"Filial Duty": Reading the Patriarchal Body in 'The Custom House.'
1993; University of North Texas Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-1512
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research
ResumoShall these bones live? In narrating Hawthorne's transition form the of civil servant to that of romance writer, Custom House is a protracted and rhetorically complex meditation on the gendered, historically determined subjectivity of the male author in postcolonial America. Suspended between offices, Hawthorne's narrator seeks renewed connection to the project: obsessively returning to the graves of the dead fathers and impelled to figure his own grave as the site of reading and writing, he consistently inflects filial desire through the sign of the corpse. The ejected Surveyor's prevading and continual hope--a hallucination, which. . .haunts him while he lives, and. . . him for a brief space after death--is, that, finally. . . he shall be restored to office (p. 39).(1) This passage, which I see as representative of the recurring impulse in Custom House to situate the narrator's hope or desire for paternal approval in a gothic space between the living and the dead, provides a vantage point from which to survey the persistent sensibility, the prevailing rhetorical tendency, and the controlling trope of Hawthorne's quest for affiliation. Here, the hope of imminent restoration to is rewritten as a which--personified implicitly as a ghostlike presence--haunts the living man and torments him after his anticipated death. This connection of desire to hallucination resonates throughout Custom House; it informs scene after scene in which Hawthorne's assumption of the task of writing The Scarlet Letter is attended by the ghost of the dead fathers, ghost summoned up by the activities of literally reading archival texts or figuratively reading the graves of the fathers. If Hawthorne's desire is to align himself with the powerful men of the past, then the rhetorical strategy, the trope, by which he makes present or embodies as revenant the ghosts of the dead fathers is prosopopoeia, the figure that, as Deborah Esch point out, gives phenomenality to his speculation and desire, to the point of their being incarnated in the person of his projected alter ego.(2) For prosopopoeia--the ascription of a name, a face, and a voice to the absent, the inanimate, or the dead(3)--is supremely the enabling figure of the ghost story; as Paul de Man observes, prosopopoeia is hallucinatory. To make the invisible visible is uncanny.(4) Since, in Custom House, the dead fathers are exhumed and revived to serve as confidants, witnesses, accusers, avengers, judges,(5) it is precisely through the operations of this controlling trope that the psychological conflation of death and desire, as well as the political specificity of Hawthorne's desired office, can be explored. Recent biographical and psychoanalytic approaches to gender politics in The Scarlet Letter have argued the centrality of the maternal, specifically, of Hawthorne's desire to recover the or absent mother. Nina Baym suggests that, because viewed patriarchal social organizations . . . with enmity, the search for the mother, rather than the father, underlies much of the story pattering in his mature fiction.(6] Joanne Feit Diehl, while conceding that Hawthorne narratively conceptualizes . . . a desire to reestablish relation with those forebears, agrees that Scarlet Letter continually reenacts an unfulfilled or thwarted desire . . . for a discourse that can carry back . . . into the mother's presence.(7) While these lines of inquiry go far in illuminating Hawthorne's ambivalent representation of Hester Prynne's feminist politics, their brief and tantalizing gestures toward the lost father need to be unpacked and explored if we are to grasp the filial anxieties that attend the scenes of reading and writing in Custom House. If, as I shall argue, seeks connection to the Puritan fathers by writing his participation in the transhistorical project of surveying and containing women's resistant energies, then Custom House narrates (and engenders) his assumption of a agenda in accepting Surveyor Pue's directive to reinscribe an exemplary tale of Puritan misogyny. …
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