"ALICE DOANE'S APPEAL": HAWTHORNE'S CASE AGAINST THE ARTIST Mark M. Hennelly, Jr.* In a journal-entry of 1835, the year "Alice Doane's Appeal" was originally published in the Token, Nathaniel Hawthorne considered the portrait of the artist theme: "A person to be writing a tale, and to find that it shapes itself against his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought; that unforeseen events occur; and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might shadow forth his own fate—he having made himself one of the personages."1 It is clear that, unwittingly or not, Hawthorne had already approximated this aesthetic scenario in the earlier tale of a similarly haunted ArtistNarrator . Thus far, however, "Alice Doane's Appeal" has been generally under-estimated and misunderstood because readers have completely identified Hawthorne with his Narrator and consequently accepted Seymour L. Gross' rationale for the tale's strangely convoluted structure . Gross contends that Hawthorne expurgated and then added the "frame" to the original "Alice Doane," an explicit exposé of incest, written ten years earlier in college, "so that the 'offensive' parts were subdued and subordinated."2 Reading the Narrator's clumsy attempts at displacement as Hawthorne's own necessarily provokes such negative evaluations as "an unsuccessful trial,"3 "too contrived,"4 "certainly not one of Hawthorne's better stories,"5 or Gross' own most damning judgment that "Alice Doane's Appeal" is "the most poorly structured and chaotically organized of all of Hawthorne's stories."6 Actually, however, the Narrator is no more Hawthorne than Gulliver is Swift or Stephen Dedalus is Joyce. Rather, this uniquely masterful tale is a kind of dramatic monologue in which Hawthorne ironically condemns his prying and perverted Artist-Narrator along the lines quoted from his notebook-entry. This condemnation is all the more poignant and telling because the Narrator's aesthetic crime is one which Hawthorne himself often feared he might commit. In this sense, the reader is not faced with a frame story and tale proper; the "frame" •Mark M. Hennelly, Jr., is an Associate Professor of English at California State University, Sacramento. He has published widely on British and American fiction in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, American Imago, Emerson Society Quarterly, Poe Studies, The Journal of Altered States of Consciousness, and elsewhere. 126Mark M. Hennelly, Jr. is the real story, and the interpolated history of the Doanes and the final nightmare vision of Cotton Mather both function like sustained allegorical insets. Their plots are Doppelgängers to the drama between the Artist and his two listeners in the same way that Alice, Walter, Leonard, and the Wizard are all secret sharers. In fact, the last three named are all dark alter-egos of the Narrator himself; Hawthorne's sketch for a story of supernatural art indicates his awareness of such projection—"It might shadow forth his own fate,—he having made himself one of the personages." In Studies in Classical American Literature, D. H. Lawrence's discussion of Hawthorne's insights into the diseased personality is consequently a good starting point for an approach to "Alice Doane's Appeal": "It is a certain sign of the disintegration of the psyche in a man . . . when [he] takes to spiritualism, and table rapping, and occult messages, or witchcraft and supernatural powers of that sort. When men want to be supernatural, be sure that something has gone wrong in their natural stuff."7 Due to the noted disparagement of the tale, critical response to "Alice Doane's Appeal" has been slow in coming. What does exist follows one of three main lines of argument. The psychoanalytic approach , first of all, focuses upon the themes of incest, fratricide, and the more latent patricidal dream-vision of Leonard. Some commentators see this family romance as the essential ingredient of any Gothic potboiler; others, like Frederick Crews, find in it proof of Hawthorne's own disturbed past: " 'Alice Doane's Appeal' is striking evidence that Hawthorne's own sense of guilt, rooted in the twin themes of incest and patricide, informs his idea of history and sabotages his efforts at moral objectivity."8 The second reading looks upon the clinical fratricide as...
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Oct 15, 2020
Dennis Berthold 
Open Access
