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. …
American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture
Visual texts uniquely demonstrate the contested terms of American identity. In "American Archives" Shawn Michelle Smith offers a bold and disturbing account of how photography and the sciences of biological racialism joined forces in the nineteenth century to offer an idea of what Americans look like--or "should" look like. Her varied sources, which include the middle-class portrait, baby picture, criminal mugshot, and eugenicist record, as well as literary, scientific, and popular texts, enable her to demonstrate how new visual paradigms posed bodily appearance as an index to interior "essence." Ultimately we see how competing preoccupations over gender, class, race, and American identity were played out in the making of a wide range of popular and institutional photographs.Smith demonstrates that as the body was variously mapped and defined as the key to essentialized identities, the image of the white middle-class woman was often held up as the most complete American ideal. She begins by studying gendered images of middle-class domesticity to expose a transformation of feminine architectures of interiority into the "essences" of "blood," "character," and "race." She reads visual documents, as well as literary texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pauline Hopkins, and Theodore Dreiser, as both indices of and forms of resistance to dominant images of gender, class, race, and national identity. Through this analysis Smith shows how the white male gaze that sought to define and constrain white women and people of color was contested and transformed over the course of the nineteenth century.Smith identifies nineteenth-century visual paradigms that continue to shape debates about the terms of American belonging today. "American Archives" contributes significantly to the growing field of American visual cultural studies, and it is unprecedented in explaining how practices of racialized looking and the parameters of "American looks" were established in the first place.
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.