Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne's Novels by Gordon Hutner (review)

Studies in American Fiction249 Hutner, Gordon. Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne's Novels. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1988. 255 pp. Cloth: $26.00. "To be perfectly secret," said Montaigne, "one must be so by nature, not by obligation." However, Montaigne did not say how an artist's secretive nature combined with those obligations imposed upon him by a commitment to an aesthetic approach in which the secret is a central component can work to produce great art. Fortunately, in Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne's Novels, Gordon Hutner does just that, or rather he shows how a reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne's longer work that focuses on the strategic use of secrets to condition a specific sort of sympathetic response in the reader can provide insight not only into "biographical and psychoanalytic themes or stylistic values" but also "clarify issues of genre, of history and culture, along with conditions of reception" (p. 3). If all of this sounds like another quasi-biographical treatment of Hawthorne's work informed by a search into Salem's historical closets for whatever skeletons Hawthorne might have left there, nothing could be farther from the truth. Hutner is willing to allow Hawthorne his much-prized personal privacy and to rely instead on his own close readings of the texts in question to argue for the controlling presence in Hawthorne's novels of what Hutner calls a "rhetoric of secrecy." In other words, Hutner begins by acknowledging what most readers of Hawthorne would accept without question: that secrets are central to Hawthorne's romances. But he quickly moves beyond this concern to the manner in which the secret becomes a mode of communication; that is, it functions through Hawthorne's promises and deferrals of disclosure in a way that suggests the specific demands that the author is placing on his reader. By noting that the secret is often linked with sympathy, Hutner is able to contend that besides being the focus of the uncertain moral and psychological worlds of Hawthorne's romances, the secret is used by Hawthorne as a device to instruct the reader in how to respond with the sort of "apprehensive sympathy" that he describes as an attribute of the ideal reader in the preface to The Marble Faun. Hutner uses this idea of a rhetoric of secrecy as what he terms "a paradigm for reading Hawthorne," and in four chapters he treats each of the romances, from The Scarlet Letter through The Marble Faun, using that paradigm as the basis for his reading of each. Therefore, Hutner's discussion of The Scarlet Letter focuses on the ways in which the romance is linked to "The Custom-House" sketch through "the rhetoric of secrecy that they share" (p. 19). In other words, Hutner contends that the story of Hester and Dimmesdale is a metaphoric treatment of the literal charges levied against Hawthorne himself at the time that he was dismissed as Surveyor at the Salem Custom House. Implicit in this argument is the notion that Hawthorne as author in the role of putative editor can keep the inmost part of himself veiled while, simultaneously, objectifying the embarrassment he felt over charges of political misconduct . This objectification takes the form of a narrative that, in being based on secrets, consistently represents the ambiguous, even indeterminate, nature of experience . This ambiguity, in turn, works to both preserve an essential element of mystification in the text (a protection against a hostile readership) and, combined with an emphasis on "tone as overriding literal meanings" (p. 45), provides the conditions necessary for eliciting the sympathy that Hawthorne desired from his reader. Hutner sees The House of Seven Gables as defined by the irresolvable dualisms it represents (male-female, domestic-commercial) and this dualism is even apparent at the level of the novel's two modes of representation, "one corresponding with commonsense understandings of secrets, the other ensuring mystification" (p. 73). According to Hutner, these dualistic representational modes define the novel's other dualisms of structure, temporality, and cultural understanding: "For the novel's disunions also can be 250Reviews understood as the faulty compromises between male and female that the marriage plot...