PICTURES OF MEAT IN HAWTHORNE’S BLITHEDALE ROMANCE
Location
SU-214
Department
English
Abstract
PICTURES OF MEAT IN HAWTHORNE’S BLITHEDALE ROMANCE Timothy Garrison Department of English, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, IL 60625 In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s preface to The House of Seven Gables, he defines limits on the way it may be read, in a brief proviso about the book’s genre as Romance. Should readers continue beyond the preface, they ought not take the book’s strokes too seriously and trace its teleology or real-world sourcing. Within a year, Hawthorne published another narrative, The Blithedale Romance. In spite of Hawthorne’s advice against looking too closely in his romances for traces of the real, today’s readers know of Hawthorne’s personal conflict about his family connection to the Salem witch trials–a topic that characters in The House of Seven Gables engage–as well as Hawthorne’s real-life investment and time spent at a communal farm very similar to the one featured in Blithedale. Separated by only a few years’ time, Hawthorne was writing two books that deal with reconciling the past, with the challenges and developments of an increasingly modernized age, and with society’s responses to these at around the same time that Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, in which they satirical self-label as spectral. In The House of Seven Gables, Hawthorne’s romantic presentation of such incipient facets of real life as photography and commuter rail travel provide a kind of tension against the narrative’s position in conflict with the characters’ intergenerational pasts. On the other hand, The Blithedale Romance assembles characters whose past and present lives seem loosely connected, and the newness they confront is not the impinging inventions of society but the challenge of being in society with themselves. This paper centers its focus on the moments just before and after Blithedale’s main character’s decision to leave that communal society, plumbing a less explored set of images while contrasting Coverdale’s reactions to real-life meat-processing and his reactions to the saloon paintings of meat-in-process. Notwithstanding the elements of satire in the saloon scene’s depictions, what is notable is the character’s easy negotiation of artifice and reality when contrasted to his similar yet uneasy negotiations in other chapters. What is revealed, and explored in this paper, is a question of the limits of satire.
Faculty Sponsor
Timothy Scherman
PICTURES OF MEAT IN HAWTHORNE’S BLITHEDALE ROMANCE
SU-214
PICTURES OF MEAT IN HAWTHORNE’S BLITHEDALE ROMANCE Timothy Garrison Department of English, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, IL 60625 In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s preface to The House of Seven Gables, he defines limits on the way it may be read, in a brief proviso about the book’s genre as Romance. Should readers continue beyond the preface, they ought not take the book’s strokes too seriously and trace its teleology or real-world sourcing. Within a year, Hawthorne published another narrative, The Blithedale Romance. In spite of Hawthorne’s advice against looking too closely in his romances for traces of the real, today’s readers know of Hawthorne’s personal conflict about his family connection to the Salem witch trials–a topic that characters in The House of Seven Gables engage–as well as Hawthorne’s real-life investment and time spent at a communal farm very similar to the one featured in Blithedale. Separated by only a few years’ time, Hawthorne was writing two books that deal with reconciling the past, with the challenges and developments of an increasingly modernized age, and with society’s responses to these at around the same time that Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, in which they satirical self-label as spectral. In The House of Seven Gables, Hawthorne’s romantic presentation of such incipient facets of real life as photography and commuter rail travel provide a kind of tension against the narrative’s position in conflict with the characters’ intergenerational pasts. On the other hand, The Blithedale Romance assembles characters whose past and present lives seem loosely connected, and the newness they confront is not the impinging inventions of society but the challenge of being in society with themselves. This paper centers its focus on the moments just before and after Blithedale’s main character’s decision to leave that communal society, plumbing a less explored set of images while contrasting Coverdale’s reactions to real-life meat-processing and his reactions to the saloon paintings of meat-in-process. Notwithstanding the elements of satire in the saloon scene’s depictions, what is notable is the character’s easy negotiation of artifice and reality when contrasted to his similar yet uneasy negotiations in other chapters. What is revealed, and explored in this paper, is a question of the limits of satire.