Democracy's Spectacle: Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing

4. The Spectacle of Reform: Theater and Prison in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance

4 / The Spectacle of Reform: Theater and Prison in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance Pursued by a “deep sadness” from Blackwell’s Island to Barnum’s Museum —from prison to theater, as it were—Lydia Maria Child offers one of her era’s more haunting accounts of democracy’s melancholy. As she dissects the affective consequences of participating in public enactments of exception, Child exposes the continuity of punishment and entertainment in antebellum public life, locating a basic violence in what Saidiya Hartman has ironically termed the era’s “innocent amusements.” Hartman argues specifically that “antebellum formations of pleasure, even those of the North, need to be considered in relation to the affective dimensions of chattel slavery.” For Hartman, this involves a reinterpretation of two of antebellum America’s most popular theatrical forms, blackface minstrelsy and racial melodrama, forms which rely simultaneously on sentiment and violence, terror and pleasure, to reveal the spectacular atrocities of the auction block within the popular spectacles of the stage.1 What writers like Tocqueville, Beaumont, and Child—as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville—add to Hartman’s account of the violence that inheres in melodrama and minstrelsy is a broader interpretation of public spectacle and its entanglements with political power, as well as an account of the psychic costs of complicity with it. These authors find the dynamic of pleasure and terror at the very foundation of public life because it is intrinsic to U.S. formations of a democratic sovereignty which “gladly works for the happiness” of 158 / the spectacle of reform its subjects (Democracy in America, 692), while creating of a chain of homologous exceptions and limits to that public. Chattel slavery provided a model of lawful violence, against which other forms of exceptional penalty—capital punishment, solitary confinement —operated in the United States in the early decades of the nineteenth century. As the penal system learned from slavery, so reform movements in general began to partake of the rhetoric and practices of penitentiary reform, particularly insofar as sentiment and sympathy produced a kind of lingua franca for reform, shaping debates about technologies of punishment along with those on abolition, temperance, public education, and any number of reformist efforts.2 Such a fluidity of connection between sentiment and punishment, reform, violation, and entertainment, in many ways, accounts for the crisis that begins to unravel the communitarian experiment in Hawthorne’s 1852 “novel,” The Blithedale Romance.3 It is not accidental that the community, which first appears to Hawthorne’s narrator as “a masquerade, a pastoral, a counterfeit Arcadia” (52), reveals itself to be an incipient penitentiary. When Hollingsworth the philanthropist admits his intention to “obtain possession of the very ground on which we had planted our Community ” in order to realize his “scheme for the reformation of the wicked by methods moral, intellectual, and industrial” (134), Miles Coverdale’s theater becomes a prison, and he finds himself occupying two metonymic sites of democratic sovereignty at once. With this, the most voluntary of associations—an intentional community created by reformers who “give up whatever [they] had heretofore attained, for the sake of showing mankind the example of a life governed by other than the false and cruel principles”—betrays its involuntary dimensions. But what is both surprising and significant about Coverdale’s aversion to Hollingsworth’s scheme is that it does not arise simply from the fear that the philanthropist intends to become a solitary, autocratic leader ruling over the community . Coverdale feels the greatest horror at the intended mobilization of “the sympathy of pure, humble, and yet exalted minds” in the service of punishment. In short, Coverdale most fears the community’s engagement of a power which demands his involvement in it. By reading Hawthorne’s satire of mid-century socialist experimentation as linked to the same continuity that Hartman traces between “innocent amusements” and chattel slavery, I do not mean to imply that Blithedale’s institution of involuntary association is analogous to the violations of slavery. Indeed, my interest in Coverdale’s experience of the involuntary has less to do with his fears of coercion or compulsion by his the spectacle of reform / 159 fellows than with a corresponding anxiety of complicity in the violation of others. Coverdale’s dilemma may be best summed up as “that strange melancholy often haunting the inhabitants of democracies” (Democracy in America, 538)—that self-serving sense of isolation and vulnerability that...