Active Agencies of Compromise
Hawthorne and the European Limits of the American Romance
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2024.i24.1576Keywords:
Hawthorne, Melville, Hegel, Heroism of compromise, Theory of the novelAbstract
Taking the cue from some of Melville’s most intense epistolary exchanges with Hawthorne, this essay highlights the two writers’ different codes of heroics to revisit “the heroism of compromise” in The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. It argues that this version of cultural heroism – allegedly, a unique aesthetic and political achievement of Hawthorne’s romances (Bercovitch 1993; 1991; 1988) – may in fact be reassessed within the broader debate on the novel as a romantic form of art in 19th-century aesthetics and genre theory. In Hegel’s terms, Hawthorne may be said to have dramatized the common “collisions” of the “novel in the modern sense,” so as to adopt and put the typical solution of the classical Bildungsroman (“the education of the individual in the actual world” and his/her reconcilement with “the order of things”) at the service of the American ideology. By so doing, he hybridizes his American romances with all the limits and aporias of the European novel. He transforms his New-World modern knights into Old-World-like middle-class conformists, exposing his plot resolutions to a contentious dispute over the balance of aesthetic gains and ideological losses in literature as cultural work.
References
Arac, Jonathan. “The Politics of The Scarlet Letter.” Ideology and Classic American Literature. Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 247-266.
Argersinger, Jana L. and Leland S. Person, edited by. Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2008.
Arsić, Branka and K. L. Evans, edited by. Melville’s Philosophies. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Benjamin, Walter. On the Concept of History. Selected Writings. Vol. 4. 1938-1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 389-400.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. “Hawthorne’s A-Morality of Compromise.” Representations 24.3 (1988): 1-27.
---. “How to Read Melville’s Pierre.” Amerikastudien 31.1 (1986): 31-49.
---. The American Jeremiad. Anniversary Edition, with a New Preface. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012.
---. The Office of The Scarlet Letter. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
---. The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Bode, Christoph. The Novel: An Introduction. Trans. James Vigus. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Buell, Lawrence. “Hawthorne and the Problem of ‘American’ Fiction: The Example of The Scarlet Letter.” Hawthorne and the Real: Bicentennial Essays. Edited by Millicent Bell. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. 70-87.
Davis, Merrell R. and David H. Gilman, edited by. The Letters of Herman Melville. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960.
Diffee, Christopher. “Postponing Politics in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.” Modern Language Notes 111.5 (1996): 835-871.
Emery, Jacob. Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2017.
Fluck, Winfried. “American Literary History and the Romance with America.” American Literary History 21.1 (2009): 1-18.
Hage, Erik. The Melville-Hawthorne Connection: A Study of the Literary Friendship. Jefferson: McFarland, 2014.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Life of Franklin Pierce. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1852.
---. Novels: Fanshawe; The Scarlet Letter; The House of the Seven Gables; The Blithedale Romance; The Marble Faun. Edited by Millicent Bell. New York: The Library of America, 1983.
---. Tales and Sketches. Edited by Roy Harvey Pearce. New York: The Library of America, 1982.
---. The English Notebooks. Edited by Randall Stewart. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962.
Hayford, Harrison. “Melville’s Usable or Visible Truth.” Modern Language Notes 74.8 (1959): 702-705.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts. Trans. T. M. Knox. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
---. Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik. Edited by Hermann Glockner. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Frommanns Verlag, 1939.
Person, Leland S. “The Dark Labyrinth of Mind: Hawthorne, Hester, and the Ironies of Racial Mothering.” Studies in American Fiction 29.1 (2001): 33-48.
Marovitz, Sanford. “Melville’s Problematic ‘Being.’” Emerson Society Quarterly 28.1 (1982): 11-23.
Marsh, Alec. “Adrienne Rich’s Dissident ‘Draft #2006’: An American Marxist Jeremiad.” Letterature d’America XLIV.199 (2024): 155-182.
Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers, 1963.
McCall, Corey and Tom Nurmi, edited by. Melville Among the Philosophers. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017.
Melville, Herman. Correspondence. Edited by Lynn Horth. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1993.
---. Moby-Dick; or The Whale. Edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988.
---. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. Edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1971.
---. The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces: 1839-1860. Edited by Harrison Hayford, et. al. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987.
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Milder, Robert. “Hawthorne and the Problem of New England.” American Literary History 21.3 (2009): 464-491.
---. Hawthorne’s Habitations: A Literary Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Moland, Lydia L. Hegel’s Aesthetics: The Art of Idealism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Pease, Donald E. Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.
Pfister, Joel. The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne’s Fiction. Stanford: University of California Press, 1991.
Pirholt, Mattias. Metamimesis: Imitation in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Early German Romanticism. Rochester: Camden House, 2012.
Rowe, John Carlos. “Nathaniel Hawthorne and Transnationality.” Hawthorne and the Real: Bicentennial Essays. Edited by Millicent Bell. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. 88-106.
Schweitzer, Ivy. “Maternal Discourse and the Romance of Self-Possession in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.” Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon. Edited by Donald E. Pease. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. 158-186.
Shamir, Milette. Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Swales, Martin. The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Symonds, Michael. The Appeal of Art in Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2020.
Thomas, Brook. “Citizen Hester: The Scarlet Letter as Civic Myth.” American Literary History 13.2 (2001): 181-211.
Ullén, Magnus. “Reading with ‘The Eye of Faith’: The Structural Principle of Hawthorne’s Romances.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48.1 (2006): 1-36.
Wezel, Johann Carl. “Vorrede” zu Herrmann und Ulrike. Ein komischer Roman. Vol I. Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1780. III-XIV.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Giuseppe Nori
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Iperstoria is an Open Access journal.- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 BY-NC License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of their work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. We require authors to inform us of any instances of re-publication.
