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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 THE MEANING AND IMPACT OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE'S NARRATOR DOUBLES DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor o f Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Mary Kathryn Ventura, B.A., M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 1992 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Thomas Woodson Debra Moddelmog Adviser Steven Fink Department of English To My Husband, C., L., B., and T.B. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I express sincere appreciation to the members of my dissertation committee-Drs. Thomas Woodson, Debra Moddelmog, and Steven Fink-for their guidance, suggestions and support throughout my research project. VITA July 10,1941........................................................................ Born - Columbus, Ohio 1964........................................................................................B.A., Capital University, Columbus, Ohio 1967 ........................................................................................M.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1965-1968 .............................................................................Teacher, Reynoldsburg High School, Reynoldsburg, Ohio 1968-1971 .............................................................................Instructor, Otterbein College, Westerville, Ohio 1971-1987............................................................................. Teacher, Lancaster High School, Lancaster, Ohio 1980-1981 .............................................................................Instructor, Ohio University, Lancaster Branch, Lancaster, Ohio PUBLICATIONS Ventura, Mary K. "The Portrait of a Ladv: The Romance/Novel Duality." American Literary Realism 1870-1910 22 (1990): 36-50. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English Other Specialties: Nathaniel Hawthorne; 19th Century British Literature iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ............................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .......................................................................................................... iii VITA ...............................................................................................................................................iv INTRODUCTION..........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER PAGE I. "ALICE DOANE'S APPEAL": THE SEDUCTIVE POWER OF STORYTELLING ....................................................................................................... 10 N otes ....................................................................................................................38 Bibliography................ 43 II. "THE DEVIL IN MANUSCRIPT": THE AUTO-EROTICS OF STORYWRITING ........... 45 N otes ....................................................................................................................70 Bibliography.......................................................................................................73 III. "THE HAUNTED QUACK"/"MR. HIGGINBOTHAM'S CATASTROPHE": THE FRAGILITY OF "WHITE MAGIC"..............................................................74 N otes ..................................................................................................................121 Bibliography.....................................................................................................127 IV. THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES: FROM OBERON TO PROSPERO...................................................................... 129 N otes ..................................................................................................................173 Bibliography.....................................................................................................180 v V. THE NARRATOR BEHIND THE NARRATORS: HAWTHORNE 182 N otes .................................................................................................................. 194 Bibliography.....................................................................................................195 LIST OF REFERENCES....................................................................................................196 vi INTRODUCTION In Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narratives. Peter Brooks explores the implications of Susan Sontag's claim that "rather than theories of interpretation we need an 'erotics' of art" (xv). Brooks is, of course, exploring a principle of postmodern literary criticism by suggesting that any textual confrontation involves not only intra-textual issues, but also extra-textual considerations-most particularly the relationship between a narrator and his/her audience. Brooks, like Sontag, suggests that this relationship is most aptly described by sexual metaphors, especially the metaphor of "seduction," for such a metaphor identifies narration appropriately as an act o f exerting power over an audience and suggests the necessity of a narrator's manipulating a fiction to that end. This postmodern paradigm is certainly applicable to postmodern texts. However, applied to the canon, it also furnishes scholars new access to established texts and often confirms their value by demonstrating that they are capable of inducing many meaning­ ful readings. Indeed, the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne seem particularly appropriate for such a reading, because Hawthorne himself seems so personally aware of his own vulnerability to the charge of sinning by writing. Because he wrote about so many self- conscious artists and artist figures and employed so many intrusive, self-reflexive narra­ tors to tell his stories, Hawthorne's texts suggest a continual and intensive concern on Hawthorne's part about the power he wields as a writer-a power which, he seems to feel, he may subconsciously expose in his narratives and by that exposure indict himself as a "sinner." 1 It is possible to speculate that Hawthorne's anxiety about his role as a storyteller is rooted in the moral and theological concerns of the nineteenth century. In The Instructed Vision, for example, Terence Martin alludes to Hawthorne's likely acceptance of the nineteenth-century view of the artist as a sort of theological heretic. Martin cites the nineteenth-century suspicion of novelists and other artists as usurpers of God’s power and refers to the fear that they, as "creators," produce little worlds which are not simply mimetic, but defacto creations, drawn from their own inner beings (60-76). Similarly, Richard Chase and F. O. Matthiessen suggest that Hawthorne's discomfort with the cre­ ative process is a personally moral issue for Hawthorne who wrote so consistently about the effects of hidden sin. Indeed, Chase and Matthiessen deal with the issue of Hawthorne's problematic narrators, their closeness to-in fact, intrusiveness into-the lives of their characters, without exhibiting much sympathy for or understanding o f those characters. Such a posture, these critics argiie, aligns Hawthorne's narrators (and, by extension, Hawthorne) with the scientist/doctor/scholar group of protagonists who are guilty of the "unpardonable sin" of Ethan Brand-the violation of the human heart. According to Chase and Matthiessen, Hawthorne's exploration of so many examples of this unbridled human egotism (the bosom serpent which replicates Original Sin) is sound textual evidence that Hawthorne sees his own narrators and thereby himself as sinners. We can see Chase’s argument most clearly in his analysis of the problematic narrator of Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance. Miles Coverdale. Interestingly, Chase suggests that Hawthorne becomes increasingly absorbed with the problem of Coverdale as narra­ tor, rather than character, once the story progresses and as Hawthorne begins to see the "literary and