The Challenge of Cultural Relativity: The Case of Hawthorne

The Challenge of Cultural Relativity: The Case of Hawthorne LARRYJ. REYNOLDS Over the past thirty years, a politics of liberation, sensitive to past injustices, has successfully expanded our knowledge ofthe American Renaissance as scholars have attended to issues of race and gender and provided previously silenced voices the chance to be heard. The entrance of Margaret Fuller into the canon as a major figure, for example, which ESQ1 and a number of its contributors have assisted, has reoriented our understanding ofthe period considerably, if only by placing the issue of revolutionary violence at the thematic center of American literary history from 1848 to 1861. The recent critical turn to issues of morality and ethics, especially with regard to the tension between transcendental idealism and radical social action , marks the latest development in this ongoing transformative and revisionist project. Despite its obvious benefits and virtues, this project suffers, I wish to argue, from certain limitations , including presentism and moral absolutism that often come into play in the treatment of authors whose views seem racist and reactionary in the context of today's academic culture . A case in point is Hawthorne, whose political conservatism marginalized him within the New England literary culture of his own day and whose politics continue to be characterized by leading Americanists as morally reprehensible. During his lifetime, Hawthorne's association with the unpopular presidency of Franklin Pierce and his subsequent lack of partisanship during the Civil War alienated him from his ESQ \V.49\ 1ST-3RD QUARTERS \ 2003 129 LARRYJ. REYNOLDS Concord neighbors, his Peabody relatives, and leading abolitionists . His 1852 campaign biography of Pierce, his 1862 Atlantic Monthly essay "Chiefly about War-Matters," and his dedication of Our Old Home (1863) to Pierce have been interpreted by many readers, in his times and ours, as evidence of immorality . But a searching consideration of the opprobrium cast on Hawthorne can illuminate not merely the difficulties faced by a public intellectual of imagination and independence during times of political strife but also the need to develop a postpartisan stage in studies of the American Renaissance, a stage less dependent on the discourse of New England righteousness and more attentive to perspectives and values beyond that region. Let me hasten to say I have no quarrel with judging an author in light of one's own present set of moral values—how can one do otherwise? However, one needs to recognize and allow for the cultural relativity of such values. This goal is especially challenging with regard to American Renaissance writers, for they, like us, were living in a highly charged partisan environment that exerted a strong centripetal force on every would-be independent observer. Moreover, those issues at the center of the period—slavery, racialism, women's rights, revolution, violence, war—have lost little of their power to stir our passions. Because my own politics are leftist, I have no desire to defend Hawthorne's pessimistic conservatism or his condescending racism; however, I believe that, to do justice to the depth and value of his political views, we must examine them not only within the context of New England antislavery discourse, a version of which persists in our academic world, but also within Hawthorne's own historically informed, albeit still partial, imaginative world. The paragraphs below will trace the hostility Hawthorne's political views evoked and suggest the kinds of insights a new culturally relative approach to them can yield. The most hostile criticism Hawthorne received during his lifetime came in response to his public comments on the Civil War in "Chiefly about War-Matters, " which he signed "APeaceable Man." The essay originated in Hawthorne's attempt to penetrate the patriotic propaganda surrounding him, and as he begins the essay, he explains, "I gave myself up to reading 250 THE CHALLENGE OF CULTURAL RELATMTY newspapers and listening to the click ofthe telegraph, like other people; until, after a great many months of such pastime, it grew so abominably irksome that I determined to look a little more closely at matters, with my own eyes."1 As it did for Walt Whitman, the closer look led to compassion for those soldiers victimized by the war. Hawthorne had visited a...