Lectures on American literature (Ukázka, strana 99)

were grim Puritans who fanatically persecuted the Quakers and were also responsible for the witch trials in 1692), and the history of the colonial period with its dominant mythology of original sin on the one hand, and with the New Jerusalem on the other.

Hawthorne’s first volume of short stories and sketches appeared quite late (1837), after two abortive attempts to write a series of tales from New England, and after years of seclusion and hard thinking over the individual stories. The title, Twice-Told Tales, not only reveals Hawthorne’s pessimistic view of life (it is an allusion to a line from Shakespeare’s King John 3.4—’Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale / Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man’), but also points to the fundamental difference of Hawthorne’s approach to history from the attitudes of his predecessors and contemporaries.

For Hawthorne, history is no general drama of humanity, as it had been for many romantics (for instance, Percy Bysshe Shelley or Poe in the poem from ‘Ligeia,’ ‘The Conqueror Worm’). Such approaches to history are treated ironically in later stories, such as ‘The Procession of Life’ or ‘Earth’s Holocaust.’ History is concrete and individual mainly because it includes stories that cannot be treated as mere historical sources but incorporate also invented narratives, elements of folktales or myths. In historical fiction, these stories are necessarily retold, and thus their relationship to the past and present, including historical facts, is changed. These changes may also be caused by the projection of Hawthorne’s moral feelings as well as by the persistent tendency of his narratives to transform their events and motives into allegories and symbols, thus stressing their meaning as signs. In his later, longer ‘romances’ (The Scarlet Letter [1850], The House of the Seven Gables [1851], and The Blithedale Romance [1852]), Hawthorne sometimes goes farther, following Emerson into problematization, deconstruction, and destabilization not only of allegorical conventions and forms but also of the processes of value-construction and meaning-making themselves.

This is especially evident in ‘The Minister’s Black Veil,’ where the piece of black crepe hiding the hero’s face soon ceases to be an explicable sign of his despair over human sinfulness, and becomes a symbol of human separation in love, life and death, and of the (sometimes problematic, especially when psychologized) division between God and humankind, time and eternity, or between the signifier and the signified in the process of writing and reading. It can also be said that the veil symbolizes the impossibility of grasping Puritan consciousness as well as the complexity of the self, the hidden links between the conscious and the unconscious.

A similar shift from religious allegory to psychological and philosophical symbolism occurs in ‘Young Goodman Brown,’ but here the questioning of the moral duplicity of the Puritans reveals the necessity of reevaluating naive notions of the relationship between illusion and reality in art. How can we tell whether the hero ‘really’ saw the inhabitants of his town at the witches’ sabbath, or whether this happened only in his dream? The mixture of allegorical and mimetic features (the whole tale can be read as an archetypal narrative of the Fall of Man, and, simultaneously, as a grim Gothic horror full of suspense) does not allow us to answer simply ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ The ‘reality’ of ‘historical facts’ has been emptied out by allegory, but the narrative illusion persists and makes us think hard about what was thought true and right in Puritan times and what is today.

Another example of Hawthorne’s historical fiction questioning the relationship between art and reality is the story ‘Alice Doane’s Appeal’ which also contains a vision of the execution of the victims of the Salem witch-trials in 1692. Here Hawthorne establishes a link between the symbolic figure of the wizard and himself as the author and narrator of the tale.

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The fact is that the author does not have more authority than the wicked wizard, and that the most important feature of his complex narrative (which tells three separate stories) is its illusoriness which makes the vision of Puritan atrocities appeal to present-day readers (represented by two young ladies whom the narrator accompanies during a Sunday walk) who do not have any idea of colonial history. In this way some Twice-Told Tales become interesting metatexts commenting on the difficulties of representing the American past and on the use of historical fiction as an antidote to political ideologies and to a complacent faith in the great historical mission of American civilization.

The second collection of Hawthorne’s short stories is called Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). The title refers to a house in Concord, Massachusetts (originally belonging to Emerson’s grandfather, a Congregationalist minister), where the author spent several happy years after his marriage to Sophia Peabody. The atmosphere of the town, which was the center of Transcendentalism and of many talks with Emerson and Thoreau, influenced Hawthorne’s fiction. They made him write more about the general situation of humankind, the possibilities of science, technical progress, religion or imagination. His style became more ornamental and sensuous and his topics ranged from tiny details in the surrounding woods (‘Buds and the Birds’ Voices’) to exotic images of Renaissance Italy (‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’).

Like Emerson, Hawthorne was very cautious of common optimism concerning the role of science. In the story called ‘The Birthmark’ he expressed his skepticism concerning the scientific improvement of nature to ideal perfection. And in ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ he problematized the religious distinction between the original innocence and the evil nature produced by the fall of man. He compared it to a modern, insoluble contradiction between the power of science and the poverty of the human heart. It is not clear whether the heroine is killed by the poisons generated in her father’s experiments with plants, or by the lack of love and compassion on the side of Giovanni who thinks of her as the embodiment of original sin. There seems to be more poison in Giovanni’s moral nature than in Beatrice’s beautiful body.

Hawthorne’s most important work, The Scarlet Letter, is often called an historical romance.

This, however, is correct only partly with respect to the character of Hester Prynne’s former husband Roger Chillingworth, and some very rare miraculous events, such as the appearance of the stigma on the breast of Arthur Dimmesdale, or the visions of the Puritans in the night sky. But neither is The Scarlet Letter a historical novel, since it does not deal so much with the life of the early Puritan settlement, as with the differences between Puritan and nineteenthcentury readings of signs. For the people who had condemned her to wear the garment with the scarlet A, Hester was to become an allegory of adultery. This allegory had to be produced by the transfer of one ‘explicit’ meaning of the graphic sign—the letter A—to Hester’s body.

But Hester managed to change the imposed meaning of the letter both by her behavior and by her skills. A came to be understood as a sign for ‘able’ and ‘admirable.’ And when it appeared as a sign on the night sky, it could mean both ‘Apocalypse’ and ‘America.’ On the other hand, A became a sign of shame connected with the secrets of privacy when discovered by Chillingworth on Dimmesdale’s body.

If we have to interpret the meaning of Hester’s A, we can understand it as a symbol of the theme and value of nature in American history and culture. The letter cannot mean just original sin, that is, the cause of the fall of man. Nor can it only denote the imagined objectives of American history—the return to the fundamental values of Christianity or to the powers and riches hidden in nature. If it points to nature, it confirms the essential freedom of love, which 99

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makes no difference between the private and public life. The deferral of the meaning of the scarlet letter in the process of signification creates a space for the authentic life and creative play of art (Hester embroiders the letter and becomes famous for her art).

However, it can also be argued that the deferred meaning of the letter prepares the ground for the revelation of a boundary between nature and culture in the character of Hester’s daughter Pearl: her ‘kindred wildness’ (closeness to forest animals) cannot be represented by Puritan typological symbolism. Pearl’s behavior seems to form another symbolic language (the romantic ‘living hieroglyphic’ of nature, Norton 5 1: 1417), pointing out the difference as the basis of the girl’s identity (in the forest she is ‘another and the same’ child, 1418). Moreover Pearl’s behavior questions all other identities derived from the symbolic language of Puritan culture. It is not surprising that her fate is left open: her ending up in a happy marriage is represented as a matter of popular belief, not the actual conclusion of Hawthorne’s story.

The Scarlet Letter ends by Hester’s return to New England, where she works patiently helping to improve relations between women and men. She is led by a firm faith that ‘in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness’ (Norton 5 1: 1447; emphasis added). This reference to another time (‘Heaven’s own’ and not human) and another revelation (‘a new truth […] revealed’) shows the value of faith, hope and love in practical life as the powers building up better relations among individuals and thus giving a different purpose to human history than the Christian myth of the Apocalypse.

Although Nathaniel Hawthorne set both his longer and shorter literary productions in specific time-frames and actual locations, and sometimes peopled them with historic personages, he was careful to disavow any pretension therein to factuality or historicity. Rather, in his great ‘romances,’ and in his introductions to them, Hawthorne presents an American alternative to the paradigm of the ‘realist’ European novelists like Balzac, Stendhal, and Flaubert, whose ‘fictions’ aimed at the positivist goal of describing (perhaps even explaining) individuals as the product of historical, cultural, economic, social, and environmental forces and conditions. These European novels had as aesthetic criterions the question of the plausibility or verisimilitude of the background constructed for each individual character, as well as the fidelity of the determined character of that individual to its conditioning in responding to new social, political, economic, cultural, or moral situations into which it was inserted, in a series of behaviorist lab experiments, by the novelist under review. Hawthorne’s ‘romance,’ on the other hand, presented the individual character not as the effect of external causes, but as a cause in itself, an autonomous consciousness capable through internal volition, life, power, of engulfing its environment and, through new subjective construction of its situation, of spontaneously changing its orbit, its trajectory, as it would have been predicted by observation of the external forces at work on that consciousness. In this ‘romance’ paradigm, the choices of the individual could not be predicted, determined, or changed by modulations in its external environment, but rather the nature of its perceived external environment could be altered, reconstructed—and the possibility or counterfactual situation constructed— by its subjective, contingent changing of its mind or consciousness.

Rather than experience’s happening to the subject of the romance, that subject happened to experience.

In his ‘Preface’ to The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Hawthorne articulates this distinction between ‘romance’ and ‘novel’ as follows: 100

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