The Ironic Romance of New Historicism: The Scarlet Letter and Beloved Standing in Side by Side

CHARLES LEWIS The Ironie Romance of New Historicism: The Scarlet Letter and Beloved Standing in Side by Side The resemblances between Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Toni Morrison's Beloved are extensive and suggestive enough that we might imagine something like a correspondence between them, and from there venture to speculate further upon the nature and consequence of this peculiar and rather problematic connection . I describe it as peculiar and problematic knowing full well that placing these two texts side by side upon the literary scaffold may be viewed from a number of critical and theoretical positions as somewhere between unimaginable and reprehensible. Not only have I suggested the trope of literary lineage between a canonical nineteenthcentury white male author and a twentieth-century black female author, but I've also joined the hands of a contemporary novel that vividly portrays the conditions and effects of slavery with another novel that, as a number of recent interpretations would have us read it, is "about" slavery too, if only by virtue of the absence of the topic from the book. Or, to be more precise, the way in which authorial intention, textual trace, and the claims of historical production and reception commingle to constitute an ideological presence very different from the one which we would (wish to?) find in Beloved. This article involves the irony of romance in unexpected places. That is to say, while I will indeed inventory a significant number of similarities between these two novels and furthermore claim that such Arizona Quarterly Volume 51, Number 1, Spring 1995 Copyright © 1995 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-161 o 34Charles Lewis resemblances suggest some shared identity as historical romances, my primary focus is neither to offer a reading of The Scarlet Letter, to argue for the most important sources of and influences on Beloved, nor to examine the tradition of American historical romance fiction.1 More central to my purposes is to consider how this suggestive linkage is strategically useful in exploring another site of relations, those involving American historical romance fiction and New Historicist criticism, for not only does Beloved (as well as Morrison's critical writing) problematize certain New Historicist readings of Hawthorne's romance in particular, but it also raises broader questions about New Historicist practice and theory. Moreover, circulating through my argument is a correspondence of yet another sort: the resemblance between historical romance fiction and New Histoticist criticism. I refer here to more than the point that both discourses concern themselves with the relationship between history , imagination, and textuality, for I want to suggest that New Historicist criticism and historical romance fiction are themselves similar discursive modes; that they employ a shared set of figurative, narratological , and rhetorical sensibilities to embody and enact their shared concerns; and that as co-incidental performances, they ptesent a surprisingly specular relationship. And again, Morrison's triangulating presence is significant, for she appropriates those discursive properties which a number of New Historicist readers of Hawthorne both dread and desire but ultimately fail to possess: Beloved, with its configurations and mobilizations of histoty, imagination, and language, is both a kind of historical romance and a New Historicism we can neither read nor write along the familiar protocols of conversation about the identity and relations of those sites of discourse. If, as the New Historicists argue, literary and nonliterary texts circulate inseparably, the point can be made that much of the discussion about New Historicism has itself ironically engaged in a kind of "closing -off"—the sort of differentiation and privileging which New Historicism would ostensibly eschew. There is a particular irony in a situation in which most of the attempts to identify, locate, and problematize New Historicism do so in terms of either critical discourses (Marxism, deconstruction, pragmatism, formalism, etc.) or material conditions (bourgeois academics, marginalization/politicization of the universities New Historicism35 in America, etc.). The possibility of linking New Historicism to imaginative discourse would seem to destabilize some implied sense of privilege , efficacy, or seriousness—although New Historicism itself proclaims just such a poststructuralist destabilization. The performative component of my paper, then, is two-fold: to circulate Hawthorne's and Morrison 's texts with New...