Scholarship > Photography, Statuary, Romance

Chapter 1

Photography, Statuary, Romance:

"Fidelity" and Reproduction in The House of the Seven Gables

and The Marble Faun

Should writers depict their subjects the way sculptors depict theirs, or should they operate "like photographers"? Photography at last comes into play when Nathaniel Hawthorne famously defines the genre of the literary romance in the Preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851). A novelist "is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity," while a romance writer, "if he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospheric medium to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen or enrich the shadow of the picture" (II: 1). Degrees of fidelity and kinds of reproductions issues in the age's attempts to come to terms with photography become not only concerns for Hawthorne's aesthetics, but principal conflicts in Hawthorne's romance. Alan Trachtenberg, Susan Williams, Carol Shloss, and Cathy N. Davidson have placed Holgrave, the first daguerreotypist in a major work of American literature, within historical contexts of the early debates about photography, and have linked Holgrave's reproductions with the failing Pyncheon family's attempts to reproduce itself in a new generation.¹ David Anthony and Shawn Michelle Smith have discussed Holgrave's art and this family's anxieties in broader terms. Anthony links Holgrave's art to popular culture's ambivalent attitude toward "white" identity, while Smith reads early photography galleries and family albums in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates over white supremacist constructions of "American" character.² But Holgrave is hardly Hawthorne's only artist, and his daguerreotypes are hardly the only reproductions that Hawthorne's fiction anxiously examines. His last published romance, The Marble Faun (1860), seems to omit photography altogether, makes its male hero a sculptor instead of a daguerreotypist, and rarely attracts as much attention from the readers who limn Holgrave's aesthetics. ³ But The Marble Faun uses different artistic media to resolve the anxieties that photography raises for Hawthorne in The House of the Seven Gables. Both works demonstrate his continued concern with each art medium's capacity, and each artist's fidelity, in reproducing life. Both romances in fact dramatize Hawthorne's attempts to place the genre of the romance somewhere in between photography's mechanical reproductions, which promise exacting "fidelity," and works of sculptural art, which often depict the disrobed human body in supposedly chaste "reproductions." He imports photography into The House of the Seven Gables, but goes so far as to name The Marble Faun after a sculptural monument. Placing the terms "photographic" and "sculptural" in the historical context of the eighteen-fifties and sixties in fact suggests that Hawthorne was exploring and questioning the boundaries of the romance in relation to the abilities of these various media. As an artist he sought to reproduce his imagination in his chosen medium, while also to some degree allowing the traditions of photography, sculpture, and romance to dictate the nature of those reproductions.

Why Hawthorne found his artist-characters' modes of reproduction precarious is the principal subject of this chapter; why Kenyon the sculptor is the only character in these romances destined to be both an artist and a parent at once, the key to the question. In The House of the Seven Gables, Phoebe banishes the shadows of Holgrave's Gothic art, while in The Marble Faun, Hilda brings an angelic innocence to both her Masters' paintings and her husband's aesthetics. At the story's close, Holgrave and Phoebe renounce daguerreotypes, while at the end of The Marble Faun, Hilda "allow[s] herself to be enshrined and worshiped as a household saint" (IV: 461) and not a commercial copyist. While each wife brightens her husband's brooding aesthetics, each wedding concludes an artist's career. Only Kenyon stands to reproduce both artistically and sexually, and even here Hawthorne seems anxiously to keep Kenyon's representations of an exotic Cleopatra distant from his chaste rendering of Hilda's hands. Artists keep themselves "pure" to keep all their reproductions pure, avoiding adultery in life, adulteration in art. As Hawthorne clearly understood in preserving a place in his culture for the romance, many readers within a middle-class, antebellum American audience wished to see themselves reproduced with a statue's supposed naturalness, but also with what they came to call photographic "realism." Above all, many audience members did not wish to see artistic reproductions in which people who looked like themselves, and people who seemed different or foreign, appeared indiscriminately mixed, promiscuously combined.

Concerns about an individual's fidelity to a family heritage and cultural lineage echo throughout Hawthorne's canon. Young Goodman Brown's nightmare vision leads him to believe that his boyhood teacher, Goody Cloyse, and his own wife, Faith, dance in the forestwith devils. When he witnesses or dreams Satan standing over them and saying, "Welcome, my children," "to the communion of your race" (X: 88), Hawthorne voices a deep anxiety about the traits that New England's Puritan forebears reproduced in later generations. Brown and his wife Faith go on to reproduce the race in their children, but Brown seems forever uncertain if he bequeaths them Puritan beliefs or devilish designs. Owen Warland, the hero of "The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844), tries to woo Annie Hovenden by reproducing life in a clock-work mechanism that seems as natural and delicate as a butterfly. But Annie marries blacksmith Robert Danforth, and bears a boy whom the narrator calls a "little Child of Strength" (X: 475). Robert Danforth's natural offspring crushes Owen Warland's miraculous creation at the story's close. Warland, strangely resigned to his fate, remains a bachelor who must still make his own reproductions. Finding themselves tested when it comes to family and fidelity, Hawthorne's heroes repeatedly face the ethical dilemmas of reproducing life. . . .

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