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. …
The Scarlet Letter of the Law: Hawthorne and Criminal Justice
In the scene of public v^ritnessing that begins The Scarlet Letter, the Governor, magistrates, and elders look dov^n from their balcony to the platform where Hester Prynne stands in proud shame, raised in turn above the grim faces of the milling crow^d. The ground-level voices we hear express a resentment quite appropriate to a townspeople both beneath and outside the nexus of unassailable power represented by that balcony, "the place whence proclamations were wont to be made" (64). Though they hold varying opinions of the letter-wearing sentence, in one thing the townspeople's comments are consistent: not they but the magistrates have had the sole power and authority to deal with Hester Prynne. "This woman has brought shame upon us all and ought to die," rants one woman. "Is there not law for it? Truly there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book. Then let the magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if their own wives and daughters go astray!" (51-52). In Hawthorne's Puritan world, the only decision-makers standing between Hester and the gallows are the all-powerful magistrates. Their word is law, their discretion untrammeled. If the colony has a fully developed criminal justice system—grand juries returning indictments, juries assessing trial testimony and returning verdicts, pre-determined criminal penalties governing the sentencing of offenders—we don't hear about it. Instead, the entire apparatus of the Puritan Rule of Law in The Scarlet Letter is signified by this small group of powerful men, accountable apparently to none but themselves and their God. The first three chapters create the clear impression that the townspeople are wholly excluded from any decision-making role in dealing with crime.* The conflation of religious, political, legislative, and judicial power in Hawthorne's early New England is total: the monolith rules and sentences. The people may mutter, but they must also unhesitatingly obey. As Hawthorne well knew, however, the legal and judicial authority of the magistrates, particularly during the tumultuous decade in which he situates his tale, was anything but unassailable.^ The colony's criminal justice system had been intentionally structured to counterpoint magistratical power with the peer-
The New England Sources of The Scarlet Letter
A FTER ALL THE CAREFUL STUDIES of the origins of Hawthorne's tales and the extensive inquiry into the English sources of The Scarlet Letter,' it is surprising that the American sources for the factual background of his most famous novel have been largely unnoticed. As would seem only natural, Hawthorne used the most creditable history of Boston available to him at that time, and one which is still an important source for the identification of houses of the early settlers and for landmarks in the city. The book is Dr. Caleb H. Snow's History of Boston. Study and comparison of the many histories read by Hawthorne reveal his repeated use of it for authentication of the setting of The Scarlet Letter. Consequently, for the most part this article will be concerned with Snow's book. If we are to see the accurate background Hawthorne created, some works other than Snow's must also be mentioned, and the structure of time as well as place must be established. Then it will become apparent that although Hawthorne usually demanded authentic details of colonial history, some small changes were necessary in his portrayal of New England in the I640's. These were not made because of lack of knowledge of the facts, nor merely by whim, but according to definite purposes-so that the plot would develop smoothly to produce the grand and simple balance of the book as we know it. During the "solitary years," I825-37, Hawthorne was "deeply engaged in reading everything he could lay his hands on. It was said in those days that he had read every book in the Athenae-