Novel Judgements by William P. MacNeil

Author:William P. MacNeil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

getting the (law-)job done: Holgrave as the Legal Realist; Phoebe as the Legal ‘Real’ (HSG, p. 122)

Holgrave? A deliverer of the law? To whom even Phoebe refers to as ‘lawless’ (HSG, p. 75)? Who, himself, rejects freely all laws, let alone courts, including (and especially) the one that ruled against Clifford; for Holgrave impliedly calls this court’s authority into question when he suggests that his house-mate was ‘settled by a competent tribunal, or one which called itself competent’ (HSG, p. 82, italics mine). I italicise the preceding quotation’s modifying clause in order to highlight what any jurisprudentially informed reader would recognise instantly in its note of qualification: an utterance of legal critique, its ‘hermeneutics of (curial) suspicion’ being unmistakeable here. Not that the courts are Holgrave’s only target. Legal personnel, as much as court processes, attract their fair share of criticism, even when they cross Holgrave’s field of vision as aesthetic subjects, caught under the glare of his daguerreotypic gaze. Consider how vividly the ‘pictures out of sunshine’ (HSG, p. 80), which this piercing stare focalises, disclose the ‘secret character’ (HSG, p. 80) of Judge Pyncheon. For, here, Holgrave’s much commented upon26 art of the camera literally brings to light His Honour’s putatively hidden nature: one that is ‘sly, subtle, hard, imperious and, withal, cold as ice’ (HSG, p. 80); and, as such, is very much at variance with the ‘exceedingly pleasant countenance’ (HSG, p. 81), the Judge presents to the world at large.

26 Charles Swan observes Holgrave’s ‘democratic art’ which ‘does not allow the operator deferentially to flatter the patron’, instead the ‘daguerreotype reveals the truth about Judge Pyncheon and that the daguerreotype is like the Colonel’: C. Swan, ‘The House of the Seven Gables: Hawthorne’s Modern Novel of 1848’, Modern Language Review 86(1), 1991, 9. Similarly, Alfred Hitchcock writes in a much earlier article that, ‘Where the shadow falls, a barrier rises which no camera penetrates’ where ‘the Judge, hiding a black heart beneath sultry smiles’ reveals to the reader that ‘their composite is Hawthorne himself, a truer portrait than that which looks down on me from my study wall’: A. Hitchcock, ‘The Relation of the Picture Play to Literature’, English Journal 4(5), 1915, 293. See also L. B. Levy, ‘Picturesque Style in “The House of the Seven Gables” ’, New England Quarterly 39(2), 1966, 159; R. Thomas, ‘Double Exposures: Arresting Images in “Bleak House” and the “The House of the Seven Gables” ’, A Forum on Fiction 31(1), 1997, 102–103 and 106; A. Trachtenberg, ‘Seeing and Believing: Hawthorne’s Reflections on the Daguerreotype in “The House of the Seven Gables” ’ 9(3), 1997, 466–468, 471 and 476–477.

Now such an ideological revelation – of the malign motives underlying the surface sweetness of the law – would be a truly radical gesture, worthy of legality’s most vociferous critic; if, that is, the Judge’s public–private divide wasn’t the worst-kept confidence in Salem, the town’s ‘diurnal gossip’ (HSG, p. 106) being so much a-twitter with the ‘vast discrepancy’ (HSG, p. 106) between Jaffrey’s exterior (‘wherewith he shone like the noonday sun’, HSG, p.

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