SHOWING AND TELLING: VISUAL CULTURE AND ITS IMPACT ON THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE AND EDITH WHARTON’S SUMMER A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Department of English California State University, Sacramento Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in English (Literature) by Juan Espinoza SPRING 2020 © 2020 Juan Espinoza ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii SHOWING AND TELLING: VISUAL CULTURE AND ITS IMPACT ON THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE AND EDITH WHARTON’S SUMMER A Thesis by Juan Espinoza Approved by: __________________________________, Committee Chair Nancy Sweet __________________________________, Second Reader Susan Wanlass ____________________________ Date iii Student: Juan Espinoza I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this thesis is suitable for electronic submission to the Library and credit is to be awarded for this thesis. __________________________, Graduate Coordinator ___________________ Doug Rice Date Department of English iv Abstract of SHOWING AND TELLING: VISUAL CULTURE AND ITS IMPACT ON THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE AND EDITH WHARTON’S SUMMER by Juan Espinoza In her 1934 autobiography, A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton admonished critics of her 1917 novel Summer who viewed the novel as a “pleasing romance of summer life.” Wharton saw her novel as part of the same Dark Romantic literary traditions of New England established by authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne. This project moves beyond Wharton’s connections of genre and geography to explore how both Hawthorne’s and Wharton’s literary works were intimately situated within their respective era’s popular culture and how popular entertainments of each era shaped the form, style, and worldview of each author’s literary works. I begin by analyzing how Hawthorne’s 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance is narrated as though it were a series of tableaux vivant or “living pictures,” antebellum entertainments with a moral message, though they were also often an excuse to skirt censorship laws. I then explore how, in much the same way, Wharton’s Summer uses the circus freakshow, a form descended from the tableaux vivant that displayed Otherness as a medical and scientific v entertainment. In Summer the freakshow is used with disturbing effect as a way to deliver an otherwise simple “seduced and abandoned” plot. Together these novels suggest that literary fiction is shaped by the popular culture that surrounds it. As that popular culture evolves, so too does the form of literary fiction. Large changes in popular culture, like those between tableaux vivant and the freakshow, are mirrored by minor differences in the narratives of literary fiction like those between The Blithedale Romance and Summer. _______________________, Committee Chair Nancy Sweet _______________________ Date vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This Master’s Thesis was made possible by many, many people. I would like to thank the following people: Dr. Nancy Sweet and Dr. Susan Wanlass for their support throughout this process and throughout my master’s degree. My family, especially my mother Traci Johnson and my father Luis Espinoza, who supported me throughout this entire journey. My brothers, José and Carlos Espinoza. My friends, especially Anthony Perez and Catalina Carapia-Aguillon, and Ambyr Gage, Ademidun Adejobi, David Ng, Sophia Louie and so, so many others. My colleagues, for supporting me in my many other endeavors. And Dora Monterroza, for putting up with me, for supporting me, for inspiring me, for pushing me to be the best person I can be. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... vii Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE STAGE ...............................................................1 2. HUSH, POSE, AND YOU WILL BELIEVE: TABLEAUX VIVANT AND BLITHEDALE .............................................................................................................25 3. THE GREATEST SHOW IN NEW ENGLAND: FREAKSHOW, CIRCUS, AND SUMMER ....................................................................................................................58 4. STRIKING THE SET: CONLCUSIONS AND NOTES FOR FURTHER READINGS AND VIEWINGS ..................................................................................92 Works Cited ....................................................................................................................106 viii 1 Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE STAGE In her 1934 autobiography, A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton admonished critics of her 1917 novel Summer. Critics of the time were excited for the release of Summer. Many reviews drew a comparison between Wharton’s earlier work Ethan Frome and Summer, with the Nation favoring the former and the Times Literary Supplement seeing the two novels as equals (Rattray xvi). To Wharton, Summer was squarely in the dark, regional traditions of fiction established by authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne. Wharton felt, for good reason, that her critics were instead expecting Summer to be “the reflection of local life in the rose-and-lavender pages of their favourite authoresses” (Wharton, A Backward Glance 294). After all, the New York Times Book Review naively titled their review “Summer a Pleasing Romance of Village Life” (xix). Wharton’s stab at her reviewers is a less emphatic rebuke of “women’s writing” than Hawthorne’s own scorn of the “damned mob of scribbling women” he felt was ruining the critical reputation of his own work in 1855 (Wagner-Martin 243). Hawthorne’s 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance came before his “scribbling women” phase, but some of the reviews of the novel are no less damning than those he would receive—and comment on—later. The Norton Critical Edition of Blithedale contains one review, by an anonymous reviewer for the Westminster Review, declaring that Blithedale “will never attain the popularity which is vouchsafed…to some of its contemporaries” and which went on to say that “Hawthorne has a rich perception of the beautiful, but he is sadly 2 deficient in moral depth and earnestness” (262, 263). Reviews of Blithedale fall into roughly two camps. One camp identifies Blithedale as a roman à clef for the real-life Brook Farm. The Penguin Classics Edition quotes a review from the Christian Examiner that states emphatically that “Mr. Hawthorne is presenting…a delineation of life and character” at Brook Farm (x). Orestes Brownson, father to a Brook Farm participant, was often reluctantly roped into the roman à clef reading but tried, in his reviews, to lead the other camp that saw Blithedale “connected with some of [his] friends” but ultimately showing “very little of the actual persons engaged in it” (x). Though the reviews were decidedly mixed for each novel, it is interesting that the two authors, connected through time and genre, share a connection through their novels’s similar persistent misreadings. However, it is also easy to see that the novels share a similar narrative structure. Blithedale is the story of failed love at a failed socialist utopian community. It follows three main characters: Zenobia, a proto-feminist and author; Hollingsworth, a criminal reformer; and Miles Coverdale, a minor romantic poet and flaneur who narrates the story after the fact. The love triangle that develops between the three is complicated by the introduction of Priscilla and Westervelt. Summer follows Charity Royall in her love affair with the urbane Lucius Harney, who is visiting North Dormer to sketch colonial era houses. The love affair is complicated by Lawyer Royall, Charity’s adoptive ward. When Charity becomes pregnant by Harney and Harney leaves her for the beautiful Annabel Balch, Charity runs away to the outlaw community on the Mountain, her ancestral home. Lawyer Royall brings the exhausted Charity back to town and promptly 3 marries her. Each novel has very similar characters. Hollingsworth and Lawyer are the brooding older men, Coverdale and Harney the feckless young men, Priscilla and Charity the delicate but brooding young women, and Zenobia and Annabel Balch the “temptresses.” Besides complicated sexual/romantic relationships, each novel deals with themes of power and control. More specifically, the male characters use their power to control, confine, judge, and punish women. In Blithedale, the gaze is each male character’s, but especially Coverdale’s, main means of control. In Summer, that male gaze is suffused into an Orwellian panopticism lorded over by Lawyer Royall. Though the similarities in critical receptions and the narrative structures are intriguing, simply put, I find Wharton’s claim of literary kinship with Hawthorne the most intriguing. Wharton’s genealogical claim establishes her roots in both a geographical space, New England, and a generic vein, Dark Romanticism, a dark counterpoint to Romantic literature often conflated with the Gothic because of its fascination with the irrational, demonic, and grotesque, as opposed to Romantic literature’s focus on the sublime and euphoric. With this project I will add another category to the connection between Hawthorne and Wharton: performance. By this I mean two things, the actual performances within the novels and readings using a performance studies lens. I take this approach because both novels include