Citizens of Somewhere Else: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James by Dan McCall (review)

Book Reviews 157 those who seek to profit from their yearnings and to the real and virtual paraphernalia invented and fabricated around both consumer and producers ; self-interested idealization of honeymooning. (The gargantuan aridity of the West Edmonton Mall will probably survive the impact of Internet retailing due to the facilities within devoted to realizing the consumable fantasy exemplified by the honeymoon scenario.) Those two latter aspects occupy the whole of the last section of the book and once again, bring in statistical material derived from participant surveys. The text makes for fascinating, and frequently entertaining, reading. The authors are especially to be congratulated upon for melding not only their scholarly stances but also their individual styles of writing. Consequently the tables of numbers appear as digestible numerical reinforcement of argument in comparable manner to the visualization of the written commentary on honeymoon episodes in the photographic plates. Romancing the Honeymoon therefore contributes to the existing literature on social behaviour and to the ordinary consequences of modernity. It also validates integrative research which deliberately incorporates the common or garden variety with the elevated and empirical. By way of example, the authors' discerning appraisal will complement such recent studies of the social architecture of familial space as Diana Agrest et al's The Sex of Architecture (New York, Abrams, 1996) or Peter Ward's A History ofDomestic Space: Privacy and the Canadian Home (Vancouver, U of B.C. Press, 1999). The seriousness of the honeymoon lurks in the defying that it so often requires of most social, financial, rational and aesthetic property. Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe University ofBritish Columbia Dan McCall. Citizens ofSomewhere Else: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry fames. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. Pp. x + 200 + illustrations. It is probably every scholar's dream to write a work of literary criticism that jettisons the cumbersome apparatus of the academic thesis and drifts instead from one beloved scene to another, savoring and caressing the texts 158 Canadian Review ofAmerican Studies Revue canadtenne d'etudes americatnes we love-much, perhaps, as we permit ourselves to do in the classroom, which, indeed, provides much of the background for the discussions of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James in Dan McCall's Citizens ofSomewhere Else. McCall is a superb reader of texts, and many moments in his book produce that heart-piercing thrill of recognition that characterizes our experience of the literary texts themselves, as when McCall explains the lapse of time signalled at the beginning of chapter 36, and the further delay of getting inside Isabel's consciousness, which leaves us wondering "what has happened...what Osmond has done to our Isabel": 'The free, keen girl had become quite another person.'...Now she is a "fine lady'...Straight step-by-step narrative...could not provide us with this mystery. We are already waiting for chapter 42, even though we don't know it exists. What we do know is that we need to see her; rather, whatever has happened to her, we want to know what she has learned and how she has been changed by it. (151) And when we do get to chapter 42, that "portrait of the soul in action," McCall registers the sad, hard, amazing knowledge that the text provides: She had wanted her life to be a novel. Well, now it is-an old novel, a bad novel. But she is by no means a pathetic victim. Her spiritual journey gathers together all the key images in the book. . .Importantly , this is the way she thinks-the chapter we have been waiting for-the Jamesian narrator has quite disappeared, no longer hanging around asking us to 'forgive' her or describe 'the poor girl's fancy' and telling us how we must be 'charitable' about her mistakes. The narrator 's voice has become hers. (153) This is the way literary criticism should be: in the service of the texts we would not only illuminate but also celebrate our scholarship. But there are drawbacks to McCall's methodology, which to some degree compromise the benefits of his approach, and which suggest, perhaps, why many of us merely mortal scholars of literature (citizens of here and not, like McCall's authors, of "somewhere else...