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Hawthorne's Bulky Puritans
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In 1944 Lawrence Sargent Hall (Hawthorne: Critic of Society, New Haven) showed that an important theme in Hawthorne's work was the progressivism of American democracy. No one has yet pointed out, though, how Hawthorne demonstrates this progress of American society by emblematizing the human body in his fiction. Yet emblematic bodies appear in all three of the major American novels: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960
References
1 Volume and page references to Hawthorne's works are, unless noted, to The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. George Parsons Lathrop (Boston, 1883).
2 As Lawrence S. Hall points out {Hawthorne: Critic of Society, New Haven, 1944), Hawthorne often contrasts, as he does here, the advancement of American society and the retrograde quality of English society. But note too that Hawthorne frequently uses this same body symbolism in making the contrast. For example: “I know not whether they [the English] valued themselves on their beef, and estimated their standing as members of society at so much a pound; but I shall set it down as a national peculiarity, and a symbol of the prevalence of the earthly over the spiritual element, that Englishmen are wonderfully bent on knowing how solid and physically ponderous they are” (vii, 282). Cf. “John Bull, on the other hand, has grown bulbous, long bodied, short-legged, heavy witted, material, and, in a word, too intensely English. In a few more centuries he will be the earthliest creature that ever the earth saw” (vii, 84).
3 That sixty pound codfish here is interesting. Cod average fifteen pounds and usually range, reports the Columbia Encyclopedia, from ten to thirty-five pounds, though larger ones are not uncommon. But that he specifies, in this passage, a codfish of sixty pounds suggests that Hawthorne is indicating that this is a sufficiently “gross” fish to emblematize a coarse era. At any rate, the ox, deer, and cod were the tokens, Hawthorne tells us, by which the ceremony “was to be made acceptable to the grosser sense” (in, 24).
4 Hawthorne makes it quite clear that it was the Colonel's social position which enabled him to usurp the land of the plebian Matthew Maule. See in, 19–21 and 227.
5 The American Notebooks, p. 23.
6 Cf. Hepzibah and Phoebe in The House of the Seven Gables. Hepzibah, Hawthorne's symbol of “old Gentility” (ill, 104), is said to have “so much more mass” (in, 167) than Phoebe, “new Plebeianism” (in, 104). And the “frame and limbs of Hepzibah, as compared with the tiny lightsomeness of Phoebe's figure, were perhaps in some fit proportion with the moral weight and substance, respectively, of the woman and the girl” (in, 167).
7 The Complete Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Julian Hawthorne (Boston, 1900), xv, 78.
8 Contrast this early inability of Priscilla to exercise with Zenobia's custom: “It was one peculiarity, distinguishing Zenobia from most of her sex, that she needed for her moral well-being, and never would forego, a large amount of physical exercise. At Blithedale, no inclemency of sky or muddiness of earth had ever impeded her daily walks” (v, 497).