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"?

And Now for Something Completely Different

The next paragraph's "Faulknerian feat[] of subordination" should not be read by anyone not named Scott Eric Kaufman. If you want to find out what I think about Marshall, Devi, trauma, and mourning, I recommend skipping to the third paragraph. But if you're wondering what a Hawthorne blogger is doing blogging on something and some, uh, two other than Hawthorne, the next paragraph may do. And if you're interested in how not to write when writing a conference paper, the next paragraph will most certainly do. Oh, and if you love it when the author of a blog nobody reads tells inside jokes to himself, the next paragraph is a must-read. (Must fight temptation to tell anecdote about the SF story I wrote for my AP Chemistry class and how easily amused I am. Aaaargh. OK, done. Yes.)

"Old School" readers of this blog (that empty set) will no doubt recall it used to be "mostly about Hawthorne" (and still is, in its technorati profile--I'm that lazy!). New readers (and how do you afford your rock and roll lifestyle, may I ask?)--coming here from such generous linkers (and good titlers) as The Hobgoblin of Little Minds (I'd thank BikeProf in a comments on his post, but one of the annoying features of the new Blogger, one which makes you wonder why they put it in there, is its tendency to freeze when you try to post a comment--or wait, is that just a feature of the ancient computer I'm using here in Chiba?), Old Is the New New, and Quod She--will have already noted that it now is "chiefly about Hawthorne matters" (for reasons I'm sure I'll devote a boring post to when I run out of material for Monday blogging [yes, the obscurest blog in blogoramaville has a programming schedule]). The point is, I'm delivering a paper in Hawaii on traumatic displacements and militant mourning in Paule Marshall's 1969 novel, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha," a short story translated into English by Gayatri Spivak in 1995 for Imaginary Maps in T-minus, oh, less than 8 days, so the Hawthorne blogging is going to be kept to a minimum the next few days as I try to tame the formless monster that began as a paper at the 1996 American Studies Association convention on trauma and diaspora in CPTP, evolved into a submission to a collection of essays that to my knowledge was never published, morphed into a paper I was planning to insert into one of the collections of essays that I'm supposed to be co-editing, and then refused to copy itself onto the memory stick that I brought to Japan last August, forcing me to start from scratch this semester as I bring in a new topic and new writer to an already-far-too-complex (and possibly lost) old essay. So good ol' Intertextual Thursday is going to begin the project of helping me not embarrass myself more than I normally do at academic conferences, even if the main purpose of this one is to see my parents and let them see their grandkids for the only time between the Augusts of 2006 and 2007. Oh, and to make up for my most humiliating job interview ever, during which I established personal records, hopefully never to be challenged again, in the categories of inability to think on one's feet, inability to hide how flustered one is, and rapidity with which one gives up on oneself in an interview. That's all.

Anyway, my third attempt to begin this post will begin, as I tend to do here, with a quotation. It's from my conference proposal that got accepted (with a close-to-$400 registration fee, I suspect most proposals get accepted--not that that's a bad thing--so judge for yourself whether mine is any good):

Although intellectuals and activists working to define and contest the boundaries and methodologies of postcolonial studies have since its inception emphasized the comparative, transnational, and indeed global nature of the field, they have so far failed to analyze together two works of literature that offer profound meditations on the meaning, significance, and stakes of colonial/racialized trauma/testimony and mourning/melancholia in their respective times and places: Paule Marshall's novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People for the post-independence Anglophone Caribbean and Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha" for post-independence India. This failure represents a missed opportunity to bring together not only two quite different colonial/post-colonial histories and regions but also two vibrant fields of study with quite relateable trajectories.

This paper proposes to show how Marshall's and Devi's texts both represent and enact the best kinds of literary, historical, ethical, and political connections and relations postcolonial theorists, critics and scholars have been calling for, marking out, and arguing over for the past two decades. In so doing, I will suggest a certain exemplarity in the intertextual dialogue between The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha," one that has serious implications for future developments specifically in postcolonial studies and more generally in the humanities. Attending to the formal, structural, and indeed theoretical similarities between the two works will allow me to address such pressing debates within postcolonial studies as how to recognize colonialisms' impact on differently colonized groups along with the deep structures of resistance practiced by such groups, how to assess nationalist, internationalist, and transnationalist forms of resistance, and how to respond to the difficult divisions between activists from the metropole and subjects in the periphery. But it will also allow me to address such pressing debates over postcolonial studies as its intellectual and political origins, geographical and historical scope, relation to other fields, and potential for transforming both academic practices and institutions and their publics.

It may seem that I am asking a medium-length novel and a long short story to carry an inordinate amount of weight in my argument. But a quick glance at their quite similar plots and themes alone should dispel this view. Marshall's and Devi's works, although produced in different decades and regions, in response to two quite different forms of colonialism and two ambiguously (post)colonial temporalities, tell basically the same story: a well-informed and well-intentioned activist from the metropole (in the former, a radical Philadelphia anthropologist who leverages the desperation of his philanthropist funders for a success story, not to mention a tax break, into control over an alternative-to-modernization development project in the Bournehills region of a Caribbean island suspiciously like 1960s Barbados that aims to build from local knowledge and practices, empower the poorest of the poor agricultural workers in the region, and model ecological, economic, and political sustainability; in the latter, a radical urban journalist who leverages his activist and government connections to travel to and report on the failure of public and private aid efforts in a famine-stricken tribal region suspiciously like 1980s India) slowly comes to realize the profundity of the limitations of his original project (due to local, national, regional, and international politics in the Cold War era), suffers a crisis with a female lover (the former on-island; the latter long-distance), experiences reality-bending events (the former a metaphorical 'road to Damascus' conversion experience; the latter a quite magically real encounter with the 'last of the pterodactyls'), and most importantly bears witness to the historical and contemporary trauma of the rural people of the region, yet finds himself unable to offer any kind of testimony to the world outside the region. The most both sympathetically-portrayed metropolitan intellectuals can offer to the people of the region is a kind of barely articulate recognition of what they have come to dimly understand as a massive mourning project by those people for centuries-old failed rebellions against enslaving/colonizing forces.

Even this bare structuralist analysis gestures toward the deeply entangled meanings, significances, and stakes of this common Marshall-Devi story of colonial/racialized trauma/testimony and mourning/melancholia. Teasing them out and using them to take positions on crucial issues within and over the past, present, and future of postcolonial studies--and their implications for both research and teaching in and curricula and institutions of the humanities--is the project of this paper.

OK, so, sound interesting? Anyone read either or both of these works? Or heard of these authors? Thought to analyze them together? Done so? I'm under the no-doubt-mistaken impression that I am actually the first to do this. I'm happy to find out I'm wrong b/c it'll save me loads of time and space in the article that will someday follow from this....

Oh, and before I start, let me note that I've already criticized my earlier Intertextual Thursday postings as not living up to their billing--not "really" being intertextual. I've failed to do more than identify links between two works (here, The Scarlet Letter and Beloved, a much-travelled path, but one on which there is always something new to notice)--failed, that is, to explore what follows from them. As you can see from my conference proposal, years of commenting on failed comparison-contrast papers from students have vaccinated me, if you will, against falling into this trap in the genre of proposal-writing. But following through on the promises made in proposals like this one, in a way that will be satisfying both to me and my audience (assuming I have one--my 1996 Marshall paper, for instance, featured a smaller audience than panel, and two-thirds of the audience was made up of friends of mine), is the challenge facing me this week. It's not just an issue of making my balky (and nebulous and missing--cf. 2nd para if you were foolish enough to actually skip it!) prose "talky" or of concisely introducing my audience to two authors and works, two regions and traditions of social/cultural analysis of them, two theoretical concepts and two intellectual/activist projects concisely enough to leave me enough time to develop and support my claims convincingly. It's the challenge of balancing enumeration of similarities and differences with tallying of meanings, significances, and stakes with the taking and defending of positions in academic and more-than-academic wars of position.

So I'll let you "all" see the "draft" this Saturday (even if it doesn't deserve the name), in a slightly revised version of CitizenSE's Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea. Hopefully I'll be able to actually come up with a decent ending to one of my posts on this blog that day. I may actually have to hold myself to some standards if people are actually reading this blog!

Perhaps Unexpected Allusions to Hawthorne

Posting on The Scarlet Letter and Beloved has gotten me thinking about the uses to which other African-American writers than Morrison have put Hawthorne. Tonight, while the family get-together is winding down downstairs and I'm up here making sure the girls don't roll off the beds we've put them in (yes, we've been evicted from our cozy downstairs sleeping-all-together-on-two-futons-on-the-floor arrangement but have upgraded to Baba's bedroom, which is too small for the SALoTFotF set-up), I'll offer a short list and hope my imaginary readers will help mex expand it.

In as close to reverse chronological order as I can get without renumbering everything when I make a mistake:

0. I've already posted a bit on Maryse Conde's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem.

1. The subtext of the Chillingworth-Dimmesdale relationship (D as fugitive slave; C as slave catcher) seems to have been developed by Charles Johnson in Middle Passage. Morrison's Schoolteacher and Johnson's Slavecatcher both seem like Chillingworth figures to me.

2-3. Both Patricia Williams (in The Rooster's Egg) and Suzan-Lori Parks (in at least one of The Red Letter Plays) have run with the idea that the Puritan magistrates' marking Hester with the scarlet letter can be linked to racialized and gendered markings of black women today.

4. In this, they seem to be following up on and developing Ralph Ellison's uses of Hawthorne in Invisible Man to explore themes of stigmatization (cf. Marjorie Pryse's implicit linking of Hawthorne and Ellison in this way in The Marka nd the Knowledge) and racialization.

5. W.E.B. Du Bois made use of many of Hawthorne's short stories in The Souls of Black Folk, in part to situate himself as a fellow New England native and writer.

6-7. Pauline Hopkins's use of the gothic around the turn into the twentieth century makes me wonder if, like Charles Chesnutt, she was reading and responding to Hawthorne's short stories and novels.

8. It's quite possible Hawthorne was responding to Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life in "The Custom-House" and The Scarlet Letter, which doesn't exactly fit the list's parameters, but seems worth mentioning.

9. As is the possibility that one of the many sources of "Egotism, or the Bosom-Serpent" comes from African-American folklore that he could have come across in Salem or in Maine.

10. A certain rock star friend of mine provided me years ago with a syllabus from a friend of his that laid out a Hawthorne-Baldwin major authors course that looked very exciting--if I can dig it up in my files once I return to the States, I'll hit the highlights.

11-12. Ah, how could I forget Richard Wright and his contributions to the black gothic? Thank you, Professor Bryant! Your essay makes me wonder if Linda Brent/Harriet Jacobs was influenced by Hawthorne's representation of trapped and fallen women in his novels of the 1850s and tales of the 1840s.

13. Professor Gruesser has a neat reading of "The Birth-Mark" and whiteness and suggests it's possible that George Schuyler's Black No More may be a response to the story.

14. Professor Sollors as always makes fascinating connections between multiple traditions of American literature. His essay raises the possibility that a Hawthorne-Tolson connection wouldn't be a stretch. Better ask a certain dangeral professor about this one of these days.

This is not a bad list for someone who consorted with Copperheads and Confederates, who was known in his time and after for his anti-abolitionism and patronizing attitudes towards African Americans, and who was decidedly ambivalent and unenthusiastic about the Civil War and the prospects of African Americans after slavery, isn't it?

A is for Abatement

Got loads of family staying overnight here somewhat unexpectedly, but I get to use the computer upstairs while imoto is napping and everyone else is finishing up preparations. Our topic today is Hawthorne's use of heraldry in The Scarlet Letter.

Even the Indians were affected by a sort of cold shadow of the white man's curiosity, and, gliding through the crowd, fastened their snake-like black eyes on Hester's bosom; conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer of this brilliantly embroidered badge must needs be a personage of high dignity among her people.

The office of the scarlet letter, to borrow a phrase famously analyzed by Sacvan Bercovitch, is a herald's office. One of Governor Bellingham's "bond-servants," a "free-born Englishman, but now a seven years' slave," newly arrived in Boston and not familiar with Hester Prynne, makes the same assumption as the Indians who saw in her "brilliantly embroidered badge" a mark of colonial aristocracy:

"Ye may not see his worship now."

"Nevertheless, I will enter," answered Hester Prynne; and the bond-servant, perhaps judging from the decision of her air and the glittering symbol in her bosom, that she was a great lady in the land, offered no opposition.

These characters of lower status in Puritan society or outside it are joined by the narrator, who is separated by time and temperament from the era, when he "discovers" the remains of the scarlet letter in the Salem Custom-House:

It had been intended, there could be no doubt, as an ornamental article of dress; but how it was to be worn, or what rank, honor, and dignity, in by-past times, were signified by it, was a riddle which (so evanescent are the fashions of the world in these particulars) I saw little hope of solving.

The narrator, certain that he has come across an item of colonial fashion, nevertheless admits to being fascinated and "perplexed" by it, wondering even if "the letter might not have been one of those decorations which the white men used to contrive to take the eyes of Indians." Of course this turns out to be as mistaken as his original, bland version of Hester Prynne--"rather a noteworthy personage in the view of our ancestors." But actually these kinds of assumptions about Hester Prynne's "badge" are not that far off.

Consider the first description of the letter in the romance itself:

On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.

No wonder, then, that one of her harsher judges among the "female spectators" at this first scaffold scene remarks, "She hath good skill at her needle, that's certain, but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy, contrive such a way of showing it! Why, gossips, what is it but to laugh in the face of our godly magistrates, and make a pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment?" The largely uncharitable remarks of the audience in this and other scenes raise questions about Hester's intentions and the effect of the magistrates' punishment on her, but they also align her with an English, aristocratic, and Catholic past (and hence suggest a certain critical attitude toward English as well as American Puritans at this point in the novel, a point that has been well made by Larry Reynolds and Frederick Newberry). Among the "mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images" that bring to Hester's mind "other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the Western wilderness; other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the brims of these steeple-crowned hats," was "her native village, in Old England, and her paternal home; a decayed house of gray stone, with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining a half-obliterated shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility."

The herald's office is to assign coats of arms to families of sufficient birth and standing; the Puritans have appropriated this office for their own purposes, using the scarlet letter to indicate that Hester may well be a descendant of English aristocracy, but she is fallen in more ways than one. Hester to some extent accepts the terms of her punishment when she tells Pearl, "Once in my life I met the Black Man! This scarlet letter is his mark!" On the surface at least, this rare admission echoes Roger Chillingworth's interpretation, "Thus she will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious letter be engraved upon her tomb-stone." But designating the scarlet letter the Black Man's mark does not necessarily make it a symbol of her sin, or her sin alone; it could easily refer to two other men she's met in the forest, Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, or it could refer to the Puritan magistrates themselves, sinning against the act that she later tells Dimmesdale "had a consecration of its own."

The battle over the meaning of the A is a well-trodden topic, so I'll stop with four observations: 1) the scarlet letter is is intended to function as a mark of dishonor; in the language of heraldry, it is an abatement; 2) Pearl disappears from the novel, but the narrator strongly suggests she has married a non-English aristocrat and is living abroad with him and their child when he notes that "Letters came, with armorial seals upon them, though of bearings unknown to English heraldry," again emphasizing her and Hester's contrast with the natal alienation and long-term inheritance of the mother's condition that marked female slaves from the mid-seventeenth century until the mid-nineteenth century in England's American colonies from Hester Prynne's time until the independent America of Hawthorne's time; 3) nevertheless, the narrator returns to heraldry at Hester's death, appearing to ratify Chillingworth's prophecy of the monumentalizing of the letter by ending the novel with "a herald's wording" of the "semblance of an engraved escutcheon" and "device": "ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES"; 4) Jim's coat of arms in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn parodies Hawthorne's ending of The Scarlet Letter, in ways crucial to understanding the compromises of 1850 and 1876--but that will be the subject of an Intertextual Thursday after I've finished with Beloved.

So, Really, Why CitizenSE?

Well, it's been 2007 in Japan for over 13 hours now, so the "New World" is about to join us; Baba has her first day off since we've been in Chiba, so the onnahito futari and the onnanoko futari have been hanging out downstairs (Diva Girl's been coming up here every so often to check on me) and are now out shopping; and in yesterday's post I raised questions (and got what I believe to be this blog's first-ever comment--thanks and congrats to nikeroo!) that I've been thinking about a bit, so I think it's about time to take them on in the course of answering the questions of why a Hawthorne blog and why call it "Citizen of Somewhere Else" more directly than I've done in previous posts in this series.

"Henceforth I am a citizen of somewhere else" is a line I've always liked from Hawthorne, for reasons I've been circling around on this blog. The ghostly quality of the declaration and of the self-referentiality is something I'm going to have to address more directly later. But today is about acknowledging the self-referentiality of the blog title. As an American living in Japan from August 2006 to August 2007, I am literally a citizen of somewhere else for that year. And when my family and I are at home in the States, I'm the only one who's not a citizen of somewhere else (my two girls have dual citizenship--until they turn 21, that is--and my wife has no plans to give up her Japanese citizenship). Maybe someday Japan and the U.S. will agree to allow people to declare dual citizenship, but until then, someone in the family is always going to be a citizen of somewhere else, no matter where we live.

The question of where to live was an important one for Hawthorne at the time he was writing "The Custom-House," and its importance is registered both in the way he writes about Salem, his "native town," in the essay itself and in the fact that he never again lived there. No doubt I am sensitive to this issue because the question of where to live is of great importance to my family and myself. Up until this past August, we've lived in a small town in western NY about three and a half hours by car from where I grew up and where my parents still live (in 10 days I'll see them for what looks to be the only time this year in Hawaii, where my dad and I are attending overlapping conferences and bringing our families along), and even closer to my aunt and uncle. To move almost anywhere else in the States would mean to move further away from my closest family (my brother and his family are in CT and central NY provides a nice place for us to meet when he ad his wife are up to travelling with their four kids). Until August 2007, we live in Fukuoka, Japan, about the same distance by plane and subway/bus (and much longer by shinkansen) from my wife's parents here in Chiba. We're about the same travel time from my wife's sister (and her three kids) in Okinawa. Wherever we live, we're going to be pretty far away from a large number of people we love. That's the reality of an international marriage. As our children grow up and our parents age, this is going to be an even bigger question than it has been for the three-and-a-half years of our marriage.

While not in an international marriage, Hawthorne himself spent several years outside the United States, when Franklin Pierce appointed him to a consular post in Liverpool and when he travelled in Italy with his family before returning to the States. And as his writings from 1853-1864 show, the questions of where to live and how he felt about being an American citizen were quite pressing to him, as well, for obvious reasons. But rather than get into that, I should note that my blog title, too, alludes to my own feelings about being an American citizen. I'll post more on this later on this "professional/personal" blog, but for those who want something of a preview, I recommend checking out my "political" blog, Objectivist v. Constructivist v. Theist, particularly my columns on immigration reform and George W. Bush. Suffice to say I'm not happy with the current administration and only wish I could spend the rest of its term in Japan. Unlike Hawthorne, I'll never be in a position to write a campaign biography for one of my friends--unless this fantasy football columnist or this rock star ever decide to give up their day jobs, that is.

Ah, my relation to Hawthorne? Obviously by choosing a blog title that references us both, albeit in complicated ways--not to mention by doing the comparison/contrast thing in this post--I am acknowledging a tie with him and asserting a distance from him. Back when I started this blog, I promised to devote several posts to my talk before the Kyushu American Literature Society, which traced the transformations in my race and Hawthorne research project from its conception as a dissertation proposal in the early 1990s to its (ongoing) becoming a book manuscript in the mid-2000s. I haven't forgotten that promise, but I don't intend to keep it just yet.

Especially because the ladies have come home and imoto wants her daddy to hold her! One-handed typing is a drag, so I'll have to continue this next Monday!

What Would Hawthorne Say About Blogging?

From the opening of "The Custom-House":

It is a little remarkable, that--though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends--an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me. The first time was three or four years since, when I favored the reader--inexcusably, and for no earthly reason, that either the indulgent reader or the intrusive author could imagine--with a description of my way of life in the deep quietude of the Old Manse. And now--because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough to find a listener or two on the former occasion--I again seize the public by the button, and talk of my three years' experience in a Custom-House. The example of the famous "P.P., Clerk of this Parish," was never more faithfully followed. The truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than most of his schoolmates and lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But--as thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience--it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind the veil. To this extent, methinks, an author may be autobiographical, without violating either the reader's rights or his own.

So what do you think? How would Hawthorne have reacted to the predominance of personal blogs in blogoramaville circa 2006? What about the controversies over pseudonymous bloggers? And over outing them? Over sprezzatura-like sock puppetry?

You could make an argument Hawthorne was doing the equivalent of blogging in his time when he published the range of his tales and sketches in the relatively established and newer American magazines and gift books of the 1830s and 1840s, that his editing of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge in the 1830s was the equivalent of our blog portaling or link-heavy blogging, that his overtly political writing and editing (such as his editing of his friend Horatio Bridge's Journals of an African Cruiser, his infamous "Custom-House" sketch, his presidential campaign biography for his friend Franklin Pierce, his essay "Chiefly About War Matters," as well as his political correspondence, both official from Boston, Salem, and Liverpool, and personal with Democratic Party friends and allies) was the political blogging of his day, and that his experiments with narratorial perspective in his short stories and with authorial personae in his prefaces to his books prefigure various pseudonymous bloggers' experiments with voice and style today. And you'd probably have a pretty good argument.

When I think of a sketch like "Old News," in which he praises old newspapers for their ability to convey a vivid sense of the past (I'll spare you the quotation for now, only b/c I left my Tales and Sketches Library of America edition in Fukuoka, not out of any abandonment of the value of heavy quotation on my part!), and when you consider newspapers were the new media of his time, I think we'd end up agreeing that despite Hawthorne's critiques of reformers, his skepticism toward Enlightenment notions of progress, and his portraits of new technologies doing more harm than good (in "Fire-Worship" and "The Celestial Rail-road" as much as in the better-known "Rappaccini's Daughter" and "The Birth-mark"), he wouldn't be against blogging simply b/c of its newness, its politicization, or its reliance on technology.

So those of you who blog, whom do you imagine as your audience? What do you hope to accomplish by blogging? What's at stake in blogging for you? What is your sense of your rights as an author, and of your readers' rights? How autobiographical do you get in your blogging, and why? How much do you experiment with voice and style? Are you more confessional or more veiled? What does the opening of "The Custom-House" make you think and ask?

[Update: Turns out John Updike would probably disagree with my take on Hawthorne (h/t: Amardeep Singh).]

How Pearl and Beloved Show Why Water Imagery Matters

Well, as predicted, I missed last Saturday. Today I hope to have time to get into some passages from The Scarlet Letter that I overlooked for a long time, but which I now believe hold one key to understanding the prose poem that is Beloved's monologue in Toni Morrison's Beloved. So for those (imaginary) readers looking forward to a post on heraldry in Hawthorne's works and its relation to race, I'll try to devote a Close Reading Tuesday to that topic. [Update: mission accomplished].And for those (hypothetical) readers interested in what a real Intertextual Thursday post would look like, I'll try to oblige with a post that goes beyond noting parallels between characters and plot elements in The Scarlet Letter and Beloved to actually consider what follows from them [Update: mission only somewhat and tangentially accomplished, but not on Hawthorne and Morrison].

Today, though, let's start, as I like to do with brainstorming-type writing, with a quotation--or rather, a set of quotations, the first two from The Scarlet Letter and the last from Beloved.

Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water, and play with the shells and tangled seaweed, until she should have talked awhile with yonder gatherer of herbs. So the child flew away like a bird, and, making bare her small white feet, went pattering along the moist margin of the sea. Here and there, she came to a full stop, and peeped curiously into a pool, left by the retiring tide as a mirror for Pearl to see her face in. Forth peeped at her, out of the pool, with dark, glistening curls around her head, and an elf-smile in her eyes, the image of a little maid, whom Pearl, having no other playmate, invited to take her hand and run a race with her. But the visionary little maid, on her part, beckoned likewise, as if to say,--"This is a better place! Come thou into the pool!" And Pearl, stepping in, mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom; while, out of a still lower depth, came the gleam of a kind of fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water.

At first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully with her own image in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom forth, and--as it declined to venture--seeking a passage for herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime.

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

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

Beloved.

As this trio of quotations should hint to you, I'm going to try to draw some connections between Pearl and Beloved in this post--specifically between Pearl's reflection and the mystery of who Beloved is and where she came from. For I believe that Hawthorne's representation of Pearl influenced Morrison's characterization of Beloved as well as Denver.

Recall that the narrator of The Scarlet Letter repeatedly emphasizes Hester's dressing Pearl in an outfit that makes her seem to be "the scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet letter endowed with life!" Like the scarlet letter, Pearl is represented as fiery and vengeful. When the Puritan children, taking time away from their usual pastimes of "playing at going to church, perchance; or at scourging Quakers; or taking scalps in a sham-fight with the Indians; or scaring one another with freaks of imitative witchcraft," decide to torment Hester and Pearl (in one of the [unintentionally?] funniest lines in the novel, one says, "Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter; and, of a truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running along by her side! Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!"), Pearl's response, "after frowning, stamping her foot, and shaking her hand with a variety of threatening gestures," is to suddenly "rush at the knot of her enemies, and put them all to flight." The narrator notes then that "She resembled, in her fierce pursuit of them, an infant pestilence,--the scarlet fever, or some such half-fledged angel of judgment,--whose mission was to punish the sins of the rising generation."

For Ella in Beloved, Beloved too is a symbol of sin and retribution:

When Ella heard 124 was occupied by something-or-other beating up on Sethe, it infuriated her and gave her another opportunity to measure what could very well be the devil himself against "the lowest yet." There was also something very personal in her fury. Whatever Sethe had done, Ella didn't like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present. Sethe's crime was staggering and her pride outstripped even that; but she could not countenance the possibility of sin moving on in the house, unleashed and sassy.

But Pearl and Beloved are much more than the symbols others make of them. Some (including Sethe and Denver) believe Beloved to be Sethe's daughter "in another form," the baby ghost that was haunting 124 before Paul D's arrival "endowed with life." (Although Denver tells Paul D, "At times, I think she was--more.") Paul D is tempted to believe Stamp Paid's supposition that Beloved may be a girl who was "locked up in a house with a whiteman over by Deer Creek. Found him dead last summer and the girl gone.... Folks say he had her in there since she was a pup." But Paul D isn't satisfied with this theory. In conversation with Stamp Paid, he says, "She reminds me of something. Something, look like, I'm supposed to remember." And upon his return to 124 he realizes that "Something is missing.... Something larger than the people who lived there. Something more than Beloved or the red light. He can't put his finger on it, but it seems, for a moment, that just beyond his knowing is the glare of an outside thing that embraces while it accuses." So just who or what is Beloved? Where does she comes from? What does she want?

One way to begin answering these questions is to note that unlike Pearl in the previous SL passage, Beloved doesn't rush at her enemies, but instead feels herself to be abandoned when others do so. When the former abolitionist Edward Bodwin arrives at 124 as Ella is leading an attempted exorcism, Sethe mistakes him for Schoolteacher and tries to attack him and Denver runs after her to stop her, as we find out from the free indirect discourse that marks Beloved's last appearance (in the flesh) in the novel:

Sethe is running away from her, running, and she feels the emptiness in the hand Sethe had been holding. Now she is running into the faces of the people out there, joining them and leaving Beloved behind. Alone. Again. Then Denver, running too. They make a hill. A hill of black people, falling. And above them all, rising from his place with a whip in his hand, the man without skin, looking. He is looking at her.

For Beloved, this is the last straw; her own confused (and confusing) account of her life (lives?) focuses obsessively on losing Sethe--or the women she confuses with Sethe:

Three times I lost her: once with the flowers because of the noisy clouds of smoke; once when she went into the sea instead of smiling at me; once under the bridge when I went in to join her and she came toward me but did not smile. She whispered to me, chewed me, and swam away. Now I have found her in this house. She smiles at me and it is my own face smiling. I will not lose her again. She is mine.

The imagery in the last scene where the young woman Beloved is present in the novel--the hill of black people, the man without skin--references Beloved's second loss. But the passages where this scene is narrated--incoherently by Beloved--make it clear that it couldn't possibly be Sethe she lost then. Let's start with the relatively coherent summary and follow it up with the stream of consciousness version to see why this is so:

Sethe went into the sea. She went there. They did not push her. She went there. She was getting ready to smile at me and when she saw the dead people pushed into the sea she went also and left me there with no face or hers.

I cannot lose her again my dead man was in the way like the noisy clouds when he dies on my face I can see hers she is going to smile at me she is going to her sharp earrings are gone the men without skin are making loud noises they push my own man through they do not push the woman with my face through she goes in they do not push her she goes in the little hill is gone she was going to smile at me she was going to a hot thing


They are not crouching now we are they are floating on the water they break up the little hill and push it through I cannot find my pretty teeth I see the dark face that is going to smile at me it is my dark face that is going to smile at me the iron circle is around her neck she does not have sharp earrings in her ears or a round basket she goes in the water with my face

If you've seen Amistad, you may recall the scene where the woman on the slave ship commits suicide; if you've read Uncle Tom's Cabin, you may recall a similar attempted suicide on the Mississippi River (I can't recall now if Tom saved the woman or not). If you read Beloved's monologue in its entirety, you'll see that most of it is a fragmented narration of a similar scene from the middle passage. Beloved asks herself at the beginning of the monologue, "how can I say things that are pictures," although without a question mark (as the entire monologue is without punctuation), this comes off as much as a rhetorical question admitting defeat from the start as an open question that the rest of the monologue attempts to answer. But as I read it, this middle passage scene is the second of the three losses Beloved suffers. In fact, I think you can break the three scenes of Beloved's monologue down into eight parts, despite the difficulty presented by a narrator for whom "All of it is now it is always now":

1-2. Somewhere in Africa, where an infant girl is separated from her mother by a slave raiding party.

I see her take flowers away from leaves she puts them in a round basket the leaves are not for her she fills the basket she opens the grass I would help her but the clouds are in the way ... I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too ... In the beginning I coud see her I could not help her because the clouds were in the way in the beginning I could see her the shining in her ears ... Sethe is the one that picked flowers, yellow flowers in the place before the crouching. Took them away from their green leaves.... wanted to help her when she was picking the flowers, but the cloud of gunsmoke blinded me and I lost her. Three times I lost her; once with the flowers because of the noisy clouds of smoke....

3-5. On a slave ship during the middle passage, where a young girl witnesses the bodies of those who died en route pushed overboard by the slave traders and a woman who commits suicide by following them into the sea.

In the beginning the women are away from the men and the men are away from the women storms rock us and mix the men into the women and the women into the men that is when I begin to be on the back of the man for a long time I see only his neck and his wide shoulders above me I am small I love him because he has a song when he turned around to die I see the teeth he sang through ... there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too I am always crouching the man on my face is dead ... we are all trying to leave our bodies behind the man on my face has done it it is hard to make yourself die forever you sleep short and then return ... those able to die are in a pile I cannot find my man the one whose teeth I ave loved a hot thing the little hill of dead people a hot thing the men without skin push them through with poles the woman is there with the face I want the face that is mine they fall into the sea which is the color of bread she has nothing in her ears ... [see above middle passage quotes] ... All I want to know is why did she go in the water in the place where we crouched? Why did she do that when she was just about to smile at me? I wanted to join her in the sea but I could not move....

6-8. This is the most confusing one, but I believe that the teenage girl Stamp Paid talked about attempted suicide from a bridge and was possessed by the spirit of the baby ghost that had been haunting 124, who then returns to 124 in the flesh.

there is no one to want me to say me my name I wait on the bridge because she is under it there is night and there is day

again again night day night day I am waiting no iron circle is around my neck no boats go on this water no men without skin my dead man is not floating here his teeth are down there where the blue is and the grass so is the face I want the face that is going to smile at me it is going to in the day diamonds are in the water where she is and turtles in the night I hear chewing and swallowing and laughter it belongs to me she is the laugh I am the laugher I see her face which is mine it is the face that was going to smile at me in the place where we crouched now she is going to her face comes through the water a hot thing her face is mine she is not smiling she is chewing and swallowing I have to have my face I go in the grass opens she opens it I am in the water and she is coming there is no round basket no iron circle around her neck she goes up where the diamonds are I follow her we are in the diamonds which are her earrings now my face is coming I have to have it I am looking for the join I am loving my face so much my dark face is close to me I want to join she whispers to me she whispers I reach for her chewing and swallowing she touches me she knows I want to join she chews and swallows me I am gone now I am her face my own face has left me I see me swim away a hot thing I see the bottoms of my feet I am alone I want to be the two of us I want the join

I come out of blue water after the bottoms of my feet swim away from me I come up

....Three times I lost her: ...once under the bridge, when I went in to join her and she came toward me but did not smile. She whispered to me, chewed me, and swam away....

Here's where the Pearl quotations that I began this post with help out the most, because they allow us to see that the passage from Beloved that I quoted at the beginning and end of this post deal with reflections, mirror images, and phantoms--and help us understand that the "I" in this scene sometimes refers to the baby ghost and sometimes to the traumatized young woman. But it's dinner time, so I'll have to continue this next Saturday!

Oates on Lovecraft

Here's a long and interesting review essay by Joyce Carol Oates from the October 31, 1996 issue of The New York Review of Books. It's on Lovecraft, the gothic, Puritanism, and more, so of course Hawthorne plays a role. A small one, but enough for me to use it this windy and freezing Friday. Time to put the diva girl down for a nap!

IT II: The Beloved Remix

My imaginary readers (hey, let's be optimistic on this sunny but not that warm late December Thursday in Chiba) will no doubt recall last week's not-quite-Intertextual Thursday post linking The Scarlet Letter and Beloved, in which I listed a bunch of SL quotes and hinted at how I think Morrison was making use of them in B. Well, given how little time I have to blog this morning, I'll just throw a few B quotes at you and offer a few sketchy comments. Maybe by next Thursday I'll be ready for a real intertextual post!

Last week, I suggested that Morrison was magically realizing Hawthorne's gothic and romantic tropes and figures, not to mention re-racializing some contexts Hawthorne had effectively de-racialized. Consider, as one example, the different views of the ghost that is haunting 124 Bluestone Road, on the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio, for much of the Reconstruction years. Is this house, "palsied by the baby's fury at having its throat cut," haunted by a ghost that is "too little to understand," as Sethe puts it? Or is Denver right that "Maybe she don't want to understand"? Is Paul D's properly Puritan question upon entering Sethe's house for the first time in 1873 and walking "straight into a pool of red and undulating light that locked him where he stood"--"Good god.... What kind of evil you got in here?"--to the point, in its unknowing evocation of the legendarily "lurid gleam" said to be cast by the scarlet letter? Or is Sethe's response--"It's not evil, just sad. Come on. Just step through," verified in part by Paul D's acknowledgment, "She was right. It was sad. Walking through it, a wave of grief soaked him so thoroughly he wanted to cry"--more on target? Or is Denver's countercharge, that the ghost is "Rebuked. Lonely and rebuked," more than adolescent projection of her own feelings onto the ghost? When Paul D exorcises the ghost, does she return in the body of a young woman known only as Beloved? The novel exists, in part, to raise questions like these, even if, Hawthorne-like, Morrison refuses to give definite answers in it.

But to return to Denver, as another example, it's worth noting that she has a Pearl-like awareness of the subtexts of her and her mother's isolation from the free black community of Cincinnati, even if, like Pearl, she lacks the knowledge of their causes. Not long after Paul D enters 124, Denver cries out:

"I can't no more. I can't no more."

"Can't what? What can't you?"

"I can't live here. I don't know where to go or what to do, but I can't live here. Nobody speaks to us. Nobody comes by. Boys don't like me. Girls don't either."

"Honey, honey."

"What's she talking 'bout nobody speaks to you?" asked Paul D.

"It's the house. People don't--"

"It's not! It's not the house. It's us! And it's you!"

"Denver!"

Denver's outburst is reminiscent of Pearl's demand that Hester put the scarlet letter back on in the famous forest scene of SL, with Denver's longing for "a sign of spite from the baby ghost" the counterpart of Pearl's demand. Yet Paul D's response initiates an extended parallel between him and the Hester of the forest scene. He suggests, "Maybe you all ought to move"--unknowingly echoing Sethe's earlier suggestion to her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, whose reply, "What'd be the point?... Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief," is somewhat reminiscent of The Scarlet Letter's narrator's hints at the haunting nature of sin and guilt--but Sethe's response to Paul D is more like the Hester at the beginning and end of the novel:

No moving. No leaving. It's all right the way it is.... I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running--from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much Now sit down and eat with us or leave us be.

Yet despite her resolve not to be moved, Sethe is running in a certain Dimmesdale-like sense--from her haunting memories of slavery, her escape from it, and after.

As for the rest, she worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe. Unfortunately her brain was devious. She might be hurrying across a field, running practically, to get to the pump quickly and rinse the chamomile sap from her legs. Nothing else would be in her mind.... The smething. The plash of the water, the sight of her shows and stocking awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet ome rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her--remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that.

Sethe's literally "terrible memory," as the narrator puts it, is linked to her belief that "the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay," as the narrator also puts it: "The 'better life' she believed that she and Denver were living was simply not that other one." Thus, Paul D's staying with Sethe and Denver, in an odd way, puts Hester in the role of Dimmesdale, striving to avoid repeating a traumatic past, and Paul D in the role of Hester in the forest scene in SL:

Sethe, if I'm here with you, with Denver, you can go anywhere you want. Jump, if you want to, 'cause I'll catch you, girl. I'll catch you 'fore you fall. Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out.... We can make a life, girl. A life.

It's one of Beloved's dark ironies that Sethe ends the novel like Baby Suggs and Arthur Dimmesdale before her, in danger of failing to heed Hester's advice to Dimmesdale: "Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down and die!"

Without jumping that far ahead, let me simply close this post by noting that Sethe and Paul D's reunion, after 18 years apart, is not unlike Hester's and Dimmesdale's meeting after a separation of 7 years. I'll put the two conversations side-by-side, so to speak, and let you draw the conclusions:

He made a step nigher, and discovered the scarlet letter.

"Hester! Hester Prynne!" said he. "Is it thou? Art thou in life?"

"Even so!" she answered. "In such life as has been mine these seven years past!"

As if to punish her further for her terrible memory, sitting on the porch, not forty feet away, was Paul D, the last of the Sweet Home men. And although she could never mistake his face for another's, she said, "Is that you?"

"What's left."

Little-Known Hawthorne Fact

It's a little-known fact about Hawthorne that he was unutterably opposed to blogging on a sunny day in the mid-60s in late December, especially when it comes the day after the worst winter typhoon to hit Japan in 34 years, and particularly when the imoto is turning 8 months old. I believe "unforgivable sin" was the phrase he used when advising against doing anything but taking the kids outside to enjoy a day like this! [Update: Actually, it was "unpardonable sin"--I blame the mistake on the unexpectedly good weather!]

CRT II: The Scarlet Letter Remix

Since I don't have time to do a good close reading this Tuesday, I'll settle for a second-worst one. Hopefully.

"Look your last on the scarlet letter and its wearer!"--the people's victim and life-long bond-slave, as they fancied her, might say to them. "Yet a little while, and she will be beyond your reach! A few hours longer, and the deep, mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever the symbol which ye have caused to burn upon her bosom!"

This quotation comes at a key moment in The Scarlet Letter, before Dimmesdale has begun his Election Day sermon and before Hester discovers that Chillingworth has booked passage on the same "questionable vessel" on which she and Dimmesdale have resolved to flee Boston for Europe with Pearl. The narrator is trying to convey her emotions upon wearing the scarlet letter for what she believes will be the last time in Boston, and perhaps ever. In this passage, he invents an internal monologue for her ("might say") and embeds within it a curious interjection. What I am interested in is the reference to Hester as "the people's victim and life-long bond-slave"--and how qualified it is, for immediately the narrator concedes, "as they fancied her." This is both a reference to her intended escape and an acknowledgement of the game he's been playing throughout the romance in using the iconography of the female slave and, here, the fugitive slave to dramatize Hester's relationship with her community. As this is ground that Jean Fagan Yellin and Jennifer Fleischner, among others, have covered thoroughly, I'm going to focus on an aspect of Hester's "social death" that has not to my knowledge been discussed before, and, in so doing, pick up where my not-very-intertextual Intertextual Thursday left off last week.

For this passage is a culmination of sorts of a consistent motif in The Scarlet Letter: the idea that the scarlet letter imposes a kind of social death upon Hester. This is the reason for all the ghostly imagery the narrator uses when attempting to identify Hester's place in the Boston Puritan community. As I (barely) discussed last Thursday, Hester could have been sentenced to death for her adultery and hence the letter is a kind of suspended death sentence; Hester is consistently portrayed as banished from the community yet still haunting it; the figure of the ghost is an apt figure for her there-but-not-quite-there, not-there-but-not-quite-not-there presence/absence. In a certain sense, then, the "social death" Hester suffers in Boston is not so different from being a "life-long bond-slave," for her condition satisfies key parts of Orlando Patterson's classic definition of slavery in his Slavery and Social Death. She is enduring a kind of social death that involves both "dishonor" and "natal alienation" (she is completely separated from her ancestors and disavowed by her husband); her "enslavement" takes place at a time in 17th-century British America when slavery was becoming racialized (the first Africans in the English-speaking New World were, like poor whites, indentured servants--it took most of the century for temporary indentured servitude to be limited to non-Africans); her daughter Pearl is, in a certain sense, following the condition of her mother; both, like some 19th-century black colonizationists or fugitive slaves, are attempting to leave North America for "the old world" (in their case, Africa; in hers, Europe) in a kind of reverse middle passage.

But at the same time as he invokes these associations of slavery, the narrator stresses the differences. Hester is, after all, only wearing a symbol, one she hopes "the deep, mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever," rather than being branded as many African-American slaves were. She is allowed to keep her daughter, unlike most African-American slaves--her natal alienation has limits theirs didn't. In fact, in the scene in Governor Bellingham's mansion where she successfully argues her case, her status is contrasted with that of a recently-arrived indentured servant of the governor. More on that scene next Tuesday, for it can be linked to another key motif in The Scarlet Letter--heraldry. But my older daughter--who on this blog will go only by the names onechan, or Gohan Girl, or "Uh oh Diva Girl"--had the shortest nap ever, and it's back to daddy duty for CitizenSE.

Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future in "The Custom-House"

Phew, Blogger wasn't exactly in the Christmas spirit for awhile there, was it? I was shut out for the entire weekend. Just kidding, I only tried today. But I was shut out for hours.

Anyway, in honor of Dickens, I'm posting a short list of ghosts in "The Custom-House," in the order in which they appear, while the musume futari are sleeping.

1. The "figure of that first ancestor," who was "present to my boyish imagination" and "still haunts me."

2. The "ghosts of bygone meals," which appear to the Inspector of the Custom-House, "not in anger or retribution, but as if grateful for his former appreciation, and seeking to reduplicate an endless series of enjoyment, at once shadowy and sensual."

3. "The past," which "was not dead": that is, "the thoughts, that had seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so quietly, revived again," which is to say the urge to write creative fiction.

4. Surveyor Pue's ghost:

It impressed me as if the ancient Surveyor, in his garb of a hundred years gone by, and wearing his immortal wig,--which was buried with him, but did not perish in the grave,--had met me in the deserted chamber of the Custom-House.... With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to me the scarlet symbol, and the little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his own ghostly voice, he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him,--who might reasonably regard himself as my official ancestor,--to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public. "Do this," said the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically nodding the head that looked so imposing within its memorable wig, "do this, and the profit shall be all your own! You will shortly need it; for it is not in your days as it was in mine, when a man's office was a life-lease, and oftentimes an heirloom. But, I charge you, in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give to your predecessor's memory the credit which will rightfully be its due!" And I said to the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue,--"I will!"

5. The "characters of the narrative," who "would not be warmed and rendered malleable, by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance."

6. A "form, beloved, but gone hence," that is "now sitting quietly in a streak of magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside."

7. A "suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away," something which is "any thing but agreeable to be haunted" by.

8. Hawthorne's "figurative self," that of a "politically dead man," whose "own head was the first to fall" upon the Whig electoral victory, and who was kept "careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like Irving's Headless Horseman, ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried."

9. The narrator of "The Custom-House," "a gentleman who writes from beyond the grave," and whose essay and romance "may be considered as the POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR."

Did I miss any?

[Update (12/28/06): D'oh! First sentence: "It is a little remarkable, that--though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends--an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me." Let's call it number 0.]

Oh, and for your holiday gift, o ghostly reader(s), k-punk has been doing some serious ghost blogging the past few weeks, so go check out the holiday hauntology!