Letters Turned to Gold: Hawthorne, Authorship, and Slavery
In her "Cuba Journal," a series of letters written home about her daily life on a Cuban coffee plantation, where she traveled for a rest cure in 1833, Sophia Peabody describes Cuba as a realm of romance imbued by moonlight. Recounting an evening when she joined King Salvador, one of the plantation's slaves and a former African king, in conversation about his "former kingdom & subjects," she writes: I think the splendor of that evening surpassed anything I have yet seen in Cuba. The air was soft as the down of a dove's breast and delicately perfumed with the jessamine fragrance of the coffee blossom & the moon was so dazzling that to look straight at it gave me a shooting pain through the head--like that caused by the sun's direct rays.... It does indeed seem palpable & like an intelligent presence--Every object looked as if the heavens had snowed pearls & diamonds.... Even the ordinary share in the royal profusion & magnificence of beauty which showers down, & are for the lime [en]folded and robed in loveliness as in a mantle. The "disembodied spirit" of the moonlight, coupled with the fragrance of coffee blossoms, transforms the actual into the imaginary--simple objects into things of wealth, magnificence, and beauty, slaves into kings. Cautioned by her sister Elizabeth Peabody in an earlier letter to "drive slavery from [her] thoughts," Sophia mystifies the slave economy: she masks the power dynamic between master and slave behind polite conversation and detaches the labor of slavery, as figured by coffee, from its political and economic meanings by transforming it into a picturesque backdrop. Sophia's moonlit evening depends upon, even as it obscures, the economy of slavery. (1) The "magic moonshine" that produces Hawthorne's realm of romance in "The Custom-House" has much in common with Sophia's moonlit evening. (2) It also "spiritualize[s]" (CE 1:35) the everyday objects of domestic life, converting them into "things of intellect" (CE 1:35) and "snow-images" (CE 1:26). By translating the actual into the imaginary, Hawthorne's moonlight aestheticizes everyday life and transports it to the literary realm of romance. Like Sophia's description of Cuba, Hawthorne's formulation of romance converts a material economy into a symbolic one. Despite his efforts to obscure the relationship between these two economies, in order to establish his romance as separate from the commercial marketplace, Hawthorne recognizes their intimate relationship: he insists upon the "coal-fire" as an "essential influence in producing" the moonlight's effect (CE 1:36) and he repeatedly describes the scarlet letter as a "rag" (CE 1:31), thereby emphasizing its relation to the raw materials of the writer's trade in the 1850s--paper made of reconstituted cotton fibers (CE 1:25). (3) The traces of "gold embroidery" in the letter's "fine red cloth" figure Hawthorne's art in both aesthetic and economic terms: the golden needlework is meant to earn him cultural as well as commercial capital, a literary reputation as well as a livelihood (CE 1:31). Similarly, Hawthorne seeks to mystify the economics of his authorship in order to claim cultural prestige in an increasingly commodified and professionalized literary marketplace. Through the fiction of his early obscurity and the persona of the withdrawn writer, Hawthorne attempts, as Meredith McGill argues, to situate his authorship as free of the marketplace. Yet, as McGill shows, this withdrawal from the market is itself a market strategy, the way he "'renegotiates a relation to the reading public" and redeems his minor fiction "by the success of his later work." (4) Hawthorne finds his place in the literary marketplace by standing apart from it. He manipulates the literary marketplace even as he veils his commercial affiliations to it. While a number of critics have begun to disentangle the fictions of Hawthorne's authorial self-construction from the economic realities of his authorship, I want to pay particular attention to how the slave economy operates in Hawthorne's understanding of--and place within--the literary marketplace. …
Pearl's Golden Chain in THE SCARLET LETTER
Moments before the final scene of The Scarlet Letter there is a brief encounter between Pearl and the gaudily dressed master of the “questionable vessel” (319) that is to carry Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Pearl back to “the Old World, with its crowds and cities” (303). Seeking to “lay hands upon” Pearl but unable to “snatch a kiss,” the shipmaster, we are told, “took from his hat the gold chain that was twisted about it, and threw it to the child. Pearl immediately twined it around her neck and waist with such happy skill that, once seen there, it became a part of her, and it was difficult to imagine her without it” (329). When Pearl next appears, there is no reference to the chain; the significance of the episode must lie in its particular elements. To some extent, the language suggests the theme of control. Uncatchable as she is, Pearl instead incorporates a portion of her pursuer into herself. When she encounters the shipmaster, Pearl has been running about with a mind to find things that “excite her ever-active and wandering curiosity,” taking whatever she finds, whether “man or thing” (329), as her own property. Thus it is understandable that one critic has found, in Pearl’s “happy skill” with the chain, evidence to support her reading of how Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel “explicates his art’s dependence on a material economy tied to slavery, and reveals the romancer’s role in mystifying that relation” (Goddu 65). Mid-nineteenth-century readers, however, would not have run most readily to such a reading of the golden chain, nor would they have necessarily, as Goddu does, immediately associated the intimated piratical activity of the shipmaster with the slave trade.1 A more immediate and widely popular association suggests a more conventional, accessible reading that should be considered in any historicist interpretation, or any other reflection on the possible sense of this suggestive encounter.
Metallurgical Process Engineering
The "material of choice" - steel.- Uprising of China's steel industry.- Process manufacturing industry and process engineering.- Engineering science in steel manufacturing process.- Analysis and integration of metallurgical manufacturing process.- Multi-dimensional mass flow control for metallurgical manufacturing process.- Time factors in steel manufacturing process.-Operating dynamics in the production process of steel plant.- Structure and mode of steel plant.- Steel plant and environment.