The meaning and impact of Nathaniel Hawthorne's narrator doubles /

This postmodern paradigm is certainly applicable to postmodern texts.However, applied to the canon, it also furnishes scholars new access to established texts and often confirms their value by demonstrating that they are capable of inducing many meaning ful readings.Indeed, the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne seem particularly appropriate for such a reading, because Hawthorne himself seems so personally aware of his own vulnerability to the charge of sinning by writing.Because he wrote about so many selfconscious artists and artist figures and employed so many intrusive, self-reflexive narra tors to tell his stories, Hawthorne's texts suggest a continual and intensive concern on Hawthorne's part about the power he wields as a writer-a power which, he seems to feel, he may subconsciously expose in his narratives and by that exposure indict himself as a "sinner." 1 It is possible to speculate that Hawthorne's anxiety about his role as a storyteller is rooted in the moral and theological concerns of the nineteenth century.In The Instructed Vision, for example, Terence Martin alludes to Hawthorne's likely acceptance of the nineteenth-century view o f the artist as a sort o f theological heretic.Martin cites the nineteenth-century suspicion of novelists and other artists as usurpers of God's power and refers to the fear that they, as "creators," produce little worlds which are not simply mimetic, but defacto creations, drawn from their own inner beings (60-76).Similarly, Richard Chase and F. O. Matthiessen suggest that Hawthorne's discomfort with the cre ative process is a personally moral issue for Hawthorne who wrote so consistently about the effects o f hidden sin.Indeed, Chase and Matthiessen deal with the issue of Hawthorne's problematic narrators, their closeness to-in fact, intrusiveness into-the lives of their characters, without exhibiting much sympathy for or understanding o f those characters.Such a posture, these critics argiie, aligns Hawthorne's narrators (and, by extension, Hawthorne) with the scientist/doctor/scholar group o f protagonists who are guilty o f the "unpardonable sin" o f Ethan Brand-the violation o f the human heart.According to Chase and Matthiessen, Hawthorne's exploration o f so many examples of this unbridled human egotism (the bosom serpent which replicates Original Sin) is sound textual evidence that Hawthorne sees his own narrators and thereby himself as sinners.We can see Chase's argument most clearly in his analysis o f the problematic narrator of Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance.Miles Coverdale.Interestingly, Chase suggests that Hawthorne becomes increasingly absorbed with the problem of Coverdale as narra tor, rather than character, once the story progresses and as Hawthorne begins to see the "literary and moral implications" for himself (85).Hawthorne, says Chase, "comes to think in The Blithedale Romance that the novelist commits the unpardonable sin, that he is a kind o f Chillingworth, whose probing intellect violates the human heart" (85).According to Chase, it is likely that Hawthorne feared that he himself was "guilty of the unpardonable sin" since "he [Hawthorne] must perforce pitilessly scrutinize his charac ters without being able to share with them their imperfect humanity, to acknowledge his kinship with their experience and destiny" (87).Matthiessen draws similar conclusions when he investigates Holgrave's narrative role in The House of the Seven Gables.In Matthiessen's critique of Holgrave, Matthiessen extends his concern beyond Holgrave's narration to the author's: . . .as Holgrave recognizes his share in other traits of the Maules, some o f them are likewise those which Hawthorne felt dangerous in himself.His cool habit of scrutinizing the characters o f others, which is symbolized by his daguerrotype portraits, causes the young man to say to Phoebe that his tendency. . .might have brought him to Gallows Hill in the old days.(300) Although Matthiessen points out that Holgrave's salvation, that which saves him "from hardening into fatal arrogance," is "the birth of his love for Phoebe," he still argues that "the common denominator between Holgrave and Judge Pyncheon and even Hepzibah, as well as between Hollingsworth and Ethan Brand and a dozen others, consists in pride, the worst sin in Dante's theology as well as in Milton's and Edwards" (300).Certainly, what Chase and Matthiessen say about The Blithedale Romance and The House o f the Seven Gables is applicable to any number of Hawthorne's fictions.In fact, as I shall show in this study, in addition to his ostensible purposes for writing, Hawthorne also uses his fictions to probe into matters relating to his own guilt or innocence in his profession as a writer-a concern which spans his career.Indeed, so much of Hawthorne's work is devoted to the exposure o f his characters' hidden guilt that it seems a natural conse quence to consider Hawthorne's works as evidence o f his.However, whatever the causes of Hawthorne's sensitivity about his artistic role, more interesting to me-and thus the subject o f this study-are the effects o f Hawthorne's mis givings about narration on his narrative strategy.My study, of course, is necessarily lim ited to a particular strategy.Because o f the size o f the Hawthorne corpus, I have limited myself to those works which are clearly metafictive-to those which most blatantly hold up the mirror of fiction to fiction itself.The works are those where Hawthorne chose to embed a narrative within a narrative-a choice which invariably necessitated his creation of one or more new narrators, or "narrator doubles," to share the responsibility o f story telling with the original, or "primary," narrator of the work (typically an unnamed observer/narrator who claims to be aloof from his fiction).These works deserve singling out because the primary narration becomes subject to subversion by the secondary text[s], thus revealing the psychological complexities of the act o f narration itself.These works, which I discuss in roughly chronological order, are "Alice Doane's Appeal" (pub lished in 1835, but likely Hawthorne's first story), "The Devil in Manuscript" (1835), "The Haunted Quack" (1831), "Mr.Higginbotham's Catastrophe" (set into its original frame, "Passages from a Relinquished Work" [1834]), and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).I have deliberately excluded consideration of any fully framed collec tions of tales, like "Legends of the Province House" and Hawthorne's framed collections for children (although I refer to The Wonder Book in my conclusion).I have done so, not because their study would be unproductive, but because their format introduces an issue not directly related to this study: the relationship o f the individual tales to each other, irrespective of their separate insertion within the same frame.Further, in the first four chapters of this study, apart from autobiographical connec tions (which I cite in each chapter), I am allowing Hawthorne his "veil"-allowing him the distance from these texts that he wanted to achieve through the smokescreen o f narra tor doubling.I focus instead on the narrative dynamics between/among the embedded stories and the primary fiction, and between/among the narrator doubles and the primary narrators-dynamics set in motion by Hawthorne's choice o f strategy and ultimately reve latory o f the hidden sins of the creative process.I will show that the embedded fictions provide a metafictive subtext which subverts the main text thereby permitting the guilty psyche of the primary narrator to become transparent.Indeed, as the storytelling shifts to one or more narrator doubles, the fiction begins to take on a life o f its ow n-to reshape itself beyond the primary narrator's ability to control it.The net result is an exposure of the guilt of the primary narrator who is revealed as a dynamic and sinister participant in the fiction toward which he had feigned aloofness.The awesome power o f the creative process is demonic in origin.Indeed, Hawthorne regularly figures it as sexual perversion and/or as other forms of violation, penetration, or conquests o f human life-even murder.That is, in this study, I deal with a range of narrative power-both extra-textual, as it extends to Hawthorne's audience, and intra-textual, as it extends to both the narrator (in the throes o f creativity), to his Active characters (who live or die at the stroke o f their creator's pen), and to the narrator's audience.In the first two chapters, I examine two tales that are provocative examples of the demonic power both in storytelling and in story writing.Chapter 1 concerns the tale pre sumed to be Hawthorne's first, revised for publication in 1835 as "Alice Doane's Appeal," while Chapter 2 treats a tale published the same year as "Alice Doane's Appeal," but likely written later, "The Devil in Manuscript."Through narrator doubling, "Alice Doane's Appeal" exposes the primary narrator's erotic designs on his listening audience o f two young women and his seduction of the reader into being a voyeuristic-and, thus, vicarious-participant in his "rape" of the girls."The Devil in Manuscript" likewise exposes the storywriting process as sexual, in this case, auto-erotic, rather than seductive.Here, in a psychomachia (a conversation between the primary nar rator and "himself"), the solitary act of creating a fiction is likened to masturbation-a trope heightened within the narrative by the self-stimulation o f the interaction between the primary narrator and his double.Certainly, in all of the works examined in this study, the dark side o f the creative process is rarely far from the surface.But, in the works I treat in Chapter 3, we see how Hawthorne modified his strategy of narrator doubling to explore the possibilities o f nar rative innocence.Indeed, we can see emerging in these narrators a sense of urgency to nullify, or at least suspend, the psychic and demonic energy which threat