“Alice Doane's Appeal” and “The Great Carbuncle” in the Token

Hawthorne’s Gifts: Re-reading “Alice Doane’s Appeal” and “The Great Carbuncle” in The Token

alexandra urakova

AMUEL Griswold Goodrich’s The Token, an annual gift S book in which Nathaniel Hawthorne anonymously published many of his early tales, has long become the emblem of his “years of obscurity.” Later in his lifetime, Hawthorne would speak about his tales as “rummaged out” “within the shabby morocco-covers of faded Souvenirs.”1 He would de- scribe “musty and mouse-nibbled leaves of old periodicals, transformed, by the magic arts of [his] friendly publishers, into a new book.”2 If the course of Hawthorne’s publication history was culling his fugitive stories from old annuals for the purposes of bringing them together under his own name, I propose to recast these stories back from the “morocco-covers” of The Token and put them alongside neighboring entries to connect them to the broader generic and ideological framework of the volumes and the format of the gift book in general. Since Jane Tompkins’s seminal Sensational Designs (1986), where she touches upon Hawthorne’s publications in The To- ken, we tend to think of classic texts in terms of the cultural

I would like to express my deep gratitude to the ﬁrst reader of this essay, Stephen Rachman, for helping me improve it and generously sharing his ideas. I thank both him and Sonya Isaak for reﬁning the essay’s style. I am grateful to IAS CEU for the opportunity to complete my research for this paper. 1Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Preface to Twice-told Tales,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America, 1982), p. 1150. 2Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Preface to Snow-Image,” in Tales and Sketches, p. 1157.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 588 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY and critical contexts in which they were recognized.3 Much work has been recently done in recontextualizing Hawthorne and reading him against the periodical culture of his day so it is all the more surprising that the studies of his gift book publications have been regrettably meager.4 Furthermore, the existing research on the subject has overstated Hawthorne’s alienation from gift book culture.5 Taking a different turn, I claim Hawthorne’s early stories, rather than merely being placed in gift books, participated in a gift book economy—one in which literary texts served as tokens of affection and sentimental sociality—and argue that while employing gift book conventions and working with this tradition’s symbolic pat- terns, Hawthorne nonetheless exposed a set of anxieties about

3Jane Tompkins, “Masterpiece Theatre,” in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 3-40. 4Kristie Hamilton relates the generically evanescent character of Hawthorne’s sketches to the spirit of modernity and contemporary social realities, including “technological advancements enabling the production and distribution of newspa- pers, magazines, and books.” “Hawthorne, Modernity, and the Literary Sketches” in The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Millington, ed. (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 101. Meredith McGill’s seminal Amer- ican Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) sees Hawthorne’s early tales and sketches as part of the antebellum culture of reprinting. Developing McGill’s ideas, Ryan Cordell ana- lyzes numerous periodical reprints of Hawthorne’s story “Celestial Railroad” and re- estimates the tale’s signiﬁcance for the antebellum readership. See “Taken Possession of’ The Reprinting and Authorship of Hawthorne’s ‘Celestial Railroad’ in the Ante- bellum Religious Press,” Digital Humanities 7,no.1 (2013), accessed June 10, 2015, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000144/000144.html 5To my knowledge, the only study that offers a close reading of Hawthorne’s texts in The Token is Thomas R. Moore, A Thick and Darksome Veil: The Rhetoric of Hawthorne’s Sketches, Prefaces, and Essays (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994). Moore deals only with sketches, not with tales. He counterpoises Hawthorne’s rhetoric of subversion and ambiguity to the annual’s rhetoric of escape that was, in his opinion, a manifestation of the annual’s desire for the “exotic” and the “unrealis- tic” (p. 21). Hawthorne/Goodrich relations, instead, have been well studied. See, for example, Lillian B. Gilkes, “Hawthorne, Park Benjamin, S. G. Goodrich: A Three- Cornered Imbroglio,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal 1 (1971): 83-112; Seymour L. Gross, “Hawthorne’s Income from the Token,” Studies in Bibliography 8 (1956): 236-38; James R. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times (1980; repr., Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1998), pp. 46-48, 70-80, 93-101; C. E. Frazier Clark Jr., “New Light on the Editing of the 1842 Edition of Twice-Told Tales: Discovery of a Family Copy of the 1833 Token Annotated by Hawthorne,” Hawthorne Journal 2 (1972): 91-139; Edwin Haviland Miller, Salem is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), pp. 93-101.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 HAWTHORNE’S GIFTS 589 a commodified gift culture, suggesting instead that literature should provide an emotionally powerful aesthetic experience. To develop this point, I will focus on two tales, “Alice Doane’s Appeal” and “The Great Carbuncle,” which gothicize the annual’s cultural conventions and challenge its prevailing sense that tokens of affection are necessarily transparent, safe, and heteronormative. Gift books, or literary annuals, performed a very specific cultural and social function in the antebellum United States since they marked the transition to a full-fledged market economy that American literary culture was undergoing in the antebellum period. Leon Jackson considers them to be an emblem of a new commodity culture being “a commercialized version of hand-written albums.” Meredith McGill places them “at a pivot point between economic and affective systems of exchange” while Isabelle Lehuu renders them as “part of the economy of sentiment,” “a prime example of the intricate junction between traditional ritual and modern consumption.”6 Indeed, a gift book is a good example of a transitional market form precisely because it commodified the gift exchanges commonly associated with traditional, pre-market economies or with the private sphere.7 Moreover, the term “gift” itself was deliberately ambiguous in that it referred both to a present and a talent. Poems, tales, and plates published in gift books were evidence of their authors’ artistic gifts and at the same time “served to remind viewers and readers that someone close by felt the sen- timents expressed in their pages.”8 Not just a book itself but,

6Leon Jackson, Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 140-41; McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, p. 34; and Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 78, 80. 7Stephen Nissenbaum suggests that gift books “might be said to represent the ‘commercialization of sincerity’ ...Perhaps,theyheldaspecialappealforthisparticular generation which was the ﬁrst to be overwhelmed by the world of commodities and thus the only one that needed to disguise commercial transactions when they threatened to intrude on an intimate setting.” The Battle for Christmas (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), p. 150. 8Louise Stevenson, “Home, Books and Reading” in A History of the Book in Amer- ica, vol. 3, The Industrial Book, 1840-1880, ed. Scott E. Kasper et al. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 143.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 590 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY synecdochally, every piece published in it was a present for the reader, be it a gift of a story or a poem. The vogue for gift books, annually published to be given away for Christmas and New Year, came from Great Britain in the mid-1820s. According to Frederick W. Faxon, “in the United States, while publishers were a little slow in getting started, the fad developed into even greater proportions and lasted longer” than in the United Kingdom. The vogue faded only in the wake of the Civil War, when gift books could no longer meet the changing public’s tastes and compete with cheaper monthly magazines. Descendants of the almanacs and the counterparts of hand-written albums, lavish and excessively ornamental, they were “the very ﬁrst commercial products of any sort that were manufactured speciﬁcally, and solely, for the purpose of being given away by the purchaser,” in the words of Stephen Nissenbaum. Gift books played an important part in the courtship process: as they passed “from purchaser to receiver, suitor to woman sought,” they had to be “transformed from mass-produced commodities into another kind of currency, ‘tokens of affection’ that [would] be rewarded by a return of the same.”9 Not necessarily tokens of heterosex- ual romance, they could be platonic in nature. Often the books were presents from fathers to daughters, brothers to sisters, sisters to sisters, mothers to daughters, female friends to female friends. Typically inscribed by the giver to the recipient, gift books were literary products designed to be personalized in the act of bestowal. These personal inscriptions, as Cindy Dickinson has shown, “whether written on the presentation page or elsewhere on the book’s front leaves, helped transfer literary annuals and

9Fredrick F. Faxon, Literary Annuals and Gift Books: A Bibliography 1823-1903, (1913; repr., Middlesex: Private Library Association, 1973), p. xii; Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas, p. 143; and McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, p. 33. There certainly remained gift editions (usually of books by individual authors) but the genre of an annually published gift book, a collection of ﬁction and plates, disappeared. Gift books were usually duodecimos and octavos in size, although some appeared as quartos. They were usually bound in silk, velvet, leather or morocco. The covers were of different colors, most commonly red, blue, and green. Some had elegant slip-cases with a ribbon attached.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 HAWTHORNE’S GIFTS 591 gift books from the publisher’s commercial market-place to the world of sentiment.” But while “any book given as a present could be personalized by means of an inscription on the fly- leaf,” in gift books “the very techniques of mass production were employed” to make them appear “personal and unique, to convey the impression that they were customized, even hand- made products,” according to Nissenbaum. The introductory page known as the “presentation plate” was usually an engrav- ing that made “the presentation itself the intrinsic part of the book.” Everything in gift books worked toward their main purpose. Not only did they have a personalized look, they were literally overcharged with symbolic meanings related to gift giving, from the titles that unequivocally indicated their gift status (Token, Souvenir, Forget-me-not, Affection’s Gift, Keep- sake, Leaflets of Memory) to the routine inclusion of works about Christmas and the holiday season, gems, flowers, and the like.10 The gift book’s special status determined the way the volume was usually kept: it was not clipped or thrown away as a monthly magazine but according to Ralph Thomp- son, “for nearly a generation . . . was among the most treasured of personal belongings. Unlike other volumes, it was not, once read, forgotten.”11 When Hawthorne speaks about “the shabby morocco-covers of the old Souvenirs,” he implies that the shab- biness is the result of their long retention. While many of the gift books were simply reprinting literary matter from their British counterparts, some volumes, Goodrich’s Token among them, published American authors and ambitiously claimed to be promoting national literature and art. Indeed, during the 1830sand1840s almost all now famous antebellum writers including Irving, Stowe, Poe, Emerson, N.P. Willis, Longfellow, Sigourney, Lowell, Catherine Beecher, and

10Cindy Dickinson, “Creating a World of Books, Friends, and Flowers: Gift Books and Inscriptions, 1825-60,” Winterthur Portfolio 31,no.1 (1996): 57; Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas, p. 148. See Alexandra Urakova, “‘The Purloined Letter’ in the Gift Book: Reading Poe in a Contemporary Context,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 64,no.3 (2009): 323-46. 11Ralph Thompson, American Literary Annuals and Gift Books, 1825-1865 (New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1936), pp. 1-2.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 592 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Catharine Maria Sedgwick were frequent gift book contributors. Yet while gift books included miscellaneous texts belonging to different authors and genres, their literary content was predominantly sentimental. In many ways, gift books stood for a sentimental literary culture that itself was closely associated with the rise and development of modern consumerism.12 Gift books targeted primarily a female audience and welcomed female contributors prompting such critics as Park Benjamin to label gift books as specimens of poor quality “female” literature; later in the century, they were contemptuously called “a needlework world, a world in which there was always moon- light on the lake and twilight in the valley.”13 It is likely that in hindsight, Hawthorne himself considered his early publications in The Token to possess a “taint of the feminine” that he wanted to get rid of later in his career, according to McGill.14 His collaboration with Goodrich, indeed, threatened to com- promise his literary masculinity: even such an acute reader as Margaret Fuller attributed the anonymously published “The Gentle Boy” to “a lady.” One may only wonder if Fuller would have been mistaken if she had not read the story “in a two or three year old Token” sent by a “kind-hearted neighbor” together with “Souvenirs, Gems, and such-like glittering ware.”15 As is well known, Goodrich deliberately kept Hawthorne anonymous with the intention to publish “many pages by one author” while at the same time making use of already established names of sentimental authors such as Sigourney, Sedgwick, Eliza Leslie, and Anne C. Gould. At least until Park Benjamin’s 1837 review in the American Monthly Magazine, his publications in The Token, thirty-seven in total, failed to provide

12See Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). 13This assessment belongs to Henry A. Beers, a turn-of-the-century biographer of Nathaniel Parker Willis. Qtd. in Moore, A Thick and Darksome Veil, p. 6. 14McGill writes of Hawthorne’s “ﬁction of obscurity” as “a nationalizing tool, part of a large attempt to rid his writing of a taint of the feminine, the childish, the regional, and the foreign.” American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, p. 221. 15Margaret Fuller, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (London: Richard Bentley, 1852): 1:220.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 HAWTHORNE’S GIFTS 593 success to their author or endow him with a coherent literary identity.16 Given the recent scholarly interest in Hawthorne’s indebt- edness to antebellum sentimental and female culture, Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler’s appeal to analyze “men’s con- tribution to sentimental genre like the gift-book” is particularly relevant in his case.17 The opinion considering Hawthorne as the supreme artist whose tongue-in-cheek sentimentality and subversive discourse set him off other gift book contributors does not give us much insight into the nature of his collaboration with The Token. But even critics who take the opposite stance and claim that it is not easy to distinguish Hawthorne’s work from sentimental literary works point to “the damned mob of scribbling women” in the 1850s, not the incipient world of the 1830s.18 Hawthorne’s embeddedness within and divergence from the sentimental Token culture should be regarded as symptomatic of an emerging modern sensibility, a literary consciousness that used a commercial format to its own ends and by so doing gen- erated products that are at once marketable and challenging, adopting and transforming mainstream commercial forms.19 “Alice Doane’s Appeal” and “The Great Carbuncle” can be read as parables of such consciousness, as textual evidence of its presence in Hawthorne’s early gift book publications that were more crucial to the forging of his authorial self than he

16Julian Hawthorne, Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Haskell House Pub- lishers, 1890), p. 43. Even though some of his tales gained popularity already in the 1830s, he was still ﬁghting “under different banners” in the words of his friend Hora- tio Bridge: qtd. in Anne Lounsbery, Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth Century Russia and America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 81. 17Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, “Introduction” in Sentimental Men: Mas- culinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, ed. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), p. 13. 18On Hawthorne’s subversiveness see Moore, The Thick and Darksome Veil, pp. 69- 72. Jane Tompkins in Sensational Designs, while discussing Hawthorne’s publications in The Token, is considerably more concerned with the 1850s, claiming that he “was not easily distinguishable” from the sentimental authors of that period (p. 19). 19This makes Hawthorne not unlike Poe. Terence Whallen, Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 594 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY perhaps wanted us to believe. They also preﬁgure an important cultural turn that would not be fully realized until the 1850s and 1860s when the aesthetic value of a literary form would win over its didactic and sentimental content.

The Scene of Reading “Alice Doane’s Appeal”20 is a metaﬁctional narrative with the scene of reading at its heart: the narrator offers a story of his own composition to his two female friends and describes the way they receive it. The tale was never included by Hawthorne in any of his subsequent collections or reprinted in his lifetime. Leland S. Person suggests this was because it “too obviously anatomizes the purpose and the method Hawthorne was still using—the manipulative affective relationship he was still test- ing out with his audience.”21 While concurring with this view, I suppose that there could yet be another reason for such omis- sion: the tale contained too explicit references to The Token and owed its present metaﬁctional form to the revision under- taken by Hawthorne after the initial version had been rejected by Goodrich.22 The narrator, introducing his tale, mentions that it was “one of a series written years ago.” He adds that “three or four of these tales had appeared in the Token, after a long time and various adventures, but had encumbered [him] with no troublesome notoriety, even in [his] birthplace” while

20All the references to “Alice Doane’s Appeal” and other Token texts in this part will be taken from The Token and Atlantic Souvenir: Christmas and New Year’s Present (Boston: Charles Bowen, 1836 [1835]) and noted parenthetically. 21Leland S. Person, “Hawthorne’s Early Tales: Male Authorship, Domestic Vio- lence, and Female Readers” in Hawthorne and the Real: Bicentennial Essays, ed. Millicent Bell (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), p. 136. 22After reading the manuscript of The Provincial Tales, Goodrich wrote to Hawthorne: “‘The Gentle Boy’ and ‘My Uncle Molineaux’ I like particularly; about ‘Alice Doane’ I should be more doubtful as to the public approbation”; qtd. in Sey- mour L. Gross, “Hawthorne’s Income from the Token,” Studies in Bibliography 8 (1956): 233. Gross suggests that Goodrich found the incest motif in the story inap- propriate for genteel readers, and therefore Hawthorne rewrote the tale to publish it in The Token: “The extant version of the story may indicate Hawthorne’s re-visional technique: passages of an indelicately dramatic nature were replaced by summary narrative, and a storyteller framework was dropped over the tale in an awkward attempt to justify the preponderance of summarization” (p. 234).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 HAWTHORNE’S GIFTS 595 another “great heap had met a brighter destiny: they had fed the ﬂames” (p. 87). This allusion would be regarded by future critics and bi- ographers as biographical evidence of Hawthorne’s obscurity; already in “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” The Token is represented as “a repository for storing forgotten objects,” barely a step above meeting “a brighter destiny” of feeding the ﬁre. A contemporary reader of the volume, however, might have seen the reference to The Token differently—as a device of annual writing, a self-advertising interpolation. Gift books “commonly contained their own advertisements—not tucked away in the back pages but inscribed within the literary matter itself.”23 The title of the gift book was referred to repeatedly in the poems or tales that generally made up its contents. For example, the opening poem in the same volume entitled “To F.” provides a detailed description of its contents and concludes with the line addressed at once to the poet’s imaginary sweetheart and the gift book’s potential reader: “and take this book—a sem- blance of thyself” (p. 6); the title of the annual is interpolated in another two stories.24 The explicit mention of The Token in “Alice Doane’s Appeal” was, indeed, a typical product place- ment, showing Hawthorne’s awareness of the annual’s market form and of his tale being part of it.25 By revealing that he is the obscure contributor to The Token, the narrator also demonstrates humility, perhaps intending to

23Loounsbery, Thin Culture, High Art, p. 88; Nissenbaum, Battle for Christmas, p. 144. 24In “A Legend of the Prairies” by the author of The Harpe’s Head and “The Field of Brandywine” by William L. Stone. Both tales, however, refer to the title in the framework that directly addresses Token readers. 25Hawthorne used the same device in “The Little Annie’s Ramble” (published in The Youth’s Keepsake for 1835), a story far more successful in his time than “Alice Doane’s Appeal.” When the narrator and Annie visit the book shop, the narrator says: “What would Annie think, if in the book which I mean to send her, on New Year’s day, she should ﬁnd her sweet little self, bound up in silk or morocco, with gilt edges, there to remain till she become a woman grown, with children of her own to read about their mother’s childhood?” Nathaniel Hawthorne, Little Annie’s Ramble, and Other Tales (Halifax: Milner and Sowerby, 1853), p. 11. Though the title The Youth’s Keepsake is not mentioned, the advertising strategy is more explicit here: the tale refers to a gift book as a desirable Christmas gift. Advertisements in gift books for children were generally more aggressive: see Nissenbaum, Battle for Christmas, pp. 144-45.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 596 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY evoke sympathy in his readers. And, indeed, the readers in the story—two schematically portrayed and unnamed females with whom an average gift book consumer easily sympathized— receive him warmly: “The ladies, in consideration that I had never before intruded my performances on them, by any but the legitimate medium, through the press, consented to hear me read” (p. 88). Listening to a manuscript personalizes the reading experience, endowing it with an air of privacy and exclusiveness—not unlike reading a signed volume of a gift book. While Hawthorne is clearly inspired by the gift book’s con- vention, he nonetheless immediately shows his lack of ease with it. Thus, the narrator lures his fair companions to Gallows Hill, a place that is anything but appropriate for reading aloud in pleasant company outdoors. It is emphasized that the walk- ers’ destination was by no means casual. “The direction of our course being left to me, I led them neither to Legge’s Hill, nor to the Cold Spring, nor to the rude shores and old batteries of the Neck, nor yet to Paradise; though if the latter place were rightly named, my fair friends would have been at home there” (p. 84). The narrator chose Gallows Hill instead of Paradise because its gloomy atmosphere was evocative of his story and helped him manipulate the mood of his listeners:

Twilight over the landscape was congenial to the obscurity of time. With such eloquence as my share of feeling and fancy could supply, I called back hoar antiquity, and bade my companions imagine an ancient multitude of people, congregated on the hill side, spreading far below, clustering on the steep old roofs, and climbing the adjacent heights, wherever a glimpse of this spot might be obtained (p. 98).

With the help of the dark atmosphere of the place, the narrator manages to stir the imagination of his companions, to produce the intended effect: “But here my companions seized an arm on each side; their nerves were trembling; and sweeter victory still, I had reached the seldom trodden places of their hearts, and found the well-spring of their tears. And now the past had done all it could” (p. 101). Hawthorne leaves us in doubt whether it is the tale or the setting—carefully chosen and staged by the author—that inspires fear. Person notices

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 HAWTHORNE’S GIFTS 597 that “Alice Doane’s Appeal” offers “a metafictional workshop for experimenting with author-audience response and especially with the male artist’s power over female response.”26 Indeed, the narrator is, above all, preoccupied with the listeners’ reac- tion to his story. He even interrupts himself to check the girls’ response: “But here I paused, and gazed into the faces of my two fair auditors, to judge whether, even on the hill where so many had been brought to death by wilder tales than this, I might venture to proceed. Their bright eyes were fixed on me; their lips apart” (p. 98). The same volume of The Token contains a tale that is as much concerned with the scene of reading and listeners’ reac- tions to the stories being read as “Alice Doane’s Appeal.” “The Reading Parties” by Eliza Leslie, a well-established gift book author,27 has a number of parallels to Hawthorne’s tale that are worth noting to the extent that they reveal the sharp contrast and underlying difference in the authors’ approach to the subject. A comparative reading of the two stories shows that while “The Reading Parties” might be considered a generic or representative gift book tale, it performs a form of social work and offers sentimental education to the readers. “Alice Doane’s Appeal” is a sample of aesthetic education that implies a strong and deeply personal emotional response and has to do with a careful, deliberate staging of it. In “The Reading Parties,” the clergyman Mr. Milstead and his wife decide to establish a periodical reading party in their village; they hope that this will lure “the members [of the congregation] into a relish for book knowledge and book amuse- ment” (p. 221) and also bring together the villagers otherwise belonging to secluded circles. The first party hosted by the Milsteads starts with reading from a gift book, “the Western

26Leland S. Person, “Hawthorne’s Early Tales,” p. 134. 27Eliza Leslie (1787-1858) was in many ways Hawthorne’s literary antipode. While Hawthorne was an obscure, low-paid artist, Leslie was well published and well read (unlike Hawthorne’s, her tales in The Token were signed by her real name, e.g. “by Miss Leslie”). She was a literary professional successfully trying herself in different genres, from cookbooks to tales for children, from conduct manuals to moral sketches; above that, she was the editor of two gift books, The Gift: a Christmas and New Year Present and The Violet, and often wrote her pieces deliberately to suit periodicals’ needs.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 598 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Souvenir: a little work highly creditable to the taste and ge- nius of our brethren beyond the mountains” (p. 228). James Hall’s “simple and thrilling tale of the Indian Hater” (p. 228)28 is followed by periodical pieces by James Kirk Paulding, Lydia Sigourney, and William Cullen Bryant, authors widely published in the annuals including The Token. The Token is never mentioned in the story as in “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” yet allusions to a gift book tale and gift book authors open up the whole world of annual literature before the reader. Metafictional nar- ratives with a motif of reading gift books were commonly published in the annuals, and Leslie’s story was no exception.29 Like Hawthorne, Leslie carefully constructs a setting for a reading party but hers is an idyllic domestic one: On the following Wednesday evening, Mrs. Milstead’s largest room was ready for accommodation of her guests. A table with a reading lamp was placed in the center of the floor. On it lay several books by the best modern authors, and a few number of the latest periodicals (p. 223). Every detail, including refreshments, adds to the success of the party. Further, Leslie contrasts it with an improper reading party at the house of another villager, Mrs. Utler, who kept her parlor in disorder and allowed children to misbehave and interrupt the readers: On the appointed evening, she [Mrs. Utler] received her company with a very pleasant countenance, apologizing for the badness of the fire, which had not been replenished in due season; and for the disorder of the room, her children having as she said, turned every thingtopsyturvy....Weneed not specify that the children were very troublesome and extremely inconvenient all the evening (p. 235). “The Reading Parties,” as “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” pays a good deal of attention to how the public reacts to the stories read, though approaching this topic in stark contrast to

28James Hall’s tale “A Legend of the Prairies” was published in the same volume: pp. 303-14. 29Leslie wrote other stories about giving and reading gift books. See her “The Souvenir” in The Pearl; Or, Affection’s Gift (1830), pp. 106-23.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 HAWTHORNE’S GIFTS 599 Hawthorne’s story. For example, the narrator reports that Washington Irving’s story “The Widow and her Son” read aloud by Mrs. Milstead “drew tears from the eyes of many of the audience.” Mrs. Milstead even had “to stop short in her heart- rending description of the burial of the poor young sailor, and to wait till a commotion at the working table had subsided.” The true reason of the commotion, however, had nothing to do with the story: “Mrs. Puckerseam having dropped her thimble, and her companions all rising at her request, and moving back their chairs to give her an immediate opportunity of seeking it on the carpet.” No matter how thrilling or moving the story is, the dropped thimble to the neighbor’s importunate remark interferes between the story and the listeners (p. 228). In “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” the girls are absorbed in the narrative, but the inappropriateness of their laughter at the end is dark and grim: “I kept an awful solemnity of visage, being indeed a little piqued, that a narrative which had good author- ity in our ancient superstitions, and would have brought even a church deacon to Gallows Hill, in old witch times, should now be considered too grotesque and extravagant, for timid maids to tremble at” (p. 99). Miss Leslie describes an equally inappro- priate, yet different response of the listener to the story heard. When one of the participants reads an amusing tale by James Kirke Paulding, Mrs. Gutheridge, a powerful widow of the village, strikes others by “the immovable gravity of her countenance” (p. 230). After the reading is ﬁnished, she promptly leaves the party saying to the clergyman: “[A]fter that person was permitted to read aloud, in the presence of a lady, a ridiculous story about a man snoring in a steam-boat, I should have been wanting to myself had I stayed” (p. 231). Thus, in both tales the listeners are not perfect; they get easily distracted; they do not react in expected ways, laughing when they should be serious or being serious when they should laugh. Yet Hawthorne’s operative mode is fear, which stands in stark contrast to Leslie’s comic solicitousness. Moreover, in “Alice Doane’s Appeal” the narrator is also the author of the story, and he creates the dangerous atmosphere that makes for another fundamental contrast; it is obvious that he and Leslie’s

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 600 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Mr. Milstead have very different attitudes to reading and its purposes. The difference is not merely circumstantial, it points to a more profound discrepancy between a mainstream gift book story and Hawthorne’s narrative. At the end of Leslie’s story, we learn what eventually hap- pened to the reading parties. New hosts of the assembly, the Scrapeﬁeld family, had a party with refreshments “in the most expensive style, to show that they were not poor; handing round in abundance, jellies, ice creams, wine, liqueurs, and plumb cake. After this, their example was followed, and it was thought expedient that at every meeting, the entertainment, as they called it, should be more and more sumptuous” (p. 242). Ladies started attending parties in ball dresses; at the next party, “only three or four of the guests were asked to read, and hints were given, that in the choice of pieces, brevity was desirable.” By and by reading parties were eagerly converted into “dancing assemblies, with the usual concomitants of ball- dresses and ball-refreshments” (p. 243). However, when Mrs. Milstead lamented to her husband that the main purpose of the parties was forgotten, he wisely remarked:

“True, my dear . . . but, after all, one of our chief designs has been successfully accomplished. These parties have certainly been the means of putting the families on a more sociable footing, and inducing a more friendly state of feeling towards each other. . . You know we have observed indications of at least half a dozen courtships, possi- ble, probable, and positive. Nay, I have already been bespoken in my clerical capacity, by no less than three couple. To say the truth, I had little hope of improving the literary taste of my congregation, but I rejoice to have done some good, though indirectly, in breaking down the ridiculous barriers which they had absurdly set up against each other” (p. 244).

The tale ends with the announcement of marriage between an infamously arrogant widow Mrs. Gutheridge and her ad- mirer Mr. Timmings. From the quoted passage and the story’s overall framework, it is evident that Leslie ironically interprets the main purpose of gift book literature—to create and sustain social bonds. By the mid-1830s, literary annuals already had gained a reputation of being books that were purchased, given,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 HAWTHORNE’S GIFTS 601 and received as gifts but not necessarily read. The 1836 review of The Token in the New England Magazine attributed to Park Benjamin said bluntly that “few people, including those who foolishly spend their money for them, read the annuals . . . [A]s the happy custom still prevails of making presents at Christmas and new-year, these books are yet purchased and presented, though seldom read, even by the presentee.”30 As early as 1829, Sedgwick’s “Cacoethes Scribendi” represented the actual perusal of these annuals as an odd practice. In this story, a naıve¨ village girl reads the gift book presented by her beau, “as if an annual were meant to be read.”31 As with Leslie, the aims of literature were marital: the girl’s marriage at the end of the tale, prompted by the exchange of gift books, proves to be the most important outcome of reading. Exchanging books as tokens of love and friendship, like the dancing cotillion at the reading party, has little to do with the act of reading or listening to literature. Yet, the social activities that displace reading or listening in Leslie’s story also legitimize it as part of the middle-class entertainment and daily routine. Albeit ironically, Leslie comes close to the idea of reading as “sentimental collaboration,” a practice that, according to Mary Louise Kete, worked in sentimental culture “as a Gift economy, establishing symbolic ties among separate persons” and ultimately ensuring the existence of “a circle of family and friends.”32 “The Reading Parties” ends at once with the failure and the triumph of Mr. Milstead’s enterprise: the parties failed to develop the literary taste of the villagers but they returned the clergyman to his direct duties—marrying happy couples. Leslie’s humorous sketch is thus a tribute to the norma- tive culture of marriage, love, and domesticity that gift books

30“Review of The Token, for 1836 [probably by Park Benjamin]” accessed 11 Febru- ary 2015, http://www.merrycoz.org/voices/token/reviews/1836.xhtml#2.Oneofthe leading engravers of the time, John Sartain stated later in 1849: “Now an annual is bought to look at. No one ever thinks of reading them.” Sartain’s Magazine, 1 (1849), qtd. in Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1850 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1930), p. 421. 31The Author of Hope Leslie [Catharine Maria Sedgwick], “Cacoethes Scribendi,” The Atlantic Souvenir for 1830 (Philadelphia: Carey, Lee & Carey, 1829), p. 24. 32Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Iden- tity in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 34.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 602 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY promoted. Hawthorne’s instead is all about fear and desire and an attack on the actual or perceived frivolity of his female audience as constructed in the story. We know nothing of the narrator’s attitude toward his fair companions, whether he was courting one of them or they were friends. While the tale in itself is no love story, the scene of reading in “Alice Doane’s Appeal” has often been compared with sexual penetration and the act of violence. There are numerous hints at repressed erotic tension, from mentioning of the pen, “now sluggish and perhaps feeble” (p. 87), to declaring the “sweet victory” of the narrator who has “reached the seldom trodden places” of the girls’ hearts (p. 101). The result of public reading is not romance or marriage, as in Leslie’s tale, but a sublimated sexual aggression. Indeed, the parallel with Leslie only emphasizes how frankly erotic and strikingly threatening the control that Hawthorne’s narrator exerts over his listeners is. The story was provocative under the gift book’s cover even though the provo- cation was of course toned down by its melancholy tone and allusions to American history.33 “Alice Doane’s Appeal” moves in the opposite direction than Leslie’s narrative: from non-reading (“no troublesome notoriety” of the Token pieces) to the absorption in the story read aloud, from reading as a social activity to emotional possession or enslavement. The narrator’s companions are typical annual readers who come to be entertained by the young author on a pleasant June afternoon. They possess “a feminine’ susceptibil- ity” and therefore they are moved by the melancholy scene of Gallows Hill, but their “gayety of girlish spirits” (p. 86)over- comes both the gloom of the place and of the story. Their laughter at the end of the reading is described as natural: “the breeze took a livelier motion, as if responsive to their mirth” (p. 98). The girls are naturally happy and attempt to resist the narrator’s effort to entirely “enslave” them within the ﬁctional frame of the story. They are engaged in the story when the

33Ironically, the framework was the result of Hawthorne’s attempt to make the framed story less provocative if we accept Gross’s hypothesis mentioned above, see n. 22.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 HAWTHORNE’S GIFTS 603 reading is performed but as it is over, they want to enjoy the sun, the breeze, and each other’s company. The narrator, however, instead of a beau or a gentle friend, turns out to be a “wizard” calling the dead from their graves with the only purpose to scare, to stir, and to subdue the listeners. Hawthorne’s model of reading as manipulation in “Alice Doane’s Appeal” bears on romantic plots and metaphors of se- duction, sorcery, hypnotic or mesmeric control. The practice of reading aloud believed to be “safeguard” against “depraved” reading here becomes its very opposite: it is dangerous because the reader’s voice, his eloquence, and the setting affect the unsuspecting listeners.34 Hawthorne’s story reminds us of Edgar Allan Poe’s fear that the effect of the literary work will be lost if the reader gets distracted by everyday duties. It is the “one sitting” effect that the narrator of “Alice Doane’s Appeal” carefully stages using every resource he has at hand.35 Moreover, the author who reads his own manuscript aloud transcends the anonymity of his publication in print; he is present in flesh and blood and can enjoy all the benefits of the recognized authorship. Despite the fact that by depicting the impotent hostility of the storyteller towards the girls, the tale suggests Hawthorne’s concern about the ineffectuality of his strategies, there is a logic of wish-fulfillment behind “Alice Doane’s Appeal”: the tale contains a manual about how Hawthorne’s Token pieces should be perceived. It emphasizes that literature should stir and awe rather than entertain; enslave and disturb, rather than please. His literary offering is unsocial or even antisocial in the sense that the only bond it seems to create is the intimate, eroticized connection between the author and the submissive, receptive reader. By sharpening readers’ sensitivity and using all means at hand to inflate their emotions, Hawthorne strives to reach them through the anonymity and the obscurity of his

34Lehuu, Carnival on the Page, p. 133. 35Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in Edgar Allan Poe, Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Leonard Cassuto (New York: Dover Publications, 1999), p. 102.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 604 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY early publications. But he also conveys an idea of literature as an equivocal, dangerous gift, a subject that will be addressed more explicitly in “The Great Carbuncle.”

The Latest Pilgrim Unlike “Alice Doane’s Appeal” that lures the reader from the domestic scene to Gallows Hill, “The Great Carbuncle”36 published in The Token for 1838 draws, in the words of Martin Terence, “morals concerning the values inherent in domesticity and futility of searching abroad for something to be found more surely at home.”37 Matthew and Hannah, a simple village couple, discover the Great Carbuncle; but they soon realize that they do not need it in their household: “We will kindle the cheerful glow of our hearth, at eventide, and be happy in its light. But never again will we desire more light than all the world may share with us” (p. 172). As Michael Dunne observes, “the ingredients of hearth, security from the outside world, and family solidarity combine to represent values dear to the cult of domesticity.”38 Unlike the flames destroying the heap of manuscripts, the hearth here is an obvious symbol of domestic happiness and peace. In a word, as many other tales published in The Token, “The Great Carbuncle” establishes and emphasizes sentimental values. “The Great Carbuncle” was not revised specifically for The Token; however, it seems to perfectly fit into the annual’s framework since the gem motif connotes the annual’s status of a literary “gift.” Stories and poems about gems were common in gift books which themselves were often named after jewels: “The Amethyst,” “The Pearl,” “The Jewel,” “The Literary Gem.” Annuals, printed on fine paper with gilt or varnished covers, embossed leather, marbled endpapers, elegant slip-cases,

36All the references to “The Great Carbuncle” and other Token texts in this part will be taken from The Token and Atlantic Souvenir: Christmas and New Year’s Present (Boston: Charles Bowen, 1836 [1835]) and noted parenthetically. 37Qtd. in Sarah Bird Wright, Critical Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Lit- erary Reference to His Life (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), p. 109. 38Michael Dunne, Hawthorne’s Narrative Strategies (Jackson: University of Missis- sippi Press, 1995), p. 162.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 HAWTHORNE’S GIFTS 605 and lavish engravings, were “gem-like” in the words of Cindy Dickinson;39 they were given away for Christmas and New Year together with brooches, rings, bracelets, necklaces, tortoise- shell combs, gold watch chains, and the like. In accordance with sentimental aesthetics, however, many literary pieces with the gem motif stressed the vanity of jewelry as opposed to spiritual treasures. For example, in the volume of The Token for 1836 in which “Alice Doane’s Appeal” appeared, there is an anonymous poem “What Shall I Give Thee, Mother?” that was often reprinted and anthologized. The son asks his mother: “What shall I bring to thee? Shall I bring thee jewels, that burn and shine / In the depth of the shadow sea?” The mother answers: “What are jewels, my boy to me? Thou art the gem I prize!” (p. 122). The poem’s line is echoed in another poem by H. F. Gould published under the same cover with “The Great Carbuncle,” “The Mother’s Jewel”: “Jewel most precious thy mother to deck, / Clinging so fast by the chain on my neck . . .” (p. 144).40 The baby, “gift from thy Maker,” is more precious than any worldly gem. Conceived metaphorically, a gem—be it a child, a wife, a family or love, religion, friendship—was of a greater value than its material counterpart: human relations and virtues are more precious than cold shiny stones. In this per- spective, a gift book was a metaphorical gem: not only gem-like in appearance as a ring or an amulet, it reminded one of love and affection while at the same time offering the reader “rich gems” of literary “brilliance.”41 Its proclaimed value was not in its price, but in the sentimental bonds it created and literary treasures it shared. Authors themselves used this metaphor: Emerson, for example, gallantly offered “garnets,” as he called his own poetic pieces, for the Diadem, a gift book edited by his friend William Henry Furnace.42

39Dickinson, “Creating a World of Books, Friends, and Flowers,” p. 55. 40In The Token, 1838, a plate with a mother and a baby playing with the mother’s chain accompanies the poem; the same plate is used on the volume’s title page. 41From “The Amethyst. Referring to the Vignette Title-Page,” Amethyst: An Annual of Literature (Baltimore: Printed by William A. Francis, 1831), p. 11. 42Records of a Life-long Friendship, 1807-1882: Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Henry Furnace, ed.H.H.F.(Boston:HoughtonMifﬂin,1910), p. 39.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 606 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Though taking a different allegorical turn, the strong didactic strain running through “The Great Carbuncle” is consonant with the gift book allegory. Matthew and Hannah’s simple feel- ings and naıve¨ ideas are juxtaposed to the vanity and ambitions of their companions; the couple discovers that their affection can shine better without the stone; at the end of their pilgrim- age, they come to realize that the values of domesticity are the only true ones. Of all the adventurers, mediums of wrong, ill-conceived ideas—Seeker, Doctor Cacaphodel, Master Icha- bod Pigsnort, a poet, Lord de Vere, and Cynic—it is, perhaps Lord de Vere, “a young man of haughty mien,” who is a direct antipode of Matthew and Hannah. He too says that he wants to get the gem to kindle his ancestral castle:

There shall it ﬂame for ages, making a noonday of midnight, glittering on the suits of armor, the banners, and escutcheons, that hang around the world, and keeping bright the memory of heroes. . . . And never, on the diadem of the White Mountains, did the Great Carbuncle hold a place half so honored, as is reserved for it in the hall of De Veres! (p. 164)

De Vere intends to withdraw the gem from the diadem of the White Mountains to make it his inalienable possession, a treasure to be kept intact, a “symbol” of his lofty line or, as the Cynic remarks, “a rare sepulchral lamp” (p. 164). Descendant of an old aristocratic Europe, he is a living dead; he plans to bury the Carbuncle in his castle but he fails to do it and eventually dies: “As the funeral torches gleamed within that dark receptacle, there was no need of the Great Carbuncle to shew the vanity of earthly pomp” (p. 174). De Vere’s Gothic, gloomy, tomb-like castle presents a stark contrast to the modest house of the two villagers with its cheerful glow of hearth; his solitary death is juxtaposed to “many peaceful years” Matthew and Hannah lived happily ever after. The gem as a symbol of aristocratic vanity is also the subject of an anonymous story about counterfeit jewelry entitled “The Tiara” that was published under the same cover with “The Great Carbuncle.” While the plots differ, both tales seem to assert that gems are to be understood as tokens of vanity and

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 HAWTHORNE’S GIFTS 607 pride. As with Leslie’s story and “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” there are a number of parallel, albeit arbitrary, juxtapositions running through the tales (aristocratic / bourgeois values, pride / humility, ambition / renunciation, counterfeit / real) that invite discussion of “The Tiara” in relation to “The Great Carbun- cle.” The narrator of “The Tiara,” an American lady traveling in Paris, meets a lovely Parisian family and learns that they own “a most delightful residence about a mile from the city— embellished with choice ﬂowers and rare plants” (p. 99). The residence has a singular name, The Tiara. The narrator, “with a little spice of Yankee curiosity,” asks Madame Renard why they have given the name of Tiara to their “little paradise” and gets a story in return. Madame Renard, a descendant of an impoverished aristocratic family, tells her about “a casket of glittering stones,” a family treasure possessed and cherished by her mother. As a girl, she was permitted to hold the case in her hand for a few minutes and to gaze upon the tiara (p. 101):

There shone the clear sparkling rays of the diamond—the ruby with its blaze of red light—the opal reﬂecting the colors of the prism in their undulating forms—the emerald with its brilliant green—the sapphire with its celestial blue—the topaz with its golden yellow— the amethyst with its royal purple! What dazzling rays they sent forth! (p. 102)

The mother was so attached to the jewelry that she was ready to starve and die in order to keep it. The daughter who inherited the tiara also inherited her mother’s attitude towards it: “I gazed upon it with rapture, slept with it under my pillow, and like her, at any sudden noise, awoke in an agony of terror and felt for my treasure” (p. 110). Only when her servant was dying of famine, did she decide to sell one or two jewels. She brought the tiara to the jeweler and found out that the stones were not real but counterfeit: “He hastily inserted a little instrument under the ruby—a piece of colorless glass fell out, and only the red foil remained” (p. 113). The heroine started earning her own living and eventually married a kind-hearted widowed physician.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 608 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY In the tale, aristocratic order with its attachment to inherited signs of honor is counterpoised by a set of democratic, bourgeois values including charity and labor. Converting family jewelry into money not only seems reasonable but is also justiﬁed by the need to rescue the servant. True sentimental virtues are superior to vanity and fake superstitions. In the tale’s economy, vanity is exchanged for modesty and devotion that are in turn rewarded by welfare and domestic idyll, “a little paradise” of family happiness. Choice ﬂowers and rare plants of the bourgeois estate called The Tiara are by far more precious than the glittering stones of the worthless “bauble.” As the moral of the tale says, “honors” and “distinctions of this world” similarly “dazzle us awhile by their glare, and delude us by their seeming value, but in the end we discover that they are counterfeit”(p.115). Both tales, “The Tiara” and “The Great Carbuncle,” use the gem motif to touch upon a commonplace subject of antebellum literature, the superiority of democracy over aristocracy, of the genuine domestic and social values over “the vanity of earthly pomp” or the counterfeit glare of the worldly honors. But for Hawthorne, this is but one aspect of the gem-related subject. Moreover, he is equally unmerciful to the merchant, Master Ichabod Pigsnort, who is planning to “dispose of the gem to the best bidder among the potentates of the earth” (p. 163). The merchant’s end is miserable: captured by Indians on the way home, he has to pay a heavy ransom for his freedom and eventually goes bankrupt; “instead of wallowing in silver, he had seldom a sixpence worth of copper” (p. 173). Exchanging the Carbuncle for money is a crime against the legendary gem and its land; not surprisingly, Master Pigsnort is punished by the Native Americans, creators and keepers of the Great Carbun- cle legend. Hawthorne’s grim irony concerning the destructive nature of the reliance upon false values reveals his renown “darkness” that resonates with the placid tone of “The Tiara.” Moreover, he is exploiting the Romantic motif of a dangerous gem: the Carbuncle has a power to kill, to blind, and to de- stroy fortune; it cannot be used without being destroyed. The

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 HAWTHORNE’S GIFTS 609 only way to defeat this power is to reject it: “For it is affirmed, that, from the hour when two mortals had shown themselves so simply wise, as to reject a jewel which would have dimmed all earthly things, its splendor waned” (pp. 174-75). Matthew (“the gift of God”) and Hannah (“grace”), like the prudent character of “The Tiara,” are rewarded with “peaceful years” of family happiness for sacrificing glory and distinction to the altar of domesticity. Keeping the Carbuncle at home would have been as uncomfortable as hiding the casket of real jewels under the pillow. “[H]ow could we live by day, or sleep by night, in this awful blaze of the Great Carbuncle!” says the bride (p. 173). Yet, unlike Madame Renard who renounces the emblem of false vanity, they reject the incarnation of the sublime. The Carbuncle is, indeed, characterized by the ambiguity inherent to the discourse of sublimity: it is glorious and awful, splendid and frightening at the same time. When Hannah and Matthew approached the Carbuncle, “they felt themselves marked out by fate—and the consciousness was fearful” (p. 170). Sublimity is incompatible with the sentimental household; the splendor of the Carbuncle is anything but “homely” or “cheerful”; it cannot be used or tamed. Importantly, the Great Carbuncle, unlike the tiara, is not counterfeit, and the Cynic pays the high price to discover that. “Where is your Great Humbug?” he asks and taking off his spectacles, he loses his sight. “So long accustomed to view all objects through a medium that deprived them of every glimpse of brightness, a single flash of so glorious a phenomenon, strik- ing upon his naked vision, had blinded him forever” (p. 172). Thus, Cynic is punished “for the willful blindness of his for- mer life” (p. 174). Blindness consists, first of all, in his inability to tell the true from the false, the real from the counterfeit. However, he is not the only one in the tale who doubts the existence of the gem. Hannah and Matthew shared their story with fellow villagers but “towards the close of their lengthened lives,” it did not “meet with the full credence that had been accorded to it by those, who remembered the ancient lustre of the gem” (p. 174).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 610 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Storytelling thus both keeps the legend of the Carbuncle cir- culating and profanes the sacred power of the gem: the more Matthew and Hannah tell their story, the less credence it has. The Irvinesque finale of the tale suggests that the Carbuncle is not fake but fictitious. Fiction cannot be true or false but is open to many different interpretations and conjectures. Some say its light waned after it was rejected, others, that it fell and disappeared in the enchanted lake, and finally there are few believers, including the narrator, claiming that the stone is blazing as of old. Constantly oscillating between the literal and the allegorical meanings inscribed upon it, the Carbuncle eventually becomes the supreme emblem of art. At the close of the tale, the narrator proclaims himself the ninth pilgrim of the precious stone: “And be it owned, that, many a mile from the Crystal Hills, I saw a wondrous light around their summits, and was lured, by the faith of poesy, to be the latest pilgrim of the GREAT CARBUNCLE” (p. 175). One of the pilgrims of the Great Carbuncle is a poet planning to use the Carbuncle for inspiration in his “attic chamber, in one of the darksome alleys of London”:

There, night and day, will I gaze upon it—my soul shall drink its radiance—it shall be diffused throughout my intellectual powers, and gleam brightly in every line of poesy that I indite. Thus, long ages after I am gone, the splendor of the Great Carbuncle will blaze around my name!” (pp. 163-64).

Poetry is seen as alchemy of a sort: the gem has to be diffused through intellectual powers so that it can brightly gleam in every line and eventually cast its splendor upon the poet’s name. The poet eventually mistakes the Carbuncle for a piece of ice, and his poetry lacks “the splendor of the gem” but retains “all the coldness of the ice” instead (p. 174). The narrator, “the latest pilgrim” of the Great Carbuncle, presents himself a coun- terexample. He has no plans to appropriate the Carbuncle but is simply lured by its magic light. Thus, he withdraws it from economic relations and establishes a new chain of meanings, restoring the gem to the realm of myth, poesy, and ﬁction.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 HAWTHORNE’S GIFTS 611 The graphic ending of the tale—the “GREAT CARBUN- CLE,” both the name of the gem and the name of the story printed in capital letters—is, first of all, a graceful gesture. Hawthorne is joining in the metaphoric field already suggested by gift books: he is the one who contributes another poetic gem to the annual’s treasury. At the same time, the ending transcends the plotline of the story as well as the story’s moral. The sublime that finds no place in the idyllic sentimental household becomes inseparable from the poetic quest. The true poet belongs to the separate, ideal sphere even if it is only “the hall of fantasy”; and the narrator carves out a space for himself in such a sphere. We can speculate that Hawthorne, while maintaining sentimental values dear to the Token reader, managed to distance his authorial self from them. The Carbuncle lightens up the obscure path of the anonymous pilgrim who sacrificed both the “cheerful glow” of the hearth and the “splendor” of fame pur- suing his ideal. Furthermore, the last line of the tale suggests a renunciative logic and therefore is a warning about this and similar offerings. To possess sublimity means to be possessed by it. In order to be given, the gift must be possessed; therefore the Great Carbuncle is a paradox in which the only gift that can be made of it is not to give it. Here we encounter a point of convergence with “Alice Doane’s Appeal” teaching us that fiction cannot be possessed but is rather an instrument of possession. “Lured, by the faith of poesy,” the narrator, “the latest pilgrim” who imprudently seeks the Carbuncle, becomes possessed by it as was the Seeker, “one of those ill-fated mortals, such as the Indians told of, whom in their early youth, the Great Carbuncle smote with a peculiar madness, and became the passionate dream of their existence.”

When read between the covers of The Token, both “The Great Carbuncle” and “The Alice Doane’s Appeal” can be seen as gifts but gifts of a speciﬁc nature. In “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” there is a gift in the meaning of pharmacon: the gift of a story

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 612 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY that the narrator bestows on his listeners is a dark and beau- tiful romance from American history, but its effect is almost forcefully imposed on the unsuspecting listeners; Hawthorne’s questions the pharmacon’s effectuality but only to dismiss it— the tale can be read as both an anti-token of affection and a secret appeal to the reader’s approval and love. This nascent metaphor will be developed fully in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” a story about a poisonous gift that, according to Michael T. Gilmore, was “an allegory of the common reader’s inability to read him [Hawthorne] rightly.”43 The Great Carbuncle func- tions as a symbol of such an ambiguous gift in that it is an incarnation of sublimity, dazzling but dangerous. At the same time, it is an impossible gift that can be given yet not possessed: the gem is eventually withdrawn from all forms of exchange as the ultimate yet unapproachable goal of poetic quest. Both stories show how Hawthorne’s notion of literature as a gift parallels the underlying conventions of the gift book’s affectionate economy but departs from them by introducing an aesthetically charged counter-theme. Instead of creating social and sentimental bonds, a dark, dangerous, Hawthornesque gift disturbs and challenges a reader and at the same time promises to ultimately reward him or her with aesthetic bliss. This idea pertains to the decidedly modern conception of art, inspired by Romanticism: what is art after all but a promise of bliss offered to us in a consumable form? What is it if not a powerful, quasi-erotic, challenging experience with its own market value? Thinking along the lines of Colin Campbell’s claim that the “the spirit of modern consumerism” was inherent in the Romantic Movement allows us to place Hawthorne’s tales at the junction of the gift book’s economy of sentimental sociality, on the one hand, and a new, emerging literary ethos, on the other. His tales warn us: literature is dangerous—but this warning is wrapped up in a gift package or rather bound up in the giftwrap of an elegant Christmas present.

43Michail T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 53.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021 HAWTHORNE’S GIFTS 613 Alexandra Urakova is a senior researcher at the A. M. Gorky In- stitute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. She is the author of The Poetics of the Body in the Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (2009, in Russian) and the editor of Deciphering Poe: Subtexts, Contexts, Subversive Meanings (2013). She is currently working on a book about dangerous gifts in nineteenth-century American literature.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00565 by guest on 29 September 2021