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LEGENDS OF LABOR C H A P T E R 2   Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Voice of Craft webs of workmanship: ‘‘rappaccini’s daughter’’ The previous chapter argued that Cellini’s canonizers accommodated the purposeful application of the body, a traditional standard of artisanship, with the narrative appeal of Cellini’s free-floating dexterity, peripatetic life, and universal capability. In this context, I suggested, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s categorical references to ‘‘such hands as those of Benvenuto Cellini’’ typify a culture of craft in which the artisan’s body was both emphasized and abstracted, at once incarnated and generalized. The current chapter traces the circumference of manual labor’s literary dimension in a wider corpus of Hawthorne’s writing than the notebooks, memoirs, and sketches in which he repeatedly names Cellini. I want to suggest that Hawthorne’s early fiction in particular, centered around crafts from embroidery and house-building to carving and watchmaking, might be understood in terms of its emphasis on artisanship. More specifically, I analyze how the crafts worker’s touch in Hawthorne’s early work appeared in specifically narrative forms: as tales told within tales about the incarnating power of labor; as crafted objects marked by their textuality ; and as a language of workmanship beholden, like Cellini’s Life, to represent both the artisan’s habitual, durable practice and the inimitability and contingency of an unstandardized life. Hawthorne used all of these forms to test the compatibility of craft’s emerging interest, as story and text, with craft’s traditional virtues as physical practice and material results. This chapter emphasizes Hawthorne’s early career. I discuss a selection of stories about artisanship from Mosses from an Old Manse, as well as The Scarlet Letter; the latter text, Hawthorne ’s breakthrough novel, itself looks back to his earliest literary e√orts, rewriting an account of engraving that first appeared in the self-published Fanshawe. These works interest me because the author’s struggle to establish mastery of his own medium—print—seems to have made him uniquely aware of the relations between craft and story. Famously, ‘‘The Custom-House’’ describes a writer who has not yet confirmed his vocation. When new literary work does π≤ talking shop come his way, in the form of the scarlet letter he discovers, Hawthorne sets the scene in a room whose condition mirrors the author’s unconsummated labors: the ‘‘brick-word and naked rafters’’ of the attic room had ‘‘never been covered with paneling or plaster,’’ appearing ‘‘still to await the labor of the carpenter and mason.’’∞ Likening his authorial charge to the artisanal charges of the carpenter and mason—all of which appear as only partially completed—Hawthorne’s meditations in his early fiction tend to recur to the questions involved in understanding text as craft and craft as text. The next chapter extends the case for craft’s animation as a narrative subject in Hawthorne’s fiction to the novel composed immediately after The Scarlet Letter. But that novel, The House of the Seven Gables, raises questions about the nature and representation of skill that are better understood, I argue, in the context of theories expressed by A. W. N. Pugin, John Ruskin, and the Arts and Crafts Movement; Hawthorne’s third major novel, The Blithedale Romance, is even more obviously oriented to the dynamics of handicraft as part of a formal utopian project. The early fiction treated in the following pages instead comes back again and again to the more general case, testing the implications for corporeal standards of workmanship when artisanship refracts into stories, projections, and narrative e√ects. ‘‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’’ (1844) is a revealing place to begin, for it lodges these concerns in a handmade artifact that initially seems to have little to do with the literary medium or storybook atmosphere of craft. On the contrary, the magnificent vial ‘‘wrought by the hands of the renowned Benvenuto Cellini’’ (the only object by Cellini in Hawthorne’s corpus that is unambiguously able to be accessed, handled, and attributed) promises to restore tactility to a world that imperils it. The vial contains what is thought to be an antidote to the poisonous engineering of Dr. Rappaccini—whose daughter Beatrice, one of his experimental subjects, kills whatever she contacts. The antidotal potential of the Cellini vase, given to a young man who passionately desires the daughter, is thus touch itself; Cellini’s handiwork, uniquely presented by Hawthorne as the actual work of the goldsmith himself rather...

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