"The Rude Contact of Some Actual Circumstance": Hawthorne and Salem's East India Marine Museum

She had in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic,—a taste for the gorgeously beautiful, which, save in the exquisite productions of her needle, found nothing else, in all the possibilities of her life, to exercise itself upon.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

What kind of Oriental images are being conjured when Nathaniel Hawthorne describes Hester Prynne as possessing in her nature "a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic"?¹ A heavily powdered woman dressed in a kimono, sighing as she embroiders? A disheveled woman in a dimly lit opium den, languidly sewing? Such speculations seem mere flights of fancy, but Hawthorne's description of Hester as "Oriental" is provocative in its ethnic reference. What does the "exquisite" "Oriental characteristic" reveal about Hester? Why does her nature find expression only in the production of an embroidered letter? How does this "characteristic," visible in the materiality of the letter, help define her place within her community? And exactly what kind of community does Hawthorne seek to portray by this allusion to the Orient?

"The Orient," as used in nineteenth-century America, conflated the geographic, cultural, and economic regions of Asia.² The terms "the Orient" and "the East" were used interchangeably, and Hawthorne, in keeping with his time, did not make any regional or cultural distinctions among East Asians, Southeast Asians, or Middle Easterners, to name a few geographic sectors important to Salem's economy. This was not because he was unaware of the particularities of U.S. trade with specific areas of the East. In fact, Hawthorne's imprecise distinctions belie his knowledge of the Orient, as his detailed historical depictions of Salem's past and his extensive reading of travel narratives, historical writings, and tales of the Orient attest. His own travels, while minimal, were figuratively enhanced by a rich assortment of books he checked out from the Salem Athenaeum.³ However, my question is not whether Hawthorne was influenced by the Orient as a political, geographic, and social entity, but whether his knowledge of it pertains to his depictions of the community of Salem, as documented by the imported Oriental objects of this period and the ideas of materialism that entered his writing.⁴

Of the few critics interested in the question of Hawthorne and the Orient, Luther Luedtke provides the most comprehensive analysis. He suggests that Hawthorne was influenced by the influx of trade into Salem from places like the Dutch East Indies, Manila, and China, as well as by his extensive readings about the Orient. Luedtke describes how Hawthorne's father, Captain Nathaniel Hathorne, who died in Surinam in 1808, left behind souvenirs, curios, and logbooks from his travels to the Far East, which arguably affected his son's interest in and knowledge of the Orient.⁵ Hawthorne "turned to the Orient," Luedtke argues, "not for spiritual unification, in the fashion of Emerson and Thoreau, but for cultural differentiation, and for a drama that carried forward from his life into his art."⁶ But while considering the influences of the Orient in Hawthorne's romances, Luedtke stops short of analyzing the stylistic impact of these cultural encounters on Hawthorne's works. Pressing Luedtke's considerations further, I argue that from Hawthorne's contact with materials from the Orient, specifically those objects housed in the East India Marine Museum, he found objects that helped him to imagine Salem and Hester as nineteenth-century representations of the Orient. As Hawthorne wrote in a letter to his wife, "[A] human spirit finds no insufficiency of food fit for it, even in the Custom-House. And with such materials as these, I do think, and feel, and learn things that are worth knowing, and which I should not know unless I had learned them there."⁷ The materials on display in the East India Marine Society, as I will argue in the following pages, serve as signs that enter Hawthorne's writing, investing his perceptions of Hester and her community with exquisite details of the Oriental.

In his famous categorization of signs, Charles Sanders Peirce provides a schema that I...