Clinging to One Spot: Hawthorne’s Native-Born Settlers

Old Man of;the Mountain, VVhite Mountains, New Hampshire. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-D4-11785. Clinging to One Spot: Ilawthorne's N ative-Born Settlers YAEL BEN-ZVI In 1853, having published numerous stories and three novels, Nathaniel Hawthorne reflected on the ];'oken, an annual magazine where his early tales were published. "It was a sort of hothouse ," he wrote, "where native flowers were made to bloom like exotics. "I Implying a supernatural transformation, Hawthorne presupposed that U.S. texts-and, by extension, their writers-were literally "native." In this imagery, the term "native " connotes the mundane, ordinary existence of unrealized potential. As in a Cinderella story, the Token brings to light the "exotic" essence ofhitherto unattractive "natives." Hawthorne's contrast may SeeI1Cl puzzling in the wake of colonial practices and discourses, whose exoticization of colonized indigenous people made "native" and "exotics" almost synonymous. Whereas today the primary connotation of "native" in the U. S. is "Native American," in Hawthorne's works "native" often pointed to white U.S. subjectivities, playing a key role in characters ' identities, motivations, and predicaments. This essay focuses on Hawthorne's persistent use of the term "native" as the property of whites in two of his largely neglected works, "The Great Stone Face" (1850) and The Life of Franklin Pierce (1852), in order to analyze its broader implications for his work in general. 2 In "The Custom-House," his introduction to The Scarlet Letter (1850), Hawthorne discusses his relationship to Salem and tries to understand the "kindred between the human beESQ / V. 52 /lST-2ND QUARTERS I2006 17 YAEL BEN-ZVI ing and the locality," which has stemmed from the "long connection of the family with one spot." Struggling to define this "kindred," Hawthorne comes to understand it as an innate, inevitable, and undesirable condition of ~(not love, but instinct ." _,Associated with "mud," "dust," "chill," "curse," and "spell," this prolonged, instinctive attachment is "unhealthy," and Hawthorne attempts to break it by giving his children ~~other birthplaces" (GE, I:II-I2). While in "The Custom-House" Hawthorne invokes this relationship through the "oyster-like tenacity with which an old settler ... clings" to one "spot," in The Scarlet Letter proper the young settler Arthur Dimmesdale seems always-already bound by the ties elaborated in the preface , trapped by "the compass of yonder town," and incapable of leaving Boston even though Hester Prynne suggests Europe and "the wilderness" as two alternatives (GE, I:II, 197). Native status is thus represented as a heavy burden restricting one's choices and possibilities. In The House ofthe Seven Gables (1851), Hawthorne further portrays the native status of New England settlers as a "curse" and naturalizes it as an inevitable inheritance that cannot be shaken off (see GE, 2:2I, 46, and elsewhere). In the much earlier tale "Young Goodman Brown" (1835), a native-horn settler whose "instincts" seern to promise a liberating sense of individualized "evil" gradually realizes that this evil has already been defined by his Salenl ancestors and contemporaries, with whom he shares ~(one m.ighty blood-spot"-and this understanding stains the rest of his life (GE, 10:83, 87). At the end of "My Kinsman, Major rV10lineux" (1832), by contrast, opportunities suddenly open up in Boston for Robin because he had an "other birthplace." Aligned as he is with the "native woods" of a frontier settlernent, Robin does not share the major's doom: the tale's anti-royalist stance refutes the significance of family ties and erects the importance ofspatial belonging instead (GE, II:222, 226). Hawthorne's insistence on this nativeness can be read as an attempt to secure native status exclusively for native -born settlers while marginalizing Native Americans-and discounting African Americans almost entirely.3 "The Great Stone Face" and The Life ofFranklin Pierce evidence Hawthorne's construction of native status in particularly tell18 CUNGING TO ONE SPOT ing ways. Written within two years of one another, both texts tell the story of a native-born, natural leader. The representations of place and spatial belonging in these works demonstrate Hawthorne's contribution to the transformation of the concept "native," which became central for nineteenth-century...