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.

Unexpectedly (but Happily) NOT the Norovirus

Or if it was the norovirus onechan has one heck of an immune system. In any case, she's back, better than ever. Her recovery started in the doctor's office kinoo and she'll be ready for school ashita. Back to Hawthorne blogging then, too.

Close Reading the Norovirus?

Try as I might, I don't have the tools to read onechan's symptoms closely enough to determine if she has food poisoning, a minor stomach bug, or the dreaded norovirus. In any case, I'm taking time off from CitizenSE until we've determined what she has and perhaps even sampled its yucky delights on our own. Because if it is what we fear it is, the next few days will not be fun.

On Dan McCall and CitizenSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.