Beyond the Romance: The Aesthetics of Hawthorne’s “Chiefly About War Matters” Edward Wesp I. Slavery and Hawthorne’s Aesthetics One of the notable recent reorganizations in Hawthorne criticism is the rise to prominence of his 1862 piece for the Atlantic Monthly, “Chiefly About War Matters,” which details Hawthorne’s trip to Washington, D.C., and Virginia during the Civil War. While James Bense could claim in 1989 that “Chiefly About War Matters” was “one of the author’s least known and appreciated writings” beyond Hawthorne specialists, the essay has since become a frequently cited text, precisely because it is now seen as a valuable point at which to integrate Hawthorne’s work into broader critical discussions about slavery and nationalism.1 Many critics, including Jean Fagan Yellin and Larry Reynolds, identify “War Matters” as Hawthorne’s most significant, but ultimately incomplete, acknowledgment of the slavery issue, while in critical histories such as Gordon Hutner’s “Whose Hawthorne?” “War Matters” exemplifies the non-canonical texts whose increasing significance marked the political turn in Hawthorne criticism.2 This recent body of criticism sees in “Chiefly About War Matters” a declaration of Hawthorne’s position on slavery and the course of the post–Civil War United States. Notably, it derives much of its authority from a single passage from “War Matters” in which Hawthorne describes his encounter with a group of fugitive slaves: One very pregnant token of a social system thoroughly disturbed was presented by a party of contrabands, escaping out of the mysterious depths of Secessia; and its strangeness consisted in the leisurely delay with which they trudged forward, as dreading no pursuer, and encountering nobody to turn them back. They were unlike the specimens of their race whom we are accustomed to see at the North, and, in my judgment, were far more agreeable. So rudely were they [End Page 408] attired,—as if their garb had grown upon them spontaneously,—so picturesquely natural in manners, and wearing such a crust of primeval simplicity (which is quite polished away from the northern black man), that they seemed a kind of creature by themselves, not altogether human, but perhaps quite as good, and akin to the fauns and rustic deities of olden times.3 For critics, the meaning of the passage lies in the way the mythic and imaginative qualities of the account—in many ways so typical of Hawthorne’s style—seem here to dominate the real circumstances of slavery that the passage describes. The discordance between political reality and what these critics consistently describe as the “aesthetic” quality of this passage has established “War Matters” as an emblem of Hawthorne’s indifference toward slavery, and, more broadly, the power of celebratory versions of American Renaissance literature to elide northern white recalcitrance on political questions of race and equality. Nancy Bentley reads the turn to aesthetics in this passage, for instance, as a move that opens for Hawthorne an imaginative space of “antithesis,” within which the faun operates as a “logically absurd” figure that allows Hawthorne to [join] two contradictory meanings, the sense of both innocence and menace that Hawthorne derives from the sight of slaves. Its efficacy comes from the way it articulates—makes thinkable—an illogical belief. In the passage the black man is and is not like a faun. Through an antithesis that separates the more pleasing fantasy from an anxious reality the figure stabilizes a disordered scene.4 For Bentley, the loosened constraints of aesthetic representation provide the necessary medium to convey and sustain Hawthorne’s self-contradictory racial ideology. In a compatible treatment of the political potential of aesthetics, Arthur Riss argues that Hawthorne turns to the aesthetic as the necessary way to illustrate what he takes to be the particularly abstract—and therefore dangerously disruptive—nature of African-American identity. Citing previous work by Bentley, Eric Cheyfitz, and others, Riss concludes that, in the current critical consensus, “this fauning of Black slaves has come to stand as merely the most egregious instantiation of the primary ideological failing of Hawthorne’s writing and thought: his use of the aesthetic to excuse, contain, or conceal the political problem of race-based slavery.”5 The dangerous...