Abstract
The Scarlet Letter’s map of Boston with all locations radiating from the cemetery can be read as an emblem of the tragic implications of the state’s control of answers to death.1 At Blithedale, there is no cemetery, as if to signal that the utopian thinkers of this community have decided to ignore that mortality and the politics of consolation are in the service of patriarchal authority. Just as by joining the commune at Blithedale they have tried to imagine new systems of living, they are also testing new ideas about dying, some of them reflecting emerging ante-bellum attitudes toward death.
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Notes
This chapter is a revised and considerably expanded version of my essay, “Tyrant King and Accused Queen: Father and Daughter in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance,” ATQ 6.1 (March 1992): 31–45. This essay focuses on the novel as the story of a plot to overthrow the accused queen Zenobia by her father/king, which brings death to the queen and impotence to her male usurpers. Zenobia’s death is the source of the downfall of the Blithedale state (31–45).
Farrell in Inventing the American Way of Death states that religious liberalism “affected the established forms of religious funeral practice” (99). He also notes that in New England liberal ideas were important to the “first stage” (1830–55) in the development of the modern cemetery, the “rural” or “garden” cemetery (99). Laderman in The Sacred Remains uses the rural cemetery movement in New England to illustrate his thesis that the culture was undergoing a “gradual process of ‘dechristianization’ that led to reconceptualizations of the meaning of the corpse and of death in general” (10).
Mount Auburn Cemetery is located on the outskirts of Cambridge, Massachusetts and was referred to as “rural” probably because of the way in which the principles behind its founding drew from the “rural” or pastoral tradition, rather than because of its actual location. See Linden-Ward, Silent City, for a thorough discussion of the social and cultural forces that affected the establishment of Mount Auburn Cemetery. See Thomas G. Connors, “The Romantic Landscape: Washington Irving, Sleepy Hollow, and the Rural Cemetery Movement” in Mortal Remains, ed. Isenburg and Burstein, who credits Washington Irving’s “romantic tastes” with shaping the ideas and conceptions of the rural cemetery movement (187).
Chief Justice Joseph Story, “An Address,” in A History of the Cemetery of Mount Auburn, ed. Bigelow, 144, 160.
See Linden-Ward, Silent City, for a discussion of the important emphasis on gardens in the original plans for Mount Auburn Cemetery (197–203). In one of the earliest reports to the original subscribers of Mount Auburn, several of whom were members of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, General Dearborn referred to Mount Auburn as a “Garden of Experiment and Cemetery.” See “General Dearborn’s Report,” in The Picturesque Pocket Companion, and Visitor’s Guide, Through Mount Auburn; Illustrated With Upwards of Sixty Engravings on Wood (Boston: Otis, Broaders and Company, 1839), 40.
In a brief discussion of The Blithedale Romance (241–49), Elisabeth Bronfen in Over Her Dead Body focuses on the function of the dead body of Zenobia in the text, using Walter
Benjamin’s analogy between allegory and ruin (242). She explains that even as Coverdale “tries to find a way to recuperate a sense of univocality, harmony and identity disrupted by this corpse, any allegorisation leads him inevitably to notions of disjunction between signifier and intended signified, to notions of difference and failure as part of what is signified and to a plurality of readings that offer no peace” (244–45).
Irigaray, “Body Against Body: In Relation to the Mother,” in Sexes and Genealogies, 11. Irigaray explains, “One thing is plain, not only in everyday events but in the whole social scene: our society and our culture operate on the basis of an original matricide” (11).
Ibid.
Seery in Political Theory for Mortals describes a social contract written “among the dead” from the perspective of the “Final Position” (159; italics in the original).
Margaret Schlauch’s identification and analysis in Chaucer’s Constance and Accused Queens (New York: New York University Press, 1927) of several key narrative patterns of the story of the accused queen inform my discussion.
Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 9–11.
Ibid., 5, 43–45.
Ibid., 9.
In Hawthorne as Myth-Maker, McPherson discusses the Greek mythic patterns in The Blithedale Romance. He sees Fauntleroy-Moodie as central to the romance because he is a “kind of god” (151).
Schlauch, Chaucer’s Constance and Accused Queens, 45, 60.
John C. Hirsh in “Zenobia as Queen: The Background Sources to Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance,” The Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal 1971, ed. C.E. Frazer Clark, Jr. (Englewood, Colo.: Microcard Editions, 1971) explains that Zenobia was a “third-century queen of Palmyra who defied the Roman empire itself and was ultimately crushed for her disobedience” (182).
Schlauch, Chaucer’s Constance and Accused Queens, 5.
Irigaray, “Belief Itself,” in Sexes and Genealogies, 33–34.
In the early nineteenth century in New England, the preparation of the dead body for burial would have been the province of the women in the community. See Farrell, The American Way of Death, 147; and Colleen McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840–1900, 98. The care of the dead body in America was not consigned to professionals until the time of the Civil War, and it was not a practice that became common among the middle class until the concluding decades of the century (Farrell, The American Way of Death, 148–49; Laderman, Sacred Remains, 8).
Jennifer Waelti-Walters, Fairy Tales and the Female Imagination (Montreal: Eden Press, 1982), 11.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition 14: 245–46; 248–49.
Ibid., 249–50.
Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, 47. My reading of Coverdale’s melancholy is indebted to Schiesari’s discussion of Freud’s theory of melancholia.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition 14: 246–47.
Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia, 47.
Ibid., 54.
Janet Todd, Gender, Art, and Death (New York: Continuum, 1993), 113.
Bakan, Disease, Pain, and Sacrifice, 119.
For a discussion of the novel as a response to Hawthorne’s experiences in Concord from 1842 to 1845, including his relationships with Emerson and Fuller, see Larry J. Reynolds’s “Hawthorne’s Labors in Concord” in The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Millington, 10–34. Reynolds sees Hollingsworth as “a subtle partial portrait of Emerson, at least as he was perceived by Hawthorne” (11).
Emerson, “Experience,” in The Collected Works 3: 29.
Emerson, “Nature,” in The Collected Works 1: 44.
Ibid., 10.
Ibid., 44–45.
Emerson, “Experience,” in The Collected Works 3: 29.
Peter B. Murray, “Mythopoesis in The Blithedale Romance,” PMLA 75 (1960): 591–96. See Anthon’s A Classical Dictionary for this version of the Titan myth.
See Castronovo, Necro Citizenship, for an interesting reading of the complex role of the dead body of Zenobia in the polis. Castronovo explains: “Zenobia’s living corpse argues, however, that as equality and liberty appear in public, they are already imbued with death because exclusion and forgotten privilege precede—and enable—the human actor’s entrance into the public sphere and underwrite his or her freedom” (150). See Gail Holst-Warhaft, The Cue for Passion: Grief and Its Political Uses (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), for a discussion of grief’s potential to “be manipulated for political ends” or to be “positively harnessed as a means to effect political change” (5). She discusses the way in which women particularly have been “inspired by the passion of grief” to threaten an oppressive regime or state (123).
Irigaray, “Body Against Body In Relation to the Mother,” in Sexes and Genealogies, 11.
“Ethan Brand,” in The Snow-Image and Uncollected Tales 11: 99.
Winthrop Wetherbee, “Constance and the World in Chaucer and Gower,” in John Gower, Recent Readings: Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983–1988, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1989), 69.
Joseph E. Grennen, “Chaucer’s Man of Law and the Constancy of Justice,” JEGP 84 (1985): 498.
See Mary Suzanne Schrieber, “Justice to Zenobia,” New England Quarterly 56.1 (March 1982): 61–78, for a somewhat different perspective on the achievement of justice for Zenobia. Because Coverdale is an unreliable narrator, he has misinterpreted the meaning and motivation behind Zenobia’s death. Schrieber concludes that Zenobia’s death is either “accidental” or a suicide motivated by a “despair of woman’s lot and future prospects” (62). While critics disagree about the extent of Coverdale’s unreliability, most recent critics agree that he is at least somewhat unreliable. Schrieber’s interpretation assumes that he is unreliable both for the facts and for his interpretation of the facts. My assumption about Coverdale’s reliability is probably closer to Richard H. Brodhead’s assessment in Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel: “He is not generally unreliable either in his information or even in his surmises—the guesses he makes about the other characters’ secrets are usually remarkably accurate—but he is unreliable in explaining his own motives” (101). Brodhead adds that Hawthorne’s relationship with his narrator is not “consistent” and at times Coverdale “exhibits a moral obtuseness that makes him seem to be the object of Hawthorne’s scorn” (100).
Sacvan Bercovitch, “Hawthorne’s A-Morality of Compromise,” in The Scarlet Letter, ed. Ross C. Murfin (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 345.
Henry James, The Tales of Henry James, ed. Maqbool Aziz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 3: 201.
Ibid., 202.
See Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976) and Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), for an explanation of the thesis of separate spheres. Alison Easton in “Hawthorne and the Question of Women” in The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Millington makes the important point that “Although ideological efforts
were made to contain the question of women through the concept of separate gendered ‘spheres’ of existence, men’s and women’s lives were, of course, inextricably intertwined” (81). She explains that Hawthorne could not have been “unaffected” by the understanding of such women as Margaret Fuller that “women were not insulated from the public realm, nor were men detached from the domestic, but that all inhabited a common world, albeit differently” (81). Other studies, such as Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hather, eds. No More Separate Spheres! (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) and Monika Elbert, ed. Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830–1930 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000), challenge the metaphor of separate spheres as an exclusive conceptual model for understanding nineteenth-century gender roles. In Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), David Greven expresses his important concern that these studies, while valuable, have the potential to “obscure” the “experiential realities—such as compulsory homosociality” of nineteenth-century society (253, note 2).
Seery emphasizes the importance of shame in initiating the process of writing a new and more just “social contract, to be debated and negotiated, written and performed among the dead” (Political Theory for Mortals, 159; italics in the original).
Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 7.
Thomas R. Mitchell in Hawthorne’s Fuller Mystery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998) sees Hawthorne and The Blithedale Romance as haunted by “two Fuller ghosts…, the Fuller of his memory at Concord and the Fuller of his imagination at Rome” (209). He also discusses the meeting between Fuller and Hawthorne that took place in the woods of Sleepy Hollow in 1842 (72–77). Larry J. Reynolds in “Hawthorne’s Labors in Concord” in The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Millington comments that the scene “suggests the unusual openness Hawthorne displayed in his relations with Fuller” (22).
Thoreau, Walden, 182.
In Margaret and Her Friends: Or, Ten Conversations with Margaret Fuller upon the Mythology of the Greeks and Its Expression in Art (New York: Arno Press, 1972), Caroline W. Healy Dall reported that in Fuller’s conversation on the myth of Pluto and Tartarus she used the term “baffled effort” to describe the “penalty” least endurable to the Greeks (124). 52. Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 7.
Certeau, The Writing of History, 47.
Seery, Political Theory for Mortals, 161.
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© 2008 Roberta Weldon
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Weldon, R. (2008). From Melancholy to Mourning: Death and Politics in The Blithedale Romance. In: Hawthorne, Gender, and Death. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612082_5
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