Mardi Morillo

English 571T- Hawthorne

Final Paper

December 13, 2001

Colonizer/Colonized in the Space of Exile

In a traditional or, maybe, simplified model of post-colonialism, a Marxist dichotomy is erected where there is a dominant and a subordinate group vying for power. In such a Manichean framework, the two groups are distinct and mutually exclusive. There is simply the colonizer and the colonized. Without equivocation or ambiguity, power is finitely held. Thus, one cannot consider the dead, white, male author as a possible vessel for colonization. As a member of the dominant group, the colonizers—who have control over America—an author like Nathaniel Hawthorne cannot (in a strict sense) be colonized.

However, if we are to broaden the concept of colonization to mean the imposition of ideologies onto an individual, if colonization is any cultural imperative(s) that oppresses thought, behavior, or imagination, each imposition bearing an obligation for an individual to conform, then anyone, irregardless of his/her ostensive membership to any group, is subject to the possibility of colonization by dominating forces.

        Subsequently, if we are to institute this broader definition of colonization, Nathaniel Hawthorne can be discussed as a type of colonized artist. More precisely, he is that member of society who resides in Homi Bhabha’s notion of “liminal space.” It is a space of exile, between cultures, nationalities, identities. He is both colonizer and colonized. This “liminal space” is a space often occupied by the intellectual who is torn between many oppositions, yet recognizes few. It is space where one must arbitrate war and deconstruct binaries in order to successfully negotiate one’s own identity.

Hawthorne is an example of such an individual in space of exile, for he, like the intellectual, is also torn. He too is informed and impelled by several “oppositional” ideologies with the task to reconcile them through his art. So for his art, he chooses “romance”: a mode which centers on the mixing of the “realistic” conventions and “supernatural” or baroque elements. This fusion of disparate “realities” can be read as a fusion of Enlightenment thought and romantic thought. Moreover, this fusion can be understood as possible through the “fictive” historicization of the past and through the use of that part of American cultural memory imprinted with the Puritan conception of moderation.

        My claim that Hawthorne is both colonizer and colonized, therein occupying a space of exile and producing a deconstructive art that, in effect, is both colonizing and de-colonizing in order to “exorcise” the text of its binary oppositions is a critical statement that seeks to contribute to the recent small body of Hawthorne postcolonial criticism. In doing so, I also call to initiate a dialog with the seminal perspective brought to light in Manfred Mackenzie’s postcolonial reading of “Roger Malvin's Burial.” In the article Mackenzie asserts:

[…] by way of its immersion in the colonial past, Hawthorne's historical fiction transforms itself into a fiction of de colonization. Hawthorne so vividly remembers a nexus of abjection and martyrdom as to need comprehensively to re-present it—always with the purpose, I have argued, of relieving his contemporary moment of violence. (Mackenzie 470-471)

Integrating Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, as presented in Powers of Horror, which deals with the creation of boundaries around the site of identity to differentiate and define the self or the living body in its negation of the Other or the cadaver, Mackenzie reads Hawthorne through Kristeva, fashioning Hawthorne into a writer who writes on colonial history to perform a negation of the Other, his own cadaver of the historical specter of injustice. Well, to phrase my divergent opinion simply… yes and no.

The only problem with Mackenzie’s argument is that there is no problem. At its heart, it oversimplifies and de-problematizes the nature of colonial struggle by making Hawthorne as the psychoanalytic victim of his ancestors’ legacy, “exorcizing” his colonizing guilt through fictive sacrifice. Mackenzie’s central quote from Hawthorne deals with the Puritan ancestor:

“The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me. . . . He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their histories, and relate an incident of hard severity towards a woman of their sect. . . . His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him.” (Mackenzie 460)

Surely, there is an unwavering sensitivity toward the injustice and “persecuting spirit” of his forefathers. Indeed, this likely caused Hawthorne to write many “exorcising” figures and texts. Mackenzie, however, evades the most important statement in that passage as Hawthorne recognized that the ancestor “had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil.” This recognition does not support Mackenzie’s claim. Though it does not refute it, either, it does complicate and problematizes which, in some ways, is even more dangerous.

        One needs only to look at the text and examine Hawthorne’s representations, and the reader inevitably finds that there is no single, finite, simple representation of history. The figure of Endicott in “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” might fit as one of those “persecuting spirits” to be “exorcised,” but is it the same Endicott in “Endicott and the Red Cross” who seem the protagonist. What are we to make of the representation of the colonial? “Roger Malvin’s Burial” can likely be considered a de-colonizing text, but as Mackenzie points out even the attempt may be another kind of colonization through Hawthorne’s “nationalistic” spirit. Or one could certainly read a kind of support of British as colonizers in “My Kinsmen, Major Molineux” as Robin joins the laughter of the mob.

Thus, the representations of the past show that Hawthorne is never univocal. Always paradoxical, always ambiguous, always double in voice, Hawthorne writes to show that binary categories are not oppositions but compliments. This is what the ancestor has taught him. True, he has learned the problem of codified history and the “persecuting spirit” of colonizing. But the ancestor has taught him too that there is “both good and evil” in even the worst man. Every spirit is a duality, and in that interplay between “difference,” a synthesis must occur in order to locate a true identity. Therein, one finds the real Endicott, the real history, the real impact of colonization, the real self—multivocal, polysemous, and free from colonization, history, and external signification.    

The “Romance” as a Hybrid Space

        The space in which this synthesis is caused by the interplay between “difference” is the fictive mode of “romance.” I consciously call Hawthorne’s revisioning of “romance” a mode, for though there is a genre of nineteenth-century writing that shares similar components and the name of romance and there is a literary genre with antecedents that he is drawing from in Shakespeare, elements of romance in The Farrie Queen, and maybe even from Arthurian romance, Hawthorne is not so static in his conception of “romance.” His continual insistence on describing, and re-interpreting “romance” suggests an attempt to separate his work from that of the contemporary vogue, and maybe also from the constraints of generic conventions.

Hawthorne, in numerous texts discusses the qualities of “romance” but in the “Preface” of The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne seems chiefly interested in describing the space of the literary mode:

When a writer calls his work a romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The former--while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart--has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation. (Hawthorne n. Pag)

Hawthorne separates “romance” and novel. The romance offers “a certain latitude” of style and subject for the author. The novel is bound by certain conventions of “realism” obligating the author to sustain, in Hawthorne’s words a “very minute fidelity” toward the possible and the probable mundane. The novel is a genre, thus dictating certain rules and constrains, it, “must rigidly subject itself to laws.” Subsequently, genre moves art away, “from the truth of the human heart.”

        So it is in “romance” that an author may be freed to fully express both the “illogical” truth of emotion versus the “logic” truth of rational thought. Thus, the “romance” is a mode where traditions of Enlightenment and romantic thought meet in a single text. The recreation of the dream world as a real world becomes an important key to his romantic/artistic vision. Toward a definition of “romance,” Hawthorne states, in the introductory chapter of The Scarlet Letter, that “if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances” (Hawthorne, SL 36). To make strange dreams “look like truth” is a powerful synthesis of the “real” and the “imagined,” or the rational and the romantic. The mimetic mode is not initiated with the imitation of observable reality, but instead Hawthorne hopes to imitate the imaginative reality of the unconscious of dreams.

This capturing of dream states was a common romantic conceit in the contemporary literature. However, with his vaulting ambition as an artist, Hawthorne, as always, strives for more than with his counterparts have done. Rita Gollin claims that,

“Never did he intend to write the kind of dream that filled contemporary magazines—the romantic idyl, or the bizarre nightmare. His purpose was to capture the intractable and unpredictable experience of real dreams, experience at once intimate and universal, yet never fully understood.” (Gollin 1)   

Unlike other romantics, he did not to simply write fiction that was baroque. Poe, for example, wrote tales to raise the passions of his reader to produce an affect or to force meditation on the nature of supernal Beauty. So the “real” becomes immaterial to Poe. His tales are filled abstractions and artifice, and there is no compulsion to make strange dreams “look like truth.” Hawthorne cannot simply be baroque, for to do so would deny the efficacy of the “real.” Thus, his call to make dreams resemble truth is a call to synthesize the conscious and unconscious realities through “romance.”

The combination of the conscious and unconscious is analogous to another feature of Hawthorne’s “romance.” This feature is the interplay of the ideal with the real.  R. K. Gupta states that “In art Hawthorne did not look for a slavish imitation of nature […] ‘something that may stand instead of and suggest the truth’” (Gupta 312). Once again the mimetic imperative is not to “slavish[ly]” imitate conventional, empirical reality, but to reveal and “substitute” another reality, perhaps an ideal world of form that “suggests truth.” With a similar conclusion Gupta proceeds, saying:

“What the artist substitutes for nature (external reality) is imaginative or spiritual reality. Hawthorne believed that in art the process of idealization was not only legitimate but absolutely indispensable. Without idealization, he felt, there could be no art.” (Gupta 312)

Art, then, is dependent on the very existence of idealization. Furthermore, the power of idealization/imagination is to open up new mimetic spaces dismissed or subordinated by a realistic representation that is only “slavish imitation of [observable] nature.” These new mimetic spaces creatively crafted in the imagination can in their “fictive” nature locate truths that realism is inherently blind to:

The world of art and the world of reality are closely related but not identical, nor is the former a mere copy of the latter. This is not to say that art distorts reality or presents it in a garbled form. In fact, idealized or spiritual reality is not less but more real than material reality: the ‘poet’s ideal’ is the ‘truest truth.’” (Gupta 312)

This passage uncovers the neo-Platonic dimension of Hawthorne that greatly values the ideal. This is indeed another feature in common with many romantics, and shows again Hawthorne’s attempt to incorporate the corporeal reality with, perhaps, an “ethereal” reality.

Hegemony: Cultural War or Hybrid Culture?

Hawthorne’s literary project to deconstruct and problematize binary oppositions through an artistic synthesis is a reaction to his status of exile. He is both colonizer and colonized and therein he also is neither of the two.  And the process of colonization breeds the problem of cultural imperialism. The subordinate culture becomes in danger of diffusion, subordination, and erasure. One could say that a war of vision begins. The colonized and the colonizers struggle to dictate what the paradigm of envisioning shall be—what the culture shall be. The victors and the victims are at first ostensibly clear. However, as the cultural critic Antonio Gramsci asserts, this war of vision is a fluid fight for hegemony. Cultural war is one of flux, and the losers of the war, with the necessary conditions, can successfully supplant or integrate their vision into that of the power structure.

So in such a war for vision, how can we read the exiled texts of Hawthorne? Are they de-colonizing, as Mackenzie partially argues? Firstly, they must be read as texts in exile. Thus, the artist of the works is both colonizing and de-colonizing, and appears to have a problem with this disjunctive nature. To hold two opposing ideas as, both, true in one’s mind is to suffer a cognitive dissonance. Subsequently, possibly the best way to read “The Artist of the Beautiful” is as the presentation of the exiled artist’s cognitive dissonance within artistic vision.

Danforth is the colonizer. As a wielder of power is often gendered as male, he too is highly gendered as “male”—muscular, powerful, with “main strength,” producing “a labor upon reality.” He is the man in control and he dominates. He is a man who possesses the land in that he possesses Annie. And he is the very epitome of a creative man, his production as a blacksmith is one of clear material utility. And his production as a husband of a healthy son successfully affirms his masculine prowess. Almost a parody that anticipates Marx’s empowerment of the proletariat, the narrator says:

“Moving about in this red glare and alternate dusk was the figure of the blacksmith, well worthy to be viewed in so picturesque an aspect of light and shade, where the bright blaze struggled with the black night.” (Hawthorne n. Pag)

This is a remarkably bold imaging of Danforth that seems almost torn from the pages of twentieth-century Communist propaganda. The language is without ambiguity, clearly succinctly expresses a masculine paradigm. It is an idealized, if not stereotypical image of “maleness,” and thereby is also an idealized representation of power, domination, and colonial oppression.  

Owen is the epitome of the colonized subject. As the subjugated are often “feminized,” Owen is highly gendered as “female” as he is often described as “delicate,” diminutive, and physically weak. Moreover, he is an artist of the beautiful—an embodiment of a creative woman. The art of beauty serves no purpose in the material world. It is fruitless. He cannot make a profit with beauty. He cannot offer the colony anything. Thus, he has no power, and cannot hold the land; he cannot win Annie.

So he is a colonized artist, in that he is an artist that is caught by the demands and subject to pressures of the society that surrounds him. The dominant culture continually attempts to impose a cultural vision of utility and “reality” upon Owen. However, Owen possesses a different vision. It is an individual vision shaped by the memory of childhood in which he had found “the love of the beautiful.” Thus, within Warland’s mind there seems always the harsh dissonance of life that he must render tuneful. Though he longs to live a life so singularly devoted to the creation of the beautiful, he learns that he can not survive without having “common sense” and submitting to the dominant cultural vision. Secondly, he longs for the acceptance and appreciation of that dominant culture to validate him to realize his pursuit. What he finds is that in the creation of the beautiful, “his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality.” Owen frees himself from the dominant cultural vision (possibly analogous to Wakefield) by removing himself from the desire to be included in that vision.  

Certainly the very construction of Owen’s name war-land points to the problem of cognitive dissonance if not explicitly a colonial model, then in an abstract struggle between the individual and his/her society. It is a war of ideologies in the land of the mind and in the community. The tale sets up the binary opposition of Owen and Danforth, or Owen versus Hovenden, Danforth, and Annie, thus, what seems also drawn is a war between romantic and Enlightenment thought. Newberry comments saying “Hovenden, Danforth, and Annie all subscribe to a version of worldmaking articulated by eighteenth-century rationalists” (Newberry 85). The practicality of Hovenden, the utility of Danforth, and the empiricism of Annie, “these signs-of-the-time distill into an alternative to Owen’s understanding of what constitutes reality seen and unseen,” (Newberry 86). Thus clear lines are drawn, opposites exist in the text; thus, the “real” art of Danforth ends up destroying Warland’s art of “imagination” because they are mutually exclusive. The problem with the text is that it is a war, and the problem with victory is the figure of Annie, for Annie is not Hester Pyrne.

The Scarlet Letter can be abstracted into this story of a colonized artist. In which two of the main characters are representative of oppositional ideologies imposed upon the other main character Hester who must find a balance of each ideology to reconcile and synthesize them in order to function. Chillingworth and Dimmesdale might even be characterized as an outward manifestation of the artist’s cognitive dissonance, and Hester might be read as the space of neutrality/ambiguity/synthesis/balance and thus the resolution of dissonance—the deconstruction of binary oppositions.

Like “Artist,” The Scarlet Letter constructs a binary opposition. Chillingworth described in colors of black and reds. He represents the highly rational, empirical, the “head. Thus, he is a “masculine” figure that constructs order and dominates the subordinate (Dimmesdale) in the text. His single-sided focus on the mind is an imbalance. As Marvin Laser comments:

Chillingworth, the learned physician, is gifted with keenness of intellect and an excess of will but becomes a man without heart (hence his insatiable lust for revenge and his destruction of himself as well as of Dimmesdale). (Laser 135)

So, this imbalance is the means to his eventual destruction.

Likewise, Laser point out a similar imbalance, inversely in Dimmesdale.

Dimmesdale, the scholar-priest, is likewise highly developed in intellect; in contrast to Chillingworth, however, the roles of heart and will are reversed; for he is extreme in development of sensibility (hence both his original illicit passion for Hester and his subsequent intense suffering as a tainted pastor), but he is completely lacking in volition” (Laser 135-36).

Dimmesdale described in white and black colors, he is “feminine,” too emotional, too passionate, too much “heart.” He, like Chillingworth, finds his downfall because of his imbalance.

Hester, however is described in grays (scarlet and gold), and she is ambiguous in gender role. In thought she is perhaps both romantic/realistic. In the forest scene she is highly passionate, but in the first scaffold scene she is very rational. According to Laser:

Hester, herself, reveals a more involved form of imbalance, complicated by her role as outcast. Initially she is portrayed as rich in passion (an extreme of heart), strong in will, but lacking in a disciplined intellection. She had “a mind of native courage and activity,” Hawthorne says, but “had habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance in a moral wilderness… Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places…” (Laser 136)

Though Laser is not exactly wrong, he misread Hester. Being in a space of exile she is torn between disparate ideological voices, perhaps Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, and must resolve them. And I believe she does through her “will” and untamed intellect. She is not so caught in passion that she has no will, yet she is not so caught in intellect that she is oppressive. She is the Puritain “middle way.” She is as the ancestor was “both good and bad.” And through this ambiguity and paradox that Laser calls, “imbalance,” she is a self—multivocal, polysemous, and free from colonization, history, and external signification. She is the one to signify her scarlet letter at the end, leaving it on, though the colonizers do not want to signify her with it. By then, she is, as Hawthorne is, her own author.