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differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13.3 (2003) 121-142



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Dialect Writing and Simultaneity in the American Historical Romance

Lloyd Pratt


Hawthorne's “delineations of New-England manners, conversations and language, are governed by good taste in avoiding to adulterate the conversation of ordinary people with idioms and barbarisms, which rarely have existence in New-England.”

(“Notices of New Books: The House of the Seven Gables." United States Magazine and Democratic Review 28 May 1851)

"The house is a berry good house, and old Colonel Pyncheon think so, too, I reckon;--else why the old man haunt it so, and frighten a poor nigga, as he does?"

(Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables 202�03)

I.

When the United States Magazine and Democratic Review erroneously praised Nathaniel Hawthorne for foregoing “idioms and barbarisms,” it set a lasting precedent. Several ingenious studies have explained how the nineteenth-century novels known as American historical romances, by authors such as Hawthorne, contributed to the early consolidation of American national identity. 1 Yet the romance's characteristic recourse to dialect writing has suffered from a kind of benign critical neglect. 2 We can attribute this omission to the fact that the dialect writing in these novels delivers an unwelcome message about the making of Americans. It informs us that the project of nationalism failed in nineteenth-century America, and not only in those historically obvious ways that come immediately to mind. Dialect writing reveals that nationalism failed because, in these novels, as elsewhere, “time” itself was arrayed against the nation.

The current view of American historical romances holds that they provided “a basis for the nation's identity in something other than a break from the British past” (Pease 8), with scholars in recent years growing especially concerned to show that these novels were “part of the [End Page 121] process by which the nation was forming itself and not merely a reflection of an accomplished fact” (Arac 608). Benedict Anderson's writing on nationalism in Imagined Communities often reinforces this view that America was successfully “engineered” by “bourgeois and aristocratic” authors such as Hawthorne, Cooper, and Sedgwick (Gould 14). Anderson famously argues that nineteenth-century novels represented “time” as “homogeneous,” which allowed readers to imagine their “simultaneity” with fellow citizens. As Anderson explains it, novels represent time in only one way: as an infinite sequence of evenly spaced “moments” lining up one after another, with each new moment differing absolutely from those that precede it. 3 In Anderson's model, it is as if an utterly thin line divides each passing moment from the one that follows it. Anderson's moments thus resemble a sequence of regularly spaced paving stones that rise up to meet the world and allow it to move forward; in novels, time is composed of an infinite number of these paving stones, not one of which precisely resembles its predecessors.

This division of time into a sequence of moments allows what Louis Althusser calls a coupe d'essence or essential section: “a break in the present such that all the elements of the whole revealed by this section are in an immediate relationship with one another” (94). 4 In this view, American romances encouraged their readers to imagine themselves united with their fellow citizens in their shared occupation of a single moment and an imagined “immediate relationship with one another.” Anderson explains, for example, that an “American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his [. . .] fellow-Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity” (26). Although the fellowship of physical proximity eludes the incipient American, “novel time” leads him to believe that at the very least he inhabits the same moment as those Americans who remain permanently outside his orbit (Anderson 22–36). Hawthorne begins his account of the House of the Seven Gables and its occupants by stating that “we shall commence the real action of...

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