Inexpressible Privacy by Shamir Milette;

Author:Shamir, Milette;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2006-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Hawthorne’s Romance and the Right to Privacy

The home ought not to be open to the casual eye, or the secrets of it liable to the prying or the propinquity of neighbors. . . . How much greater the harm which comes from always living so near to others so exposed front and rear, and both sides, that inevitably, in spite of you, the daily life . . . is subject to influences you would gladly be rid of.

—John F. Ware

an ante

more private than a bedroom even, for neither lovers nor

maids are welcome, but without a

bedroom’s secrets . . .

Devoid of flowers and family photographs, all is subordinate

here to a function . . .

reached by an

outside staircase, domestic

noises and odors, the vast background of natural

life are shut off. Here silence

is turned into objects.

—W. H. Auden1

At the heart of the American canon stands a room. It is the room where Nathaniel Hawthorne conceived his greatest romance: suffering from the “wretched numbness” that dulled his imagination in the Salem Custom House, unable to find relief in his walks on the seashore and the New England countryside, and intimidated by the spirits of his predecessors in the Old Manse’s study, Hawthorne entered the parlor, deserted at night by wife and children and turned into a makeshift study, to find the ideal place for bringing The Scarlet Letter to life. If the archetypical study, as in Auden’s poem, is defined in opposition to domesticity—it shuns women and sexuality, shutting its door to lovers and refusing to accommodate familial portraits—Hawthorne’s makeshift study described in “The Custom House” does not oppose domesticity so much as transform it. The “little domestic scenery”—with “the chairs,” “the center table,” “the sofa,” “the picture on the wall,” “a child’s shoe”—lose their “actual substance, and become things of intellect.” The parlor as the scene of domestic events is turned into a space within Hawthorne’s mind, an uncanny space, “invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness.” Thus appropriated and defamiliarized, this room serves as the backdrop to his most famous definition of romance as “a neutral territory somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.”2 Romance, we might say, is born when domestic life is subsumed under the intractable privacy of the mind.

In the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, however, Hawthorne defines romance not in relation to domestic space but in relation to law. Romance, he writes, must “rigidly subject itself to laws,” even as it claims for itself—in contradistinction to the novel—“a right,” or “privileges” of representational latitude and of the freedom of the imagination.3 This famous definition is at this point misleadingly simple: what precisely is that system of “laws,” “rights,” and “privileges” to which the romance writer must adhere? Are those laws that delimit and determine the genre, that is, strictly aesthetic?

The last paragraph of the preface suggests otherwise. Here, in a judicious disclaimer (that has since become standard in fictional works), Hawthorne cautions his readers not to bring “his fancy-pictures .

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