Origen y desarrollo de la poesia tradicional y popular chilena desde la conquista hasta el presente by Inés Dölz-Blackburn (review)

86Rocky Mountain Review syphilis emerges as the culprit like the butler in a drawing room melodrama.) However, the syphilis conclusion is not at all insisted upon, the author explicitly acknowledging that it is not essential to her overall interpretation. A reader could even dismiss it out of hand and still find the remainder of the book convincing. Bensick has two important points to make about Hawthorne. Both have been made before, but she makes them especially well. The first point is that when Hawthorne places a tale in a. historical setting, whether seventeenth-century Boston or sixteenthcentury Padua, it would be a mistake to conclude in haste that the setting was chosen gratuitously, arbitrarily, or merely for the sake of atmosphere. Another way to say this is that history is by no means ancillary in Hawthorne's fiction. Of course it is now fashionable to study literature in terms of history, taking history in an extraliterary sense, and Hawthorne's exploitation of the New England past has already been ably treated in this manner, most notably by Michael Colacurcio. (Curiously, Bensick's definitive diagnosis of the hidden ailment in "Rappaccini's Daughter" calls to mind, both in a positive and in a negative sense, Colacurcio's specific identification of the major characters in The Scarlet Letter.) But Bensick has achieved more than simply to show that Hawthorne's skill in extracting useful historical material and shaping it to profound literary ends is not limited in scope to the narrow historical ground to which he is personally connected. Of even greater value is the further demonstration she provides that Hawthorne puts his historical imagination to uses that are profoundly subversive of his contemporaries' most cherished assumptions . To explain, I will turn to Bensick's second point about Hawthorne. Simplifying somewhat, Bensick attempts to establish, in my judgment successfully , that the narrator of "Rappaccini's Daughter," far from serving as merely another representation of Hawthorne's favorite authorial pose as genteel romancer, in fact embodies the flabby sentimentalism of the nineteenth century, as Hawthorne sees it, at its worst. The story Hawthorne gives him to narrate, then, exists in large part to undercut his own interpretation of it, specifically his weepy sense of its supposed moral purport and his pompous condemnation of Giovanni's failure to recognize Beatrice's inner purity. Having them both infected with syphilis would thus pull the rug from under the narrator's sentimental edifice immediately. However, the historical fabric Hawthorne has crafted, and which Bensick masterfully brings to light, in itself posits a universe where the narrator's presuppositions are meaningless , regardless of the medical condition of the individual figures in this particular sequence of fictive events. It is this more general insight into Hawthorne's genius, to which Bensick's study has greatly contributed, that will endure. KENNETH MARC HARRIS University of Idaho INÉS DÖLZ-BLACKBURN. Origeny desarrollo de lapoesía tradicionalypopular chilena desde Ia conquista hasta elpresente. Santiago, Chile: Editorial Nascimento, 1984. 247 p. Chile is a country where there has always been a lively interest in folkloric and autochthonous materials and their projection as recurring motifs on all levels of Book Reviews87 Chilean culture. This interest, not surprisingly, projects itself as a constitutent of the various ideologies of culture in Chile. One version is a romantic-nostalgicsentimental interest based on the presence of these traditions as part of a safely isolated past that can be both commercialized and propagated without representing a threat to "progressive" cultural programs. At the opposite end of the spectrum is a leftist nationalism that would insist that the only abiding elements of social identity lie in this culture, which must be recovered, sustained, and enhanced at all cost, as a bulwark against aggressive and insidious multinationalism (and it should be noted that Latin American countries like Chile experience cultural imperialism at the hands not just of the United States and Europe, but also from other Latin American cultural exporters like Argentina and Brazil). Other positions involve the tensions and ruptures between urban, essentially multinational, culture and rural traditions, or the possibility of reading the latter, despite its essential conservatism and the reactionary uses to which it is...