Hypocrisy and Self-Deception in Hawthorne’s Fiction by Kenneth Marc Harris (review)

gives us a detailed new perspective on the whole period. This perspective raises more questions than it resolves, but it is a significant achievement to have nudged scholars to reconsider their shibboleths from his new angle of vision. Some key questions Reynolds has raised ought now be the subject of speculation and research. First, most generally, is there a subversive culture as well as a subversive literature that should figure largely in our understanding of the American Renaissance? Without writing a history of this culture, Reynolds has unearthed a plethora of materials that might form the basis for such a history. Second, how much emphasis should one put on regional differ­ ences within this subversive culture? Although I think Reynolds should have paid more attention to regional contexts for New England writers such as Thoreau or Hawthorne, one of his achievements is to have shown that all United States writers in the period shared more of a common frame of reference and a common cultural text than has been supposed. Third, what is the relation between the popular literature of England and Scotland and that of the United States during the period? Both popular and unpopular literature were porously open to British influence in the 1840s and 1850s. To what extent is the American subversive imagi­ nation nurtured by British writing? Fourth, what are the cultural implications of “the skeptical philosophy” that according to Reynolds “runs through much sensational literature” (p. 175)? More pointedly, is there a fundamental skeptical strain within a culture usually regarded as profoundly evangelical? And finally, some recent culturally oriented commentary on the major writers, for example Sacvan Bercovitch’s new work on Hawthorne, has made the case that as a group these writers are subtly conservative in their cultural politics in conformity with the conservative dynamic built into the American revolutionary ethos. Does Reynolds wish to challenge this position, arguing instead that Melville, Whitman, Emerson, and company belong among the “radical democrats”? Are we to accept Reynolds’ 1960s-Whig interpreta­ tion of our literary history, effacing Bercovitch’s invitation to read that history ironically and conservatively? Ifso, Reynolds needs to face his predecessors more openly and contentiously. Yet if Beneath the American Renaissance fails to fully confront or resolve any of these ques­ tions, part of its distinction is to have raised them, with such pertinence and authority that they now cry out to be addressed by American literary historians. University of Michigan James McIntosh Harris, Kenneth Marc. Hypocrisy and Self-Deception in Hawthorne’s Fic­ tion. Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1988. 160 pp. Cloth: $27.50. In a time when we appear almost hypnotized by the shimmering coin of “theory,” it is unusual to find a new book that concerns itself with one of the fundamental themes of a major writer and that deals with it without specialized vocabulary and without cumbersome preformulations, that heavy baggage that many modem young literary critics must carry along on their celestial railroad journey to fame. The theme that Kenneth Marc Harris devotes himself to is that of hypocrisy in Hawthorne’s fiction. He is not concerned with how Hawthorne himself viewed this most common of all sins but with “the meaning of hypocrisy and self-deception in his fictions and with the manner of their functioning in his artistry.” One of the problems that Harris faces, of course, is that of selectivity, for, as he admits, “a census of all the inhabitants of Hawthorne’s imagined world would certainly result in the finding that the overwhelming majority are hypocrites, self-deceivers, or both.” Consequently, he does not attempt an exhaus­ tive survey of all the hypocrites in Hawthorne, a task that would be self-defeatingly tedious and repetitious, but picks and chooses from the short stories and discusses the main characters in The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blitbedale Romance. Examining other people and oneself for signs of hypocrisy was the most popular American pastime before baseball, and Harris feels that Hawthorne was influenced in his fascination with this subject by some of the Puritan preachers, who had detective techniques for uncovering phoniness. This may be true, but Hawthorne needed no...