Divine Omnipotence and Suffering Humanity: Hawthorne's Answer to Ahab

Abstract

Keynote address delivered at the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society Biennial Conference, June 13, 2014, North Adams, MA From the title my talk, some you might assume that I'll be comparing Hawthorne and Melville, but I should tell you that I'm assuming most you are familiar Melville's quarrel God, as Lawrence Thompson termed it, so evident in Ahab's attempt to take revenge upon Moby Dick. Most what I have to say, therefore, will focus on Hawthorne. In Devils and Rebels: Making Hawthorne's Damned Politics, I assert that Christian pacifism, not unlike that the Quakers, serves as the foundation [Hawthorne's] politics (xvi), and my talk today expands upon the religious, as opposed to political, aspect that assertion. I'm well aware that countless critics have attempted to get a fix upon Hawthorne's religious sensibilities, including a number you in the audience, but I'm going to give it a try here myself, using Melville as a guide and Ahab as a foil. Some 175 years ago, not far from here in North Adams, Hawthorne stopped on his travels and mingled villagers from the area. In his notebook, he recorded his encounter a wretched man, who, like Ahab, had lost parts his body--one his feet maimed by an axe; also, an arm amputated two or three inches below the elbow. Hawthorne describes him visually as disagreeable figure, waning from middle-age, clad in homespun pantaloons and a dirty shirt, bare feet and a grim and grisly beard of a week's growth. (1) This actual amputee, unlike the fictional Ahab, seeks no dramatic revenge against that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms life and thought (156), to quote Ishmael. Hawthorne's dismembered old man, instead, resembles a philosophical Captain Boomer. Once a lawyer, but ruined by alcohol, he has become a smelly soap-maker, willing to sit on a stoop and genially talk about the amputation his arm. Hawthorne records, The man spoke the pain cutting the muscles, and the particular agony at one moment, while the bone was being sawed asunder; and there was a strange expression remembered agony, as he shrugged his half limb, and described the matter. When Hawthorne asks him whether he still seemed to feel the hand that had been amputated, the old man answered that he did, always (8:91). man has studied and practiced phrenology, and he talks to Hawthorne about it with a great deal sense and acuteness. He then catches Hawthorne off-guard by declaring, My study is man. I do not know your name, but there is something the hawk-eye about you too (8:92). moment is fascinating as the observer becomes the observed, and it's as if Hawthorne finds the jolt transformative, for his pity becomes informed respect. He continues, poor devil kept talking to me long after everybody else had left the stoop, giving vent to much practical philosophy and just observation on the ways men ... at last, ... he rose from the stoop, and went his way, a forlorn and miserable thing in the light the cheerful summer Sabbath morning. Yet he seems to keep his spirits up, and still preserves himself a man among men, asking nothing from them. (8:93) Such an early notebook entry, I would argue, and others he made while at North Adams in 1838, presage both the realism and compassion that is foundational to Hawthorne's best fiction. His attention to the old man and his precise description the encounter contain implicit respect. Hawthorne, course, had many flaws. He disapproved slavery, yet did not speak out against it. He admired strong women, yet insisted on separate spheres. In private correspondence, he at times made racist and sexist remarks, which have become notorious, even though they went unremarked at the time. What he acknowledged and worried about most was his perceived inability to share the political and religious passions animating his friends and neighbors. …