(Download) "Hawthorne's Glimpses of English Poverty (Nathaniel Hawthorne)" by Nathaniel Hawthorne Review ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Hawthorne's Glimpses of English Poverty (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
- Author : Nathaniel Hawthorne Review
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 206 KB
Description
In his dedicatory preface to Our Old Home, his last completed book, Hawthorne writes that "some of my friends have told me that they evince an asperity of sentiment towards the English people which I ought not to feel, and which it is highly inexpedient to express. The charge surprises me" (5:4). His surprise at this response seems genuine--and why not? Barring a couple of satiric thrusts at English womanhood, Our Old Home is surely one of the milder pleasures in the canon, consisting as it does of bemused observations conveyed in an avuncular tone designed to give offense neither to his American readers nor to his British hosts. Amusing anecdotes, earnest pilgrimages, beneficent comparisons of national character--these make up the substance of the volume. Nearly the only exception to the geniality of proceedings and cumulative power, I quote the passage in full: is the penultimate chapter, "Outside Glimpses of English Poverty," which rises (or falls) to a remarkable and disturbing climax in Hawthorne's account of the diseased baby he saw in an almshouse. Because of its importance There are many reasons for finding this passage remarkable. First, there is the direct, personal sense of moral pollution that the mere sight of the baby creates in Hawthorne; he'll never be the same after this, and he is a worse man, not a better, for having seen it. Second, the baby is the signifier for "something grievously amiss in the entire conditions of humanity," not just our fallen condition (which is susceptible, as we know from The Marble Faun, for one, to recuperation as the "felix culpa," the fortunate fall), but some horrid perversion of the very possibility of moral being. Third, the baby is also the signifier for human sexuality in its basest form, and the very fact that it can come to so hideous a moment is a kind of indictment and pollution of sexuality itself. (The baby's genealogy, we recognize, echoes that of Death in Book II of Paradise Lost). Fourth, the baby creates a narrative crisis for Hawthorne: "I can by no means express how horrible this infant was, neither ought I to attempt it," he writes, and yet he has attempted it (and with appalling success), and he goes on. Here we may be reminded of those narrative gaps in Melville's representations of poverty, as in "Poor Man's Pudding," lacunae which arise when, "without the easy excuse of individual immorality or cultural inheritance, normative discourse is rendered speechless" (Jones 775). Finally, and most horribly of all, the baby appears to have a particular significance for and power over Hawthorne himself: "when it positively met and responded to my own awe-stricken gaze," he is like Coleridge's wedding guest, held weirdly helpless by the Ancient Mariner. The sense of crisis provoked by it is even clearer in the language Hawthorne originally used in describing his response: "Did God make this child? Has it a soul capable of immortality?--of immortal bliss? I am afraid not. At all events, it is quite beyond my comprehension and understanding" (21:414). This baby has a message for Hawthorne in particular, and the author of The Scarlet Letter cannot escape it.
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