Hawthorne Essay, Research Paper
Within this outline, as it stands at the moment, the hippie is seen as the seeker of peace, love, and joy. He is not hung up. Freed from materialism, from the past, from traditions, institutions, inherited customs, values, and restraints, he is open to the flow of experience. Acceptance of the body frees his senses for the apprehension of beauty beauty. He rejects Christianity, my student tells me, but sees some possibilities in Buddhism. Christianity, one assumes, is associated too strongly with war, acquisitiveness, and asceticism. Behind the whole complex is a large unstated and unexamined assumption. But examining assumptions is a part of the rationalism and traditionalism the hippie rejects. The assumption is that man does not grow into peace, love, and joy through study, contemplation, discipline, self-restraint. They are his natural inheritance. He is not a bucket to be filled, laboriously, with goodness by church, family, society. Rather, he is a spring in which goodness and happiness bubble up unless clogged or polluted by ancient impurities.
The square is an even more familiar figure. If, as my student tells me, he has always run America (but not run it well), he should be familiar. He is a churchgoer, but if there.are peace, love, or joy in Christianity the square misses them. His Christianity is selective, yielding him righteousness and respectability, but not forbidding those things to which he is attracted. He is attracted to wealth, power, competition. He approves of war as group competition at its most intense. He stresses sobriety and distrusts the senses. But relation of cause and effect is not clear. Perhaps he rejects beauty and joy because they interfere with business efficiency; perhaps he is driven to efficiency and aggression by his lack of beauty and joy .
My student offers little help on the sources of his ideas. When I ask him, he says, ”I’ve just been rapping in the dorms.” But if ultimately his types go back to whoever first set out to distinguish the contemplative from the active life, it is not too difficult to trace them more immediately to such sources as McLuhan, Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown. If my student has just been rapping, someone in the dorm has been reading. It is almost a critical cliche now to see the whole complex of thought my student represents as part of a ”New Romanticism” descended from the earlier Romantics, particularly Blake. In America it goes back farther than the Romantics and its history is more continuous. The aspiration, the longing, my student shares is a part of the American Dream: und however sour that dream may turn at times it is a real part of American thought and feeling, perhaps most present when it is most denied. So many would not, from the start, have seen our cquntry as a nightmare if they had not unconsciously expected it to be a pleasant dream.
At this point I am tempted to trace that tradition in a long digression, but the digression might grow to book length. One can see the Pilgrims as drop-outs from, and the Puritans as rebels against, an ecclesiastical Establishment that stood too much between individual men and women and their God, an Establishment that had grown hypocritical and mechanical. One could point out the extent to which Puritan traits are still visible in our hippies.1 One could move on to the intuitional and libertarian rebellion of Ann Hutchinson (”the sainted Ann Hutchinson” Hawthorne calls her in The Scarlet Letter) and Roger Williams against the orthodoxy the Puritan rebels established, and then to the Transcendentalist revolt. How near Emerson was to our day, scholars who translate his philosophical terms into the terms of modern psychology are only now finding out.2 One could add Walt Whitman, hero of the ‘Beats ” who preceded the hippies; Melville’s picture of mixed piety and greed in Captains Peleg and Bildad; Twain’s view of society from the underside in Huckleberry Finn; James’s portraits of the square in the Newsomes and Pococks of The Ambassadors, and the pictures Lewis gives us in Main Street and Babbitt. Speaking of Lewis, as one reads the writers of the 1920s now, it is surprising how close their mood is to that of the hippies.3 But in an essay on Hawthorne, longer digression would be intolerable. Let it suffice that if the square has dominated American life he has fared badly in serious American literature, and that even Ben Franklin was less square than D. H. Lawrence has painted him.
Hawthorne is our most instructive illustration of continuity. In his dissatisfactions, in his vision of the good life and the good society, in his analysis of psychological and social forces that contribute to or block the good life or the good society, he is often strikingly similar to disaffected youth of 1970. Perhaps in his points of difference with that youth he is also instructive. He deals more thoughtfully than any other American writer save possibly Melville with the issues raised (but usually not answered) by the hippie ethic: the individual and society, freedom and responsibility, emotion and reason, law and love.
The issue of peace to begin with the usual starting point of the hippie was, until the Civil War, less pressing in Hawthorne’s time than in ours. But note that Emerson and Thoreau worked out early in their careers justification for withdrawal from active politics to make possible contemplation and growth of the soul. (Emerson’s “Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing” is one of many statements of that justification.) Yet both abandoned their position to passionately defend John Brown.4 They became, as it were, activists rather than hippies, and activists in a dubious cause. Hawthorne neither withdrew frpm politics when young nor threw himself passionately into them when old. He abhorred equally the violence of slavery and the anti-slavery violence of John Brown. His lack of enthusiasm for the Civil War was such that the Atlantic was doubtful about accepting his last sketches. As we look back now on how much the Civil War cost and how much it failed to accomplish we may see some virtue in his position.
At the center of Hawthorne’s thought and feeling is the paradox that each person is sacred and must be free, and that at the same time he is incomplete and must have society and love for his completion. Q. D. Leavis is right in saying that the relation of the individual to society is his special theme, and R. W. B. Lewis is right in adding that he is particularly qualified to deal with the theme because he can sympathize with both.5 In this balancing of claims he is more modern than the Transcendentalists, who, for all their essays on love and friendship, placed almost unlimited reliance on the individual soul.
The case for individual freedom and dignity is made by Dimmesdale, of The Scarlet Letter. His sin and Hester’s he says is not so great as that of Chillingworth: “He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of the human heart.”6 All of Hawthorne’s chief sinners are men who in pride of position, wealth, or intellect violate that sanctity: Chillingworth, Rappaccini, Ethan Brand, Hollingsworth, Colonel Pyncheon and Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon. Societies, as well as individuals, may be guilty. Witness the Puritan villages of “The Gentle Boy” and The Scarlet Letter. “The action of the novel springs,” says Lewis of The Scarlet Letter, ”from the enormous but improbable suggestion that the society’s estimate of the moral structure of the universe may be tested and found inaccurate.”7
The need for the opposite pole of love and community Hawthorne came to through his own loneliness and his desire to escape from it, to “establish an intercourse with the world.” The ”haunted chamber” in which he felt himself imprisoned until Sophia Peabody and a political appointment drew him out has been a commonplace of Hawthorne biography and criticism. Reacting from such isolation, he filled his notebooks with observations on the common life about him. It is probably not by sheer chance that while others supported Brook Farm from outside, he alone of major figures of his time risked his savings and seven months of his life in that experimental community. But it was Sophia whom he hailed, again and again, in letters and notebooks, as his deliverer. What she saved him from he called “unreality.” Gifted with unusual power to see through the superficial and the false, he was, as he realized, all too prone to see as illusion what most men take for reality, to find no value in things others value. Only in close ties with others could he find the emotional vitality that makes life meaningful. When he first parted with Sophia after his marriage for a brief return to his mother’s home he noted the difference Sophia had made. ”But how changed was I! at last I had caught hold of a reality, which never could be taken from me.”8 Again he wrote to her, ”I should be only a shadow of the night; it is you that give me reality, and make all things real for me.”9 Of Phoebe, of The House of the Seven Gables, he exclaimed: “She was real! Holding her hand, you felt something; a substance, and a warm one; and so long as you should feel its grasp, soft as it was, you might be certain that your place was good in the whole sympathetic chain of human nature. The world was no longer a delusion” (327). The reference to holding Phoebe’s hand, ”a substance, and a warm one,” is a reminder that, in terms of a distinction he was fond of making, Hawthorne loved with his heart, not only with his head. Sophia’s later attempts to blot such words as ”bedfellow” from his notebooks failed, and — lest younger readers should be confused by the nineteenth-century propriety of his words —it is clear that the body was involved. For all his withdrawal and reticence, he had spontaneous emotional warmth that separates him from the abstracting tendencies of the Transcendentalists and links him to the dissenters of our day. ”Unless you love someone nothing else makes sense” says a poster for sale in college bookstores. Hawthorne would have agreed.
Hawthorne’s age was like ours again in its concern with the question of the meaning of time, and of how one responds to time. Lewis follows Emerson in conveniently dividing writers of the period into ”The Party of Hope” and ”The Party of Memory.” For Hawthorne and Melville he creates a new class, ”The Party of Irony.” The classification is brilliant, but misses a facet of Hawthorne’s mind. Though such works as The House of the Seven Gables show that he knew that the past lives on in the present, he shared the general Romantic desire to escape from always looking before and after. He even used the favorite term of our youth. When he was with Sophia, he said, ”Then I feel that there is a Now, and that Now must be always calm and happy.”10 Rummaging through the library of the Old Manse he found himself musing ”the fact that the works of man’s intellect decay like those of his hands. Thought grows mouldy. What was good and nourishing food for the spirits of one generation affords no sustenance for the next.”11 He gives to Holgrave, Clifford, and Uncle Venner attacks upon the tyranny of the past, upon inherited institutions, ideas, and property, rivalling those expressed by Emerson in ”Nature.” The Past, says Holgrave, is Death, and death controls our property, rules our courts, gives forms to our worship of living Deity. We live in dead men’s houses, built as foundations for perpetuating our families. But the houses should be burnt, and the families ”once in every half-century, at longest, should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity” (pp 352-54). That the older, happier, and wealthier Holgrave reverses himself proves only that Hawthorne belongs to the Party of Irony, not that he had himself repudiated the view. The fall of once proud and wealthy families into decay is presented so often and approvingly in the American Notebooks that Stewart treats it as one of Hawthorne’s major themes.12 A chapter in Our Old Home, his last book published during his lile, ends with the contrast between the mass marriage of a crowd ol Manchester poor and the marriage of two of Manchester’s wealthiest. One parson and one service had amalgamated the wretchedness of scores of paupers; a Bishop and three or four clergymen had combined their spiritual might to forge the golden links of this other marriage-bond.” The poor returned to their hovels, while the wealthy pair returned to a “fair property” which “seemed more exclusively and inalienably their own, because of its descent through many forefathers.” But Hawthorne continued, ‘And is it possible, after all, that there may be a flaw in the title-deeds? Is, or is not, the system wrong that gives one married pair so immense a superfluity of luxurious home, and shuts out a million others from any home whatever?” That question, he concluded, “the gentlemen of England” must some day answer.13
Hawthorne feared the dominance of the past, then, both because it blocks unselfconscious joy in the present, and because it perpetuates injustice and suffering. In his sympathy with all who suffer, in the quality that would now be called compassion, is another link to the hippie. Certainly he felt compassion with an intensity less sensitive and imaginative men, of his time or ours, cannot match. Perhaps too his religious faith, which our age has largely lost, enabled him to feel more strongly for the welfare of others. For Hawthorne had more at stake. He linked inequality and injustice to the question of immortality. Viewing the slum children of Manchester he speculated: “It might almost make a man doubt the existence of his own soul to observe how Nature has flung these little wretches into the street and left them there, so evidently regarding them as nothing worth, and how all mankind acquiesce in the great mother’s estimate of her offspring. For, if they are to have no immortality, what superior claim can I assert for mine?”
It is the intensity of his feeling, I believe, that builds the marked rhythms of his sentences as he continues. First he sees the children of Victorian poverty as the “hideous bugs and many-footed worms” he found under logs as a boy, but soon the image changes to that of the body beneath dark water so frequently found in his novels:14 “Ah, what a mystery! Slowly, slowly, as after groping at the bottom of a deep noisome, stagnant pool, my hope struggles up vard to the surface, bearing the halfdrowned body of a child along with it, and heaving it aloft for its life, and my own life, and all our lives. Unless these slime-clogged nostrils can be made capable of inhaling celestial air, I know not how the purest and most intellectual of us can reasonably hope to taste a breath of it. The whole question of eternity is staked there. If a single one of these helpless little ones be lost, the world is lost.”15 The same theme is continued in Hawthorne”s visit to the children’s ward of a workhouse, where a “sickly, wretched, humor-eaten infant, the offspring of unspeakable sin and sorrow” held up its arms to him. Hawthorne lifted the child and comforted it, explaining, “No doubt, the child’s mission in reference to our friend was to remind him that he was responsible, in his degree, for all the suffering and misdemeanors of the world in which he lived, and was not entitled to look upon a particle of its dark calamity as if it were none of his concern.”16 It is typical that he should have disguised himself through the use of the third person. His English Notebooks, not originally intended for publication, reveal “our friend’s” true identity. But more important is the feeling of responsibility for the child. Hawthorne goes beyond ”compassion” into what Howells (who must certainly have been helped in discovering the theme through his reading of Hawthorne) called “complicity.” Stephen Crane, in turn, was to borrow the word and the theme from Howells and give them one of their finest expressions in “The Blue Hotel.”
With the sense of complicity goes an attack on the proud, insensitive, and successful, who are seen as denying their part in sin and suffering. Hawthorne, like the hippies, saw such qualities as related and as characterizing a group, the group now called the Establishment. It is clear in The Scarlet [ester that the judges who judge Hester are unfit to judge. "Young Goodman Brown" carries the suggestion further with its vision of corruption in deacon, magistrate, and priest. In The House of the Seven Gables Hawthorne states directly in his own person what "Young Goodman Brown" so ambiguously suggests: "Since there must be evil in the world . . . a high man is as likely to grasp his share of it, as a low one" (p. 322). Although he here as always qualifies by noting that all share in evil, the novel shows it particularly among the wealthy, powerful, and respectable. His sympathetic characters are, like Huckleberry Finn, from the bottom of society. Like Twain, or the hippies, or Bret Harte but without his sentimentality, he gives us a reverse view of society, seen from the bottom and with a preponderance of virtue at the bottom and evil at the top.
Symptomatic of the degree of social corruption are false official images and a general inability to recognize evil in high places. As the hippies would say, you can't trust the media. Only the innocent Phoebe, the recluse Hepzibah, the jail-bird Clifford; and the speculative radical Holgrave see the real Judge Pyncheon. All others are so caught up in the material values he represents that, consciously at least, they accept the face he presents to the public. In an impressively developed passage Hawthorne compares the public image of Judge Pyncheon to a stately palace. But, he continues, "in some low and obscure nook, some narrow closet on the ground floor, shut, locked, and bolted, and the key flung away or beneath the marble pavement in a stagnant water-puddle, with the richest pattern of mosaic work above it may lie a corpse, halfdecayed and still decaying, and diffusing its death-scent all through the palace." Familiarity will make the "inhabitants" miss the scent; for "visitors" it will be covered by the "rich odors" scattered through the house. But to the "seer" the palace will "melt into thin air, leaving only the little nook, the bolted closet" (pp. 380-81).