Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Anxieties of the Archive

Abstract

Abstract: Twenty-five years ago, Robert K. Martin published an important essay that explored the gendered anxiety of authorship that left its traces throughout Nathaniel Hawthorne’s career. Given that novel-writing was understood in mid-nineteenth-century America as an essentially feminine occupation, did Hawthorne perceive himself as emasculated? Savoy supplements Martin’s argument by taking up the “fiction” of authorship, specifically the personage of “Nathaniel Hawthorne” that is constructed in “The Custom-House.” Previously, Savoy focused on Hawthorne’s gothic poetics as the figurative matrix within which the “author” accepts the exhortation of Surveyor Pue to fulfill his “filial duty” by delivering to the public the historical romance of Hester Prynne. This new article explores the “psychic economy” of what Jacques Derrida conceptualizes as the event of the archive—that is, the performative ways in which subjects are constituted precisely as subjects, in conformity with the regulatory ideals of nation, religious tradition, and gender. If there is no subject without a subtending and largely mythical archive of cultural practice, then “The Custom-House” is a spectacular mise-en-scène—rhetorically rich and charged with affect—of the ritualistic protocols of assujettissement.