Along the Wayside

Abstract

The editors of Gothic Nature observe that the Gothic now serves as a primary means to articulate the horrors of climate change and our current environmental crisis. EcoGothic, however, has been a fundamental component of American literature since William Bradford recoiled from the continent's “hideous & desolate wilderness.” A recent spate of articles not only acknowledges this strange continuity but has begun to situate Nathaniel Hawthorne as one of the tradition's key figures. This panel further investigates Hawthorne's entanglement with the ecoGothic.Taking Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The House of the Seven Gables (1851) as an allegory of colonial agriculture's crushing destructiveness, I will discuss the novel also as a complex kind of gothic/elegy, in which Hawthorne celebrates the end of white, human supremacy even as he mourns the extinction to which he bears witness. The scenes involving farmed animals and meat production point us in these directions: the massive cattle-roast, for instance, that underscores the empire's blazing consecration in the eighteenth century; the flock of tired-looking chickens that indicates its coming-undone in the antebellum period. Published the decade before the US Civil War, the novel represents slave labor in allusions to the nonhuman animals devoured by white settlers—that is, as livestock recorded in ledgers, enslaved humans and farmed animals together, both forms of plantation capital. The entire system is corrupt, built on blood—Hawthorne's narrator insists, page after page—and self-annihilating, represented moreover as a terrifying and yet breathlessly anticipated finale of white human civilization, so-called.On the map of the Pyncheon family's unproven territorial claim in Maine that drives generations of greedy and murderous acts in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Nathaniel Hawthorne describes “grotesquely illuminated … pictures of Indians and wild beasts,” emphasizing a predisposition to see the world through deluded, rapacious social constructs that prevents the Pyncheons from seeing the real “natural history of the region … which was put down most fantastically awry” (33). This reveals a doubling of the environment as both human representation and natural reality in Hawthorne that creates a cultural–natural framework in which both human conceptualizations of the environment and the endemic, real environment coexist simultaneously. While many critics have studied Hawthorne's characters as gothic doubles, I will expand upon Andrew Smith and William Hughes's statement that the ecoGothic “challenges the way in which the world has been understood” by presenting “nature … as a space of crisis,” to demonstrate how, like with his human characters, Hawthorne creates spectral doubles of the environment that destabilize the ontological surety of human reductions of the environment to flat symbolism (4, 3). Building upon Sean Kelly's interrogation of “material ghosts” manifested in Hawthorne's daguerreotype imagery, I will argue that through diegetic doubles—paintings, maps, and deeds—Hawthorne's humans attempt to bury the nonhuman environment beneath convenient human representations. Revealing the fallacies in purely symbolic environment representations, Hawthorne's environments haunt The House of the Seven Gables to suggest that American lands rest uneasily between symbol and reality, always materially gothic.It's easy to connect the environmental degradation of industrialization with urban space and cities. Likewise, when Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils write that “the stubborn materiality of land, trees, swamps, and vegetation has meant that American gothic literature has always been ecogothic,” the gothic can also seem antithetical to cities. But while an anti-urban mindset seeps into both ecocriticism and gothic studies, this need not be the case. I argue that the city is not exclusively destructive and anthropocentric and that ecogothic readings of the city can help ecocritics go beyond demonizing it. Ecocriticism aims to break down the imagined binary between the human and the nonhuman, but continuing to see “nature” as distinct from the city reinforces that imagined binary. After all, ecocritics such as Timothy Morton and William Cronon have established that “nature” is socially constructed. I argue that the city is not inherently antithetical to “nature” or to environmental justice and that taking an ecogothic approach to cities can illustrate important parallels between anti-urbanness and ecophobia. Hawthorne is rarely considered an advocate of urban life, but I argue that portrayals of the city in “Wakefield” and The Blithedale Romance go beyond critiques of urbanization. My paper uncovers the urban ecogothic leanings in Hawthorne that combine the ecophobic fear of the natural world with the anti-urban fear of cities. In “Wakefield” and The Blithedale Romance (which is, after all, a satire of an explicitly anti-urban social experiment), Hawthorne's urban writing, I argue, decenters the human and resists the imagined divide between “nature” and the city.If you have any news relating to the study of Hawthorne and his work, or about upcoming Hawthorne events, please let us know for future “Along the Wayside” columns. Contact James Hewitson at jhewitso@utk.edu.