When Nathaniel Hawthorne died in May of 1864, not quite 60, he died accompanied by perhaps his best friend, who was one of the most hated men in the Union: Franklin Pierce. In a series of letters written in July 1863, just as the news of Pierce’s treasonous encouragement of Jefferson Davis leaked and as Gettysburg revealed the Union’s strengths, Hawthorne refused “to withdraw the dedication” of his last publication Our Old Home to Pierce. They were friends, Hawthorne protested to James T. Fields, Pierce had made the experiences possible by gifting Hawthorne with the Liverpool consulate, and whatever else had happened was unfortunate, but wasn’t going to change those facts or the relationship. So, he decided to take the reputational and financial hit.
Hawthorne was racist, and a specially-conflicted kind of misogynist—and he’s already been cancelled once: the Hawthorne we know about is the result of the campaign to recover him that began with Sophia Peabody Hawthorne and Annie and James T. Fields working to make him palatable to post-Civil War Victorian readers. They got a major assist from Henry James, and the belated, and deeply ironic decision to start using The Scarlet Letter as a by-pass into Puritan history. (Both Hawthorne and George Bancroft, heck, Richard Hildreth and Horace Mann too, would have been horrified by this).
Why devote years to work that might wind up in a manuscript that might, if I’m lucky, haunt JSTOR like Betty Bennett’s “Mary Shelley Manuscript”?
Hawthorne was narratively and culturally experimental in an experimental time. When Chris Richards of The Washington Post lit into Taylor Swift for wanting to live in the 1830s “without the racism,” the callousness of his dismissal of that decade (and maybe, for my purposes, the 1840s too) made it painfully obvious just how much people don’t know about how radical and experimentational those decades were.
Of course, when decades like the 50s and 60s (but especially the 1930s!!) have also been memory-holed, sure, an obscure 20 year period that no one can really remember who was President, etc. Yeah. I get it. But if you’re just gonna shit on a time because of the crap occurring during it and pay no attention to the attempts to . . . ugh . . . sorry . . . be better, well, that’s like asking to turn into the nihilistic Alexander Pope and just accept whatever is as right.
And, so, Hawthorne fascinates me, in large part, because I could NOT figure his stuff out. And that’s after teaching it according to some of the approved ways for in some cases, 20 years.
And I woke up at 4:36 (or so) this morning with an answer: Hawthorne is ‘about’ the impossibility of ‘love’ in the normalized cis-het circumstances of Anglo-American culture. Especially in homosocial Patronage cultures. That’s why there’s a grand total of 2 happy relationships in Hawthorne and both of them happen because the dude rejects what Patronage culture tells him to do and be and instead, listens to his partner.
We can get hip to how the Romantic Ideology suckered people in, and wake up to a variety of other disciplinary functionings, but the long, invisibly coercive normalization of patriarchal family and patronage-determined social structures means that it’s hard to see the Patronage battle happening in “Rappacini’s Daughter.” But Giovanni’s a pawn between Baglioni and Rappacini: the “poison" in his heart comes from Baglioni. And Beatrice suffers. (For that matter, “Bartleby, the Scrivener is also a Patronage story . . .”)
Even Frantz Fanon accepts as ‘normal’ that “For the individual the authority of the state is a reproduction of the authority of the family in which he was shaped in his childhood” (BSWM 143). Well. That’s certainly what the Puritans wanted. It ain’t what happened in the Manning household in which the Hathorne children found themselves. The typical narrative identity never fit because their raising was atypical—and even after Hawthorne made up a Chattertonesque gothic origin story to cover up the untidy realities of his experiences, his hostility to the Standing Order hypocrisies he had to try to live his life according to appears, especially in blasts like the “Governor Pyncheon” chapter of House of the Seven Gables.
Finally, there are the mind-blowing experiments and Easter Eggs. The Scarlet Letter, after all, is really a story about a purloined letter told from a manuscript written by a guy named Pue. If you know the history and controversy surrounding the Overbury Murders, Frances Howard, and the gender-controversies of hic mulier, there’s a real question beyond whether or not there was a letter A on Arthur’s “breast”—in his quest to take over Hester’s punishment for his own, how much of Hester has Arthur taken on (with an assist from Roger).
The “Alice Pyncheon” chapter of House of the Seven Gables, written by a character in the story, knows things that the narrator of the story appears not to know. How that could be factors into a basic orientation towards narrative that privileges Mystery over History, Theology, and Philosophy as a basic mode, since most events involve the revelation and solution of a crime or wrong caused by (or enabled or perpetuated by) a commitment to Patronage structures.