The School of Hawthorne (review)

Book Reviews 287 Richard H. Brodhead. The School of Hawthorne. New York: Oxford U P, 1986. 215 pp. pb $11.95. Taking Hawthorne as Üie always canonical American novelist, the "great concatenator ," who above all others "pulls disparate writing into a coherent and continuous line," Richard Brodhead treats Üie "school of Hawthorne" as a paradigm of literary tradition. Into his theory of literary infuence Brodhead incorporates concepts such as the construction of authorship, canon formation and the sacralization of "high" culture, the role of social mediation in die history of taste, and, most important of all, the various social and historical constructions of whatever has passed into the past. His School of Hawthorne demonstrates that from among potential versions of past events, institutions construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct usable pasts in a dynamic series of creative revisionings. In studying how die past passes and is selectively recovered for new uses, how yesterday's rebellion becomes today's orthodoxy, Brodhead contributes a social dimension to Emerson's American scholarship of "creative reading." Rather than lament mat institutions were built on Hawthorne's tropes, Brodhcad finds that Üie past renews itself primarily by "continuing adaptation within" cultural insitituitons. He uses the vicissitudes of Hawthorne's reputation to demonstrate that "traditions can be reclaimed from institutional possession and made plastic again to their inheritors' wishes and needs." Brodhead starts his historical demonstration with the influential magazine industry and the canny promotional strategies of the publishing firm Ticknor and Fields that enabled Evert Duyckinck and James T. Fields to construct the public Hawthorne as an emblem of "high culture." In this process of commodification, high and low culture were separated into different marketplaces, and novels were elevated into new prominence as high art. Regrettably, üie analysis does not consider whatever ideas, influences, or models Nathaniel Hawthorne used to create himself as author. In this study of authorial selfcreation , the "founder" is himself without visible foundation except as a creation of his promoters. We must look elsewhere to learn how Hawthorne dealt with his uneasy assumption of authorhood and with his sense of failure. Reviewing the development of American literary historiography, Brodhead traces the different Hawthornes that time uncovered, a line composed of many separate strands, such as his symbolism, his plots, his character types (especially the daimonically obsessed ones), his theories about romance, and his conception of authorship. Drawing upon such a wide and open-ended range of Hawthornes, Brodhcad allows himself considerable breadth in defining a "school" of Hawthorne, a body that comprises novelists significandy influenced by him. Primarily, Brodhead is interested in those authors whose works show a deep "knowing" of Hawthorne, rather than those like Frederic, Crane, or Dreiser who allude to him in superficial ways. Once canonized by social institutions, Nathaniel Hawthorne was appropriated for various purposes by Herman Melville (no big surprise, but beautifully depicted), William Dean HoweUs (the big surprise), and, of course, Henry James, but all in different ways at different times. So prompt and successful was the canonization of Nathaniel Hawthorne, according to Brodhead, that later in life Hawthorne had to contend with himself as his own strong precursor, a presence so intimidating that it prevented him from achieving a final climactic phase to his authorial career. Brodhead attributes the weakness of Hawthorne's late fiction to this kind of anxiety radier than to illness or changing literary ideals. As Hawthorne's successors, Melville found or invented a prophetic Nay-sayer, HoweUs an august representative of high culture, Jewett and Freeman a license to create "supercharged monomanics," and James, among a great many other debts, the example by which he constructed his own idea of "achieved authorship." Very informative about 288 The Henry James Review the way changing times and social institutions elicited various aspects of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Brodhead underplays the psychological differences that also influenced what successors took from Hawthorne. In addition to what the changing canon served up to MelviUe, James, or Faulkner as appropriate models, we want to know what level of their personalities responded to what level of Nathaniel Hawthorne's personality. Brodhead provides some very fine readings of Hawthorne's works, often extending critical commonplaces into new intensity and enlightening new applications...