CHAPTER
8
THE
END OF SPECTROPOETICS: BLITHEDALE AND
AFTER
"Mysterious
creature . . . I would know who and what you are!"
—Theodore
to the Veiled Lady in Zenobia's tale, "not exactly a ghost-story."
As
theoreticians or witnesses, spectators, observers, and intellectuals, scholars believe
that looking is sufficient. Therefore,
they are not always in the most competent position to do what is necessary:
speak to the specter. Herein lies
perhaps, among so many others, an indelible lesson of Marxism.
—Derrida,
Specters of Marx
I
do I do I do I do believe in spooks!
—Bert
Lahr as the Cowardly Lion
I.
By
way of preface: several years ago, in the wake of the revelations concerning
Paul de Man's collaborationist past, we saw a spate of Op-Ed columns equating
deconstruction with nihilism and attacking it as the ground (or rather
un-ground) for many political positions of the contemporary Left. To my mind, most of these attacks can only be
characterized as shallow; nevertheless, I would not recommend Jacques Derrida as
a suitable role model for the progressive.
Not that deconstruction is politically irrelevant; neither, however, is
it relevant in any simple way—other interventions may be far more effective. I also doubt deconstruction's political
efficacy because of an "emperor's new clothes" conspiracy among some
of its acolytes. Granted, Derrida's
wildness may itself be relentlessly rigorous.
But there are relatively few initiates who can follow its chief
practictioner's logical and rhetorical threads; the rest of us must feign
comprehension. This problem has been
recognized and addressed at an institutional level, for an easily digestible
alternative "Derrida" was concocted for American palates. As Nealon notes acerbically, "Derrida's
writings were and still are, for the most part, scrupulously avoided in
introductory courses because of their complexity and difficulty—or so the story
goes" (27). Even as the wacky
Frenchman's thought was gutted in
Having
said that, and having registered my global doubts as to poststructuralism's
political utility, I would like to place the preceding paragraph sous rature. For Derrida's Specters of Marx (trans. 1994) drives its paradoxical point home
relentlessly, and, at times, with uncharacteristic clarity: the death of
Marxism, he argues, has made Marx more relevant than ever. Marx, who haunts our age like the ghost of
Hamlet's father, demanding decisive action in a time out of joint. (We might add that our time, according to the
Frankfurt School's pessimists, is one in which decisive action is no longer
possible. Even more depressing: given
Marxism's track record, this impotence is a blessing.)
In
asking, "What is the effectivity or the presence of a specter,
that is, of what seems to remain as ineffective, virtual, insubstantial as a
simulacrum?" (10), Derrida conjures up several oppositions. Ghosts are present and yet absent: they
return from the dead, perhaps retaining their appearance, but they do not
return in the flesh. Present again (as
the thing itself), but also present for the first time (as its
simulacrum):
Repetition and first time, but
also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first
time makes of it also a last time.
Each time is the event itself, a first time is a last time. Each time it is the event itself, a first
time is a last time. Altogether
other. Staging for the end of
history. Let us call it a hauntology. (10)
The pun is too good not to be taken seriously, which
Derrida proceeds to do, tracing Marx's fascination with the trope of the
specter. In The German Ideology, this fascination verges on obsession:
throughout, he and Engels rail against the tendency to "make religious
illusion the driving force of history" (MECW 5:55). The centerpiece
of the manuscript is Marx's "Saint Max," a 334-page tirade against
the Young Hegelian Max Stirner, which begins with an exposé of Stirner's
ideological "conjuring tricks" (5:119-129). Later, under the subheading "The Possessed
(Impure History of Spirits)," Marx argued that Stirner had given his
readers "instruction in the art of ghost-seeing" (5:152). Most spectacularly, under the sub-subheading
"The Apparition," Marx seeks to demolish Stirner's narrative of human
history as a watered-down Hegelian procession of "various kinds of
spectres passing before us one after another": God, essence, the God-Man,
man, the national spirit, and "everything" (5:157-159). After performing a historical materialist
exorcism, Marx concludes:
[S]ince Saint Max shares the belief of
all critical specualtive philosophers of modern times that thoughts, which have
become independent, objectified thoughts—ghosts—have ruled the world and continue
to rule it, and that all history up to now was the history of theology, nothing
more, nothing could be easier for him than to transform history into a history
of ghosts. (5:160)
And so on, for almost three hundred pages more.
Derrida
suggests that "[o]ne might read the whole German Ideology . . . as the inexhaustible gloss on
this table of ghosts," comparing this "tableau of spirits" to a
"[séance table that] begins to dance before our eyes, like a certain
'table' in Capital which we will
later see move, when its becoming-commodity opens up the dimension of secrecy,
mysticism, and fetishism" (142). To
this extent, Marx's motivation is not difficult to fathom: one can exorcize the
ghost by demonstrating that its appearance, its "prosthetic body"
is itself nothing more than "a ghost of spirit, nothing more than a ghost
of the ghost." By analogy,
"[t]he theory of ideology depends . . . on this theory of
the ghost" (126-127). Yet Derrida
also notes that Marx's "rage" seems out of proportion to its object,
so much so that he seems "captivate[d]" by his "prey":
My feeling . . . is that
Marx scares himself [se fait peur], he himself pursues [s'acharne
lui-même] relentlessly someone who almost resembles him to the point
that we could mistake one for the other: a brother, a double, thus a diabolical
image. A kind of ghost of himself. Whom he would like to distance, distinguish:
to oppose. He has recognized
someone who, like him, appears obsessed by ghosts and by the figure of the
ghost and by its names with their troubling consonance and reference . . . . Now, Stirner talked about all this before
[Marx] did, and at such great length, which is even more intolerable. In the sense given to this word in hunting,
he poached the specters of Marx. (139-140)
There
was yet another reason to be sensitive: the best-known of these specters was
not on Stirner's list, not a revenant from the pre-Hegelian past, but a
portent of things to come, one for whose incorporation Marx himself bears
responsibility. The Manifesto opens, "A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of
Communism." To be more precise, the
haunting specter was not actually-existing communism, but the communist
potential feared by the crowned heads of Europe; nevertheless, the distinction
can be fine, for a revolution can turn into "a parody of the specter
itself"—after June 1848, as Derrida points out, a newspaper named The Red Specter surfaced, then later a
revolutionary group with the same name (116, 188n9).
One
might add that as suggested in the preceding chapters, Fourier, the prophet of ultra-mondian
life, had created ghosts of his own.
Like Marx and like countless others in the nineteenth century, Nathaniel
Hawthorne was acutely sensitive to socialism's supposed links to the spirit
world. Is the Blithedale community a
parody of the Veiled Lady, "endow[ed]," perhaps, "with many of
the privileges of a disembodied spirit"? (N 636) Does it both
"announc[e] and cal[l] for a presence to come"—that is,
socialism? After the community's failure,
how does Blithedale signify "the presence of a persistent past"? (Derrida 101)
And, keeping in mind Zenobia's curse on Hollingsworth and its
fulfillment—"Tell him that I'll haunt him!" (N 829, 844)—is it a friendly spirit?
Hawthorne's
The Blithedale Romance (1852) is of
course the best-known response to Fourierism in the American canon. When narrator Miles Coverdale reminisces
about the community years after its demise, he still regrets Blithedale's
dissolution, in spite of Zenobia's suicide and his own disillusionment. For the community had been based upon such a
promising plan, the "beautiful scheme of a noble and unselfish life":
More and more, I feel that we had
struck upon what ought to be a truth.
Posterity may dig it up, and profit by it. The experiment, so far as its original
projectors were concerned, proved long ago a failure, first lapsing into
Fourierism, and dying, as it well deserved, for this infidelity to its own
higher spirit. Where once we toiled with
our whole hopeful hearts, the town-paupers, aged, nerveless, and disconsolate,
creep sluggishly afield. Alas, what
faith is requisite to bear up against such results of generous effort! (N
846)
Several generations of critics have devalued Blithedale for its thesis-driven didacticism. Indeed, this passage supports the romance's
central argument, that veils are ineffective in the long run. Just as a Veiled Lady's identity—her
essential nature—cannot be concealed forever, none of the major characters is
able to maintain his or her façade indefinitely. It is thematically fitting that this passage
reveals the Blithedale community's true identity. Brook Farm's "infidelity to its own
higher spirit" was the same as Blithedale's: Fourierism represented its
descent from the transcendent (ghostly) realm to the material. Furthermore, Coverdale's revelation is
accompanied by a devaluation. Some of
his youthful idealism may remain, as indicated by his comment that Blithedale
could have succeeded had it remained faithful to its "noble and
unselfish" original principles, rather than base and selfish
Fourierism. But Coverdale's
condemnation of Fourierism is not accompanied by faith in other forms of
socialism. Rather, he feels that the
Blithedalers "had struck upon what ought to be a truth,"
implying that socialism is just a dream, and that Blithedale's lesson to
posterity will be a negative one.
Intentional
fallacy notwithstanding, Coverdale's opinion of socialism is close to
Hawthorne's. In the Preface, the author
specifically denied passing judgment on Brook Farm, insisting that the
fictional community had only a tenuous relationship to West Roxbury and,
further, that he did not "put forward the slightest intentions to
illustrate a theory, or elicit a conclusion, favorable or otherwise, in respect
to Socialism." But just as Margaret
Fuller's appearance at Blithedale only heightens our suspicions about Zenobia's
identity, we should be equally suspicious of the author's claim not to be passing
judgment on Brook Farm. Indeed, Hawthorne
immediately undercut this claim by arguing that a socialist community was the
ideal setting for an American romance because it is the nation's closest
approximation to a "Faery Land" with "a suitable
remoteness" and "an atmosphere of strange enchantment" (N 633).
It is precisely Hawthorne's loss of faith in utopian socialism—familiar
enough not to need rehearsal here—that enabled him to transform Brook Farm into
"the most romantic episode in [the Author's] own life—essentially a
day-dream, and yet a fact—and thus offering an available foothold between
fiction and reality" (N
634). Hawthorne's formulation insists
upon socialism's half-imaginary status.
Compare his famous recipe for romance in "The Custom-House"
preface to The Scarlet Letter, the
ode to moonlight and its power to transform a familiar room into a
"neutral territory" outside of space and time (N 149). This is also a
recipe for utopia. The imagined
community (ou-topia) can never be actualized; the ghosts of the romance
will never be anything but ghosts.
Hollingsworth,
after listening to Coverdale's translation of a passage from Fourier,
unequivocally condemned Fourierism for being based upon "the selfish
principle—the principle of all human wrong, the very blackness of man's heart,
the portion of ourselves which we shudder at, and which it is the whole aim of
spiritual discipline to eradicate."
Hollingsworth's judgment seems to have been vindicated, for the fall
into materialist Fourierism has indeed corrupted a potential
"Paradise" and turned it into "Gehenna," making it
Blithedale's "Unpardonable Sin" (677-78), the sin against the Holy
Spirit previously discussed in Chapter 4.
In Hollingsworth's version of Christian orthodoxy, humans err
irrevocably when they attempt to realize their own ideals in the material
world, rather than those of the Holy Spirit.
In other words, those who attempt to realize utopia are building a new
Tower of Babel; the prison-reform projector himself is tainted with this "sin."
Critics
markedly less orthodox than Hollingsworth have echoed his sentiments. I have already alluded to D. H. Lawrence's
seminal reading of Blithedale in Studies in Classic American Literature,
which proclaims that "the first part of reverence is the acceptance of the
fact that the Holy Ghost will never materialize: will never be anything but a
ghost," and that the irreverent Blithedalers "have sinned against the
Holy Ghost" (117). In the first
chapter of Studies, the similarities
between his "Holy Ghost" and the id are apparent:
Men are not free
when they are doing just what they like.
The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care
about doing. Men are only free when they
are doing what the deepest self likes.
. . . . If one wants to be free, one has to give up
the illusion of doing what one likes, and seek what IT wishes done. (13)
This sounds suspiciously like the doctrine of
"passional attraction," the illusion of free will being equivalent to
the "subversive" passions of "Civilization." But while Lawrence doesn't mention Fourier by
name, his reading of Blithedale
suggests that he would find the Fourierist project of social perfection just as
"[t]heoretic and materialistic" as Franklin's project of
self-perfection in the Autobiography
(26). Just as the Holy Ghost within
cannot be tamed by Franklin's "moral machine" (22), no communitarian
system can force the gods within to "tingl[e] in tune with the Oversoul,
like so many strings of a super-celestial harp" (112). Still, Lawrence's rejection of the Blithedale
/ Brook Farm experiment differs from Hollingsworth's. Lawrence also insists upon the
irreconcilability of the ideal and material realms, but does not insist upon
the transcendence of one of these realms:
You can't
idealize hard work. . . .
And
that's why the idealists left off brookfarming, and took to bookfarming.
You
can't idealize the essential brute-blood activity, the brute blood
desires, the basic, sardonic, blood-knowledge.
That
you can't idealize it.
And
you can't eliminate it.
So
there's the end of ideal man.
Man
is made up of a dual consciousness, of which the two halves are most of the
time in opposition to one another—and will be so long as time lasts.
You've got to learn to
change from one consciousness to the other, turn and about. Never try to make either absolute, or
dominant. The Holy Ghost tells you the
how and when. (112)
Sometimes brute-blood is in the foreground (as in
Section II of this chapter), sometimes the spectral ideal (as in Section III),
but, as Lawrence insists, this dualism cannot be reduced to a system.
II.
Even though John Hay's novel The Bread-winners (1883) was, I strongly
suspect, modelled on Blithedale, its
similarities with its predecessor may not be obvious. For example, Blithedale is pastoral, set in a fictionalized Brook Farm, while The Bread-winners is urban, set in a
amalgam of Cleveland and Buffalo.
Coverdale is the unreliable narrator par excellence; Hay's
omniscient narrator speaks with crystalline certainty. Yet there are some obvious ideological
sympathies. While Coverdale remains
sympathetic to utopian ideals, Blithedale
warns its readers that socialist praxis is unlikely to succeed; The Bread-winners unequivocally
demonstrates that socialist labor movements are frauds. Without collapsing the differences between
Hawthorne's cautionary tale and the diplomat's reactionary diatribe (provoked
by the Great Railroad Strike of 1877), I believe that both novels ultimately
underwrite (consciously or not) the capitalist project of transforming American
society into a profit-generating machine.
Surprisingly, the references to hothouses in the two texts can be used
to support this assertion, as well as to illuminate the complex sexual dynamics
of the two novels.
The
construction of the first large-scale glass structures (such as the Winter
Garden, completed in 1846) led, as Georg Kohlmaier and Barna von Sartory have
argued, to the formation of a nineteenth-century hothouse "mythos"
(7). Both as building and as metaphor,
the hothouse becomes the site at which a bewildering variety of concerns
intersect. First, the hothouse was seen
as the resolution of the pastoral dilemma.
Urban dwellers no longer needed to mourn the loss of rural pleasures,
for they could now enjoy nature in the city, reaping the benefits of living in
both worlds. Thus, the hothouse
artificially re-created Eden; the Industrial Revolution had made a natural
Utopia possible.
Yet
this mythos also had a dystopian strain.
Some ambitious graduate student might someday construct a Foucauldian
history showing that even before the hothouse became a capitalist marketplace,
it had been part of a violent discourse of power. For example, the eighteenth-century term for
the hothouse is "forcing house" (Hix 9), that is, a place where
plants are made to grow out of season in a foreign soil (compare the French
"forçerie"). In Capital, Marx would later argue that the
bourgeoisie "employ[s] the power of the state . . . to
hasten, hothouse fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of
production into the capitalist mode. . . . Force is the midwife of every old society
pregnant with a new one" (qtd., Schmitt 40). With the erection of the Crystal Palace in
1851—possibly on Hawthorne's mind as he was writing Blithedale—the hothouse came to be used for commercial
purposes. The artificial micro-ordering
of its contents represented a very efficient form of discipline. Just as Linnaeus had forced a classification
upon Nature by studying the plants in an Anglo-Dutch financier's hothouses (Hix
11), the exhibitors at the Crystal Palace imposed an equally artificial order
upon the display of commodities (Kohlmaier and von Sartory 1). Since the hothouse imposes an
artificial order upon nature, it can readily figure the artificial ordering of
mankind. With few exceptions, hothouses
were constructed for the benefit of a noble and wealthy elite. Contemporary accounts portrayed the private
winter garden as "an unreal world where amid rarities and rituals the
nobility prepared to make its departure from the historical scene" (K.
& v.S. 36). Furthermore, since
today's glass-and-iron architecture is a lineal descendant of the
nineteenth-century greenhouse (K. & v.S. 5), this utopian critique can be
extended to the power of modern skyscrapers and arcades to mark class
boundaries.
In The Blithedale Romance, Coverdale never
sees a hothouse in our presence, but two early scenes draw attention to
Zenobia's hothouse flowers. When he
recalls his arrival at Blithedale, he performs the courtesy of "summon[ing
Zenobia up like a ghost, a little wanner than the life, but otherwise identical
with it." He was and still is taken
by the "single flower" in her hair: "an exotic of rare beauty,
and as fresh as if the hot-house gardener had just clipt it from the
stem." But his image of the
phantasmagorical flower is faint: while he claims to "see it and smell
it" in the present ("That flower has struck deep root in my
memory"), these sensory perceptions are not passed along to the
reader. The narrative is less concerned
with the flower itself than with it as symbol: "So brilliant, so rare, so
costly as it must have been, and yet enduring only for a day, it was more
indicative of the pride and pomp, which had a luxuriant growth in Zenobia's character,
than if a great diamond had sparkled among her hair" (N 644-645).
Coverdale
suggests that the division of work has not changed at Blithedale, for women
still have to perform the "artificial" domestic chores, rather than
field work, labor befitting "the life of paradise" (16). Zenobia's reply suggests that the flower also
signifies the intersection of the natural life and the artificial in the
pastoral:
"I am afraid . . . we shall find
some difficulty in adopting the Paradisiacal system, for at least a month to
come. Look at that snow drift sweeping
past the window! Are there any figs
ripe, do you think? Have the pine-apples
been gathered, to-day. Would you like a
bread-fruit, or a cocoa-nut? Shall I run
out and pluck you some roses? No, no,
Mr. Coverdale, the only flower hereabouts is the one in my hair, which I got
out of a green-house, this morning. As
for the garb of Eden," added she, shivering playfully, "I shall not
assume it till after May-day!" (16-17)
In
these two episodes, we see two distinct ways of thinking about
greenhouses. Zenobia's decadent daily
plucking implies that the hothouse is somehow linked to an equally decadent
attempt to control Nature technologically, especially if one is reading through
the lens of "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844)—perhaps Zenobia plucks her
flower from the "scientific" Rappaccini's botanic garden (978). The second episode suggest that Nature, or at
least Nature in New England, is not at all like Eden and needs to be
controlled: if not by the agency of the Boreal Crown, then by more mundane
means. As Leo Marx has shown, there is a
similar tension built into the America-as-garden metaphor. Is the American garden is "a pre-lapsarian
Eden" that needs no improvement?
Then technological 'improvements' like the hothouse would merely
commodify Nature, turn a flower into a throwaway product. Or is the American garden an untamed
wilderness that needs to be cultivated? (L. Marx 87). Then the hothouse, as garden machine, is
essential to growing coconuts and roses in an otherwise bleak environment.
Coverdale
later recalls his confinement to a sickbed, and the flower Zenobia wore as she
nursed him back to health. The memory of
his illness induces an floral preoccupation that repeats the invalid's
obsession:
I noticed—and
wondered how Zenobia contrived it—that she always had a new flower in her
hair. And still it was a hot-house
flower—an outlandish flower—a flower of the tropics, such as appeared to have
sprung passionately out of a soil, the very weeds of which would be fervid and
spicy. . . . It might be,
that my feverish fantasies clustered themselves about this peculiarity, and
caused it to look more gorgeous and wonderful than if beheld with temperate
eyes. In the height of my illness, I
went so far as to pronounce it preternatural.
"Zenobia is an
enchantress!" whispered I once to Hollingsworth. "She is a sister of the Veiled
Lady! That flower in her hair is a
talisman. If you were to snatch it away,
she would vanish, or be transformed into something else!" (670)
Not only does Coverdale romanticize Zenobia's flower by
fantasizing that it is essential to her identity, but also by willing
forgetfulness. He struggles to suppress
a acknowledged fact ("And still it was a hothouse flower
. . . ."). He struggles
so successfully that by the time he is finished, Coverdale—as narrator, not as
febrile patient—concludes that Zenobia's flower must have grown in the wild, in
a soil foreign enough to produce "fervent and spicy" weeds. As a result, he takes the cultivated Zenobia
herself for an exotic, an "enchantress," or, as Hollingsworth less
charitably puts it, a "witch" (670).
Despite Zenobia's denials, the men may have been right; Zenobia has used
the flowers to captivate Coverdale, then Hollingsworth soon after. All
these passages cited so far have all been sexually charged, for the
hothouse—once synonymous with "brothel"—is a sexually-charged
site. Not only do Zenobia's flowers
invoke the traditional vaginal symbolism, but they also suggest the Fourierist
connection between non-monogamous sexuality in utopian communities and the idea
of the hothouse as a dwelling place.
In
March 1845, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody complained to her daughter that the French
thinkers had "corrupt" ideas about woman, although she provisionally
excepted one popular philosopher:
There is a sad tendency to the same
evil among us. Why does not some undoubted
man translate Fourier? Can the
heavenly-minded W. H. Channing admire and follow an author whose books are
undermining the very foundations of social order? Swedenborg, you know, has been misunderstood
and his doctrine corrupted. It is
possible it may be so with Fourier's.
The subject is often discussed in the book-room, and it is strange to me
that among learned men, who are interested about public morals and our civil
institutions, no one should take the trouble to read what Charles Fourier
wrote. Time will prove, I trust; but
many a young mind may be ruined first.
(Peabody to Sophia Hawthorne, 28 March 1845, qtd. in J. Hawthorne
267-268)
Reading between the lines, Peabody seems to be
suggesting that Brisbane was a doubted man, and that Social Destiny of Man was an untrustworthy representation of
Fourier. (Like Emerson, she compares the
possibly unjust tarring of Fourier's reputation to that of Swedenborg, a
further indication of the currency of this topic.) Sophia Hawthorne rapidly confirmed her
mother's worst fears:
It was not a
translation of Fourier that I read, but the original text,—the fourth volume;
and though it was so abominable, immoral, irreligious, and void of all delicate
sentiment, yet George Bradford says it is not so bad as some other
volumes. . . . It is very
plain from all I read (a small part) that he has entirely lost his moral
sense. . . .
This is the highest
motive presented for not being inordinately profligate. My husband read the whole volume, and was
thoroughly disgusted. (qtd. in J.
Hawthorne 268-269)
In the fourth volume of Théorie de unité universelle, Fourier took nine pages to mark a
"forced lacuna" in the exposition of his theory. He bitterly complained that the prejudices of
"Civilization," which assumed that "a theory of free love is a
theory of obscenity," obliged him to suppress "the quadrille of
amorous equilibrium" (OC 5:461). Nathaniel could have filled in many of the
blanks from his subsequent reading of Quatre
mouvements, and the remainder with his imagination. As in Joseph Smith's Nauvoo—alluded to more
than once in Blithedale—sexuality in
Fourier's imaginary community was carefully controlled. However, infractions of Fourier's rules could
themselves be entertaining, as the following example from the suppressed Nouveau Monde amoreux illustrates:
It is customary
for the Damsels [i.e., sexually active adolescents of both sexes] to remain
faithful until they reach the age of twenty.
But since everything is done by gradations in Harmony, and since it
would be difficult, not to say impossible, for a couple to remain faithful for
four or five years, the amorous code allows for exceptions to the rule of
fidelity. Thus no one is expelled from
the Damselate until he or she has committed three infidelities and one
inconstancy, or else seven infidelities without an inconstancy. Only half an infidelity is counted if a Damsel
has an affair with one of the priests or priestesses who, in view of their
advanced age, are given special advantages.
Thus a Damsel can commit fourteen acts of infidelity with priests . . .
.
A homosexual affair is
counted as half an infidelity. Likewise
only half an infidelity is counted when two partners go to the amorous registry
and announce their intention to engage in reciprocal infidelity for a period of
three days or less. . . . These customs
might seem to be libidinous in a corporation which is reputed to be faithful,
but in fidelity as in all things exceptions are the rule. (OC 7:434-435, qtd. in Beecher and Bienvenu 367)
One gets the impression that Fourier himself would have
been thrilled to keep the books on these infractions. Surveillance plays an enormous role in the
community of pleasure; the "amorous registry" is a form of
self-policing. A priestly caste receives
special sexual privileges, and certain practices receive preferential
treatment. Elsewhere, Fourier proposes
to found separate Phalanxes for the satisfaction of the rarest sexual manias,
such as "amorous heel-scratching" (qtd. in Beecher and Bienvenu
355). As with Linnaeus' ordering of the
hothouse plants and the ordering of the exhibitions in the Crystal Palace,
Fourier's control of sexual practices is exemplary of Foucault's "'new
micro-physics' of power" (139).
It
is easier to play the field, or keep score, when all the players are under one
roof. Fourier's great architectural
anticipation, the phalanstery, performs a crucial role in the ordering of the
Phalanx. For example, one's dining hall
was to be determined by one's social class, and one's dormitory by one's age
and sexual practices. Fourier's
innovation was to connect each building in the phalanstery to the others by
heated, ventilated, glass-covered passageways, allowing members of the
community to enjoy Nature without being subjected to the rain or the cold
(Beecher and Bienvenu 242-245).
Kohlmaier and von Sartory consider this innovation representative of the
utopian desire to find a harmonious balance between nature and culture;
Fourier's passageway, first mentioned in Quatre
mouvements, was one of the first major contributions to the greenhouse
mythos (15).
We
have seen that the hothouse mythos incorporates, and is incorporated in, the
American pastoral, as well as capitalist discourses of power. Through association with Fourier, a more
tenuous link exists between the hothouse and the regulation of sexual excess. We have seen much more of the hothouse mythos,
however, than we have of the hothouse itself—for which we turn to The Bread-winners.
The
protagonist of Hay's novel, Arthur Farnham, is a thirtyish widower, a former
Army officer, and the sole heir to a multi-million dollar estate in Buffland, a
metropolis on the shores of Lake Erie.
When the beautiful carpenter's daughter Maud Matchin calls upon Farnham,
she learns that he was unable to fulfill his promise of a job at the local
library, as corrupt politicians have used the vacancy for patronage. Although Farnham is anxious to put an end to
Maud's visits for propriety's sake, he impetuously promises to find her another
position. As Maud leaves, Farnham takes
Maud into the garden's rose house (built by Maud's father, as was the nearby
greenhouse), picks some flowers for her, and escorts her to the garden
gate. He then tells her that she may use
this rear entrance for her next visit, ostensibly because it is closer to her
home, but actually to make her visits less conspicuous. Maud later discovers that her carpenter beau,
Sam Sleeny, happened to be working on the Farnham greenhouse that day and had
jealously spied on the couple.
Sam need not have worried, as
Farnham is more interested in Alice Belding, the carefully-cultivated daughter
of his next-door neighbor. When
Farnham's gardener Ferguson informs him that the rare cereus grandiflorus in
the conservatory is about to blossom, Farnham runs next door to invite Alice
and her mother to enjoy the spectacle.
Mrs. Belding contrives to leave Alice and Farnham alone. While Alice sketches the flower, Farnham
flirts with her gallantly, and by the end of the evening, they are quite taken
with each other.
In
the meantime, Maud goes to a séance, at which she asks Bott, the medium, how
she can find out whether Farnham loves her.
The pathetic Bott believes that Maud wants to know whether he
loves her, and offers her the counsel of the spiritual world: "Tell your
love!" (112). After several days of
hesitation, Maud finally gathers the courage to tell Farnham, breaking the news
to him with a torrid profession in the rose house that ends with her proposal
of marriage, after which she is on the verge of fainting. Farnham gallantly catches her in his arms and
kisses her, but then confesses that her love is unrequited. Alice's mother happens to walk into the
rose-house in time to witness this scene.
Although she is amused, her daughter is not, and the romance is
temporarily derailed.
Mrs.
Belding is not the only spectator, however.
Sam Sleeny, who has been unsuccessfully courting Maud, is infuriated by
Farnham's kiss and vows revenge, thus setting the political intrigue in
motion. Earlier, the honest but naive
Sam had made the acquaintance of the ne'er-do-well Andrew Jackson Offitt. The narrator helpfully explains the
significance of this name for his apolitical readers:
[I]n the West, [it] is an unconscious
brand. It generally shows that the
person bearing it is the son of illiterate parents, with no family pride or
affections, but filled with a bitter and savage partisanship which found its
expression in a servile worship of the most injurious person in American
history. (89-90)
Offitt invited Sam to join his secret "labor
reform" society, the Brotherhood of Bread-winners. The Bread-winners are a group of drunks and
incompetents who spend much time theorizing about labor reform, but little time
laboring. In fact, Offitt had formed the
organization in order to live off the union dues.
Soon
after Maud has been rejected by Farnham, the unions of Buffland plan a general
strike. At the same time, both Bott and
Offitt begin to court Maud. Bott is
summarily dismissed, but the smooth-talking Offitt has more success. Moved by his flattery, she tells Offitt how
Farnham has spurned her, and how she would "owe a great deal to the man
who would give her a beating" (211).
The next day, Offitt and the other Bread-winners incite the striking
workers to violence, in scenes based on the urban riots during the Great
Railroad Strike. They mount an attack
the Farnham and Belding estates. A
factory owner, however, had tipped Farnham off to the danger, and Farnham's
rapidly organized private police force easily repulses the rabblerousers. The only rioter who holds his ground is Sam
Sleeny, who unsuccessfully rushes at Farnham with a hammer. He is arrested and vows revenge.
When
Sam is freed a week later, Offitt decides to frame him. He steals Sam's hammer, slips into Farnham's
study, brains the capitalist with the hammer, and steals his cash. Offitt then visits Maud at midnight and tries
to persuade her to elope. Sam is
arrested for attempted murder, but then escapes, exposes Offitt's treachery,
and kills him. The court conveniently
exonerates Sam, and Maud reconciles herself to marrying him. Farnham is nursed back to health by Alice,
and they live happily ever after.
What functions do the hothouse episodes serve
in The Bread-winners? First, the hothouses themselves reinforce the
class barriers between Farnham, the owner, and Saul Matchin (Maud's father),
Sam Sleeny, and the gardener Ferguson, all hothouse laborers. Hay, however, does not portray the class
relationship as capitalist exploitation.
When Sam complains that Ferguson is ordering him around and slowing down
his work, Saul replies,
"that ain't none o' your
lookout. Do what Scotchee tells you, and
I'll keep the time on 'em. We kin stand
it, ef they kin," and the old carpenter laughed with the foolish pleasure
of a small mind aware of an advantage.
"Ef Art. Farnham wants to keep a high-steppin' Scotchman to run his
flowers, may be he kin afford it. I
ain't his gardeen." (72)
Here, as elsewhere in the novel, Hay is standing the
labor theory of value on its head: Farnham is being forced to pay an inflated
value for Sam's labor. (It should be
noted that the craftsman Saul is portrayed more sympathetically than any other
worker.) If labor is being paid a
more-than-fair price, then labor has no complaint, which in turn serves to
reify class barriers.
Class
distinction is also illustrated by comparing the cultivation of Maud and Alice
to the cultivation of the flowers with which they are associated. Alice's flower is the cereus grandiflorus, a
"regal flower" in the "inner room" of the conservatory that
receives Ferguson's constant attention and has "a wall to itself"
(115). Alice herself has just returned
from two years of cultivation at Madame de Veaudry's exclusive New York
finishing school. The unexotic Maud, on
the other hand, is given roses; she was cultivated in a public
high-school. Even this minimal eduction,
the narrator notes, was a waste of time; her "education" has done
nothing but make her unfit for domestic work.
Hothouse cultivation is not appropriate for weeds.
If
the Blithedale community is another species of hothouse, then how well do
Priscilla and Zenobia flourish there?
Upon her arrival at Blithedale, Coverdale observes that Priscilla's face
“was of a wan, almost sickly hue, betokening habitual seclusion from the sun
and free atmosphere, like a flower-shrub that had done its best to blossom in
too scanty light” (27). City dwellers,
especially Veiled Ladies, don't get much sun.
A few months at Blithedale improve her appearance, however. When
Coverdale calls on the ladies in the boarding-house, he tells Zenobia that
Priscilla has become "as lovely as a flower" (169). Zenobia's arch reply draws attention to
Priscilla's working-class status:
"Well, say so if you like. . .
. I wonder, in such Arcadian freedom of
falling in love as we have enjoyed lately, it never occurred to you to fall in
love with Priscilla! In society, indeed,
a genuine American never dreams of stepping across the inappreciable air-line
which separates one class from another.
But what was rank to the colonists of Blithedale?" (170)
Zenobia realizes that the relatively firm class barriers
of New England (barriers that will be even more impenetrable in Hay's Buffland)
are being threatened by the Blithedale experiment. Indeed, the two sisters are competing for the
same man (unlike The Bread-winners,
in which Maud only imagines that she is competing with Alice for Farnham), and
it is Priscilla, the "poor, pallid flower" "flung wilfully
away" by Zenobia (193), who eventually gets Hollingsworth.
The
complex and indeterminate sexual relationship between Zenobia, Hollingsworth,
Priscilla, Westervelt, and the amorous spectator Coverdale cannot be reduced to
a relationship between classes, but this pentagram does suggest something about
the sociosexual dynamic of Blithedale as a community. The life of Priscilla, like that of the
"wild grapevine" which "had caught hold of three or four of the
neighboring trees, and married the whole clump with a perfectly inextricable
knot of polygamy," is a
"fragile thread" that "has inextricably knotted
itself with other and tougher threads, and most likely it will be broken"
(N 718, 720, emphasis added). These passages, often quoted in conjunction,
suggest sexual misconduct among the protagonists, and the inevitable consequence
of such acts.[1] But in her tale, Zenobia links the
disappearance of the Veiled Lady to the appearance of Priscilla among the
"knot of visionary transcentalists" of Blithedale (N 733, emphasis added). It would appear that polygamy ensnares not
just the main characters, but the entire "Knot of Dreamers" (N 644).
In other words, everyone at Blithedale is potentially a participant in
Fourierist sexual misconduct.[2]
The
sexual relationships in The Bread-winners,
on the other hand, are much easier to untangle: Offitt, Bott, and Sam all
desire Maud; Maud desires Farnham, who resists her for reasons of class; and
Farnham and Alice desire each other.
Unlike Hawthorne's novel, everything goes according to form in Hay's—like
marries like.
Besides
keeping classes in their respective places, Farnham's hothouses also control
sexual conduct. Alice's visit to the
hothouse gives the narrator opportunities for sexual innuendo of the
pistil-and-stamen variety that effectively objectifies Alice:
The bud was so far
opened that the creamy white of the petals could be seen within the riven
sheath, whose strong dark color exquisitely relieved the pallid beauty it had
guarded so long. The silky stamens were
still curled about the central style, but the splendor of color which was
coming was already suggested, and a breath of intoxicating fragrance stole from
the heart of the immaculate flower.
They spoke to each other
in low tones, as if impressed with a sort of awe at the beautiful and mysterious
development of fragrant and lovely life going forward under their sight. The dark eyes of Alice Belding were full of
that vivid happiness which strange and charming things bring to intelligent
girlhood. She was looking with all her
soul, and her breath was quick and high, and her soft red lips were parted and
tremulous. Farnham looked from her to
the flower, and back again, gazing on both with equal safety, for the one was
as unconscious of his gazes as the other. (118)
Farnham has a proprietary feeling towards everything
that comes into the hothouse—once in the conservatory, the
"unconscious" Alice becomes his, possessed, admired, kept under
glass. In this respect, he is Rappaccini
rewritten as a sympathetic character: the woman/flower sisterhood is healthy
rather than evil. Maud also places
herself at Farnham's disposal, but Farnham's flirtations with the two women
take place in two separate hothouses: the private conservatory for Alice, the
more public rose house for Maud. A
Blithedale-like mixing of classes is hindered by the architecture of the rose
house. Both the bourgeois Mrs. Belding
and the working-class Sam literally watch over the flirtation between Farnham
and Maud, and are in position to nip it in the bud.
Besides
serving as a site for sexual passion and a marker for class boundaries, the
hothouse is a place where the country and the city can be reconciled in the
pastoral. For Farnham, who had been
stationed on the frontier during his Army career, the hothouse enables him to
be reconciled to life in Buffland.
Although the Blithedale community is intended to be a similar escape
from the evils of the city, a hothouse-like phalanstery in which its members
can flourish, Coverdale ironically finds his escape from the city only when he
returns to the city and looks out the window of his hotel room:
There were apple-trees, and pear and
peach-trees, too, the fruit on which looked singularly large, luxuriant, and
abundant; as well it might, in a situation so warm and sheltered, and where the
soil had doubtless been enriched to a more than natural fertility. (148)
This garden's artificial enclosure and fertilized soil
makes it a roofless hothouse. It cannot
be confused with Eden—Death is present in the form of a murderous cat stalking her
prey. But it is not like Rappaccini's
garden, either. Despite its
artificiality, Coverdale finds the city hothouse a more congenial environment
than Blithedale. The rural community
fails to reconcile country and city, but the urban garden may succeed.
In
Hay, the positive virtues of the hothouse are emphasized: it succeeds in making
the pastoral reconciliation, it exemplifies the justice of capitalism, and it
promotes a healthy, class-conscious sexuality.
In Hawthorne, the negative features of the hothouse eventually surface:
the pastoral reconciliation fails, and the blossoming Priscilla becomes the
object of desires that transgress class boundaries. While Priscilla flourishes at Blithedale, the
environment is wrong for Zenobia: the replacement of her hothouse flowers with
inanimate jewels signals the failure of the project. Compare the moment in "Rappaccini's
Daughter" when a "drop or two of moisture" falls from the flower
and kills the lizard:
Beatrice . . . [did not] hesitate to
arrange the fatal flower in her bosom.
There it blushed, and almost glimmered with the dazzling effect of a
precious stone. ("Rappaccini's" 955)
There is a "great diamond" in Zenobia's
hair now but the diamond is a lifeless beauty that symbolizes the death of
Nature, Blithedale, and Zenobia, who have all given up the ghost. For her and for Beatrice, the hothouse is a
death machine.
What
I would like to stress here is the difference in the narrator's attitude
towards hothouses in these texts. There
is a historical progression from Aubépine's rejection of the hothouse project
in "Rappaccini's Daughter," to Coverdale's more ambivalent attitude
in The Blithedale Romance. Three decades later, Hay's narrator affirms
the hothouse project. The interpretation
of the hothouse mythos has also shifted: in Hay, the project no longer has
anything to do with the creation of a Paradise on Earth. Hawthorne tells us how the utopian dream of
the hothouse/phalanstery failed, while Hay tells us how Offitt's dystopian
communist scheme was averted by a hothouse owner.
III.
One of Maud's failed suitors,
Bott, has the same profession as Westervelt; he is also identified with the
'shirking class' through his membership in the Brotherhood of
Bread-winners. Hay uses this ideological
shorthand to equate spiritualism, a "grotesque superstition" that
"rush[es] in at the first opportunity to fill the vacuum of faith"
(35) with the false ideology offered by the quasi-communist Offitt, Maud's
other failed suitor. For Offitt's name
conjures up not only the memory of the Democratic hero, but that of Andrew
Jackson Davis. If we read Blithedale through Hay's lens, we need
not fear the spells cast by Zenobia's hothouse flowers or Westervelt's power
over Priscilla, for these illusions are readily exorcised. Equally illusory for Hay, then, is the
ideology that underlies the Blithedale community, whether it be materialistic
Fourierism or idealistic Transcendentalism.
While
Orestes Brownson had drawn a similar political conclusion from Blithedale, he had insisted upon the
reality of the very ghosts that Hay later dismissed, even claiming firsthand
acquaintance with these specters.
Brownson's novel The
Spirit-Rapper: An Autobiography (1854), was in a sense autobiographical,
for it drew upon his earlier interest in the experiments of the mesmerist and
Saint-Simonian Charles Poyen (see Stoehr 37-40). Further, the author claimed that the novel
contained "no fiction" other than the plot machinery:
The connection of spirit-rapping, or
the spirit-manifestations, with modern philanthropy, visionary reforms,
socialism, and revolutionism, is not an imagination of my own. It is historical, and asserted by the
Spiritists, or Spiritualists themselves . . . . (SR vi)
The tale is told by an unnamed narrator who, on his
deathbead, reflects on the grave errors of his life. His troubles had begun in 1836, when he fell
in with the French mesmerist Dr P————.
Under the doctor's guidance, his friends begin experiments in animal
magnetism. One young man mesmerizes his
fiancée too many times, inadvertently causing her death. But the undeterred narrator, waxing Faustian,
is tempted to exploit the power of this new science. As he studies mesmerism, he falls in with a
brazen young woman who is given the pseudonym "Priscilla" and who is
modelled on Brownson's former friend Fanny Wright. After Priscilla instructs the narraton in the
evil doctrines of abolitionism and feminism, the two travel to a World Reform
convention. Among the speakers are a
"Mr. Edgerton" who waxes Emersonian and a "M. Beaubien" who
offers a straightforward summary of Fourier.
Afterwards, the narrator resolves to "devote myself body and soul
to the cause of World-Reform" (SR
112).
The
overjoyed Priscilla casts her lot as well.
An "honest Christian" urges her to turn away from reform and
especially from modern spiritualism, a form of "demonic
worship." But she declares,
"Satan is my hero" (116). A
lineal descendant of Cotton Mather warns the narrator that he too is
"forming a league with the devil" (124), but to no avail; emboldened,
the narrator mesmerizes and enslaves Priscilla à la Westervelt. All these events unfold between the late
1830s and the mid-1840s. Looking back on
these sinful days, the dying narrator concludes that the revolutions of 1848,
like that of 1789, were inexplicable without postulating the agency of some
invisible force: "France, Europe was mesmerized" (SR 163).
In
fact, the repentant narrator reveals that it was he, assisted by his mesmerized
slave Priscilla, who had been the agent of the plot to overthrow all the
governments of the world:
[G]reat movements
are never carried on by simple human means alone, and never get beyond
brilliant theories unless inspired and sustained by a superhuman power, either
from heaven or from hell. . . .
Men might form the most brilliant ideals, bring out the soundest, most
attractive and perfect theories of reform, but it would avail nothing, unless
endued with a power not their own, to realize them in practice. Here was the defect in the plan of Signor
Urbini [a Mazziniesque reformer in the novel] and Young
Italy. . . . It is
necessary to have a support outside of man; a source of power which is not
human, and as the world would say, either divine or satanic, to be able to
accomplish any thing.
But had I not this very
power in the agent I had been experimenting with? What else was this mesmeric agent, whether a
primitive, an elemental force of nature, or indeed a superhuman spirit endowed
with intelligence and will? . . .
Mesmeric clubs or circles must be formed on all points on which it is
necessary to operate, and batteries to be erected everywhere, so that anywhere,
and at any moment, a mesmeric current may be sent instantaneously through the
masses, infusing into them a superhuman resolution and energy, and making them
stand up and march as one man. This,
then, was the first thing to be done. I
would erect my mesmeric batteries in every country in Europe, all connected by
an invisible, but unbroken, magnetic chain.
(SR 170-172)
Despite Brownson's earlier predictions in such articles
as "No Church, No Reform," the Continent had been swept by a reform
movement, one that had largely left the Catholic Church on the sidelines. Since Brownson was convinced that mere human
agency could not have fashioned a simulacrum of the Body of Christ that
"st[ood] up and march[ed] as one man," it followed that the power had
to be satanic. This suggests a somewhat
different interpretation of "A specter is haunting Europe." Acting on the Devil's behalf, the narrator
and Priscilla had gone on a whirlwind tour, magnetizing reformer after reformer
and turning them into revolutionaries (173-217). Had it not been for Pius the Ninth's
"passive courage"—a phrase that would have made Fuller howl—Europe
might have been lost (212).
As
with the Salem witch trials, another social crisis blamed on Satan, the
American failure to redeem the world calls the nation's claim to theological
exceptionalism into question. (Note that
Brownson consciously alluded to the witch trials in the novel through the pious
descendant of Cotton Mather.) Brownson's
idiosyncratic reading of 1848 suggests one possible cause of the earlier
psychic crisis in the Bay Colony. If the
Puritan city on a hill had in the end failed to redeem the world, then the
fault must lie with an unseen evil Other.
All these witch hunts—the search for the betrayer of China, of France,
of the Bay Colony—are symptomatic of a loss of faith in America's Christic
mission. Spiritualism intersects not
only with socialism, but with the failure of American utopianism. At the close of The Spirit-Rapper, the remorseful sinner evaluates his life
according to a formula we have seen before: "Had I not blasphemed the Holy
Ghost, committed the Unpardonable Sin?" (SR 399)
[1]Coverdale's choice of books during his
convalescence also suggests the community's violation of sexual norms—he reads
Zenobia's copies of George Sand's romances as well as Fourier (52). In The
Bread-winners, Maud reads La petite
fadette because she has seen newspaper articles referring to Sand as a
"corrupter of youth." The
upwardly-mobile teen is disappointed to learn that Sand writes about peasants
"poor as crows," loses interest, and thus remains uncorrupted (29).