Poe and Hawthorne: Perspectives and Prospects

Alexander Hammond INTRODUCTION Poe and Hawthorne: Perspectives and Prospects At the 2004 HawthorneBicentennialConference in Salem,Massachusetts,the coeditorsof Poe Studies /Da& Romanticismsponsoreda panelthat examined Nathaniel Hawthorneand Hawthornescholarshipfromthe vantagepointof comparisonswith EdgarAllan Poe, a contemporarywriter who a l s o laboredin the earlynineteenthcenturyAmerican periodical and book marketplace. The panel granted thatHawthorneand Poenoticedandwere influencedby one another’swritings in the 1830s and 18&, especiallyin referenceto the shortstory and the gothic,while it emphasized reading their worksin otherthan authorcenteredcontexts.Featuring a range of scholars,all of whom had contributed significantlyto the previous critical dialogue on both writers, the panel developed a series of exploratoryperspectivesfor thinking p r e ductively about Hawthorne and Poe in common categories: how daguerreotypyboth represented the twoand provided them with an aesthetic language ; and how selected writings dealt with gender issues,periodicalsources,nationalismand democracy , and race. The papersthatfolloware revised,reordered, and somewhat expanded versions of those remarks . They begin with Susan Williams, “Daguerreotyping Hawthorne and Poe.” Professor Williamsis Professorof English at Ohio StateUniversity ,coeditorof thejournal American Periodicals and of ReciprocalInjlwces: LiteraryProduction, Dktributim , and Consumptionin America (1999),and author of twobooks: CmfoundingZmages:Photography and Portraiture in Antebellum American Fiction (1997) and Rechiming Authorship:Literary Women inAmerica, 185&1900 (2006).ProfessorWilliis’s original proposal for the Salem conference suggested that daguerreotypes taken of both Hawthorne and Poe “wereeventuallyused as celebrityportraitsthatputforwarda romanticmodel of authorship.”As Williams contends in her 1997 study ConfoundingZwwgs, both writers deal with haunted portraitsand daguerreotypesin theirs t e ries; in the essay printed here, Williams further finds that the circulation and reception of mechanicallyreproduced images of themselves and others,which “couldserve as an emblem of both ‘repose’and ‘unityof effect,’“provides “away of conceptualizingthe Poe-Hawthornerelation”and points to transnationalcontexts (16,20). Williams’sessay incisively argues these points whilealsoservingasan introductiontotheremaining four papers. She notes that the approach to authorship that emerges from the marketing of Hawthorne’sand Poe’s daguerreotypescontrasts with “thefeminizednature of creativeproduction” that Monika Elbert elaborates in the second contribution below (17), “Poe and Hawthorne as Women’sAmanuenses.”ElbertisProfessorandDistinguished Scholar at Montclair State University, and her extensive scholarship on Hawthorne includesEncodingtheLetterA : Genderand Authm‘ty in Hawthorne’sEarly Fiction (1990)and “TheSurveillanceof Woman’sBodyin Hawthorne’sShortSte ries” (Women’s Studies, 2004). Following up this work on Hawthorne, her explorations in “Poe’s Gothic Mother and the Incubation of Language (PoeStudies/DarkRomanticism,1993),and those of CynthiaJordan in Second Stories: ThePoliticsOfLanpage , F m , and Gender in Early American Fictions (1989),Elbert contendsthat in texts like TheScarletb a n d “Ligeia”both Poeand Hawthorneare “driven by a desire to get woman’s story right, or at least to empower the hushed woman” (21). Elbert sees these authors’“identificationwith the femalepsyche”asintense,indeed asyieldingdangerous consequences for the male “teller of 12 Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism woman’sstory” (22).The critic maintains, as she did in Encoding the LetterA, that “womanholds the key to understanding for the male initiate or the male artist” of Hawthorne’s fiction. The case for Poe’s stories is “less certain,” she acknowledges, and both Poe’s and Hawthorne’s comments on women writers complicate any simple generalizations (25),but she implicitly resists recent assessments that deny Poe and Hawthorne are, in the words of her proposal, “genuinely interested in women’sstories and experiences.” The third essay in this feature, “Periodicals as Key in Poe and Hawthorne,” is by Richard Kop ley, Professorof English at PennsylvaniaStateUniversityDuBois .Editor of Poe’sPym: CriticalExplmations (1992) and of the Penguin Narrative ofArthur Gordon Pym (1999),and coeditor of Resourcesfm American Literary Scholarship, Kopley is author of The Threads of “TheScarlet Letter”:A Study of Hawthmrze ’sTransfmativeArt (2003).After brieflysurveying Hawthorne’s and Poe’s reliance on each other’sworkfor source material,Kopleyurges continued close study of periodicals with which the writers had known connections: “For Poe and Hawthorne, their culture’supper current-as evident in a news story,an advertisement, and a book review-ffered a means by which to intimate the biblical undercurrents of their greatest literary achievements”(29).Kopley especiallycallsfor further research on Robert Lowell’s short-lived periodical the Pioneq in which both Poe and Hawthorne published. Here again, I would point to the relevance of Susan Williams’s discussion of visual technology in the marketing of authors: in addition to the lettersKopleycites...