Hawthorne's Politics of Storytelling: Two "Tales of the Province House" and the Specter of Anglomania in the Democratic Review

Mine excellent friend, the landlord of the Province-House, was pleased, the other evening, to invite Mr. Tiffany and myself to an oyster supper. This slight mark of respect and gratitude, as he handsomely observed, was far less than the ingenious tale-teller, and I, the humble note-taker of his narratives, had fairly earned, by the public notice which our joint lucubrations in the Democratic Review, had attracted to his establishment.

—Hawthorne, "Lady Eleanore's Mantle"¹

With these two sentences, Hawthorne begins "Lady Eleanore's Mantle," the third tale in his popular "Tales of the Province-House" series,² which was first published between May 1838 and January 1839 in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, then a Washington, D.C.-based monthly magazine.³ While references to his earlier tales and the Democratic Review fuel the story's overarching plot, which involves an invitation to return to the Province House, they also unmistakably record Hawthorne's literary relationship with a magazinewhose political commitments and Locofoco agendas were well known. His decision here and in other early short stories to associate himself with the Democratic Review calls attention to Hawthorne's own "mark of respect and gratitude" to the magazine and, perhaps, a willingness to be publicly allied to its politics.

While acknowledging the Democratic Review's historical importance as an antebellum political magazine, Hawthorne scholars generally overlook the Democratic Review's significant literary contributions or agenda. With the exception of Michael Colacurcio's The Province of Piety (1995), most readings of the Democratic Review provided by leading Hawthorne scholars tend to underemphasize the literary ethos of the magazine, although antebellum editors and writers considered the Democratic Review to be a major literary magazine.⁴ While observing that the Democratic Review had a "decided political character," Orestes Brownson—the controversial editor and owner of The Boston Quarterly Review who, in 1840, merged his magazine with O'Sullivan's—explained to his readers that the Democratic Review was "devoted principally to general literature."⁵ In 1842, Poe also admitted that O'Sullivan's magazine featured the highest quality of American literature despite its radical politics. "Most highly, indeed, do we esteem the Democratic Review," he added, "and take it all in all, we acknowledge only three [British magazines] as its superiors in any country; namely, Tait's Magazine, Frazer, and Blackwood, and these it will fully equal when it has the advantage of their experience."⁶ While critical misunderstanding of the magazine's literary enterprise will not be addressed here, this neglect of the Democratic Review no doubt shapes how the story of Hawthorne's relationship with the magazine and its editor John Louis O'Sullivan remains underplayed and how Hawthorne criticism generally overlooks shared political language and social concerns embedded in stories like "Lady Eleanore's Mantle" and "Old Esther Dudley."

The degree to which we observe the underlying political themes in Hawthorne's Province House tales and their response to the subculture of Jacksonian nationalism depends upon our familiarity with the language and ideology of the Democratic Review. As Colacurcio stresses, "Only in the context of the Democratic Review—in the midst, that is, of Bancroftian History, Jacksonian Democracy, and Manifest Destiny—can we understand [. . .] 'Old Esther Dudley,' or account for the involuted complexity of Hawthorne's narrative point of view."⁷ While Hawthorne does question Jacksonian myth making in his "Province House" tales, such questioning, I argue, facilitates a broader Democratic dialogue on America's history and political traditions. The assumption of Hawthorne's perfunctory politics in the late 1830s and early 1840s may be shown to be more complicated once the political language and themes rooted in his early short stories are framed with reference to...