Starting a dialogue with “romance” at and from Chapter 6 of The House of the Seven Gables

“While we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it.”

the daguerreotypist {this is the 33rd usage out of 107 of the word “character” in The House of the Seven Gables}[1]

“I want my happiness!” at last he murmured hoarsely and indistinctly, hardly shaping out the words. “Many, many years have I waited for it! It is late! It is late! I want my happiness!”

Clifford …[2]

“There appeared to be qualities in Holgrave, such as, in a country where everything is free to the hand that can grasp it, could hardly fail to put some of the world’s prizes within his reach. But these matters are delightfully uncertain.”[3]

“The Judge’s face, indeed, rigid and singularly white, refuses to melt into this universal solvent. Fainter and fainter grows the light. It is as if another double-handful of darkness had been scattered through the air. Now it is no longer gray, but sable.”[4]

I have come to this essay via a strange route.

I am writing a book on poets who have affected and influenced me and I was starting preliminary work on my Walt Whitman chapter when I went to the bookshelves to find a particular work and emerged instead with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables. I read the first few chapters wondering if and when I had read it before (likely, but not certain), and slowly got caught up. Then I came across a particular form of key change in parenthesis that prompted thinking about a number of ways of reading the text and the implications of such readings.

So, though the specific, topical connections are scanty with Whitman, I also started thinking about Whitman visiting Emerson’s grave (such intense desiring), and about sharp tangents to Transcendentalism in prosody and fiction. And with the anticolonial theme of my book and the sense always that maps are claims I will refute, and deeds documents I will contest, I engaged in a dialogue with the text as I moved through it from that point (with interpolations as I went back in my text here and there).

The idea of brackets, scare quotes and footnotes as asides are a mimesis of the rhetoric Hawthorne uses to pretend this most novels of novels is otherwise.

This is not a research essay, not a set of facts, but a dialogue and contestation. Its performativity carries its own subset of anxieties.

There is no escaping dissembling and anxiety in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851). In this self-styled “romance” that is a novel in the truest most manipulative sense of a “genre”, a critique of a specific place across time with specific emphasis on wrongs of dispossession, possession and property is diluted by the evasiveness of purpose.[5] Hawthorne created a politics of equivocation while appearing not to do so, and of appropriation while refuting it. Within the parentheses of his narrative stylistics and cautious/wary articulation of his own moral code/seeing, he hid in public review his own polysituating polymorphous perversity.

If anxiety is lacking in the “urchin” consuming “Jim Crow” gingerbread[6] in The House of the Seven Gables, it is certainly present in the use of parenthesis in Chapter 6. Here we read:

The evil of these departed years would have naturally sprung up again, in such rank weeds (symbolic of the transmitted vices of society) as are always prone to root themselves about human dwellings.[7]

Hawthorne wants to insist what is already abundantly evident[8]. And he wants to emphasise both the essential nature of “the symbol” and its evasiveness (in the way vice is evasive and even often hard to define yet also to be challenged, contested and if necessary — a vague adjective — rooted out). He wants the symbol to echo and be rammed home upon the reader’s sensibility. If the Puritan vs witch-wizard undercurrent, the moral and criminal wrong of religious persecution amplified through the greed for property (stolen country in its essence, and stolen within the diegesis of the storylining) is omnipresent in this novel, Hawthorne also wants us to know it is supra-evident in his own thinking and worldview.

If there is irony in his use of the parenthesis as their clearly is in his gothic positionality of characters within the house, it also carries an anxiety around his own purpose — his willingness to confront a New England heritage but at the same time reassure his contemporary readers of his own ethical awareness and moral range (from irony to judgement). And if we are to find any form of redemption for past wrongs and injustices within the diegesis, within Hawthorne’s particular framework (which will surely not see justices for dispossessed “Indians”), it comes via the “relieved” non-parenthesised “however” of the narrative flow.

The very next sentence reveals the un-Richard II garden (here, my parenthesis enclose Act 3, scene IV, and part of the Gardener’s verse: “Go thou, and like an executioner,/ Cut off the heads of too fast growing sprays,/ That look too lofty in our commonwealth:/ All must be even in our government.”[9]):

Phœbe saw, however, that their growth must have been checked by a degree of careful labour, bestowed daily and systematically on the garden.

[And we will learn this gardening in the black old earth has been done by the (young, male … suitable on a second glance but complicating the familial degenerative purity of the immediate picture … we already expect a catharsis from such a lightly but emphatically daubed scene, don’t we?)[10] daguerreotypist (wizardry!) who lives in part of the house under another gable, and who claims to “make pictures out of sunshine” … a mimesis of black and white that will or won’t reveal truths, only “likenesses” … but modernity will demand more, no doubt … ][11]

This non-vice of an idealised (possible) social structure also imitates (if not mirrors) the ideal writer’s template: to write daily and systemically (Hawthorne had his strict seasonal writing regimes[12]). This of course is subsumed by the indulgent levity of the omniscient narratorial voice, by the faux attenuation of judgement of a player such as Phœbe, and the positioning of her within the web (which, among the murkiness, has that New England female “golden thread”).

Tone modulation is everything in such narration, reliant as it is on description but always declining to “moral” approbation or criticism, and Hawthorne (attempts to) skilfully operates on us through this device. This tonality is pumped up to equate ‘the race had degenerated’ and the residues of moral corruption that flow through the Pyncheon family with the forlorn chickens in the small garden, whose crests Hawthorne delights in having Phœbe align (“to the poignant distress of her conscience”)[13] with cousin Hepzibah’s turban.

The house itself is an overwriting of the land, and the remnant garden is both an exemplar of the “old” earth and also the intervention of Puritan settlerdom — brought back to health might signify rectification, but its cultivation and landscaping is still part of a dispossession of habitat and a more ancient local dwelling.

There can be no good governance over such gardens, only threads of remediation. I doubt Hawthorne would have extended the metaphor this far, but what is written is not all that was thought behind the act of writing, of making moral interjection. Brackets are also a mirror: () … as is the rank water of Maule’s well. And as the old and damaged feeds on the song of Phœbe, the garden breaks out of its enclosure and reaches into the house:

She possessed the gift of song, and that, too, so naturally, that you would as little think of inquiring whence she had caught it, or what master had taught her, as of asking the same questions about a bird, in whose small strain of music we recognize the voice of the Creator as distinctly as in the loudest accents of his thunder. So long as Phœbe sang, she might stray at her own will about the house. Clifford was content, whether the sweet, airy homeliness of her tones came down from the upper chambers, or along the passageway from the shop, or was sprinkled through the foliage of the pear-tree, inward from the garden, with the twinkling sunbeams.[14]

Phœbe makes sad songs happy. She turns the parenthesis inside out. Clifford’s obsessional need for “beauty” is exemplified by the domestic “packaging” of Phœbe as rejuvenator — his imprisonment has “frozen” his sensibility into a binary of the corrupted and the beautiful. He represents the status quo in the family of thirty years prior, and even further back, while she is redemption.

This aesthetics exists outside the brackets but is restrained by the reiteration of moral gravitas in that singular statement — yes, moral examination is on almost every page of the book, but the mirror-enclosure paradox of “(symbolic of the transmitted vices of society)” enforces the reading and straitjackets the tone (which is not as modulated as it at first might seem). Can the house that was never a true “home” be sanctified into being a “home”? As occupied country, as “Indian” land, I would say not, but Hawthorne intimates it might, certainly by the time we’ve digested “Chapter 9: Clifford and Phœbe”.

Yet maybe the lines that should be emphasised as an anxiety of the author, that sidestep his sweetly-strung irony, are these, which indict as much as celebrate:

All her little womanly ways, budding out of her like blossoms on a young fruit-tree, had their effect on him, and sometimes caused his very heart to tingle with the keenest thrills of pleasure.[15]

Hawthorne sees the problems of his gardening (where a garden has been lopped, put under pressure, and “neglected”) but also indulges them. “Actual facts” are an issue of this work and echo even as it unfolds into its “middle eight”. If Clifford reads Phœbe as a “verse of household poetry” (the light, pretty unpolluted body as the vector for “versifying”)[16] this also enfolds the prison, the poem, and the author’s aspiration to poetry. His prose almost reeks of a struggle with prose as poetry, a search for a prosody of disentanglement with the heritage wrongs that make him who he is and compel him to write methodically, obsessively.

And how did Phœbe regard Clifford? The girl’s was not one of those natures which are most attracted by what is strange and exceptional in human character.

Is this anti-poetry or public forum politic, the hardened poetry of Roman politics even? Or a scientific practicality? A domestic pragmatism. In parenthesis, the failure of poetry to be one thing … it won’t parse. The garden needs tending or its romance is consumed by weeds, by competing plants (of course, that is the problem-thinking behind gardens!):

Yet, it must be said, her petals sometimes drooped a little, in consequence of the heavy atmosphere about her. She grew more thoughtful than heretofore.

The failing garden is also a garden of deeper contemplation, of wariness and also susceptibility. The garden parenthesised by house, fences, streets, neighbours, is the paradox.[17] And as we submerge into chapter 10 and Clifford in the revamped summerhouse, we hear that sensibility is awakened by the rhymes and rhythms of poetry (being read to him by Phœbe, whose interest is more in fact and maybe policy!), but especially so by the flowers of the reinvigorated garden: “This affection and sympathy for flowers is almost exclusively a woman’s trait.” … with males losing it early though Clifford’s loss of life in prison sparking a re-awakening across the gap.

One wonders if this line urged itself towards parenthesis, or, if evading such emphasis through enclosure, Hawthorne knows that to say this is a complete fallacy in any era (and this novel stretches across 160-plus years). And in the conflation of symbols gardens allow, we have “wizard bees” and beans still fertile after forty years in a chest up in a gable, and hummingbirds that are the period under the stroke of an exclamation mark, a recollection of origins of a thwarted but rejuvenating aesthetics (for Clifford … for the narrator?)![18]

The garden is becoming a place of transformation, conversion, adjustment and potential “reconciliation” or reconciling in this “kind of Indian Summer”.[19] Maybe edging towards parenthesis (going on the earlier cited usage)? It is, however, opening declared to be the “Eden of a thunder-smitten Adam”. Chickens are freed, but bound by their symbolism (we are told they are symbols … and told by guess who at that[20]), their literary fate, their role in the plot’s riddling. And if we look for an anxiety that inflects a guilt of dispossession (guilt does not restore stolen land), we are countered with the narrator’s urge to explain his system.

Even the reflections of Maule’s well are countered:

The truth was, however, that his fancy — reviving faster than his will and judgment, and always stronger than they — created shapes of loveliness that were symbolic of his native character, and now and then a stern and dreadful shape that typified his fate.

But the overstatement, we suspect, might hide a truism or even truth as well. To state the obvious might well be a distraction to appease a public unwilling to accept a renunciation of property, to lull them into reception. Gently and affectionately “mocked” (of course, he is not in reality) as Uncle Venner might be, we get to something well beyond symbolism in his declaration: “It does seem to me that men make a wonderful mistake in trying to heap up property upon property.” The daguerreotypist-artist-scientist-philosopher-wizard tells us this is innocently (essentially) Fourier-like[21] … but this is after Phœbe has asserted: “But for this short life of ours, one would like a house and a moderate garden-spot of one’s own”, which places all her sweetness and “little housewife” into its true pragmatics, into its wider consumer appeal. And as we are directed in our thinking, right to the core of the consequence of having a large chunk of life excised through imprisonment (between the square, round and curly brackets of prison) — “Clifford was indeed the most inveterate of conservatives” — we learn that progress is a concept of familiarity, and that even the scissor-grinder’s wheel under the Seven Gables elm tree and its “hiss as fierce as those emitted by Satan and his compeers in Pandemonium” are acceptable because of childhood familiarity, whereas the railway is horrifying.

This spatial-temporal relativity shifts the ground on how questionable we are supposed to think the crime of occupation (of land) actually is, making the text more compliant to Pilgrim possession than the overall emphasis might imply. We view the world aesthetically through the eyes of Clifford (by degrees of separation) allowing a retrograde “take” but also a displaced through time one — still of the same place — but apparently a different one. The performing monkey is ugly, but the Italian[22] organ-grinder makes beautiful if illusory and ultimately empty sounds. The street is a constricted panopticon in which the unfamiliar is threatening, though it is familiarised to residents living in their now, and not the delayed, stymied now of Clifford. If chapter 11’s “Arched Window” becomes a performance space under which Thanatos vies with real events (external world in real time) — under which a church-congregation’s[23] potential affirmation (spiritual-social) is abruptly arrested before brother and sister have even left the house and decays into ghostliness, under which freshness is valorised but underwritten by decay, and Clifford’s soap bubbles descend to be broken by the judge, his nemesis — so we perform the role of a reader to escape the aesthetic limitations of an eternal childhood. The disruptor of the aesthetic is inevitably “the daguerreotypist”, who, as the adventurer “artist” resolves knowledge as process of self-learning and opportunism in which his photographic art is temporary at best (though his analysis of the human condition boundless).

Aesthetics are about control for someone who is restless, but also deeply placed in the certainty of their own “identity”. Clifford doesn’t know (say, the specific details of his early life), but knows experentiality in detail. So his character, “opposite” to Phœbe’s, fits the aesthetic/antiaesthetic jigsaw puzzle of Hawthorne’s educating of society — that is, the author’s moral purpose. Qua the refreshing of the wells that have been corrupted (into the artesian purity of Clifford’s eye-wells).

To match Phœbe’s regenerative spirit, we have the de rigueur masculinised “progress”:

It seemed to Holgrave, — as doubtless it has seemed to the hopeful of every century since the epoch of Adam’s grandchildren, — that in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to begin anew.

The struggle in/of the garden is not only one between good and evil, but of how to balance a progressive aesthetics to redefine a suspect past.[24] Hawthorne immediately addresses this mundane egoistic assertation by talking of things “gradually renewing themselves by patchwork”, but he doesn’t condemn the materialism of the progress. In fact, he lauds it. The fact that the artist had read little but is a “thinker” is part of an eruptive everyman–new-man view of American ascendancy, indulgent of the vision of an expansive intellectual, material and spiritual future. This is the energy of a Whitman. This is an address to the entitled by creating new forms of entitlement (which we sense will be validated at some point via the obvious synching with Phœbe — the fresh heirlooming) which thrive in contradiction, which reconcile paradoxes to create “positive” denialism.[25]

As the artist wants to grub out the “planted” family, this reader of few books who writes stories, narrates a tale. The mise en abyme is inflected through the nook of the garden. The daguerreotype contains the positive and negative in itself, and mirrors the way of looking/viewing. The polishing of the household silver (or washing ancient tea cups), the mirror(ing) of the photographic plate. We see as we look, we hear as we listen.

Gardens are rarely ever silent. And remember (mantra … a foreshadowing) … that it’s the daguerreotypist, the artist, the Holgrave who diminishes Scipio the black servant to the house thirty-seven years after the Colonel’s death in the tale of Alice Pyncheon … who is made to perform his dialectical role in the tale of whiteness — both the wronging whiteness to whiteness, and the wronged whiteness by whiteness.

Remember the rendering of colloquial speech by the narrator years after the events which he was not present at, imagining the voice of the servant, the subservience.

Remember this is all predicated through the brackets enclosing social direction, in performing the role of Jim Crow in the urchin’s mouth. Maule the carpenter whose ancestor was the executed Maule whose land the Colonel “acquired” speaks with familiar (pseudo) friendliness to the servant to show a tolerance arising from being outside the Puritan ascendancy:

“Well, well, friend Scipio; let your master know that I’m coming,” said the carpenter with a laugh.

And to position this familiarity, the story within a story turns on this:

“No matter, darky,” said the carpenter. “Do you think nobody is to look black but yourself?

[And in this we have objection and delight in the subservient role of the black servant at once … we have the turn which allows the wrongs of subjection and a bizarre relishing of it to take place simultaneously … a foreshadowing in so many ways …] And the story within a story forces a role within a role, an articulation of that racist trope of put down on behalf of the master class: ““He talk of Mistress Alice!” cried Scipio, as he returned from his errand. “The low carpenter-man! He no business so much as to look at her a great way off!”“ This displacement is an anxiety of benefiting from the fruits of the garden “commonwealth” whilst renouncing inequality through slippage, and not directly, not in its essence.[26]

Holgraves “adoption” of the overall narrator’s tone of sarcasm (towards brute Puritan utility) does not free him or, indeed, Hawthorne himself from these subtexts. A serious intervention into the social mores of his own inheritance is imprisoned within the brackets of manners of acceptance. Of retirement. This is not (for me) what a writer’s life should be! A quietism underwrites even the most vociferous lines of The House of the Seven Gables. And in the manner of Maule’s ghost demanding the rent be paid or the house reverted, the ghosting of an older custodianship of land, if not intimated, is deep in “footnotes”.

In Chapter 6: Maule’s Well, we read this:

Hepzibah’s form, though its sable outline mingled with the dusk, was now less imperfectly visible …

and in Chapter 13: Alice Pyncheon we have the polyadic of maid, slave, and exoticised lady:

Now and then a maid-servant, neatly dressed, and now the shining sable face of a slave[27], might be seen bustling across the windows, in the lower part of the house. At an open window of a room in the second story, hanging over some pots of beautiful and delicate flowers, — exotics, but which had never known a more genial sunshine than that of the New England autumn, — was the figure of a young lady, an exotic[28], like the flowers, and beautiful and delicate as they.

The garden in the house, the shadowing juxtaposition of the slave as contrast, and the inheritance of Hepzibah. Hepzibah, in the rot of heritage, is associated with the enslaved. This imagistic elision says more about Hawthorne’s parenthesised (re: society) values than we might expect as we glissade across the romance.

The next line in the book brings Hawthorne’s anti-Puritan spell-throwing into focus (and contrast):

Her presence imparted an indescribable grace and faint witchery to the whole edifice.

There is a fusion in this. And the aggrieved Maule grandson carpenter discusses land as a holding, which is almost feudal: “grandson of the rightful proprietor of the soil”. In this are definitions of America as Jus soli, which are an inheritance of English Common Law. Revolution (later) as separation but not from capitalism per se but rather from who possesses, controls and apportions the capital and land. It’s in the ‘Alice Pyncheon’ tale within a tale that this parenthesising reaches an absolutely frenzy that breaks the bounds of social propriety and becomes sexual manipulation.

An issue of control (and lack of it) underwrites the entire novel, and desire is entangled with oppression. Class boundaries are crossed by Maule (grandson of the Old Maule, son of the carpenter-builder of the house, and carpenter himself) and vengeance obtained through controlling Alice by having her behave inappropriately in social settings (laughing, crying, dancing in a frenzy) in a master-slave abusive relationship justified as punishment for haughtiness, inherited culpability and sexual anger (sublimated). This chapter contains seven uses of parenthesis that guide us through the tale and act as commentary on aspects of control. The social contract has been broken and the inherent anxiety (of Hawthorne) results from stepping outside the social norms through the mock-romance of gothicisation. If the anxieties of the “New World” vs “Old World” are in full play, especially around land, manners and inheritance, so too are those polyvalently inflected through the sexualising of possession. A sado-masochistic construct absorbs the abuses of capital, even offsetting the desire for the deed/evidence of greater wealth[29]. The basic selling of the soul (not of one’s self, but rather Euro-Pyncheon’s sale of his daughter’s soul to the grandson wizard Maule) is lifted from its fireside origins (as indicated in the tale[30]) to become a polysituating pivot within the greater fabric of Hawthorne’s tale.

I strongly believe that rather than redress Puritan wrongs, Hawthorne is driven by a need to examine the nature of witchcraft in the context of property, driven by an innate awareness in all things of Native American dispossession (and the anxiety some Western-style deed of confirmation of the theft will surface in conjunction with spiritual judgement), and that he writes enabled by slavery: of African American people and of women as a whole.

And at the end of the tale within a tale, we see a parenthesis that in marking further loss of control seems to mark a return of control to Alice (who is about to die and be re-purified in the process) — “(but not her own; for, so lost from self-control, she would have deemed it sin to marry)” — when, in fact, we are seeing the perpetuation of the parenthetic control anxiety that set this essay in motion … that is, a social more is being observed even under great duress and Alice knows how to behave within the social rubric (patriarchal, white, Euro-centric even if displaced through New World sensibilities), and is steadfast in the “essential” way. And if we think the opening of chapter 14 will dispel the “accusations” made above, then the fact that Holgrave (Maule’s descendent, remember) finds his tale-telling and personal mesmerism has induced drowsiness and opened a path to possession of Phœbe (in her virginal innocence and vulnerability) we are offered a New Man assurance that, though conscious of the power, this American also recognises the intactness and agency of the individual, and that he overcomes the temptation to seduce/control her[31]:

Let us, therefore, — whatever his defects of nature and education, and in spite of his scorn for creeds and institutions, — concede to the daguerreotypist the rare and high quality of reverence for another’s individuality. Let us allow him integrity, also, forever after to be confided in; since he forbade himself to twine that one link more which might have rendered his spell over Phœbe indissoluble.[32]

If this is both the moral and conceptual turning point of the book — a shedding of heritage-overhang that compels behaviours (a myth of the blood) — then it is also an attempt to rework sexual power structures. In the moonlight, the moon goddess is ironically more secure, having giving her sunlight to Hepzibah and Clifford, and is now part of the reproductive machinery of imagery.[33] As an explainer of what he’s doing, it seems Hawthorne suffered anxiety over reception, over how the work might be interpreted. Earlier, I alluded to the window arch as a theatre, then we have Phœbe herself describe the house as a theatre: “You talk as if this old house were a theatre”. We worked this out already, and yet with need the sympathetic character of Phœbe to affirm what we know.[34] The same with the laboured image and symbol (the word is manifest by now) of the garden itself (where she and Clifford are speaking): the conventions of genre have their own markers, and any departures from genre need signposting to help us on our moral journey. Transcendental pedagogy without the (occasional!) subtlety. Our “(symbolic of the transmitted vices of society)” is under such pressure and tension now it is fracturing into the flowers of characters as symbols.

Doubt might enter the critique if we take a parenthetic narratorial interlude (spoken on behalf of the reader, of “us all”) when, in discussing the Judge’s character, we come across: “Nor (we must do him the further justice to say) did Judge Pyncheon himself …” because of the obvious irony/sarcasm yoked with a perverse reasonableness of the statement for someone who we yet don’t completely know (in all their obvious corruption — after all, subsequent sentences will architecturalise the sweet-odour mansion built on the decaying corpse). And doubt is reasonable, but it would seem also a distraction from the manipulation of contents of the bracket enclosure which is designed to manipulate while exonerating the narrator through constant deployment. We well might ask in the face (omo dei) of this doubt if our “(symbolic of the transmitted vices of society)” is in fact just narratorial irony, but to do so would also be a potential denial of any critique of society itself, and, further, to question the underpinning notion that responsibility persists across generations. And if this is so, surely Hawthorne’s position is actually so glib and bleak that it is abusive: wrong has been done and we wear no culpability.

This does not seem possible. There is a sense of invasive wrong being addressed in the novel, but “the text” evades taking full responsibility for that wrong, for articulating the nature of the (mass) murder. Or is Hawthorne activist on many levels rather than one (that of obvious corruption and social wrong-doing hypocritically covered up and benefited from because it serves society to allow such travesties). This would seem to be the case when we come to:

We might say (without in the least imputing crime to a personage of his eminent respectability) that there was enough of splendid rubbish in his life to cover up and paralyze a more active and subtile conscience than the Judge was ever troubled with.

Here, parenthesis is reinforcement of the narratorial sarcasm and disdain: we are directed forcefully. But this is also distraction from sins even deeper: dispossession, enslavement and exploitation on levels beyond epiphany within the field offered by the book. And that is my issue with the whole. In the heaping irony of the Judge’s long list of social virtues that follow, we expect, more and more, the ugliest of falls. If wrong he has done in the past, then no amount of social approbated deeds can wash clean the stain. Loss of property, however, might be one redress.

This doubling down of irony within the colonial undercurrents (and overt presences) of the “property” (dispossession) and how it is maintained (slavery and social inequity) is the ultimate distraction from cause and effect. Hawthorne liked the security of houses! And gardens! That the Judge is pursuing information from Clifford that will further enrich himself, that this money connects with secretive European investments which connect Old and New World is part of a fatalism of capital that is judged harshly but nonetheless still maintained.

This “confusion” of righteousness and just behaviour also underpins something like Thoreau’s own privilege of presence while lamenting the “fate” and oppression of Native Americans (as individuals and/or social groups and/or custodian-owners of land) or, rather, the complicating issue of prior presence/s. Hawthorne critiques, but only within the limits of his own settler socio-geographics. If we reach crisis point and a form of denouement (with aftershocks to come, we are sure) in Chapter 16 — Clifford’s Chamber, with the demise of the Judge and the spectral release and ghostly rejuvenation of Clifford (enough to have him compel Hepzibah and himself to leave/vacate/escape the house) — we also have a spatial-fantastical turning out of the hidden into the public eye, the exploding of the private into the public. This happens in Hepzibah’s frightened imagination of the outside world and the place being surrounded by water (the wharves, the storm etc) and the risk of Clifford drowning himself out of “lunacy” brought on by the ugliness of the public gaze/vilification, set against the Judge’s earlier declaration (in his chapter) that neighbours, vendors, customers … the world … have been surveilling the house and its occupants for him … that the performance space of the arched window has in fact been that with an aware and informed audience … even in Chapter 16 Hepzibah opening a “disused” door (tearing a membrane of web, making direct contact, subverting the barrier as medium) to enter the artist’s rooms under their gable to see a (psychically destructive) daguerreotype of the Judge (who is actually seated in the death chair under the portrait of the Colonel in the parlour… behind another door, just as Clifford is not behind his door… all those “crazy” doors!) but find the artist absent and at his public rooms (his omniscience informs us) … all the modes of interiority and exteriority, of the hidden and exposed, of the representational and the fantastical, private and public are revealed. Even the garden in its stormy drabness is revealed and the grimalkin driven out by a window stick hurled down by Hepzibah. The self-incarcerated and the societally incarcerated flee together into the threatening openness which is, ironically, inhibited by the rain/inclement weather, thereby limiting surveillance!

There is in Clifford a child-adult crisis of behaviour, also represented by frenzy in similar way to his ancestor Alice’s frenzies of possession. Taboos are broken by this, and taboos are also imposed/created. In an anxiety of behavioural propriety that Hawthorne wishes to break but also feels held back by, he “confuses” us:

As they proceeded on their strange expedition, she now and then cast a look sidelong at Clifford, and could not but observe that he was possessed and swayed by a powerful excitement. It was this, indeed, that gave him the control which he had at once, and so irresistibly, established over his movements. It not a little resembled the exhilaration of wine.

As when he was with Phœbe, there’s a suppressed sexuality revealed in Clifford by his exposure to external conditions (similar to pornographic photography).[35] The question of how beauty is equated with sexuality splices with Puritan control over both private and public sexual mores, and their inflections in contemporariness. In their compacted Grand Tour of modernity on the train (novels of England are being read … fantasy within fantasy), life is returned to brother and sister through their becoming observers, vicariously sensing the quotidian (the detail of what’s happening around them compiling as sensations). There is a hunger and an anxiety for all the sensual activity, experience and reception missed over the decades. Suppression has had the lid pried off it. And this is cast within the slippage of sublimity: the novelty of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful taken into a moving interior (speed!):

Within the car there was the usual interior life of the railroad, offering little to the observation of other passengers, but full of novelty for this pair of strangely enfranchised prisoners. It was novelty enough, indeed, that there were fifty human beings in close relation with them, under one long and narrow roof, and drawn onward by the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its grasp.

What is available, and what is not. How is it available (or not). Clifford’s eye for beauty is also an eye for availability of sensuous experience:

“You are not happy, Hepzibah!” said Clifford, apart, in a tone of reproach. “You are thinking of that dismal old house, and of Cousin Jaffrey” — here came the quake through him, — “and of Cousin Jaffrey sitting there, all by himself! Take my advice, — follow my example, — and let such things slip aside. Here we are, in the world, Hepzibah! — in the midst of life! — in the throng of our fellow beings! Let you and I be happy! As happy as that youth and those pretty girls, at their game of ball!”

Happiness is vampiric. As Hepzibah (vegetally) moves only to see images of the house, Clifford’s rejuvenation is the romantic aligning of modern travel (the train) with the “nomadism”:

My impression is, that our wonderfully increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to bring us around again to the nomadic state.

This joyous anxiety of an “ascending spiral” of progress, of rejecting the ties and tithes of fixedness, almost seems to seek an exoneration for theft and claim. The dubious correlation of nomadism with the land’s spiritual and material “owners” is part of the problem Hawthorne has in articulating the colonial injustice he is afraid to openly declare. He remains vivaciously circumspect. In speaking to the “old gentleman” on the train, Clifford unleashes a contestation of capital-familial dwelling that is almost a revolution but is bound by the prejudices of the sublime.[36] The aesthetics of colonial occupation are fetishised by association into a “noble savage” romanticism that is locked into a “Manifest Destiny”[37] form of momentum (apropos Hawthorne’s occasionally contradictory issues around refuting this West-looking colonialism). But Clifford as seer, while extolling the spiritual nature of the telegraph (while hurtling along in the train), and encapsulating the drive of colonial capital, can also laud the bank robber and even murderer as being much like most others (sans the social constraints), and focalise beauty through the words materialising in far-flung places of the nation:

A bank-robber, and what you call a murderer, likewise, has his rights, which men of enlightened humanity and conscience should regard in so much the more liberal spirit, because the bulk of society is prone to controvert their existence. An almost spiritual medium, like the electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful, and holy missions. Lovers, day by day — hour by hour, if so often moved to do it, — might send their heart-throbs from Maine to Florida, with some such words as these “I love you forever!” — “My heart runs over with love!” — “I love you more than I can!” and, again, at the next message “I have lived an hour longer, and love you twice as much!”

If Clifford has become the liberator, he also embodies the paradox of the annihilator of distance, and the condemner of those very “nomadic” traits he valorises. Off the train at a deserted siding, his vision shuts down. And as we return to the narratorially living-death of the Judge, and we have wealth placed in its enclosure of greed (as it “reaches out” to accrue) — as we go through his day as it was would be if alive, Hawthorne utilises a conditional rhetoric to challenge the very basis of colonial wealth, patriotism and nation-building:

Five-and-twenty years for the enjoyment of his real estate in town and country, his railroad, bank, and insurance shares, his United States stock, — his wealth, in short, however invested, now in possession, or soon to be acquired

… But again, he doesn’t rhetorically (as irony) or through parenthetical interjection make a more complete anti-colonial statement.[38] Interestingly, in the dead Judge who is rhetorically still being indirectly questioned (or, rather, we are being questioned insofar as why wouldn’t we be asking), we see a parenthetic self-reassurance:

Another business, which, however, he puts no great weight on (it is well, you know, to be heedful, but not over-anxious, as respects one’s personal health)

This echo of the Judge’s (likely) thoughts is sarcasm, sure, but it’s also a standard to use for our interpretation of tone and intent in the parenthetic interludes.

This is far away from our social anxiety statement, being an anxiety of style (romantics). Old money, old families, political influence and the question of what underpins contemporary democracy eat at the narrator in the same way the wealthy eat (or in the dead Judge’s case, not) their feasts[39]. The trashing of wealth and privilege still doesn’t amount to a full consideration of colonial wrongs (or any at all, really). That’s the romance? And is the narrator’s breaking of the faux free indirect speech of someone who cannot speak (perverse) rendered as declaration — “But ambition is a talisman more powerful than witchcraft” — disclaimed by “romance”.

Through enforcing the motif of whiteness in death, of its struggle with darkness, Hawthorne shows an awareness of white self-obsessiveness without finally challenging racial tropes. Rather, he works in a binary with subtexts, a faux Manicheanism as literary device. Romance, not novel … :

And there is still the swarthy whiteness, — we shall venture to marry these ill-agreeing words, — the swarthy whiteness of Judge Pyncheon’s face. The features are all gone: there is only the paleness of them left. And how looks it now? There is no window! There is no face! An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!

Blackness is inscrutable and annihilates sight but it is sight of death, anyways. Again, the paradox that is evasion. The ghost story tropes are played with, ironised, but the essence of the chapter is the consequence of greed and colonial whiteness. Can redemption come through the stuff of the garden:, say the moonbeams through the pear tree into the room of the dead? No, but in the next chapter, 19 “Alice’s Posies”, after five days of storm we see “abundance”, and the vegetal, in fact, is liberation in life and maybe even afterlife.[40]

There might be Hades, but hasn’t the house now been rendered benign? Of course not … the psycho-sexual symbolism (the symbol the narrator doesn’t define!) of the house, especially writ in Alice, is exemplified by the sex-frenzy of the storm, conceptual “liberation” (from restraint and toxic heritage), and death (of the oppressor):

One object, above all others, would take root in the imaginative observer’s memory. It was the great tuft of flowers, — weeds, you would have called them, only a week ago, — the tuft of crimson-spotted flowers, in the angle between the two front gables. The old people used to give them the name of Alice’s Posies, in remembrance of fair Alice Pyncheon, who was believed to have brought their seeds from Italy. They were flaunting in rich beauty and full bloom to-day, and seemed, as it were, a mystic expression that something within the house was consummated.

But the hymenal house is not broken yet, and death still lurks inside. The urchin is infuriated, as is the butcher, and you wonder about the lack of control over the image and symbol. It’s probably the most invasive and terrifying passage of the book because of the mixing of innocence with invasiveness, and is completely about modes of (gender) control.[41] If the rhetorical question to the reader (which is not a stable entity though for coherence and sales sake — it’s likely Hawthorne hoped it was enough to endure the patterning across the sharps and flats of the book) has gathered pace since the Judge’s death, we are still wrapped up in it. It attempts to compel us to persist, to enter the minds of those wondering where the players are and why they are not appearing.

It’s a simple and persistent narrative device, but it’s also an anxious one. Too much of our societal parenthesis and the moral judgement becomes too loud to allow the preface’s disclaimer to be more than a grim irony. With Phœbe’s arrival at the house (now suspected to be a house of contemporary and immediate murder) we find she cannot cross its threshold and that it is “impenetrable”. Thus she is made innocent of the sexuality of the house (so wrapped up in Clifford … and also the artist but that is displaced through a mostly locked away section of the house and concentrated through the garden and well), but finds the garden overgrown, unruly (Comus was invoked earlier in a different context … Lord of Riot), with the promiscuous well overflowing. But then she knocks and the door is opened not by Hepzibah as she imagines, but … And another threshold is confronted, and this time crossed into the house complicating the psycho-sexuality of enclosures. This time, as Holgrave draws here in, it’s not with rape subtexts or undertones, but with a safe warmth:

Before her eyes had adapted themselves to the obscurity, a hand grasped her own with a firm but gentle and warm pressure, thus imparting a welcome which caused her heart to leap and thrill with an indefinable shiver of enjoyment. She felt herself drawn along, not towards the parlor, but into a large and unoccupied apartment, which had formerly been the grand reception-room of the Seven Gables. The sunshine came freely …

Holgrave is still controlling the situation: he imparts the information of death, he has taken a daguerreotype of the dead Judge, he directly through speech links Thanatos and Eros[42], merges science (the notion that Old Maule might have known the medical realities of the Colonel and his susceptibility in what turns out to the a congenital disease of the heart and which would answer questions around Clifford being falsely blamed for his Uncle’s death, likely a medical episode) with mysticism, and creates an exclusiveness of sexual access[43]. Past tense that utilises foreshadowing with the examination of a distant and immediate past is a manipulation of impression that arcs between character voices to make a manifesto of parts in tension with each other but of the same whole. The tilting into deflowering (and possession) returns the narrative to invasiveness and sexual manipulation (the true horror story):

Yet the artist did not feel the horror, which was proper to Phœbe’s sweet and order-loving character, at thus finding herself at issue with society, and brought in contact with an event that transcended ordinary rules. Neither was he in haste, like her, to betake himself within the precincts of common life. On the contrary, he gathered a wild enjoyment, — as it were, a flower of strange beauty, growing in a desolate spot, and blossoming in the wind, — such a flower of momentary happiness he gathered from his present position.

The flower, the garden, the house, the body … inside and outside of enclosures, the possession. And the stiffened body is the fixative (interpolation and anachronism run riot in the historicity of photography!) for “love”: “The image of awful Death, which filled the house, held them united by his stiffened grasp.” And then, and without the need for brackets, we get the control value of the entire work, despite Phœbe’s tempered protestations … compliance (or, really, minimising protest):

have a presentiment that, hereafter, it will be my lot to set out trees, to make fences, — perhaps, even, in due time, to build a house for another generation, — in a word, to conform myself to laws and the peaceful practice of society. Your poise will be more powerful than any oscillating tendency of mine.” “I would not have it so!” said Phœbe earnestly.

But conformity has been the romance from the beginning. We doubt it only if we believe this is a novel (which I do). Anxiety is the only hope we have against total compliance in an already deeply compromised worldview and pragmatism. Even Clifford smiles at the completionist view of sexual regulation:

“It is our own little Phœbe! — Ah! and Holgrave with, her” exclaimed he, with a glance of keen and delicate insight, and a smile, beautiful, kind, but melancholy. “I thought of you both, as we came down the street, and beheld Alice’s Posies in full bloom. And so the flower of Eden has bloomed, likewise, in this old, darksome house to-day.”

In the end, however, we have a conservative romance that breaks out of its anxiety by declaring its position on the estate with glee. Irony confronts the pleasure of reconciled plot through which Native American symbols and land ownership are mocked via the passage of time and the investment of property law that protects the settler “inheritance”. Holgrave embraces wealth and conservatism with nonchalant irony[44], Uncle Venner is saved from the workhouse (“The Farm”) by being taken onto the estate of the deceased, corrupt Judge, and Maule’s son’s revenge is as neat as a compartment behind the spell-bound frame of the Colonel’s portrait containing the “mysterious” dead.

The “gothic” valorisation of colonial legacy is complete, the purification ritual completed, and moral responsibility abrogated. What does this mean for the bracketed social comment? That social conventions are to be maintained, and that to question the white American post-Puritan legacy is tantamount to treason:

Holgrave opened it, and displayed an ancient deed, signed with the hieroglyphics of several Indian sagamores, and conveying to Colonel Pyncheon and his heirs, forever, a vast extent of territory at the Eastward.

And as this novel is essentially a pastoral focussing around the ancestral house, we might read the virgin-rape dichotomy (false) motif[45] in “Alice” being liberated with a whimsical levity that allows a goodnight before we retire from the homely, anxiety-free fireside:

And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of music, and fancied that sweet Alice Pyncheon — after witnessing these deeds, this bygone woe and this present happiness, of her kindred mortals — had given one farewell touch of a spirit’s joy upon her harpsichord, as she floated heavenward from the HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES!

And so ends an obscene, morally violent and deceptive novel. And contemplating the sixty-eight or nine set of parentheses in it, and the two sets in the preface, we might consider the final usage in the work:

A plain, but handsome, dark-green barouche had now drawn up in front of the ruinous portal of the old mansion-house. The party came forth, and (with the exception of good Uncle Venner, who was to follow in a few days) proceeded to take their places.

Its purpose if functional, lest a piece of the puzzle be left unresolved. And would Uncle Venner (the pseudo-shepherd of this urbanised pastoral drama) have been allowed in the barouche with them to parade one last time down Pyncheon Street? Maybe … maybe not. Brackets are a class system. And this pastoral is a diluted tale of persecution — Salem has come off basically intact rather than condemned for its persecutions and extension of its colonial annihilation into those residents who did not serve its pure-capital of spirit purpose, which is truly frightening and morally abhorrent. No wonder the preface functioned as a disclaimer … even if it was intended ironically, it still covers the failure to fully address the polyvalent wrongs. It is, then, a “romance”?

FOOTNOTES

[1] A prelude … the bolding intimates connection between words. The subject of. Herein braced (ie by curly brackets). Punctuation outside these brackets. The signs we follow in order to “read”. The character of a house overwhelms only because of the character of the original proto-capitalist Puritan injustice, the crime against Matthew Maule (who was also a settler-dispossessor and occupier of “views”) … the false accusation of wizardry (and if he had been a wizard, what so?) and the gain arising from this … the collapsing contradictions, the paradox of presence underpinned by murder. Murder is the inheritance directly and “indirectly” (the scare quotes seem to be a paradox in themselves). What are the inherent qualities, the quiddity of injustice, that inform such dwelling? And so the “little housewife” characteristics of Phœbe’s intervention into the broken workings sweep away the dust and grime [a “breeze”, the “fragrance” (as of “attar roses”) … and of course white rose light without the mildew and canker of the “ancient” heritage that also binds her and needs breaking …]. I started taking quotes down from the Bantam Classic edition I picked off the shelves, only to resort to the cut and paste of: https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/77/pg77-images.html#chap18  … in doing this, I spent much time with the subtleties of Hawthorne’s “overuse” of the word “subtile” (twelve usages) as opposed to the use of subtle (eight usages) … the evasive nature of the former playing its genre part!

[2] Ellipses … the costs of happiness … a chain reaction of theft … multiplying injustice, stolen lands, stolen lives, inflections of colonialism and possession of the body earth, water, sky … the heirloom paradoxes …

[3] I would place brackets around every word and ellipses between every abutting bracket. The “free to hand” is both the irony and the deepest underlying belief … Why am I reminded on Emerson’s essay “Montaigne; or the Skeptic”, and: “The superior mind will find itself equally at odds with the evils of society and with the projects that are offered to relieve them. The wise skeptic is a bad citizen; no conservative, he sees the selfishness of property and the drowsiness of institutions. But neither is he fit to work with any democratic party that ever was constituted; for parties wish every one committed, and he penetrates the popular patriotism …” Oh, that superior mind! And the ever quotable (and quoted out of context: “no man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also. In England, the richest country that ever existed, property stands for more, compared with personal ability, than in any other.” Oh, as an aside to property, and troubled by inheritance, Holgrave unwittingly betrays Hawthorne’s deepest anxiety about his own whiteness: “We worship the living Deity according to dead men’s forms and creeds. Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man’s icy hand obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man’s white, immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart!” Further, Holgrave’s desire for “reform”, his hatred of the Past, and especially the House of Seven Gables (a place to study … not a book, but akin to a book) is a confrontation with injustice whilst underwritten by the greatest undeclared injustice: that of the theft of Indigenous land. The young man does not reject his own whiteness, of course.

[4] Please bear this quote in mind as you read through … the most abominable portrait of greed will not lose its whiteness in the gray then sable air… should we rethink Hawthorne’s sublimated bigotries … sadly, I think not because … see all that follows.

[5] And so we leap from the last paragraph of the Preface (1851, Lennox): “The reader may perhaps choose to assign an actual locality to the imaginary events of this narrative. If permitted by the historical connection, — which, though slight, was essential to his plan, — the author would very willingly have avoided anything of this nature. Not to speak of other objections, it exposes the romance to an inflexible and exceedingly dangerous species of criticism, by bringing his fancy-pictures almost into positive contact with the realities of the moment. It has been no part of his object, however, to describe local manners, nor in any way to meddle with the characteristics of a community for whom he cherishes a proper respect and a natural regard. He trusts not to be considered as unpardonably offending by laying out a street that infringes upon nobody’s private rights, and appropriating a lot of land which had no visible owner, and building a house of materials long in use for constructing castles in the air.” We, the reader, presumably must make out own decisions. Alone … or collectively?

[6] An interpolation … I am now in Chapter 14: Phœbe’s Good-Bye, and read: “She took from the window some specimen or other of natural history, — her eyes being too dim with moisture to inform her accurately whether it was a rabbit or a hippopotamus, — put it into the child’s hand as a parting gift, and went her way”. And this Jim Crow is placed within the evolutionary, within “fauna”, and dismissed as gastronomical.

[7] This footnote is for the parenthesis marks — the brackets — which defy any consistent system of quoting within this short piece.

[8] There are eighty-eight uses of parenthesis in the book … this usage is an imperative that serves a moral purpose, acts as guide, and works within the bounds of popular social acceptance insofar as selling books was concerned … it sold 6710 copies in its first year of publication.

[9] https://shakespeare.mit.edu/richardii/richardii.3.4.html [and notice that I’ve footnoted the quote and not the parenthesis themselves … they include to contain and not to claim part of Shakespeare’s language! The footnote is its own variation on parenthesis.]

[10] I am writing this in real time, but I suspect, I seem to be able to tell something. These brackets are friendly though … really, I am asking you, but please don’t tell me how it all resolves.

[11] Square brackets … a foreshadowing? Note round brackets inside square brackets.

[12] The point is made by Malcolm Cowley in the Portable Hawthorne (1969) but I guessed such “rigidity” from the textuality and not from reading this … in fact I went searching for evidence to prove my point and found this. We might assume it’s reliable? If not, I can tell you that it’s the case from what Hawthorne wrote on these pages because as a writer I sense the modus operandi. If I had placed the footnote number outside the brackets it would have been out of an anxiety I do not have. Do I contradict my premise? Maybe not because I am talking about a specific set of brackets (as indicated above — and this “in parenthesis” acts as guide rather than moral insistence … suggesting a difference that may or may not amount to anxiety) and not parenthesis in general.

[13] And this use of parenthesis is just me being ironic … but I hope not sarcastic! (though Hawthorne’s out and out mocking sarcasm of the rank hypocritic aura of the Trumpian Judge Pyncheon is baroque decorative sarcasm with a raw flourish that makes one wince …) I am caught up in a storm of exclamation and ellipses.

[14] Thus the daughter of heaven and earth soothes the vampiric world. In this case, paradoxically (of course), a moon goddess bringing light to the day. Or, rather, she is a flycatcher in the garden. Apparently, in 1804, the year of Hawthorne’s birth, the Eastern Phœbe became the first banded bird in America, its settler naming stretched way back into the previous century. Flycatchers are deft and effective insectivores. They are also migratory. A summer, breeding bird of New England.

[15] Here’s the larger quote: “Thus, his sentiment for Phœbe, without being paternal, was not less chaste than if she had been his daughter. He was a man, it is true, and recognized her as a woman. She was his only representative of womankind. He took unfailing note of every charm that appertained to her sex, and saw the ripeness of her lips, and the virginal development of her bosom. All her little womanly ways, budding out of her like blossoms on a young fruit-tree, had their effect on him, and sometimes caused his very heart to tingle with the keenest thrills of pleasure. At such moments, — for the effect was seldom more than momentary, — the half-torpid man would be full of harmonious life, just as a long-silent harp is full of sound, when the musician’s fingers sweep across it. But, after all, it seemed rather a perception, or a sympathy, than a sentiment belonging to himself as an individual. He read Phœbe as he would a sweet and simple story; he listened to her as if she were a verse of household poetry, which God, in requital of his bleak and dismal lot, had permitted some angel, that most pitied him, to warble through the house. She was not an actual fact for him, but the interpretation of all that he lacked on earth brought warmly home to his conception; so that this mere symbol, or life-like picture, had almost the comfort of reality.”

[16] Irony, of course, but transcendentalism had its cake and ate it too!

[17] And the inversion of sexual control through the “sweetness” available via the garden is emphasised (always in struggle with attenuation in the garden) through her managing the mood of interaction with Clifford, through her anti-gothic practicality (and, sadly, subservience to the language of non-wildness): “But Phœbe afforded her poor patient a supply of purer air. She impregnated it, too, not with a wild-flower scent, — for wildness was no trait of hers, — but with the perfume of garden-roses, pinks, and other blossoms of much sweetness, which nature and man have consented together in making grow from summer to summer, and from century to century. Such a flower was Phœbe in her relation with Clifford, and such the delight that he inhaled from her.”

[18] As a long-term vegetable gardener, I can tell you beans turn to dust or at least become infertile after not so many years even in reasonably adequate storage. I have never come across one that will still sprout after a decade … so this is the planter’s magic (the daguerreotypist!) …

[19] “ … and death in its gaudiest delight. The more Clifford seemed to taste the happiness of a child, the sadder was the difference to be recognized. With a mysterious and terrible Past, which had annihilated his memory, and a blank Future before him, he had only this visionary and impalpable Now, which, if you once look closely at it, is nothing”. We wish this to carry a decolonising weight but know it has broken the restraint of brackets, has denied the mirror, and functions too much as narrative device.

[20] “The daguerreotypist once whispered her that these marks betokened the oddities of the Pyncheon family, and that the chicken itself was a symbol of the life of the old house, embodying its interpretation, likewise, although an unintelligible one, as such clews generally are. It was a feathered riddle; a mystery hatched out of an egg, and just as mysterious as if the egg had been addle!”

[21] And this is inserted from reading further on (have I read this many years before? possible …) regarding the daguerreotypist: “At a later period he had spent some months in a community of Fourierists. Still more recently he had been a public lecturer on Mesmerism, for which science (as he assured Phœbe, and, indeed, satisfactorily proved, by putting Chanticleer, who happened to be scratching near by, to sleep) he had very remarkable endowments”. The semi-mythical rooster takes the brunt and is demeaned as proof. What of property? Animals as property even when given their “freedom”?

[22] “ … observable when one of those Italian boys (who are rather a modern feature of our streets) … “ … and this is where parenthesis does the work without declamation … with a slippery inference … “less” than the moral gravitas of our singular parenthetic declaration at the beginning of this disquisition (self-irony) but within its ambit (its fallout) nonetheless … a subset we need to investigate further … the other that Clifford doesn’t really know … so the “Italian” is a positive he can’t understand within the context of his Puritan decay and its puritanical judgement which we already suspect is false (as intimated by the daguerreotypist’s early reference to his situation when talking with Phœbe in the garden before Clifford’s release/return to the house) … a house of Jim Crow gingerbread sold (profited from) and fetishised … of double dispossession but for one absolute injustice that is not adequately addressed beyond hints of the “Indian deed” … the claims to a vast amount of land … the fortunes of the family. As we read in chapter 1, “The Old Pyncheon family”: “but there was a claim through an Indian deed, confirmed by a subsequent grant of the General Court …” This is grotesque gothic displacement of racist reasoning and legitimising theft within the diegesis … and I anticipate it will not be adequately addressed, or will be left “open”. Rejecting the wrongs of Puritan land-grabbing and spiritual-social hypocrisy is not enough — it seems subtly replaced with other systemic hypocrisy’s made semi-permanent through the act of novelising. Interpolation … in Chapter 19 the disdain of the general public towards the foreigner is expressed in various ways (he is even called “French” …), but we at least have a welcome narratorial (if awkwardly “romantic”) affirmation of difference: “These wanderers are readily responsive to any natural kindness — be it no more than a smile, or a word itself not understood, but only a warmth in it — which befalls them on the roadside of life”. There is no property claim in this, which in the system of cause and response in the book might be said to match with Clifford’s visionary statement on the train, but because it requires no capital overlay of railways and buildings belongs (almost) to a de-capitalised philosophy of presence.

[23] Close, but also overwhelmingly distant …. beyond reach … but not for Phœbe, of course. Phœbe leaves the house (the next chapter affirms that) and is not the parallel but seemingly self-selected prison for her that it is for Hepzibah (who chooses not to see far and in doing so loses the ability … she wears Clifford’s losses and becomes the negative plate, the wearer of an ugly frown that repels  the suspended animation of Clifford’s aesthetics). Hawthorne is, for me, at his most disturbing when he so deeply indulges the aesthetic binary that the brother and sister (labelled respectively imbecile and lunatic) are offset together against Phœbe’s remorseless “freshness”, her good order of being (the tones of transcendentalism are constantly complicated and contradicted in the architecture of character and book, though Phœbe getting her outside of the house life “moral medicine” does the extra-curricular philosophical work). The garden encapsulates various pasts and different possible futures. “But the sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtile and universal than we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes of organized life, and vibrates from one to another. A flower, for instance, as Phœbe herself observed, always began to droop sooner in Clifford’s hand, or Hepzibah’s, than in her own; and by the same law, converting her whole daily life into a flower fragrance for these two sickly spirits, the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade much sooner than if worn on a younger and happier breast”.

[24] And maybe to escape responsibility for dispossession and evade its consequences … a relief for the reader’s very very submerged (to the point of non-existence) anxiety. But this is a contemporary interpolation on a contemporariness that evaded many aspects of local truth (cause and effect) of the impact of invader presence on Native Americans through “treaties” from then 1621 New Plymouth Colony-Wampanoag treaty, or the 1778 Fort Pitt Treaty of the Revolutionary War that suited one party ultimately through to the grotesque and genocidal Removal Act of 1830 and so on and on and on. Anxiety has many inflections, and makes for a special kind of interpolative literary trope (also). Whether it’s a Pilgrim vs (later) Puritan binary, the loss of land underpins the gaining of land which is the desire of so many, and the preserve of relatively few (addressed by expansionism, which is inevitably finite producing the same conditions as prior in the property-owning governance).

[25] “Altogether in his culture and want of culture, — in his crude, wild, and misty philosophy, and the practical experience that counteracted some of its tendencies; in his magnanimous zeal for man’s welfare, and his recklessness of whatever the ages had established in man’s behalf; in his faith, and in his infidelity; in what he had, and in what he lacked, — the artist might fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his native land.” aka “citizen” …

[26] Underneath it all, Hawthorne’s self-exposing “beautiful peculiarities”? And if you grant leeway (which I don’t), there is ambiguity demonstrated in the texts.

[27] The lampooning is hard-wired into Maule tale within a tale forming a reflective surface to the omniscient narrator himself (with its anxieties and non-generative ambiguities played upon these surfaces): “…showed the whites of his eyes, in amazement …”

[28] The counter-aesthetic of “Old” vs “New World” dynamics: “New England modes of life, in which nothing beautiful had ever been developed”. The irony within irony is that witchcraft is then equated with beauty. Or maybe it’s no irony at all.

[29] Parenthesis reaches its sexual frenzy here: “But that admiring glance (which most other men, perhaps, would have cherished as a sweet recollection all through life) the carpenter never forgave. It must have been the devil himself that made Maule so subtile in his preception.” … drawn out of sexual class anger and vengeance (capital and punishment go hand in hand in possession of other people’s rights): ““Then, Mistress Alice,” said Matthew Maule, handing a chair, — gracefully enough, for a craftsman, “will it please you only to sit down, and do me the favor (though altogether beyond a poor carpenter’s deserts) to fix your eyes on mine!”“ The use of wizardry to supra-boost this essay in dissimilation of responsibility (for dispossessing Native Americans, for murder and abuse, for theft, for enslavement, for the corrosive persistence of class, for failing to democratise society, for sexual hypocrisy … it is worth noting the fluidity of the temporal in all this as we reprocess from the time of the novel’s writing back to the beginnings of the Pyncheon Puritan tale of post-settlement) is both a plot device (thematically appealing to the anxieties of the anticipated readership) and an attempt at personal exorcism (which I would guess failed).

[30] ‘The wild, chimney-corner legend (which, without copying all its extravagances, my narrative essentially follows) here gives an account of some very strange behavior on the part of Colonel Pyncheon’s portrait … a narrative dialogues with, interprets, adjusts, adapts, “follows” …

[31] This is one of the truly creepy moments of the novel because we sense Hawthorne’s irony is lapsing into a kind of wistful contemplation set against Modern Scientific reasoning: “To a disposition like Holgrave’s, at once speculative and active, there is no temptation so great as the opportunity of acquiring empire over the human spirit; nor any idea more seductive to a young man than to become the arbiter of a young girl’s destiny” … In other words, that for such a person it would have been understandable!(?) Another interpolation: as we encounter the Judge in the next chapter, we learn that, despite approval of state and church, the daguerreotypist is one who sees deeper: “the Judge, beyond all question, was a man of eminent respectability. The church acknowledged it; the state acknowledged it. It was denied by nobody. In all the very extensive sphere of those who knew him, whether in his public or private capacities, there was not an individual — except Hepzibah, and some lawless mystic, like the daguerreotypist, and, possibly, a few political opponents” … as a liminal character between ages (200 years prior and the “present” of the story), between superstition/magic and science (his photography allows him to “see” in into representations: the art isn’t just reproduction, but casts light/shadows on inner truths), and class/social status.

[32] We are reminded of the chemicals involved in making the photographic surfaces. Mirrors occur in so many abstracted ways, also.

[33] She has become the photographic plate, and not the photographed: “So sweetly cool was the atmosphere, after all the feverish day, that the summer eve might be fancied as sprinkling dews and liquid moonlight, with a dash of icy temper in them, out of a silver vase.”

[34] It is interesting to see a parenthesis within speech (of the artist … one of the name frequent name switches) and imagine how it is being spoken as distinctly subtexted within the line of speech (as a personal thought, a verbal emphasis …  change in tone … a whisper … or out loudly?): “(hark, how Maule’s well is murmuring!)” … and all the while assuring us the player has not forgotten his propinquity to said feature”. Or are we dealing with the narrator’s direct anxiety over the novel’s architecture. Given how narrow its stage actually is in terms of the drama (and, as a contrary, how massive and all-consuming it is in its moral implications and geographic-ethnographic intrusion …). This use of internal brackets (within speech) is both a narrative device (function as dashes: thought or utterance within speech) and also a marker of the confidence or arrogance of the speaker to persuade their addressee. As a speaker-interlocuter seeks to control reception, they manipulate through tonal shifts. Disingenuousness, “pathos”, irony and deception are all intensified at once as the judge “says”: “There lives not the human being (except yourself,—and you not more than I) who has shed so many tears for Clifford’s calamity”.

[35] And if we doubt such a brazen alignment, consider the associative/juxtaposing (to the grim old sister and the broken but suddenly frenzied brother, the two owls out in the demi-day without their moon goddess to protect them) period-sensitive visuals of: “But their two figures attracted hardly so much notice as that of a young girl, who passed at the same instant, and happened to raise her skirt a trifle too high above her ankles”. The polymorphous nature of this construct is emphasised with what follows: “Poor Hepzibah! Could she have understood this fact, it would have brought her some little comfort; for, to all her other troubles, — strange to say! — there was added the womanish and old-maiden-like misery arising from a sense of unseemliness in her attire. Thus, she was fain to shrink deeper into herself, as it were, as if in the hope of making people suppose that here was only a cloak and hood, threadbare and woefully faded, taking an airing in the midst of the storm, without any wearer!” This is affectionate mockery and it’s the male gaze entertaining itself. An interpolation. We open chapter 18 with an extension of the owl image: “Judge Pyncheon, while his two relatives have fled away with such ill-considered haste, still sits in the old parlor, keeping house, as the familiar phrase is, in the absence of its ordinary occupants. To him, and to the venerable House of the Seven Gables, does our story now betake itself, like an owl, bewildered in the daylight, and hastening back to his hollow tree’.

[36] “You are aware, my dear sir, — you must have observed it in your own experience , —that all human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future. To apply this truth to the topic now under discussion. In the early epochs of our race, men dwelt in temporary huts, of bowers of branches, as easily constructed as a bird’s-nest, and which they built, — if it should be called building, when such sweet homes of a summer solstice rather grew than were made with hands, — which Nature, we will say, assisted them to rear where fruit abounded, where fish and game were plentiful, or, most especially, where the sense of beauty was to be gratified by a lovelier shade than elsewhere, and a more exquisite arrangement of lake, wood, and hill. This life possessed a charm which, ever since man quitted it, has vanished from existence. And it typified something better than itself. It had its drawbacks; such as hunger and thirst, inclement weather, hot sunshine, and weary and foot-blistering marches over barren and ugly tracts, that lay between the sites desirable for their fertility and beauty. But in our ascending spiral, we escape all this”.

[37] The term was (debatably) first used in 1845 and the notion of ‘annexation’ in the context predates that by some years. The novel was published in 1851 (largely written in 1850). Even so, I am potentially (even likely) “deploying” the term retrospectively as well as interactively. The disturbance resonates from the constantly self-originating colonial purpose.

[38] If the word “moral” is used twenty-four times throughout the novel, we still need not confuse that with a “moral of the story”. In his preface of 1852 (at Lenox), Hawthorne disabuses us of suspicion that his purpose may be ultimately and absolutely moral. In fact, he uses the grotesque image of pinning a butterfly to allow himself moral wriggle room. But this is an ethics of evasion: “Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral, — the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief; and he would feel it a singular gratification if this romance might effectually convince mankind — or, indeed, any one man — of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms. In good faith, however, he is not sufficiently imaginative to flatter himself with the slightest hope of this kind. When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod, — or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly, — thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first”. So, an anti-manifesto. If the bolds are mine, the slippages are Hawthorne’s and I don’t believe ‘em!

[39] “They are practised politicians, every man of them, and skilled to adjust those preliminary measures which steal from the people, without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers”.

[40] “Vegetable productions, of whatever kind, seemed more than negatively happy, in the juicy warmth and abundance of their life. The Pyncheon Elm, throughout its great circumference, was all alive, and full of the morning sun and a sweet-tempered little breeze, which lingered within this verdant sphere, and set a thousand leafy tongues a-whispering all at once. This aged tree appeared to have suffered nothing from the gale. It had kept its boughs unshattered, and its full complement of leaves; and the whole in perfect verdure, except a single branch, that, by the earlier change with which the elm-tree sometimes prophesies the autumn, had been transmuted to bright gold. It was like the golden branch that gained Aeneas and the Sibyl admittance into Hades”.

[41] And the disturbing subtext here is the implication of Uncle Venner’s fattening of the pig for slaughter. One is reminded of the commodified association of meat with female bodies and sexuality (see Carol J Adams). Then we hear from Holgrave who has been out of the picture for some chapters: ““I have heard,” said the daguerreotypist, as he drew in his head, “that the water of Maule’s well suits those flowers best.”“ It is not far-fetched to take this into a seminal imaging that inflects his own struggle over Phœbe (who is still absent in the country at this stage).

[42] “A rumor reached me, too, of Judge Pyncheon being missed. A feeling which I cannot describe — an indefinite sense of some catastrophe, or consummation — impelled me to make my way into this part of the house, where I discovered what you see”.

[43] “It separated Phœbe and himself from the world, and bound them to each other, by their exclusive knowledge of Judge Pyncheon’s mysterious death, and the counsel which they were forced to hold respecting it. The secret, so long as it should continue such, kept them within the circle of a spell, a solitude in the midst of men, a remoteness as entire as that of an island in mid-ocean …”

[44] ““Ah, Phœbe, I told you how it would be!” said the artist, with a half-melancholy laugh. “You find me a conservative already! Little did I think ever to become one. It is especially unpardonable in this dwelling of so much hereditary misfortune, and under the eye of yonder portrait of a model conservative, who, in that very character, rendered himself so long the evil destiny of his race.”“ This is the joke that’s not a joke. It is the outcome of the narrative, the closure, suggesting there are degrees of conservatism, some of which just might be acceptable. This is intended to relieve the anxiety of the readership, and its relief has extended well into the twentieth century and frighteningly, maybe, into the age of the deplorable “MAGA” movement.

[45]Which could possibly be constructed as a “paradox”, with sublimated rape imagery metastasising conservative morality with regards to “chastity” in the context of intrapersonal, colonial and economic violence.

All images by the author.