Hawthorne's "Vicious" Circles: The Sphere-Circle Imagery in the Four Major Novels

HAWTHORNE'S "VICIOUS" CIRCLES: THE SPHERE-CIRCLE IMAGERY IN THE FOUR MAJOR NOVELS D. G. Kehl D. G. Kehl (B.A., Bob Jones University; M.S., University of Wisconsin; Ph.D., University of Southern California) has been an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University since 1965 and is now serving as director of freshman English. He has also taught at the University of Southern California . His article, "The Chiaroscuro World of Par Lagerkvist" is scheduled for publication in Modern Fiction Studies in the summer of 1969. Also scheduled for summer 1969 publication is a book, The Literary Style of the Old Bible and the New, which is a part of the Bobbs-MerriU Rhetoric and Composition Series. Henry James, in his critical biography Hawthorne, asserts that the "solitary defect" of Hawthorne's style in The Scarlet Letter is his "too liberal use of the two substantives 'sphere' and 'sympathies.' 'u James, who earlier states erroneously that Hester meets the minister by appointment in the forest, seems to be guilty of "tampering" with Hawthorne's "flute" and then "criticizing his music." More recent Hawthorne commentators, avid gatherers of critical bouquets, have, in their zealous casting about in the lights and shadows of Hawthorne's prose, given only shadowy glimpses of Hawthorne's techniques; in their efforts to examine the "power of blackness" perhaps they have at times neglected to appreciate the power of Hawthorne. In addition to scrutinizing Hawthorne's use of light and dark, one must examine the "single flake of pigment," the "index to his aims," as F. O. Matthiessen has called James's own predilection for such terms as picturesque and romantic.2 Such "Hawthornean" terms as charm and circle seem to have crept unawares into James's own essays on Hawthorne, and in The Bench of Desolation, where the symbolic term bench recurs at least a dozen times, the author seems to violate the very principles of usage which he accuses Hawthorne of violating. One also wonders why James singles out The Scarlet Letter in this criticism, for if the frequent use of sphere is a defect in that novel it would seem to be an even greater defect in the other major novels where it appears even more frequently, not to mention the frequent appearance of such words as morbid, sensibility, charm, region, and airy. At first view, one might regard such terms as kinds of "aesthetic catch-alls," but a closer study reveals a subtle "index" to Hawthorne's aims, just as an examination of the as if clause (appearing sixty-five times in The Scarlet Letter, seventy-eight times in The Marble Faun, and one-hundred and six times in The House of the Seven Gables) suggests the essence of Hawthorne's narrative technique, related to his "multiple choice" device 'Henry James, Hawthorne (New York, 1879), p. 116. 2F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (New York, 1944), p. 122. 10RMMLA BulletinMarch 1969 and to his whole aesthetic philosophy of the Romance as outlined in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables. Similarly, one will discover that the "spheres" or "circles," not simply repeated but used subtly in varying situations, are the significant, sustained images, the interaction of which provides both the structural method and the central meaning of the four major novels. As such, the "sphere" is not a foible but a forte. Hawthorne's world is a "rude sphere,"3 a "sphere of strangely mingled elements." (The House of the Seven Gables> p. 41) Mankind occupies an eccentric position in the great circle of existence; he has distorted the Great Chain of Being, for "nature, in beast, fowl, and tree, and earth, flood, and sky, is what it was of old; but sin, care, and self-consciousness have set the human portion askew."4 Just as mankind is separate and awry, so the individual is isolated within the "sphere of humanity": This perception of an infinite, shivering solitude, amid which we cannot come close enough to human beings to be warmed by them, and where they turn to cold, chilly shapes of mist, is one of the most forlorn results of any accident, misfortune, crime, or peculiarity...