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Order and Excess in Hawthorne's Fiction. Michael F

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Order and Excess in Hawthorne's Fiction. Michael F Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1969 Order and Excess in Hawthorne's Fiction. Michael F. Dunne Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Dunne, Michael F., "Order and Excess in Hawthorne's Fiction." (1969). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 1587. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/1587 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received 70-234 DUNNE, Michael F„ 1941- ORDER AND EXCESS IN HAWTHORNE’S FICTION. The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Ph.D., 1969 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan ORDER AND EXCESS IN HAWTHORNE'S FICTION A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Michael F. Dunne B.A., Fordham University, 1964 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1966 May, 1969 PREFACE This study was initiated during the Spring, 1966 semester as a term project in a seminar on Hawthorne con­ ducted by Professor Otis B. Wheeler. At that time I exam­ ined a group of Hawthorne's better-known short stories in the light of my feeling that Hawthorne displayed a marked opposition to the romantic "quest." Further investigation suggested to me that the "anti-quest" motif was actually only one aspect of a more significant theme in Hawthorne's work. A close reading of the novels, tales, sketches, and notebooks revealed a general pattern of conservative thought which seemed very surprising in an American Roman­ tic. Under the direction, first of Professor Wheeler, and later of Professor Nicholas Canaday, Jr., I compared my findings with those of the many other writers who have tried to arrive at a better understanding of Hawthorne's work. I believe that my final thesis concerning Haw­ thorne's conservatism is consistent with the text and ten­ able despite some disagreements with respected authorities. My method of approach in this paper has been to restrict my discussion to Hawthorne's major fiction except where com­ parisons with his non-fiction or lesser fiction have seemed likely to illuminate some major work. iii When dealing with Hawthorne's own writing, I have used the standard texts. The principal edition has been the Riverside Edition: The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, with Introductory Notes, ed. by George P. Lathrop, 12 vols. (Boston, 1883). This edition has been augmented by the newer Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, from the Ohio State University Press, Columbus, Ohio, whenever the newer volumes have been avail­ able. Thus, I have adopted the Centenary texts of The Scarlet Letter (1962); The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe (1964); and The House of the Seven Gables (1965). For the Notebooks, I have used Randall Stewart's editions: The American Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne (New Haven, 1932); and The English Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York, 1941). The American Notebooks have been supplemented by those few passages which appear in Sophia Hawthorne's ver­ sion of the Notebooks, but not in Stewart's. Mrs. Haw­ thorne's edition, which appears as Volume IX of the River­ side Edition, will be designated in the notes as Passages. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Pro­ fessor Wheeler, who encouraged me to develop this study; to Professor Canaday, who supervised the research and writing of this dissertation; and to my wife, Sara, who sustained my morale and typed my manuscript. CONTENTS Page PREFACE ............................................. ii ABSTRACT ............................................ v I INTRODUCTION .................................... 1 II IMBALANCE AS A DESTRUCTIVE PRINCIPLE .......... 17 III THE DANGERS OF AN ECCENTRIC VIEW OF THE UNIVERSE ......................................... 75 IV SELF AND SOCIETY: THE SCARLET LETTER ...... 131 V DOMESTIC LIFE AS SALVATION: THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES .......... 181 VI THE EXTREMES OF "OVERPLUS AND ABSENCE": THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE ............................ 214 VII SEVERAL TYPES OF EXCESS: THE MARBLE FAUN.... 245 VIII CONCLUSION ........................................ 279 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................... 296 VITA .............................. 305 ABSTRACT Hawthorne is not an orthodox Romantic. In The Blithedale Romance and The House of the Seven Gables, his awareness of the limitations of man's capacity for reform is alone sufficient evidence to place Hawthorne outside the principal lines of thought popular with his contemporaries. Furthermore, individuality, as represented in Ethan Brand and Hollingsworth, is presented, not with an eye toward glorification, but with a strong note of moral censure. Hawthorne's true "heroes" are not Byronic individualists but rather domestic men like Holgrave and Kenyon. There is throughout Hawthorne's major work an insistence on the need for moderation, for balance, for conservatism of thought and action, instead of the assertions of self expected from a romantic artist. Against the pride of Lady Eleanore and the scienti­ fic obsession of Aylmer Hawthorne proposes the need for that conformity which society appears justified in demand­ ing from the individual. His tales and romances repeatedly stress the error involved in a conviction of individual righteousness. True religion cannot be practiced behind the distorting filter of the Minister's Black Veil. True happiness cannot be attained through the discovery of the vi Great Carbuncle. True fame cannot be won through the soli­ tary distortion of human nature practiced by the Ambitious Guest. A recognition of the insufficiency of individual striving is the necessary prelude to any real success. Only when he has turned from a defiant eccentricity to a balanced integration with his fellow men, can the indi­ vidual hope to achieve the ideal happiness of Holgrave and Phoebe, Hollingsworth and Priscilla, the Village Uncle and his Susan. Man may depart from the essential norm in human be­ havior in two significant ways. First, he may, like Dr. Heidegger or Mr. Lindsey, permit a single faculty to de­ velop unrestrainedly, thus causing the stifling of some other vital faculty and creating a dangerous imbalance in his personality. A personality thus distorted is a false prism through which to view reality and, as such, is likely to lead one to inverted perceptions of the universe such as those that haunt Young Goodman Brown. Second, one may, perhaps owing to an imbalance of some sort, miscalculate man's existential priorities and conclude that the dis­ covery of eternal youth, for example, can guarantee absolute human fulfillment. The tragedies of Aylmer and Ethan Brand clearly demonstrate that no individually significant prin­ ciple of existence is capable of bringing satisfactory congruence to human life. Any man who, like John Brown, makes such a "preposterous miscalculation of possibilities," is on a track fast approaching madness. In this study, Hawthorne's four major romances and his most characteristic tales are examined principally through their characters. Each character is measured against the human norm presented in his story and is then judged in error insofar as he departs from this norm. Char­ acters such as Hepzibah Pyncheon, whose eccentricities are largely harmless, win Hawthorne's ridicule. Those who, like Rappaccini, extend the influence of their distortions toward the destruction of others merit the author's moral censure. The central concern remains the same, however: the norm and those various excesses which violate the norm. The centrality of this concern is apparent in tales such as "Ethan Brand" and "Egotism" in which moral serious­ ness is combined with obvious satire,. This combination is possible because Hawthorne's pose as narrator remains amazingly constant in his fiction. He remains the defender of stability, of the values which have been tempered by time, of the classical ideal of a balanced human nature. Hawthorne's eccentrics, his victims of excess, are fasci­ nating chiefly because their primary function is the illu­ mination through contrast of the essential norm which their author asserts as the human ideal. CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Despite the fact that Nathaniel Hawthorne lived dur­ ing the "American Renaissance," that his wife and sister-in- law were close friends and admirers of Margaret Fuller, that he himself joined the Brook Farm experiment, that he was a neighbor of Emerson, there is something about Hawthorne's writing that suggests that he is not an orthodox "Romantic." Many readers have discovered aspects of his thought that are incompatible with a classification of Hawthorne as a thinker analogous to Emerson, Melville, and Poe. Millicent Bell finds in Hawthorne "antagonism toward the Romantic- idealist exaltation of the ego." Vernon L. Parrington sees Hawthorne as "cool, detached, rationalistic, curiously in­ quisitive." George E. Woodberry suggests that Hawthorne was "primarily a moralist,
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