The Marble Faun

The House of the Seven Gables was slow enough, but this is totally unbearable.

Page after page of nothing happening at all.

That would be all right, I suppose, if his characters weren't so utterly inhuman, such complete cardboard fabrications.

And the complete sexlessness of his women, his characters, his universe seems extreme even for his era.

Gave up on it about halfway through.

On the road from Faust to Mengele

Rappaccini's Daughter

Reading Nathaniel Hawthorne.

By the way, here as elsewhere, but so far especially here, N's prose puts me in mind, somewhat, of the writing in the novels of Henry James that I read twenty or thirty years ago.

Very nice stuff.

Well, here and there.

Deplorable ending.

Trite, repugnant, canned.

A dissertation in American studies at Pyongyang University, 1970

Well, maybe not.

I particularly like the repeated, rather clinical sounding references to Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, and Thoreau as "four Northern white male writers."

As if the thing were being written at the Marxist-Feminist University of Tralfamador, a thousand years hence, by someone very remote, indeed, from being Northern, white, male, or even a writer.

Tralfamadorans looked rather like bathroom plungers, as I recall.

Anyway, we are a long way from Harold Bloom.

Kim, EunHyoung

Does the word "duckspeak" come to mind?

Hawthorne's racism?

For the politically correct, racism is both as damning and as shameful as vice privatus to an earlier generation of good Catholic boys.

The PC onslaught is like a vast outpouring of sewage spilled out in hatred over all of America and all American, indeed all European, achievements.

Hawthorne's racism.

Young Goodman Brown

He saw nothing in the forest that night that a well schooled Puritan should not have expected.

Copperhead Democrat

NYRB on John Brown

  

Whether Brown was mad, whether he was a delusional religious fanatic, whether he was a terrorist of Bloody Kansas, whether he was guilty of murder and incitement to murder many times over, are questions of fact.

 

Whether he was a moral hero fighting a just campaign against an intolerable moral crime is an entirely imaginary question with only imaginary answers.

 

The  radical sees the conditions of the ragged and brutalized serf, slave, and free laborer and says all are alike victims of injustice.

 

His revolution does not end until all that is overthrown.

 

He will ruin the universe trying to get there.

 

The libertarian sees the same horrors and protests serfdom and slavery are unjust but not the frightful state of free labor.

 

His revolution ends with the destruction of the ancien regime and the liberation of the slaves.

 

For both he would spill oceans of blood.

 

It seems that Hawthorne, though a solid republican who disapproved slavery, was a Copperhead Democrat who would have let the South go and sympathized more with hard-driven free white labor than slaves he thought generally no worse off, and perhaps not as badly off in some cases.

 

He sought no revolution, in any case, and deplored the Civil War.

 

Not your typical Yankee intellectual of those days, though in fact for many decades that was the view of most abolitionists.

They wanted to end slavery in the US, and if the way to do that was to sunder the Union they would sunder it. 

But that was not the view of the Republicans, who agreed with Lincoln in insisting before secession that if the South attempted it "We will not let you go!"

Some, distressed by Hawthorne's position, attribute it to racism. 

That is just stupid. 

Lincoln was a racist, as were nearly all abolitionists, including the most fanatic. 

The bones of contention were slavery and Union. 

The Copperheads did not accept the intolerance of Lincoln's "house divided" speech and did not want to plunge into war either to convert the Union from a voluntary association to a creature of conquest or to end slavery. 

The Republicans wanted all those things and more. 

And did them.

They ended slavery in the South by conquest and they kept the South in the Union by conquest. 

And then they spent decades trying to force political and civic equality for blacks upon the country without real majority support. 

These things would have shocked and horrified the men of Philadelphia. 

As they shocked and horrified people like Hawthorne. 

The end of funny?

Actually rather amusing up to now, rather like Dickens, the funny stops with a few remarks that, in French, might have been Zola.

 

The House of the Seven Gables,  Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851, B&N Classics, 2007.

 

Page 106.

 

Phoebe has just met Judge Pyncheon.

 

She notes his "hard, cold, relentless" look, by which he resembles his long dead ancestor of the same name, the man who built the house on stolen land, and wonders if it is his settled character, inherited.

 

Hawthorne intrudes, commenting this realization implies a hereditary transmission of "criminal tendencies" and "moral defects" more certain than the hereditary transmission of wealth and property according to law.

 

Not funny.

 

Character is destiny, said Heraclitus and Schopenhauer.

 

A remark of which Sheriff Longmire's libertarian interpretation the other night could not have been more absurd. 

Without question, a solid bourgeois and a firm republican

Phoebe vs. Hepzibah.

 

Compare Hawthorne on Patrician vs. Plebian with the rather less assertively modern French Lieutenant's Woman of John Fowles on Aristocracy vs. Bourgeoisie.

 

The House of the Seven Gables.

 

Fowles is notably more open to the aristocratic liberty of those who are free from toil because, being rich, they live by the toil of others.

 

Or at least more superficially understanding.

 

Hawthorne is out of sympathy even with the coupon-clippers, those bourgeois aristos of the capitalist age who live on the labor of others as surely as any Duke or Earl.

 

An attitude equally forthright in Mark Twain, in Huckleberry Finn and elsewhere.

 

In The Scarlet Letter, we saw in the introductory "The Customs House" his contempt for government employees whose charges were essentially sinecures.

The Black Man

So, in this novel, the hags of Salem really do meet at midnight in the forest to celebrate their evil doings and their arrangements with The Black Man.

 

Well, why not?

 

The Scarlet Letter.

 

Everyone thinks her husband is dead.

 

Why was the charge adultery rather than fornication?

The husband betrayed

From the 16th Century to our own, he is a joke unless vengeful, and then he is a demon.

 

In The Scarlet Letter, he is a demon and the man who put horns on him is a flawed but basically admirable fellow.

 

Such is the enlightened literature of adultery.

Pearl

Well, she's a little affliction, a little demon sent to harass and immiserate Hester, is she not?

What the hell?

The Scarlet Letter.

A little overdone?

Her husband is old, past it, missing for years, thought dead, and a hunchback.

And a vengeful bastard and a truly poor loser, at that.

Was Hawthorne afraid we'd otherwise have little sympathy for his inwardly defiant, scornful, and remorseless "heroine"?

Was this the first "enlightened" book in America written in defense of adultery?

Yes, yes.

A defense of the sinner is not a defense of the sin.

Sure.

Divorce. Adultery. Fornication. Homosexuality.

In enlightened literature, the sinner is only a stalking horse for the sin.

The Scarlet Letter, 1850.

She's a better man than Dimmesdale, that's for sure.