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c h a p t e r 4 Population and the Limits of Civil Society in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter In the preceding chapter, I suggested that Jacksonian-era gothic fiction addresses the problems posed by common sense for a nation made from closed and isolated cultural groups. In doing so, I charted a shift in the cultural logic of the gothic from the early republic to the early decades of the nineteenth century. What began as a form that allowed early U.S. writers such as Brown or Sansay to imagine the cosmopolitan nation as a vigorous, transatlantic flow of people and goods had, by the 1830s, transferred its attention to the problem of local culture. As the previous chapter argued, writers such as Irving, Poe, and Bird use the cultural materials of the gothic to imagine a collective social body built from discrete and autonomous parts. In this chapter, I want to show how the national imaginary undergoes yet another shift in the middle of the nineteenth century to focus on what, after Foucault, I call the “population .” The gothic, as might be expected, has an important role to play in the discursive production of this emergent social paradigm. This chapter argues that, in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, the nineteenth-century American novel comes to register a tension between the earlier contractual model of the state and a much larger measure of humanity conceptually hostile to the restrictive categories of individual, household, or nation. Foucault calls this the population; Giorgio Agamben and others call it “bare” or “mass” life. These are the human beings who are part of a nation but are excluded from membership within it on the grounds that they lack the requisite properties of self-sovereignty. As the bare life 116 chapter 4 excluded by civil society, this measure of the human conventionally finds expression as slaves (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852), children (The Wide Wide World, 1850), women (The Scarlet Letter, 1850), and even political prisoners (Israel Potter, 1855). These characters represent just those forms of life that the paternal household is supposed to protect, or so Locke would have it: “Let us therefore consider a master of a family with all these subordinate relations of wife, children, servants, and slaves, united under the domestic rule of a family ; which [resembles] a little common-wealth.” As Charles Brockden Brown argued in his gothic novels, the limitations of Locke’s “little common-wealth” are all too clear for a country that is not made up of land-owning, elite, autonomous , and self-governing individuals organized hierarchically. Indeed, Brown’s legacy to American letters is arguably an enduring skepticism about the British household as a tenable paradigm for the American nation. As cultural historians have noted, the years prior to the Civil War were marked by increasing threats to regional and national cohesion and the rapid expansion of a market economy. Those eighteenth-century mechanisms for social good—sympathy, the contract, compassion, and so on—seemed less likely to succeed as models for social cohesion as the traditional structures of American life underwent profound upheaval. As I see it, fiction writers continued to critique the family through the 1840s and 1850s as a model for the nation in the face of vast groups of people ostensibly lacking property-in-themselves. Since mass life is not an aggregate of individuals, life thus constituted is disqualified from membership in both civil state and the domestic haven of the British tradition. It makes sense, therefore, that novelists such as Stowe, Melville, Hawthorne, and Warner might all address the question of the population—namely, its logical relationship to the contractual model of political relationships underwriting the U.S. Constitution. In this chapter, I plan to test this theory on Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. While not conventionally regarded as a gothic novel, The Scarlet Letter nonetheless draws on gothic conventions, I argue, to cancel out the mutually dependent categories of the self-enclosed individual and the social contract to make room for an alternative political formation, embodied in Hester and Pearl, that comes to us as something to the order of a population. In making this claim, I aim to complement scholarship that places The Scarlet Letter firmly at the center of an antebellum debate over “personhood” and the problem of social cohesion. That body of work has conventionally construed Hesterasapowerful ,dissentingindividualconsciousness,atemplateformiddle-class interiority, or a paradigm for liberal consensus. I take a...

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