narrator who attempts to voice the necessity and costs of turning away from a haunting past that refuses to remove itself from the present; as if Morrison's theorizing of an Africanist presence in American literature and culture takes Curtis's metaphors of the "black thread" and the haunting of New England woods, fields, and shores and runs with them....

There's much more to be said, but this Curtis passage is the clincher for laying out the terms of a "race and Hawthorne problem" admirers of his works have been wrestling with since his death not long before this essay was published:

When he went to Europe as a consul, Uncle Tom's Cabin was already published, and the country shook with the fierce debate which involved its life. Yet eight years later Hawthorne wrote with calm ennui, "No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land." Is crime never romantic, then, until distance ennobles it? Or were the tragedies of Puritan life so terrible that the imagination could not help kindling, while the pangs of the plantation are superficial and commonplace? Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, and Thackeray were able to find a shadow even in "merrie England." But our great romancer looked at the American life of his time with these marvellous eyes, and could see only monotonous sunshine. That the devil, in the form of an elderly man clad in grave and decent attire, should lead astray the saints of Salem village, two centuries ago, and confuse right and wrong in the mind of Goodman Brown, was something that excited his imagination, and produced one of his weirdest stories. But that the same devil, clad in a sombre sophism, was confusing the sentiment of right and wrong in the mind of his own countrymen he did not even guess.

In the first chapter of my manuscript, I call our attention to late 19th C debates over Hawthorne's racial politics in which Curtis was a major participant--and trace the history of attempts by 20th C scholars and critics to do more than repeat them--in an effort to turn the traditional review of the literature into something more like a genealogy of race and American literature through the lens of Hawthorne studies. Curtis makes other powerful moves like this one, using Hawthorne's own fiction to criticize his politics, which I'll discuss later.

But for now consider in closing what Morrison does with Curtis's "In the softest morning you will suspect sadness; in the most fervent noon a nameless terror": Paul D's first appearance in Beloved comes during Curtis's "softest morning" and the arrival of "the four horsemen" and "Sethe's rough response to the Fugitive Bill" both come very close to his "most fervent noon." Morrison truly makes the border between the American south and midwest "as radiant with grace and terrible with tragedy as any country and any time."

How Did Faith's Ribbon End Up in Stamp Paid's Hands?

So finally I have a chance to share one of the Morrison-Hawthorne ideas I'm most excited about, and which, more than 10 years since it first came to me, is still original, I believe. The only other time I tried to share some of this was at a job talk almost exactly 9 years ago and people there seemed to think it was new, even if they didn't choose to make me an offer. Since then, although I've taught it in 1999 and 2003 twice, I've been too nervous someone would beat me to it in print to even check if anyone had (makes a lot of sense, right?). In any case, I think the following idea is "new": correct me if I'm wrong!

As you can tell from my previous Hawthorne-Morrison posts, I'm particularly interested in Book 2 of Beloved, which frames and then delivers the "unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" of the women of 124 (and, as I'll show, not only of those women). As I've devoted a few posts to the idea that Beloved is possessed not only by the spirit of Sethe's "crawling-already baby" but also by the spirits of those who died in the middle passage, I want to turn our attention from the monologue to the frame, and particularly to the figure of Stamp Paid, who hasn't gotten nearly the critical attention his place in the novel suggests he deserves. Let's start with a simple question: where did he get the ribbon he holds as he attempts to check in on Sethe, Denver, and Beloved after Paul D has left 124? As this post's title suggests, the answer is going to take us to "Young Goodman Brown." But first it takes us to the Licking River:

Tying his flatbed up on the bank of the Licking River, securing it the best he could, he caught sight of something red on its bottom. Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather stuck to his boat. He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet woolly hair, clinging stil to its bit of scalp. He untied the ribbon and put it in his pocket, dropped the curl in the weeds. On his way home, he stopped, short of breath and dizzy. He waited until the spell passed before continuing on his way. A moment later, his breath left him again. This time he sat down by a fence. Rested, he got to his feet, but before he took a step he turned to look back down the road he was travelling and said, to its frozen mud and the river beyond, "What are these people? You tell me, Jesus. What are they?"

Before proceeding further with this key passage, let me turn to a similarly important passage from "Young Goodman Brown," one that, it turns out, also involves a ribbon:

But something fluttered lightly down through the air, and caught on the branch of a tree. The young man seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon.

'My Faith is gone!' cried he, after one stupefied moment. 'There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil! for to thee is this world given.'

This is the moment that Goodman Brown, "maddened with despair," sets himself practically flying down the forest-road he has been travelling, into "the heart of the dark wilderness," heading through the "haunted forest" toward the witches' sabbath presided over by a "dark figure" or "sable form" that he had originally set out on his "errand" into the "unconverted wilderness" precisely to reject and turn back from. Morrison has many figures for what triggers a similar despair that grips her characters; for Stamp Paid, as for Goodman Brown, it is a ribbon. Let's go back to Beloved to see what I'm talking about:

Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes, eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken; necks broken. He smelled skin, skin and hot blood. The skin was one thing, but human blood cooked in a lynch fire was a whole other thing. The stench stank. Stank up off the pages of the North Star, out of the mouths of witnesses, etched in crooked handwriting in letters delivered by hand. Detailed in documents and petitions full of whereas and presented to any legal body who'd read it, it stank. But none of that had worn out his marrow. None of that. It was the ribbon.

Faith's pink ribbon has turned red, stained by the blood of the black victims of white terrorism during the Reconstruction period. Rather than being ambiguous specter evidence, as the "something" that Young Goodman Brown seizes, beholds, and takes to be damning testimony to his wife's "infidelity" and indeed to the "innate depravity" of all humanity, Stamp Paid's ribbon is all too real, its testimony as speechless and unheard as any of the more formal attempts to stop the deviltry of the KKK and similar terrorist organizations in the postbellum South. Hawthorne scholars tend to read "Young Goodman Brown" as a coded commentary on the Salem Witch Trials and the dangers it taught of taking specter evidence to be real; I believe Morrison is trying to suggest through her "Young Goodman Brown" allusions in Beloved that the violence of the middle passage, slavery, and Reconstruction should be seen as a much great national tragedy. To see the full scale and scope of Morrison's coded suggestion, however, we have to follow this ribbon further, connecting it both to Stamp Paid's and Baby Suggs's despair and to the voices surrounding 124 in Book 2. But the girls are up from their nap, and duties domestic and professional call. Next week, then.