Who's the winner: Hawthorne or the transcendentalists?

Hawthorne is the 19th-century American writer that I like the most. I've always known this. When I read The Blithedale Romance twelve years ago, I absolutely adored it. This book is his send-up of a transcendentalist community in New York, Brooks Farm, where a bunch of intellectuals get together in order to farm and get close to the land in order to...do...something. Be gooder, somehow. They feel that hard labor will somehow improve them and the world. It's just typical commune stuff.

We meant to lessen the laboring man's great burden of toil, by performing our due share of it at the cost of our own thews and sinews. We sought our profit by mutual aid, instead of wresting it by the strong hand from an enemy, or filching it craftily from those less shrewd than ourselves (if, indeed, there were any such in New England), or winning it by selfish competition with a neighbor; in one or another of which fashions every son of woman both perpetrates and suffers his share of the common evil, whether he chooses it or no. And, as the basis of our institution, we purposed to offer up the earnest toil of our bodies, as a prayer no less than an effort for the advancement of our race.

And, as usually happens, a lot of dark sexual drama gets in the way and ruins everything. There's a vamp, Zenobia, who is a powerful writer and orator (though the narrator has a rather low opinion of her intellect). She's in love with Hollingsworth: an idealist who's monomaniacal about prison reform. There's the implication that he's using her, leading her on in order to get ahold of her fortune and use it for his causes. Then there's another girl, an ingenue, Priscilla, who also worships Hollingsworth. The whole emotional life of this place revolves around Hollingsworth, because of his forceful personality, but it's unclear if there's really anything to him.

The novel is light and fun, but riven through with dark undercurrents, and it ends in tragedy, of course. On a line-level, it's full of pithy observations about these would-be reformers. For instance:

On the whole, it was a society such as has seldom met together; nor, perhaps, could it reasonably be expected to hold together long. Persons of marked individuality—crooked sticks, as some of us might be called—are not exactly the easiest to bind up into a fagot...We had individually found one thing or another to quarrel with in our past life, and were pretty well agreed as to the inexpediency of lumbering along with the old system any further. As to what should be substituted, there was much less unanimity. We did not greatly care—at least, I never did—for the written constitution under which our millennium had commenced.

What I enjoy most about Hawthorne, as distinct from other 19th-century American authors, is his sense of America's age. He is from Salem. This is an old city. It was founded in 1626. So it was almost 200 years old when Hawthorne was born. Much of Hawthorne's fiction is concerned with times that are outside living memory. For instance, "The Gentle Boy" is about the early Massachusett's colony's persecution of Quakers. "Roger Malvern's Burial" is about an early Indian war. House of the Seven Gables is about the legacy of a family from colonial times whose blood has finally grown cold and diffuse. As he puts it:

Under those seven gables, at which we now look up—and which old Colonel Pyncheon meant to be the home of his descendants, in prosperity and happiness, down to an epoch far beyond the present—under that roof, through a portion of three centuries, there has been perpetual remorse of conscience, a constantly defeated hope, strife amongst kindred, various misery, a strange form of death, dark suspicion, unspeakable disgrace—all, or most of which calamity, I have the means of tracing to the old Puritan’s inordinate desire to plant and endow a family. To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that, once in every half-century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors. Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean pipes. In the family-existence of these Pyncheons, for instance—forgive me, Phoebe; but I cannot think of you as one of them—in their brief, New England pedigree, there has been time enough to infect them all with one kind of lunacy or another!

It's such a different perspective from other American authors. And it's even carried through into his writing on Europe. In The Marble Faun, which takes place in Rome, there's one Italian character, a Count, Donatello, but he's portrayed as innocent and child-like. His blood is old--much is made of his resemblance a Roman statue of a faun--but he's somehow more youthful, more easy-going than any of the visitors to Rome.

For Hawthorne there is just some darkness that's always lingering in America. And it's there in both the Puritans and in these would-be reformers—a fanaticism and greed that ultimately dooms many of his characters.

It's simultaneously quite pessimistic and somewhat good-humored. The only answer is to just relax, to chill. The character in The Blithedale Romance who escapes all the trouble is Silas Foster, the bemused farmer who's been hired to teach them about agriculture. In House of the Seven Gables, we see the ultimate victory of Hepzibah Pyncheon, the poor cousin who's finally forced, in her poverty, to open up a tiny shop that seems sweets to neighborhood kids. The people who exist on the margins, just doing their tidy good business, without grand, sweeping ambitions—they are the ones who succeed in the end (or at least come out unscathed).

With Hawthorne, I really love the humor. It's a humor that's not necessarily apparent in The Scarlet Letter or in his most famous tales ("Young Goodman Brown" or "The Birthmark" or "Rappacinni's Daughter") but many of his minor works are quite funny. For instance, there's a story called "Wakefield", about a man who leaves his house one day, goes to a neighboring street, rents a room, and doesn't come home for twenty years.

The man, under pretence of going a journey, took lodgings in the next street to his own house, and there, unheard of by his wife or friends, and without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment, dwelt upwards of twenty years. During that period, he beheld his home every day, and frequently the forlorn Mrs. Wakefield. And after so great a gap in his matrimonial felicity—when his death was reckoned certain, his estate settled, his name dismissed from memory, and his wife, long, long ago, resigned to her autumnal widowhood—he entered the door one evening, quietly, as from a day’s absence, and became a loving spouse till death.

There's another called "The Celestial Railroad" that revisits Pilgrim's Progress after a railroad has been built that purports to take the pilgrims straight to the Celestial City.:

At the end of the Valley, as John Bunyan mentions, is a cavern, where, in his days, dwealt two cruel giants, Pope and Pagan, who had strewn the ground about their residence with the bones of slaughtered pilgrims. These vile old troglodytes are no longer there; but in their deserted cave another terrible giant has thrust himself, and makes it his business to seize upon honest travellers, and fat them for his table with plentiful meals of smoke, mist, moonshine, raw potatoes, and saw- dust. He is a giant by birth, and is called Giant Transcendentalist; but as to his form, his features, his substance, and his nature generally, it is the chief peculiarity of this huge miscreant, that neither he for himself, nor anybody for him, has ever been able to describe them. As we rushed by the cavern's mouth, we caught a hasty glimpse of him, looking somewhat like an ill- proportioned figure, but considerably more like a heap of fog and duskiness. He shouted after us, but in so strange a phraseology, that we knew not what he meant, nor whether to be encouraged or affrighted.

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After reading this story I thought to myself that I ought perhaps to look into transcendentalism, so I listened to a series of lectures on the subject.

Thus, armored, I re-read Walden and some of Emerson's Essays.

These are two books that I did not enjoy when I first read them twelve years ago. At that time, I had the same reaction to both authorss. They were full of many wonderful phrase and observations, but they didn't necessarily have a lot of substance.

When I mentioned on Notes that Emerson's philosophy doesn't particularly cohere, several people got mad at me, but I am not alone in this observation. Hawthorne felt the same way. Many people, throughout history, have made fun of Transcendentalism for lacking a strong, determinate content.

Transcendentalism is a form of mysticism. It's the idea that people can make direct contact with the truth, without necessarily needing the intervention of the truth's of the past. Emerson has a whole essay on this subject, called "Self-Reliance", about how a person can make themselves anew, discover their own truth. In Walden, Thoreau also said: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

This is great. I am not like Hobbes. I am not suspicious of conscience. I believe in the idea of personal conscience, personal truth.

But there's an obvious problem. If you're someone who has a personal truth that you can explain to other people convincingly, then you're a prophet. But if you're explaining to people that they should find their own personal truth, then you're a mystic.

These two roles contradict each other somewhat. Gandhi was a prophet. He had a revelation about how people ought to live: he believed in simplicity and self-reliance, people ought to live in small communities, making their own clothes, growing their own food. He thought his truth was true for all Indians.

Thoreau believes in something different. He believes in the abstract idea of freedom, of freeing yourself. Walden is all about freeing yourself from the need to work. He repeats the point over and over—the worst thing in life is to be dependent on other people. For instance, he has a parable about using the railroad:

One says to me, “I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg to-day and see the country.” But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day’s wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the mean while have earned your fare, and arrive there some time to-morrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should have to cut your acquaintance altogether.

Everything you like to do is another way of enslaving you. Every pleasure has a cost, and the cost in terms of time and worry isn't worth the pleasure. But Thoreau does not put forth any vision of a society organized on these principles. There is no room in his worldview for kids, for marriage—who will create the books he reads? Who will make the tools he uses? Who will take care of the sick? Who will create the education that he, admits, is necessary for people to live this way?

At some point Thoreau tries to explain to a poor Irish family that they can live much more simply if they want to, but he realizes that they simply don't have the education they need to enact his plan. He writes:

I told him, that as he worked so hard at bogging, he required thick boots and stout clothing, which yet were soon soiled and worn out, but I wore light shoes and thin clothing, which cost not half so much, though he might think that I was dressed like a gentleman, (which, however, was not the case,) and in an hour or two, without labor, but as a recreation, I could, if I wished, catch as many fish as I should want for two days, or earn enough money to support me a week. If he and his family would live simply, they might all go a-huckleberrying in the summer for their amusement. John heaved a sigh at this, and his wife stared with arms a-kimbo, and both appeared to be wondering if they had capital enough to begin such a course with, or arithmetic enough to carry it through. It was sailing by dead reckoning to them, and they saw not clearly how to make their port so; therefore I suppose they still take life bravely, after their fashion, face to face, giving it tooth and nail, not having skill to split its massive columns with any fine entering wedge, and rout it in detail;—thinking to deal with it roughly, as one should handle a thistle. But they fight at an overwhelming disadvantage, living, John Field, alas! without arithmetic, and failing so.

Thoreau's vision is an extremely personal vision. Not necessarily good for all people. And, at a certain level, that collapses to banality. If the lesson is, "We should live as best we're able" well...that's what we already do! You don't necessarily need a book to explain that.

I enjoyed both Emerson and Thoreau much more this time around than I did the first, but the effect of reading Emerson and Thoreau is a lot like being harangued. Both of these men are very insistent that they understand something, but what do they understand? Thoreau doesn't literally believe everyone should live in a cabin they build for $28 dollars on land they don't own. He doesn't stay in Walden himself. He stays there for two years. What he believes is that men should be free of other people, and that men should do whatever they feel compelled to do.

He feels that most of what men do is silly and useless, and that they would be better off freeing themselves from their cares.

I agree!

But...I also think you need other people. That's the tension in life, right? Would Thoreau write this book if nobody else could read it? Whatever you do, you need other people. And that means being responsive to their desires.

Moreover, other people will impinge on you. In reading Thoreau, I kept being reminded of the beginning of Moby-Dick, where Ishmael remarks:

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.

Ishmael also goes to sea out of a desire to take his fate in his own hands and live purposefully. But because of that desire, he ends up trapped on a vessel run by a mad-man, who is in pursuit of death. And, ultimately, that's everyone's fate. This control that Thoreau strives for, in Walden, is an illusion.

It's a beautiful illusion, and I am very impressed that Thoreau was able to set it forth at such force and with such eloquence.

But, for me, Hawthorne’s critiques are ultimately more convincing. I think there’s more honor and joy in living well, raising a family, doing your work than there is in some radical break with society. That doesn’t mean Walden isn’t a good book, just that there’s a kind of darkness at the center of its vision—a darkness that Hawthorne brings out ably and convincingly in his work.¹

A Note on the Texts

The Great Courses series on the transcendentalists was very good. Highly recommend.

Otherwise, I listened to all these books in audio, following along with free online versions where necessary. Links to the audio editions I used are below. The only paper version that I found truly indispensible was the Norton Critical Edition of Hawthorne’s Tales: he wrote a lot of short stories, and this is the best compendium I was able to find. It seems to give the best balance of completeness, quality, and readability.

Preferred audio versions:

• The Blithedale Romance

• The Marble Faun

• House of the Seven Gables

• Walden

• Emerson’s essays

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Index of Posts About 19th-century American Writers

I feel myself losing steam when it comes to reading American writers, just as I lost a bit of steam with The Mahabharata (though I only have a few hundred pages before I'm done with the tenth volume of the latter). With Thoreau and Emerson I might be done with this phase of my reading journey, though it's hard to say for sure. I feel some desire to free myself, read many different things, and see what strikes me.

However, I thought I'd create an index so people could see my previous writings on American writers:

• Mark Twain

  • Roughing It, Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mississippi

• James Fenimore Cooper

  • Last of the Mohicans, The Pioneers, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer

• Herman Melville

  • Typee and Omoo

  • Whitejacket

  • Moby-Dick

  • Piazza Tales

• Richard Henry Dana

  • Two Years Before The Mast

• Washington Irving

  • The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon

• Maria Cummins

  • The Lamplighter

• Harriet Beecher Stowe

  • Uncle Tom’s Cabin

• Edgar Allan Poe

  • Tales

I am pleased with this body of work, and in particular my effort to contextualize the popular sentimental tradition (as embodied by Irving, Stowe, and Cummins) alongside better-known writers like Melville, Twain, and Poe. I also read two other sentimental novels, by Susan Warner and Fanny Fern, but never wrote about them. And to be truly complete I probably should’ve re-read Little Women, but c’est la vie.

In this corpus, I am most pleased with my essay about James Fenimore Cooper: his work was a genuine surprise, and he’s probably one of the writers that I most-enjoyed reading during this go-around.

Next week I have a post scheduled about a contemporary book, and I think over the next few weeks I’m going to attempt to: a) finish up my Mahabharata project; and b) look into different directions for my reading.

1. Much has been made of the idea that Thoreau was a hypocrite: Walden was only a few miles from Concord; he had company over; he went to dinner in town; his mother did his laundry. But I really don’t think any of these things are incompatible with the vision set forth in Walden. The point wasn’t to be completely divorced from society, it was to be free of society—to take society in exactly the amount that you desired, when you desired. To me, the fact that he didn’t abjure all social ties (he mentions often having company at his cabin) only makes the book better.