Integrating Hawthorne

TeresaA. Goddu Integrating Hawthorne I want to begin with a query that those of us who work in “race studies”might usefully pose: why is it that Poe, not Hawthorne, has become the figure through whom antebellum American literature is reread in terms of race and slavery? Toni Morrison ’s 1992claim, in Playing in theDark, that “no early American writer is more important to the conceptof American Africanismthan Poe”seems to have set the agenda for the criticism of the last decade. No longer simply condemning of Poe’s politics, Poe criticism is now quite sophisticated, locating his works in relation to racial discourses and cultural formations of the antebellum period. The recent volume Romancing the Shadow:Poe and Race, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg (2001),attests to the central status that race and slavery now hold in Poe studies. Why is there not a similar volume on Hawthorne and race? How is it that, in A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Larry Reynolds (2001),Jean FaganYellin can provide an extensive summaryof Hawthorne’sknowledgeof the debate over slaveryand yet state that his great romances fail to “acknowledge the necessary engagement of politics and art”when they fail to connect their “great moral problem[s]” with the issue of slavery ?2Her claim that Hawthorne’s texts do not engage their context is all the more troubling since, in reiterating her 1989argument in ”Hawthorne and the American National Sin,”it fails to take into account the decade of criticism on Hawthorne and race that has i n t e ~ e n e d . ~ Located in the canonical context of the historical guide, Yellin’s argument typifies the mixed message that continues to be sent about Hawthorne’s relation to race studies: Hawthorne’s conservative racial politics and his multiple connections to slavery are important but not integral to our understanding of his fictions. Why are slavery and race integrated in Poe but not in Hawthorne studies?Book-length studies of Poe, such as Terence Whalen’s Edgar Allan Poe and theMasses (1999),an examination of Poe’s relation to the mass marketplace, necessarilytake up the issuesof race and slaveryaspart of a larger argument. The same does not hold true of booklength studies of Hawthorne. There arguably has been a longer history of race criticism on Hawthorne -going back to Melville’sreview of Mosses froman Old Manse-than on Poe, and there is certainly a greater wealth of information and documents related to how Hawthorne viewed slavery or thought aboutrace: his editedJournal o f an A&can Cruiser, his campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, and his prominently published essay on the Civil War, “Chiefly about War-Matters,” are only the most obvious.Why, then, have important contributions like Nancy Bentley’s 1990 ELH article “Slavesand Fauns: Hawthorne and the Uses of Primitivism”or Anna Brickhouse’s 1998PMLA article on the Mexican genealogyof “Rappaccini’s Daughter” not made more of an impact on the way we read and think about race in Hawthorne’s canon and ae~thetic?~ Let me offer some possibilities. First, it is not a matter of numbers. According to the MLA database , the count for entries on race/slavery in Hawthorne is similar to the count for Poe during the period 1963-2004. (While the MLA database is not comprehensive, it doesgive an approximate sense of the amount of scholarship produced on a particular subject.) For each author, these numbers amount to a small percentage of the total entries; statistically,race and slavery do not a p pear to be issues central to the body of criticism about either.Second, their assumed unimportance IntenatinnHawthorne 37 is not,as I have alreadysuggested,due to the lack of fine criticism on the topic of Hawthorne and race/slavery. There are significantessays on race politics about all of his major workJay Grossman andLeland Personon TheScarlethtter;David Anthony,Paul Gilmore,and Robert K. Martin on TheH m e of the Seuen Gables;my own work on The BlithedaLRomance;NancyBentleyandArthur Riss on The Mad& Faun; and Larry Reynolds, Bruce Neal Simon,EricCheyfitz,and RichardBrodhead on Hawthorne’s politics generally! The answer liesnot somuch in Hawthornestudiesbut in race studies-in understanding, that is,why...