Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation: Selected Essays on American Literature

by Michael Davitt Bell

Overview

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright.

Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us to reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226041803
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	12/01/2000
Edition description:	1
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Michael Davitt Bell was, at the time of his death in 1997, the J. Leland Miller Professor of American History, Literature, and Eloquence at Williams College. His books include The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea and The Development of American Romance, both published by the University of Chicago Press, as well as Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England.

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Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation: Selected Essays on American Literature

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By Michael Davitt Bell

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2001 Michael Davitt Bell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226041808

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Nathaniel Hawthorne

During the 1950s, the age of the "New Criticism" in literary scholarship, critics spoke repeatedly of the "ambiguity" of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Now, decades later, this term is likely to strike us as inadequate. Our Hawthorne is a figure not so much of ambiguity as of paradox and profound contradiction: a public recluse, openly and even sociably proclaiming his own isolation and alienation--a mild rebel, at once a conformist to the literary and social pieties of his day and an ironic underminer of these pieties. First published in ladies' magazines and annuals, whose editors' tastes he cultivated throughout his literary career, he was also praised by Herman Melville, in an 1850 review entitled "Hawthorne and His Mosses," for subverting these pieties by appealing to "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." In 1851 Melville would dedicate his masterpiece, Moby-Dick, to Hawthorne, "In Token of My Admiration for His Genius." It was no small accomplishment, in mid-nine-teenth-century America, to appeal simultaneously to the canons of "genteel" literaryrespectability and to Herman Melville's ultimately antisocial conception of "Genius."

The essential paradox at the heart of Hawthorne's life and writing is nowhere clearer than in his frequent public comments on his own career. Indeed the very frequency of these autobiographical excursions is itself paradoxical, since their point is usually to insist on the author's retiring nature--even on his personal and social insignificance. What is most striking in these prefaces to volumes of tales and sketches and later to novels is Hawthorne's public insistence on his literary insignificance. For instance, in his preface to an 1851 edition of Twice-told Tales, a collection originally issued in 1837 (and expanded in 1842), Hawthorne expresses surprise that his tales "have gained what vogue they did," while noting that this "vogue" was in any case "so little and so gradual." He then goes on to enumerate the defects of his tales--to write, in effect, a hostile review of his own work. He also insists that he was never "greatly tormented by literary ambition," by a "craving desire for notoriety."

Hawthorne's self-effacing pose was by 1851 characteristic, but by 1851 it was also at the very least disingenuous. Although The Scarlet Letter, which had appeared in 1850, was not exactly a best-seller, it had firmly consolidated Hawthorne's literary reputation; in fact, his publisher chose to reissue Twice-told Tales, in 1851, in order to capitalize on its author's newfound fame. Nor should Hawthorne's disavowal of "literary ambition" and a "craving desire for notoriety" be taken at face value: few of his American contemporaries in the first half of the nineteenth century pursued a literary career with such single-minded application over such a long period of time. Behind Hawthorne's public disavowal of ambition lurks a sense of dedication bordering on obsession; and obsession and the concealment of obsession were, from first to last, Hawthorne's great literary subjects.

Hawthorne was born on the Fourth of July, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, into a family descended from influential seventeenth-century New England Puritans. Four years later, his sea-captain father died in Surinam, and young Nathaniel grew up in genteel poverty, often dependent for support on his more prosperous maternal relations. This support enabled him to attend Bowdoin College from 1821 to 1825, where his classmates included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who would become the most popular American poet of his generation, and Franklin Pierce, who would serve as President of the United States from 1853 to 1857. In an 1821 letter to his mother Hawthorne announced his literary plans with a characteristic mixture of ambition and self-deprecation: "What do you think of my becoming an Author, and relying for support upon my pen. Indeed I think the illegibility of my handwriting is very authorlike. How proud you would feel to see my works praised by the reviewers.. . . But Authors are always poor Devils, and therefore Satan may take them."

Following his graduation in 1825, Hawthorne returned to Salem to live in his mother's house and pursue his literary career. In 1828 he published, anonymously, a novel, Fanshawe, which he would later seek to suppress; but he devoted most of his energies to short tales and sketches. These began appearing, also anonymously, in 1830--most frequently, in the early 1830s, in Samuel G. Goodrich's The Token, an annual published in Boston. Although Hawthorne planned at least three book-length collections, he could persuade no publisher to take the risk of issuing them, and it was not until 1837, twelve years after he initially set out to become a writer, that his first published collection, Twice-told Tales, brought his name before the public. This was not an auspicious moment to seek a living through literature; 1837 was the year of a great financial panic in the United States, and the literary marketplace--with book prices depressed by the competition of cheap, pirated editions of foreign works--was in even worse shape than the general economy. Not very surprisingly, Twice-told Tales achieved only a modest success; 600 or 700 copies, of an edition of 1,000, were sold in two months, but then sales pretty much stopped. Still, the collection received favorable reviews-- including high praise in Boston's North American Review from Hawthorne's former classmate, Longfellow.

In an 1837 letter thanking Longfellow for this review, Hawthorne recalled the years of his anonymous apprenticeship with something close to bewilderment:

By some witchcraft or other--for I really cannot assign any reasonable why and wherefore--I have been carried apart from the main current of life.. . . I have secluded myself from society; and yet I never meant any such thing.. . . I have made a captive of myself and put me into a dungeon; and now I cannot find the key to let myself out--and if the door were open, I should be almost afraid to come out.. . . For the last ten years, I have not lived, but only dreamed about living.

Thus began Hawthorne's cultivation of the myth of his "solitary years" of writing in Salem. This myth has been challenged; it has been argued that Hawthorne exaggerated his seclusion and alienation, that between 1825 and 1837 he was in fact involved in a number of significant social activities and relationships. What matters, though, is that Hawthorne chose to cultivate and promulgate this myth of self-isolation.

And what is most interesting about the letter to Longfellow is the way Hawthorne dissociates himself from his own activity: if he chose literary seclusion, he nonetheless "never meant any such thing." Writing is here viewed as a form of unmotivated, even compulsive behavior, and the voice that speaks to us stands far outside of this behavior. Hawthorne's application to literature--carried on for more than a decade with no public recognition and little financial reward--suggests a powerful ambition; yet here, instead of admitting this ambition, he attributes his literary seclusion to "some witchcraft or other." This stance of what we might call self-dissociation-- this radical separation of the voice that speaks to us from the subjects about which it speaks, this separation of the sociable speaker from the antisocial person--lies at the heart of the narrative strategy of much of Hawthorne's best fiction. As Hawthorne himself put it in his preface to the 1851 edition of Twice-told Tales, his stories "have none of the abstruseness of idea, or obscurity of expression, which mark the written communications of a solitary mind with itself. They never need translation. It is, in fact, the style of a man of society."

The publication of Twice-told Tales in 1837 marked, in any event, a turning point both in its author's career and in his personal life. Hawthorne continued to publish tales and sketches in annuals and magazines, even though his income from these sources remained minimal. When he became engaged to Sophia Peabody of Salem in 1839, he was obliged to seek some reliable means of financial support. Very few American writers, before the Civil War, were able to earn anything close to a living from literature, and Hawthorne was never one of this select few; he had to find other work and hope to write in his spare time. So in 1839-40--while he worked at the Boston Custom House, a patronage appointment secured through his Democratic political connections with Franklin Pierce and others--he sought to tap the potentially lucrative market for children's literature by writing three small volumes of children's history, published in 1840 and 1841 as Grandfather's Chair, Famous Old People, and The Liberty Tree. A fourth volume, Biographical Stories for Children, was added to the series in 1842. Hawthorne briefly joined the transcendentalist utopian community of Brook Farm (in West Roxbury, Massachusetts) in 1841. In 1842 he published an expanded version of Twice-told Tales that, although it sold even less well than its predecessor, elicited a highly favorable review from Edgar Allan Poe, in which Poe first formulated his well-known argument for the "unity of effect" of short fiction.

In the same year Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody were married, and they settled at the Old Manse, in Concord, Massachusetts. Here they lived for three years, and here Hawthorne wrote many of the tales collected in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). This brief experiment in literary self-sufficiency ultimately proved unsuccessful; in 1846 Hawthorne was still unable to support himself by his writing, and reviewers increasingly spoke of him, even in praise, as an author unlikely to reach a broad public. But he was by now well known, at least in "cultured" circles, and generally admired; the self-proclaimed recluse of 1837 had become a husband, a father, a writer of some reputation, and a public figure with valuable Democratic political connections.

These connections led to Hawthorne's appointment in 1846 as Surveyor of Customs at Salem--an appointment made famous in 1850 by "The Custom-House," the autobiographical preface to The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne and his family lived with his mother in Salem, and while there was little time for writing he was at least able to support his wife and children. Then, in 1849, things changed dramatically. In January, the Whigs having defeated the Democrats in the previous year's national elections, Hawthorne was dismissed from his customhouse position. Six months later, his mother died. At this point--with no means of earning a living, and profoundly affected by his mother's death--he returned to his writing, with new dedication. The result was The Scarlet Letter, completed in February 1850, and published in March. In May the Hawthornes moved to Lenox, in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts, where, in August, Hawthorne first met Herman Melville, who was living nearby in Pittsfield.

Hawthorne had originally planned to include The Scarlet Letter as a long tale in yet another story collection, to be called "Old Time Legends," but his new publisher, James T. Fields, convinced him to publish the work (together with the "Custom-House" preface) as a novel--Hawthorne's first novel (except for the suppressed Fanshawe) after twenty-five years of writing fiction. While sales were not spectacular, they were better than those of any of Hawthorne's earlier books--perhaps because of the novel's scandalous theme of adulterous love and because of the preface's attack on the Whigs who had dismissed him from the customhouse. In any case, spurred on by the success of the book and by Fields's constant encouragement, Hawthorne in the next few years pursued literature at an almost frantic pace. He produced two more novels (or, as he called them, "romances"): The House of the Seven Gables in 1851 and The Blithedale Romance (based very loosely on his experience at Brook Farm) in 1852. There were also works for children: in 1851 True Stories from History and Biography (a revised collection of the children's histories originally published in 1840-42) and two new books of mythology for young readers, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys in 1851 and Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys in 1853. Fields sought to cash in on the reputation of The Scarlet Letter by reissuing Twice-told Tales in 1851, and The House of the Seven Gables was followed in 1852 by a new collection (mostly of earlier, previously uncollected stories) called The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-told Tales. And in 1852 Hawthorne published a campaign biography of his friend Franklin Pierce, who was running for President on the Democratic ticket. Meanwhile, in November 1851, the Hawthornes had moved once again, from the Berkshires to West Newton, Massachusetts, just outside Boston.

It has been argued that Fields exhausted Hawthorne by forcing him to produce so much material so rapidly, but while it is certainly true that Hawthorne would never match this pace again, he had reasons other than exhaustion for turning away from literature after this flurry of activity. Franklin Pierce won the election of 1852, and in 1853 he rewarded his friend and campaign biographer by appointing him American consul at Liverpool, a truly valuable bit of patronage. By the time Hawthorne left this position in 1857, he had managed to save $30,000--which one might compare to his total lifetime earnings from American sales of The Scarlet Letter of $1,500.

Following their four years in Liverpool, the Hawthornes spent two years in Italy, living in Rome and Florence. Here, as in Liverpool, Hawthorne's writing was confined to his notebooks; he was storing up materials for future "romances." Ultimately he managed to extract only one more "romance" from this horde: The Marble Faun, set in Italy, appeared in 1860. Following its publication the Hawthornes returned to the United States, to the "Wayside" in Concord, where Hawthorne wrestled with his increasingly intractable materials until his death in 1864. He did get a book of social observation out of his English notebooks--Our Old Home, published in 1863; but except for The Marble Faun his fictional exertions in the late 1850s and 1860s produced only confused fragments. Portions of these unfinished manuscripts were published posthumously as Septimius Felton; or, The Elixir of Life (1872), The Dolliver Romance (1876), Dr. Grimshawe's Secret (1883), and "The Ancestral Footstep" (1883).

"An old man," says a character in Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, "grows dreamy as he waxes away. . . . But I should think it hardly worth while to call up one of my shifting dreams more than another." One suspects that this character speaks for his author. In 1837 or 1851 the disavowal of literary ambition had been for Hawthorne a paradoxical or ironic pose. By the 1860s, following the years of financial and social success in England and Italy, this pose had apparently become a reality; Hawthorne could no longer remember, it would seem, what he wrote for, why he had called up his "shifting dreams" in the first place. Having forgotten this, having finally disguised his ambition and the sources of his inspiration even from himself, he could no longer write. Following a long period of illness and depression, he died on May 19, 1864, at the age of fifty-nine, while visiting the White Mountains of New Hampshire with his friend Pierce.

In his laudatory 1837 review of the first edition of Twice-told Tales, Longfellow described the book in terms characteristic of the way Hawthorne would come to be valued and understood by most of his contemporary admirers. Longfellow praised Hawthorne for his "bright, poetic style," for revealing the "poetry" of the commonplace; and, like most of Hawthorne's readers in the 1830s and 1840s, he preferred the fanciful sketches or essays--for instance, "The Vision of the Fountain," "Sunday at Home," "A Rill from the Town-Pump"--to the "tales" (what we would now call the "short stories"). Of these latter, Longfellow's favorite was "The Great Carbuncle," an allegory of the search by "a party of adventurers" for a legendary jewel in the White Mountains. He did not mention, that is to say, the works modern readers most admire and anthologize--for instance, "The Gray Champion," "The Minister's Black Veil," "The May-Pole of Merry Mount," "The Gentle Boy," "Wakefield," "The Prophetic Pictures." A review of the 1837 Twice-told Tales in New York's Knickerbocker Magazine expressed what would soon become near-consensus even more explicitly. Singling out for special praise "A Rill from the Town-Pump," a light sketch "spoken" by the pump at the corner of Essex and Washington Streets in Salem, the reviewer went on to mention "Sunday at Home," "Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe," "The Gentle Boy," and "Little Annie's Ramble"--while noting that "'The Minister's Black Veil,' and 'The Prophetic Pictures,' are less to our taste."

In 1850, at the close of his "Custom-House" preface to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne caustically imagined that future citizens of Salem might "sometimes think kindly of the scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary of days to come, among the sites memorable in the town's history, shall point out the locality of the town-pump!" Still, Hawthorne deliberately cultivated the taste he here mocks; he was careful to leaven the more somber works we now tend to admire with the lighter sketches most of his readers apparently preferred. Indeed, among the tales already published in magazines and annuals by 1837, and therefore available for collection in Twice-told Tales, Hawthorne passed over some of the grimmest ones, stories now considered to be among his finest works. "Roger Malvin's Burial" (1832) and "Young Goodman Brown" (1835) were not collected until 1846, when they appeared in Mosses from an Old Manse. "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" (1832) was not collected until 1852, when it was included in The Snow-Im-age, and Other Twice-told Tales. Of Twice-told Tales Longfellow wrote in 1837, "A calm, thoughtful face seems to be looking at you from every page; with now a pleasant smile, and now a shade of sadness stealing over its features. Sometimes, though not often, it glares wildly at you, with a strange and painful expression." Hawthorne was usually careful to keep such "painful expressions" to a minimum.



Continues...

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Table of Contents

Preface
Selected List of Publications
Introduction: "Culture," New Historicism, and the Sociology of Literary Vocation
I. Hawthorne
1. Nathaniel Hawthorne
2. Arts of Deception: Hawthorne, "Romance," and The Scarlet Letter
3. The House of the Seven Gables
II. Conditions of Literary Vocation
4. Beginnings of Professionalism
5. Women's Fiction and the Literary Marketplace in the 1850s
III. African-American Writing and the Legacy of the "Protest" Debate
6. African-American Writing, "Protest," and the Burden of Naturalism: The Case of Native Son
Notes
Index 

Recipe

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright.

Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us to reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers.