Jee Yoon Lee on the Oriental Hester

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have Some Fun While I'm in Sendai

Hey kids, you know I'm feeling good about this Saturday's almost-finished talk when I was confident enough this afternoon to interrupt my final edits for a half an hour to announce this contest over at Mostly Harmless. Figure some of the literary/theoretical folks on the CitizenSE blogroll might enjoy taking part in an effort to produce the best parody of Hilton Kramer blaming postmodernism for the Bush administration--or more generally the best parody of a Bush administration dead-ender trying to come up with a fig leaf for finally jumping ship. Betcha ya didn't know Hawthorne would approve of such a contest....

Why, Indeed?

Yes, well, given that I have a draft due tomorrow (late, of course), the final version due Thursday evening (even later) and the talk in Sendai on Saturday (how did March 3 come so soon?!), don't expect me to be blogging much this week, either. But what I can do is try to explain what an antebellum (and earlier) U.S. literature specialist is doing participating in a lecture series sponsored by the Tohoku Association for American Studies on "The United States of America: Its Present and Future," talking about "The End of the American Century in Contemporary U.S. Literatures."

Here's the abstract for the talk:

My talk surveys the ways in which nine contemporary American women novelists have represented and reimagined new world slavery, borders, and history. In it, I show how Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison have renavigated Atlantic slavery; how Gloria Anzaldua, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Karen Tei Yamashita have remapped North American borders, and how Maryse Conde, Bharati Mukherjee, and Octavia Butler have rewritten "American" history. At stake in these efforts, I argue, is more than a reconsideration of the American literary canon or the relationships among U.S. literatures. It is, more crucially, a break with the assumptions of the American Century and the first steps toward a transnational, postcolonial history of the Americas, and the world, since Columbus.

First obvious connection to my writing on this blog: Paule Marshall and Toni Morrison.

Second obvious connection: "postcolonial."

Third, less obvious (unless you've checked out my home page), connection: the talks and teaching I've done, conveniently summarized for you on my c.v..

What do these suggest? That in my teaching and research, I am about as familiar with the not-quite-latest U.S. literatures as I am with the not-quite-earliest, if not with the scholarship (much less the bloggership) on the former. That I particularly like to write and teach about the ways in which recent U.S. literatures establish dialogues with older literatures and histories. And that this talk is something of an attempt to convey to a general audience why they should be as interested as I am in the authors and issues I address in it.

Part of the impetus for the talk also comes from my (admittedly limited) knowledge of the American literary canon in Japanese universities, which I addressed a bit in terms of Hawthorne not that many posts ago. From what I've seen, there isn't much interest in teaching American literature after modernism, or, to hedge my bets a bit, that there are far more resources devoted to pre-1960 than post-1960 U.S. literatures. And that even in the post-1960 courses, there's less attention paid to the "multicultural" and "multiethnic" dimensions of contemporary American literary culture in Japan than in the U.S. So part of what I want to accomplish in the talk is get my audience excited about nine fairly recent women novelists who I believe represent a new trend, if not quite a new movement, in American literature today, and do my little part to help expand and rethink the Japanese American literary canon.

But part of the impetus also comes from the ways in which received notions of identity politics (as always-already essentialist, exclusionary, divisive, cooptable, opposed to class politics, etc.) have affected reactions to these and other writers in the U.S. and Japan. That is, I've seen a tendency among some contemporary and twentieth-century Americanists to deploy this negative sense of identity politics to delineate an emerging post-1960 U.S. literary canon that purportedly avoids its traps. Writers like Bellow, DeLillo, Doctorow, Mailer, Nabokov, Pynchon, Roth, and Updike are in for their virtuosity, longevity, ability to contain multitudes in their fiction, and so on, while non-white-male authors' fame rests on their not being white males more than on their talents. According to my colleague Adrienne McCormick, you can see similar moves in poetry criticism in the 1970s through 1990s, as well, particularly criticism that attempts to differentiate theoretical from multicultural/multiethnic poetry and valorize the former. So what I want to try to get at in my talk is where I see the nine non-white, non-male writers I'm focusing on differing from this admittedly rear-guard effort to establish a "traditional" post-1960s U.S. literary canon--and to do so in formal, thematic, and political terms. Ultimately, I want to suggest that the attempt to establish a "traditional" post-1960 U.S. novel canon is itself a kind of identity politics, and that we need a different way of demarcating "periods" in the post-WW II U.S. novel than those that received notions of identity politics tend to provide us with.

This is where my title's invocation of "The End of the American Century" comes in. I want to argue in my talk that we can identify a period in U.S. literatures that runs from, say, 1945-1995, which I'll call "The American Century." And that the novelists I'm focusing on, whose works span roughly 1965 to the present, are in some ways posing an alternative to the novels of the American Century and in other ways part of an emerging period that I at first thought to call "The Atlantic Century" but have since decided not to attempt to give a name to it (with the Black Atlantic and the Asian Pacific being so popular, and no clear sense of how long this new period will last, as it's still ongoing, "Atlantic Century" seemed wrong on many counts). "New World Literature" springs to mind, as well, but it's still not very good. Anyway, my point is not names but what it means to be writing from within the American Century (even if you're writing against its assumptions) and what it means to stop writing from within it.

More on this...later.

What Would Hawthorne Say About a Two-Week Blog Hiatus?

Not much. Nothing compared to the dents on his writing schedule caused by Brook Farm or his various political appointments. Don't sweat it. (He'd probably appreciate the irony that CitizenSE's average daily hit count didn't decline all that much over the past two weeks, as well.)

Mrs. Hutchinson, Anyone? Or, Another View of Amanda

Shorter "What Would Hawthorne Say About L'Affaire Marcotte?":

Conclusion 1: The Latter-Day Puritanism of the right-wing critics of John Edwards's new bloggers (ably led by such fair and balanced sources as Michelle Malkin and Bill Donohue), with their attempts to affix such scarlet letters as AC (anti-Catholic), IH (intolerant hypocrite), and PM (potty mouth) to them, are part of a long-standing yet ever-more-efficient smear machine of "public women" (cf. Anita Hill, Lani Guinier, Patricia Williams....);

Conclusion 2: The Concern Trolling stance taken in the course of the national media's transmission of the right-wing noise machine (in such beacons of journalistic integrity and quality as The New York Times and Time) are a repetition of Hawthorne's narrators' strategies of representing Anne Hutchinson in "Mrs. Hutchinson" and Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter;

Conclusion 3: Lauren Berlant's analysis of the "Another View of Hester" chapter of Hawthorne's novel in The Anatomy of National Fantasy suggests that, as easily mockable as both Greater Wingnuttia and the corporate media are, the traditions they are drawing on run all the way back to the antinomian crisis, if not further, so we need to call attention to this bigger picture as we continue to beat down the manufactured scandal du jour.

Now to see about recovering the original post that new Blogger ate when I tried to save it!

Reading Hawthorne in Meiji Japan

I recently came across a great little collection of essays and stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Introduction of an American Author's Work into Japan, which was a 1993 production of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society of Japan and the Peabody Essex Museum of Salem, MA. Its aims are modest but the possibilities it opens up are endless. Consider its answers to the following basic but crucial questions:

1) When were Hawthorne's works first imported into Japan and translated into Japanese?

The short answer is, in the last years of the Tokugawa period and the first years of the Meiji period, as Japan was opening to the world after centuries of seclusion.

Frederic Scharf focuses on the work of what became the Maruzen Company, Ltd., in importing Western books into Japan from 1869 to the present, but notes that Meiji government employees, Japanese students who studied in the West, and Western missionaries (who started arriving in Japan in 1859 although they weren't allowed to proselytize until 1873) also brought significant libraries with them upon their return or entry into Japan. He focuses on the influence of Peter Parley's Universal History, a textbook on world history Hawthorne co-wrote with his sister Elizabeth (although, as Fumio Ano points out, it took until the mid-20th C before a consensus was established among Japanese scholars, editors, and translators that Hawthorne was indeed the [co-]author).

Like Scharf, Ano notes that Yukichi Fukuzawa, mentor to the founder of Maruzen, was the first to bring a copy of Peter Parley's Universal History to Japan in 1867. He adds that selections from it were first translated into Japanese in 1871, but it wasn't until 1876 that an unabridged translation was produced. By the 1880s and 1890s, various works of Hawthorne's and biographical sketches of his life were appearing in textbooks and encyclopedias either imported into or produced in Japan. Women's Magazine began translating selected Hawthorne tales between 1889 and 1894, and other magazines like Waseda Literature, A Companion to the People, and New Magazine, as well as newspapers like Yomiuri and Kokumin, joined in during this time. However, The Scarlet Letter was not translated into Japanese until 1903, and the rest of Hawthorne's novels had to wait until what Ano calls the Hawthorne Renaissance that began around the centenary of his death: The House of the Seven Gables in 1964, The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun in 1984, and Fanshawe in 1990.

This was almost all news to me. Of course there are many books out there that provide better contexts on "the opening of Japan" (more comprehensive, less coded about the global politics of the late 19th C), but I simply hadn't looked into what those contexts meant for those who wanted to read Hawthorne in Japan, either in English or in translation. The level of detail in the book will likely appeal only to hard-core Hawthornists, but anyone who's interested in translation, interculturalism, globalization, colonialism, and the spread of English and of literature in English could find much of interest and use.

2) Why did Hawthorne's work enter Japan at this time?

Ano argues that "Hawthorne as an author was brought into the country almost solely as a vehicle for the adoption of English" during "one of the most agitated periods in the history of Japan," when those interested in modernizing Japan "used the advanced countries of the West as [their] models" in an effort to "imitate and assimilate Western culture."

Scharf agrees but emphasizes multiple motives among multiple actors. "One needs to view the initiation and development of the Maruya business of importing foreign books both in its educational context and as an integral part of Japan's clear objective of attaining equality as a participant in international trade," he emphasizes at one point in his essay. But he also notes that

The works of Nathaniel Hawthorne were especially well suited to the goals of the missionary agenda. They could be read as a means of learning rudimentary world history (Peter Parley's Universal History was definitely chosen for this purpose). They could also be utilized as English reading lessons (his stories were included in such series as Swinton's Reader). Even the missionary activities could benefit from the works of Hawthorne since they could be construed to be suffused with a morality that was essentially Christian.

David Cody also emphasizes the official effort to "open" Japan "to certain Western influences (including literature, to some degree) in order that it might achieve military, industrial, and material equality with the Western powers." He quotes Shinichiro Noriguchi's claim from 1966 that

"portions of Hawthorne's works often appear as part of English examinations for entry into Japanese universities" because "English teachers in Japan regard his works as ideal material for reading comprehension," and because his style "is based on the traditional English grammar, which Japanese students are required to study. In addition, educators hope to cultivate their students' insight into human existence, which Hawthorne treats both profoundly and symbolically."

But Cody also notes that

The fact that this apparently limpid, neoclassical prose style concealed or permitted so much complexity and obscurity--so many difficulties and ambiguities--may have delayed the appearance of his works in Japanese, for the authorities [i.e., the Japanese scholars' whose work he's relying on] agree that his work was not read for its literary qualities until much later [than the Meiji period], ostensibly because it seemed too gloomy for Japanese tastes, was too much concerned with religious matters, and, interestingly, seemed too "difficult" to translate.

Again, the trends and variety and consequences of Meiji Japan's reasons for responding to Hawthorne were pretty much all news to me. Clearly there's much more that has been done--and to be done--on the politics of English language and American literature in Meiji Japan than in this book, but there are literally dozens of research projects suggested by these answers alone.

3) What was the early Hawthorne canon in Japan and how has it changed?

Ano and Cody agree that the early Japanese Hawthorne canon was very different from the post-1964 canon. Of the 49 Hawthorne tales translated during the Meiji period into Japanese, almost three quarters were selected from Twice-Told Tales, with "David Swan," "Fancy's Show Box," "The Great Stone Face," and "The Ambitious Guest" being most-often translated between 1889 and 1967. Both note that the kinds of stories I prioritized in my own top 10 Hawthorne lists went largely untranslated during this period. Cody concludes, "readers in Japan and America have differed in their sense of the relative importance of various works, although of late there has been a convergence of critical interest."

He also speculates that in addition to providing insight into world literature, Western thought, and American literature and history, Japanese readers may continue to be drawn into Hawthorne's works because his sensibilities "might have much in common with attitudes and affinities--spiritual or psychological--that we might think of as being traditionally Japanese"; his "interest in masks and outer appearances"; his "preoccupation with his ancestors, and the mingled sense of pride, duty, guilt, and resentment that characterized his attitude toward them"; and his "plight as a man both fascinated and repulsed by his immersion in the older, alien cultures that made it increasingly difficult for him to retain his sense of personal identity" in his years abroad in England and Italy.

Just getting your head around the pre-1964 Hawthorne canon in Japan is a major endeavor, so I won't comment on what fuels the post-1964 Hawthorne Renaissance. I do wonder if the contributors to this book are taking too much for granted about the institutionalization of Hawthorne in the U.S., not to mention the institutionalization of American literature. Millicent Bell, for instance, has pointed out that one way of understanding the perennial "Hawthorne problem" is in terms of gender: Hawthorne's career was aided by female critics like Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller, and he wrote many of his sketches and some of his tales precisely to reach the female audiences that "the damned mob of scribbling women" were reaching so successfully in his times, yet he also wrote the "dark" tales that writers like Herman Melville praised so effusively in "Hawthorne and His Mosses" and that later critics have come to value as his most important work. Which raises the question of what the Hawthorne canon looked like in the U.S. between 1868 and 1912. This seems to me the most relevant comparison to the Meiji-era Hawthorne canon. The fact that Sophia and Julian were doing all they could to shape public images of Hawthorne and his works during this time is worth considering, as are the racial politics of Civil War, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction America. I focus more on the latter in my dissertation, on which I'll blog later. Maybe much later.

The existence and stakes of a post-1964 gradual convergence in U.S. and Japanese Hawthorne studies are also worth exploring. This actually ties into a future research project of mine that I'll write about this Saturday if the musume futari's cousins allow me computer time at baba and gigi's place in Chiba. If I do get to that, I might also have time to throw out a few thoughts on an editing project that just occurred to me, as well, stemming from one of my frustrations with the book--that Cody's essay focuses on Japanese Hawthorne scholarship in English.

4) Which Meiji-era Japanese writers responded to Hawthorne's works in their own fiction and drama?

Ano points to Koshoshi Miyazaki (the novels White Clouds/Hakuun, 1887; Confession/Jihaku, 1908), the social reformer Naoe Kinoshita, Soseki Natsume (the novels Sanshiro, 1908; And Then/Sorekara, 1909; The Gate/Mon, 1910), and Shoyo Tsubouchi (the one-act play A Dream of a Millionaire/Aru Fugo no Yume, 1920) in his essay.

Sounds like I have some reading to do between semesters!

Speaking of which, I'm taking tomorrow off to turn in my grades for the fall 2006 semester--yeah! Next time from Chiba, then.

And Now, By (an Absolute Lack of) Popular Demand...

...here's some more Mooninite blogging!

Shorter "The Devil in Manuscript": Artist's work blows up Boston. Who'da thunk it?

Shorter "A Virtuoso's Collection": E-Bay enthusiast shows off Lite Brite Mooninite he bought for a mere $2,147.69, among other detritus of American pop culture he's accumulated over his suspiciously long life. Just who is this guy?

Shorter "A Rill from the Town-Pump": Unconsciously self-parodying monologue from a 21st-C reformer who wants to ban guerrilla marketing. Because it's all about the temperance, baby!

Shorter "The Birth-mark": In attempting to remove the Mooninite Lite Brite arrays marring the fair face of Boston, and purge the nation of the trash culture that produced and enabled Aqua Teen Hunger Force, liberal homeland security hawks, the anti-corporate left, and wingnuts-in-training band together to purify American culture, which dies and goes to heaven thanking them for their efforts. "Was it all worth it?" those left behind are compelled to wonder.

Shorter "The May-pole of Merry Mount": In which the narrator appends a prefatory note stating that "the grave pages of our New England annalists the great pages of Blogoramaville have wrought themselves, almost spontaneously, into a sort of allegory," suggests in the tale's opening that "Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire," and proceeds to tell a satirical version of Paradise Lost and Comus that turns into a parody of the Mooninite blogspat and the larger culture wars of which it is a part. Features passages like this:

In due time, a feud arose, stern and bitter on one side, and as serious on the other as any thing could be among such light spirits as had sworn allegiance to the May-pole. 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.

A mock on both your houses? Or a subtle questioning of the terms of the framing of the event? You make the call!

Shorter "Main-street": A blogger trying to produce an amusing yet significant history of L'Affaire Mooninite is forced to give up the effort when inundated by commenters questioning his methods and motives so voluminously that his site crashes.

Add the first on this list to your own list of Dan McCall's thought crimes, for his mention of "The Devil in Manuscript" in Citizens of Somewhere Else sparked it, so to speak. The rest are entirely my own responsibility, I'm sorry to say. And I can't guarantee that I'm done with this....

BTW, if you think you're going to get a Close Reading Tuesday post after this unprecedented two-a-day, well, just keep hoping!