SOURCE: Martin, Robert K. “Haunted by Jim Crow: Gothic Fictions by Hawthorne and Faulkner.” In American Gothic: New Inventions in a National Narrative, edited by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy, pp. 129-42. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Martin examines the themes of gender and race in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, and notes that the issues raised in the novel are mirrored in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! However, Faulkner's novel, while dealing with many of the same issues, presents a more complicated picture of the world, replacing Hawthorne's happy ending with a vision that is ultimately nightmarish.]

In his now somewhat outdated but still influential formulation, Harold Bloom argues for an agonistic relationship between the “strong poet” and his predecessors. The task for the belated writer is simultaneously to express admiration and filiation and to mark off difference. The model does not allow for collaboration and simple indebtedness, presumably the characteristic only of weak poets. More importantly, the model assumes the centrality of the heroic individual author without allowing for a larger cultural process of self-creation and citation.

I want to examine two well-known and important American gothic texts, to suggest the ways in which the later text, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! rewrites the earlier text, Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables. Of course one way of looking at them might be simply to place them both in the context of the gothic. Indeed, Faulkner's gothicism is often remarked on. As Eric Sundquist has put it, “Which of Faulkner's major works is not an American gothic?” (44). Hawthorne's gothicism, once a commonplace of criticism, is less acknowledged these days, although it is crucial to The Marble Faun as well as to House. My argument here will be that Hawthorne's drama of “class warfare,” as Richard Brodhead has called it (79), conceals other, more troubling conflicts of race and gender that are expressed through gothic elements. In Leslie Fiedler's well-known words, American gothic expresses national “obsessive concerns,” especially “the ambiguity of our relationship with Indian and Negro” (xxii), constantly rewriting a masterplot of cultural authority and guilt. Faulkner's reworking of this material (whether taken as a personal or as a cultural act) places into relief the submerged texts of Hawthorne and their significance for the writing of an American history.

The gothic, it seems to be generally agreed, is most often a politically conservative form that gives expression to the anxieties of a class threatened with violent dissolution. On the other hand, the gothic can allow for the voice of the culturally repressed and hence act out a resistance to the dominant culture. This function is particularly striking in African-American adaptations of the genre, where the voice of the dead slave can act as a means of insisting on the presence of history. The references to blackness in The House of the Seven Gables are a reminder of that which the new generation wants to forget as it moves away from the house to begin life over again. Hawthorne's gothic text works against his dominant text to recall the anxiety over race and gender in midcentury America, writing a countertext of guilt and endless expiation in the midst of a narrative of redemption.¹ Hawthorne's use of the gothic form is no mere borrowing of its trappings, although they are certainly present. Even if The House of the Seven Gables, with its haunted house, doomed family, mysterious lost documents, and hereditary curse, cannot help reminding us of gothic texts such as The Fall of the House of Usher, its tensions could suggest a reversal of Poe's famous remark, for Gables is distinctly about the terrors of America, if not of Germany. Indeed, it is in part the role of Hawthorne's texts in defining American history that has rendered them so susceptible to rewriting and reinterpretation, from Henry James to John Updike. Hawthorne's gothic enacts the presence of the past, even as his text seeks to deny that past. If the motif of the haunted house central to the gothic is maintained, it is now situated in the heart of commercial Salem, not in a grotesque landscape of the imagination. Among the secrets it conceals is a racial history of slavery which at least in part shifts the novel's theme away from family guilt to national guilt or uses the family as a synecdoche of the nation. The gothic is associated with the past, with the house itself, its gothicism exaggerated as a way of attempting to escape from that tradition. Hawthorne's novel attempts to reclaim the gothic wizard for a new harmonious future, but the very gothic elements he both calls upon and mocks retain a power to haunt.

What links the two texts by Hawthorne and Faulkner is the centrality of the house that stands for a fallen family, the failure of an attempt to inscribe the self in history through possession. Both houses contain a secret, the Indian deed as well as the dead Judge Pyncheon, in Hawthorne's case, and the physical body of Henry Sutpen, standing in for the entire history of forbidden desire and aggression, in Faulkner's. In both cases, the secret of the house is the secret of the family and the sign of the family's participation in a primal crime. Faulkner's reference to Ikkemotubbe, the displaced Indian king (50), makes it clear that Sutpen's claim is as flimsy as that of the Pyncheons. If Faulkner indeed thought of Hawthorne's example as he wrote Absalom (and it is of course not necessary to my argument that he should have), it was not, I believe, such generic similarities that would have attracted him most.² Rather, what Hawthorne's text reveals, as its own secret, is the story of race in America and of the power of the phallus.

Hawthorne's text was written in the midst of a national—even international—debate over the right to property: private property as opposed to communal property, the right to hold and sell slaves, and the connections between the enslavement of women and that of black Americans.³ Although the propertyless, like Uncle Venner, are threatened by the poorhouse, Gables offers a view of property that suggests the need for better management rather than any radical change, indeed, for a management that can forestall revolution. Holgrave, the Fourierist, will become a wealthy man inheriting, or marrying, property and possessing the woman by a now domesticated phallic power. Although Holgrave is the successor to Hawthorne's scientist/rapist figures, Hawthorne asks us to see him as a new-tamed phallus, domesticated by his “little housewife” (136). It is not that Holgrave lacks the power of the practitioners of black magic from whom he descends but that he chooses not to use it or to accept its service of a new domestic economy. But Hawthorne's text suggests some of the ways in which this shift to a new masculinity would not be total. Hawthorne identifies only two kinds of property—that obtained by legal means, by land grant or purchase, and that obtained by labor. The Maules base their claim to the house on the original work of clearing and building (Maule has “hewn” his land “out of the primeval forest” [7]), but that claim has come to seem weak in mid-nineteenth-century America, where property is bought and sold without any claim to “natural” possession. Even the Pyncheons, rich as they are, find themselves losing out in the new economic marketplace, and the Judge, like the Colonel his ancestor, seeks to find the original land claim. The Colonel had offered to give the Maules back their house in Salem if he can repossess his lands in Maine—his willingness to do so indicates the growth of a capitalist economy in which inheritance plays an increasingly marginal role and is supplanted by colonial mercantilism. That the almost mythic lands in Maine (an “unmeasured tract of eastern lands” [18]) can be claimed only through a missing Indian deed underlines the role of national theft and genocide. These “vast,” “unexplored and unmeasured” lands are what remains of the colonial dream of America, the imposition of European property rights on native peoples; they are also a fantasy of the wealth of the “East” that awaits the merchants of Salem.

It is the cultural work of the text to resolve the dilemma of the stolen land, and it does so in a way that evades the issue of the Indian lands by staging a conflict between two white families in the absence of the now dispersed and dispossessed Indians. The two modes of property holding, through labor and through abstract ownership, come together in the marriage of Phoebe and Holgrave. If Hawthorne can acknowledge that aristocracy is based on theft, he quickly moves to resolve that guilt. Marriage between the aristocratic family and the working class makes the wealth of the aristocracy guiltless, as well as provides a new phallic potency which purifies the naked aggression of the earlier patriarchs, both Pyncheon and Maule. By marrying Phoebe, Holgrave, the last of the Maules, will inherit the Pyncheon estate (that is, reassert a male line of succession, in which Phoebe as a female Pyncheon is disinherited, as Walter Herbert has remarked [103]) and thereby recuperate the old Maule claim. They will have little need of the house, now that they have the money, which carries no deed and no signature. Capital, not real estate, is the key to the future. The marriage that accomplishes the closure of the novel is not only an act of reconciliation, it is an imagined moment of redemption from history. Phoebe's housekeeping activities have accomplished their goal: there is no longer the grime of history in the house, thereby fulfilling Phoebe's ideological role as the exponent of a domesticity (Pfister 161) that partakes of the Gothic of neither Pyncheon nor Maule. But the light that now penetrates the Pyncheon house also reveals its secrets: by opening the shop, Hepzibah exposes the history of slavery and cannot escape its consequences. At such a moment the sharp difference between Hawthorne and Faulkner becomes visible. For Faulkner there can be no redemption from history, only the suspension of time in death. Similarly, for Faulkner there can be no successful domestication, no Phoebe to let in the sunbeams. It is as if he must insist on the burden, or the nightmare, of history precisely to argue against an American tradition that clings to the possibility of eternal renewal, even as it repeats its gestures of exclusion.

It is not as though Hawthorne were unaware of the stakes. He may misrepresent the meaning of Hepzibah's opening of the shop as “the instant of time when the patrician lady is to be transformed into the plebeian woman” (38), thereby eliding the emergence of the mercantile system and the new middle class. (Phoebe knows how to run a shop, but once she is united with Holgrave she will presumably retire from public life to become the domestic wife. The shop will be closed not, as Hepzibah would have it, to preserve an upper-class claim to the invisibility of money's origins but to prevent any intrusion of the public sphere into the private.) However, Hawthorne locates the commercial exchange at the heart of American history. Hepzibah's first customer (she refuses Holgrave's money) is Ned Higgins, of the new Irish lower middle class, whose shabby dress is “owing to his mother's carelessness”—the renewed Pyncheons and Maules will surely have better dressed children of careful domestic mothers like Phoebe. And the first transaction is the sale of a gingerbread Jim Crow.

Slavery, we know, was the mainstay of the Salem economy and the bartering of human bodies the origin of most New England wealth. Hepzibah's own appearance signals her place in the economies of sex and race. Her turbaned head is not merely a “droll parody of Oriental splendor” (Luedtke 190) but an indication of her status as slave woman, for which the turban was the accepted sign. By the time of Gables slavery had been abolished in Massachusetts, of course, but the fugitive slave law still required complicity from Massachusetts—it was the only thing that got Hawthorne excited in opposition to slavery (Mellow 409-410), on which he had highly conflicted views. Hepzibah's sale of Jim Crow to the voracious boy, who will move on to other exotic animals, repeats the economics of America and reveals the hidden sources of northern wealth. That it is the body of the black that is commodified is made clear by the references to Ned as a “cannibal.” The effect of Hepzibah's transaction is dramatic, as Hawthorne makes clear: the exchange of money gives her a “copper stain,” the indelible mark of participation in the slave economy, which for sentimental antislavery writers was inimical to the family. “The little schoolboy, aided by the impish figure of the negro dancer, had wrought an irreparable ruin” (51). The boy and the supposedly comic figure of the black serve as a return of the (national) repressed and give the lie to the claim of aristocracy, even more than the ostensible cause of financial transaction: the aristocracy rests its claims on ownership of land and on the invisibility of the origins of its gains. Selling Jim Crow to Ned, Hepzibah is found out. She has clearly opened the wrong door to the Pyncheon house, as to New England morality and finance, the one that should always be discreetly shut. Jim Crow is presented comically in the text, as in the minstrel show tradition from which he arises, but at the same time his dance, the sign of the culture's ability to accomplish a reduction of race to the playful, acts as a reminder of that which has been concealed, of the grounding of New England wealth in the slave trade. The Jim Crow figure evoked here illustrates the presentation of the black body as a means of asserting white purity; it is consumed (physically, by Ned) by a white population in the minstrel shows that create a public space for the black and simultaneously contain that black within the confines of an agitated body.⁴ The portrayal of the black body as entertainment serves to conceal the black body as labor.

The Jim Crow episode is paralleled by the scene of the street musician. Although it is commonplace to read this scene as an allegory of money or a commentary on popular art and Hawthorne's anxiety about his own declining cultural authority, such a reading, while usefully reminding us of the commercial nature of art despite claims to its purity, also effaces the way in which racial paranoia is built into the urban landscape. Like Ned Higgins, the boy musician is an immigrant set off from the world of the rival New England families, representing another, less idyllic future than that acted out at the end of the novel. Such boys, the text reminds us, “are rather a modern feature of our streets” (162), both a sign of liveliness and activity against the deadly world of the Pyncheon House and too vulgar to be taken seriously. Although it is the immigrant who produces the first level of cultural anxiety in this episode, the text simultaneously raises the stakes by linking the organ grinder and his monkey with the dancing black, Jim Crow. The monkey holds out a “small black palm” in which he receives the “copper coin,” virtually the same one that Ned used to buy his Jim Crow. It is not necessary to insist on the monkey as a displaced figure of the black, since such connections were conventional in the period and long after, expressing as they did dismay over theories of evolution.⁵ Hawthorne underscores this anxiety by depicting the monkey's “strangely manlike expression” and links it with a new degraded capitalism, “the grossest form of the love of money.” Particularly striking about Hawthorne's account is its association of the black/monkey figure with a dangerous and disturbing masculinity, a link already common in the minstrel shows and songs. The obscene play on the monkey's tail and its “preposterous prolixity,” which is “too enormous to be decently concealed under his gabardine” (164), gives expression to a fear of cultural and physical impotence (Clifford is a man of “merely delicate endowments” whose tears once again show his femininity) as well as to a possible homoerotic attraction to the phallic black alongside a panic over his possible revolt, what Lee Edelman has memorably called “the essentializing white fantasy of the black male's intensified biological potency and virility, which makes possible the racist reduction of black man to the status of genital part” (Edelman 67). It is not merely that the street musician represents the triumph of a vulgar art of the marketplace, threatening the existence of higher cultural values, but that the musician's monkey insists on the bestiality of such public art, of the display of that which should be private, not only private domestic space but private parts. The dilemma of the text is how to find a new masculinity and fertility that are not threatening. But to evoke that public world of new values and loss of class privilege is, inevitably in the American 1850s, also to evoke the specter of slave revolt imagined in terms of a panicked response to the black phallus. The scene of fascination and horror is one that is repeated throughout Hawthorne's fiction, as the delicate man (Dimmesdale, Coverdale, Owen Warland) watches a display of masculinity with desiring terror.

The gothic embedded narrative in Gables, Holgrave's story of Alice Pyncheon, is similarly firmly rooted in the soil of American racism and sexualized power. The story opens with a message from Gervayse Pyncheon to Matthew Maule, brought by Pyncheon's black servant, Scipio. Scipio is not simply an anonymous messenger: the importance of his race is stressed by Holgrave. Scipio speaks in black dialect and identifies himself as that stereotyped “comic” figure, the frightened “poor nigger.” Above all, the text insists upon blackness as trope and on Maule's own status as black man, or magician. Scipio says to Maule, “[W]hat for do you looks so black at me?” to which Maule replies, “No matter, darkey! Do you think nobody is to look black but yourself?” (188). If Maule employs the derogatory diminutive “darkey,” he also sees himself as oppressed, by class if not by race. This claim reminds us that not all whites share the privileges of the Pyncheons (although they can imagine that they could), but at a time before the abolition of slavery (passersby can see “the shining, sable face of a slave” [191] in the windows of the house) a metaphorical reading of “black,” like Thoreau's metaphorical reading of “slave,” seems problematic. However, the clear analogy between the traffic in slaves and the traffic in women makes the linkage appropriate. Gervayse Pyncheon sells his daughter as he would his slave, and her speech and conduct become the expression of her new mesmerizing master, a voice of the victim seeking revenge, virtually from beyond the grave.

Maule refuses the conventions of class that would have him come to the side door, not the front, and no one is more shocked by this lèse-majesté than Scipio, the servant who, we take it, comes to identify with the masters. Pyncheon himself is willing to accept the lack of manners in the carpenter if only he can obtain the secret of the house, the missing deed. To obtain this he agrees to offer his daughter Alice. The situation is of course similar to that in the main narrative: young Matthew Maule is highly, visibly phallic, with “a long pocket for his rule, the end of which protruded,” and a figure that combines “comeliness, strength, and energy” (201). To the declining Pyncheons this new source of power is attractive indeed. Maule the magician can hypnotize the young Alice so that she becomes a creature of his will, just as Holgrave can mesmerize Phoebe. They can become the slaves of love. To be mesmerized is to lose one's self, that is, to be appropriated or dispossessed by a form of possession, much as the slave lost his fundamental property—himself—by being enslaved. Such relations between father and would-be son over the body of a daughter (see the triangular relations in The Scarlet Letter and Blithedale) were always a source of enormous anxiety for Hawthorne, who worried about Sophia's susceptibility in terms that mark clearly the fear of rape. Hawthorne told Sophia, “[T]he sacredness of an individual is violated by it; there would be an intrusion into the holy of holies—and the intruder would not be thy husband!” (Mellow 190). As Hawthorne's text says of Holgrave, “he could complete his mastery over Phoebe's yet free and virgin spirit” (212). These fears of suggestive power were to be echoed, and rendered more complex, in James's use of the theme in The Bostonians, where Selah's control over Verena is then bartered to Olive, who must in turn compete with Basil for the ability to control Verena.

The theme of the two doors, and the refusal to accept one's place, may be fundamental to all stories of class, but the specifics of this story seem clearly echoed in Faulkner's repeated and foundational text of the young Thomas Sutpen as “the boy outside the barred door,” the boy who is told “by a nigger to go around to the back” (293). Faulkner attributes much lower-class white prejudice against blacks to such insults, creating a resentment in which the poor whites seek to punish the plantation owners but settle instead on their stand-ins, the servants who execute their orders. Faulkner's rewriting of this primal scene out of the Maules' story thus moves it from a simple tale of class tension by bringing out the racial implications discreetly present in Hawthorne's text. The results, though, are strikingly different: the youngest Maule will seek to marry the last Pyncheon and thus overcome the curse, while the last Sutpens can only yearn for the forbidden black bodies with whose histories they are already intertwined. Faulkner will write no marriage novel in part because the burden of guilt and anger cannot be so easily assuaged and in part because any marriage that can be imagined (Judith and Bon, Henry and Bon, Quentin and Shreve) must be forbidden. It is not that incest is absent in Hawthorne but rather that it is treated (apart from the Beatrice Cenci theme in The Marble Faun) in ways that attempt to defuse its power by turning it from gothic to picturesque. Clifford and Hepzibah are essentially lovers, but Hawthorne devotes such energies to mocking Hepzibah's appearance that one forgets her love for her brother. The sterility that in the gothic would be the fated consequence of sexual transgression is now a petering out of erotic energies into a comic vision of a weird couple. They cling to the house, not as the site of their passions but rather as a tomb of forgotten desires.

Although Faulkner carries the exploration of gender much further than Hawthorne, the text of House is frequently occupied with the question. Hawthorne rehearses what I consider to be one of his foundational myths—the decline of an artistic male personality linked to the aristocracy in the face of opposition from a more aggressive male figure, allegedly over the possession of a woman. It is Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, Coverdale and Hollingsworth, Donatello and Kenyon, and of course Clifford and Holgrave, as well as Clifford and Judge Pyncheon. In many of these instances, Hawthorne appears to be of two minds: he has a strong identification with the somewhat feminine male whose privilege is disappearing. In House, however, he tries to write in support of the new man, or at least of a new man formed in union with the old. The Judge, who recalls Hawthorne's Uncle Robert Manning, is a scientist and horticulturist, breeding fruit of a “rare variety” (272) in a world that links sex and science. Phoebe and Holgrave, unlike the old Pyncheons, represent a “correct” alignment of genders and the consecration of a new domesticity. Hepzibah is deprived of all sexuality, and Clifford is depicted as androgynous (Lee Person calls him “Hawthorne's most feminine male character” [95]).⁶ The Malbone portrait reveals in Clifford “feminine traits, moulded inseparably with those of the other sex!” (60) such that the narrator can ask whether he was not “an early lover of Miss Hepzibah.” These render him sterile and thus ensure the doom of the Pyncheons against the forces of the phallic Colonel, whose sexual energy had “worn out three wives,” and his later-day relative, the Judge, whose wife “got her death-blow in the honey-moon” (123). Holgrave is imagined as a middle ground of limited masculinity who can be contained in his masculinity by the power of the domestic, his “Black Art” now tempered by Phoebe's “natural magic” (71). Phoebe's comment about the miniature quickly warns against carrying Clifford's softness too far: “it is as sweet as a man's face can be, or ought to be” (75, my emphasis). It is hard to be certain whether Hawthorne extended his discussion of Clifford's femininity to the concept of his sexual difference, although there is reason to suggest something of that kind. He is the “sport of boys,” “insulted by the filth of the public ways, which they would fling upon him” (247-248), in terms that suggest his violent marginalization and indeed echo the fate of sexual criminals and others exposed in the stocks. There can be no room for the refined in a world where production and reproduction are the central concerns.

Faulkner carries gender and sexual difference much further. Sutpen's two “legitimate” children, Judith and Henry, reverse gender expectations, particularly in the fighting scene. Henry runs away “screaming and vomiting,” while his sister looks down calmly from the loft (31, 33). This sexual difference runs throughout the text, in Henry's love for Bon and in Quentin's relationship to Shreve. The feminization of the mulatto is a part of racial stereotyping, of course; it allies the feminine Other to the racial Other. Bon is French, or “Frenchified,” which is largely the same as feminized, and is seen “reclining in a flowered, almost feminised gown … this man handsome elegant and even catlike” (117). The fear of Judith's marriage to Bon is thus in part the fear of a doubled sexual inversion. Given the stress in the critical debate on the question whether Henry kills Bon because he will be committing incest or because he will be committing miscegenation, it is striking that both arguments assume that Henry wants to save Judith. What if we imagine that he must save Bon for himself, by killing him if necessary? As Mr. Compson puts it, “he loved Bon, who seduced him as surely as he seduced Judith” (118). Or, even more tellingly, “Bon not only loved Judith after his fashion but he loved Henry too and I believe in a deeper sense than merely after his fashion. Perhaps in his fatalism he loved Henry the better of the two, seeing perhaps in the sister merely the shadow, the woman vessel with which to consummate the love whose actual object was the youth” (133). Faulkner's insistence on his racial theme here swerves to acknowledge the bisexuality of incest and to see the possibility of reading a doomed interracial love as homosexuality.

The emphasis on stolen land and bartered bodies joins the two texts of Hawthorne and Faulkner as national narratives and originary myths that locate the gothic as a national repressed, a series of crimes that are not incidental to but rather constitutive of the nation. At the same moment in mid-nineteenth-century America Herman Melville was dealing with similar themes in Pierre. Here too the inherited wealth is based on an Indian deed, and this fictionality of property is directly connected to the fiction of paternity. Faulkner's reworking of Hawthorne's material not only makes Hawthorne's own themes clearer by exposing them, but it complicates the question of guilt and, above all, like Pierre, renders impossible the happy ending of Hawthorne's romance. If for Hawthorne national guilt can be effaced by a wedding and the provision of a sudden fortune, if the gothic can serve as a farewell to such a past and such desires, for Faulkner it is that wedding itself (whatever form it takes, between races, between classes, between genders) that is damned. For Faulkner there can be no way out of this nightmare of murder and hatred, and a rewritten novel of Hawthorne's serves to stress a will-to-unknowing that is itself criminal.

Notes

1. Sacvan Bercovitch argues that Hawthorne was undisturbed by “Southern slavery [and] Indian genocide” (236). I would argue that the text experiences these issues differently from its author.

2. Richard Chase argues that “the non-Emersonian tradition of Hawthorne and Melville prepared the way for Faulkner by introducing the strain of dark and sombre drama” (220). I would agree with this statement, while attempting to see that “tradition” in its more concrete darkness.

3. There is an excellent account of many of these issues in Walter Benn Michaels.

4. For the Jim Crow tradition, see Lott (on the black body, see 116).

5. Although Darwin did not publish On the Origin of Species until 1859, the ideas were already circulating.

6. I am not sure I can agree with Person's assessment that House is “the novel in which [Hawthorne] most thoroughly researched alternative gender identities and roles” (95), since that seems to ignore the multiple sexual possibilities of The Blithedale Romance and to underestimate the power of gender conservatism in House.

Works Cited

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Edelman, Lee. “The Part for the (W)hole: Baldwin, Homophobia, and the Fantasmatics of ‘Race.’” Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 1994.

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