Democratic Terror in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and “The Man of the Crowd”

PaulDownes Democratic Terror in “MyKinsman, Major Molineux” and “TheMan of the Crowd” 1 One of the cheers that accompaniedinstancesof tarring and feathering in the Revolutionarycoloniesreminded the victim that he or shewas a cent r a lparticipant in a politicalbirthday party: “May feathersand t a rbe your next birthdaysuit,/And the block be the fate of North, Mansfield and Bute.”’I like to think that NathanielHawthorne, whose birthday we are here to celebrate, would have enjoyedthe note of menace introduced into the occasionby thisallusion.Hawthorne,afterall, distinguishedhimself by resistingeasynostalgiaby complicating the simplecelebration of happy returns, posthumous or otherwise.Hawthorne’s career as a writer could almost be said to have begun with such resistance. “MyKinsman,Major Molineux” (published in 1832 but probably begun in 1828)culminates in a terrifying incident of tarring and feathering that coincideswith the protagonist’s rebirth as a democratic American. Hawthorneknew, perhapsbetter than anyone,all about the anxietyand the violence generated by birthdays. In this study, I consider the politics of Hawthorne ’s story and suggest a comparison with Edgar Allan Poe’sshort storyof eight years later, “TheMan of the Crowd.”I explorehow these stories trouble simple solemnizationsof democracy and hint at the specific forms of terror and uncertainty introduced by post-feudal and egalitarian forms of social belonging. For Hawthorne, democratic terror finds an original ritual in the practice of tarring and feathering that becameso significant for the Revolutionary colonies. For Poe, thisterror takesthe form of a monstroussingularity (and a corresponding terror of invisibility ) that is both the promise and the threat of democracy’segalitarian liberation. -My Kinsman, Major Molineux” has succeeded in generating a host of careful and persuasive critical readings that nevertheless come to entirely different sets of conclusions: at their most didactic, these readings celebrate Hawthorne ’s cleareyed account of psychologicaland political maturation or applaud his mordant attack on the aggressivenaivete of the prototypical American citizen.‘ One recent reader asserts, after drawing an analogy between “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”and Virgil’s A d d (an analogy Hawthorne provokes by implicitly transforming Massachusetts Bay into the River Styx), that the story offers a ”severe critique of that aspect of colonial rebellion which, when it sacrifices family , religion, and country for power, greed and feebleconformity,pervertsthe best of human v a l ues , and indeed perverts the entire American quest for economic,religious, and political freedom .”sBut if “MyKinsman”doesindeed demonstratea l lthe failingsand apparentperversionsthat John Shieldsso carefullydiscovers,I would argue that its persistent appeal derives from its refusal to disavowthat pastcompletely.Hawthorne’sstory seems to suggest that this city of the dead, this city of mob violence and night terrors, isalso our America,ourdemocracy,our modernity.“MyKinsman ,MajorMolineux,”in other words,mightstill be read for insight into the difficult politics of democracy (anditsintimatelyrelated ideologyof human rights)at the beginningof the twenty-first century. If Hawthornehas generatedsharplydivergent Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism political interpretations, Poe has tended, particularly in recent times, to attract more consistently damning readings.John Carlos Rowe, to takejust one example, argues that “Poe’sracism is inextricably entangled with his attitudes toward women and his . . .aristocratic pretensions.” Rowe picks up on the line, inherited from F. 0.Matthiessen, that differentiates Poe from his literary contemporaries in the North on the grounds of his implicit and sometimes explicit antipathy toward democracy.Poe’s“reactionarypolitics,”Rowe continues , “rejectanysign of liberal progressivism for the sakeof a ‘radical’retreat to feudal hierarchies, albeit redefined to survive in Poe’s nineteenth ~entury.”~ But what if we consider Poe’s political philosophy (or, more accurately, the response to democratic philosophy that might be found at work in his tales) apart from questions that specifically concern race and gender?The question I want to ask is this: is there anything of value (politicalor philosophical) to be found in nineteenthcentury expressions of resistance to the ideology of democracy? Poe, for example, was highly suspicious of Emersonian philosophy. But in this respect he had something in common with contemporary critics of Emersonianism’s complicitywith Manifest Destiny. In Poe’s fiction, I want to suggest , we can find traces of a critique of democratic ideology (which is also to say the ideology of human rights in its Enlightenment form) that we might...