Hawthorne’s Picturesque at Home and Abroad

Abstract

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE SPENT MANY YEARS SEARCHING FOR PICTURESQUE scenes in New England, England, Scotland, France, and Italy. His travel writings indicate that he followed conventional picturesque tourist routes and sought out popular destinations featuring ruins, cottages, tree-framed vistas, rugged terrain, and mixtures of heights, hues, and lighting. As an early participant in the nascent tourist industry in the northeastern United States in the 1830s, he acquired the techniques of picturesque viewing as well as the standardized idiom for translating scenes into notebook entries, sketches, and essays. (1) When he used these conventions in his domestic and foreign travels, he made tourism itself an explicit theme of his travel writing. His own sightseeing was modeled after English picturesque tourism, which had been based on late eighteenth-century aesthetic standards governing landscape painting and estate gardening. Hawthorne saw the English picturesque as an aristocratic mode of composition that was immensely appealing but in many ways at odds with an American ethos of social mobility: in his view, it privileged landscapes and standards of beauty produced by a hereditary landowning class and promoted the notion of a permanently poor class. His complicated relation to this aesthetic reflects his own ambivalence about English social stratification, and picturesque moments in his writing are often occasions to grapple with the powers and limitations of an American rhetoric of social mobility and economic promise. As both a domestic and foreign tourist, Hawthorne had to contend with the ideological underpinnings of this aesthetic even as he found it compelling. He often responded to this challenge by detaching the pictorial conventions of the picturesque from his representations of white, native-born American men. In his writings based on travels in the northeastern United States, his picturesque figures tend to be European immigrants presumably fixed in their lowly positions. In his writings based on European travels, he also posits himself as a detached outsider, free to enjoy an aesthetic derived from a class system not his own. By aligning certain features of the picturesque with Old World social hierarchy, Hawthorne effectively reinforces, by way of contrast, a positive vision of American social fluidity. Hawthorne offers one example of the various ways American writers and painters of his time embraced and revised an older English picturesque to articulate values they believed were distinctly American. But consistent with his understanding of the picturesque as a mode of composition that reveals its own operations, Hawthorne's picturesque ratifies American ideals as it questions the process of their making. This questioning is particularly dramatic in Chiefly About War Matters (1862), a late essay about a trip to Washington, D.C. and several Virginian battlefields during the Civil War. In this essay, the various modes of detachment that had enabled touristic pleasure in the face of derelict figures and scenes are no longer possible when he travels in the war-tom terrain of his own country. Not surprisingly, the picturesque conventions Hawthorne had previously linked to figures of Europeans and European immigrants (especially the Irish) emerge here in his description of fugitive slaves, reinforcing his alignment of this aesthetic with social stratification. But the picturesque also strikes him as surprisingly suited to the Confederate soldiers he encounters at a prison in Harper's Ferry. Unlike the fugitive slaves and European immigrants, these soldiers are both U.S.-born and white, and yet they seem to Hawthorne incapable of improvement. When he compares these soldiers to European peasants content with their lowly positions, this picturesqueness belies the assumption that social mobility is available to white native-born men. This use of picturesque conventions makes clear that Hawthorne's prior notions of social mobility have been the result of his own limited vantage point. …