So, I've been wondering how the Cliopatricians would like my submission to their Jamestown 2007 symposium, given its unconventional format. Well, it appears Ralph Luker likes it just fine, even if he links to the group blog I'm on leave from rather than CitizenSE.
Oh, and 458. If you read the comments there, you'll get all the in-jokes in my title. Among other things.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
This Is SO Not a Post
Just a link to Scott McLemee's link to Robert Pinsky emceeing The Colbert Report's tribute to National Poetry Month: Meta-Free-Phor-All. Close readings encouraged.
Oh, and 354.
Oh, and 354.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
This, Too, Will Not Have Been a Post
It's really just an update on Scott Eric Kaufman's blogwide strike action and a link to my contribution to Cliopatria's Jamestown 2007 symposium, which, as it turns out, is comment #301 out of the 500 needed to bring Acephalous back. If this is somehow accepted into the symposium, I implore any new visitors to CitizenSE to reply to my ideas on Scott's comment thread, at least until we get him blogging again. Thanks!
[Update 5/8/07: Professor Ahmed has graciously given us all an extension. I pledge, however, that even if that Acephalous thread were to reach 500 approved comments before noon May 10 (my time), I will continue to insist that my submission is on that thread.]
[Update 5/8/07: Professor Ahmed has graciously given us all an extension. I pledge, however, that even if that Acephalous thread were to reach 500 approved comments before noon May 10 (my time), I will continue to insist that my submission is on that thread.]
Saturday, May 05, 2007
This Is Not a Post
It's just a number: 155. Or rather, more than 345 to go.
My latest crazy idea is that anyone reading this non-post click on the link above and get Scott Eric Kaufman blogging again. He's writing on Wharton and listening to Asia, people. We need to stage a blogoramawide intervention. Asia!
This is a crisis that makes CitizenSE's first troll being a white supremacist insignificant (check out the comments on yesterday's post if you wish--I pledged not to delete his there so long as he doesn't delete mine on his).
End non-post. Back to bloggy solidarity.
My latest crazy idea is that anyone reading this non-post click on the link above and get Scott Eric Kaufman blogging again. He's writing on Wharton and listening to Asia, people. We need to stage a blogoramawide intervention. Asia!
This is a crisis that makes CitizenSE's first troll being a white supremacist insignificant (check out the comments on yesterday's post if you wish--I pledged not to delete his there so long as he doesn't delete mine on his).
End non-post. Back to bloggy solidarity.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
One Hundredth Verse Not Unlike the First
Well, well, well, CitizenSE has reached the century mark (in posts). Consider this an open call to anyone out there who wants to guest post or regularly blog on the matter of Hawthorne. I want to finish CitizenSE's second century faster than it took to close out the first!
In fact, though, this post isn't about Hawthorne at all. It's about a book/daddy post reviewing Jon Clinch's first novel, Finn, which, as the title suggests, reimagines the life of Huck's "Pap." And it's about the opportunity it provides me with to give you a preview of my American Adam and whiteness chapter from my book manuscript! Here 'tis--I think you'll see why I desperately want to read Clinch's novel after you read the book/daddy review and this post--and get a better sense of where I disagree with Arac's reading of AHF as a literary narrative drafted into a Cold War liberal nationalist project.
***
The fact that both Tom and Huck assume that they are at fault for attempting to “steal” Jim out of slavery, the narrative of white resentment at black liberation, and the equation between African Americans’ emancipation and avoidance of work that are implicit in the evasion scene are all prominent features of Pap Finn’s infamous diatribe:
On the one hand, Pap sounds like a pro-slavery Southern secessionist: “Sometimes I’ve a mighty notion to just leave the country for good and all. . . . Says I, for two cents I’d leave the blamed country and never come anear it agin.” His complaint that, “A man can’t get his rights in a govment like this” is not only over his custody battles with Judge Thatcher and Huck’s six thousand dollars; it is also over his status as a white man. Because Pap assumes that the government’s role is to maintain white racial status and privilege through protection of the right to hold property in slaves, he sees any incidence of black freedom as a direct attack on white rights. Furthermore, his association of black freedom and black criminality--“a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger”--is itself an ironic confirmation of the anti-slavery notion that the only way out of slavery was to “steal away” even as it enacts the pro-slavery logic that to escape from slavery is to steal yourself (not to mention a foreshadowing of the novel’s end).
Yet there is a more specific context for Pap’s particular configuration of class and racial resentments than the antebellum South. As Eric Sundquist explains, “In the figure of Huck Finn’s father, [Clemens] had, in fact, already painted his darkest portrait of the crude, illiterate white racist authorized by the disfranchisement decisions to vote at the expense of qualified black (male) voters.” Indeed, Mark Twain’s staging of Pap’s diatribe is one of the first analyses of the way that the figure of the black “fop” was used to mobilize racial resentments in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in order to constitute a segregated society. Where the figure of the black rapist signified the inherent savagery of freedmen no longer under the control of the plantation system, the black “fop” signified the inability of African Americans to fit into white civilization and implied that their striving for higher education was motivated by sheer laziness—a desire to shirk work. Pap’s diatribe, however, shows that it was not the failure of freedmen to “become civilized” that so enraged racists; rather, it was precisely African Americans’ success that led to resentment and calls for government protection of white rights.
It bears repeating that Clemens is not simply mocking “white trash” in this passage. That is to say, more is at stake in Pap’s diatribe than his individual ideas, beliefs, opinions, and prejudices--or even the fact of their prevalence among many of his peers. As James Cox reminds us, the point of reading this passage should not be to join in the “self-indulgent public emphasis on the negative character of Pap in order to expose his bigotry to the lash of criticism”--self-indulgent, that is, because after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, most white readers have learned to dissociate themselves from this kind of public expression of overt racism. The idiosyncrasy of Cox’s warning to contemporary readers and critics should not obscure his point about the dangers of treating racism as something out there, as something we have gotten beyond, as somebody else’s problem, as the exclusive property, that is, of “white trash.” Yet Cox’s reading, in its effort to criticize Clemens’s liberal elitism and our contemporary “complacency,” underplays the violence of night riders and the Klan, the virulence of lynching and race riots, the force of mob rule, the extent to which Pap’s views were shared in the North as well as the South (and disseminated by a calculatedly racist media), and, most important, the consistent attack on African Americans’ rights by the Supreme Court, as well as federal and state governments, even before the 1877 Compromise that ended Reconstruction. In other words, as Mark Twain was composing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, calls like Pap’s for state protection of white privilege were being answered; or, more precisely, the state’s interventions were made in the name of people like Pap. In this climate, Clemens’s biting burlesque may well have been the most effective way of foregrounding the widespread investments in Pap’s racism.
To put this point more strongly, Mark Twain’s aim is precisely not to single Pap out unfairly; on the contrary, Clemens makes Pap a representative American man. Recall that Pap’s diatribe is introduced by an apparently off-handed joke by Huck and ends with an apparently inadvertent fall. Upon seeing Pap, Huck jokes to himself, “he had been drunk over in town, and laid in the gutter all night, and he was a sight to look at. A body would a thought he was Adam, he was just all mud.” Not only does Pap, before he begins speaking, remind Huck of Adam, he also reenacts the Fall in the midst of his tirade: “Pap was agoing on so, he never noticed where his old limber legs was taking him to, so he went head over heels over the tub of salt pork, and barked both shins.” Clemens here superimposes the issue of racism on what R.W.B. Lewis has identified as an “emergent American myth” in nineteenth-century U.S. culture. This myth of the American Adam
In effect, Mark Twain uses this myth of the American Adam to comment on what he correctly identified in the early 1880s as a major turning point in American history. Clemens ironically portrays Pap as “a new kind of hero” for post-Reconstruction America--yet he reverses the value of every attribute that the myth of the American Adam affirms. Pap is ignorant of history and jealously protective of the privileges of ancestry, family, and race he fears are being eroded; he portrays himself as self-reliantly standing alone, but is actually appealing to the state. Clemens aims to dramatize the racism and the state investments underlying rugged individualism, as well as to show his contemporaries that rolling back Reconstruction would not produce “a divinely granted second chance for the [white] race.” In short, by implying that Pap is an American Adam, Mark Twain places racism at the very heart of nineteenth-century America. His American Adam is a white supremacist.
***
Well, there you have it. 100 posts down. How many more to go before the manuscript is done? Before the book is out?
[Update: Well, having finished two posts in less than 45 minutes here at little 'ol CitizenSE, what do I find out when I visit one of my favorite large mammals (that is, if TTLB isn't screwing with his numbers as bad as it's been messing with mine!) has called for a blogwide strike. In solidarity with Scott Eric Kaufman, then, I will not post here until he gets his 500th comment and is forced to write a post on the topic of the commenter's choice. And my first post will be a response to his that somehow brings Hawthorne in while still adhering to my programming schedule. Oh, and I tried to start a pool on date/time and topic for his first post back. It's only a quarter stake, people, so hop to it. I've got May 12 @ 3:45 pm and "explanation of strike."]
In fact, though, this post isn't about Hawthorne at all. It's about a book/daddy post reviewing Jon Clinch's first novel, Finn, which, as the title suggests, reimagines the life of Huck's "Pap." And it's about the opportunity it provides me with to give you a preview of my American Adam and whiteness chapter from my book manuscript! Here 'tis--I think you'll see why I desperately want to read Clinch's novel after you read the book/daddy review and this post--and get a better sense of where I disagree with Arac's reading of AHF as a literary narrative drafted into a Cold War liberal nationalist project.
***
The fact that both Tom and Huck assume that they are at fault for attempting to “steal” Jim out of slavery, the narrative of white resentment at black liberation, and the equation between African Americans’ emancipation and avoidance of work that are implicit in the evasion scene are all prominent features of Pap Finn’s infamous diatribe:
“Call this a govment! why, just look at it and see what it’s like. Here’s the law a-standing ready to take a man’s son away from him. . . . That ain’t all, nuther. The law backs Judge Thatcher up and helps him to keep me out o’ my property. . . .
“Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there, from Ohio, a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane--the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? they said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could vote, when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was ’lection day, and I was just about to go and vote, myself, if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin. Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me--I’ll never vote again as long as I live. And to see the cool way of that nigger--why, he wouldn’t a give me the road if I hadn’t shoved him out o’ the way. I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold?--that’s what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn’t be sold till he’d been in the State for six months, and he hadn’t been there that long yet. There now--that’s a specimen. They call that a govment that can’t sell a free nigger till he’s been in the State six months. Here’s a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it is a govment, and yet’s got to set stock-still for six whole months before it can take ahold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger. . . .”
On the one hand, Pap sounds like a pro-slavery Southern secessionist: “Sometimes I’ve a mighty notion to just leave the country for good and all. . . . Says I, for two cents I’d leave the blamed country and never come anear it agin.” His complaint that, “A man can’t get his rights in a govment like this” is not only over his custody battles with Judge Thatcher and Huck’s six thousand dollars; it is also over his status as a white man. Because Pap assumes that the government’s role is to maintain white racial status and privilege through protection of the right to hold property in slaves, he sees any incidence of black freedom as a direct attack on white rights. Furthermore, his association of black freedom and black criminality--“a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger”--is itself an ironic confirmation of the anti-slavery notion that the only way out of slavery was to “steal away” even as it enacts the pro-slavery logic that to escape from slavery is to steal yourself (not to mention a foreshadowing of the novel’s end).
Yet there is a more specific context for Pap’s particular configuration of class and racial resentments than the antebellum South. As Eric Sundquist explains, “In the figure of Huck Finn’s father, [Clemens] had, in fact, already painted his darkest portrait of the crude, illiterate white racist authorized by the disfranchisement decisions to vote at the expense of qualified black (male) voters.” Indeed, Mark Twain’s staging of Pap’s diatribe is one of the first analyses of the way that the figure of the black “fop” was used to mobilize racial resentments in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in order to constitute a segregated society. Where the figure of the black rapist signified the inherent savagery of freedmen no longer under the control of the plantation system, the black “fop” signified the inability of African Americans to fit into white civilization and implied that their striving for higher education was motivated by sheer laziness—a desire to shirk work. Pap’s diatribe, however, shows that it was not the failure of freedmen to “become civilized” that so enraged racists; rather, it was precisely African Americans’ success that led to resentment and calls for government protection of white rights.
It bears repeating that Clemens is not simply mocking “white trash” in this passage. That is to say, more is at stake in Pap’s diatribe than his individual ideas, beliefs, opinions, and prejudices--or even the fact of their prevalence among many of his peers. As James Cox reminds us, the point of reading this passage should not be to join in the “self-indulgent public emphasis on the negative character of Pap in order to expose his bigotry to the lash of criticism”--self-indulgent, that is, because after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, most white readers have learned to dissociate themselves from this kind of public expression of overt racism. The idiosyncrasy of Cox’s warning to contemporary readers and critics should not obscure his point about the dangers of treating racism as something out there, as something we have gotten beyond, as somebody else’s problem, as the exclusive property, that is, of “white trash.” Yet Cox’s reading, in its effort to criticize Clemens’s liberal elitism and our contemporary “complacency,” underplays the violence of night riders and the Klan, the virulence of lynching and race riots, the force of mob rule, the extent to which Pap’s views were shared in the North as well as the South (and disseminated by a calculatedly racist media), and, most important, the consistent attack on African Americans’ rights by the Supreme Court, as well as federal and state governments, even before the 1877 Compromise that ended Reconstruction. In other words, as Mark Twain was composing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, calls like Pap’s for state protection of white privilege were being answered; or, more precisely, the state’s interventions were made in the name of people like Pap. In this climate, Clemens’s biting burlesque may well have been the most effective way of foregrounding the widespread investments in Pap’s racism.
To put this point more strongly, Mark Twain’s aim is precisely not to single Pap out unfairly; on the contrary, Clemens makes Pap a representative American man. Recall that Pap’s diatribe is introduced by an apparently off-handed joke by Huck and ends with an apparently inadvertent fall. Upon seeing Pap, Huck jokes to himself, “he had been drunk over in town, and laid in the gutter all night, and he was a sight to look at. A body would a thought he was Adam, he was just all mud.” Not only does Pap, before he begins speaking, remind Huck of Adam, he also reenacts the Fall in the midst of his tirade: “Pap was agoing on so, he never noticed where his old limber legs was taking him to, so he went head over heels over the tub of salt pork, and barked both shins.” Clemens here superimposes the issue of racism on what R.W.B. Lewis has identified as an “emergent American myth” in nineteenth-century U.S. culture. This myth of the American Adam
saw life and history as just beginning. It described the world as starting up again under fresh initiative, in a divinely granted second chance for the human race, after the first chance had been so disastrously fumbled in the darkening Old World. It introduced a new kind of hero, the heroic embodiment of a new set of ideal human attributes. . . .
The new habits to be engendered on the new American scene were suggested by the image of a radically new personality, the hero of a new adventure: an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources.
In effect, Mark Twain uses this myth of the American Adam to comment on what he correctly identified in the early 1880s as a major turning point in American history. Clemens ironically portrays Pap as “a new kind of hero” for post-Reconstruction America--yet he reverses the value of every attribute that the myth of the American Adam affirms. Pap is ignorant of history and jealously protective of the privileges of ancestry, family, and race he fears are being eroded; he portrays himself as self-reliantly standing alone, but is actually appealing to the state. Clemens aims to dramatize the racism and the state investments underlying rugged individualism, as well as to show his contemporaries that rolling back Reconstruction would not produce “a divinely granted second chance for the [white] race.” In short, by implying that Pap is an American Adam, Mark Twain places racism at the very heart of nineteenth-century America. His American Adam is a white supremacist.
***
Well, there you have it. 100 posts down. How many more to go before the manuscript is done? Before the book is out?
[Update: Well, having finished two posts in less than 45 minutes here at little 'ol CitizenSE, what do I find out when I visit one of my favorite large mammals (that is, if TTLB isn't screwing with his numbers as bad as it's been messing with mine!) has called for a blogwide strike. In solidarity with Scott Eric Kaufman, then, I will not post here until he gets his 500th comment and is forced to write a post on the topic of the commenter's choice. And my first post will be a response to his that somehow brings Hawthorne in while still adhering to my programming schedule. Oh, and I tried to start a pool on date/time and topic for his first post back. It's only a quarter stake, people, so hop to it. I've got May 12 @ 3:45 pm and "explanation of strike."]
On Twain, Arac, and Hypercanonization
Scott and Amanda's posts at The Valve's book event on The Novel of Purpose have inspired me to go back and read Jonathan Arac's Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target from cover to cover. I was struck while reading it at its consistent good sense and effective argumentation, and particularly at how brilliantly Arac compares and contrasts Twain and Stowe in one chapter, Twain and Cooper in another, and Twain and Flaubert in yet another. Yet I must admit to being disappointed he didn't go to Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter or Melville's "Benito Cereno," two other works that were receiving a lot of critical attention from people working in race and American literature in the '90s--and two authors whom he refers to several times as writing literary rather than national narratives mid-century. So in this post I was going to try to fill in some of the gaps in Arac's comparativist approach to Twain. But I had to get caught up on teaching two of my four courses that weren't cancelled despite it being Golden Week here in Japan, dealing with tech gremlins in the office, and recovering from the short trip we took to one of the onsens about an hour outside Fukuoka on Monday. Today we took onechan and imoto to their first amusement park ever and my head is still spinning from the 6 or 8 rides we took on those spinning cups. So on the five minutes before this day is over, let me make just a few points, in bullets.
To be continued! (I hate backdating posts, but had to do it for the second time this week--you'll see why in a second!)
- I love the fact that a senior Americanist tried to write a book for a general audience--and particularly for the mainstream media It's really well written and well organized. Arac saves his most complex and ambitious arguments for his final three chapters, but even at his simplest and most direct, he's making important points about the limitations of AHF in its own time and in ours--and especially the weaknesses of the arguments of those who idolize the novel.
- Still, as an attempt to introduce the debates in the then-relatively-new field of race and American literature to a wider audience, I find the book's limitations a bit annoying. Eric Sundquist's To Wake the Nations had come out years earlier and made a strong case for looking at Pudd'nhead Wilson as Twain's most interesting response to postbellum racial politics; plus his situating of Melville's "Benito Cereno" in the context of hemispheric abolitionist debates provided strong counter-evidence to Arac's characterization of Melville as a writer of literary narrative. Even though Arac gets into transnational contexts for Twain at the end by returning to De Voto's reading of AHF as the novel of the imperialist moment in America, he never gets into Twain's anti-imperial writings of the late-19th century. So there are annoying omissions and gaps.
- Hawthorne presents more problems for Arac's anti-hypercanonization argument, for several reasons. For one, unlike Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter is still taught in high schools and colleges all over the country. Yet rather than fitting Arac's pattern of a literary narrative drafted into the service of Cold War liberal nationalism, Hawthorne's novel was the site of intense political debate since the 1940s--whether over religion, gender, sexuality, race, or nationalism depended on the decade--rather than idolization and defenses against attacks of racism. And Hawthorne's racial politics were a big deal in the last 14 years of his life, from the Compromise of 1850 to the midst of the Civil War. Plus, Eric Cheyfitz had already anticipated many of Arac's arguments in a brilliant essay critical of the two most influential readings of SL in the early 1990s, those by Sacvan Bercovitch and Lauren Berlant. Finally, as I've been arguing here and in my manuscript, Twain is not just messing with Sir Walter Scott in the evasion sequence of AHF; he's also contextualizing the compromise that ended Reconstruction and Hawthorne's literary and racial politics at the same time.
To be continued! (I hate backdating posts, but had to do it for the second time this week--you'll see why in a second!)
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Colonial Spaces in Three Early Hawthorne Tales
If you're less interested in my readings of the wilderness and the desert in "Roger Malvin's Burial," "Wakefield," and "Young Goodman Brown," head on over to WAAGNFNP for my readings of figures for global capitalism in Subcomandante Marcos's "The Southeast in Two Winds: A Storm and a Prophecy" and William Greider's One World, Ready or Not. If not, check out these passages--bonus points to those who can identify the stories from which each comes before I do.
If you guessed that I'd stick to alphabetical (and chronological) order--or if you recognized the passages as Cyrus's daydream not long before his father, Reuben Bourne, accidentally shoots him dead at the same place he left his father-in-law, Roger Malvin, to die decades earlier after a battle with Indians left them both wounded; the narrator's musings on Wakefield, a Londoner who decided one day not to return home to his wife, moved to new dwellings a few blocks away, and stayed there for twenty years before finally returning home; and Young Goodman Brown's arrival at what he takes to be the witches' coven that he had set out into the wilderness to avoid going to, until he was deceived by the devil's illusions into losing faith in his wife Faith--well, good for you.
The reason I collect them here is that they are key moments in Hawthorne's representation of colonial spaces. Later, I'll share my readings of how David Levin, Michael Colacurcio, and Manfred Mackenzie read "Roger Malvin's Burial," how Robert Martin reads "Wakefield," and how Renee Bergland reads "Young Goodman Brown," but for now I want to simply note that Hawthorne consistently represents the new world wilderness in terms colonial Puritans would have been quite familiar with. The narrator in RMB refers to "a region, of which savage beasts and savage men were as yet sole possessors" and calls each of the four main characters of the tale "pilgrims"; both Malvin and Bourne refer to the "howling wilderness." The narator in YGB describes Goodman Brown's journey into the woods as an "errand" and describes the wilderness as "heathen," "dark," "benighted," and "unconverted"; Goodman Brown himself worries that "There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree," he describes himself as having "kept covenant by meeting thee here" when addressing a figure he believes to be the devil and claims, "My father never went into the woods on such a errand, nor his father before him." Even Wakefield's sojourn of a few blocks in London echoes the kind of identity-transforming experiences of Bourne, Brown, Chillingworth, and Hester. I'll pick up where this intro to a close reading leaves off next Tuesday--I've run out of time today!
And the boy dashed one tear-drop from his eye, and thought of the adventurous pleasures of the untrodden forest. Oh! who, in the enthusiasm of a day-dream, has not wished that he were a wanderer in a world of summer wilderness, with one fair and gentle being hanging lightly on his arm? In youth, his free and exulting step would know no barrier but the rolling ocean or the snow-topt mountains; calmer manhood would choose a home, where Nature had strewn a double wealth, in the vale of some transparent stream; and when hoary age, after long, long years of that pure life, stole on and found him there, it would find him the father of a race, the patriarch of a people, the founder of a mighty nation yet to be. When death, like the sweet sleep which we welcome after a day of happiness, came over him, his far descendants would mourn over the venerated dust. Enveloped by tradition in mysterious attributes, the men of future generations would call him godlike; and remote posterity would see him standing, dimly glorious, far up the valley of a hundred centuries!
He had contrived, or rather he had happened, to dissever himself from the world--to vanish--to give up his place and privileges with living men, without being admitted among the dead.... It was [his] unprecedented fate, to retain his original share of human sympathies, and to still be involved in human interests, while he had lost his reciprocal influence on them. It would be a most curious speculation, to trace out the effect of such circumstances on his heart and intellect, separately, and in unison.... Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another, and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.
He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him onward, and heard the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly from a distance, with the weight of many voices. He knew the tune; it was a familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The verse died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices, but of all the sounds of the benighted wilderness, pealing in awful harmony together. [He] cried out; and his cry was lost to his own ear, by its unison with the cry of the desert.
If you guessed that I'd stick to alphabetical (and chronological) order--or if you recognized the passages as Cyrus's daydream not long before his father, Reuben Bourne, accidentally shoots him dead at the same place he left his father-in-law, Roger Malvin, to die decades earlier after a battle with Indians left them both wounded; the narrator's musings on Wakefield, a Londoner who decided one day not to return home to his wife, moved to new dwellings a few blocks away, and stayed there for twenty years before finally returning home; and Young Goodman Brown's arrival at what he takes to be the witches' coven that he had set out into the wilderness to avoid going to, until he was deceived by the devil's illusions into losing faith in his wife Faith--well, good for you.
The reason I collect them here is that they are key moments in Hawthorne's representation of colonial spaces. Later, I'll share my readings of how David Levin, Michael Colacurcio, and Manfred Mackenzie read "Roger Malvin's Burial," how Robert Martin reads "Wakefield," and how Renee Bergland reads "Young Goodman Brown," but for now I want to simply note that Hawthorne consistently represents the new world wilderness in terms colonial Puritans would have been quite familiar with. The narrator in RMB refers to "a region, of which savage beasts and savage men were as yet sole possessors" and calls each of the four main characters of the tale "pilgrims"; both Malvin and Bourne refer to the "howling wilderness." The narator in YGB describes Goodman Brown's journey into the woods as an "errand" and describes the wilderness as "heathen," "dark," "benighted," and "unconverted"; Goodman Brown himself worries that "There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree," he describes himself as having "kept covenant by meeting thee here" when addressing a figure he believes to be the devil and claims, "My father never went into the woods on such a errand, nor his father before him." Even Wakefield's sojourn of a few blocks in London echoes the kind of identity-transforming experiences of Bourne, Brown, Chillingworth, and Hester. I'll pick up where this intro to a close reading leaves off next Tuesday--I've run out of time today!
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