Why Water Imagery Matters in Hawthorne, Morrison, and Marshall

So we're heading out for Hawaii later today but I am so dissatisfied with my previous Hawthorne-Morrison posting I need to get this one off my chest before we leave and I begin my first-ever CitizenSE vacation.

Too long ago I suggested that Pearl's playing in the sea-side pool with her phantom-like reflection toward the end of The Scarlet Letter had something to do with the most puzzling part of Beloved's stream-of-consciousness monologues near the end of Beloved. It's almost as if Morrison asked herself, what if Hawthorne's pool represented a boundary between the living and the dead? what if Pearl and her reflection had somehow been able to "join" each other? or what if it were really a phantom in the pool and not her reflection? what would have happened if Pearl were possessed by her reflection? And then she imagined Beloved as a vehicle for giving her answers to these questions.

Well, there's another pool in The Scarlet Letter, this one formed by a brook in the middle of the famous forest where Hester and Dimmesdale reunite after seven years apart. Check out the language in these passages, but whatever you do don't dismiss it as mere filler, suspense-building, foreshadowing, or pathetic fallacy. To help you along, I'll italicize key SL phrases and break the flow of the passage in order to note Beloved resonances and crossings after them. So let's visit this forest brook and keep an eye on Pearl and her reflection:

It was a little dell where they had seated themselves, with a leaf-strewn bank rising gently on either side, and a brook flowing through the midst, over a bed of fallen and drowned leaves.

connection to "what it is down there" from the end of Beloved? could these leaves symbolize those who died in the middle passage or in attempted escapes from slavery or in post-slavery lynchings and other racialized violence?

The trees impending over it had flung down great branches, from time to time, which choked up the current, and compelled it to form eddies and black depths at some points; while, in its swifter and livelier passages, there appeared a channel-way of pebbles, and brown, sparkling sand.

think of the collar around the woman's neck in the middle passage scenes from the monologue for the choking up part; for the second, think of the compulsion to repeat or the compulsion to testify often associated with the kinds of traumatic experience Morrison not only writes on but makes crucial to the form of the novel (consider what triggers various characters' flashbacks and how the order in which events are narrated itself follows a traumatic logic--and think of the course of the stream in The Scarlet Letter as something like the form of Beloved

Letting the eyes follow along the course of the stream, they could catch the reflected light from its water, at some short distance within the forest, but soon lost all traces of itamid the bewilderment of tree-trunks and underbrush,

a line seemingly modified at the very end of Beloved....

and here and there a huge rock, covered over with gray lichens. All these giant trees and boulders seemed intent on making a mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing, perhaps, that, with its never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper tales out of the heart of the old forest whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of a pool.

what does this stream connect to, Morrison might have asked--what is its source and destination? and just what do those trees symbolize? what might they be trying to block or hide? and what tales might the stream tell?

Continually, indeed, as it stole onward, the streamlet kept up a babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy, like the voice of a young child that was spending its infancy without playfulness, and knew not how to be merry among sad acquaintances and events of sombre hue.

Denver? the crawling-already baby? both?

"O brook! O foolish and tiresome little brook!" cried Pearl, after listening awhile to its talk. "Why art thou so sad? Pick up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!"

But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the forest-trees, had gone through so solemn an experience that it could not help talking about it, and seemed to have nothing else to say.

The child went singing away, following up the current of the brook, and striving to mingle a more lightsome cadence with its melancholy voice. But the little stream would not be comforted, and still kept telling its unintelligible secret of some very mournful mystery that had happened

trauma and testimony key in Beloved--what traumatized the brook? is it like the voices Stamp Paid hears outside 124? what secret and mystery might Morrison pondered in the writing of Beloved....

--or making a prophetic lamentation about something that was yet to happen--within the verge of the dismal forest....

Just where she had paused the brook chanced to form a pool, so smooth and quiet that it reflected a perfect image of her little figure, with all the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of flowers and wreathed foliage, but more refined and spiritualized than the reality. The image, so nearly identical with the living Pearl, seemed to communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible quality to the child herself.

Almost a metaphor for being possessed by your own reflection, isn't it?

It was strange, the way in which Pearl stood, looking so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the forest-gloom; herself, meanwhile, all glorified with a ray of sunshine, that was attracted thitherward as by a certain sympathy. In the brook beneath stood another child,--another and the same,--with likewise its ray of golden light. Hester felt herself, in some indistinct and tantalizing manner, estranged from Pearl; as if the child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to return to it.

There was both truth and error in the impression; the child and mother were estranged, but through Hester's fault, not Pearl's. Since the latter rambled from her side, another inmate had been admitted within the circle of the mother's feelings, and so modified them all, that Pearl, the returning wanderer, could not find her wonted place, and hardly knew where she was

sounds to me like Denver's and the baby ghost's reaction to Paul D's initial presence in 124....

"I have a strange fancy," observed the sensitive minister, "that this brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou canst never meet thy Pearl again."

ah ha! didn't I call it at the beginning of this post? and I didn't even remember this passage until I typed it in!

...alone as she was in her childish and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if a hidden multitude were lending her their sympathy and encouragement. Seen in the brook, once more, was the shadowy wraith of Pearl's image, crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its foot, wildly gesticulating, and, in the midst of it all, still pointing its small forefinger at Hester's bosom!

again, we have "voices of 124"/"unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" connections, as well as the idea that Beloved was more than just a single person....

...And the melancholy brook would add this other tale to the mystery with which its little heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages heretofore

as if the tale of Beloved's death is part of a much-longer and much-larger mysterious, traumatizing history....

***

As long as I've got quotation fever, let me end by quoting from some related passages from Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, which I think also influenced Morrison's coded allusions to the middle passage in Beloved:

It was the Atlantic this side of the island, a wild-eyed, marauding sea the color of slate, deep, full of dangerous currents, lined with row upon row of barrier reefs, and with a sound like that of the combined voices of the drowned raised in a loud unceasing lament--all those, the nine million and more it is said, who in their exnforced exile, their Diaspora, had gone down between this point and the homeland lying out of sight to the east. This sea mourned them. Aggrieved, outraged, unappeased, it hurled itself upon each of the reefs in turn and then upon the shingle beach, sending up the spume in an angry froth which the wind took and drove in like smoke over the land. Great boulders that had roared down from Westminster centuries ago stood scattered in the surf; these, sculpted into fantastical shapes by the wind and water, might have been gravestones placed there to commemorate those millions of the drowned.

...here on this desolate coast, before this perpetually aggrieved sea which...continued to grieve and rage over the ancient wrong it could neither forget nor forgive.

...they seemed to be puzzling over the sea in front of them which was so different from the mild Caribbean on their side of the island. Their wondering faces raised, they appeared to be asking the reason for its angry unceasing lament. What, whom did it mourn? Why did it continue the wake all this time, shamelessly filling the air with the indecent wailing of a hired mute? Who were its dead? Despairing of finding an answer they would turn away eventually and, leaving the young people romping in the surf, make their way slowly back to the village in time for the car race along the main road.

If you liked these passages from Marshall's novel, you might want to check out another passage I quoted on my other blog to honor the end of Le Blogue Berube. When I get back from my conference and blog vacation, I'll continue with the Hawthorne-Morrison thing, this time finally following through on the issue of specter evidence in "Young Goodman Brown" and Beloved!

The Many-Headed Hydra in Hawthorne's Tales and Sketches

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, should be required reading for all Hawthornists. In the way it deals with transatlantic Puritan radicalism and its connections with political, social, and economic radicalism in the centuries before and during which race was codified as a scientific and legal institution, it provides as important a context for Puritan Studies as does the more top-down global history of the same period by Thomas Bender in the similarly-important study A Nation among Nations: America's Place in World History. Of course the revolutionary Atlantic is a place Melville scholars should know well, even if not enough of them have read C.L.R. James. But those who think Hawthorne simply ignored, denied, or disavowed this world have not read his tales and sketches closely enough.

What follows is an incomplete list of pirates, sailors, slave traders, India traders and others that can be found in the Tales and Sketches Library of America edition of Hawthorne's works. Just so y'all don't think I was overreading or anything in my Conde/Mukherjee post forever ago....

"Sir William Phips": this biographical sketch of an early colonial governor not only sheds light on The Scarlet Letter and Hawthorne's relation to Cooper but perhaps shows what Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen might have been dreaming about when he left Appalachia for the Caribbean after his encounter with the plantation system.

In this state of society the future governor grew up, and many years after, sailing with a fleet and an army to make war upon the French, he pointed out the very hills where he had reached the age of manhood, unskilled even to read and write. The contrast between the commencement and close of his life was the effect of casual circumstances. During a considerable time, he was a mariner, at a period when there was much licence on the high seas. After attaining to some rank in the English navy, he heard of an ancient Spanish wreck off the coast of Hispaniola, of such mighty value, that, according to the stories of the day, the sunken gold might be seen to glisten and the diamonds to flash, as the triumphant billows tossed about their spoil. These treasures of the deep (by the aid of certain noblemen, who claimed the lion's share) Sir William Phips sought for, and recovered, and was sufficiently enriched, even after an honest settlement with the partners of is adventure. That the land might give him honor, as the sea had given him wealth, he received knighthood from King James....

Hawthorne's narrator then goes on to imagine a day in the life of Governor Phips, noting various details that can be related to Linebaugh and Rediker, Bender, Conde, Mukherjee, and others:

Just emerging from the door are two footmen, one an African slave of shining ebony, the other an English bond-servant, the property of the governor for a term of years....

Another object of almost equal interest, now appears in the middle of the way. It is a man clad in a hunting shirt and Indian stockings, and armed with a long gun; his feet have been wet with the waters of many an inland lake and stream, and the leaves and twigs of the tangled wilderness are intertwined with his garments; on his head he wears a trophy which we would not venture to record without good evidence of the fact,--a wig made of the long and straight black hair of his slain savage enemies. This grim old heathen stands bewildered in the midst of King-street. The governor regards him attentively, and recognizing a playmate of his youth, accosts him with a gracious smile, inquires as to the prosperity of their birth place and the life and death of their ancient neighbors, and makes appropriate remarks on the different stations allotted by fortune to two individuals, born and bred besides the same wild river. Finally, he puts into his hand, at parting, a shilling of the Massachusetts coinage, stamped with the figure of a stubbed pine tree, mistaken by King Charles for the oak which saved his royal life. Then all the people praise the humility and bountifulness of the good governor, who struts onward flourishing his gold-headed cane, while the gentleman in the straight black wig is left with a pretty accurate idea of the distance between himself and his own companion....

A great crowd of people is collected on the common, composed of whole families, from the hoary grandsire to the child of three years old; all ages and both sexes look with interest on the array of their defenders; and here and there stand a few dark Indians in their blankets, dull spectators of the strength that has swept away their race.... After a variety of weary evolutions, evening begins to fall, like the veil of gray and misty years that have rolled betwixt that warlike band and us.

This apparent acquiescence to what scholars today call "the myth of the Vanishing American" is particularly striking in light of the controversies over Jackson's Indian Removal policy. Even more striking is the implicit contrast between "that warlike band and us," in a decade characterized by the Trail of Tears and several Indian wars. Writing here from the beginning of the decade, Hawthorne missed the signs apparent even then that there were to be more continuities between the era of King Philip's War and his own.

"Dr. Bullivant": this sketch gets into social changes in the New England colonies over the course of the 17th C but focuses on its last 30 years in particular. In some ways, this is a less mythic and more historicized version of events taking place later than "The May-pole of Merry Mount" and somewhat reversing the implications which Hawthorne drew out of Endicott's actions in that story.

This gradual but sure operation [the passing away of older, more pious Puritans and an accompanying "relaxation" in society's "theory and practice of morals and religion"] was assisted by the increasing commercial importance of the colonies, whither a new se of emigrants followed unworthily in the track of the pure-hearted Puritans. Gain being now the allurement, and almost the only one, since dissenters no longer dreaded persecution at home, the people of New-England could not remain entirely uncontaminated by an extensve intermixture with worldly men. The trade carried on by the colonists, (in the face of several inefficient acts of Parliament,) with the whole maritime world, must have had a similar tendency; nor are the desperate and dissolute visitants of the country to be forgotten among the agents of a moral revolution. Freebooters from the West Indies and the Spanish Main,--state criminals, implicated in the numerous plots and conspiracies of the period,--felons, loaded with private guilt,--numbers of these took refuge in the provinces, where the authority of the English king was obstructed by a zealous spirit of independence, and where a boundless wilderness enabled them to defy pursuit. Thus the new population, temporary and permanent, was exceedingly unlike the old, and far more apt to disseminate their own principles than to imbibe those of the Puritans.

There's much more from this sketch of interest, but let's continue with our maritime theme.

"Sights from a Steeple": Almost twenty years before "The Custom-House," Hawthorne was quite aware of where much of New England's wealth came from.

I can even select the wealthiest of the company [of gentlemen]. It is the elderly personage in somewhat rusty black, with powdered hair, the superfluous whiteness of which is visible upon the cape of his coat. His twenty ships are wafted on some of their many courses by every breeze that blows, and his name--I will venture to say, though I know it not--is a familiar sound among the far separated merchants of Europe and the Indies.

"Edward Fane's Rosebud":

She can speak of strange maladies that have broken out, as if spontaneously, but were found to have been imported from foreign lands, with rich silks and other merchandise, the costliest portion of the cargo.

"Egotism; or, the Bosom-Serpent":

It was a dark-browed man, who put the question; he had an evasive eye, which, in the course of a dozen years, had looked no mortal directly in the face. There was an ambiguity about this person’s character--a stain upon his reputation--yet none could tell precisely of what nature; although the city-gossips, male and female, whispered the most atrocious surmises. Until a recent period, he had followed the sea, and was, in fact, the very ship-master whom George Herkimer had encountered, under such singular circumstances, in the Grecian Archipelago.

"The Intelligence Office": Supten? Paging Mr. Sutpen. Are you there, sir? Please report to the Intelligencer. Are you there, Mr. Sutpen?

The next that entered was a man beyond the middle age, bearing the look of one who knew the world and his own course in it. He had just alighted from a handsome private carriage, which had orders to wait in the street while its owner transacted his business. This person came up to the desk with a quick, determined step, and looked the Intelligencer in the face with a resolute eye; though, at the same time, some secret trouble gleamed from it in red and dusky light.

"I have an estate to dispose of," said he, with a brevity that seemed characteristic.

"Describe it," said the Intelligencer.

The applicant proceeded to give the boundaries of his property, its nature, comprising tillage, pasture, woodland, and pleasure-grounds, in ample circuit; together with a mansion-house, in the construction of which it had been his object to realize a castle in the air, hardening its shadowy walls into granite, and rendering its visionary splendor perceptible to the awakened eye. Judging from his description, it was beautiful enough to vanish like a dream, yet substantial enough to endure for centuries. He spoke, too, of the gorgeous furniture, the refinements of upholstery, and all the luxurious artifices that combined to render this a residence where life might flow outward in a stream of golden days, undisturbed by the ruggedness which fate loves to fling into it.

"I am a man of strong will," said he, in conclusion; "and at my first setting out in life, as a poor, unfriended youth, I resolved to make myself the possessor of such a mansion and estate as this, together with the abundant revenue necessary to uphold it. I have succeed to the extent of my utmost wish. And this is the estate which I have now concluded to dispose of."

"And your terms?" asked the Intelligence, after taking down the particulars with which the stranger had supplied him

"Easy--abundantly easy!"” answered the successful man, smiling, but with a stern and almost frightful contraction of the brow, as if to quell an inward pang. "I have been engaged in various sorts of business--a distiller, a trader to Africa, an East India merchant, a speculator in the stocks--and, in the course of these affairs, have contracted an encumbrance of a certain nature. The purchaser of the estate shall merely be required to assume this burthen to himself."

"I understand you," said the Man of Intelligence, putting his pen behind his ear. "I fear that no bargain can be negotiated on these conditions. Very probably, the next possessor may acquire the estate with a similar incumbrance, but it will be of his own contracting, and will not lighten your burden in the least."

"And am I to live on," fiercely exclaimed the stranger, "with the dirt of these accursed acres, and the granite of this infernal mansion, crushing down my soul? How, if I should turn the edifice into an almshouse or a hospital, or tear it down and build a church?"

"You can at least make the experiment," said the Intelligencer; "but the whole matter is one which you must settle for yourself."

The man of deplorable success withdrew, and got into his coach, which rattled lightly over the wooden pavements, though laden with the weight of much land, a stately house, and ponderous heaps of gold, all compressed into an evil conscience.

There's much more, but for today let's end with a passage from Lathrop's study of Hawthorne:

Each town had a special trade, and kept the monopoly. Portsmouth and Newburyport ruled the trade with Martinique, Guadaloupe, and Porto Rico, sending out fish and bringing back sugar; Gloucester bargained with the West Indies for rum, and brought coffee and dye-stuffs from Surinam; Marblehead had the Bilboa business; and Salem, the most opulent of all, usurped the Sumatra, African, East Indian, Brazilian, and Cayenne commerce.

More on this next Wednesday, if we get back from Hawaii soon enough to blog!

Marshall, Devi, and Militant Mourning

Here's a long passage from Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, part of which I'll be discussing during my Marshall/Devi talk in Hawaii on Friday, featuring American radical anthropologist Saul Amron's response to Bournehills organic intellectual Merle Kinbona's room as he watches over her while she is in a kind of coma, rendered in free indirect discourse by the semi-omniscient, semi-objective narrator of the novel:

But the room expressed something more, it suddenly seemed to his own overtaxed and exhausted mind, something apart from Merle. It roused in him feelings about Bournehills itself. He thought he suddenly saw the district for what it was at its deepest level, the vague thoughts and impressions of months coming slowly to focus. Like the room it, too, was a kind of museum, a place in which had been stored the relics and remains of the era recorded in the faded prints on the walls [of slave ships and plantation labors and punishments], where one not only felt that other time existing intact, still alive, a palpable presence beneath the everyday reality, but saw it as well at every turn, often without quite realizing it. Bournehills, its shabby woebegone hills and spent land, its odd people who at times seemed other than themselves, might have been selected as the repository of a history which reached beyond it to include the hemisphere north and south.

And it would remain as such. The surface might be jarred as it had been by the events today [the closing of the Cane Vale factory in which the Bournehills natives who own land have traditionally brought the sugar cane they have grown and harvested on their own time to be processed]. People like himself would come seeking to shake it from its centuries-old sleep and it might yield a little. But deep down, at a depth to which only a few would be permitted to penetrate, it would remain fixed and rooted in that other time, serving in this way as a lasting testimony to all that had gone on then: those scenes hanging on the walls, and as a reminder--painful but necessary--that it was not yet over, only the forms had changed, and the real work was still to be done; and finally, as a memorial--crude in the extreme when you considered those ravaged hills and the blight visible everywhere, but no other existed, they had not been thought worthy of one--to the figures bound to the millwheel in the print and to each other in the packed, airless hold of the ship in the drawing.

Only an act on the scale of Cuffee's [leader of a slave revolt that freed Bournehills for a time] could redeem them. And only then would Bournehills itself, its mission fulfilled, perhaps forgo that wounding past and take on the present, the future. But it would hold out until then, resisting, defying all efforts, all the halfway measures, including his, to reclaim it; refusing to settle for anything less than what Cuffee had demanded in his time.

I know this is Close Reading Tuesday and all, but I have to follow this up with a passage from Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha," for the juxtaposition of these two passages gets to the heart of my talk's argument about the meaning, significance and stakes of the similarities and differences between Marshall's and her take on militant mourning; in it, Pirtha can be compared to Bournehills, Puran Sahay to Saul Amron, Shankar to Merle Kinbona, and Bikhia to someone like Stinger or the residents of Bourne Island's Harlem Heights, a shanty town on the outskirts of Bourne Island's capital city (italics are reproduced as in the translation, to indicate words in English in the original novella):

Bikhia, the only discoverer of the embodied ancestral soul, gives everyone oil from a small bowl at the point of a twig in a ceremonial way.

Why does this boy observe the same rule in the matter of the form of the ancestral soul as is appropriate to the funeral rites of the formerly living? No one asks this question.

Did he see its death?

No questions asked.

Did he cremate or bury it?

No questions asked.

But the flow of excitement travels like a current of electricity.

Did the soul of the ancestors come in this way? Or didn't it?

Pirtha knows, it knows.

Did they fall into mourning at a dreadful news? Pirtha knows, it knows.

There are many rites after the oil bath, Pirtha will perform them as needed.

Puran realizes that the crisis of the menaced existence of the tribals, of the extinction of their ethnic being, pushed and pushed them toward the dark.

Looking at Bikhia's tawny matted hair, freshly shaven face,he understood they were being defeated as they were searching for a reason for the ruthless unconcern of government and administration. It was then that the shadow of that bird with its wings spread came back as at once myth and analysis.

This is a new myth. For the soul of those long dead will return hundreds of years later in the form of an unknown tired bird. Such a thing is probably not even there in their oral tradition.

But from now on they will wait in their suffering and in evil times for that shadow, otherwise this deception cannot be humanly explained.

Having drawn that stone tablet Bikhia is the guardian of the new myth. He will protect it.

And this mourning, this "oil bath" has given them an assurance. Now something has happened that is their very own, a thing beyond the reach of the understanding and grasp and invasion and plunder of the outsider....

Shankar says softly, "...But we will not leave Pirtha."

He looks around and says, "Why should we leave? Isn't this our place? Now no tribal will leave. The ancestors' soul let us know that all the places it visited are ours. Can anyone leave anymore, or will they leave?"

--Is that what it let you know? Who told you this?

--Bikhia.

Shankar says triumphantly.

Puran shakes and shakes his head. They will not leave, they will not go anywhere leaving those stones, hills, caves, and river. To the fertile fields, to the plains, where there is plenty of water, and many supports for survival.

--If they want to give us aid, let them give it to us here.

Spreading his arms, he says, "All this land was ours, the kings took it from us. They were supposed to return it to us, to whom did they give it back? No, we won't go anywhere. Let them give us our dues here."

Both Devi and Marshall draw intimate connections between mourning and militancy, in these and other passages where it either happens or fails to happen for native or outsider individuals. Where Marshall might be read as celebrating a kind of postcolonial melancholia, or at least a work of mourning so protracted and massive that it takes on aspects of melancholia, Devi might be read as celebrating the completion of the work of mourning, a move from individual and collective despair and depression toward hope and resolve. But both seek to subvert and reimagine classic colonialist and racist stereotypes--of backward, primitive peoples trapped in the past by their irrational attachment to ancestral lands and traditions; of the superiority of civilization, progress, modernity, modernization, development--by showing that trauma has a history and a presence, by showing that mourning has a politics and a promise. In a sense, the apparition and passing of the pterodactyl in Devi's novella plays a similar role that Cuffee Ned's rebellion and leadership during Bournehills' brief period of independence plays in Marshall's novel: both provide material for a new story, a new myth, a new sense of identity to be created out of a past and present that seem to offer little but oppression and exploitation--all of which offer resources for survival and endurance of the repeated repetition of the traumatic history of enslavement and conquest which forms the past of Marshall's novel and, in Puran's vision, at least, the likely future of the people of Pirtha in Devi's novella, long enough to perhaps change or end it.

The distance between the realistic reports the outsider protagonists end up submitting and what Marshall and Devi try to achieve in their fiction--and their relation--is worth developing further. But I'm going back to Hawthorne the next two days, then taking a break from blogging until we return from Hawaii on the 17th. I'll report on how the talk and conference went soon afterwards and then in February devote several posts to breaking the talk down into blog-post-sized chunks. Tomorrow I plan to return to the sea and Hawthorne's relationship to Mukherjee/Conde and Thursday before we leave for Hawaii to the brook in The Scarlet Letter and its relation to Beloved.

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 Marshall and Devi?

It's heartening to note that after his first two children were born in 1844 and 1846, Hawthorne didn't publish much until The Scarlet Letter in 1850. And that after his third child was born in 1851 he was only able to publish one novel and the Pierce campaign biography until the late 1850s (if you don't count what he did in 1851, which I prefer not to for the purposes of this digressive intro paragraph). Because after today's adventures in moving and settling back in in Fukuoka, it really hit home to me how much we depended on my wife's parents the past two weeks. Except for brief walks to the grocery store and one jackpot visit to the ocal discount shoe store, we didn't need to shop, and when the ladies did, Baba drove them around. Except for the occasional meal, my wife didn't need to cook, as Gigi is the acknowledged master chef of both families. Coming back home to a freezing and food-less apartment and realizing that the incipient migraine my wife was suffering from on the flight would go full-bore if we pushed it today, we sent mom and imoto to bed and dad and onechan to forage for supplies. The walking was fun, actually, and it was warmer outside than inside the apartment when we left, but by the end of our three-hour tour (half of which was playtime for onechan) it was no longer so warm outside, onechan was super-cranky (until she fell asleep), and dad was itching to work. But imoto was missing him and tsuma needed to arrange our three post-Hawaii trips (2 for conferences and 1 for a visit to the sister-in-law in Okinawa and endless sparring with her three Ultraman-Power Ranger-Boukenja-loving sons, ages 9 months to 5 years) and help me wade through the forms I need to fill out for the following academic year, which is why I'm not even starting this till 8:15 pm.

OK, so this has to be fast, as it's basically warm-up writing for the last push on the conference paper tonight and tomorrow before 3 of my last 4 classes of the semester meet on Tuesday and Wednesday. But basically because I have Hawthorne on the brain, I was finding moments in Marshall and Devi that seemed positively Hawthornesque to me. And it got me wondering what Hawthorne would have made of their fiction.

Both Marshall and Devi create memorable characters who are made representative of different groups and situations by the plots of the works they appear in. In The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and Imaginary Maps, at least, both use a semi-omniscient semi-objective third person narrator who's not quite a fully fleshed-out persona, but whose voice is interesting. Both mix historical, political, and psychological insights and write with a sense of the past and its continuing presence that Hawthorne would have found interesting, even if he would have disliked their politics. (I was trying to think of antebellum equivalents--Lydia Maria Child meets Harriet Beecher Stowe meets Margaret Fuller for Devi? William Apess meets Herman Melville meets Martin Delany for Marshall?)

For instance, consider the representation and function of Carnival in CPTP--how might it relate to stories like "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" or sketches like "The Procession of Life"? Or take the haunting of Harriet (mostly by memories from her past) and particularly the last scene we see of her before her presumed suicide--how might it relate to Judge Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables? How might Marshall's technique of jumping from one highly charged tableaux-like scene to the next relate to Hawthorne's similar mode of compression in The Scarlet Letter? Or take Devi's creation of representative female tribal figures like Mary Oraon and Douloti in Imaginary Maps--how might these women compare to Hester, Phoebe, Zenobia, and Miriam?

These are just random examples and not even the best, as my mind is already elsewhere. I'm certainly not trying to build a case for influence on Hawthorne's part or conscious re-vision on Marshall's or Devi's part. I'm just wondering what possibilities open up when you put Hawthorne alongside writers whose politics would absolutely oppose his yet whose narrative strategies and literary techniques can be related to his....

Trauma, Mourning, Marshall, Devi

One of the great things about being an academic is that you can do a lot of work in your head. Say imoto--who I may start referring to here as Giggling Science Girl (because she giggles at the drop of the hat and has amazing powers of concentration and observation for an 8-month-old) or Standing-Already Girl (uh, thinking through the Morrison reference there, that would be a no) or maybe just Grabby Girl (nothing is safe from her now that she can crawl and sometimes half-stand half-balance on chairs and small tables or the kotatsu I love to work on because it's heated)--wakes you up at 2 am, but it's too cold in the house to seriously contemplate getting out of bed and firing up the computer, the space heater, and the kotatsu, yet in the time it took to change her diaper and go to the bathroom the cold woke you up enough to get you thinking about everything you have to do the next day, so rather than aimlessly stressing, you can do something productive like come up with an outline for the conference paper you've been working on.

Normally I don't outline when I write. I write down a lot of notes and do a lot of brainstorming by hand, then type them and key notes from my research process into a Word document, type out some key quotations I know I want to use in the paper, and agonize over my introductory paragraph or three until I feel some confidence about my thesis, and then start into the body. When I start again the next day, I edit what I wrote to get warmed up, then pick up where I left off. This process continues until I finish the first draft. Then the serious editing starts. But more on my inefficient and time-consuming writing process later.

For this paper, however, I have to be much more disciplined than usual. Here's what the panel looks like:

Friday
Time: 3:00 - 4:30 PM 1/12/2007 Room: Waikiki III (Marriott)
Session Topic: Postcolonial Identities
Session Chair: Waggaman, Beatrice

Decolonization and Surrealism in Aimé Césaire’s Two Plays: "A Season in the Congo" and "Tragedy of King Christophe”
Waggaman, Beatrice Villanova University

Literary Vestiges of France in the Mississippi Valley
Metzidakis, Stamos Washington University in Saint Louis

Traumatic Displacements and Militant Mourning: Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and Mahasweta Devi’s “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha”
Simon, Bruce Kyushu University

The Colonial Poems
Puch-Bouwman, Jen The University of the South Pacific

Going third in a 90-minute panel means I have to keep it to 15 minutes, because I can count on the two people ahead of me to go over time (nothing personal, everyone does it) and I don't want the person going last to hate me for the rest of my life.

So here's the outline for the paper:

Outline (15 minutes, 7 pages)
I. Intro (1): key issues, debates, claims
II. Structural Similarities (2): the chart I'm preparing will allow me to do a faster plot summary than usual b/c I'll let my audience read the details
III. Detail Similarities (1): these are bonus details that allow me to clarify I'm not talking about influence and transition into the next, bridge section
IV. Differences (4): summarize via works' different perspectives on and uses of trauma/testimony and mourning/melancholia, using chart and quotes handouts--again, I can let my audience read the details, so I can keep this short
V. Significance of Intertextual Dialogue (3): I can use this section to spell out what I mean by "traumatic displacements" and "militant mourning" and make a case for the theoretical significance of the two works
VI. Stakes of Dialogue (3): the two works together provide a meeting-space for thinking through key issues facing activists and intellectuals today--a space for debate not consensus
VII. Conclusion (1): implications for postcolonial studies, black studies, marxism

Well, this is probably meaningless to anyone but me, but I did promise I'd give the update on the conference paper today. Little did I know when I made the promise that our flight leaves 6 am tomorrow morning, which means we have to get up at 4:30 am, or that the three-year-old's formal photos we put off taking until today would be a two-hour extravaganza, complete with hair (lots of it), make-up (lipstick only!), costumes (kimono and yellow princess dress), and lighting--or that the process would be so fascinating and horrifying at the same time that I had to get it all down on video"tape" and thus would be unable to do any real thinking about the paper during it--or that it would go on so long I'd have little time to write this evening. Long story short, it's time to put the girls to bed! Next post from Kyushu!

The Hobgoblin of Little Minds, Hester Prynne, and Student Cheating

Since BikeProf was nice enough to devote a post to CitizenSE, I want to say a word or two about the post that made me decide to put The Hobgoblin of Little Minds on my blogroll. In it, he describes the confrontation with a student other students of his had accused of cheating on the final exam for the course he was teaching. Over the course of the conversation he starts feeling more and more like Roger Chillingworth or Governor Bellingham from The Scarlet Letter (assuming they had the capacity to recognize that they might be judging Hester just a little harshly). Was the student just guilt-tripping him? Or was she guilty? His title, "The Opacity of Truth," says it all. I encourage my readers to put their two cents in on his blog (but read the earlier posts, too). I have three cents (or is that six?).

I don't give final exams in most of my classes to avoid this problem. You can look at my syllabi for the rationale and for the way I typically handle assessment in my classes (profile-->web site for those who need the direction)--I don't have time today to write about it. So if a problem comes up for me it has to do with plagiarism. But forcing students to formulate their own final project and check in with me at various stages tends to cut down on the opportunities for this. It's time-consuming to meet and correspond with my 70-100 students per semester to make this work, but the students generally do better work and you can really tell who's fired up about it and who's just checking it in. I've taught well over a thousand students and graded more than six thouand papers and only had to deal with a handful of plagiarism issues. I wonder what other people's experience has been?

I've thus experienced the pleasures of plagiarism mainly vicariously. The personal part has been the pleasures of wrangling as a department and university over how to stop it. Topics for future posts. Maybe I can get my fantasy football buddy to guest blog here, too. He has the worst two cases I've ever heard of and they both happened the first semester he escaped from adjunct hell and began to enjoy life as a tenure-track professor. Two stories from grad school I can pass on, though. Student walks into professor's office and says, "The grade on this paper is unacceptable." The professor, an earnest young tenure-tracker, agrees and launches into an explanation of what went wrong and how to improve it when the student interrupts and says coldly, "You don't understand. I said, this grade is unacceptable." The professor is taken aback and speechless for a moment (must have been a priceless moment if you happen to know the guy!). The student continues, "My father is a very important donor to this campus...." but before he can finish his tirade the professor kicks him out of his office. The next day, he worries that he just ended a heretofore promising career and goes to his chair for advice. The chair says not to worry and calls the alumni giving office to see just how important a donor the dad really is. The answer comes back, "Just six figures. Expendable." End of story 1. Story 2 is simpler, and I think just as true. A rumor was going around that a student turned in a senior thesis but left the receipt in it. Heh. The Ivy League. You gotta love it!

My third comment is simply to note that in The Scarlet Letter Hester's pregnancy is irrefutable evidence of her having had sex, so the case is somewhat different from BikeProf's. But given that her husband was missing and presumed dead--and that Mr. Prynne (i.e., Roger Chillingworth, or am I making an unwarranted assumption that Hester took and kept his name?) never came forward to prove otherwise--my students and I this semester were a bit confused as to why she was accused and convicted of adultery. I know as a responsible professor I should have looked this up, but for American Puritans did adultery include having a child out of wedlock? Yeesh, you'd think I'd have a good answer to that already....

May I add that right now the Spider-Man villain is winning out over Emerson as my mental image of BikeProf? How bad is it that ads for Spider-Man 3 here in Chiba are more influential than "Self-Reliance"?