Características geográficas del municipio y de la UHBSS II

The Delia Bacon fiasco may have shaken Hawthorne's confidence in the ultimate outcome of his aesthetic idealism. His later works reflect an intense, explicit consideration of his own technique and aesthetic - and betray a growing insecurity about the results. The Marble Faun, initially published as

Transformation in England in February 1860, places increasing emphasis on the subjectivity of interpretation, and readers were left perplexed as to exactly what had happened and why. Writing in 1879, Henry James observed that Hawthorne's Italian romance "lapses into an almost fatal vagueness" (James 1967, 155), a charge which others (with somewhat less justification) would subsequently level at James's own later fiction. Hawthorne had agreed to write an almost equally evasive explanatory postscript for the second edition, but observed that he did so reluctantly:

.. Because the necessity makes him sensible that he can have succeeded but imperfectly at best, in throwing about this Romance the kind o f atmosphere essential to the effect at which he aimed. He designed the story and the characters to bear, of course a certain relation to human nature and human life, but still to be so artfully and airily removed from our mundane sphere, that some laws and proprieties of their own should be implicitly and insensibly acknowledged (Hawthorne 1983, 1239). Hawthorne then turned to the English romance which he had

long envisaged as "the crowning achievement" of his career. In Italy, from March to May of 1858, before beginning work on

The Marble Faun, he had already sketched out rough ideas for The Ancestral Footstep. This short 'claimant' draft was conceived as an imaginary sequel to a legend he had come across in England concerning the allegedly bloodstained imprint of a foot on the threshold of an English country manor. The new romance would self-reflexively both echo and contain the older tale as key to the American hero's English ancestry. In addition to preliminary sketches and studies, the theme o f an American claimant returning to his ancestral estate in England was

developed in three separate drafts now collected in volume XII of the Centenary Edition. The theme was by no means new and Hawthorne may have encountered such eighteenth-century

treatments (previously mentioned on pages 12-13) as Voltaire's Tlngénu,^^

and Robert Bage's Hertnsprong, or Man as He is Not^^ Hawthorne was almost certainly aware of Thackeray's treatment of twin American

In Hawthorne's Reading 1828-1854: A Transcription and Identification o f Titles Recorded in the Charge Books o f the Salem Athenaeum Marion L. Kesselring notes that Hawthorne read widely in French literature, including Voltaire and Rousseau. From

1829-31 he borrowed numerous volumes of Voltaire's Oeuvres Completes.

In his biography of Hawthorne, Arlin Turner does not mention Bage but notes Hawthorne's youthful enthusiasm for William Godwin's Caleb Williams

(Turner 1980, 27). J As previously mentioned on page 13, Hermsprong was a more obscure work inspired by similar radical views, responding to Godwin’s novel of 1794, originally titled Things as They Are: or the Adventures o f Caleb Williams

claimants in ITie Virginians, which began appearing in numbers while Hawthorne was consul in Liverpool.

Hawthorne's statement that he had kept his English Notebooks

for future use in the composition of his English romance suggests that the author intended a work based upon his experiences in Britain, but this appears not to have been precisely the case. Although his manuscripts indicate that he did refer to these notebooks, the English experiences recorded there only seemed to inform the fiction insofar as these experiences echoed (and so confirmed) fantasies and reflections already expressed in his American Notebooks and earlier fiction. In England, he had many such moments of recognition, discovering independent 'historical' variations of his youthful obsessions and literary fantasies.

One key motif which would recur through all his later narrative experiments is the legend of Smithills Hall, explaining the impression of a (supposedly) bloody footprint which appears on the threshold of a country manor. Hawthorne

was intrigued enough by the legend to make his own examination of the footprint - he thought it more naturally discoloured than bloodstained. The original Hawthomean version of this symbolic manifestation of visible guilt is found in his 1843 American Notebooks, where he describes a potential narrative mystery: "The print in blood o f a naked foot to be traced through the street of a town" (Hawthorne 1972, VUI, 239).

The 'claimant' theme o f disputed inheritance and its corollary, the unrecognised heir's dread o f ancestral influence, jointly

provide the premise for Hawthorne's The House o f the Seven Gables, published in 1851. The dispossessed heir's most

chilling outburst in that novel is largely a transcription of an 1844

American Notebooks entry:

To represent the influence which Dead Men have among living affairs; - for instance, a Dead Man controls the disposition of wealth; a Dead Man sits on the judgement- seat, and the living judges do but repeat his decisions; Dead Men's opinions in all things control the living truth; we believe in Dead Men's religion; we laugh at Dead Men's jokes; we cry at Dead Men's pathos; everywhere and in all

matters. Dead Men tyrannize inexorably over us {Ibid., 252).^^

In Seven Gables, Holgrave is similarly moved to exclaim: "Shall we never, never get rid of this Past!" cried he, keeping up the earnest tone of his preceding conversation. - "It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body! In fact, the case is just as if a young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only needs to be decently buried. Just think, a moment; and it will startle you to see what slaves we are to by-gone times - to Death, if we give the matter the right word! .. a Dead Man, if he happen to have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much longer dead than he.

A Dead Man sits on all our judgemoit-seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in Dead Mai's books! We laugh at Dead Men's jokes, and cry at Dead Men's pathos! We are sick of Dead Men’s diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with wfiich dead doctors killed their patients! We worship the living Deity, according to Dead Men's forms and creeds! Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a Dead Man's icy hand obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a Dead Man's white, immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we must be dead ourselves, before we can begin to have our proper influence cm our own world, which will then be no Icmger our world, but the world of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to interfere. I ought to have said, tcx), that we live in Dead Men's houses; as, for instance, in this of the seven gables!" (Hawthorne 1983, 509-510).

Hawthorne's gothic-romantic ambition is essentially a dramatic

revival of such sentiments as Shelley's revolutionary exclamation in Hellas:

The world is weary o f the past,

Oh, might it die or rest at last! (Shelley 1950, 337). Hawthorne would address the inherited influence of the past first in the American setting o f Seven Gables, re-examining the theme in the broader cultural context o f Anglo-American history in which he set his American claimant narratives. In both situations, a

young protagonist would address himself to the historical injustice which has deprived him of his true identity and inheritance.

Hawthorne attempts to enfold his romance in the "lightsome and brightsome" quality o f a children's tale. His early tales

had reassessed and undermined the historical platitudes of Jacksonian American discourse. Now he returned to a simple, somewhat

antiquated didactic style o f legend, in an apparent effort to construct a definitive parable of American experience and difference. Collections of folk legends were an offshoot of a rising tide of nationalism that swept nineteenth-century Europe as well as America, and the author worked both within and against that tradition, exploiting the form, and the tone o f legend as well as the appetite for trusty folk wisdom, although the historicised content was more imagined than found. Hawthorne's American

Post-modernist short fiction writer Donald Barthelme seems to have lifted the premise for his tale “The Dead Father” directly from Holgrave's statement.

claimant was seemingly conceived as an extended "Twice Told Tale", with the residual knowledge of the legend on either side of the Atlantic serving to establish the hero's true identity and bridge the gap between his lost English past and lonely American present:

"I suppose," said he to the old man, "the settlers in

my country may have carried away with them traditions, long since forgotten in this country, but which might have an interest and connection, and might even piece out the broken relics o f family history, which have remained perhaps a mystery for hundreds o f years. I can conceive, even that this might sometimes be o f importance in settling the heir­ ships of estates but which now, only the two insulated parts o f the story being known, remain a riddle, although the

solution of it is actually in the world;[. . .]" (Hawthorne 1977, XII, 5-6). Such a narrative synthesis would o f course rely upon a structurally

problematic metaphorical parallel, with the authentic English past fragmented and relocated in the American present, while England itself remained static, embalmed in historical tradition. In

Hawthorne's English romance the past is literally another country, but one which can nevertheless be visited and potentially possessed by the claimant. The American's triumph and ultimate rejection of his English patrimony was a foregone conclusion: preliminary studies and plot summaries for all draft versions indicate that the young heir was to gain his English inheritance only to renounce it in favour of returning to an uncertain, self-made future in America.

When he took up the project in earnest in October 1860, Hawthorne had already compiled a collection o f auto-instructions

and ideal demands regarding the work, mostly written in the future imperative and future conditional, with scant technical

elaboration on how to achieve his design. He expanded these notations further throughout the "The Ancestral Footstep" and "Etherege" drafts, interspersed amidst the developing narrative. The narrative's stated intention was lofty, and somewhat vague;

The moral, if any moral were to be gathered from these paltry and wretched circumstances was, "Let the past alone, do not seek to renew it, press on to higher and better things - at all events to other things; and

be assured that the right way can never be that which leads you back to the identical shapes that you long ago left behind. Onward, onward, onward!" {Ibid., 56).

Further notes for this ideal fiction concerned the tone: ...there should be a tinge of the grotesque given to all the characters and events... It must be a humorous work, or nothing (58).

And on further reflection, he almost immediately adds: The tragic, and the gentler pathetic, need not be excluded by this tone and treatment. If I could but write one central scene in this vein, all the rest of the Romance would readily arrange itself around that nucleus (58). In "Etherege" he continues to place unworldly and abstract demands upon his imaginative and technical skills:

The narrative must be pitched in such a tone and enveloped in such an atmosphere, that improbable things shall be accepted; and yet there must be a certain quality of homely, common life diffused through it, so that the reader shall feel a warmth in it (126).

He becomes impatient with his own descriptive powers, breaking the narrative with the parenthetical command: "((Describe, in rich

poetry, all shapes o f deadly things))" (339). The author continued to charge himself with the performance of hyperbolic, impossible narrative feats, without elaborating on how such literary effects might be accomplished. Similarly vague, ambitiously

superlative notes for Hawthorne's supreme fiction are lavished throughout the "Footstep" and "Etherege" drafts.

As the narrative developed, Hawthorne would repeatedly return to the image of a large, exotic spider, strategically positioned within the text as a self-reflexive narrative device. The creature busily spinning and casting out its line becomes a metaphor for the author's persistent attempt to fasten on to what is invoked as a new consciousness or aesthetic tradition, an altered state occasionally glimpsed in certain disoriented moments which seem to occur out o f time.

“Etherege” metaphorically assigns to England all history, experience and possibility o f identity, while post-revolutionary America is isolated in the present and as such lacks any character but that which the narrative may provide. Such metaphorical assumptions impose an interpretative dilemma upon the narrative's chronological duration, in which the hero passes from dreamlike

childhood to manhood and travels from America to England. Once the symbolic link between nation states and specific temporal

England should become a venture into the past, a transition which would rupture the fable's thin facade of realism. By keeping his hero in the narrative present, Hawthorne defies his own symbolic logic. The resulting contradictions between the meta­ phorical and literal levels o f interpretation, or, in linguistic terms, between the signifier and the signified, can only be escaped in fleeting moments in which experience cannot be contextualised and the present is mysteriously filtered into the past. The wounded protagonist's delirium in "Grimshawe" illustrates this ideal o f temporal transfusion:

He, meanwhile, would willingly accept the idea, that some spell had transported him out of an epoch, in which he had led a brief trouble, of battle, mental strife, success, failure, all equally feverish and unsatisfactory, into some past century, where the business was to rest; to drag on dreamy days, looking at things through half-shut eyes; into a limbo where things were put away; shows o f what had once been now somehow parted, and still maintaining a sort of half-existence, as serious mockery; a state likely enough to exist just a little apart fi'om the

actual world, if we only know how to find our way into it (453).

The confusions accompanying the encroaching age of some characters also induce the possible interweaving of time past and time present, as in the previous draft a pensioner encountered by the injured hero explains:

"An old man," said the pensioner quietly, "grows

dreamy as he waxes away; and I too am sometimes at a loss to know whether I am living in the past or the present, or whereabouts in time I am - or whether there is any time at all. But I should think it hardly worth while to

More specifically alluding to Hawthorne's aesthetic concerns, "Grimshawe" reflexively suggests that Dr. Grimshawe's fantastic stories may have a similar transforming effect on emerging consciousness in the susceptible minds of Elsie and Ned, his young, isolated wards:

So they lived a good deal o f the time in a half waking dream, partly conscious of the fantastic nature of their ideas, yet with these ideas almost as real to them as the facts of the natural world, which are at first trans­ parent and unsubstantial to children (367).

The problem which the author has set himself is logically unresolvable within a consistent metaphorical structure. The missing proof of the hero's personal identity is located in the past, yet that English past must be thoroughly differentiated from

the American present in order to establish a new national (and individual) identity. It seems that Hawthorne was attempting to suggest a

dialectical synthesis o f time present and time past from which an imagined new tradition might emerge. A convincing structure for this ideal fiction remained imaginatively elusive.

The hero's lament for so-called lost possibilities helps

foreclose against the past in any attempt to define national character. Etherege describes and judges tradition as a passive and seemingly detached observer, innocent o f any act of personal transgression or rejection:

institution was beautiful in its day," ejaculated he aloud to himself; not to his companion, "but it is a thing of the past. It is dying out in England, and as for our­ selves, we never had it. Something better will come up; but as for this, it is past" (187).

In The American Jeremiad, Sacvan Bercovitch identifies similar passages in Hawthorne as expressing "the familiar [American] jeremiadic formula o f affirmation through lament" employed by New England Puritans in political sermons, an ideological form of address used to inspire social consensus and submission to authority

(Bercovitch 1978, 157). Yet Hawthorne's relationship to any national myth o f consensus is much more problematic and ambivalent than Bercovitch implies. In his designation of all "classic American

authors" as American Jeremiahs, Bercovitch would seem to be organising his own myth of national identity, affected by the very impulse he

proposes to examine. There is a distinct undertone o f political sermonising in his own exposition. The 'ejaculation' o f Etherege - "ejaculation" being an awkward, aggressive term suggesting self- assertive virility, here curiously at odds with his statement's pretence of objective passivity - is not specifically endorsed by

the author. The voice o f Etherege is not equivalent to the voice

Bercovitch's generahsation manifests the general critical induise to systematise, coincidentally an inpulse Hawthorne seemed to reject in the previously cited letter to Ixsigfellow (1837) in which he denied having led a studious life. His

pr<mounced approach to historical interpretation was "desultory" and romantic rather than rigorous. Unlike Bercovitch, he shrugs off any consistent critical agenda.

o f Hawthorne.

The American claimant's fixation upon the past is obliquely expressed in certain "Footstep" passages which entertain the possibility of revealing the secret buried in the ancestral