Abstract
In a lecture given in Boston on January 23, 1839 and in Concord on April 24, Emerson lamented that “history gave no intimation of any society in which despondency came so readily to heart as we see it and feel it in ours.” He singled out “grief” and “melancholy” as the defining characteristics of the time and pointed out that these qualities might be even more pervasive among those under thirty years old because “if they fail in their first enterprizes…the rest of life is rock and shallow.”1 In another lecture delivered to the senior class of the Harvard Divinity College only a year before, he expressed concern that “when men die we do not mention them.”2 The two statements taken together evoke a New England middle-class society grieving yet struggling to deny its grief. Where death and failure were concerned, many mid-nineteenth-century New Englanders practiced the policy of avoidance, trying to deny the reality of grief and despondency in their lives.
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Notes
Emerson, “Tragedy,” in Robert E. Spiller and Wallace E. Williams, eds. The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1972), 3: 104.
Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” in Robert W. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson, eds. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1971), 1: 89.
Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 4. Farrell explains that the phrase “the dying of death” was first used in 1899 by an English author to identify a phenomenon in the American conception of death between 1830 and 1920 (4). The “dying of death” does not refer to the “banishment of biological death, but the cultural circumvention of dread of death” (4–5).
For another perspective on this question, see Watson, The Rest Is Silence. Watson believes that the Jacobean period in England produced literature that “often reverts from its surface narrative to repressed anxieties about death as eternal annihilation” (3), and, although this pattern may be more pronounced in this period, it is not unique or new to this era. He argues that cultural critics “have underestimated the continuity of human anxieties about death partly because they underestimate the continuity of selfhood assumed in earlier cultures. The fact that the invention of individuality always seems to occur during the period in which the investigator specializes should give some pause” (326). He would grant that in various historical periods certain historical and cultural events did shape responses to death, but also that death denial is natural and the “dying of death” is a phenomenon apparent in varying degrees in any time period or culture (4).
Jackson, ed. Passing, 61.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ariès in The Hour of Our Death argues that there was a world-wide shift in attitudes toward death at the beginning of the nineteenth century (442). For other studies of changing attitudes toward death in America, see note 11 in my “Introduction.”
See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Collier Books, 1961), for his characterization of the liberal “variety” of religion: “The advance of liberalism, so-called, in Christianity, during the past fifty years, may fairly be called a victory of healthy-mindedness within the church over the morbidness with which the old hell-fire theology was more harmoniously related. We have now whole congregations whose preachers, far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, seem devoted rather to making little of it. They ignore, or even deny, eternal punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than the depravity of man” (87–88).
Farrell in Inventing the American Way of Death explains that as early as the 1820s Unitarianism affected attitudes toward death, although the full force of religious liberalism, which crossed the lines of several Protestant denominations, was not completely apparent until mid-century (28–30; 74–75).
Bigelow, A History of the Cemetery of Mount Auburn, 176.
Jackson, Passing, 61.
By the middle of the century, the number of rural cemeteries in America had grown to sixty, and the expanded role of cemeteries in nineteenth-century cultural life led to the development of several death-related industries, including cemetery horticulturalists and monument artisans and marketers. Peggy McDowell and Richard E. Meyer, The Revival Styles in American Memorial Art (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1994), 14. A core group of the founders of Mount Auburn Cemetery were horticulturalists who proposed that professionally tended grounds and graves should form an integral part of the cemetery. The grounds of the rural cemetery became the prototypes of the recreational urban and suburban park (Linden-Ward, Silent City, 296).
Bakan, Disease, Pain, and Sacrifice, 116–20.
Ibid., 119.
Ibid.
See Pfister, The Production of Personal Life, and Herbert, Dearest Beloved, for a discussion of the complex relationship between male identity and the middle-class family and the way this relationship is expressed in Hawthorne’s life and art.
See Alison Easton, The Making of the Hawthorne Subject (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), for a thorough analysis of the developmental patterns of image and idea that cluster around the concept of the human subject in Hawthorne’s fiction. Her approach to subjectivity does not focus as singly as Pfister’s or Herbert’s on issues of class or gender. She argues that in Hawthorne’s fiction the “locus of reality” is the “individual consciousness,” but this consciousness rarely can “originate its own meaning,” and “subjectivity becomes the far more common site on which many conflicting, mainly socially derived views struggle for primacy” (7).
Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 11.
Thoreau, Walden, 3.
Ibid., 36.
Hawthorne’s version of the myth of the dragon’s teeth is based on Charles Anthon’s in A Classical Dictionary (New York: Harper, 1857), 278. According to McPherson, Anthon’s dictionary is Hawthorne’s primary source for information about myth (14). “The Dragon’s Teeth,” Hawthorne’s version of the Cadmus story written for children, is included in Tanglewood Tales For Girls and Boys Being A Second Wonder Book (1853).
Irigaray, “Each Sex Must Have Its Own Rights,” in Sexes and Genealogies, 1–2.
Ibid., 2.
Ibid.
Emerson, “Tragedy,” in The Early Lectures 3:104.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 9. See Jay Ruby, Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), for an interesting review of the practices of postmortem daguerreotypists in the antebellum period. The most common practice was to capture the image of the dead at peace, in “‘the last sleep’ pose” (72). Because the corpse of Judge Pyncheon is described as “still seated” after the daguerreotype is taken, Holgrave took a rarer, although not unheard of, seated portrait of dead Pyncheon, a pose entitled “alive, yet dead” (72).
William Shakespeare, Major Plays and the Sonnets, ed. G.B. Harrison (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948), 144, 142.
Irigaray, “Each Sex Must Have Its Own Rights,’ in Sexes and Genealogies, 4, 2 (italics in the original).
Irigaray believes that in the “patriarchal regime” a woman must devote herself to her husband and children, while “there seems little indication that man has sublimated the natural immediacy of his relationship to the mother. Rather, man has transferred that relationship to his wife as mother substitute” (ibid., 2).
Irigaray, “Belief Itself,” in Sexes and Genealogies, 39.
Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition 18: 14–15.
Irigaray, “Belief Itself,” in Sexes and Genealogies, 31–32.
See Frederick Crews, Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), for an influential Freudian reading of Hawthorne’s fiction that he later called into question in Skeptical Engagements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Pfister in The Production of Personal Life offers an insightful explanation of the relevance of Freudian theory to Hawthorne’s fiction (50–52). Some of Irigaray’s ideas about the nature of the family and the construction of the male subject are grounded in Freud’s theory, although they critique this theory. Combining Freud’s and Irigaray’s theories makes more
apparent the complex and nuanced way in which Hawthorne imagined the male-female relationship.
Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition 18: 15.
Irigaray, “Belief Itself,” in Sexes and Genealogies, 27.
In Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), Tamsin Lorraine distinguishes four versions of the Irigarayan female subject: “In addition to depicting the feminine other as seen by the masculine subject, Irigaray depicts the feminine other co-opted by masculine subjectivity (that is, the feminine other who buys into the way the masculine subject views her), the feminine other of the masculine subject as she is apart from the masculine subject’s perspective, and the feminine other in the process of articulating herself as a subject and thus providing an alternative paradigm for subjectivity that may not yet be actualized” (16). In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud confines his portrayal of the feminine other to the first category. In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne ranges among these various ideas about the feminine other in his depiction of both Hepzibah and Phoebe. In his portrayal of Hepzibah, he provides glimpses of “an alternative paradigm for subjectivity,” but, finally, he presents both Hepzibah and Phoebe as “co-opted by masculine subjectivity.”
Irigaray, “Belief Itself,” in Sexes and Genealogies, 35 (italics in the original). 37. Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition 18: 16, 38, 41 (italics in the original).
Irigaray, “Belief Itself,” in Sexes and Genealogies, 31.
See Stanley French, “The Cemetery as Cultural Institution: The Establishment of Mount Auburn and the ‘Rural Cemetery’ Movement,” in Death in America, ed. Stannard, 83–84; Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 106–7, 113; Sloane, The Last Great Necessity, 70–71, and Linden-Ward, Silent City, 217, 226–27, for discussions of the significance of the family plot in nineteenth-century New England rural cemeteries. During this period family plots in cemeteries became more popular, promoting the idea that the family could be together forever. Fences around family grave-sites also became more common, as if the plot of land they enclosed was the exclusive property of the family-dead. The upkeep of these plots was entrusted to professionals to ensure “perpetual control” (Linden-Ward, Silent City, 212). Linden-Ward concludes, “Mount Auburn provided for a private cult of ancestors enshrined in carefully defined family burial lots even more than for a cult of heroes meriting public fame” (226).
Irigaray, “Belief Itself,” in Sexes and Genealogies, 41.
Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze, 61.
Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition 18: 15 (italics in the original).
Seery, Political Theory for Mortals, 157.
Ibid., 156–62.
Laderman in The Sacred Remains identifies “four trends” in mid-nineteenth-century New England Protestant attitudes toward death: “valorization of the affections of the survivors, memorialization of the dead, augmentation of the spiritual possibilities in the next world, and domestication of the corpse” (55). This scene with dead Judge Pyncheon runs counter to the spirit of these “attitudes” because it avoids any inference of affection for dead Judge Pyncheon by his family, includes as his only memorial the photograph taken by Holgrave, and refuses to offer hope of heaven. Although the scene occurs in the house, the position of the corpse, seated rigidly in the parlor, and the disturbing reference to the emblem of decay, the fly, thwart “domestication.”
Shakespeare, Major Plays and the Sonnets, 860.
Seery, Political Theory for Mortals, 182. Seery sets forth a political theory of death that involves writing a social contract from the perspective of the dead. This kind of social contract is not “written from the state of nature, it is written from the land of Hades; rather than an origin myth, it might be called a terminus myth” (159). The perspective of the “Final Position” involves “a collapse of all boundaries between public and private” (161).
See Russ Castronovo, Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth Century United States (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), for another perspective on the role of the dead in the American polis. Castronovo believes that the antebellum political system was structured to encourage “dead” citizenship (not only were certain citizens “dead” to the polis, but the system encouraged all, even the dominant white males, to assume the stance of death). While Seery believes it is possible that the dead can be considered an active political force, Castronovo views nineteenth-century United States citizens as immune to the political energy of the dead. He concludes, “The dead speak: the question is whether the living will hear a story about the ways in which belonging, incorporation, and other processes of democratic community produce social corpses” (149).
Seery, Political Theory for Mortals, 162.
Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1983), 457.
Seery discusses this scene in Political Theory for Mortals, 156–57.
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© 2008 Roberta Weldon
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Weldon, R. (2008). “Familial Immortality” and the “Dying of Death” in The House of the Seven Gables. In: Hawthorne, Gender, and Death. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612082_4
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