“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. The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXIX, no. 4 (December 2016). C 2016 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. doi:10.1162/TNEQ a 00565. 587 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 sen- timental 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 associ- ated with traditional, pre-market economies or with the pri- vate 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.

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