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Shyness in Hawthorne and James Ryan Stuart Lowe Washington University in St

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Shyness in Hawthorne and James Ryan Stuart Lowe Washington University in St Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) Winter 1-1-2012 Outcasts of the Universe: Shyness in Hawthorne and James Ryan Stuart Lowe Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation Lowe, Ryan Stuart, "Outcasts of the Universe: Shyness in Hawthorne and James" (2012). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 1013. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/1013 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of English Dissertation Examination Committee: Robert Milder, Chair Miriam Bailin Guinn Batten Barbara Baumgartner Peter Kastor Vivian Pollak ―Outcasts of the Universe‖: Shyness in Hawthorne and James by Ryan Stuart Lowe A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2012 St. Louis, Missouri Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... iii Preface ............................................................................................................................................ 1 Portrait of the Artist as a Shy Man ........................................................................................... 14 The Romantic Reading: The Pure Substance ............................................................................ 18 The Environmental Reading: The Flower in Thin Soil ............................................................ 25 The Psychological Reading: The Plummet ............................................................................... 31 The Skeptical Reading: The Invincibly Modest ....................................................................... 40 The Ethical Reading: Sociable Silence ..................................................................................... 46 Another Kind of Inquest ........................................................................................................... 51 The Blithedale Romance: Shyness as Closeting ........................................................................ 54 A Will of One‘s Own: Developing Consciousness and The Blithedale Romance ................... 61 Blithedale as Post-heroic: An Awfully Sophisticated Pass....................................................... 72 The Meaning of Coverdale‘s Confession ................................................................................. 80 A Revisiting that is also a Rebuke: Protesting Blithedale ........................................................ 89 The Importance of Being Bewildered ....................................................................................... 97 The Gemlike Flame and the Cold Stone: Hawthorne, Pater, and James ................................ 102 An Aesthetic Company: On the Margins of the Cosmopolitan .............................................. 108 Beyond Bewilderment ............................................................................................................ 115 Americans Going Nowhere..................................................................................................... 123 Tourist Love: Travel, Romance, and Roderick Hudson ........................................................ 131 Tourists, Tour Guides, and Tourist Love ................................................................................ 137 Sight-seeing............................................................................................................................. 142 Taking Separate Ways ............................................................................................................ 150 After Daisy: The Tourist Love Story as Genre ....................................................................... 158 “The Tolerance of Talk”: Gossip, Shyness, and The Sacred Fount ..................................... 161 The Allegory of the Introvert .................................................................................................. 166 Miss Briss: The Counter-Allegory .......................................................................................... 176 Gossip as Seduction: The Problem with Guy and May .......................................................... 181 Re-Nailing Down the Coffin ................................................................................................... 188 Coda ........................................................................................................................................... 193 Primary Sources ........................................................................................................................ 199 Secondary Sources .................................................................................................................... 202 ii Acknowledgements While considering the novel that he felt had launched his career, Henry James admitted a problem: ―Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.‖ In considering my dissertation, I can only draw a similar circle and hope it appears comprehensive. This dissertation could not have happened without the most generous attention and support of my dissertation director, Robert Milder. It was in my first semester of graduate school—and in his American Renaissance course—that I first fell in love with the character of Miles Coverdale. I cannot overstate how exciting and illuminating it has been to explore the lives and works of Hawthorne and James under the guidance of an experienced scholar who was also turning his attention to these writers. Over the years, he has been an indispensable advocate and the most careful of readers. Many thanks to my other mentors, Miriam Bailin, Guinn Batten, and Vivian Pollak. I especially appreciate Miriam‘s introducing me to theories of the novel, Guinn‘s special guidance during my major field study, and Vivian‘s unflagging support of the Gender and Sexuality Reading Group. Thanks also to Barbara Baumgartner and Peter Kastor for their thoughtful comments and questions during the defense. A special thanks goes to Kathryn Bond Stockton, professor at University of Utah, who first introduced me to queer theory. She will always remain the professor whose charisma and intellectual insight I hope to emulate in the classroom—someday, maybe. iii For all those small but countless moments of friendship and camaraderie, I thank my colleagues—graduate students, professors, and academic staff—at Washington University in St. Louis. Finally, thanks and love to my wife Sara Flannery Murphy and to baby Miles Eliot Lowe—are you named after Miles Coverdale from Blithedale Romance or after Miles from Turn of the Screw? We‘ll never know for certain. iv There is one secret,—I have concealed it all along, and never meant to let the least whisper of it escape,— one foolish little secret, which possibly may have had something to do with these inactive years of meridian manhood, with my bachelorship, with the unsatisfied retrospect that I fling back on life, and my listless glance towards the future. Shall I reveal it? — Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance v Ryan Stuart Lowe – [email protected] Dissertation — Prof. Milder — 2009-2012 Preface I came across the problem of types, for it is one‘s psychological type which from the outset determines and limits a person‘s judgment. — Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections I remember reading Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s The Blithedale Romance for the first time. It was there that I met Miles Coverdale—Hawthorne‘s sometimes affectionate and sometimes scathing self-parody—who framed the tale as a prurient observer, an unreliable narrator, and a failed hero. I was perplexed by Coverdale‘s thwarted curiosity, by his ironic self-criticisms; I was maddened by his confession that he was in love with Priscilla rather than Zenobia, choosing the least enticing of Hawthorne‘s fair maidens over the richest of his dark ladies. But most of all, I was fascinated by Miles Coverdale himself, his personality, his role in the story. These complexities were best encapsulated in an early reflection Coverdale had upon his own place in the novel‘s plot: My own part in these transactions was singularly subordinate. It resembled that of the Chorus in a classic play, which seems to be set aloof from the possibility of personal concernment, and bestows the whole measure of its hope or fear, its exultation or sorrow, on the fortunes of others, between whom and itself this sympathy is the only bond. (90- 91) It was this phrase, ―singularly subordinate,‖ that struck me: a phrase verging on—though not quite arriving at—oxymoron. In these two words, Coverdale represents himself as subordinate: peripheral, inessential, and contingent to the story he watches; as singular: alone and sometimes 1 lonely in his distance from the action that unfolds; but as ―singularly subordinate‖ as if he is in this particular case exceptional. Marginalized,
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