Masculinist Theory and Romantic Authorship, Or Hawthorne, Politics, Desire

In The Powerful Hands of Critics such Sacvan Bercovitch, Jonathan Arac, and John Carlos Rowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne as artist and person assumes the shape of an unattractively conservative writer whose works alternately achieve political consensus through the reconciliation of opposing points of view, all ostensibly given their platform yet fused into one, reactionary position of social inaction (Bercovitch); reveal a writer whose politics facilitated the slave trade even as it pulled the curtain over the oncoming onslaught of the Civil War (Arac); ingeniously innovate the literary means of American global colonization (Rowe). To read such bold and authoritative critics on Hawthorne is to believe that a reactionary and racist writer continues to occupy a stable position in American high school and college curriculums. In this essay, taking these critics’ positions as metonymic of an entire approach to literature in academic writing—a cross-fertilized version of Foucauldian and Marxian theories,¹ which in its most common application in literary criticism and theory we can, crudely, call the “Bad Politics” school of leftist criticism²—I will demonstrate that, however valid and illuminating their positions prove to be, these critics’ views of Hawthorne not only mutilate Hawthorne’s work but also rely on surprisingly heterosexist and masculinist approaches to the study of imaginative literature. Considering the work of these critics on Hawthorne allows us to examine a particular, influential trend in academic writing from the 1980s to the present.

What is most distressing about this political critique of Hawthorne’s work is the way in which it frames what is and is not “political.” Gender gets mentioned, dutifully, but there is little sustained engagement with gendered themes. Perhaps this problem stems from biases and blind spots inherent in Marxism: as Joan Wallach Scott observes, “within Marxism, the concept of gender has long been treated as the by-product of changing economic structures; gender has had no independent analytic status of its own.”³ The relegation of gendered issues to the sidelines confuses as much as it disturbs; as critics such as Helene Moglen remind us, eighteenth-and nineteenth-century fiction reacted primarily to the social and psychological strains of the modern sex-gender system, so the failure to include a sustained analysis of the gendered dynamics of politics is a considerable blind spot.⁴ Yet, from another perspective, questions of gender may be said to preoccupy leftist literary criticism. In a remarkably obvious manner, politics here connotes the public sphere of male ideas, ideas put into publicly visible place and the effects of men of action, or, more pertinently in Hawthorne’s case, the effects created by a failure to act.

The leftist treatment of a Romantic author like Hawthorne evokes longstanding debates in criticism over American literature itself, the asseveration of the superiority of realism over romance that has been with us at least since Henry James in his critical study of Hawthorne. A “prominent function of claiming to be a realist or a naturalist,” argues Michael Davitt Bell, “was to provide assurance to one’s society and oneself that one was a ‘real’ man rather than an effeminate ‘artist.’”⁵ Lionel Trilling’s essay “Reality in America” remains relevant for our current critical predicament.⁶ As Americanists, we have not yet budged from our position at what Trilling described as “the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.” “One does not go there gladly,” remarks Trilling, “but nowadays it is not exactly a matter of free choice whether one does or does not go” (9). Trilling continues to pose many political problems as a critic, as evinced by his vexing denigration of Steinbeck and Dreiser. (Jonathan Schaub’s study of Cold War literary criticism offers several useful insights into the postwar criticism in which Trilling played so vital a part, particularly in what Schaub calls the “liberal narrative” guiding postwar thought.⁷) But Trilling’s nowadays are our nowadays. We continue to be vexed by this “deadly sin,” the “turning away from reality” (5), as Trilling put it. Despite the manner in which he himself questioned the “reality,” or lack thereof, in...