The French Face of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Monsieur de l'Aubépine and His Second Empire Critics

Abstract

This book collects—and translates into English for the first time—six substantial review essays about Nathaniel Hawthorne that were published in France during his lifetime. Hawthorne's fanciful French nom de plume, Monsieur de l'Aubépine, the imaginary author of “Rappaccini's Daughter” and other works, steps unexpectedly into reality in the composite French impression of Hawthorne that results.The French Face of Nathaniel Hawthorne contributes to the current critical interest in “the complexities of transatlantic cultural exchange in the nineteenth century” by documenting Hawthorne's “surprisingly intelligent critical reception in France” (3, xii). Few scholars of nineteenth-century American literature will be familiar with these essays, though they were published in reputable French journals—three of them in the Revue des Deux Mondes. Even Hawthorne specialists who may have known of their existence will be grateful to the editors, Michael Anesko and N. Christine Brookes, for making this “unknown—or forgotten” (xi) body of criticism readily accessible to English-language readers.The six essays appeared between 1852 and 1864 (the year of Hawthorne's death): one by Paul Émile-Daurand Forgues (1852), two by Louis Étienne (1857, 1860), and three by Émile Montégut (1852, 1860, 1864). Because none of these writers is well-known today, Anesko and Brookes provide useful background information on their lives and careers in an excellent historical introduction. The three critics have some things in common. For one, they are surprisingly well informed about Hawthorne, characterizing his work with examples drawn from throughout his career. All three emphasize Hawthorne's Puritan heritage as well as his affinity for Emerson and transcendentalism. They all pointedly stress Hawthorne's originality, implicitly refuting the European prejudice against colonial (and postcolonial) products as necessarily imitative. Each translates into French long passages of Hawthorne—sometimes several pages in length—to convey the unique flavor of his style and point of view. (Anesko and Brookes, in their introduction, assess in detail the strengths and weaknesses of each critic as a translator of Hawthorne.)These French critics also represent, in their disagreements, an interesting range of judgments on Hawthorne's achievement. Montégut and Étienne (like Herman Melville) make much of Hawthorne's blackness, his obsession with sin and guilt, his pessimism, his gift for allegory in the Puritan line. Forgues, however, charmed by Hawthorne's genial prefaces, finds him essentially a gentle humorist. All three prefer Hawthorne's short stories. Of the novels, Forgues and Etienne judge The House of the Seven Gables the best, while Montégut (reversing an earlier negative review) ultimately awards the palm to The Marble Faun. For Montégut, The Marble Faun is Hawthorne's “last great work” (285), embodying a bittersweet message of Christian redemption. Étienne, in contrast, finds it a purely transcendentalist novel exemplifying Emersonian pantheism. These disparate readings raise issues that continue to engage Hawthorne's critics today.The historical introduction carefully contextualizes these essays, taking into account the particular political affiliations and prejudices of each critic as well as the contemporary socioeconomic developments in France that affected the literary marketplace. Writing from the perspective of the European class system, these critics viewed with fascination the American experiment in democracy, and they found in Hawthorne's fiction evidence to support their own progressive (Montégut) or conservative (Étienne) ideas about social reform.Perhaps the most interesting revelation in this book is that Émile Montégut's insights have had a “direct impact” in shaping our modern understanding of Hawthorne. This is true, the editors argue convincingly, because Henry James drew extensively (and without full acknowledgment) on Montégut's 1864 essay in writing his own, influential Hawthorne (1879). (Anesko published this discovery in the Henry James Review: “Is James's Hawthorne Really James's Hawthorne?” 29, no. 1 [2008]: 36–53.) The editors demonstrate that James was “if not an outright plagiarist, then at least a transparently deceptive appropriator of another distinguished critic's work” (71). James's “selective (and sometimes misleading) quotations, his misrepresentations of [Montégut's] conclusions, his silent appropriation of critical ideas” all suggest that “James's Hawthorne is not altogether his own but rather a plagiaristic amalgam of insights” (73). This aspect of Hawthorne's “French face” has been hiding in sight ever since.Anesko and Brookes's translations are clear and a pleasure to read, though I do not know French well enough to judge their accuracy. The thorough annotations are helpfully placed at the end of each essay rather than together at the end of the book. The French Face of Nathaniel Hawthorne is a welcome resource for scholars of nineteenth-century American literature.