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By Rupert Holman Thesis Submitted to the University of Nottingham for The MEMORIALIZING, ALLEGORY AND THE REWRITING OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE by Rupert Holman Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, October 1998. 0TTI NG/1gM 2'`ý07SITY Q L\6PP `Hawthorne's stencil used when he was the customs surveyor in Salem', (A Descriptive Guide To The Exhibition Commemorating The Death Of Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804-1864, The Grolier Club, New York, October 20 - December 5 1964, p 6). THESIS ABSTRACT The thesis usesHawthorne's interest in a sceneof filial ambiguity, namely SamuelJohnson's penance,to arguethat Hawthorne's(re-) writing is characterisedby a subversionof origins (both metaphysicaland cultural). Complementingthis argument,the thesisalso attemptsto show, with referenceto texts by J. Hillis Miller, Jean-FrancoisLyotard, Paul de Man and Maurice Blanchot, how deconstruction can offer new and important insights into Hawthorne's writing. Having outlined other important critical approaches(New Critical and New Historical) the thesis claims that, with its heightenedsensitivity to the use of tropes, deconstructionis a particularly useful critical tool when it comesto readingHawthorne. The thesispays particularly close attention to two theoretical texts: Miller's Hawthorne and History: Defacing It and Lyotard's `Rewriting Modernity' and attemptsto extend Miller's analysis(the only deconstructivetext which refers directly to Hawthorne). This involves two movements. Firstly the thesis extends Miller's analysis by showing how it is echoed in the writings of de Man, Blanchot, and Lyotard. Secondly,the thesis refersto a wider selectionof writings from Hawthorne's corpus (including writings from Twice-told Tales,Mosses From An Old Manse, TheSnow-Image, `Alice Doane's Appeal', The Scarlet Letter, The Marble Faun, Our Old Home, the final `unfinished' manuscriptsand diary and notebook entries). Using insights from thesetexts the thesis argues that Hawthorne rejects the idea that history involves the storing up of facts for future retrieval (a project which is aligned with memorialising). Hawthorne, it is argued,subverts this senseof memorialising by repeatedlydrawing attentionto an instability that contaminateseach and every historical happening. ABBREVIATIONS USED FOR WORKS BY HAWTHORNE (WORKS ARE LISTED ALPHABETICALLY). ACM - TheAmerican Claimant Manuscripts,The Centenary Edition Of The WorksOf Nathaniel Hawthorne VolumeXH,edited by Edward H. Davidson,Claude M. Simpsonand L. Neal Smith (Columbus: Ohio StateUniversity Press,1977). Of AN - TheAmerican Notebooks,The CentenaryEdition The Works Of Nathaniel Hawthorne Volume VIII, edited by Claude M. Simpson,(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972). BS - Biographical Stories For Children [1842], collected in Nathaniel Hawthorne, True Stories From History And Biography, TheCentenary Edition Of The WorksOf Nathaniel Hawthorne Volume VI, (Columbus: Ohio StateUniversity Press,1972). ' [1862] in Ch - `Chiefly About War Matters. By A PeaceableMan. MiscellaneousProse And Verse, The Centenary Edition Of The Works Of Nathaniel Hawthorne VolumeXXIII, editedby ThomasWoodson, Claude M. Simpson,L. Neal Smith (Columbus:Ohio State University Press,1994). EL - The Elixir of Life Manuscripts, The CentenaryEdition Of The Works Of Nathaniel Hawthorne VolumeXIII, edited by Edward H. Davidson, Claude M. Simpson and L. Neal Smith (Columbus: Ohio StateUniversity Press,1977). EN - The English Notebooks1853-1856, The CentenaryEdition Of The Works Of Nathaniel Hawthorne VolumeXXI, edited by Thomas Woodson and Bill Ellis, (Columbus: Ohio StateUniversity Press,1997). HSG - TheHouse Of TheSeven Gables [1851], Edited with an Introduction by Milton R. Stern (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1986). Notebooks,The Works Of Nathaniel FIN - TheFrench And Italian CentenaryEdition Of The Hawthorne VolumeXIV, Edited by ThomasWoodson (Columbus: Ohio StateUniversity Press,1980). MF- The Marble Faun [1860], With an Introduction and Notes by Richard H. Brodhead, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). Sketches(Cambridge: The Riverside Press,1863). OOH - Our Old Home: A Series Of English Letter And SelectedTales, Edited SL - The Scarlet Letter [1850] in The Scarlet with an Introduction by Thomas E. Connolly (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1986). 1982) T&S - TalesAnd Sketches.Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce(New York: Library of America, `Uttoxeter" in Our Old Home: A Series U- `Uttoxeter' - `SpecialAppendix: Original 1857 of English Sketches, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne Volume V, (Colombus: Ohio StateUniversity Press,1970) pp 481 - 487. OTHER ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE TEXT: DI - Hawthorne and History: Defacing It, J. Hillis Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991). RM - `Rewriting Modernity', Jean-FrancoisLyotard, in Jean-FrancoisLyotard, TheInhuman: Reflections on Time, Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press,1991). CONTENTS PREFACE 1 INTRODUCTION The Historical `Object': Memorializing, Allegory and the Rewriting of Samuel Johnson's Penance 6 CHAPTER ONE WretchedSimulacrum: Allegory and the Primal Father 51 CHAPTER TWO A Peculiar Sentiment: The Primal Scene and an Impossible Picture 103 CHAPTER THREE The Scarlet Letter: The Law of Literary Propriety and a State of Separation 154 CONCLUDING CHAPTER `Alice Doane's Appeal': Salem and Uttoxeter 228 BIBLIOGRAPHY PREFACE Hawthorne`is infinitely too fond of allegory' wrote Edgar Allan Poe in 1847.' Poe's criticism was reiterated in differing ways by Henry James in 1879, Yvor Winters in 1938 and in the New Critical view of Hawthorne that was prevalent in the mid twentieth century United States?In more recent times, however, there have been a number of more positive evaluations of Hawthorne's allegory.3 It will becomeapparent in sectionsII and III of the introduction, that important differencesof opinion as to the significanceof Hawthorne'sallegory can be discerned in these reappraisals. The `rewriting' in the title of the thesis, then, partly refers to these reappraisalsand re-evaluations.However, the senseof the word that I really want to emphasize describesHawthorne's own style of writing. This sensederives from Jean-FrancoisLyotard's `Rewriting Modernity. '4 In `Rewriting Modernity' Lyotard connectsrewriting with Freud's "Tale-Writing -Nathaniel Hawthorne' (Godey's Magazine and Ladys Book, Nov. 1847), collected in G.R. Thompson, ed., Edgar Allan Poe: EssaysAnd Reviews,(New York: Library of America, 1984), p 587. 'See Henry James,Hawthorne (1879), (Ithaca,New York: Cornell University Press, 1956), Yvor Winters, Maule's Curse: SevenStudies In The History Of American Obscurantism, (New York: New Directions, 1938) - particularly 'Maule's Curse, or Hawthorne and the Problem of Allegory', R.P. Blackmur, Afterword to `The Celestial Railroad and Other Stories' (1963) in Outsider at the Heart of Things: Essaysby R.P. Blackmur, ed. JamesT. Jones,(Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1989), Richard Chase, TheAmerican Novel and Its Tradition (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1957), Charles FeidelsonJr., Symbolismand American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953) and F.O. Mathiessen,American Renaissance(New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). 3SeeJ. Hillis Miller, Hawthorne and History: Defacing It, Donald E. PeaseVisionary Compacts:American RenaissanceWritings in Cultural Context, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), G. R. Thompson, TheArt ofAuthorial Presence:Hawthorne's Provincial Tales, (Durham and London: Duke University Press,1993). 4 `Rewriting Modernity' is a modified text of a paper given at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and Madison in April 1986. Other works by Lyotard that I have drawn on, either senseof working through. `I recall' he says: that in working through, the only guiding thread at one's disposal consistsin sentiment or, better, in listening to a sentiment. A fragment of a sentence, a scrap of information, a word come along. They are immediatelylinked with another`unit'. No reasoning,no argument,no mediation. By proceedingin this way, one slowly approachesa scene,the sceneof something. One describesit. One doesnot know what it is. One is sure only that it refers to somepast, both furthestand nearestpast, both one's own past and others' past. This lost time is not represented like in a picture, it is not even presented. It is what presentsthe elementsof a picture, an impossible picture. Rewriting meansregistering theseelements (RM 31). The importance of this passageto my thesis will becomeapparent. The passage,I argue, has particular relevance to Hawthorne's style of writing. The scenethat one approaches,says Lyotard, refers to `both one's own and others' past'. Yet this scenecannot be represented;it is never even really present. Whatever connects one's own past to others' past, then, has no directly or indirectly, include The PostmodernCondition, tr. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press/ Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1984), Just Gaming, (with Jean-LoupThebaud), tr. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press/ Manchester:Manchester University Press,1986), The Differend, tr. GeorgesVan Den Abbeele, (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press/Manchester,Manchester University Press,1988), Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press,1988), Heidegger and `thejews', tr. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press,1990), The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence1982-1985, translations edited by Julian Pefanis and Morgan
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