Nathaniel Hawthorne as Political Philosopher

Revolutionary Principles Domesticated and Personalized

John E. Alvis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351503822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Using the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne as a case study, John E. Alvis shows that a novelist can be a political philosopher. He demonstrates that much of Hawthorne's works are rooted in the American political tradition. Once we view his writings in connection with the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence, we grasp that what Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had stated explicitly, Hawthorne's fiction conveys dramatically. With examples drawn from Hawthorne's shorter works, as well as acknowledged classics, such as The Scarlet Letter, John E. Alvis shows that Hawthorne's characters bear something sacred in their generic humanity, yet are subject to moral judgment. He conveys reciprocity between obligations regulating individual relations and the responsibilities of individuals to their community.From America's founding proclamations in the Declaration of Independence we take a sense of national aspirations for a political order that conforms to laws of nature and nature's God. From this higher law emerge the principles enumerated in that revolutionary document. Are these principles confined to the political, or do they reach into the experience of citizens to inform conduct? Do they include family, local community, and individual face-to-face relations with neighbors and strangers? Can one make a distinct way of life by fidelity to such standards as higher law, equality, liberty, natural rights, and consent?This study is distinguished from other writings on Hawthorne in its largely positive focus on America. Alvis characterizes Hawthorne as a rational patriot who endorses America's new terms for human association. This fascinating study provides new insights into the mind of one of the greatest American writers.

1
Jefferson and Hawthorne: Declarations of American Identity

During the “classic” era of American literature such major fiction writers of the North as Cooper, Melville, and Hawthorne took upon themselves a project of defining America, the polity, in ways that extended beyond mere gestures toward the official founding documents. Their project involved defining “American,” a predicate they attached to every feature of manners and disposition considered expressive of the national character. Obviously, imaginative literature of every modern nation-state concerns itself with national identity in some way, by implication if not explicitly, but in a degree unique to nineteenth-century American writers of the North this enterprise tends to shoulder aside all other subjects. Hardly surprising given that this country arrived late on the scene of Western history and considering that many of its settlers viewed themselves as engaged in revolutionary undertakings before they touched shore more than a century and a half prior to the official state founding. Circumstance and self-consciousness of novelty requiring apology or some native manifesto yet more assertive will not alone account, however, for this preoccupation with national definition. Extensive tracts of a territory new to Europeans became a “new” Spain, sharing a continent with a New England, yet the latter was from the outset more radically a new order than the former, and was conscious of being so. This because New England—more so than the middle and southern regions of what would become the United States—drew upon settlers dissident who conceived their common life on terms already different from those of their country of origin. Once New England dissidents united with the middle and southern regions, they chose to continue their fathers’ insistence upon viewing the New World as a new beginning exemplary for mankind at large. Yet New Englanders making common cause with New Yorkers needed to covenant under revised terms, terms still deemed godly while not so exclusionary as hitherto with respect to doctrine, ecclesiastical government, and mode of worship. Early nineteenth-century fiction writers who undertook to assess these revisions of the original Puritan effort came to conceive a union in service of an idea, a polity organized on behalf of advancing what these writers held to be a long overdue conception of civil society. This new departure would still look to God for its ultimate justification. But for some American fiction writers of the two generations following independence and writing during the period that has come to be spoken of as the “classic” era of American literature the God who superintends their nation’s conduct takes on new features, more rational yet more remote than the biblical God who watched over their Puritan predecessors. Particularly Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville direct attention to a deity they conceive differently from the God of Winthrop, Endicott, and the Mathers. The difference amounts to a reversal of priorities: reason and nature take precedence over faith and revelation in determining what constitutes divinity, an ideal of civil society as a voluntary association for the security of natural rights takes precedence over the ideal of a holy nation, and pursuit of happiness supplants piety as paramount aim of private life and public order. To found a polity on explicitly declared intellectual principles asserted to be universally authoritative had at the time no historical precedent. To discern antecedents of any sort, one must cite schemes entirely theoretical and imaginary—Plato’s Republic, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Monarchy, More’s Utopia, Bacon’s New Atlantis, Milton’s Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Commonwealth, or Winstanley’s seventeenth-century socialist projects. Of course, none of these intellectual antecedents had ever acquired actual endorsement by an existing political authority—Virgil came closest. America was, as no other nation then was, or hitherto had been, an intellectual creation upon which was conferred authority to make and enforce law.

The classic American novelists Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville continue the intellectual enterprise begun by dissenting Protestants (in the North) and consolidated on still newer terms by the country’s official founders from 1775 through 1789. The Puritan forebears found in their Bibles a model for their polity, whereas it’s no great exaggeration to say their grandchildren found in their founding political documents a guide for reconceiving the God of their forebears. All three writers issue appeals for champions of a distinctly native literature independent of European models. And they could draw upon biblical language to call for a new, more emphatically independent spokesman. Hawthorne will envision, though doubtless with some irony, an American author who will accomplish for American letters a national deliverance on the order of the political autonomy a revolutionary generation had wrested from the British. Melville describes the task and attributes required for its execution while he summons a “literary Shiloh.” Melville professes to have found that champion in Hawthorne, while Hawthorne himself delineates one such literary messiah in his story “A Select Party.”¹

Yet for these imaginative writers “continuing” entails criticizing as well as keeping faith: entails interpreting founding principles, imagining or recording the manifold ways those principles produce distinctive manners; requires also accounting for the origins of principles in a more distant European past embraced in part, in part repudiated; and requires comparing the way of life thus generated with the ways of an “Old World” or with an imagined more perfect order yet to be realized. For the writers I have mentioned a further critical office devolves from their allegiance to standards by reference to which patriotism must give an account of itself, must answer to standards transcending positive law and custom. For all three novelists an American ethos must seek its justification against a measure dictated by perennial nature and, hence, a standard more authoritative than any and all national usages. America’s classic novelists not only look back to the time of national formation but project founding principles onto a present somewhat removed in spirit as well as in time from origins. Moreover, they configure some definite prospects for a people who have inherited those principles. These writers insert prophecies in fictions for which they provide settings in a future imaginatively hypothesized. Some works afford a conspectus of America past, present, and future within a single plot. Cooper’s The Crater, Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance and Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick and Clarel—each joins the era of formation with mid-nineteenth century and a portended future. The authors of such works pursue the task of reading national character with a competency that justifies applying to some of their achievements the distinction of having risen to the status of “classic” in the evaluative sense. Just below the first rank of European writers, their best is nevertheless classic for providing a measure by which we judge their successors, a standard for perceiving the shaping force of national institutions, and for discerning the meaning, consequences, and worth of those institutions in net effect upon human beings engaged in pursuit of happiness. Of the three, it appears to me Hawthorne affords us the most ready access if only because one may begin anywhere in his relatively compact body of work and read all his other writings while still retaining reliable recollection of the first one taken up. Melville may penetrate to more remote depths, and Cooper declares himself with less ambiguity. But Hawthorne’s coherence and wholesomeness may well compensate for what he lacks of Melville’s beckoning but murky depths. If Cooper is still more definite, he is prolix and, not infrequently, strident. Then I will contend that such ambivalences as one encounters in Hawthorne’s fiction owe to his honest confrontations with certain tensions inseparable from the principles he attributes to his countrymen past and present, tensions identical with those one can perceive in Jefferson’s Declaration, paralogisms in truth probably innate to political reality.

This study proposes to examine Hawthorne’s understanding of founding beliefs developed through his depiction of their ramifications in the lives of transplanted Europeans during the country’s Puritan seedtime and in the era following independence up to about the middle of the nineteenth century. Announcing such a purpose places one among many commentators on the idea of American “exceptionality.” I have no objections to the word, but my address to the issue of Americans’ conception of what distinguishes their country may be itself sufficiently exceptional to require explanation. My impression is that authors recently concerned with the subject of national self-conception have fought shy of making clear whether they consider the American founding a good thing. I suspect they would rather be regarded as dissenters than suffer imputations of patriotism. I proceed from the conviction that America actually was and still draws upon a founding uncommonly well devised. So I approach the matter not with a view to reproving but with the intent of better understanding America’s polity and national character in order to defend a past more productive of good than bad. I seek to arrive at a critical estimate of the claim put forward in every generation, not excluding the present one, that the life made possible by the founding is not just distinct from but better than that fostered by other nations. Taking one thing (violation of the principles asserted by the Declaration by countenancing slavery) with another (adherence to those principles otherwise and capacity for self-correction with respect to the sole notorious traduction), I find the old claim convincing and seek therefore to understand Hawthorne partly for the sake of better understanding America. My supposition is that his America is still, in a degree more than vestigial, ours. Hawthorne likewise conveys a view of his country’s past more favorable than not. Partly this approval may be ascribed to modest expectations of politics as such, since suspecting extravagance of any sort, he seems to have inoculated himself against both the immoderate hopes and the equally immoderate disappointments that troubled Melville. Hawthorne apparently knew that expressing dissatisfaction with his country required confronting the rejoinder: compared with what? Evidently he held a view of America as he thought it to be during the founding era more favorable than his response to a present that he suggests represents something of a decline. For all the fondness he feels for “Our Old Home,” he appears to take not England but his own polity—or the one that was originally founded—as the measure against which he finds others wanting, and the America of his own day in need of correction.

One consequence of the purpose here confessed lies in the caliber of writings chosen for examination. To survey historical opinion, any statement authenticated for provenance will serve, whereas if one seeks conclusions likely to be grounded in persuasive reasoning, imaginative or discursive, one looks to writings that promise superior cogency. For example, many New England sermons, tracts, and inaugural speeches rely on a set of commonplaces and imagery drawn from scripture. Public oratory adapted to New England experience produced biblical symbols of a chosen people in bondage, in wilderness wandering, thereafter relocated in a promised land prospering under divine favor or undergoing chastisement from a divine monitor. Subsequently this figurative language was appropriated to dramatize more secularized models of a national quest. To my mind these effusions prove to be rarely critical, and in no instance sufficiently so to enable reasoning on the part of an audience not similarly enthused. By contrast, Hawthorne’s better tales, especially the four extended romances, combine cogency with a critical disposition. Other of his less ambitious fictions nonetheless exhibit designs carefully enough executed to provoke a reader toward a scrutiny of New England’s self-interpretation more exigent than Yankee sermons invite. At times Hawthorne depicts Puritan legends with an eye to their anticipation of the Revolution, or with editorial remarks asserting that certain Puritan institutions found correction or fulfillment in principles of an American founding that improved upon the efforts of first settlers (the Endicott stories, “The Gray Champion,” “Legends of the Province House”). These stories convey respect for the pre-Revolutionary fathers as well as reservations, but the question I seek to reopen is whether the praise as well as reservations extend to the revolutionary principles themselves.

How to identify these founding principles? Some are voiced explicitly by Hawthorne’s characters, some inferred from manners and communal actions, some specified here and there by Hawthorne in narrator’s commentary, in writings expository (e.g., the various prefaces and the notebooks), in autobiographical (e.g., “The Custom House”), or in minimally fictionalized redactions of American history (Grandfather’s Chair). We can collect evidence from the foregoing to correlate with those documents of state designated in the first volume of the U.S. Code to be the nation’s organic laws, namely, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the U.S. Constitution, along with the Northwest Ordinance enacted by the first Congress. It is thereafter an exegetical operation to determine how far, in what guise, and with what valuation, principles codified in these public documents have been incorporated in Hawthorne’s fiction. I conclude Hawthorne has marked a trail for us by adverting to the Declaration for his best authority on the political and moral assumptions that once had animated his compatriots and which he held hopes of reviving for his present or for future generations.

This contention brings me to the other eccentricity of the present essay. I am as interested in grasping the thought preserved in the Declaration as I am concerned to understand Hawthorne. Indeed, I consider Hawthorne to be a predecessor in undertaking to grasp the national charter. The document does not exactly prescribe to him, but he takes it seriously, and it more or less constantly solicits his meditation on its leading propositions. Consequently, we may hope to arrive at a firmer hold upon these contents by rethinking Hawthorne’s course of thought upon them. So I propose examination of a state utterance in company with a body of fiction to try the chances of mutual illumination.

Whatever motives have lately impelled scrutiny of America’s specific difference within the genera nation-states, it may occasion some surprise that, except by way of fugitive remarks, discussions of the issue rarely consult the Declaration itself. The omission can appeal to a distinguished precedent—in more than a thousand pages of social analysis Tocqueville mentions the first document of the nation’s organic law not once. Maybe one should not be surprised to discover the same oversight among literary critics and historians today. The familiar we suppose we understand. Few public statements are more familiar than the opening lines of the Declaration. Besides, in those lines one meets with the assertion that the “truths” therein stated are “self-evident,” a phrase usually taken (mistakenly) to mean obvious.² Why think about the familiar if the familiar also professes to state the obvious? Academic specialization also contributes to neglect. Formalists may be disinclined to poach on preserves supposed to belong to political scientists. Yet presently among literary critics minding walls has lost something of its former scrupulosity. No one acquainted with contemporary literary studies will be so naïve as not to have perceived that the practice has become highly politicized, not to say partisan. But the political tendentiousness so displayed, or smuggled in as often it is, rarely acknowledges its premises and tends to be ill informed regarding political philosophy prior to the twentieth century. The state of affairs recalls Macaulay’s less justified mot that the British Navy combined gentlemen with sailors but that the sailors were not gentlemen and the gentlemen not sailors.

Since I’ve fallen into extravagancy, I should restate in terms more subject to verification. Jefferson claimed in drafting the Declaration he had sought to “harmonize sentiments” by transmitting what he deemed a consensus among political theorists mentioning “Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.”³ Today even specialists in political theory decline the rigors of a research in all four that would be necessary to verify Jefferson’s claim.⁴ As for specialists in literature, none profess an interest in, never mind a competency for, testing Jefferson with respect to any one of the thinkers he had named. Professional preoccupation, familiarity, assumption that Jefferson’s “truths” are truisms, or are false generalities since corrected or anyway superseded by other generalities, or certainty that these truths are empty, or that all such statements are empty—these causes, singly or operating in concert, have deflected inquiry elsewhere than to the one official pronouncement upon national exceptionality ratified in blood and codified at law.

Allowing for the blunting effect of familiarity, such reluctance to rethink Jefferson’s argument does not follow necessarily. During Hawthorne’s lifetime the Declaration was probably more familiar than it is today. Yet whether the document was affirmed or contested, it was sometimes thought through anew and debated. On the affirmative, one can cite John Quincy Adams near the beginning of Hawthorne’s writing career, and at the middle and end of that career, Lincoln in all of his important speeches and in debate with Stephen A. Douglas during the autumn of an 1858 senate campaign.⁵ On the negative, Rufus Choate dismissed Jefferson’s principles as “glittering generalities,” Calhoun wrote his Disquisitions to refute them, and Lincoln in his debate with Douglas at Galesburg reported his shock at having heard them pronounced “self-evident lies” on the floor of Congress (by one Petit of Indiana). In setting up as a republic Texans chose selective imitation of the Declaration (1836). Its leading ideas attracted Melville’s scrutiny in White-Jacket written during the time Melville and Hawthorne commenced their lifelong friendship. Accumulating internal evidence of Hawthorne’s understanding of the Declaration will be the burden of this book. But an early indication that he had turned his mind in that direction surfaces in remarks made in the course of the history lessons that make up Grandfather’s Chair (published in 1840).

Rationality and a Higher Law

In an attempt to think through anew so as to see why the Declaration ought to overcome our reluctance to confront its argument with the seriousness it provoked in Hawthorne’s contemporaries and, so I contend, in Hawthorne himself, we might consider a few of its assertions and speculate upon the connections linking them. However casually these assertions may be presently regarded, both generalizations and connecting logic deserve to be recognized as controversial. I will confine myself to the opening paragraph since the bill of indictment which comes thereafter is much less subject to controversy (among Americans) than the foundation announced at the outset and, indeed, would hardly be controversial at all (among Americans) were the initially voiced premises not matters for contention and reinterpretation.

The first premise to appear was less controversial at the time than in our day, but it rests on an assumption contested at least as long ago as the Greek sophists conducted their schools of rhetoric.⁶ Not itself one of the self-evident truths shortly thereafter to be enumerated, this assumption underlies those that are specified and establishes a precondition for those that will follow. Jefferson, with the Continental Congress approving, chooses to submit the case to “a candid world.” At that time the word conveyed a meaning close to our present usage of disinterested in its scientific sense. The assumption of such capacity for nonpartisan reflection anywhere available declares for a view of human nature inclusive of a confidence in the ability of at least some men in some circumstances to reason dispassionately. For classical sophists such as Gorgias or Plato’s Thrasymachus, men are not capable of disinterested reasoning at all, at least not on matters moral or political. Interest predetermines thought. Some members of the generation of Constitution framers agreed with the ancient sophists. At the Constitutional convention South Carolina’s John Rutledge insisted that interest and interest alone guided political discourse. This doctrine, somewhat enlarged...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Jefferson and Hawthorne: Declarations of American Identity
• 2. Hawthorne's Personalizing of the Declaration
• 3. Three Impaired Romances
• 4. Heart and Letter
• 5. Hester's Declaration and Hawthorne's
• Bibliographic Essay
• Index