Showing and Telling

SHOWING AND TELLING:

VISUAL CULTURE AND ITS IMPACT ON THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE OF

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE AND EDITH

WHARTON’S SUMMER

A Thesis

Presented to the Faculty of the Department of English

California State University, Sacramento

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

English

(Literature)

Juan Espinoza

SPRING 2020

Juan Espinoza

SHOWING AND TELLING:

VISUAL CULTURE AND ITS IMPACT ON THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE OF

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE AND EDITH

WHARTON’S SUMMER

A Thesis

Juan Espinoza

Approved by:

______, Committee Chair Nancy Sweet

______, Second Reader Susan Wanlass

______Date iii

Student: Juan Espinoza

I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this thesis is suitable for electronic submission to the Library and credit is to be awarded for this thesis.

______, Graduate Coordinator ______Doug Rice Date

Department of English

Abstract

SHOWING AND TELLING:

VISUAL CULTURE AND ITS IMPACT ON THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE OF

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE AND EDITH

WHARTON’S SUMMER

Juan Espinoza

In her 1934 autobiography, A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton admonished critics of her 1917 novel Summer who viewed the novel as a “pleasing romance of summer life.” Wharton saw her novel as part of the same Dark Romantic literary traditions of New England established by authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne. This project moves beyond Wharton’s connections of genre and geography to explore how both

Hawthorne’s and Wharton’s literary works were intimately situated within their respective era’s popular culture and how popular entertainments of each era shaped the form, style, and worldview of each author’s literary works. I begin by analyzing how

Hawthorne’s 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance is narrated as though it were a series of tableaux vivant or “living pictures,” antebellum entertainments with a moral message, though they were also often an excuse to skirt censorship laws. I then explore how, in much the same way, Wharton’s Summer uses the circus freakshow, a form descended from the tableaux vivant that displayed Otherness as a medical and scientific

v entertainment. In Summer the freakshow is used with disturbing effect as a way to deliver an otherwise simple “seduced and abandoned” plot. Together these novels suggest that literary fiction is shaped by the popular culture that surrounds it. As that popular culture evolves, so too does the form of literary fiction. Large changes in popular culture, like those between tableaux vivant and the freakshow, are mirrored by minor differences in the narratives of literary fiction like those between The Blithedale

Romance and Summer.

______, Committee Chair Nancy Sweet

______Date

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This Master’s Thesis was made possible by many, many people. I would like to thank the following people:

Dr. Nancy Sweet and Dr. Susan Wanlass for their support throughout this process and throughout my master’s degree.

My family, especially my mother Traci Johnson and my father Luis Espinoza, who supported me throughout this entire journey.

My brothers, José and Carlos Espinoza.

My friends, especially Anthony Perez and Catalina Carapia-Aguillon, and Ambyr Gage,

Ademidun Adejobi, David Ng, Sophia Louie and so, so many others.

My colleagues, for supporting me in my many other endeavors.

And Dora Monterroza, for putting up with me, for supporting me, for inspiring me, for pushing me to be the best person I can be.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

Acknowledgements ...... vii

Chapter

1. INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE STAGE ...... 1

2. HUSH, POSE, AND YOU WILL BELIEVE: TABLEAUX VIVANT AND

BLITHEDALE ...... 25

3. THE GREATEST SHOW IN NEW ENGLAND: FREAKSHOW, CIRCUS, AND

SUMMER ...... 58

4. STRIKING THE SET: CONLCUSIONS AND NOTES FOR FURTHER

READINGS AND VIEWINGS ...... 92

Works Cited ...... 106

viii

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE STAGE

In her 1934 autobiography, A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton admonished critics of her 1917 novel Summer. Critics of the time were excited for the release of

Summer. Many reviews drew a comparison between Wharton’s earlier work Ethan

Frome and Summer, with the Nation favoring the former and the Times Literary

Supplement seeing the two novels as equals (Rattray xvi). To Wharton, Summer was squarely in the dark, regional traditions of fiction established by authors like Nathaniel

Hawthorne. Wharton felt, for good reason, that her critics were instead expecting

Summer to be “the reflection of local life in the rose-and-lavender pages of their favourite authoresses” (Wharton, A Backward Glance 294). After all, the New York Times Book

Review naively titled their review “Summer a Pleasing Romance of Village Life” (xix).

Wharton’s stab at her reviewers is a less emphatic rebuke of “women’s writing” than

Hawthorne’s own scorn of the “damned mob of scribbling women” he felt was ruining the critical reputation of his own work in 1855 (Wagner-Martin 243). Hawthorne’s 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance came before his “scribbling women” phase, but some of the reviews of the novel are no less damning than those he would receive—and comment on—later. The Norton Critical Edition of Blithedale contains one review, by an anonymous reviewer for the Westminster Review, declaring that Blithedale “will never attain the popularity which is vouchsafed…to some of its contemporaries” and which went on to say that “Hawthorne has a rich perception of the beautiful, but he is sadly

2 deficient in moral depth and earnestness” (262, 263). Reviews of Blithedale fall into roughly two camps. One camp identifies Blithedale as a roman à clef for the real-life

Brook Farm. The Penguin Classics Edition quotes a review from the Christian Examiner that states emphatically that “Mr. Hawthorne is presenting…a delineation of life and character” at Brook Farm (x). Orestes Brownson, father to a Brook Farm participant, was often reluctantly roped into the roman à clef reading but tried, in his reviews, to lead the other camp that saw Blithedale “connected with some of [his] friends” but ultimately showing “very little of the actual persons engaged in it” (x). Though the reviews were decidedly mixed for each novel, it is interesting that the two authors, connected through time and genre, share a connection through their novels’s similar persistent misreadings.

However, it is also easy to see that the novels share a similar narrative structure.

Blithedale is the story of failed love at a failed socialist utopian community. It follows three main characters: Zenobia, a proto-feminist and author; Hollingsworth, a criminal reformer; and Miles Coverdale, a minor romantic poet and flaneur who narrates the story after the fact. The love triangle that develops between the three is complicated by the introduction of Priscilla and Westervelt. Summer follows Charity Royall in her love affair with the urbane Lucius Harney, who is visiting North Dormer to sketch colonial era houses. The love affair is complicated by Lawyer Royall, Charity’s adoptive ward.

When Charity becomes pregnant by Harney and Harney leaves her for the beautiful

Annabel Balch, Charity runs away to the outlaw community on the Mountain, her ancestral home. Lawyer Royall brings the exhausted Charity back to town and promptly

3 marries her. Each novel has very similar characters. Hollingsworth and Lawyer are the brooding older men, Coverdale and Harney the feckless young men, Priscilla and Charity the delicate but brooding young women, and Zenobia and Annabel Balch the

“temptresses.” Besides complicated sexual/romantic relationships, each novel deals with themes of power and control. More specifically, the male characters use their power to control, confine, judge, and punish women. In Blithedale, the gaze is each male character’s, but especially Coverdale’s, main means of control. In Summer, that male gaze is suffused into an Orwellian panopticism lorded over by Lawyer Royall.

Though the similarities in critical receptions and the narrative structures are intriguing, simply put, I find Wharton’s claim of literary kinship with Hawthorne the most intriguing. Wharton’s genealogical claim establishes her roots in both a geographical space, New England, and a generic vein, Dark Romanticism, a dark counterpoint to Romantic literature often conflated with the Gothic because of its fascination with the irrational, demonic, and grotesque, as opposed to Romantic literature’s focus on the sublime and euphoric. With this project I will add another category to the connection between Hawthorne and Wharton: performance. By this I mean two things, the actual performances within the novels and readings using a performance studies lens. I take this approach because both novels include detailed accounts of and slight references to a range of actual performances and actual popular entertainment spectacles of their respective eras. I use the term performance interchangeably with entertainment and spectacle because historical accounts of these

4 performances stress both the performer, the spectacle, and the entertainment value of each performance. Indeed, it seems, in reading historical accounts, that performance, spectacle, and entertainment are inextricably linked and not distinct categories. A performance genealogy can be traced through strictly literary works1. Hawthorne’s 1860 novel The Marble Faun could be read as blending sculpture, painting, and architecture with popular forms of Gothic and travel writing. Wharton’s The House of Mirth, with its spectacular, fantastical, and infamous tableaux vivant scene could be read as a blending of popular stage performances with the popular novel. However, Blithedale and Summer do not just feature performance, they use performance as a frame with which to deliver their narratives. Hawthorne uses performance, the nineteenth-century fad of tableaux vivant2 specifically, as a frame for his first-person narrator, Miles Coverdale, to deliver

Blithedale. Wharton similarly uses performance to deliver Summer through her third person narrator. That performance, the freakshow or circus sideshow, is a direct descendant of the tableaux vivant used in Blithedale.

Thus, this project is as much a study of Hawthorne and Wharton as it is a study of popular culture and how both high and low entertainment together form a dynamic

1 For a discussion of this literary connection using both literature and tableaux vivant, see “Tableaux Vivants: Masculine Vision and Feminine Reflections in Novels by Warner, Alcott, Stowe, and Wharton” by Grace Ann and Theodore R. Hovet. 2 It is important to note a seemingly trivial concern before proceeding too far forwards: spelling. Many modern critics use the proper French spelling of tableaux vivant for the plural, as I do. However, it seems to be common practice to also use the Americanized tableaux vivants, which, when referring to 19th century writing, seems to be the preferred method. When quoting, I retain the spelling of the author or critic; however, when writing, I will use the French version of the term.

5 entertainment ecosystem that evolves over time. In this respect, my work taps into the same critical vein as Mark Storey’s critical work, which suggests that nearly any combination of works by Henry James could be included as literary intermediaries between Hawthorne and Wharton. Storey reads James’s works as exemplify how literature can participate in the evolution of visual culture from the straightforward theatrics of antebellum stages to the kaleidoscopic three-ring circuses of postbellum entertainments. Blithedale and Summer serve as more intriguing points along the evolutionary timeline than Storey’s readings of James’s works because the two novels are both far enough apart to not be bogged down with the minutiae of change (as Storey’s study of James is) and close enough together to not fall victim to grand historical oversimplifications. In other words, they are situated at the right distance to establish a valid overarching evolutionary narrative. Too, the connections between Hawthorne and

Wharton and tableaux vivant and freakshow are well documented; Blithedale and

Summer allow me to suture the authors and the entertainments together into one unified narrative. In examining these two points along the evolutionary timeline, this project also proposes a way for current readers and scholars to understand literature’s place in their current entertainment ecosystem.

As mentioned above, the entertainments I will focus on will be the tableaux vivant and freakshow. Both are now functionally extinct, existing in some form within our modern entertainments but not existing on their own as they did in past centuries. Along with studying these actual performances, this project also uses “performance” as it is used

6 by varying fields of study. For instance, this project uses a performance studies approach to read each novel. Tracy C. Davis, in her introduction to The Cambridge Companion to

Performance Studies, sees a timeline of academic “turns”—vogueish philosophies or stances of studying that supposedly shook up academia—of which the “performative turn” is the most recent in line. The performative turn itself acknowledges “how individual behavior derives from collective, even unconscious, influences and is manifest as observable behavior, both overt and quotidian, individual and collective” (1). The

“performative turn” was built first from the “linguistic turn” of theorists like Jacque

Derrida. In linguistics, a performative is what J. L. Austin calls an utterance that does things with words. For example, promises, oaths, and naming utterances are not necessarily true or false, but are actions done through words. Stanley Cavell takes up this notion and expands performativity to also include the ability for language to carry and thus perform emotion3. The performative turn subsequently built from the “cultural turn” of Michel Foucault (1). The more well-known definition of performativity comes from the “cultural turn” approach of Judith Butler. Butler’s concept of “performativity of gender” argues that identities are “performed,” as in made up of many actions and costumings. Gender, in turn, can be replaced by any number of other terms to suggest that our reality and identities are made up of actions, costumes, and roles. For example,

3 This is, of course, not the entire history of linguistic performativity. Scott Lash conducts a thorough and easy-to-read interview in Theory, Culture & Society with philosopher John Searle on linguistic performativity titled “Performativity or Discourse? An Interview with John Searle.”

Nicholas Ridout argues that democracy is a performative act because we must play the role of a member of the polis. However, Davis also points out that key terms pertaining to the field of performance studies have a certain “heterogeneity” to their definitions and uses (7). One key contention within performance studies is between “adherents of performance studies” and those “making use of the power of ‘performance’ as an explanatory metaphor without regard for…‘limits’ to the performative” (1). This project will use the “heterogeneity” of the term “performance” to explore the many layers of performance in each novel and will push the boundaries of the performative metaphor by moving beyond the performer/audience dichotomy of many performance studies to include director, critic, and theatre space.

However, I feel that if I am to fully explain the connection through performance, it is necessary to provide here some historical context for this project. The following sections proceed chronologically, delving into the history first of tableaux vivant and then of freakshow. Along with the history, I provide some technical, cultural, and critical information of each performance type. This historical section serves as a basis from which to begin excavating the connections between Hawthorne and Wharton. In fact, even here certain themes emerge that both historians of the performances and critics of the novels hold in common. Critics of both the entertainments and the novels discuss the dynamics of the gaze and the many attempts to subvert the power of the gaze. Another common theme is mixture. Critics of performance inevitably talk about the mixing of

8 audience and stage, viewer and viewed, while critics of the novels talk about the mixture of reliable and unreliable narration, objective and subjective reality.

Hawthorne begins his introduction to Blithedale by declaring that, “In short, [his] present concern with the Socialist Community is merely to establish a theatre…where the creatures of his brain may play their phantasmagorical antics” (Hawthorne 1). Even before the play begins, readers are cued to seek out the theatrical, to favor the subjective over the objective, in The Blithedale Romance. Critics have taken this cue to discuss the most spectacular theatre genres of the novel: mesmerism and masque. Michael S.

Martin’s and Samuel Coale’s separate investigations into masque and mesmerism respectively argue for theatre not as an innocent entertainment but a phantasmagorical, almost psychotropic, exploitative performance. In Blithedale, the two argue, performance is a way to challenge reality or a way to exercise one’s power over others, the narrative, and, to an extent, reality. However, masque and mesmerism are only two examples from the breadth of theatric and performative references in Blithedale that stem from Hawthorne’s “interest in large-scale nineteenth-century American spectatorship and entertainment” (Martin 85). Though Hawthorne’s particularly contentious relationship with mesmerism does provide a fertile ground for critical readings, this project explores the rest of the ecosystem of entertainments that Hawthorne could have drawn from.

Equally prevalent, and equally odd, as mesmerism and masque are the tableaux vivant, or living pictures, put on by the inhabitants of Blithedale Farm before the

“Zenobia’s Legend” chapter (Hawthorne 106). Like the masque, tableau has a long

9 history. It is important to note here that tableaux vivant were not a homogenous performance type nor were they singularly an American experience during Hawthorne’s life. In fact, the tableau, like most theatrical traditions that originated in Europe, “carries a long history dating to the early Renaissance” though it can be traced even further back to medieval morality plays, where, “at important moments in [the] morality plays,

[performers] often used a tableau to give the central personage (together with the audience) a moral insight” (Patterson 616, Bussels 239). Even in these pre-modern performances, the form’s basic themes, and contradictions, are clearly present. Stijn

Bussels discusses the extensive use of tableaux vivant in the “joyous entry” ceremonies of the Lowlands. The joyous entry was a performance staged by the town to welcome a new ruler but to also deliver a political message to the ruler regarding what the town saw as the moral, ethical, and legal relationship between state and city. However, the tableaux of the joyous entries did not draw solely on the medieval performance traditions of the morality play. They drew extensively from Classical and medieval treatises on the rhetoric of painting and theatre. Bussels suggests that, at least “In 1458,” tableaux were

“an ideal means to experiment with the capacities of both [theatre and painting] to present the political relation between” the town and the visiting ruler (Bussels 238). This pre- modern history presented by Bussels suggests that tableaux, from the beginning, were performances that freely mixed media to serve a certain end and communicate a certain message concerning power relations between two parties, in this case the ruler/audience and the town/performer. An important caveat is, as Bussels points out, that the tableaux

10 of the joyous entry were not always easy for the audience, whether ruler or townsperson, to decode. In Bussels’ history, this difficulty is inherent in the tableaux’s mixed-media formant. Combining the rhetorics of painting and performance led to a product that was overladen with meaning. Though the historical consequences of this for the Lowlands are not important to this project, the concept of overdetermined meaning is, as will become clear.

What became the popular tableaux vivant of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “can be traced to the eighteenth-century Neapolitan drawing room displays”—or attitudes—“by Lady Emma Hamilton…who famously covered her seminude form with shawls” (Assael 746). These attitudes were performed “for private and aristocratic entertainment” (Patterson 616). One of those aristocrats, who is often credited in the historical and critical literature for popularizing tableaux in Europe and subsequently America, was Goethe who showcased tableaux in his novel Elective

Affinities (Patterson 616). For his part, Goethe thought Lady Hamilton’s performances were inspired by religious tableaux, which Peter McIsaac, in his discussion of Goethe and tableaux, traces back to renaissance Italy (McIsaac 155). McIsaac also argues that, beyond simply popularizing tableaux, Goethe was also responsible for popularizing the linking of several tableaux into a kind of cycle to create more complex meanings. By juxtaposing several tableaux, the performer could suggest a narrative (156) without actually moving or acting. Goethe is also credited by McIsaac and Cynthia Lee Patterson as the originator of many of the gender issues present in later tableaux. Goethe

11 effectively rendered tableaux performance feminine and viewing—and thus decoding— tableaux masculine. However, the tableaux still were not easily decoded by the audience.

McIsaac suggests that Lady Hamilton’s performances were often mediated by Lord

Hamilton who provided “suggested interpretations” in the form of “commentary or poetic passage” (McIsaac 157). Lady Hamilton’s “attitudes” bring up several interesting points absent in earlier tableaux. For one, audiences of Lady Hamilton’s were often unsure of just who they were looking at. On the one hand, it was Lady Hamilton in front of them.

On the other hand, “once [her shawls] dropped, she was said to portray a series of grand gestures as if the statues she represented, like Helena, Cassandra, and Andromache, had come to life” right there in the parlor (Assael 746). McIsaac furthers this by saying

“whereas the figure frozen in a pose is the presented ‘material,’ she can likewise be recognized as the creative instance” (McIsaac 157), i.e. Lady Hamilton blurred the line between artist and art object.

That Lady Hamilton’s body was displayed so brazenly—ostensibly as art—was in stark contrast to another practitioner of the tableaux at the time: Stéphanie de Félicité, the

Countess of Genlis who advocated for the tableaux’s pedagogical uses. Specifically, the

Countess of Genlis “advocated a strict, religiously based method that avoided the use of theoretical explanations” in favor of “historical scenes [that] were enacted as tableaux vivants in the hopes that bodily emulation of certain poses would transmit proper morals, politics and Bildung well before young minds could grasp those abstract concepts”

(McIsaac 165). Though McIsaac does not speculate as to why this split between the

12 artistic and the instructive occurred, it is possible to see how the tableaux’s uncertain and uneven past in politics, theatre, and painting could lead to such a bifurcation. The tableaux of the joyous entries could just as easily be split between their political and moral exigencies and their artistic exigencies. What is most important about Lady

Hamilton, the Countess of Genlis, and the eighteenth-century period is, simply, the bifurcation. It is the bifurcation of tableaux production, viewership, and criticism into pedagogical and artistic camps that defines the rest of the history of both the tableaux vivant and the freakshow as well as both performances’ critical receptions.

The nineteenth century saw tableaux move from the courtly home and into popular public venues, though the form continued to have a strong presence inside the home. Robert Lewis corroborates much of the above history of tableaux, suggesting that the home sphere “constituted protected space, a sanctuary and refuge from the fray, and from the frenzy of modern, commercial urban life” and that “in the select company of family and invited guests, there could be some pretense that entertainments were

‘instructive,’ ‘improving,’ character-developing rather than ‘dissipating’” (Lewis 282).

Lewis’s work adds, however, that “in aristocratic society in early nineteenth-century

England, the favorite tableaux subject was art, either classical sculpture or Renaissance painting” (Lewis 283). The early “parlor” tableaux, those performed in the homes of aristocrats, often mimicked the “attitudes” of Lady Hamilton. Lewis suggests that it was these parlor tableaux that initially moved from Europe to America when “American visitors on the Grand Tour witnessed [these] ‘attitudes’ and were duly impressed” (Lewis

283). In America, the parlor tableaux were often “clichéd examples of American

Victorian taste…striving for melodramatic effect” because “knowledge of the fine arts was not widely disseminated” in America as it was in Europe (285, 284). With the invention of chromolithography Americans had more and more colorful access to classical works of art (284). Lewis is sure to point out that parlor tableaux evolved into ever more complex productions, often taking up the entire parlor so that the audience had to view the tableaux from the front room through the doorway between the two rooms

(287). This move from small attitudes to grandiose productions mirrored the same evolution in public tableaux discussed by McCullough.

One critic suggests that outside the home, “the earlier nineteenth century versions of the tableau vivant took place in disreputable venues and were seen as lewd entertainment for those who had little or no pretense to be lovers of ‘high art’” like Lady

Hamilton (Huxley 220). However, this claim cannot be taken as altogether true. For one, public tableaux performances could still be passed off as “moral” even if they could not be passed off as “high art.” In the mid-1800s, Louis Godey used popular tableaux as inspiration for illustrations in his magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Magazine4. “Godey’s match plates”—illustrations juxtaposing moral and immoral actions such as industry and idleness—“proved quite popular during the 1840s and 1850s, many enacting a performative morality reminiscent of the popular stage tableaux vivants, and moral

4 For a continued discussion of Godey’s and literature, see Monika M. Elbert’s “Striking a Historical Pose: Antebellum Tableaux Vivants, ‘Godey’s’ Illustrations, and Margret Fuller’s Heroines.”

14 melodramas also captivating audiences at mid-century” (Patterson 614). These match plates were often illustrated first then made more robust with the addition of a story or essay from prominent writers. Moral melodramas themselves “involve[ed] scene- opening and -ending dramatic tableaux, accompanied by music” (616). The ending tableaux was especially powerful because it “presented the core melodramatic truth to the audience” (617) similar to the medieval morality play tableaux. Tableaux were also being performed on their own as well. It is important to note that “while the dramatic tableau freezes action in a melodrama or other stage performance, the tableaux vivants provide the opposite effect, bringing to life on the stage scenes taken from painting or sculpture” (616). These tableaux were initially actors and circus performers posing as classical statues. Over time tableaux showcased pictures or “scenes” whose “productions had shifted to a more grandiose style involving whole companies of performers”

(McCollough 19). Tableaux attempted to imitate a piece of art as closely as possible and yet remained obviously theatric, blending realism, fantasy, and theatre together.

Tableaux, like the mesmeric performances covered by Coale, involve “an erotic tension between male ‘persons of taste,’ who are bearers of the look, and female signs of ‘the beautiful,’ who are their object” (Chapman 31). And like mesmerism, “there was a ready and eager market for tickets, and there were entrepreneurs, legitimate and otherwise, who were ready to exploit that part of the public which was more interested in the

‘proportions’ of the female artists than the ‘classical’ works of art they represented”

(McCollough 29).

However, the same bifurcation between Lady Hamilton and the Countess of

Genlis persisted into the nineteenth century. Though there were dubious practitioners whose tableaux more closely resembled pornography, “supporters [of tableaux] could inscribe tableaux vivants with aesthetic registers, allowing them to be claimed for respectability rather than immorality—to be upheld as art rather than obscenity” (Assael

745). Brenda Assael quotes from The Daily Graphic, a nineteenth-century newspaper, which said “it was good for the public to see at least ‘a fac similie’ of high art” (751) suggesting that critics understood the erotic tensions of tableaux, but understood that even copies of art could provide some benefit and instruction to the public. Detractors, however, argued that tableaux were solely an excuse to ogle the female body. If the tableau itself and the public reception of tableaux were always inherently a complicated and contradictory affair, so too were the laws regarding public tableaux performances.

Nudity—real or implied—was only allowed if the model was still. Any movement on the model’s part would result in a charge of indecency. Though this seems easy enough to regulate, complaints of indecency levied against tableaux led to strict government oversight. A line from Assael is instructional: “Contemporaries, unable to discern whether what they were viewing was ‘nude’ or ‘naked,’ ultimately concluded that prohibition was inappropriate” (745). Regulators could condemn a tableau just as easily as they could condone one. The slippery distinctions between “naked” and “nude” left lawmakers and moralists with no real ground to make a stand on. Instead, tableaux seem to have been dealt with on a case-by-case basis, with performers and directors occupying

16 both the moral and immoral spheres equally. The odd mixture of moral and immoral tableaux presented during the nineteenth century suggest that the form was malleable to the whim of the director or advertiser, the audience, and even the venue it was being performed in. However, as the Godey’s example suggests, tableaux were so popular that they transcended even the visual medium and inspired, if not infiltrated, the written medium of fiction. It is into this ecosystem of entertainment that Hawthorne would have entered and written Blithedale and, indeed, it is this ecosystem that Blithedale and

Coverdale imitate.

Wharton, writing a half-decade later, would participate in an entertainment ecosystem evolved from Hawthorne’s, one that would include the freakshow. No one exemplifies the historical progression from the tableaux to the freakshow quite like

Phineas Taylor Barnum. Though P.T. Barnum is famous for his part in Barnum and

Baily Circus, his exploits in entertainment run the full gamut between tableaux and freakshow. Patterson discusses P.T. Barnum, almost in passing, as one of several

“museum theatre” owners who ran moral-reform melodramas and small historical reenactment theatres fit for respectable ladies and families (617). As mentioned previously, a moral-reform melodrama used a tableau at the end of a scene to highlight and convey the moral message in all of its weight and power. However, fully understanding how the tableaux led to the freakshow requires exploring a concurrent ecosystem of entertainment, one that combined spectacle with the sciences of the day.

This is a slight, but important, detour from Barnum, one that illuminates his role in

American entertainment. Nadja Durbach connects the Early Modern era’s proclivity towards collection and display to the display of “freaks” in the Victorian/Antebellum era.

What were originally “museums and cabinets of curiosity in the early modern period institutionalized the display of natural wonders and in the process connected the culture of an emerging scientific profession to that of spectacular entertainment” (56-7).

Durbach goes on to say that “in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these collections and catalogues of anomalous animals, plants, and minerals expanded to include human monstrosities, both whole and in parts” (57). However, the cabinet of curiosity is really nothing more than an archive of artefacts to be looked at and perhaps studied and there is no inherent narrative or message in the display of a deformed person or part in an archival cabinet of curiosity5. Robert Bogdan points out that in displaying human deformity, showmen did their best to control the messages associated with the freaks in the show, especially “pity” because audiences did not want to associate amusement with negative emotions. Moral messages, often used in early freakshows, quickly gave way to other messages. Instead of relying on a moral message, the displays were examples of the era’s other proclivity: the application of new fields of science to help categorize—and thus understand—the world. Durbach is emphatic when proclaiming that the evolution of science and medicine in particular is “inextricably linked to the show world” (60). The line between collecting, studying, and entertaining was, without a doubt, a very thin one

5 The distinction between annal, archive, and narrative history is well laid out in Hayden White’s “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.”

18 and, like the tableaux, was ripe for exploitation by promoters more interested in money than scientific discovery. Even the line between voyeur and scientist seems to be just as miniscule. Whatever the motive, the freakshow seemed to fill a niche during its height of popularity from the 1850s to the 1940s (Bogdan). By providing the public and the professional with examples beyond established categories recognized by science, the freakshow helped to expand not just what constituted illness or monstrosity but what constituted normalcy. What the tableaux did for the moral message of a stage melodrama, the freakshow did for the medical and scientific message of the cabinet of curiosity, it created and sustained the image and narrative of a normal body through spectacle6.

Examples of Barnum’s own participation in this ecosystem of entertainment are instructive. The smallest example is his “Feejee Mermaid,” the top half of a monkey sewn to the bottom half of a fish and passed off as a mummified example of an exotic animal. The mermaid was purported to be a hybrid animal, defying the classifications of the animal kingdom. This defiance made it exotic and unique. However, as the description implies, it was obviously a fake, two preserved halves sewn together to create the illusion of a creature uncategorizable by the understandings of biology and zoology.

On the other end of the spectrum were Barnum’s largest and most ambitious entertainments, his “hippodromes” and their “ethnological congresses.” As the name

6 For a more in-depth discussion of how that message was received and constructed by audiences, see Jan Alber’s “Narratology and Performativity: On Processes of Narrativization in Live Performances.”

19 implies, the ethnological congress grew out of the study and classification of races of people. Barnum’s hippodromes purported to include presentations of all the people of the world and, in reality, employed over 600 diverse people to maintain the hippodrome and perform the various “races” of the congress (Adams).

And between these two extremes were Barnum’s actual freakshows. Though the line between entertainment and scientific pursuit is thin, it divides critical readings of the freakshow. On the one hand is Robert Bogdan who, in his work in disabilities studies, brings to light how the Barnum freakshow linked freak “exhibits with science [which] made the attractions more interesting, [and] less frivolous to Puritanical anti- entertainment sentiments” (541) similar to how tableaux used a veneer of artistic integrity to avoid charges of indecency. Bogdan essentially claims that freakshows participated in scientific discourses in order to downplay their sensationalism and upsell their instructional value. To legitimate the performance, many freakshows used “museum” in their titles to play up the “association of this form of entertainment with natural sciences”

(Bogdan ). Similarly, the street barkers who tried to rope in passersby often called themselves “professors or doctors” (541). The performances, according to Bogdan, were draped in show business artifice as they showcased people with actual medical conditions. Much of the scenery and plot for the exhibits was taken from “the scientific reports and travelogues of 19th and early 20th century natural scientists” as well as

“pseudo-scientific writing on classification and anthropological reports about the ‘races of man’” (541). Of course, in the exhibit “the odd, bizarre, erotic, and savage were

20 highlighted” (541) instead of the scientific. These traits helped to play up the Otherness of the freaks and the exoticness of the foreigners on display. However, some of the exhibits and promotions focused on how the freak “was [an] upstanding, high status citizen with extraordinary talents of a conventional and socially prestigeful nature” despite their particular condition (542). Bogdan points out that it was advancements in science that led many people to move past the superstitious stigmas surrounding the birth defects of the freakshow performers. This allowed the emphasis of the presentation to be on “how the abnormality was a discrete condition and not a reflection on the integrity or morality of the exhibit or his or her parents” (543). In other words, changing cultural attitudes allowed the show to focus on the scientific instead of the moral. Freaks no longer were freakish as punishment for a sin, but for some “scientific” reason.

On the other hand, Lisa Kochanek and Nadja Durbach both separately point to how the freakshow was an integral part in the evolution of actual medical science. In fact, the freakshow was just one performance type out of the many, often found in the fairground and in the circus, that played a part in medical science. Indeed, “since the

Renaissance, dissections [had] been performed in anatomy theatres that were in many cases open to the public and thus encouraged a degree of performativity that linked them to the playhouse” (Durbach 44). Indeed, the worlds and rhetorics of the freakshow and the medical community borrowed heavily from each other. As discussed above, freakshow barkers called themselves doctors to lend an air of respectability and often got

“doctors” to comment on the uniqueness of the freaks on display. Kochanek uses a “Dr.

Kahn” as an example of the London medical freakshow: “the most infamous Leicester

Square exhibition, however, was Dr. Kahn's Museum, with its live and waxen monstrosities and its lectures on male and female anatomy, supplemented by inexpensive, explicit pamphlets on sexual hygiene” (Kochanek 227). Doctors, on the other hand, borrowed heavily from the freakshow world. Durbach quotes from a 1902 manual by

J.W. Ballantyne that shows the British obstetrician comparing “congenital hypertrichosis

(the superabundance of hair)” to “the Sacred Hairy Family of Burma,” a famous freakshow exhibit (Durbach 55). Both authors quote heavily from case studies published in Victorian editions of the British Medical Journal and the Lancet that exhibit “the professional need to distance medical looking from sideshow voyeurism” (Kochanek

231). Each case study “establishes the need for a physician’s presence, gives empirical, factual definition of the situation, allows the doctor to speculate about causes for the abnormality, and supplements verbal description with graphic representation” (Kochanek

233). Without the written medical account, the engravings were almost indistinguishable from freakshow handbills and often “reproduce[ed] many of the tropes of anatomical illustrations dating back to the Renaissance that…aestheticized and sometimes even eroticized the écorché” (Durbach 64). Again, like tableaux, even these medical accounts and their often eroticized and aestheticized graphic representations have a long history from the Anatomical Venuses of the renaissance to the “Sleeping Beauties” of the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth century travelling fairs (Hoffmann).

Like the tableaux, the freakshow appeared in many forms in many places. It is important to point out, as Hoffmann does, that at some point the freakshow would more than likely not have been a separate, independent entertainment. Instead it more than likely would have been a part of a larger circus or travelling show. Even as far back as the 1860s and 1870s, the freakshow was appearing in fiction. Hildegard Hoeller argues that the Ragged Dick character created by Horatio Alger had much in common with

Barnum’s own Tom Thumb. Both were “charming miniature [men]” (190). While Tom

Thumb entertained middle class viewers with his body, Ragged Dick entertained them with his story and allowed them “to face and appease fears about pressing social issues”

(190). Hoeller goes so far as to say that Dick’s rise to wealth is as true as any

“Barnumesque humbug” (190). However, the freakshow enters into Wharton’s fiction at a much less ambivalent time. By the time Wharton wrote Summer the freakshow had also absorbed the rhetoric of the eugenics movement. Bluford Adams sees eugenicist politics creeping into the freakshow as far back as Barnum’s hippodromes. In fact,

Adams compares Barnum’s two hippodromes and finds that the later version more obviously denigrated foreign cultures and subordinated those cultures to the Anglo and

American cultures presented at the hippodrome. However, the medical spectacle was still very much a part of the freakshow ecosystem during Wharton’s time writing Summer. In this way, the freakshow actually doubled back to its earliest tableaux predecessors and actually began to include a kind of morality founded on the eugenics movement’s push for a racial hierarchy. By displaying and studying the body of the racially Other, an

Anglo-American audience member could conclude the reasons for the racially Other’s supposed moral and intellectual inferiority.

The freakshow drew on many staging elements of the tableaux. A highly decorative stage and highly evocative costumes each highlighted the freak’s (often erroneously ascribed) Otherness. The freakshow also borrowed from the tableaux’s narrativizing tendencies, presenting a freak as a medical anomaly one day and a missing link in human evolution the next. Both forms of entertainment played into the American popular appetite for spectacle and entertainment. From this brief history of the tableaux and the freakshow, several important points emerge that will be important for understanding Blithedale and Summer. Perhaps the most important point is that the actual history and experience of these entertainments would have been much less organized and much less linear than the history presented above. Indeed, both the tableaux and the freakshow would have existed alongside many other entertainments as their own independent shows. However, they would have also existed as parts of many different kinds of entertainments. The tableaux, as mentioned, was an integral part of the melodramatic theatre and the freakshow was an important part of travelling shows and circuses as well as “museums” like Barnum’s American Museum in New York. The tableaux, especially in its moralistic form, existed in different spaces and different media, as a dramatic pause in a melodrama, in Godey’s match plate illustrations and stories, and likely as a home tableaux production. The freakshow could present itself in multiple forms at the same time, as both an ethnological congress for early practitioners of

24 anthropology and as Wax Venuses, Sleeping Beauties, and live performers at various places for curious onlookers with a penchant for medical sensationalism and progressive health crusades. Thus, there is no stable timeline or definitive performance with which to relate Blithedale to tableaux and Summer to freakshow. Instead, the novels embrace the messy, irregular, and often contradictory histories, messages, and performances of tableaux and freakshow. In doing so they demonstrate that any one entertainment is simply a part of a larger, dynamic ecosystem of entertainments, that each entertainment is inspired by and inspires the others, that each entertainment exists, comingles, and competes with the others.

Chapter 2

HUSH, POSE, AND YOU WILL BELIEVE:

TABLEAUX VIVANT AND BLITHEDALE

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, to reiterate the introductory chapter, is a story of failed love at a failed socialist utopian community. It follows three main characters: Zenobia, a proto-feminist and author; Hollingsworth, a criminal reformer; and Miles Coverdale, a minor romantic poet and flaneur who narrates the story after the fact. The love triangle that develops between the three is complicated by the introduction of Priscilla, who turns out to be the mesmeric Veiled Lady, and Westervelt, her show promoter and mesmerist. The novel has inspired many, often contradictory, readings in part because its narrator, Miles Coverdale, is trying, through the act of narrating his memoir, “to compose a self, to locate in retrospect an authenticity that continues to elude him” (Millington “American Anxiousness” 299). As Tony Tanner, in his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics Edition, states, authenticity continues to elude Coverdale because “the atmosphere of Blithedale has been saturated with artifice of all kinds from the start” because “everybody is, more or less, posing…and at least

Coverdale knows he is posing” (x, xxxii). The complicated relationship between

Blithedale and authenticity has led readers and critics of Blithedale to fall into two camps, both spurred on by Hawthorne’s introduction to his novel in which he declares that he “availed himself of his actual reminiscences” of his time at Brook Farm in writing

Blithedale, but counters himself by saying “his whole treatment of the [Brook Farm]

26 affair is incidental to the main purpose of the Romance” (Hawthorne 1) The first camp sees, or actively tries not to see, Blithedale “as a roman à clef, in which the feminist

Zenobia may stand for Margaret Fuller, who visited Brook Farm; the reformer

Hollingsworth (or the mesmerist Westervelt) for Albert Brisbane, the community's

‘apostle of Fourierism’; and the narrator, Coverdale, for Hawthorne himself” (White 78).

Hawthorne acknowledges this reading in his introduction to the novel, saying that “many readers will probably suspect a faint and not very faithful shadowing of Brook Farm”

(Hawthorne 1). The roman à clef reading is intriguing because the history and the social- sexual politics of Brook Farm, Fourierism, and reform so closely mirror those presented in Blithedale.

From April to November of 1841, the then thirty-seven-year-old Nathaniel

Hawthorne lived and worked at Brook Farm, a Transcendentalist utopian community about eight miles outside of Boston near West Roxbury (Wineapple 24). The enterprise itself lasted only six years until 1847. Hawthorne obviously did not live at Brook Farm for all six years, and his patience with the enterprise was even shorter lived. After only two months, Hawthorne wrote his then fiancé, Sophia Peabody, “in exasperation, ‘A man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap or in a furrow of the field, just as well under a pile of money” (24). Though he portrays himself as a skeptic of utopias and reform, Hawthorne’s relationship with Brook Farm is much more complicated. He was a

“full-fledged member” who spent “$1,500 in all (the full amount of his earnings for the previous year)” to build a house and purchase two shares of the community (23, 24). The

27 chronology presented in the Cambridge Companion points out that Hawthorne was a trustee and director of finance for Brook Farm and hoped to bring Sophia there with him.

Hawthorne shared more than his money with the enterprise, sharing in the sentiments of

George Ripley, the founder of Brook Farm, and the literati of 1840s Boston that Brook

Farm could demonstrate “a way of life that would be a beautiful, sustainable, and humane alternative to the competitive, exploitative world that, these experimenters felt, an emerging market capitalism was already producing all around them” (Millington

“Introduction” xiii). Brook Farm began as a “simple cooperative joint stock venture attempting a kind of agrarian socialism” (Kolodny 253n27) during Hawthorne’s tenure.

In either 1843 (according to Norton) or 1844 (according to Oxford), Brook Farm took on aspects of Fourierism, a form of anarchist/socialist theory named after French social theorist Charles Fourier (Dugdale 251n52). Fourier’s theories “attracted great interest and sparked debate among reform-minded American intellectuals” because they offered a

“scathing critique of the inequities of modern life and devised a complex system of communal living and working designed to achieve complete social harmony” (Norton

183). More than fifty Fourierist communities sprang up across America between the

1840s and 1850s (Tanner xxiv), attesting to the widespread utopian and reformist movements of those decades. American reformists often elided Fourier’s more radical sexual theories when they presented his work to the public and yet, to many in the

American public, Fourierism was synonymous with radical free love (Tanner xxiv) and

Brook Farm, after its alignment with Fourier’s theories, was always and already

28 synonymous with Fourierism (Kolodny xv). In fact, even the novel’s inception mirrors its narration, lending at least a patina of credibility to the roman à clef reading. Since he was not there while Brook Farm was Fourierist, Hawthorne had to borrow several volumes of Fourier’s works from a Brook Farm associate in preparation for writing

Blithedale in 1851, a whole decade after he had left Brook Farm (Kolodny xiv). Some critics go so far as to read Blithedale together with Hawthorne’s 1852 campaign biography of Franklin Pierce as proof of Hawthorne’s virulent skepticism of reform

(Beauchamp 39) while several others do so to tease out more nuanced understandings of

Hawthorne’s sentiments.7

The other camp is equally spurred on by Hawthorne’s introduction and his

“present concern…to establish a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their phantasmagorical antics”

(Hawthorne 1). Michael S. Martin focuses his critical attentions to Blithedale’s many allusions to Milton’s masque Comus and the mythological and fantastical overtones those allusions lend the novel. However, many scholars focusing on the theatrics of the novel tend to focus on mesmerism, a medical and scientific theory and performance where entranced mediums “having submitted to the trance, supposedly discovered new insights, wisdom, and revelations he or she may have been consciously unable to discover” (Coale

274). Richard H. Brodhead suggests that Hawthorne, in grouping the mesmeric Priscilla with the reform-minded Zenobia and Hollingsworth, saw the cultish overtones of

7 See Robert Levine’s “Sympathy and Reform in The Blithedale Romance.”

29 mesmerism as part of a larger cultural milieu that mixed pseudoscientific and philosophical theories with social theories. Brodhead specifically suggests that

Hawthorne saw mesmerism in the same league as many of the utopian movements and popular reform movements of the time, specifically citing Swedenborgianism, women’s rights, and criminal reform.8 However, for a novel so infatuated with performance,

Coverdale does seem to miss a lot of the performances going on around him. Brodhead must ask, “did a book ever miss so much of the story it purports to tell?” Coverdale mistakenly walks into the middle of the masque, the actual tableaux happen as a matter of fact without our seeing them, and the story only starts after Coverdale leaves a mesmeric performance of The Veiled Lady. Performance, to Brodhead, is central to Blithedale but it is also “imperfectly knowable” (339). Indeed, Tanner points out that, even if he does eventually witness a performance, “Coverdale is usually too far away in some sense or another…out of earshot or eyeshot” to know fully what is happening (xxxii). This, in essence, is the world of entertainment as Hawthorne’s America came to know it. The entertainment world of the 1850s began to develop a sense of commercialization, one that actively advertised entertainments into popularity. That commercial engine, as Brodhead argues, was visible enough for the public to know it existed, but “that [it shut] the public out from detailed knowledge of its motives or arts of contrivances” (340). In other words, the audience was always out of earshot or eyeshot of the burgeoning business of

8 W.D. King’s “‘Shadow of a Mesmeriser’: The Female Body on the ‘Dark’ Stage” provides a detailed analysis of mesmeric performances and their cultural connections.

30 entertainment and thus only knew the incomplete narratives of what they were shown or told. To this end, Brodhead and Tanner equally declare that Coverdale is “pre-eminently an observer” (Tanner xxix), “he exists only in and as a watcher” (Brodhead 341) not as a practitioner of the entertainment business. Coverdale’s specific spectatorness—Brodhead goes so far as declare all spectatorness in the antebellum period—mirrors performances like Priscilla’s own static mesmeric spectacle. In his static position, Coverdale can watch and observe Priscilla’s performances, the performances of the Blithedalers, and, more importantly, he can watch his own recollections of his experiences at Blithedale Farm.

However, Coverdale is not aware of the larger machinations of those scenes that he witnessed.

The Coverdale who narrates, whom I will refer to as Coverdale the Elder when it is necessary to distinguish, relates Blithedale after the fact. In doing so, he sets his younger self (i.e. Coverdale the Younger), his former compatriots, and Blithedale farm in a series of tableaux vivant. These entertainments were, like Priscilla’s mesmeric performances, static representations of virtues and vices, depictions of classic art, or allegorical figures. Too, they were incorporated into melodramatic theatre to heighten the plot by freezing it just as it reached its moral apex. Since a tableau is a static performance, Coverdale can remain immobile and observant though he also remains ignorant of the larger issues surrounding the tableau like those discussed in the introduction. Tableaux often contained an overabundance of symbolism and, if they were performed outside of respectable venues, often relied on moral imagery to shield their

31 performance from the censors. A tableau thus would have added extra layers of interpretation and uncertainty on top of that already established by Brodhead. An audience member at a tableau would have to sift through the layers of meaning and

(false) moral messaging—not to mention the maze of show business propaganda—to even begin to approach a singular message or insight in a tableau. However, it is important to recognize that Coverdale, though static, is not inactive. “He is…a shameless fetishist” (Tanner xxiii), actively collecting mementos—physical and mental— throughout the story that hold deep and abiding significance to his understanding of his experiences at Blithedale, to the tableaux that he stages in his narrative. Tanner complicates this too by declaring that Coverdale is “a late product of that Puritan-

Transcendentalist line of American thought which requires a second order of justifying meaning behind the merely materially visible and palpable” (Tanner xxxvi). So, each and every image Coverdale recollects is not just an image, it is laden with significance for

Coverdale, his understanding of himself, his sense of ethics, and his narrative of his experiences at Blithedale. Although he is an active audience of his own tableaux, he often will not stop analyzing the scene for meaning. Tanner further complicates this by pointing out that “the original [Miles] Coverdale was the first translator of the Bible, in a version reputedly pretty inaccurate” (xxiii). Not only is the tableaux form itself fraught with inconsistencies and overburdened images, Blithedale’s Miles Coverdale, the one who translates each of the tableaux he presents, is himself spectacularly inconsistent and inexpert at doing so.

With this in mind, this chapter explores how Coverdale, in recollecting his experiences at Blithedale, narrates his scenes as though they were tableaux vivant performances. As evidences in the introductory chapter, tableaux did not have a singular, master form. Instead, tableaux encompassed a range of forms, from the parlor theatrics of bourgeois homes, to the moral climax of melodramatic theatre productions, to stand alone representations of allegories and ancient paintings, to seedy theatres who used tableaux to skirt censorship laws, to reformists who staged allegorical tableaux representing their cause. Coverdale equally does not stick to one particular form of tableaux, but instead draws from the entire range of tableaux productions in his attempts to glean an understanding of himself and his experiences. The catch, as there always seems to be with Blithedale, is that Coverdale is ultimately unconvinced by his own search and his own discoveries. Coverdale, Millington declares, possesses “the ability to elude the implications of experience” (“American Anxiousness” 315). Where melodrama would lead Coverdale to a moral conclusion and mesmerism would lead him to a supernatural conclusion, the tableaux leads Coverdale to a conclusion he can simultaneously accept and reject, believe in and question. The tableau is the perfect form for Coverdale’s elusion because it is so overburdened with moral, allegorical, and theatrical meaning and so overburdened with its own sensationalist history as to almost be meaningless in and of itself. In this sense, Coverdale can—and does—avoid coming to any worthy conclusion at the end of his search for self and meaning.

Coverdale, at the beginning of the novel, is working mainly in the melodramatic tradition of tableaux. This is not to say that his tableaux or his motives carry the same moral weight and authenticity that a melodrama might suggest. Upon leaving a mesmeric performance by The Veiled Lady, Coverdale runs into Old Moodie, who has a mysterious and unnamed favor to ask of Coverdale. The favor, a “very great one” at that (Hawthorne

7), irks Coverdale, who is in a rush to leave for Blithedale Farm. However, Moodie piques Coverdale’s interest by suggesting that “some older gentleman, or…some lady…who may happen to be going to Blithedale” may be better suited to the favor (7).

It is not the mystery of the errand, but the mystery of the woman involved in the errand that draws Coverdale in. In the tableaux reading of this project, the mysterious favor has already been given meaning by Moodie: only Moodie knows what the favor is, and he is withholding that information. With the woman, on the other hand, Coverdale sees a blank stage, ready to have a meaning placed upon her by his directorial hand. In terms of the tableaux history, Moodie and Coverdale are playing for a spot as Lord Hamilton, the male voice explicating the mysterious female form of Lady Hamilton’s attitudes. Moodie recognizes that Coverdale, as a young man, would be interested in the female form instead of the performance and so suggests, to Coverdale’s dismay, that an older man or woman would be better suited to the favor because presumably neither would be seeking a pseudo-sexual gratification in directing the woman in question.

After being turned down for the favor, Coverdale returns home. The scenes in his

“bachelor apartment” are instructive for several reasons. For one, Coverdale reveals

34 definitively that he is narrating the novel after the fact. For another, he makes his directions (and the fact that he is directing) explicitly clear. Coverdale the Elder reveals his narration at the very start of Chapter II. Not only does he reveal that he is temporally well removed from his experiences at Blithedale, he also reveals the kind of narrator he is. He likes to expound on certain images, in this case a fire. Though the scenes of the chapter are staged on the day he leaves for Blithedale, Coverdale begins by recollecting the fire at Blithedale Farm on the first “April afternoon, but with the wintry gusts of a snow-storm roaring in the chimney” (9). The image comes back to Coverdale only after he “rake[s] away the ashes from the embers in [his] memory” (9). The Blithedale fire, burning only faintly, is compared to the “phosphoric glimmer, like that which exudes, rather than shines, from damp fragments of decaying trees” (9). Around “ such chill mockery of a fire” (9)—which at once refers to the phosphoric glimmer of Coverdale’s simile, his fading and perhaps false memory, and the actual roaring fire in the Blithedale hearth—Coverdale imagines sitting “talk[ing] over [their] exploded scheme for beginning the life of Paradise anew” (9). The subtext and references that this small tableau refer to are only revealed much later in the novel, so the tableau does not make perfect sense to the reader here. However, this tableau does indicate that Coverdale not only inscribes the images in his memory with poetic meaning, he over-inscribes them with meaning leading to a confused, jumbled message being relayed to the audience of the tableau. This small tableau also reveals that Coverdale does not maintain a strict timeline for his narration.

The Coverdale the Elder inserts himself in the narrative to comment on and philosophize on the experiences of his younger self.

By revealing himself as the narrator, Coverdale the Elder is adding a layer of uncertainty to the narrative on top of Hawthorne’s own layers of historical and authorial uncertainty added in the introduction. Kenneth Marc Harris sees Coverdale’s and

Hawthorne’s uncertainties as two of the almost infinite layers of obfuscation and ironic posturing in the novel. It is hard to argue that Blithedale is not rife with irony and thus holds the reader at several removes from the Truth, but where Harris’s reading focuses on the distance itself—or rather why Coverdale/Hawthorne might choose that distance—the tableaux reading focuses on the way the distance is constructed by Coverdale. Following

Coverdale’s overdetermined fireside speech, he describes his bachelor apartment and his actions as his younger self prepares to leave for Blithedale. The simple narrative of the scene—the narrative that is never really shown or experienced by the reader so much as it is told to the reader—is that Coverdale drinks the rest of his liquor with a friend and smokes a few cigars and then leaves in a blizzard. The narrative is mediated by

Coverdale, who chooses to focus on the moral choices motivating his actions instead of the actions themselves. As he relates the scene and action, Coverdale the Elder provides deliberate images and pauses to pose the actor (i.e. himself) to create a poetic meaning out of a mundane scene. In the background of the tableau, the snow is falling outside the apartment. But it is not just snow; it is a snow that is both “dreary” and “dingy,” impressed with “an old conventionalism” (11). The blizzard itself has a “business-like

36 perseverance” and has “guarantee from a thaw” (10). The blizzard is not just snow; it is an urban, capitalistic snow opposed to the Paradise of Blithedale. In the foreground is

Coverdale himself. The action we see is his deliberating on leaving; he does not say if he is literally on the threshold, but he might as well be. In the middle ground, his apartment,

“one of the midmost houses of a brick-block,” is “partaking of the warmth of all the rest” of the apartments along with the “sultriness of its individual furnace heat” (10).

Obviously, the quarters are comfy, but they are also convivial. His quarters come with the finer things in life, like Coverdale’s closet full of claret. What is important to note is that Coverdale the Younger does not expound on the poetic image of leave taking; it is

Coverdale the Elder who provides the poetic commentary. This distinction becomes clear when, during his expounding, Coverdale questions leaving for “the better life” (10).

“Possibly, it would hardly look so now” like the better life, Coverdale the Elder says, reminiscing (10, my emphasis). The above phrase is the lead in to two paragraphs of poetic expounding on one paragraph of tableau imagery. Coverdale takes this space to mull over his choice to leave. He tries to convince himself that the choice to leave for

Blithedale was heroic, that it was the very real possibility of Blithedale’s failure that explicitly made his choice to leave heroic. His leaving for Blithedale stands as an example of his good deeds compared to his life of listless flânerie: “whatever else [he] may repent of,” Coverdale implores some audience (the reader, God, himself), “let it be reckoned neither among [his] sins nor follies” that Coverdale once believed in the perfectibility of society (11). Staying or leaving does not become of choice between a

37 warm room and a blizzard. Instead, it becomes a moral, almost biblical choice with complex consequences for Coverdale. It is important to note the pattern of Coverdale’s thoughts here. He moves from concrete images to a moral quandary to a philosophical or ethical stance. However, it is the still image of his preparing to leave that launches the whole tract. Like a tableau, the scene is not simply a man’s leaving a nice apartment in a blizzard. The image of leaving during a blizzard is supposed to convey the moral weight of concepts like heroism and human perfectibility to the audience. In essence, Coverdale skirts around Harris’s questions regarding Truth in favor of moral and ethical questions

(was leaving for Blithedale right and good?), the answers to which can only come out of careful examinations of subjective experiences.

In his bachelor apartment, Coverdale establishes some of the basic processes he goes through to turn a scene into a tableau. The scenery of the apartment launches

Coverdale into an extended philosophical treatise, or as Patricia Ann Carlson puts it in her study of Hawthorne’s settings, inspires Coverdale to “swell the actions of a single time and place to a universal meaning” (195). One way that Coverdale swells the action is by blurring the line between his past and present selves, the self that acts and the self that expounds. However, the apartment tableau is still in the “scene ending” melodramatic tradition. As the action swells, it is the action itself that gains philosophical significance in the apartment tableau. Coverdale is, after all, taking his final leave of his apartment and so the action is ripe for heightened, melodramatic commentary. In a tableau vivant, however, the single time and place of the still image is

38 brought to life and impresses upon the viewer a sense of life and, in keeping with its penchant for allegory, a sense of timelessness and universality. Thankfully, Coverdale does not wait long to provide a good example of a tableau vivant.

Coverdale takes leave of his apartment and climbs into a carriage with three other gentlemen bound for Blithedale Farm. They leave the windows open despite the blizzard because they cannot contain their excitement. Riding by “snow-encrusted…deserted villas, with no footprints in their avenues” on his way to Blithedale farm, Coverdale

“virtually consumes the rural landscape in a single sentence” as if the landscape was one large tableau for him to enjoy (Hawthorne 12, Carlson 193). But if Coverdale consumes the scene, he also digests it. Coverdale transmutes the scenes into a moral tableau, denigrating the immoral cityscape and elevating the pure countryscape. He laments the

“track of old conventionalism” stamped into the city snow by feet and city smoke but relishes the empty “wave-like drifts” of snow that fall through the “country fires, strongly impregnated with the pungent aroma of peat” (Hawthorne 11, 12). The irony is lost on

Coverdale that the snow still falls through smoke in either locale, but then that is not the point for Coverdale. For him, the country is symbolic, even allegorical, of a sort of

Arcadia apart from the morally corrupt city. The air of the country has, after all, not been

“spoken into words of falsehood, formality, and error like all the air of the dusky city”

(11). The city/country dichotomy brings to mind the match plates of Godey’s that contrasted virtue and vice. Both Coverdale and the match plate artists can do this because they utilize allegorical references that help to provide a larger significance than

39 the image might suggest alone. What makes this scene particularly difficult to parse out is that Coverdale the Elder explicitly states that he is remembering this moment. The question becomes, then, if transmutation of the scene is done by the Elder, in retrospect, or by the Younger to be recollected by the Elder. To whom did Coverdale address his aside and almost describe the snow as dingy? Us or his fellow carriage riders? The ambiguity of the scene suggest that Coverdale, the Elder and Younger, are partaking in one allegorical still image not bound by any temporality.

The other way Coverdale swells the action of a single time and place is by using a similar strategy to his apartment tableau and suggesting a more complete narrative than the images actually represent (Chapman 26). After arriving at the Blithedale farmhouse, or what Coverdale calls “Paradise,” he is seated inside with his fellow travelers around a fire “built up of great logs…that farmers are wont to keep” (Hawthorne 12-3) since they cannot be sold as lumber. All the faces around the fire are “a-blaze” with “the past inclemency and present warmth” (12) of the evening. The faces imply both the warm fire of the farmhouse but also the snowstorm the men recently came in from. The image that ties the two times—the present around the fire and the past in the blizzard—is the melting snow in the men’s beards. The image of snow melting by the fireside becomes symbolic of past hardships melting away. Similarly, Coverdale also implies some nameless but universal “farmer” is somewhere present to provide the logs. However, Coverdale really swells the time and place when he suggests that a “family of the old Pilgrims might have swung their kettle over precisely such as fire” as Coverdale is sitting around at Blithedale

(13). This combined with the obviously biblical reference to Paradise and Coverdale’s penchant for calling the farmhouse “Eve’s bower” “adds depth and breadth to his tale by supplying an innuendo both of mythological significance and of the endless flux of eternity” (Carlson 195). Coverdale’s image does not just encompass his present and immediate past, it encompasses the Pilgrims and Biblical times, characters, and locations.

I would call these first few tableaux quite innocent and morally sound, especially relative to Coverdale’s tableaux that follow. For now, Coverdale is concerned with understanding his actions as moral decisions and with understanding his original euphoria at joining Blithedale. These first tableaux help Coverdale to analyze his past by staging and viewing his past but also by connecting incidents in his past to other incidents (even those we as readers have not encountered in the novel yet) and larger storylines like the

Bible and American history.

From there, Coverdale’s tableaux devolve into the current conception of tableaux: theatrical productions “simultaneously celebrated as a means of promoting virtue and denigrated as a licentious display of semi-nude women in public” with audiences “more interested in the ‘proportions’ of the female artists than the ‘classical’ works of art they represented” (Chapman 26, McCollough 29). This is because Coverdale encounters others who try to direct the narrative of Blithedale. Until this point, we were given only

Coverdale’s directorial vision. For example, we had no reason (beyond simple distrust of the narrator) to assume that Blithedale was not a Paradise. However, Zenobia,

Coverdale’s first directorial opponent, is quick to put the Blithedale-as-Paradise tableau

41 into question. Zenobia’s “deliberate theatricality” may bring “out everyone else’s unconscious feigning” (Harris 137) but it especially exposes Coverdale’s attempts to direct. As her first move, Zenobia assigns “the domestic and indoor part of the business” to the women and work “afield” to the men (Hawthorne 16). Coverdale, incensed by

Zenobia’s directorial power grab, counters with his original concept of Blithedale-as-

Paradise. In his directorial vision, women’s work is “that which chiefly distinguishes artificial life—the life of degenerated mortals—from the life of Paradise” (Hawthorne

16). Zenobia counters by asking Coverdale for all the “material signs that could betoken the moral qualities possessed” by a Paradise including figs, pineapples, and bread-fruit

(Chapman 31, Hawthorne 16). As discussed previously, a tableau’s moral power comes through inductively, i.e. the scenery and set pieces of a tableau are what suggest the larger moral position or lesson. Zenobia’s counterargument makes it clear that without the proper scenery—the tropical fruits—the tableau absolutely cannot function the way

Coverdale conceives of it.

This is not to say that Zenobia fully dismisses the Blithedale-as-Paradise tableau.

Like an Eve, Zenobia does introduce elements of sexuality into the tableau, blurring the line between the pornographic and the morally instructive. Coverdale, in deriding

Zenobia’s gendered division of labor, laments that the women will have to tend to the washing even though “Eve…had not clothes to mend, no washing-day” (Hawthorne 16).

To this, Zenobia responds by saying “as for the garb of Eden, I shall not assume it till after Mayday,” which she accentuates with a playful shiver (17). The shiver sends

Coverdale—the Younger and, it seems, the Elder—into a fervor. In reality, Zenobia’s

“admirable figure” and “fine intellect” are “so fitly cased” in a dress “in an American print…with a silken kerchief, between which and her gown there was one glimpse of a white shoulder” (15). What “a great piece of good-fortune that there should be just that glimpse” of Zenobia’s body (15) because, as the shiver indicates, she knows there is “an erotic tension between ‘persons of taste,’ who are bearers of the look, and female signs of

‘the beautiful,’ who are their object” and she actively exploits that tension between her and Coverdale (Chapman 31). Zenobia’s directorial power, like that of Lady Hamilton’s, comes from her costumes which she uses as “an adjunct to [her] action[s] in order to assert her power over the supernumeraries in her self-directed drama” (Carlson 202). To

Coverdale, Zenobia’s shiver suggests the most powerful costume of all: her “fine, perfectly developed figure in Eve’s earliest garment” (Hawthorne 17). By exploiting the tension between the male look and the female object inherent in tableaux, Zenobia is able to wrest control of the directorial powers from Coverdale. She does not outright dismiss his Blithedale-as-Paradise vision. Instead, she revises it with her in the center, dictating her part, those of the supernumeraries around her, and, most importantly, her audience of male lookers.

However, Coverdale and Zenobia are not entirely opposed to each, nor can they afford to be. On the one hand, they can co-exist, though it is an uneasy coexistence to say the least. After the playful shiver, Zenobia exits the sitting room to “the ‘homey’ kitchen and parlor of the farmhouse [that] provide her with a mise en scène appropriate to

43 her act of ‘rustic hostess’” (Carlson 203). The dinner table and the space of the kitchen and parlor is Zenobia’s own domestic tableau separate from Coverdale’s homosocial tableau around the hearth. In her own space, Zenobia can appear “to be the very picture of the spirit of hospitality” (203). As Zenobia planned, the two have separate spaces to direct their various tableaux. On the other hand, they both accept—willingly, grudgingly, playfully—that they will continue to compete over the directorial powers of Blithedale.

Zenobia recognizes that Coverdale will continue to attempt to direct the narrative of

Blithedale. Early in their time at Blithedale, Coverdale laments that “the clods of earth, which [they] constantly belabored and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought” (Hawthorne 66), or in other words, that his farm labor leaves no time or energy for poetry. Zenobia teasingly deflates Coverdale’s poetic lament by suggesting

Coverdale will, in his old age, turn into Silas Foster, the cantankerous old farmer teaching the Blithedalers to farm, and not into a revered poet. Though she accepts his version of

Blithedale in that moment, she cannot help but point out, as she did in their first meeting, the absurdity at the logical end of Coverdale’s poetic passages. At other times, Zenobia mocks Coverdale’s poetry as a way for her to understand the narrative of Blithedale and her place within that narrative. After learning of her tragic fate, Zenobia suggests that

Coverdale will be “turning this whole affair into a ballad” (223). She only demands that the moral “shall be distilled into the final stanza, in a drop of bitter honey” (224). For

Zenobia, Coverdale’s predictable balladry provides certainty for Zenobia where her lived experience does not. Similarly, Coverdale recognizes Zenobia’s own artistic endeavors

44 and powers. He is quick to point out, even before leaving for Blithedale, that “Zenobia, by-the-by…is merely her public name; a sort of mask in which she comes before the world” (8). Zenobia’s real name is never revealed to the reader, so it is safe to assume that Coverdale respects the part of Zenobia’s directing that concerns herself. Coverdale also seems to accept the fact that Zenobia leads the actual “tableaux vivants” and other

“occasional modes of amusement” at Blithedale Farm (106) and that, generally, she holds more sway over the Blithedalers. In essence, Coverdale must admit Zenobia’s tableaux into his own tableaux, subsuming them but never quite controlling them. Whereas

Coverdale can contract or expand his own temporality by blending his past and present selves, Zenobia’s tableaux dilate and contract the aperture of the narration. In these moments of actual performance and moments of Zenobia’s direction, we become privy to the depth and breadth of the world of performance that is only a small part of Coverdale’s tableaux. We also come to realize just how narrow Coverdale’s gaze is, or as Brodhead puts it, how much Coverdale actually misses.

However, the Coverdale and Zenobia are in competition for more than just the narrative of Blithedale. The two are in competition for the most valuable artistic territory: a woman. After his convalescence, Coverdale meets Zenobia and Priscilla “a- maying together” (58), with Zenobia “decking out” Priscilla in a “variety of sylvan ornament[s]” of flowers and blooming boughs (59). In Priscilla’s bouquet “had been stuck a weed of evil odor and ugly aspect, which…destroyed the effect of all the rest” of the flowers (59). Coverdale soon deduces, from Zenobia’s “eye, which seemed to

45 indicate a slightly malicious purpose in the arrangement” (59), that Zenobia had inserted the weed. Zenobia jokingly asks Coverdale if Priscilla is “worth a verse or two” (59).

Coverdale points out that “there is only one thing amiss” and Zenobia flings away the weed. The scenery suggests to Coverdale that Priscilla is, as a woman should be,

“happier than any male creature” (59), but to Zenobia, Priscilla “provokes one’s malice” at “see[ing] a creature so happy—especially a feminine creature” (59). In this instance, the moral being conveyed is dictating the scenery. Zenobia, seeing an object of malice, inserts the weed of evil odor; Coverdale, seeing an object of childlike wonder, removes the weed to better complete the effect. In the middle is Priscilla, the innocent model supposedly at the whim of both directors.

Priscilla, though, is being pursued by more than just Coverdale and Zenobia, and this is why the two directors cannot exist purely as antagonists. Hollingsworth, the philanthropic criminal reformer who brought Priscilla to Blithedale, is equally interested in directing the meaning of Blithedale and Priscilla. Coverdale and Zenobia both understand on the first day that Hollingsworth makes no secrets of his plans for

Blithedale: to use the farm for his criminal reform project. The two make a sort of pact on the first day before Hollingsworth even arrives to “systematically commit at least one crime a piece” in order to appease Hollingsworth (Hawthorne 22). Implicit in the pact is that Hollingsworth directs his world through the lens of his moral-reformist message and that for Zenobia and Coverdale to pose in a tableau for Hollingsworth they will need to make the stuff of that tableau—namely themselves as the models—match the moral

46 message. However, Coverdale and Zenobia are not prepared for Hollingsworth’s intense directorial style. Nowhere is this more apparent than at Eliot’s Pulpit. If for no other reason, the history Coverdale provides for Eliot’s Pulpit gives the scene a façade of tableau-like allegorical meaning. Though the story goes that “the venerable Apostle Eliot had preached there, two centuries gone by, to an Indian auditory” it is also true that “the old pine forest…had fallen, an immemorial time ago” (118). The Apostle Eliot, or John

Eliot, was a pastor who, in 1651, “founded the first community of Praying Indians”

(Kolodny 256n65). He was also known for preaching to slaves and for translating “the

Bible and a catechism into the Indian tongue” (256n65). The man was real enough, but

Coverdale’s confused timeline—“two centuries” versus “immemorial time ago”— suggests that the scenery is like somewhere the Apostle Eliot would have preached and that is good enough for the tableau. Again, the exact historical details are not important.

The moral details are important, and it is important that the scenery match the moral message of the tableau. The foliage grows out of the “shattered granite boulder, or heap of boulders with an irregular outline and many fissures…as if the scanty soil, within those crevices, were sweeter to their roots than any soil” (118-9). The foliage thus provides an allegory of ascetic living. The canopy of a large birch tree “serve[s] as a sounding-board for the pulpit” (119) while the floor serves as the pew where the Indians, and in this case Coverdale, Zenobia, and Priscilla, sit to listen to their respective

Apostles.

The sermon, though led by Hollingsworth, is usually taken up by the others who would talk afterwards “around [the exhausted Hollingsworth], on such topics as were suggested by the discourse” (119). Coverdale and Zenobia seem to ignore the religious imagery of Eliot’s pulpit. Stripped of its religious imagery, the scene resembles a kind of theatre pit and the group the “unclassified miscellany that [make] up the pit” (Grimstead

55). The pit at a theatre, according to David Grimstead, was a democratic and indefinable lower-middle-class area that had no real directing force, social or theatrical, save for their own “relative seriousness and intensity of…interest” in theatre (55). It was the boxes that usually housed the respectable middle-class theatergoers, the ones more obviously directed by mandates of “taste,” or, as Grimstead phrases it, “pretensions to quality” (55). Within the less socially self-policing space of the pit, Coverdale and

Zenobia are free to discourse on women’s rights, the topic of the day. Coverdale, in his usual eloquence, declares his desire “to have all government devolve into the hands of women” (Hawthorne 121) while Zenobia does her best to convince him of his own shortsightedness and implicit desire for young, beautiful women to govern over him.

Priscilla, concerned, asks Hollingsworth’s opinions on the matter. And does he ever deliver. It is important to note that Coverdale and Zenobia both assume the space of

Eliot’s Pulpit is a space of equal opportunity, but this is an illusion as much as the historicity of the place is an illusion. Just as “democracy freed drama from its literary conventions” and theatre from its class conventions it also “begot a conformity or voluntary compliance with other conventions that was at least as strict as anything

48 imposed before” (Grimsted 171). In other words, even though the pit seemed like a miscellaneous but roughly egalitarian mass of humanity, it eventually succumbed to the same pressures of “taste” and “convention” of the boxes. Hollingsworth is the avatar of that conservative “taste” that tamed the pit. His rub with the group is that the discussion does not fit his moral message. Zenobia, and Coverdale, for that matter, “do not seem to

‘belong’ to men—they have neither husbands nor fathers” and thus can move and converse freely within what they perceive to be a democratic theatre pit (Chapman 38).

In other words, they do not have a punitive social guide to observe their actions and so feel free to act as they see fit. Hollingsworth sees a feminist radical and as anti-reformist stirring in his church pews discussing how to upend the gendered order of his world.

Hollingsworth, in his sermon damning the proto-feminist discussion, “call[s] upon [his] own sex to use its physical force, that unmistakable evidence of sovereignty” to force the

“petticoated monstrosities” back to “their proper bounds” (Hawthorne 123). By “some necromancy of his horrible injustice,” Hollingsworth deploys, doubly so, the conventions of tableau (“silence and immobility” [Chapman 31]) onto the scene and forces the tableau directions from Coverdale and Zenobia, who are both cowed into silent submission at

Hollingsworth’s feet while Priscilla acts the part of “ the gentle parasite, the soft reflection of a more powerful existence” that Hollingsworth desires of women

(Hawthorne 124, 123). Using the language of Mary Chapman, Hollingsworth “mans” each of the other characters. Priscilla and Zenobia both have their looks forced towards

Hollingsworth in adoration and humility respectively while Coverdale is forced into

49 submission by the despotic Hollingsworth. In fact, Coverdale is forced out of the tableau space altogether and becomes nothing more than an audience member gazing passively on Hollingsworth’s tableau of “true manhood.” To add to the insult, Coverdale is then forced to watch Hollingsworth’s tableau of his phalanstery after the troupe walks away:

Zenobia and Hollingsworth standing prominently on the hill above the whole farm on the prominent land where Hollingsworth wishes to build his phalanstery, Priscilla in the wooded background.

What is important about the Eliot’s Pulpit scene is that Coverdale is forced to inhabit a space outside the tableau proper by Hollingsworth. However, there are several instances where Coverdale exists—of his own volition—outside the main tableau or as something other than the director of the tableau. Through all of chapters VI and VII

Coverdale is laid up in bed recovering from a sickness. At first, he is delirious and incoherent; Hollingsworth and Zenobia pose around Coverdale as they try to nurse him back to health. However, this does not mean that Coverdale the Elder is not framing the scenes as tableaux. In fact, tableaux seem to be the only way that Coverdale can make any sense of the other characters and construct a narrative of the time he was unconscious in a feverish daze. That is to say that tableaux are a way for Coverdale the Elder to fill in the blanks of his memory from the few incidents he can recall. Zenobia is construed as both a mediocre nurse and a beautiful but mocking sprite. The two images exist in the same person such that a tableau is the only way to combine the two. Just as tableaux in real life purported to be moral but often objectified beautiful women, so too does

Coverdale’s tableau try to reconcile the two images of Zenobia. Hollingsworth’s image is more straightforward. Coverdale recasts Hollingsworth as a caretaker of his soul, someone who may not feed Coverdale with “gruel [that] was very wretched stuff” (48), but someone who acts as a confidant and spiritual guide. Hollingsworth is seen as praying over Coverdale and even receives Coverdale’s fever-dream confession that

Zenobia is not who she seems.

As Coverdale is convalescing, it makes sense that he is not out directing

Blithedale farm towards his artistic image. That role is given up to Zenobia and

Hollingsworth. During his time in bed, “there had been a number of recruits to [the] little army of saints and martyrs” at Blithedale (62). After Coverdale wakes up—or rather decides that laying around longer would be “nonsense and effeminacy” (58)—he wakes up to a farm that is made under Hollingsworth’s directions. Hence Coverdale’s complaint mentioned previously about his art not being able to coexist with his labor.

Coverdale cannot write versus because, as Hollingsworth notes, Blithedale is now a tableau of good labor and earnest living: “There is at least this good in a life of toil, that is takes the nonsense and fancy-work out of a man, and leaves nothing but what truly belongs to him” (68). Where Coverdale sees Blithedale as a “modern arcadia” fit for lounging shepherds and bards, Hollingsworth sees a farm where labor refines the man and saves the soul. This tension is something that Coverdale’s other tableaux try to explain and understand. As Coverdale, Hollingsworth, and Zenobia rest at the end of their day—after posing in the tableaux of good work—Hollingsworth derides Coverdale,

51 saying the poet “is not in earnest, either as a poet or a laborer” (68). Though Coverdale tries to defend himself by saying his “bones feel as if [he] had been earnest[ly]” laboring

(68), the charge of idleness has been leveled against him and he spends several extended passages constructing tableaux in hopes of figuring out just what it is he earnestly believes and is willing to do.

One of the most important tableaux Coverdale stages in his quest for self-meaning and purpose is the tableau of his “hermitage,” or a “kind of leafy cave, high upward into the air, among the midmost branches of a white-pine tree” where “a wild grapevine, of unusual size and luxuriance, had twined and twisted itself up into the tree” and, in the process, “caught hold of three or four neighboring trees, and married the whole clump with a perfectly inextricable knot of polygamy” (98). I include much of the initial description because even there Coverdale shows his directorial motives more clearly than he can amongst the others at Blithedale. The natural and the human, the stand of trees and the polygamy, come together in the perch. The trees are brought together in a kind of free love but also by the grapevines that Coverdale allegorizes further in his other self- tableaux. In setting up his hermitage, Coverdale opens “loop-holes through the verdant walls” of grapevines turning his hermitage into both a “turret” and an “observatory”

(Hawthorne 98, 99). Coverdale’s hermitage, his director’s seat, is a place to see and comment on the images of the other Blithedalers. “Through one loop-hole” he is able to see the river, some Blithedale workers digging peat, and a cart road where Hollingsworth is working a “yoke of oxen hitched to a drag of stones, that were to be piled into a fence”

(99-100). As Coverdale watches Hollingsworth, he asks, “are we his oxen” and “what right has [Hollingsworth] to be the driver” (100). Coverdale, “at [his] height above the earth” (100), labels Hollingsworth’s directorial vision “philanthropic absurdities” (100).

In fact, from his height above the earth he declares the whole of Blithedale, from the mundanity of daily work to Hollingsworth struggling against the “stubborn, stupid, and sluggish,” absurd but Hollingsworth’s end goal of criminal reform and his tyrannical means are especially ridiculous given that there “is enough else to do” instead of

“dragging home the ponderous load of” Hollingsworth’s dogma (100). Turning slightly,

Coverdale can also see Priscilla in Zenobia’s window, though with the distance he must rely on the “eye of faith” to be sure that it is Priscilla (100). She is simply knitting, but

Coverdale allegorizes Priscilla’s needle work into a mythical tale “of her fragile thread of life…inextricably knotted” together with “other and tougher threads” (100).

However, Coverdale only assumes it is Priscilla there and admits he has “idly decked her out” in “fancy work” (100), directing her, needlessly, in her costume, action, and meaning. Taking in the whole scheme with his “bodily eye,” Coverdale realizes, from his vantage point, that Blithedale “looked so ridiculous that it was impossible not to laugh aloud” despite the joke being “a little too heavy” (101). Coverdale’s senses and his

“eye of faith” lead him to “disbelief in moral beauty or heroism, and a conviction of the folly of attempting to benefit the world” (101). However, he quickly retracts his statements upon hearing Westervelt, the devilish showman, coming up the path beneath the hermitage. Westervelt’s “disagreeable characteristics,” namely his worldly and “cold

53 skepticism [that] smothers what it can of our spiritual aspirations, and makes the rest ridiculous,” have tainted Coverdale’s perceptions of Blithedale (101). Coverdale tries to convince himself that he actually sees the “essential charm” of the Blithedalers; that

Hollingsworth’s dreams are “glorious, if impractical,” that Zenobia’s character possesses a “noble earthiness,” and that Priscilla’s grace “lay so singularly between disease and beauty” (101). But, as he laments, a part of himself agrees with Westervelt’s worldly skepticism. There are several important things happening in these moments. Coverdale is taking in the images of Blithedale and transmuting them into a dialogue on morality and the perfectibility of humankind. However, the scene he gazes upon can be interpreted in multiple ways: the “coldly skeptic” or the romantic. Coverdale comes to understand that he possesses both natures, that he is both a romantic and a skeptic.

Coverdale does not stop there, however. He is also looking to understand more than just his own nature; he wants to know what it is that he believes in if he is skeptical of every other Blithedaler’s utopian vision. To help himself understand, Coverdale creates another tableau where he poses on the fringes, just outside the image proper. In his other hermitage, a corner booth in a tavern, Coverdale takes “a boozy kind of pleasure in the customary life that was going forward” in his tavern tableau (175). His tableau of

“second stage drinkers” and “staunch, old soakers” might as well be of the gold-fishes swimming in the tiny bar fountain that “any freakish inebriate” could empty his glass into. The drinkers might as well be like the goldfish: “[inhaling] jollity with the essential element of [their] existence” (178). To explain the connection between the drinkers and

54 the goldfish, Coverdale declares that “human nature has a naughty instinct that approves of wine” (175), which for Coverdale means moments of “renewed youth and vigor, the brisk cheerful sense of things present and to come” (178) that alleviate the tyranny of

“the worldly society at large, where a cold skepticism smothers what it can of our spiritual aspirations, and makes the rest ridiculous” (101). Finally, able to put into words his feelings about Blithedale, Coverdale summarizes his tavernal philosophy by declaring that reformers “must do away with evil by substituting good” (175). It does no good, for

Coverdale, to save a soul by working to death as Hollingsworth would prescribe. Instead, to truly reform someone, they must experience the good in life. Despite—or in spite of— the “temperance-men” and their sermons, Coverdale believes the “cold and barren world will look warmer, kindlier, mellower, through the medium of a toper’s glass” (175). If he had his way, Coverdale would appear to the Blithedalers as the “allegorical figure of rich

October.” He is impatient for the grapevines of his hermitage to ripen, what he calls the

“abundance of his vintage,” out of which a “wine might be pressed” that would be

“endowed with a new kind of intoxicating quality,” a wine he might give to Blithedale to assuage some of “the curse of Adam’s posterity,” a wine that “gives substance to the life around us” (99, 208, 206). Coverdale’s reformist mission is summed up in one fabulous tableau of inebriation and salvation.

However, Coverdale is not quite convinced of his own philosophy. In his tavern tableau, Coverdale cannot help but note the presence among the paintings of sirloins and salmons of a painting “in an obscure corner” of a “New England toper, stretched out on a

55 bench, in the heavy, apoplectic sleep of drunkenness” (Hawthorne 176). The only comfort the painting provides comes in “forced reflection, that, real as he looked, the poor caitiff was but imaginary, a bit of painted canvass, whom no delirium tremens, nor so much as a retributive headache, awaited, on the morrow” (176). While Coverdale tries to initiate himself into his inebriate’s philosophy, he cannot help but remember the overbearing temperance morality embodied by its “death-in-life” mascot, the toper. The world and reality that Coverdale occupies does not allow for any ecstatic, Dionysian revelry. Whereas Coverdale’s Arcadian tableaux of early Blithedale can be easily corrected by simply removing a stinking weed from Priscilla’s bouquet, Coverdale’s tavernal tableau cannot be directed away from the performances of the temperance movement. The world provides a kind of memento mori: instead of remembering that one must die, one must remember they have to come back to reality, that drunkenness can only last so long and should not be drawn on forever, a memento sobriatate one could say. As a preeminent observer, Coverdale cannot help bringing in this memento, as a moralist he cannot ignore it, and as an equivocator par excellence he cannot help but use it to undermine his newfound moral stance. Coverdale uses his experiences elsewhere to help him make sense of the New England toper. Earlier, before leaving Blithedale,

Coverdale allegorizes a pen of pigs as though they too were under his directorial control.

The pigs, “symbols of slothful ease and sensual comfort,” enjoy a “ponderous and fat satisfaction of their existence” (143, 144). To Coverdale “they alone are happy” because the pigs “were involved…and buried alive, in their own corporeal substance” (144). And

56 yet Coverdale cannot leave on that allegoric note. Silas Foster invites him to “eat a part of a spare-rib” (144) when he returns to Blithedale. The pigs then become a symbol of fleeting youth and vigor fully feasting on their corporeal bounty; Silas Foster cannot help but remind Coverdale of the death in life of the pigs. Even Coverdale’s hermitage “had been formed by the decay of some of the pine-branches, which the [grape] vine had lovingly strangled with its embrace” presenting Coverdale’s “one exclusive possession” that “symbolized [his] individuality” as much life-in-death as the toper (98, 99).

Coverdale, contrary to Kenneth Marc Harris’s argument, does not mistake his mental projections of toperism and Rich October for reality. Instead, Coverdale grudgingly admits his projections are inconsistent with the pain of human life and so must settle for keeping that pain “at a supportable distance through [dramatic] irony”

(Harris 120). Or rather, it may be better to say that Coverdale the Elder does not mistake his projections for reality. Again, reality is not the point of the narrative for Coverdale the Elder. The point is the moral and philosophical meaning of his personal narrative.

Coverdale, charged by Hollingsworth with believing nothing, excavates his past in search of something to believe in. To excavate the moral and philosophical meanings of his past, Coverdale narrates his past and sets himself, in hindsight, in his own tableaux for him to look upon from his present moment. Coverdale is “immobilized” in his hermitage and in his tavern booth, sat perfectly still for the viewer—himself in the present moment—to gaze upon. However, he is not posed femininely with eyes lifted in adoration, eyes dropped in submission, or bare shoulders shivering. Instead he exists

57 outside of the frame of the tableaux—his hermitage literally frames both images while his booth exists outside the “customary life that was going forward” in the tavern (175). By dilating the aperture of his memory this wide, Coverdale can do more than just question the images his younger self is seeing. By viewing a tableau of himself looking at a tableau of Blithedale or the tavern, Coverdale can compare and contrast his younger self

(and older self) to those images in order to excavate an understanding of his relationship to Blithedale and his compatriots. In his hindsight, Coverdale is trying to provide himself

“access to the virtues represented by [his] individual tableaux” in order to “[actualize] a newer, better” self in the present (Chapman 28, 29). In other words, he is trying to not just understand his past self but is trying to piece together something resembling a belief system for his present self. Unlike traditional tableaux, Coverdale is not trying to install virtue into his character but instead is trying install a purpose into himself, both past and present. Though he jokingly will join any cause “provided, however, the effort did not involve an unreasonable amount of trouble,” Coverdale the Elder is quick to point out that the “reader must not take [his] own word for it” (Hawthorne 246, 247). Though purpose, “the want of which…has rendered [Coverdale’s] life all an emptiness” (246), is still missing in Coverdale’s life, he at least has a method—directing his memory as though it was a series of tableaux—for creating a meaningful purpose out of the disparate images and scenes of his past. Whether he cares to do so is another question entirely.

Chapter 3

THE GREATEST SHOW IN NEW ENGLAND:

FREAKSHOW, CIRCUS, AND SUMMER

Wharton, writing her autobiography eighty-two years after Hawthorne’s The

Blithedale Romance, would swell the action of her own narrative, connecting herself with

Hawthorne as she herself looked back over her experiences and into the mythical history of New England literature. It was through her 1917 novel Summer specifically that

Wharton felt connected to Hawthorne’s writing. To reiterate, Summer follows Charity

Royall in her love affair with the urbane Lucius Harney, who is visiting North Dormer to sketch colonial era houses. The love affair is complicated by Lawyer Royall, Charity’s adoptive ward. When Charity becomes pregnant by Harney and Harney leaves her for the beautiful Annabel Balch, Charity runs away to the outlaw community on the

Mountain, her ancestral home. The next day, Lawyer Royall brings the exhausted

Charity back to town and promptly marries her. However, Wharton only really connected herself to Hawthorne through genre and place. This chapter explores how, like

Hawthorne’s Blithedale, Summer uses the entertainment of the era to develop and complicate the narrative. Where Hawthorne uses the tableaux vivant, its complicated history, and its complex presentations and receptions to accentuate his narrator’s ambiguous morality and desires, Wharton uses the freakshow to give her narrative the kaleidoscopic feel of a circus or carnival midway, to develop a pervading atmosphere of horror and disgust, and to play with our ability as readers to identify with and be repelled

59 by characters. As this long list suggests, Wharton, like Hawthorne, did not confine her use to one form of freakshow only. Instead her narrative utilizes the wide variety of freakshow performances to explore many aspects of freakishness.

This approach, though similar to Hawthorne’s, implications unique to Summer.

For one, Blithedale’s first-person narration, delivered as it is by the always-obfuscating

Coverdale, heightens and intensifies the novel’s themes of indeterminacy and unknowability. As readers, we must confront Coverdale as we read and grapple with him as a narrator. In Summer, readers are presented with a third-person narrator who will, at times, use free indirect discourse to enter into the psyche of Charity. In these moments, I argue, we identify with Charity, at least the part of her that resembles us, and at times we are doubly repulsed by her as she returns our gaze. At other times we observe Charity from afar, seeing her through an unaffiliated third person narrator. In these instances, I argue, she is posed like a freak, generally immobile, removed from the audience on a decorated stage not unlike a tableau performer, under the watchful, amateur medical/scientific gaze of the audience. For another, the entertainments and show businesses of Hawthorne’s era are not entirely erased but are instead evolved into a different form. This is not to say that the tableaux vivant was extinct by the time

Wharton was writing; it would still have been a popular entertainment. Indeed, the tableaux vivant plays a central role in Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth. As described in the introductory chapter, the freakshow is a term for several related entertainments where people with exceptional attributes—skin color, physical and mental

60 deformities, diseases—were exhibited to audiences eager to “study” the performers. To this category of “born” freaks, Janet Davis adds the category of “made” freaks, those with body modifications and those with spectacular acts like fire or glass eating. The freakshow was descended from tableaux vivant in that the performer is usually posed with symbolic decorations that, like a tableaux vivant, suggest certain kinds of freakishness or with a narrative mediating the audience’s interpretation of the performer the same way Lord Hamilton would have mediated Lady Hamilton’s attitudes. Where the tableau dealt in morality and social enlightenment, the freakshow dealt with education and the new sciences of genetics, evolution, anthropology, and “ethnology,” though it could easily adopt a moral register in discussions of freakish women, certain deformities, and sexual maladies. Too, Brodhead’s description of the commercialized entertainment industry of the 1850s would also have been relevant in Wharton’s time. In fact,

Brodhead’s examination of the relationship between P.T. Barnum and the performer

Jenny Lind holds true in understanding the interests and motivations uniting show promoters, especially Barnum, and freakshow performers.

Of the critical attention paid to Summer—which is scant compared to the attention paid Wharton’s other works—very little addresses the performances in the novel.

Instead, most critical readings of Summer focus on Wharton’s use of freakishness in

Summer. Or, to be entirely true to the critical material, the critical attention has been focused around the critics’ own disgust, and in some cases their morbid curiosity, with the novel and its characters. Gary Totten’s approach to reading Summer is an instructive

61 example. Using race and eugenic theories popular around the time Summer was written

(and popular with Wharton), Totten sees the Mountain people as a mix of dysgenic savages who live in animalistic, grungy squalor. Totten also sees Charity, who is originally from the Mountain, as a racialized and Othered abomination in the oppressively Anglo-normative town of North Dormer. Though Totten never outright discusses the novel or the characters in terms of freakishness, the implication is surely present that the world of the novel and many of its characters are radically different— physically, mentally, racially, socially, and so on—from Totten’s presumed reader and from the normative Euroamerican characters of the novel (i.e. Lucius Harney, Lawyer

Royall, Annabel Balch). In Summer, that radical difference is not just present, it is put on display to examine and judge. It is also important to recognize that the audience of this display is not only in the novel but includes the reader as well. Readings like Totten’s have been consistent from the novel’s initial publication. In her introduction to the

Oxford World’s Classics edition, Laura Rattray suggests that the novella was “like its protagonist…regarded for many years as a product of ‘tainted origin’, an illegitimate child in the author’s oeuvre” (Rattray xiii). Rattray argues that critics of the 1910s were excited to see the kind of novel Wharton would produce out of her time in Europe during

World War I. Expecting—unfairly, as Wharton would later argue—something in the generic vein of what Nancy A. Walker calls the “seduced and abandoned” novel, critics were surprised that Wharton and Summer did not blindly follow generic conventions.

Wharton does begin with the “seduced and abandoned” formula. In Summer, Charity

Royall is seduced by, has a torrid affair with, and is ultimately abandoned by the urbane

Lucius Harney, a young Bostonian architect visiting Charity’s small town of North

Dormer to sketch colonial houses. However, Walker is quick to point out in her critical reading that Wharton quickly throws aside the façade of genre. With such a radical shift away from the moral novel formula and towards a more gothic novel, it may not be surprising that critics were disgusted with Summer and how it differed from their generic expectations. T.S. Eliot, in a review of Summer, wrote that the novella would “certainly be considered ‘disgusting’ in America” (xvi) presumably for the overt themes of sexuality and incest. Many modern critics have continued talking about Summer with disgust. Kathy Grafton takes a Freudian psychological approach and labels Charity and

Harney as sexually deviant and perverse. Karen Weingarten takes a particularly interesting approach to Wharton’s treatment of abortion. Weingarten combines Hannah

Arendt’s political theories concerning war refugees together with Wharton’s history aiding refugees in World War I. Only those lives recognized and embraced by the law,

Weingarten argues, are actually “legible.” Charity, in her search for a home and a life, is a haunting, unhomed, illegible figure who is only made legitimate when she marries

Lawyer Royall.

Each critic discusses some aspect of Summer that is disgusting, distasteful, grotesque, abject, or abhorrent to them as readers and yet they cannot help but to analyze those aspects. Indeed, it is the repulsion/attraction behind the critical work that further suggests the freakshow reading. There is both a taboo and a spirit of inquiry motivating

63 the audience’s gaze, and that gaze and its attendant motives are returned by the freak performer. The freakshow need not be spectacular, but the audience needs to knowingly gaze upon something or someone that transgresses normality with a sense of curiosity.

And to be perfectly clear, the critical literature stops short of labelling Summer and its characters freakish. However, the way that the disgusting elements of Summer are showcased suggests that the world of the novel is constructed like a freakshow. The best illustration of this freakshow is the scene in the brown house. Charity and Harney go to the swampy, dilapidated home of Bash Hyatt at the base of the Mountain so that Harney can sketch its colonial architecture. Before going to the Mountain, Harney learns from

Charity, Lawyer Royall, and some other unnamed source about the Mountain and its people. The people of North Dormer, according to Charity, “took the Mountain for granted, and implied its disparagement by tone rather than explicit criticism” (Wharton

33). That is, Charity thinks this until she overhears Lawyer Royall explicitly telling

Harney that the Mountain is a “blot” full of “scum” who “herd together like heathens”

(36). The “gang of thieves and outlaws” living on the Mountain are, according to Lawyer

Royall, living within town limits but without “a sheriff or a tax collector or a coroner” that are requisite for civilized life (36). Lawyer Royall’s comments suggest that the

Mountain is a negative space, everything the town is not. Harney, in his own research, thinks the first Mountain people “are supposed to have been men who worked on the railway” (33). Combined with Charity’s own “swarthy” features (3) and Lawyer

Royall’s “thieves and outlaws” comment (36), the Mountain people are an example of

64 what Totten calls the era’s “variegated whiteness” (Totten 70). Harney’s comments bring to Totten’s mind the “many Irish immigrants [who] settled in western Massachusetts between 1850 and 1900,” many of whom “worked on the railroads during the late nineteenth century” (71). Charity’s and Lawyer Royall’s comments lead Totten to believe the Mountain people may also be “[drawn] from stereotypes associated with the

Italian immigrants who settled in Western Massachusetts at the turn of the century,” stereotypes specifically concerning “popularly held beliefs about the dubious intellect and character of Italian immigrants” (70). In modern terms, these people would be white, but

Totten points out that eugenic discussions of Wharton’s era considered Nordic peoples to be white and other Europeans to be less white the further south they originated.

The Mountain people are not only culturally abject Others, they are racially abject

Others. North Dormer is made all the whiter by the racial freaks of the Mountain.

Specifically, the people on the Mountain are a peculiar kind of freakshow called the ethnological congress. Janet M. Davis argues that American “zoological proprietors pioneered [the] systematic, full-blown exhibits of exotic people with animals” (118).

According to Davis, “located inside the menagerie tent, the ethnological congress of

‘strange and savage tribes’,” such as the potentially Irish and Italian immigrants,

“physically collapsed human and animal boundaries in a spectacular act of Otherness”

(118). Davis’s reproductions of lithographs show “well-appointed Euroamerican families viewing the display of the ‘strange and savage tribes’ as an instructive exercise” (119) on not just the natives but on their own Euroamericanness. Examples abound in the brown

65 house scene of animal language applied to the freaks. The young woman of the house is an “unkempt creature,” the old man’s face is “so sodden and bestial” (Wharton 42, 43).

The family live “like vermin in their lair” and are referred to by the collective phrase

“poor creatures” (44, 45). Like any good freakshow, the Hyatts display not only their

“‘born’ (for the congenitally deformed or racially exotic)” freakishness, but their “‘made’

(when the acts involved conscious bodily disfigurement…)” freakishness as well (Davis

118). The little girl has “a scar across her cheek,” and the old woman with the kitten is referred to later as a “half-witted old woman” (43, 49). However, the Hyatts’ Otherness and the town’s contempt for people like the Hyatts do not make for a freakshow, only for freakish characters. The brown house scene makes for a show by positioning Charity and

Harney as viewers of the Hyatts, not just as guests of the Hyatts. After they are allowed to stay to wait out the storm, Charity and Harney “[sit] down on a bench made of a board resting on two starch boxes” (Wharton 43). They are literally positioned as audience members would be positioned watching the Hyatts and their awkward cultural practices such as not “rousing the sleeping man” in the corner (43). Charity and Harney both try to interact with the Hyatts but are cut off each time. Charity tries to beckon two apprehensive children to come to her when she sees them peeking through a doorway.

Harney, on his initial entrance, enters the brown house with “a general ‘How are you?’ to which no one responded” (43). If it were not for a few civilized actions by the Hyatts, the brown house could be read as a tableau. To help quell Charity’s shiver—her dress is drenched by the storm after all—the younger woman brings her a broken teacup full of

66 whiskey. The younger woman is playing her part, a savage playing at being civilized.

This gesture also brings money into the already theatric staging of the scene. Harney feels as if he should pay, or at least tip, for the whiskey that he drinks. He “feel[s] in his pocket for a dollar and draw[s] it out” (44) in an attempt to pay the performers/Hyatts for their performance of civility. For Harney, no show of civility or savagery is free of cost.

As Davis shows in her study of the ethnological congress, the show at the Hyatts’ reinforces Harney’s own Euroamericanness and to an extent enforces Charity’s own white-like identity. The Hyatts and their savagery are contained within the brown house, ostensibly the stage of the freakshow. The Hyatts are under Harney’s and Charity’s gaze.

At a safe remove, Harney and Charity can, as Davis puts it, “judge for [themselves] what the freaks ‘had’” that made them outlaws and thieves or “why [the freaks] came down to that fever hole” brown house (Davis 118, Wharton 45). The most obvious example of diagnosis involves the old man sleeping in the corner. On the one hand, Charity can piece together the relationship between the sleeping man and the actions of the other

Hyatts to diagnose why the scene is so oppressively silent. The children, “it occur[s]” to

Charity, are afraid of waking the old man, and “probably the woman shared their fear”

(Wharton 43, emphasis added). Charity cannot be certain; she can only make a hypothesis as to why the room is silent. Charity can take the minute details of the scene and piece together something of a “reason” for its construction just as a freakshow audience would amateurishly guess at the source of the freak’s condition. On the other hand, Harney cannot quite make the same kind of diagnosis, though he does make two

67 diagnoses. There is a suggestion in the scene that Harney diagnoses the old man’s alcoholism, though Harney remains seemingly blind to the old man’s violence. Though

Charity quietly shrugs away the whiskey in the broken teacup, Harney takes it, drinks it, and makes a motion to pay for it. In contrast to the old man, Harney can hold his liquor and goes through the socially acceptable sequence of actions for drinking liquor. In this sense, Harney’s diagnosis is that the old man drinks the wrong way, i.e. to excess and to stupor, while his own drinking habits are diagnosed as the right way, i.e. polite and paid in full. However, this is only a superficial diagnosis on Harney’s part. Harney also leaves still wondering why the family moved to the “fever hole,” the answer to which

Charity can easily supply: because the “fever hole” is an improvement to the mountain.

In addition, Harney actually more gravely misdiagnoses the Hyatts as a dashingly roguish

“handful of people who don’t give a damn for anybody” (33). However, on the ride back to North Dormer, Harney is unsettled. He looks “oppressed by what he had seen” at the brown house (45). Harney and Charity have an awkward, stilted discussion about him trying to pay for the whiskey. He only really says “I wasn’t sure—” to which Charity fills in with the real diagnosis, that “[he] knew they were [Charity’s] folks, and thought

[she’d] be ashamed to see [him] give them money” (45). In the moment when Harney puts the dollar back in his pocket, he has correctly diagnosed Charity as being freakish like the Hyatts, as being not entirely “normal.”

Interestingly, Charity (at least in the brown house moment) is made all the more human, white, and American by way of comparison to the Hyatts. However, as Davis

68 puts it, despite Charity’s differences, during the live performance “the relationship between self and Other is constantly in flux…because as an entertainer, [the freak] returns the audience’s gaze with [their] own, thus undermining the controlling function of the gaze” (Davis 27). The squalor of the brown house brings to Charity’s mind the

“kitchen at the red house, with its scrubbed floor and dresser full of china” (Wharton 44).

The “smell of dirt and stale tobacco” inside the Hyatts’ brown house brings to Charity’s mind “the peculiar smell of yeast and coffee and soft-soap” (44). Importantly, Charity is clear in declaring that “she always hated” those smells and the images of the kitchen, but in light of the brown house ethnological congress, the aspects of the red house “now

[seem] the very symbol of household order” (44). In other words, the brown house reveals to Charity how white and how right her experiences are in the red house she lives in with Lawyer Royall. Returning to the teacup of whiskey, every instinct and habit learned while living in the red house informs Charity’s head shake and maintains her distinct position within the audience of the performance. To accept the cup, itself a grotesque version of her own wares and its contents would be to accept her inheritance as a “child of a drunken convict” (37). Yet Harney gladly takes the cup and drinks because for him the cup is nothing more than a peace offering from a savage. As with any good service, Harney feels the need to tip the younger woman and pulls a dollar out of his pocket only to put it back. Charity “guessed that he did not wish her to see him offering money to people she had spoken of as being her kin” (44, emphasis added). The emphasis is added here to highlight the swirling relations between Charity, Harney, and

69 the freakish Others. Had Harney gone through with his action, the boundary between audience and performer could have been replaced. However, by putting the dollar back,

Harney shows (to Charity) he understands that Charity is both abject freak and normal citizen, that she has some affinity with the freaks and could take offense to his actions.

Harney’s gesture and Charity’s conjecture together reveal that although the “stage could contain the racial Other, the ethnic threat [that makes] the nonwhite body safe through the trappings of the freak show” (Fahy 56), the inviolate boundary between spectator and horrible spectacle is only an illusion. Harney realizes that Charity has been a freak passing as human this entire time.

While the freakshow allows Harney the opportunity to haphazardly explore his curiosity, it has the effect for Charity of redoubling the normalness of her middle-class,

Euroamerican experience in the red house. However, in tandem with Harney’s diagnosis of Charity as a freak, the brown house scene begins to come undone as a strict analogue to a freakshow. Specifically, Charity is highlighted as a liminal character somewhere between object and viewer, consumer of the show and player in the show. She is reminded of her normal experiences in the red house but is also reminded of her

Otherness in relation to Harney. What the brown house scene ultimately brings into consideration is that the world of Summer is a freakshow, but that the show is not strictly contained and constrained to a limited space, i.e. a stage. The freakshow as a socially and culturally normative performance, indeed the ability to view any Other as a tableaux-like performance, according to Joseph Boone, relies on “the illusion of some ineffable but

70 inviolate boundary dividing spectator and spectacle, subject and object, self and other”

(93).9 Though the boundaries of the freakshow as a strictly staged performance break down in the brown house, that does not mean that the freakshow of Summer ceases to exist, nor does it mean that it loses its function as a cultural norming practice. On the contrary, it means Charity and Harney are not the only audience viewing a freakshow and that the freakshow is being performed in various places. The brown house scene suggests, actually, the opposite of a neatly contained freakshow: that Harney has entered into a space, North Dormer and its surroundings, defined by its freakshowness and that there is a larger audience of the much larger freakshow. In her introduction, Laura

Rattray points out the “prevalence of disabilities among the women who make up the background of Summer” (xxi). Allie Hawes has an “uneven, limping step” (81). Verna

Marsh, the lady hired to do the cooking at the red house, is deaf with “old deaf-looking eyes” (80). Though she is never seen, Carrick Fry’s wife is paralyzed (38). Each character is linked to their physical disability, whether “born” or “made.” Since we are not given much history of the women, a viewer (or reader) can only attempt to diagnose what each “has.” However, Miss Hatchard is given a more extended show. Miss

Hatchard, Harney’s cousin, is “too lame to come around” the library (Wharton 8). She obviously has a physical disability like the other secondary characters. However, she also has a mental disability. After Lawyer Royall tries to force his way into Charity’s

9 Judith Sensibar uses Boone’s work in her chapter “Edith Wharton as Propogandist and Novelist” to argue that Wharton’s travel writing resembles tableaux.

71 bed and after he asks Charity for the first time to marry him, Charity goes to Miss

Hatchard to ask for a job to earn some money to get away or to hire a woman to help keep house. The implication is that Charity needs another woman present to help ward off Lawyer Royall’s advances. However, Miss Hatchard’s response is milquetoast at best: “The… the housework’s too hard for you, I suppose?” Miss Hatchard’s inability to overtly discuss the matter of sex, rape, and incest looming in the red house leads Charity to feel “compassion for Miss Hatchard’s long immaturity” (15). Charity decides Miss

Hatchard must “be talked to like a baby” (15). The effect of this realization makes

Charity feel “incalculably old” (15). Miss Hatchard, despite her age, is diagnosed by

Charity as having the mental and emotional capacity of a child. Charity’s diagnostic gaze if reflected back to her by Miss Hatchard. In that moment, standing across from Miss

Hatchard, Charity experiences something akin to progeria, a disease that prematurely ages children,10 that makes Charity feel “incalculably old” despite her age. “Alone” with a “deeper sense of isolation,” Charity realizes that her sense of feminine comradery with

Miss Hatchard was only a childish myth. With that myth proven false, Charity’s identity as an adolescent quickly disappears, replaced with an old, supposedly wise and resolute woman.

However, it is not just the world of North Dormer that is freakish. Charity is made even more freakish because, just like her own experience in the brown house, the

10 For a more in-depth discussion of “literary progeria” see Conan O’Brien’s “The ‘Old Child’ in Faulkner and O’Connor.”

72 boundary dividing Charity and the reader is not inviolate. Like Winegarten, I see

Wharton’s work during World Way I as an instructive lens to explore Charity’s freakishness. Wharton did many odd jobs during World War I, among them was propagandizing. Thomas Fahy argues that “WWI propogandists recognized the power

(as well as the draw) of” freakshow performers and “enfreak[ed] the enemy” in their propaganda. By depicting the enemy as freakish and inhuman, propagandists appealed to fear and hatred of the enemy in the American public. But, unlike the safely staged show, propogandists “didn’t want to contain the threat” (56). Instead, “they wanted to remove the safety net that freakshows offered and to depict the Other as unleashed on American soil” (56). These elements combined gave recruitment efforts a powerful urgency and served to legitimize the war efforts. Wharton does something similar with Charity, unleashing her miscegenated freakishness on North Dormer. It is important to note that

Charity is not necessarily a racial freak to the reader, though she is still an abjection of the reader. Charity is marked as a freak within the novel by the same animalistic language used to describe the Mountain people. The animal language used to describe

Charity is less distasteful than the language used to describe the Mountain people, for example when “a kind of animal secretiveness possessed her” and “the secretive instinct of the animal in pain was so strong in her” (Wharton 52, 80, emphasis added). However,

Charity is also described as a freakish and bestial sexual deviant. On the night that

Harney fails to show for supper at the Royall house, Charity ventures out after dark to find him. It is weird enough that “the darkness drew her” on that night, but it also draws

73 on her animal instincts and pulls her to “the hill and…the larch-wood above the pasture”

(51). Instead, she spots Harney’s light on in Miss Hatchard’s house and is pulled towards him. Besides the “animal secretiveness [that] possessed her” (52), she is made animal by the way she moves towards Harney: “crouch” and “crept” (54, 55). She even stalks

Harney like a predator stalking prey. She notices Harney had “taken off his coat and waistcoat, and unbuttoned the low collar of his flannel shirt” and particularly notices the

“vigorous lines of his young throat, and the root of the muscles where they joined the chest” (53). This would be erotic if Charity was not stalking “softly on the short grass, and keeping so close to the house that [Harney], even if roused by her approach, would not be able to see her” (52). Her epiphany is that she could easily rouse Harney and do

“the thing that did happen between young men and girls” (54), but she gives up the position of hunter/dominator and declares that Harney “must seek her: he must not be surprised into taking her” (55). She must be the prey, not the hunter.

Charity’s freakishness extends beyond even North Dormer. Charity is cast as freakish to the reader. In the above example, Charity is “aroused…by the clandestine nature of” stalking Harney and “doing something taboo” (Grafton 357, 359). The passage is focalized through Charity. The boundary between reader and Charity is dissolved so that the reader is in contact with Charity at her most erotic as she considers her “sensual urges” and “the forbiddenness of her own actions” (358). Our inquisitive gaze is returned to us as we find ourselves, figuratively speaking, hunched next to Charity in the bushes. However, Charity’s most abject and freakish trait is her ignorance. Robert

Bogdan, in his taxonomy of freakshow performances, argues that when freaks were presented as “exotic,” advertisers “appealed to people’s interest in the culturally strange, the primitive, the bestial, the exotic” with “the emphasis on how different and, in most cases, how inferior to person on exhibit was” (540, 542). This is in comparison to

Bogdan’s “aggrandized mode” of promotion where advertisers would tell the public “the

‘freak’ was highly educated, spoke many languages, and had ‘snobbish’ hobbies like writing poetry or painting” (542). Charity is presented to us throughout in the exotic mode and thus her ignorance is an extension of her bestiality. She decides not go to school so that she can stay with the lonely Lawyer Royall, and what little interest is stirred in her for knowledge is quickly doused: Charity “found it easier to take North

Dormer as the norm of the universe than to go on reading” (Wharton 4). For Charity, reading and knowledge are associated with death and imprisonment; there is a sort of taboo about them for Charity. Charity calls the Honorius Hatchard Memorial Library a

“prison-house” (6) where Charity “wondered if [Honorius] felt any deader in his grave than she did in his library” (6). Though she is “blind and insensible of many things, and dimly knew it” (10), the reader is all too aware of the weight, and irony, of “her ignorance of life and literature” (19). Charity is not a classically tragic figure doomed by her ignorance, the way, say, The House of Mirth’s Lily Bart is doomed by her pride.

Instead, Charity’s ignorance is an abjection of the reader’s knowledgeable position.

Consider Nancy A. Walker’s structuralist argument that Summer is a reworking of a

“seduced and abandoned” novel. Walker’s argument is based on knowledge gleaned

75 from reading: of novels, historical texts, the writings of other knowledgeable readers, etc.

Walker—as well as the presumably mistaken contemporary reviewers of Summer— approaches Summer with knowledge that Charity very clearly lacks because of her aversion to reading. That is to say, Charity is the abjection of the reader, a sort of illiterate and uninformed freak. If the boundary between the abject freak and the audience/reader is dissolved in the voyeur scene discussed above, then it is re-established in places where the narrator takes over the narrative. For example, the narrator evaluates

Charity’s relationship to Harney and concludes that “there had been nothing, therefore, in the outward course of events to raise in Charity’s breast the hopes with which it trembled” (Wharton 38). The intrusion of the narrator brings back the division between

Charity and the reader by commenting on the narrative facts, bringing back into sharp relief the constructed nature of the narration.

The ill-defined stage of the freakshow extends even further out to include even

Harney, though Harney would arguably be presented to us in the aggrandized mode. As

Kathy Grafton argues, Harney is freakish in his sexual proclivities. A large portion of the critical literature, including Grafton’s work, focuses on Charity’s sexuality and for good reason. Returning to the scene between Charity and Miss Hatchard, Charity more openly expresses her sexual situation. Compared to Miss Hatchard, Charity brazenly brings up the issue of rape, incest, and sex where normally those issues would be silenced. Though in this example it might be unfair to label Charity a sexual deviant, her blatant sexuality and knowledge of sex is the reason for her freakishly premature aging in the presence of

Miss Hatchard. However, as Grafton points out, Harney has his own sexual proclivities that make him stand out as freakish. Harney is a freak because he is uncanny. If Charity is the abjection of the reader because of her ignorance, then Harney is the mirror image of the reader because of his erudition. However, that mirror image, like many of the mirror images in Summer, is actually distorted like a funhouse mirror. Lucius Harney occupies, in a broad application of Carol Wershoven’s work, the place of the “female intruder,” a trope Wershoven identifies in much of Wharton’s fiction. For Wershoven, a Wharton narrative is most often made dramatic by a female character who “intrudes” upon the until-then peaceful world of the protagonist. However, in Summer, it is Harney who intrudes into the world of North Dormer. This casts Harney in a kind of literary drag, occupying a male position within Summer, but a female position within Wharton’s oeuvre and to the erudite reader. Too, he is uncanny because despite his urbane and erudite character he is positioned as a near-equal rival to Charity. The two compete for

Annabel Balch, or “the patriarchal ideal, the ‘fixed and upright’ womanhood that both

Charity and Harney want to possess” (Fedorko 73). To put it another way, the beautiful

Annabel Balch is someone Charity wants to be, and Harney wants to be with. Kathy A.

Fedorko goes even further to argue that Charity and Harney are two halves of a single self, the male and female, intellect and sensuality, some kind of Siamese twin on display for the reader.

However, Harney is able to perform in more ways than the freakshow. For example, as established previously, he is a drag queen to the erudite reader. When

77 glancing backwards at Hawthorne’s works, Harney can be seen to have the same effect on Charity as Westervelt has on Priscilla. Within the novel Harney is a kind of mesmerist or hypnotist over Charity. Harney is often linked with the spiritual world as either a sort of mesmerist or connected to death. He suddenly appears, seemingly from nowhere, “as if he were a vision” (Wharton 84) when Charity tries to escape North

Dormer. For a man who is often described as shortsighted, Harney’s vision is often disturbingly described. As Charity spies on him in the night, Harney lays on the bed

“motionless and with fixed eyes, as though following his vision to its bitter end” (55). He is looking towards the ceiling of his room, but his eyes see through the ceiling towards a vision of the future. In that moment, Charity is reminded of similar scene where Harney, looking up towards the afternoon sky, seems to be focused elsewhere than in the moment.

His eyes also have a hypnotic effect on Charity. Harney’s shortsighted eyes widen and deepen “as if to draw [Charity] down into them” in a trance (102). His touch also sends her into a catatonic state somewhere between the waking realm and the pseudo-spiritual realm supposedly accessed by mesmerists. The mesmeric/hypnotic performance was often erotically charged as male performers often enacted their performance on female subjects. Harney exhibits his fair share of sexuality and does so more often and in more extreme language than Charity does. Kathy Grafton argues that Harney, in Freudian fashion, needs “a certain kind of degradation of Charity to occur before he can find her sexually accessible” (350). As a degraded object of sexual desire (compared to the elevated object of love, i.e. Annabel Balch), Charity is often acted upon by Harney.

Though Grafton focuses on each character individually, together the two suggest a relationship based on power plays over and under one another. Harney’s habit of kissing

Charity involves “push[ing] the hair from her forehead, bending her face back…and leaning over so that his head loomed black between her eyes and the paleness of the sky”

(Wharton 96). Compared to Charity’s predatorial infatuation with Harney’s throat,

Harney’s kisses are practically vampiric as he goes “feeling for the curve of her throat below the ear, and kissing her there, and on the hair and eyes and lips” (110). Harney’s embraces have a kind of “spell” (112) over Charity that binds her to him. As Charity runs away from the red house, Harney catches up to her and exclaims: “Did you think you could run away from me? You see you weren’t meant to” (85). Before Charity can say anything, he kisses her. From that point onwards, Harney looks at Charity but rarely hears her. In fact, his “kiss blotted…all out” (93), and only “at stated hours, the ghost of

[Charity] came back” to town (94). The “new world” of Harney’s that Charity comes back from is an “abyss” (110) where she is “suspended in the void” (90). As in their first kiss, Harney’s world is one of darkness, or as Charity puts it, one on “the other side of the grave” (81). Not only is he intimately linked with the Memorial Library, which Charity already links with death, but his hands that he continually wraps around Charity’s hands, face, and hair convey a touch that is “lifeless” (63), returning to Charity early on the feeling of abjection, disgust, and terror similar to what she gets from touching her dead mother’s body. The death-in-life aspect of Harney’s spiritualist persona is reminiscent of several different performance types. For example, he could be said to do a kind of

79 somnambulist performance in the vein of “Sleeping Beauty” displays. Kathryn A.

Hoffmann’s discussion of the “Sleeping Beauty” focuses on static displays of women ostensibly for medical and scientific educational purposes similar to how the ethnic freaks were showcased for anthropological education. The somnambulist supposedly performed in a mythical or pseudoscientific realm between life and death. Too, Harney’s death-in-life qualities resemble the real life case of Julia Pastrana who was, in life, displayed as a “hairy woman” freak but who, in death, was exhibited in London with the handbill proclaiming her a “NEW AND UNPARALLELLED DISCOVERY in the ART

OF EMBALMING, Whereby the Original Form and Almost Natural Expression of Life are Retained” (Durbach 39, 38, original emphasis). Though it seems safe to assume there were probably examples of male “sleepers” and male freaks displayed after death, it is interesting that Hoffmann and Durbach both focus on female performers. This reinforces

Harney’s drag performance discussed earlier but refocuses that performance inside the novel rather than outwards towards the reader. Harney’s performances suggest that the world of Summer is not a one-dimensional performance, but rather a plethora of performances all contained in a sprawling geographic space.

With this in mind, I again want to refine the term “freakshow.” Though exhibitions like the one displaying Julia Pastrana existed mostly independent of larger fairs and circuses, it seems to be that the opposite was more common. Looking at

Hoffmann’s work on “Sleeping Beauties,” rarely were the exhibitions of medical models and somnambulists spectacular enough to exist independently of the larger circuses and

80 fair. Hoffmann is clear in explaining that the individual exhibition might travel, but that in their various stops they existed largely as one of the attractions in a larger fair or circus. Similarly, even discussions of Julia Pastrana in London reference specific neighborhoods in London and other large towns known for their sordid performance venues.11 Harney’s various performances point to the same kind of entertainment ecosystem existing in Summer. In other words, the sum of the performances equals a world that is circuslike. To be clear, the term is not carnivalesque but circuslike. The concept of the carnivalesque comes out of pre-modern festivities wherein normal law and order were suspended, upended, and comically reversed. On the one hand, this allowed common people a modicum of freedom to resist the power of the church and royalty, while, on the other hand it allowed the church and royalty to maintain power by giving the people an illusion of freedom. The circus is very much not of this dynamic. Though the circus can be traced back to the same carnival tradition, the circus is more aptly described as a leisure activity, enjoyed by people for the purpose of entertainment.

Further, the circus was also a capitalistic venture that continually worked to monetize leisure time and entertainment. Brodhead points to the 1850s as the emergence of a

“more massively publicized order of entertainment…by which artistic performance

(broadly understood) came to reach larger and more stabilized mass publics” (334-5).

Along with the publicizing machine, Dana Anderson notes a similar pattern bombarding

11 For more information on Britain’s various entertainment districts, see Lisa A. Kochanek’s “From Sideshow to Science” in Victorian Periodicals Review

Americans in the mid- to late-1800s wherein trolley companies of the time, looking to maximize profit, “realized that encouraging weekend family excursions [on their trolley lines] was their best chance” at maximizing ridership and profit (3). The sudden influx of riders to parks and gardens led to a boom in entertainments to fill the otherwise “bucolic” space (3). Enter P.T. Barnum. Barnum was intimately associated with this culture of monetized leisure. In a study of circus literature, Yoram S. Carmeli quotes the circus book author William S. Bosworth as saying of Barnum “When he could not discover a genuine wonder he manufactured one and he also adroitly mixed the real and the faked that the visitor could not tell the false from the true” (Carmeli 216). Barnum publicized the exhibition and subsequent autopsy of the supposedly 161-year-old former slave Joice

Heth in the 1830s (Reiss), legitimized his display of the “Feejee Mermaid” with lectures from a “Dr. Griffin” in the 1840s (Levi), and publicized the opera singer Jenny Lind’s tour of America in the 1850s (Brodhead). Barnum’s hippodromes of the 1870s, precursors to his more famous circus, featured the “Congress of Nations.” With its

“roster of nearly 1000 performers” the Congress of Nations was “an epitome of ‘well- regulated labor’” (Adams 39). While the showrunners like Barnum were busy publicizing the entertainments, other laborers worked with the express purpose of creating a well-regulated experience for patrons.12 While this construct may have

12 Frederickx et al and Bigné, Andreu, and Gnoth both conduct empirical studies of the theme park experience, specifically how emotions of pleasure and arousal are manufactured by theme park promoters. Durrant et al and Chaim Noy both conduct qualitative studies of patrons interacting with park infrastructure. Finally, Stephen Lyng

82 provided some opportunities for freakshow performers to experience a “normal” life with normal freedoms, the critical readings suggest that the paying public would rarely if ever have seen anything but the highly mediated circus performance.13 Summer exhibits its entertainments in several different ways. Throughout the novel there are slight allusions to circuslike entertainments embedded in several motifs. Too, there are scenes that can be read as circus-like entertainments because they so closely resemble the entertainment.

In a much more obvious sense, Summer, like The Blithedale Romance, is full of actual entertainments and performances. However, the most spectacularly circus-like instance is the Fourth of July at Nettleton, a larger, more prosperous town near North Dormer.

Beginning with the circus-like entertainment, one of the major motifs in Summer is mirrors and reflections. These images begin simply enough but devolve into more and more bizarre and ultimately nightmarish visions. The progression of reflections suggests that the motif is more appropriately read as a house of mirrors and not simply as reflection. At the beginning of the novel the reflection motif can be read as an extension of the novel’s preoccupation with looks. For instance, on the very first page, Wharton sets up this motif as Charity, upon realizing Harney is new to town, scuttles back into the red house ostensibly to look for a key she already had, but really to hide from the city fellow. In the entranceway Charity looked at her reflection in “a narrow greenish

writes a compelling psychological study of how park promoters play into patrons’ desires for novelties and thrills. 13 Brottman and Brottman pg. 93 provides a well laid out description of the myth of the noble freak and ethnographic research that dispels that myth.

83 mirror…hung on the passage wall” (1) and “wished for the thousandth time that she had blue eyes like Annabel Balch” (1). This passage can be read as simply one of several that bring forward Charity’s Otherness by way of her complexion. However, the mirrors do not always show the same swarthy girl when Charity looks into them. Later, in Nettleton,

Charity is still unsure of her own image, but with Harney’s blue brooch she walks out of the restaurant dressing room “with her head held high” (70). She is taken aback by “the glow of her face under her cherry-coloured hat, and the curve of her young shoulders through the transparent muslin” of her dress (70). This progression of reflections suggests that the mirrors do not always objectively reflect reality but instead reflect a subjective experience of reality. The reflection motif is not so simply about looks, but about experiences. In this sense, the reflection motif is more aptly read as a house of mirrors than simply reflection. As the narrative progresses, the reflections become more and more distorted. On a boat ride on a lake in Nettleton, the reflection on the water becomes twisted up with “the inverted tree-tops interwoven with the green growths of the bottom” (73). Later, while riding back at night to the red house on bicycles, the stars

“looked as faint as their own reflections in water” (96). The reflections are disoriented and disorientating, mixing up and inverting up and down. Late in the novel, finally married to Lawyer Royall, Charity looks at the mirror above the dressing table in their marital suite and sees “the high head-board and fluted pillow-slips of the double bed and a bedspread so spotlessly white that she had hesitated to lay her hat and jacket on it”

(147). The reflection does not reflect the entirety of the bed tableau. It leaves out the

84 large engraving of a lake scene “full of drowsy midsummer radiance” with two lovers boating “on a lake overhung with trees” (147) that reminds Charity, cruelly, of her Fourth of July with Harney. The final reflection is so nightmarish because from Charity’s initial vantagepoint it only shows the incestual bed and not the engraving that reminds her of

Harney and Nettleton. Ironically, instead of a warped image, Charity is seeing a sliver of her new reality clearly reflected back to her.

In a similar vein, there are also distinct passages that read like close analogues to performances. The passages are contained within several pages, not sprawled throughout the novel, giving them a sense of a limited experience. In this case that limited experience is one peep show and one cabinet of curiosity. After hearing that Harney is leaving North Dormer, Charity brazenly leaves the red house at night and muses on

“climbing the hill and plunging into the larch-wood above the pasture” (51). Instead, a light in Miss Hatchard’s house catches her eye and convinces Charity that Harney is there. She sneaks over to the house and peeps into the window. Charity sees Harney trying to sketch “quietly sitting at his drawing-board” (52). In a fit of frustration, Harney flings away his sketches and sullenly rests his chin on his hands at his desk. “He had taken off his coat and waistcoat, and unbuttoned the low collar of his flannel shirt” so that

Charity could see “the vigorous lines of his young throat, and the root of the muscles where they joined the chest” (53). Charity has an unobstructed—though voyeuristic— view of Harney in his private state of semi-undress. The extreme attention to detail, looking in at the connections of his muscles, suggests that Charity is not just looking at

85 him but studying him and his body. In a gender reversal, Charity is peeping backstage at

Harney hoping to catch a glimpse of him undressed just as several circuses would often have a “‘Gentlemen Only’ ‘cooch’ show” where they “could pay an extra twenty-five cents to stand in a small enclosed area watch” so that “they might see nude women”

(Davis 5, 126, 5). Instead, Charity is the voyeur looking in on Harney.14 Another scene closely resembling a performance is Charity’s visit to Dr. Merkle’s office after she first discovers that she is pregnant by Harney. The office begins with a “Stuffed fox on his hind legs proffer[ing] a brass card-tray to visitors” (Wharton 117). The rooms are full of

“gold-framed photographs of showy young women” and Dr. Merkle herself is dressed extravagantly in a “rich black dress, with gold chains and charms hanging from her bosom” (117). The whole room gives off the air of a cabinet of curiosity. The stuffed fox done up like a greeter resembles any one of Barnum’s humbugs while the over- whelming number of pictures and chains and charms—not to mention the that Dr. Merkle

“get[s] so many things of that kind” (150)—suggests that Dr. Merkle is a collector of some kind. Though she might not collect deformed specimens, she does collect and showcase the girls she works on and the collateral they put up for their abortions.

Similarly, it would not be too far of a stretch to suggest that Dr. Merkle’s office is a kind of medical sideshow, one like the “wax venus” shows of medical models of women used

14 Davis does discuss “female impersonators” and several gag cooch tent performances in which audiences were duped into watching men perform; see ch. 5 in The Circus Age. For a more in-depth discussion of semi-nude male performances see David Huxley’s “Music Hall Art: La Milo, Nudity, and the Pose Plastique 1905-1915”

86 ostensibly to explain medical procedures and educate audiences on the dangers of sex.

These shows combined science and pornography into one show, much the way Dr.

Merkle combines her medical practice with gilded displays of her patrons.

Even more obviously, there are numerous actual performances throughout

Summer. In an attempt to run away from the red house, Charity leaves North Dormer and along the road comes across a gospel tent that she initially mistakes for a circus tent in town for the Fourth of July. When the preacher asks Charity to repent and lay her sins before God, she quickly derides him and says “[she] only wish’t [she] had any to lay”

(84). The exchange is brief but important. On a much larger scale is the North Dormer

Old Home Week,15 a big production featuring songs, dances, speeches, and a town dance.

Though Charity takes part in the production work and has a part on the stage, it is Lawyer

Royall who takes over most of the actual performance. His oration transfixes the crowd in the stuffy town hall, and even when the set breaks apart and Charity faints from the heat the crowd cannot help but remember Lawyer Royall’s speech. However, it is the

Nettleton Fourth of July that is the biggest and most spectacular performance of them all.

While the rest of the performances happen sporadically or are so diffused as to be almost imperceptible, the Nettleton Fourth of July is one large scene of performance after performance that congeals into one dizzying site similar to a fair midway. Though it might be surprising to see a whole town done up like a fair midway, the idea of a leisure

15 For more on Home Weeks and historical pageants, see David Glassberg’s American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century

87 park at the end of a short train ride was not something unheard of in the early twentieth century. In plotting the history of the roller coaster, Dana Anderson discusses how “the proliferation of attractions such as coasters and assorted carnival rides materialized from the commercial exchange between trolley companies and the power syndicates which provided their electricity” (4). Trolley companies seeking to make money on weekends when they were still being charged for electricity would build parks at the end of their trolley lines to attract people onto the trolleys: “Investors descended upon gardens, parks, and other typical bucolic leisure locales and enlivened them with enough shows and rides to pique the interest of the most sedentary families” (4). Again, there are several types of performances throughout the Nettleton Fourth of July, some obviously performances and some analogues to performances. As discussed earlier, there is the boat ride that Charity and Harney take on the lake. There are also several food options just off the main street, one of which is discussed as the house of mirrors previously. Charity and Harney see a movie where “all the world has to show seemed to pass before” Charity (Wharton 72).

Upon leaving the movie, Charity and Harney climb into an electric run-about. The driver offers to take them to the ballgame, which is happening on the outskirts of the town.

Charity and Harney stay in Nettleton for the fireworks show: “From every point of the horizon, gold and silver arches sprang up and crossed each other [and] sky-orchards broke into blossom, shed their flaming petals and hung their branches with golden fruit”

(76). Despite the dazzling fireworks display, Charity is even more excited to see that on the lake is a boat done up as a set piece of “Washington crossing the Delaware” (76), an

88 example proving that tableaux were not extinct. In between the fireworks, “the velvet darkness settle[s] down” around the crowd (76). Charity and Harney are watching all of this on a set of bleachers, Harney one seat above Charity with his knees around her. In the darkness, Harney clasps Charity’s head with both his hands, draws it backwards, and kisses her, revealing to Charity “an unknown Harney…[one] who dominated her and yet over whom she felt herself possessed of a new mysterious power” (77). The fireworks display can be read as a kind of dark ride, where riders are led through a cavernous tunnel full of wonders or horrors. Besides the obvious entertainment, “a significant purpose…is to provide a cover of darkness for activities on the part of its riders” since the darkness of the ride “gives opportunity for an immediate change to behaviors which are socially unacceptable in other [brighter] contexts” (Kwaitek 10, 127). Harney, sensing the liberty of the darkness around him, takes his chance and kisses Charity. However, the dark ride also narrativizes the experience it provides riders, often using either kitschy love symbolism or supposedly horrific hell symbolism. Unfortunately for Charity, the

Nettleton dark ride uses hell symbolism in the form of a drunken Lawyer Royall.

As the couple tries to leave on a boat heading up the lake, they run into Julia

Hawes again, a scandalized woman from North Dormer who was rumored to have visited

Dr. Merkle and fallen into a life of ill repute. She ominously tells Charity that the Fourth of July was “a family party” (Wharton 77). From behind Julia Hawes comes Lawyer

Royall, drunkenly trying to steady “himself on the hand-rail in a desperate effort at erectness” (78). He moves a bit closer to Charity and Harney and, drawing “himself up

89 in the tremulous majesty of drunkenness” (78), declares for all to hear that Charity a

“bare-headed whore” (78). And this is ultimately why the world of Summer is a circus and not a carnival, because Lawyer Royall is everywhere exerting and declaring his power. He is the ringleader, the P.T. Barnum to the world of Summer.16 Not only does he show up at Nettleton in Charity’s happiest moment, he shows up throughout the novel to direct the events even though he is rarely seen. Looking back towards the beginning of the novel, Miss Hatchard has to consult the select-men of North Dormer when Charity asks for another woman in the house or a job to earn enough money to leave (16).

Ultimately, Charity is gifted both a female maid and the job by Lawyer Royall, who declares Charity the next librarian of the Honorius Hatchard Memorial Library. Later,

Lawyer Royall gifts Charity the money he makes from renting his buggy to Harney. It is

Lawyer Royall who resides over the Old Home Week. It is Lawyer Royall who shows up at Nettleton. It is Lawyer Royall who shows up at the dilapidated old house the young couple uses for their trysts. And ultimately it is Lawyer Royall who saves Charity. After confirming her pregnancy, Charity writes the absent Harney and gives him permission to marry his true sweetheart, Annabel Balch. Without anything to keep her in North

Dormer, Charity decides that she will have her baby in her ancestral home, on the

Mountain. On her trek up the mountain, Charity is caught in a storm and so must ride with the town preacher up the Mountain. To her surprise the preacher is going up the

16 For a further discussion of the power that Lawyer Royall holds of Charity and North Dormer, please see William E. Hummel’s “‘My Dull-Witted Enemy’: Symbolic Violence and Abject Maleness.”

Mountain to watch over Charity’s mother, who is on her death bed. Charity makes it just in time to see her mother pass. Charity stays the night on the Mountain to wait out the storm, but the conditions are so rough, and Charity has eaten so little that she can barely even stand in the morning. In fact, she can barely even think. In her stupor, she is rescued by Lawyer Royall, who was alerted by the preacher and travelled all night to reach the Mountain. However, in her stupor, Charity is little more than a walking corpse, little more than the real-life freak Julia Pastrana or the supposedly 161-year-old ex-slave

Joice Heth, still posing at the commands of her exhibitors even in death. Perhaps most disturbingly, we are paralyzed in the face of Lawyer Royall’s actions. In these final moments, the narrative is focused through Charity. The abundance of ellipses in the stream of the narration suggests that it mirrors Charity’s thoughts. And so, we are, narratively speaking, in close proximity to her. Instead of some grandiose, kaleidoscopic circus entertainment, we are seated front and center to the exhibition of Charity’s death- in-life performance, so close, in fact, that we can see Lawyer Royall directing, or rather manipulating, Charity. The food that Lawyer Royall secures for them after coming back down the Mountain helps her to “feel like a living being again” (141), except that “the return to life was so painful that the food choked in her throat” (142). Charity’s

“consciousness [grows] more and more confused and immaterial, [becomes] more and more like the universal shimmer that dissolves the world to failing eyes” (143).

However, she is still somewhat alive with the feeling that “if she ceased to keep close to

[Lawyer Royall], and do what [Lawyer Royall] told her to do, the worlds would slip

91 away from beneath her feet” (146). In order to keep herself alive, Charity submits and gives Lawyer Royall what he has been lusting after since the beginning of the novel: she marries Lawyer Royall. The freak can never really escape the circus.

Chapter 4

STRIKING THE SET:

CONLCUSIONS AND NOTES FOR FURTHER READINGS AND VIEWINGS

I would like to conclude by more deeply exploring the reading of The Blithedale

Romance and Summer I have just provided. I examined Blithedale for traces of tableaux vivant within the narrative and Summer for traces of freakshow. My goal, in doing this reading, is to argue that visual culture and literary culture evolved hand-in-hand on one cultural timeline. In a way, I glanced backward, like Wharton, to explore this new, unified timeline of entertainment culture. Where Wharton was concerned with geography and genre, I was concerned with how each author was influenced by his and her era’s visual and entertainment landscape. Wharton’s argument has its own logic and narrative, tracing a genealogical line backwards from herself to Hawthorne, her generic predecessor. I have done something similar, looking back at two points, i.e. the two novels, to suggest that there is, indeed, a singular, unified timeline of American entertainment culture, one that addresses both visual and literary culture together. As Jan

Alber argues, I have looked backwards and “made a narrative by the sheer act of imposing a narrative on” the history of Hawthorne, Wharton, and American literary and entertainment culture. Hayden White’s discussion of narrative and recorded history helps to explain why, after providing my reading, I want to more deeply explore my reading of the two novels, the two authors, and the two entertainments. According to White, different kinds of historical records have different degrees of narrativity. The annal is

93 simply a sequence of events that lists events by date without any comment on their significance, and the chronicle begins to narrativize dates and events but is “usually marked by a failure to achieve narrative closure” (9). A history, on the other hand, provides a fully realized narrative account of events. And if a history is a story, and

If every fully realized story, however we define that familiar but conceptually

elusive entity, is a kind of allegory, points to a moral, or endows events, whether

real or imaginary, with a significance that they do not possess as a mere sequence,

then it seems possible to conclude that every historical narrative has as its latent

or manifest purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats. (White 17-

18)

The desire to moralize, for White, is the desire “to identify [events] with the social system that is the source of any morality we can imagine,” or put differently, narrativizing, as a moralizing act, glues together real events and social meaning (18). In other words, to create a narrative out of disparate events is not simply a nonchalant activity, but instead is a complex rhetorical act, one that is brought about by the desire for significance and that alters our understanding of events, of “reality, not by direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action” (Bitzer 4). If historical narratives are rhetorical, it follows that we should “examine [historical] narratives and other communicative acts in the pragmatic context of the intent of their producers” (Nielson et al 64). I have done this with Coverdale in Chapter One and have done this, to an extent,

94 with Wharton’s autobiography in the Introduction. I propose to do this to myself, here, as well.

I would like to think that this project has some affinity with Coverdale, making much out of a seemingly trivial, small phrase. I have, after all, built this project from one passage in Wharton’s autobiography. In doing so, I believe that I, like Coverdale, have come to see both “the narrative potential of life” and that “events do not offer themselves as stories” (Ryan 377, White 8). We, as “spectators” of events, have each “construct[ed] a narrative structure as a way to rationalize” the events we have witnessed. However, I like to think that I have been more forthcoming with my motives than Coverdale. My goal was always to suture each novel to its respective moment in the history of visual culture. In doing so, I have identified the novel (the event, as White would say) with a social system, both the novel’s own social system (albeit strictly of entertainments) and my own social system of New Historical literary criticism. My purpose—as I found during the writing of large portions of this project—in doing this twice to novels sixty- five years apart is to develop a valid and credible evolutionary narrative. Here, I would like to also consider the reliability of the way of reading that I present in this novel. That is to say, that I wonder what would happen if a similar reading to mine was conducted with a novel and entertainment further down the timeline. I wonder if, and how, a recent novel might reveal a similar relationship between literature and visual culture and how a recent novel might further our understanding of the evolution of literary and visual culture.

I would like to dig further into this notion of evolution. Though I suggest that my timeline is an evolutionary timeline, I would argue as well that it maps more than just the evolution of Romantic literature and/or visual culture. Instead, it might be more accurate to use the term “ecological” evolution, or a broad study of the interaction between individual cultural objects and their human and physical environments. This notion of

“ecology,” even loosely applied as it is here, provides a deeper understanding of my project. In terms of ecology, to view a novel in isolation would be to examine it as an induvial. Wharton, in her glance backward to Hawthorne, was looking at her literary work in relation to Hawthorne’s literary work as a population of similar individuals (i.e. novels). To view an individual (the novel) in relation to a different kind of individual

(tableaux vivant) would be to study a community of interrelated types (of entertainment).

To then study those communities in relation to every other community and to every other cultural artefact would be something like the project of New Historicism, seeking out the extended web of connections between even the most mundane cultural artefacts. Indeed, my project limits its discussion to a community of entertainments, but it also considers the ways in which consumers consume and producers produce entertainment. To view either novel or either performance in isolation would be to ignore the complex relationships between entertainments that existed in those historical moments. To view those relationships only in one moment would ignore the dynamism of entertainment. To ignore the ways in which audiences viewed entertainments and the ways showbusiness shaped entertainments ignores potential cultural and economic understandings of each

96 era. For example, as mentioned in the Introduction, tableaux vivant existed as several different performances at the same moment and even infiltrated literary and magazine writing, and to ignore that would be to ignore the complex interrelated media landscape of Hawthorne’s world. Further, to ignore the lineage of the freakshow, specifically its roots in tableaux, would be to ignore the audience/performer dichotomy specific to the freakshow and to several scenes in Summer. Ignoring showmen like P.T. Barnum, whose work spanned the era between Hawthorne and Wharton, and his penchant for manipulating each entertainment to lure in his patrons would be to ignore a significant aspect of the history of entertainment.

Of course, the full extent of this complexity is incredibly difficult to record in one definitive source. Too, this project does not intend to act as the definitive source for recording the full extent of the complexity of ay era. This project only uses Blithedale and Summer as evidence of that complexity. This is not to say that the novel is some zenith of entertainment or some paragon of artistry. Instead, this is to say that the novel, as a dialogic medium, can and does have the unique ability to carry multiple, often contradictory elements in its narrative. In other words, the novel is a medium that can represent multiple versions of tableaux vivant or freakshow within the text itself. The novel is, then, a kind of archive in which to study Hawthorne’s and Wharton’s eras, one that enables a reading like mine to happen at all. However, this project also considers how communities of entertainments change over time. Again, the Introduction lays out how tableaux evolved from parlor theatrics for bourgeois Europeans into the circus

97 freakshow. Thankfully, Wharton explained the connection between herself and

Hawthorne. However, if this evolutionary stance is to be considered reliable, then one should be able to extend both the visual cultural timeline and the literary cultural timeline forward beyond the freakshow and Wharton respectively. Having done that, one should also be able to take a novel from somewhere on that extended timeline and conduct the same experiment I have: suturing together the visual and literary entertainment timelines through a close reading of a novel. Indeed, both timelines do extend beyond the limits of this project.

There is a through line from tableaux vivant to freakshows to cinema, one that necessarily includes the circus. Thought the circus is maybe not “dialogic” in the same sense as a novel, it did contain multitudes of entertainments under a common producer’s name. Indeed, it is “well-documented by both film and circus historians that cinema shared not only its subject matter but its first venues with fairgrounds and circuses, so the audiences were often literally the same” (Stoddart 3). Vanessa Toulmin explores this relationship between film and circus travelling shows in Britain, where “bioscope” or

“Theatrograph” operators first appeared in 1896 and played to provincial audiences and music hall patrons alike (219). These early films had motifs that clearly point to their genealogy. In their examination of the early films of Georges Méliès, Vito Adriaensens and Steven Jacobs point to “films made shortly before and after 1900 [that] often make explicit the contrast between the new medium of film and the traditional arts by means of the motif of the statue or the painting coming to life” (41). In other words, early

98 filmmakers had an affinity for tableaux vivant. By filming a perfectly still model, the film maker could make it seem like the statue had come to life. Since this was before major advances in editing, the trick shot could be easily completed without much special direction. Helen Stoddart, on the other hand, explores the relation between circus and cinema, in general and in America, noting that early films tended to favor circus performances because they were so spectacular. Early circus films simply recorded the circus act “for its own sake” (Stoddart 3). The clunky film technology often kept film from fully embracing the “colorful, fast-moving, and spatially dynamic acts of the circus”

(Stoddart 6). However, Stoddart points to films made after 1913 that “began to move away from pure exhibitionism to ‘narrativisation’ and thus…from attempts to show or capture circus acts to telling stories about them” (6). Stoddart sees this move towards narrativization as a move towards using editing techniques to mimic the movements of circus performances, relying on editing to show the trick or tumble instead of simply recording and displaying the act itself.

Daniel Weigand takes a slightly different approach, examining the cultural impact of early cinema, specifically how cinema “reformers” and variety theatre “reformers” shared similar ideologies and both fit into larger reform movements of the time.

According to Weigand, “like the cinema reformers, the variety reformers were concerned with elevating forms of entertainment that originated among and addressed the lower classes—such as circus shows—in order to lend them a semblance of art for middle-class audiences” (15). In the above example, the traces of tableaux vivant’s early, moralistic

99 practices can be found in early cinema, as cinema itself was viewed as a similar tool for moral improvement. Looking much further beyond the eras covered in the project, tableaux can still be seen in modern film. Judit Pieldner explores magical realism in

Hungarian and Romanian cinema and how that cinema uses tableaux vivant to create a sense of the fantastical. Pieldner even begins her exploration in Hungarian prose works of the 1990s. For Pieldner, the aesthetic of a tableau lends itself to the magic realist mode, as both are concerned with “excess…saturation and density” of images and the

“dialogue between the ‘real’ and its artistic rendition” (99). With so much of the circus and variety theatre still present in modern cinema, it is easy enough to say that these early entertainment types have “spilled over into and, indeed, have been significantly extended by the mechanized and technologically complex twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular pleasures of cinema” (Stoddart 1). In other words, they have not vanished so much as they have influenced and, in some cases, been subsumed by more modern, technological entertainments.

However, the legacies of circus and tableaux are fairly innocuous. The freakshow, on the other hand, has a more troubled legacy. There is, of course, the 1932 film Freaks directed by Tod Browning, director of 1931’s Dracula. Freaks was controversial on its release because it cast real freakshow performers as its main characters. Joan Hawkins quotes a 1932 audience member’s review of Freaks as a movie

“so loathsome I am nauseated thinking about it” (143). Indeed, the bodily grotesque and horror of Freaks can still be found in many horror movies. The films of David

100

Cronenberg and Guillermo Del Toro each revel in the same bodily horror and grotesque of Freaks, their shock and horror coming from the display of their freakish monsters.

Mikita and David Brottman draw a more formal through line from freakshows to modern entertainment. On the one hand, they see a very prominent role for freaks “in the clandestine outlets of subculture, such as hard-core pornography” (106). Less sensationally, they also see the freakshow present in “human interest documentaries” about exceptional humans, in late-night talk shows that display tragic human interest stories for the audience’s “perverse voyeurism in the guise of thoughtful and understanding sensitivity” (95), and in the tabloids and punk culture of the 1990s.

Brottman and Brottman also make an interesting case for ethnographic freakshows showing up in academic discussions of tribal peoples who “are isolated in the ‘zoos’ of research papers” (94). Too, they point to sensational “mondo ‘documentaries,’” like those found on supposedly educational television networks, “with their ‘realistic’ depictions of bizarre human behavior and strange cultural practices” (94). The many iterations of the freakshow are still present though they have “been (unhealthily) repressed, or else channeled into popular cultural outlets” (106). Like tableaux, the freakshow is still very much with us today.

Too the literary timeline can be extended beyond Wharton herself. Susan

Goodman argues that “Wharton wanted to be remembered in two traditions: one of mostly male English and European prose masters, the other of fascinating women” (16).

However, that tradition, in genre at least, includes the likes of the fascinating American

101 prose master F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, like Wharton, wrote from the notion that “the most significant kind of reality is to be found in the observed manners of the immediate social group” (Way vii-viii). For Brian Way, the “subtle artistry” of Wharton’s and Fitzgerald’s fictions, the way both fictions examine “the point where a character’s inner life and

[their] social life blend together,” suggest that Fitzgerald should be viewed in the shadow of Wharton. Way even mentions the actual moment that Fitzgerald stood in Wharton’s shadow, sending copies of The Great Gatsby to Wharton for her to review and the subsequent meeting over tea. If one takes Wharton’s other initial criteria from her autobiography, namely geography, then Goodman’s discussion of the expatriate artist community in France is instructive. Goodman’s understanding is that “Wharton may have come [to France] more as a supplicant to the French aristocrats and academicians on the Right Bank and [Gertrude] Stein as a pasha to the American artists and collectors on the Left” (118). It was “the salon [that] gave them both a stage” from which to minister to their artistic circles (118). Wharton shared her expatriate experience with many

American artists of the time and should be seen in light of that movement. The line from

Hawthorne, however, is similarly laid out. Samuel Coale, in his book-length work In

Hawthorne’s Shadow, sees Hawthorne as the prime example of American Romance fiction. Coale argues that Hawthorne “the romancer,” in his attempt “to lure the reader into his dark art,” “must create a spell” with his fiction (9). Coale sees the same

“spellbinding” qualities in “[William] Faulkner’s winding sentences, [John] Cheever’s dark corners, [Joyce Carol] Oates’s breathless prose, and [Joan] Didion’s chantlike style

102 of incantation” (9). Coale also argues that the “Manichean vision” of Hawthorne’s work was perhaps most prevalently replicated in the fiction of the 1960s. More interestingly,

Coale sees Hawthorne’s works as diametrically opposed to “novels of character” by authors like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike, and Paul Theroux. Instead, novelists who “write fables of vision in which characters are subordinated to the author’s more public visions of society in general, of a world in arbitrary flux, a wasteland, a realm of ultimate conspiracy” more closely resemble Hawthorne’s work. These modern romanticists, according to Coale, include Thomas Pynchon, John Hawkes, and E.L.

Doctorow. Emily Miller Budick, in her study of female Romance authors Engendering

Romance, similarly sees Hawthorne’s legacy carried on by female authors, specifically citing Wharton but also Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Toni Morrison.

Again, if this project is reliable, one should be able to take a novel and a popular visual entertainment from the above timelines and see evidence of that visual entertainment within the novel. It is important to stress that this action, connecting a novel to a visual entertainment, connects an event with a social system. Perhaps this project is connecting “novel reading” in a general sense with a specific sense of media communities and New Historical criticism of this current moment. This current moment includes media phenomena like “extended universes,” right- and left-wing media spheres, and even fully immersive or interactive media. It would seem that the “extended universe” model, where a story unfolds over movies, tv shows, comics, novels, web shorts, and so on, would be (deliberately and knowingly) made for a wide-ranging

103 analysis of the kind practiced by New Historicists. However, I would caution that an examination of deliberately multimedia storylines is actually incompatible with this project. Instead, a more compatible reading would be to examine how multimedia

“universes” have shaped fictional narratives and narrativity. I would also caution that there are certain elements of my current moment that this project only touches on for the sake of space. As Brodhead argues, Hawthorne and Coverdale represent a new form of audience, one that sits quietly and observes. The nature of the audience shifts slightly in

Chapter Two with my analysis of the freakshow to an audience who deduces. Extending this project to include recent history might be better served by exploring in more detail what the audience is constructed to be (or instructed to do) by current entertainments.

However, Brodhead’s work also suggests that, if there was a new way for an audience to gaze upon entertainment, then there must be some new understanding of gazing itself.

Performance thus became a phenomenon not simply isolated on a stage but rather one suffused into the culture. In examining a recent novel, considerations of recent cultural understandings and usages of “performance” might prove fruitful.

This brings to light another potential outcome of this project, this time concerning the theoretical approach. Performance studies and studies of performativity attend to issues of gaze, culture, and objects of the gaze. However, the trend in the performance studies literature seems to be for performance studies to ignore any agent who controls the performance and thus controls how that performance is viewed and interpreted. In other words, performance studies seems to ignore the director. As far as this project is

104 concerned, performance in Blithedale and Summer suggests that the entirety of the performance should be considered because the performance is directed by someone.

Coverdale directs the “creatures of his brain” in tableaux, and Lawyer Royall is revealed to be directing the action of North Dormer. Too, in Summer an unnamed narrator infiltrates the narrative to direct the audience’s understanding of the events and characters. These directors are not apolitical. They have motives and agendas and they have the power to enact those motives. Despite Tracy C. Davis’s admonition, this project suggests that the performative metaphor should be extended beyond its current boundaries to include the whole machine of performance including the director. This project makes a similar, though less passionate, case for including physical space into the performative metaphor as well. Performance studies already attends to space but only when that space is the performance. As David Turnbull argues, people perform space as they move through and interact with space. The tableaux and the freakshow, and their descendants in film too, each deliberately use the physical attributes of their exhibition space to heighten their performance. From competing tableaux and freakshow exhibits on the same city block to special lighting techniques and stagecraft in the performance halls, each performance uses physical space for the performance itself. This project also implies a question of degree of performativity. Indeed, Blithedale is far and away more obviously influenced by performance than Summer. The amount of critical literature on

Blithedale’s infatuation with performance—and the lack of the same for Summer— supports this premise. It would seem, then, that Blithedale could be considered more

105 performative than Summer, or at least it more readily lends itself to a performance studies reading. Marie-Laure Ryan suggests that novels can be categorized by their degree and kind of narrativity. Perhaps novels—anywhere on the unified timeline of American entertainment culture—can also be categorized by their degree and kind of performativity as well. Finally, this project brings into consideration what happens if reading is understood as gazing. Alber argues that audiences make sense of live performances by narrativizing them. This project flips that, asking instead what happens with readers make sense of a novel by watching it like a performance.

106

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