Hawthorne's Illusive Garment of Visibility in "Monsieur Du Miroir"

The perennial problem in scholarship has always been how best define the real Hawthorne. (1) As Michael Colacurcio cogently frames this debate in The Province of Piety (1984), the Hawthorne Problem is basically reducible a Jamesian/Melvillean difference of opinion on the subject of original sin. According Henry James, imported the Puritan sense of sin as an aesthetic tool for creative artistry; his relation it was only, as one may say, intellectual; it was not moral and theological (54). Herman Melville, on the contrary, marveled at Hawthorne's great power of blackness and said its force was derived its appeals that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free (107). Given the special prominence of the Hawthorne Problem in the secondary literature, it is curious that Monsieur du Miroir (1837) has not figured importantly in this discussion, especially since the author's explicitly stated intention in this sketch is present a few of more salient features before estranged audience. An extended evaluation of this is likewise sorely lacking from all developmental studies of the author date. Whenever mention is made of this tale, it usually takes the form of a dismissive remark or a hastily improvised misprision. (2) Not surprisingly, James' early monograph set the tone for much of the criticism follow. He observed that Hawthorne's sketches so light, so slight, so tenderly trivial, that simply mention them is put them in a false position. The author's claim for them is barely audible, even the most acute listener. They are things take or leave--to enjoy, but not talk about (40). (3) Melville apparently heard something that was inaudible James, however, for he remarked of this sketch, to a reader at all capable of fully fathoming it, what ... can possess more mystical depth of meaning? (107). (4) James emerges a little worse for the wear in this case, for despite its deceptively playful surfaces, Monsieur du Miroir is an in-depth study of the radical finitude of the human condition in all its vicissitudes, whether conceived as the limitation of the mind, the mortality of the body, or the impurity of the will. The following exposition will provide a close examination of Monsieur du Miroir coupled with a brief history of the author's reading habits at the time he composed this sketch. Far from being an irrelevant fancy or a failed composition, this much maligned meditation upon body and soul pits the claims of idealism against skepticism, specifically on the topic of the redemptive power of reflection, a subject that was brought the fore for by Coleridge's transcendentalist contribution the debate between philosophy and religion. Although the Jamesian/Melvillean difference on original sin has been treated as the privileged site of the debate, the contemporary split over the author's alleged transcendentalism actually dates back another early and influential literary litigant, Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote three reviews of between 1842 and 1847. (5) Poe was the first declare that many of Hawthorne's prose compositions read more like essays than tales. He had British essayists like Lamb or Hunt or Hazlitt (570) in mind, but given Hawthorne's early appetite for Montaigne, Voltaire, and Rousseau, the Frenchphilosophes undoubtedly played a larger part in shaping the stylistic contours of literary effusions at the time. According transcription records from the Salem Athenaeum Library, read close fifty volumes of Voltaire's Oeuvres Completes between 1829 and 1831, turned Montaigne's Essais between September and November of 1831, and borrowed several volumes of Rousseau's Oeuvres Completes at this time as well. (6) He first recorded idea for Monsieur du Miroir in a notebook entry for October 17, 1835, when he wrote: To make one's own reflection in a mirror the subject of a story (15). …