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Chapter 6  Boarders, Brothers, Lovers: The Blithedale Romance’s Theater of Feeling My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. —Roger Chillingworth, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, 1850 Antebellum literature occupied uncommonly melodramatic ground in popular works by the likes of best-selling author George Lippard, and yet the genre of boardinghouse letters was not inclined solely toward the rhetorical excesses of works such as The Quaker City. Boarding was similarly hospitable to the more tempered discourse of sentiment. Literary boarding brought to an already emotionally implicated art form the straitening conditions of urban housing. It thereby further intensified contemporary American culture’s receptiveness to socio-personal states of heightened feeling. The more boarders who resided at any one address, after all, the greater was the collective store of sentiment on offer there; the greater, too, was the likelihood, within boarding’s radically collapsed spatiotemporal context of close contact, that pent-up sentiment would find expression. Boarding, in short, redoubled the potential discursive force of affect simply by creating causal conditions that were likely to sustain strong manifestations of sentiment in the short term. It ironically did so, however, by residing outside the sanctified space-time of the antebellum home. That private zone of domesticity was the very coordinate of culture denied by boarding. But if boardinghouse letters nullified the sympathetic base on which so many period sentimental texts depended, they did not necessarily obviate affect per se. Boarding, rather, gradually shifted the modern focal point for feeling out from under the figurative stage lights of domestic-sentimentalism, into comparatively sterile urban 225 environs where affect was held at a high premium, and would therefore have to be found before it could be flaunted. In boarding, the distinctive melodramatic effects of affect transformed the discursive conventions of urban American sentiment. It is, appropriately, the oft-noted dramatic quality of U.S. author Nathaniel Hawthorne’s body of writing that perhaps best demonstrates the complex quality of this city literary transformation, by which boarding “on the boards” emerged as a favored more-than-metaphor for emotional depth (or lack thereof) and display among the era’s readers and writers. Theatrical motifs are conspicuous in Hawthorne’s short fiction from the 1830s and 1840s. Repeated staging of his acclaimed novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) confirms a wish among not a few contemporaries to rank the author alongside the nation’s playwrights, given his fictional gift for compelling mise-en-scène. But it is the dramatic trappings of Hawthorne’s fourth novel, The Blithedale Romance1 (1852)—with its emotionally charged plot twists and love triangles, in boardinghouse environs—that have led any number of scholars to apply the theater as the most fitting figure for that book as well as the author’s evolving views on art and life.2 If writers since Shakespeare have deemed all the world a stage, and all its inhabitants players, then modern literary men and women in the antebellum United States increasingly came to extend the long-standing theater analogy for life’s vicissitudes to a more immediate dramatic arena that they were able to locate in everyday boarding. Among the American writers to explore (and exploit) most fully these dramatic possibilities was Hawthorne. This chapter proposes not only that the boardinghouse is the central motif of Blithedale; it suggests as well that Hawthorne’s primary concern as he brought his project to completion was to relay to his readers the impact that close-quartered urban habitation was having on our collective affective lives. Hawthorne himself knew boarding personally. The antebellum reform culture of which he writes resorted to the boardinghouse as a national platform of operations, as we will see. Boarding, we also know, was very much in vogue with authors on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the nineteenth century. Appearing additionally on several levels in the novel in question, the boardinghouse provides a conceptual framework for interpreting the ambivalent intricacies of Blithedale. The novel does address reform, as is evident from the text. It anatomizes human relations, too, as do most of Hawthorne’s writings. One need only witness this particular work’s romantic storyline for evidence of its interpersonal themes. Blithedale even exposes the sexual tensions that emerge between its characters—hence we can account for so much of the novel’s drama. Yet, a more encompassing view of the book indicates that social 226 Chapter 6 [18.117...

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