The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life

276 Pages·1991·3.676 MB·English

by  Lauren Gail Berlant

L A U R E N B E R L A N T
T H E A N A T O M Y OF
N A T I O N A L F A N T A S Y
H A W T H O R N E , U T O P I A , A N D
E V E R Y D A Y L I F E
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Chicago & London
Lauren Berlant is associate professor of English at the University of
Chicago.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 1991 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1991
Printed in the United States of America
00 99 98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 5 4 3 21
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berlant, Lauren Gail, 1957—
The anatomy of national fantasy : Hawthorne, Utopia, and everyday
life / Lauren Berlant.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-226-04376-2 (cl.). — ISBN 0-226-04377-0 (pa.)
1. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864. Scarlet letter.
2. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804—1864—Political and social views.
3. National characteristics, American, in literature.
4. Nationalism in literature. 5. Utopias in literature. 6. Fantasy
in literature. I. Title.
PS1868.B397 1991
813'.3—dc20 90-26907
© The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction
“I am a citizen of somewhere else. ” 1
O NE America, Post-Utopia: Body,
Landscape, and National Fantasy
in Hawthorne’s Native Land 19
TWO The Paradise of Law in
The Scarlet Letter 57
T H R E E The State of Madness: Conscience, Popular
Memory, and Narrative in
The Scarlet Letter 97
F O U R The Nationalist Preface 161
F I V E America in Everyday Life 191
Notes 219
Index 261

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES,
the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research in the Human­
ities, and the University of Chicago provided welcome financial and
temporal relief during the emergence of this project. My research
assistants, Carrie Klinger, Nguyen Kung, and Megan Shein, per­
formed immensely valuable alienated labor, for which I am truly
grateful. A version of chapter 1 appeared in Arizona Quarterly 44,
no. 4 (Winter 1989); the journal has kindly permitted me to re­
publish it here. This manuscript has been read and improved by
many sources and conversations. It is especially indebted to the
teaching and the example of Michael Colacurcio. In addition, the vii
commentary of Nina Baym, Laura Brown, and William Veeder
came at crucial early moments. Jay Schleusener, Michael Murrin,
and Lorelei Sontag said important probing things; Julie Skurski and
Jim Chandler offered really wonderful clarifying thinking and de­
bate. Finally, the supreme intelligences of Michael Warner, Claudia
Johnson, and most of all Tom Stillinger have been illuminating and
inspiring, incalculably.
We must not voodoo the people .
Frantz Fanon
“I am a citizen
introduction
of somewhere else.”
NATIONS PROVOKE FANTASY. WHEN NATHANIEL HAW­
thorne loses his job as the federal Surveyor of the Custom-House
(1849)—where his task was to police the national border, regulat­
ing what commodities might enter and exit the public space—his
imagination runs wild. Now “a politically dead man,”1 he pictures
himself as a victim of the French Revolution, his head “axed” by the
federal “guillotine” of patronage (41); he also imagines himself as
the Headless Horseman of Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” a
ghostly vestige of the American Revolution who rides a triumphant
horse and carries a weapon—his detached head—to throw at any
offensive stranger (43). In addition, he writes The Scarlet Letter.
Even this carries a ghost title and authorship: the “POSTHUMOUS
PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR” (43).
America, which bestows on Hawthorne “the crown of
martyrdom—(though with no longer a head to wear it on) (42),
dominates his represented relation to his activity, his knowledge, his
affect, his very body. This domination is primarily textual, but Haw­
thorne does not experience national effects as muted or indirect.
The “guillotine,” he writes, is “one of the most apt of metaphors,”
INTRODUCT I ON
rather than a “literal fact” (41); yet these comic images of revolu­
tionary rupture testify to the intimate violence of political life with­
in the national frame. But the language of violation does not do
justice to the tonal ambivalence toward national intimacy that
Hawthorne’s text also registers. The author expresses pride in
federal office, personal embarrassment at being fired, and rage at
his own dependency on the symbolic and the actual nation. He
mocks his own complicity in the silences that protect national self­
privilege, referring to the “causes which I may not have space to hint
at” (19) and the “better book than I shall ever write” (37) about
what happens to those who seek and obtain too close a proximity to
the federal apparatus, “this peculiar mode of life” (19). He also
mixes his assorted negations with rhetorical impulses of nationalist
pleasure—through intertextual allusion of topical and literary
sorts, the modes of satire and sentiment, and a playful fantasy that
as author-in-exile from the state he might be a servant, a fount, and
a privileged source of a revitalized American memory.
In these nationally based images of citizenship and decapita-
2 tion, Hawthorne engages in what we might call the fantasy-work of
national identity. As an “official” man—a party underling and a
federal employee—he says that he overidentifies with many aspects
of the national system, and shows that its effects on him are more
dramatic and public than they are for the general populace. For the
“official,” political change is direct and brutal, so dependent is he
on a specific configuration of power—for example, on the success
J of one political party over another, or on the continued identifica­
tion of political with racial and patriarchal privilege. Moreover, in
“The Custom-House,” Hawthorne seems always uniquely on the
verge of personal transformation: he casts himself as a solitary writ­
er of “native” tales, a radical utopian transcendentalist, a custom­
house official, a headless victim of the historical nation, a headless
national fiction, a triumphant dead American author, and, at an­
other remove, an “editor” of the American antiquarian material
that becomes The Scarlet Letter.
Rather than display his transformations simply as exceptional
personal crises, Hawthorne suggests that they are also fundamen­
tally a condition of identity: the experience of identity might be per-
INTRODUCTIO N
sonal and private, but its forms are always “collective” and politi­
cal. The relation of personal experience to public form is not, how­
ever, a relation of the “real” to the “inauthentic.” In Hawthorne’s
own represented history, diverse kinds of memory, knowledge, and
experience intermingle in his patrilineal and national legacies. The(
eruption of these pasts into the present does not provide for him a
deep and rich sense of self-understanding; the more kinds of knowl­
edge he brings to consciousness, the more defamiliarized he be­
comes, both with respect to himself and to his geopolitical
surroundings. Within the moment of estrangement, he grasps at cer­
tain consoling, familiar feelings as well. The figures of consolation
also involve permeable boundaries, interfaces between public and
private: the federal “Hawthorne” is mentally linked to his later in­
carnation as a “literary man” (43) by his vernacular intimacy with
“Uncle Sam,” the American common ancestor (5, 39); and the “lit­
eral” Hawthorne turns to the hard fact of his physical body, noting
that whatever the fate of his “figurative self,” “the real human
being” remained, “his head safely on his shoulders” (43). But nei­
ther the body, the national ancestor, the New England family ro- 3
mance, nor the vestiges of textual knowledge provide Hawthorne a
stable, foundational place from which to live in the modern nation.
These are axes of personal identity, in constant and unsettled ex­
change with a political heritage that is both abstract and affectively
invested. Opening with a narrative about Hawthorne’s forced dis­
charge from the federal Custom-House, the text begins on a hybrid
note of personal/national violence and follows through its myriad
aftershocks.
Accordingly, although in “The Custom-House” Hawthorne
writes autobiographically, he reveals not “the inmost Me” (4) de­
tached from social inscription but speaks in an exemplary way, as a
citizen, taking care-to play out the complex regimes of knowledge,
power, and desire that transform him into a being intimate some­
how with mass political culture.2 Ending the essay as “a citizen of
somewhere else,” he acts out how it feels to be a citizen by con­
structing “America” as a domestic, and yet a strange and foreign
place. The same structure of personal/national representation ob­
tains in The Scarlet Letter. The narrator paradoxically asserts both
INTRODUCTIO N
that state-authored public torture is inhumane and that the purpose
of torture—to force a person’s private fetishes into the light of pub­
lic scrutiny—is vital to the reproduction of political legitimacy (55,
260). Locating the possibility of political identity in the linked phe­
nomena of personal depravity and its public exposure, he argues
that the citizen should dissolve the state’s ethical dilemma by show­
ing “freely to the world” an embodiment, a trace by which her/his
“worst” traits might be construed (260). By so construing the sub­
ject’s “consent” to becoming available to interpellation as a citizen,
the narrators of “The Custom-House” and The Scarlet Letter se­
cure the linkage between naturalization and nationalization, politi­
cal estrangement and intimacy.
In humorous and in deeply serious moments, then, Hawthorne
depicts national fantasy as fundamental to the political and every­
day life of all Americans, whose “Americanness” is as central to
their sense of entitlement and desire as any family name and tradi­
tion and sensation itself might be.3 The nation’s presence in the ge­
neric citizen’s daily life is more latent and unconscious than it is in
4 his incidental, occasional relation to national symbols, spaces, nar­
ratives, and rituals: still, whether consensually or passively trans­
mitted, national identity requires self-ablation. Citizenship becomes
equivalent to life itself and also looms as a kind of death penalty:
both activity in and exile from the political public sphere feel like
cruel and unusual punishment. It is apparently a quality of nations
to claim legal and moral privilege, to inspire identification and sac­
rifice, as well as to make citizens feel violated in public and private.
Thus the complexity of Hawthorne’s tone: the pain and pleasure of
his citizenship and the sublime jocularity of his exile.
In The Anatomy of National Fantasy “America” is an assumed rela­
tion, an explication of ongoing collective practices, and also an oc­
casion for exploring what it means that national subjects already
share not just a history, or a political allegiance, but a set of forms
and the affect that makes these forms meaningful. As his prefaces
repeatedly stage it, “we”—that is, the author, Hawthorne, and the
readers who consume his fictions—are already inextricably bound
together by America, prior to joining in the novel’s process. We are