A Carnivalesque Reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the
Seven Gables
Ensieh Shabanirad
PhD Candidate of Language and English Literature
University of Tehran, Iran
Zohreh Ramin
Assistant Professor of Language and English Literature
University of Tehran, Iran
Abstract: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables was
published in 1851. Its origin is in the history of the Puritans of the
Massachusetts. It addresses the Puritan culture of the seventeenthcentury America as, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms, a ‘monlogical culture.’
According to Bakhtin the heteroglossic form of the novel allows for the
challenging and subverting of monologic and authoritarian discourse.
This is linked to Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘carnivalesque’, whereby the
established language of authority is flouted and social hierarchies are
temporarily inverted. This paper aims to apply Bakhtin’s theory of the
carnivalsque to The House of the Seven Gables. In this novel
heteroglossic language and carnivalized action create polyphonic
exchanges in which power relations between characters are negotiated.
This novel, it is argued, exposes the ruptures and grotesqueness of the
American Puritan culture.
Key Terms: Mikhail Bakhtin, heteroglossia, carnivalesque, grotesque,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables.
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1. Introduction: Bakhtin and Carnival
Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian thinker, is one of the most influential
writers of the twentieth century. He has made great contributions in such
fields as history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, linguistics and
literature. Writing under the repressive Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin,
Bakhtin labored most of his life in obscurity. In David Lodge’s words,
Bakhtin’s career was “an extraordinary story of outstanding intellectual
achievement in the teeth of every imaginable obstacle and
discouragement” (3). Bakhtinian concepts such as dialogism, polyphony,
heteroglossia and carnival, to name just a few, have dominated Western
literary theory and criticism towards the end of the twentieth century.
Bakhtin’s theory of the novel relies on the key concept of the
carnivalesque which was first introduced in his well-known book
Rabelais and His World, a study of the writings of Francois Rabelais
(1494-1553). The novel is the form, as Simon Dentith explains, “which
most exploits the heteroglossic potential that is present in all languages
that come from all but the most isolated and homogenous societies. But
the specific social and institutional form which enables and anticipates
the activity of the novel is the epochal force of carnival” (Simon Dentith
57).
Carnival is a subversive force, a lived experience, providing an
opportunity for the people to oppose the authority. In fact, carnival
allows people who in life are separated by hierarchical barriers to enter
into free and tangible contact, suspending the established official order
and allowing new relationships to emerge. Carnival turns the world
upside down. Hierarchies are reversed and suspended. As Vincent B.
Leitch points out, “The carnivalesque is Bakhtin’s term for those forms
of unofficial culture that resist official culture, political oppression, and
totalitarian order through laughter, parody, and grotesque.” (1187) In
relation to Rabelais, Bakhtin shows how the official ceremonies and
customs of the Church and the feudal state are parodied and ridiculed by
rituals that show low bodily functions. Some critics interpret Bakhtin’s
account of carnival as being a critique of Stalinism. Bakhtin’s study of
Rabelais, in Dominick LaCapra’s words, “can be read as a hidden
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polemic directed against Stalinist uses of Marxism in the Soviet regime
of the 1930s and 1940s” (321). Bakhtin’s conception of carnival creates
a fulfilling and intellectually acceptable vision of an “alternative social
context” to the Stalinist system(Ibid. 322). Carnival opposes all that is
Stalinist: the dialogical voice of unofficial culture in the people resisted
the theological monologism of the Catholic Church and tyrannical
communism; the grotesque body was celebrated, not condemned as
sinful; collective laughter in broad daylight defeats eschatological terror
and laughter as sinful in Russia; vitalist primitivism replaces the ascetic
and life-denying culture of celibate prelacy. The utopian freedom of
permanent becoming transcends the prison house of dogma and Gulag of
dissent. (Shakespeare and Carnival: 4)
Carnival practices are found throughout the world. Carnival was
traditionally staged as a licensed or authorized activity, not only offering
an alternative to official imagery but also suspending and inverting
social hierarchies. It provided an alternative construction of social
relations. For Bakhtin, carnival is both a populist utopian vision of the
world seen from below and a festive critique, through the inversion of
hierarchy, of the ‘high’ culture:
As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrates
temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order; it
marks the suspension of all hierarchal rank, privileges, norms, and
prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming,
change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and
complete. (Bakhtin 1968: 109)
Carnival is presented by Bakhtin as a world of topsy-turvy, of heteroglot
exuberance, of ceaseless overrunning and excess where all is mixed,
hybrid, ritually degraded and defiled. Carnivalesque practices, in
general, consist of three key aspects: grotesque imagery, laughter, and
the market location.
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1.1. Grotesque imagery
Carnivalesque practices were imbued with images of the grotesque
body, images of “exaggeration, hyperbolism…[and] excessiveness”
(Bakhtin Rabelais: 303). Fundamental to the corporeal, collective nature
of carnival is what Bakhtin calls ‘grotesque realism’. It emphasizes the
material and the bodily. Grotesque realism uses the material body to
represent cosmic, social, and linguistic elements of the world. In
contrast with the classic conception of the body as a complete,
individual entity, the grotesque conception of the body was of an
incomplete, amorphous entity.
Moreover, grotesque imagery contributed to the alternative construction
of reality provided by carnival as a whole. The material imagery of the
grotesque not only provided an alternative to the spiritual imagery of
the Church, but the dynamism of the grotesque body represented an
alternative to the stasis of the official order. This is because, as Peter
Stallybrass points out, “it is always in process, it is always becoming, it
is a mobile and hybrid creature, disproportionate, exorbitant,
outgrowing all limits, obscenely decentered and off-balanced, a figural
and symbolic resource of parodic exaggeration and inversion” (9).
Therefore, the grotesque imagery represents an alternative to the
symbolism and ideology of officialdom. While official culture always
strove to portray social relations as natural and unchanging, grotesque
imagery contrastingly represented the extent to which human existence
was bound up with processes of transition.
‘The essential principle of grotesque realism’, Bakhtin writes, ‘is
degradation’ (Rabelais, 19). In carnival the high, the elevated, the
official, even the sacred, is degraded and debased, but as a condition of
popular renewal and regeneration. Carnival always celebrates renewal.
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1.2. Laughter
Grotesque imagery also has an important connection with laughter, the
second aspect of carnival. Bakhtin ascribes great importance to the
spirit of carnivalesque laughter.
Let us say a few initial words about the complex nature of
carnivalesque laughter. It is, first of all, a festive laughter. Therefore it
is not an individual reaction to some isolated ‘comic’ event. Carnival
laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in
scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s
participants. The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay
relativity. Third, this laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at
the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and
revives. Such is the laughter of the carnival. (Bakhtin 1968: 11-12)
Carnival laughter has a vulgar, earthy quality to it. It was responsible for
shaking the body out of its proper form; laughter caused an eruption of
the other within the self, and it was probably for such a reason ─ the
transgression of bodily propriety, that Bakhtin places particular
emphasis on laughter. Laughter was also transgressive because it
traversed the limits of all social forms and was very ambiguous. While it
humiliated and mortified, it also revived and renewed. “Laughter
degrades and materialises” (Bakhtin 1968: 20). In carnival, laughter
pushes aside the seriousness and hierarchies of official life. Carnival
laughter is egalitarian, and derision, not death, is the great leveller.
In his essay ‘Epic and Novel’, Bakhtin accredits laughter with the
capacity to undertake a thorough examination of objects that fall within
its scope:
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Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close,
of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it
familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from
above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center,
doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it
freely and experiment with it. (Bakhtin The Dialogic Imagination: 23)
According to Bakhtin, carnivalesque laughter had the potential to
demystify reality insofar as it provided the means for probing the
objects around it. It was not the objects of laughter, though, that
interested Bakhtin so much as the perspective laughter brings. Laughter
drew attention to the forms of relationship which were often fixed in
one-sided, hierarchical order. Carnival laughter could subvert official
authority. Through laughter, according to Bakhtin, “the world is seen
anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when seen from the
serious standpoint…Certain essential aspects of the world are accessible
only to laughter” (1968: 66)
1. 3. The marketplace
The third aspect of carnival is its typical location: the marketplace.
Bakhtin locates the autonomy of the people in the marketplace where
grotesquery and laughter took place. To Bakhtin the marketplace was an
unofficial site where people were in control, a place where people could
experience a sense of their own collectivity:
The carnivalesque crowd in the marketplace or in the streets is not
merely a crowd. It is a people as a whole, but organized in their own
way, the way of the people. It is outside of and contrary to all existing
forms of the coercive socioeconomic and political organization, which is
suspended for the time of the festivity. (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World 255)
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Here in the market place people could communicate freely and frankly.
The coarse and familiar speech of the fair and the marketplace provided
a complex vital repertoire of speech patterns excluded from official
discourse which could be used for parody, subversive humor and
inversion. In the fair, the place of high and low, inside and outside,
stranger and local, commerce and festivity was never a simple given. In
such a hybrid place , Bakhtin argued, one could experience “a certain
extraterritoriality” from “official order and official ideology” (154):
Abuses, curses, profanities, and improprieties are the unofficial elements
of speech…Such speech forms, liberated from norms, hierarchies, and
prohibitions of established idiom, become themselves a peculiar argot
and create a special collectivity.( Bakhtin 1968: 187)
The language of the marketplace is ambivalent and subversive,
simultaneously debasing and renewing, revealing and hiding, selling and
entertaining. Therefore, while carnival laughter and grotesquery had the
potential to critique the ruling ideology, it was in the marketplace that
people could voice the suppressed and the unexpressed.
2. Carnival and The House of the Seven Gables
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables was published in
1851. Like its predecessor, The Scarlet Letter, its origin is in the history
of the Puritans of the Massachusetts. Hawthorne’s family history can be
traced in this later book as well, in the story of the Pyncheon family over
two hundred years in Salem. Puritanism and the history of early
Massachusetts settlements form one important context in which to
understand Hawthorne’s writing. Scholars such as Charles Ryskamp and
Michael Colacurcio have connected characters and events in
Hawthorne’s works to the New England historical record. A tale of the
effects of sin and guilt as manifested through successive generations of a
New England family, Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables is a
novel with multiple levels of meaning that have lead to a wide variety of
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critical interpretations. The events of The House of the Seven Gables
center on the Pynchon House, located on a piece of land obtained more
than a hundred-fifty years earlier by Colonel Pyncheon after he had
played a role in having the land’s owner, Mathew Maule, hanged as a
wizard. According to legend, Maule placed a curse on the Colonel. This
curse became the source of many misfortunes suffered by his
descendants.
Bakhtin’s notion of carnival appears germane to the novels of Nathaniel
Hawthorne. A carnivalesque reading of The House of the Seven Gables
uncovers the subversive elements in the American Puritan culture and
highlights the cultural exchange between the forces of gentility and
democracy. The language of heteroglossia is evident in this tale, giving
voice to a variety of discourses explaining the world of New England.
These discourses include the language of New England Puritanism
obsessed by sin and determination, the language of capitalism and
commerce, describing a world dominated by profit and loss, and the
language of science and technology. Each discourse Hawthorne employs
in this novel creates a different way of understanding the transitional
world of the new world.
Throughout his novel The House of the Seven Gables Hawthorne brings
together heterogeneous collections of characters from various social
orders and have them mingle in festival-like gatherings reminiscent of
medieval carnival celebration. For another, the interaction among these
disparate characters often results in the suspension of hierarchical
barriers and in what Bakhtin calls “carnivalistic mésalliances” that
mingle “the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great
with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid” (Problems 123). As
Bakhtin argues,
All distance between people is suspended, and a special carnival
category goes into effect: free and familiar contact among people. This
is a very important aspect of a carnival sense of the world. People who
in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter into free
familiar contact on the carnival square. (123)
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Thus, familiar and free format of carnival allows everything that may
normally be separated to reunite. More than any other of Hawthorne’s
novels, The House of the Seven Gables seems attuned to the American
present – engaged with various social, economic, and technological
phenomena. It also features class conflicts, business and political
intrigue.(Person) In Harold Bloom’s words: “This novel portrays
Hawthorne’s contemporary world more than his other American
novels…the contemporary, the local, and the national qualities lurk
between the lines… Nevertheless, this novel contains the most “literal
actuality” in any of Hawthorne’s novels”. (Harold Bloom)
The House of the Seven Gables constitutes Hawthorne’s employment of
American philosophy as a basis for a social ethic. The theme of this
romance is an inherited sin, the sin of aristocratic pretensions against a
moral order which calls for a truer evaluations of man. For the
inheritance of the Pyncheon family proves to be no more than the
antagonism of the old Colonel and his world toward things democratic.
Hawthorne was aware of the fact that the Puritan society of New
England had been as aristocratic in its way as the feudal society of
Europe. He saw the sharp contrast that existed between the various
members of the social group. The servants who stood inside the entrance
to the House of the Seven Gables directing one class of people to the
parlor and the other to the kitchen preside likewise over the social
distinctions of the whole story, separating the Pyncheons from the
Maules and gentility from democracy. Standing as the division between
high and low, the house is located midway between two civilizations. It
faces the commerce of the street on the west, while to the rear is an old
garden. To move from the sepulchral darkness of the old Pyncheon
house to the dusky sunlight of the street is to discover the hubbub of the
contemporary environment. The locus of the carnival is the street where
counter-hegemonic, subversive and mocking voices run parallel to the
official, serious, and pious tone of the ruling class. Although Hawthorne
occasionally describes the street as a quiet by-way, he obviously
intended to capture within it the whole throbbing turmoil of nineteenthcentury life in this country. The street becomes "a mighty river of life,
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massive in its tide," brimming with chattering housewives and raucous
peddlers and venders; the world is like a train or a bus dropping, here
and there, a passenger, and picking up another. It seems that the town’s
streets are bustling with life.
As the story opens, Hepzibah Pyncheon, the inhabitant of the gabled
house, is compelled at the age of sixty to stoop from her aristocratic
isolation from the world , and open a little shop, in order that she may
provide for the subsistence of an unfortunate brother. The chapters
entitled “The Little Shop-Windoew,” “The First Customer,” and a “Day
Behind the Counter,” in which her humiliations are described, include
the mingling of the high and the low and the inversion of the hierarchies.
Hepzibah Pyncheon’s reluctant decision to open a cent shop because she
desperately needs the money enables Hawthorne to engage the streets of
Salem – to represent the street traffic that otherwise would never enter
the aristocratic precincts of the House. Hepzibah feels embarrassed
when she discovers that her customers “evidently considered themselves
not merely her equals, but her patrons and superiors” (2: 54). After her
first day on the job, this “decayed gentlewoman” (2: 54) comes to some
“disagreeable conclusions as to the temper and manners of what she
termed the lower classes, whom, heretofore, she had looked down upon
with a gentle and pitying complacence, as herself occupying a sphere of
unquestionable superiority.” One of Hawthorne’s purposes is to portray
the social leveling forces at work in American society, coincident with
the rise of business, manufacturing, and a host of opportunities to sell
things, including entertainment, to increasingly wealthy middle-class
people. Hepzibah, for example, quickly finds herself with a double
identification. Suddenly a member of the shopkeeper’s class, she looks
with disdain at the “idle aristocracy” – at one woman in particular,
whose “delicate and costly summer garb” and “slippered feet” make her
look as if she is floating down the street. “For what good end,” Hepzibah
wonders bitterly, “in the wisdom of Providence, does that woman live!
Must the whole world toil, that the palms of her hands may be kept
white and delicate?” (2: 55).
Even if the central focus of the novel remains the fortunes of the
aristocratic Pyncheons, Hawthorne includes a working-class perspective
10
– often in the form of characters who critique the Pyncheons from
outside their house. Even before Hepzibah has her first customer, two
“laboring men” assess her prospects (2: 47). Savvy patrons of local
businesses, they don’t think much of Hepzibah’s chances. Jaffrey will
later tell her that, ever since Clifford’s return from prison, her
“neighbors have been eye-witnesses to whatever passed in the garden.
The butcher, the baker, the fishmonger, some of the customers of your
shop, and many a prying old woman, have told me several of the secrets
of your interior” (2: 236). This remarkable statement, which sounds
more like something we would hear in our own time, is a function of
social leveling. The street itself is a marketplace, furthermore, featuring
vendors and popular entertainers.
In his introductory chapter Bakhtin outlines the basis of his approach to
what he sees as Rabelais’ ‘world’. There are two principal concepts, that
of carnival and the grotesque. Bakhtin conceives an oppositional folk
culture the expression of which is humour:
All these forms of protocol and ritual based on laughter and consecrated
by tradition existed in all the countries of medieval Europe; they were
sharply distinct from the serious, official, ecclesiastical, feudal and
political cult forms and ceremonials. They offered a completely
different, non-official, extra-ecclesiastical and extra-political aspect of
the world, of man, and of human relations; they built a second world in
which all medieval people participated more or less, in which they lived
during a given time of the year. (pp. 5–6)
In a scene that Hawthorne took directly from his notebook, he describes
an organ grinder and his monkey, who set up opposite the Pyncheon
house to entertain the crowd. With his “man-like expression” and
“enormous tail, (too enormous to be decently concealed under his
gabardine” (2: 164), the organ grinder’s monkey creates a scene imbued
with the spirit of carnival. Representative of increasingly popular forms
of mass entertainment, such as the minstrel show, the monkey “offers
the sort of obscene caricature of black male sexuality so common within
the period’s minstrel performances” (Anthony, 447). The chapter (“The
Arched Window”) in which the organ-grinder appears is a set piece – an
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example of the crowd scenes that Hawthorne loved to write and an
opportunity for him to root the House of the Seven Gables in the texture
of popular culture.
Class conflict plays an important role in The House of the Seven Gables
in the tension between the Pyncheons and the Maules, and Holgrave
clearly comes from a workingman’s background. “I was not born a
gentleman,” he insists to Hepzibah; “neither have I lived like one” (2:
45). He is the sort of man Hawthorne encountered on the docks in
Boston and Salem when he worked in the Custom Houses there, and he
resembles many of the Brook Farmers whose ranks Hawthorne seemed
proud to join. Holgrave promises to be a spokesman for democratization
and social leveling of the sort that the Brook Farmers imagined. The
terms “lady” and “gentleman,” he observes, “had a meaning, in the past
history of the world, and conferred privileges, desirable, or otherwise, on
those entitled to bear them. In the present – and still more in the future
condition of society – they imply, not privilege, but restriction” (1: 45).
A man on the make, Holgrave also represents the new breed of
entrepreneurial opportunists that proliferated in nineteenth-century
America. In stark contrast to Hepzibah, who feels as if the “sordid stain”
from the first copper coin she receives in her newly opened cent shop
“could never be washed away from her palm” (1: 51), Holgrave seems
comfortable in a society that increasingly valued and rewarded men who
invested themselves in business and marketable professions. Protean in
his capabilities–a far cry from the eighteenth-century model of
artisanship and lifelong devotion to a single craft–he is only twenty-two
years old but has already held many positions: country schoolmaster,
salesman, editor, peddler, dentist, mesmerist, and of course
Daguerreotypist (2: 176). Holgrave has changed with the economy,
taking up each new thing as it comes along and promises to turn a profit.
Class issues in The House of the Seven Gables reflect a deep, fearful
interest in class generally in the 1850s, a time of social crisis when, as
Hawthorne himself experienced, bourgeois existence became dominant
ideologically, yet remained highly vulnerable to economic uncertainty
(Richard H. Millington 92). Women are a focal point in Hawthorne’s
deconstruction of these class formations. In an economy where only 30
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percent of women (mainly unmarried and seldom middle class) did paid
work, middle-class women’s material dependency on male family
members demonstrated their social ascendancy. But this also contained
the threat of destitution and the loss of the fiercely promoted feminine
“decency” that distinguished their middle-class existence in moral terms
while veiling its actual financial base. So the event most likely to
dismantle the bourgeois illusion is the woman going out to work, or in
the case of House of the Seven Gables, the private home shockingly
opened up to commerce when unsupported gentlewoman Hepzibah
starts her shop. Historically, separation of money-making work premises
from the home was fundamental in the new capitalist order; here the
shop is tellingly part of the house.
Several commentators have interpreted the novel as a statement of the
superiority of American democracy to the Old World aristocratic social
system. However, in the chapter “Behind the Counter” Hawthorne
demonstrates how far American society is from the fundamental
egalitarian principles. Hepzibah, at the opening of the book the sole
possessor of the dark recesses of the mansion, is the embodiment of
decayed gentility, sustained only by her delusion of family importance,
lacking any revivifying touch with outward existence. It is impossible in
the present state of society even for the dark old sanctuary of Pyncheon
gentility to preserve its insularity intact.
Let us behold, in poor Hepzibah, the immemorial, lady—
two hundred years old, on this side of the water, and thrice as many
on the other, —with her antique portraits, pedigrees, coats of
arms, records and traditions, and her claim, as joint heiress, to
that princely territory at the eastward, no longer a wilderness, but
a
populous
fertility,—born,
too,
in
Pyncheon Street, under the Pyncheon Elm, and in the Pyncheon House
where she has spent all her days, — reduced. Now, in that very
house, to be the hucksteress of a cent‐shop. (26)
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The opening of the cent-shop to let the outside world into the stifling
interior of the secluded house is a symbol of the salutary virtues of the
Maule forces, or the forces of democracy, in contrast to the moribund
condition of the Pyncheons. “ In this republican country, amid the
fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the
drowning‐point.”(26) The Pyncheons were drowning in their own
separateness, unable to draw the breath of life because they had so
entirely shut themselves away from it. The cent-shop is a kind of
pulmonary connection from humanity to the almost strangled existence
of the House of the Seven Gables:
Hitherto, the life‐blood has been gradually chilling in your veins
as you sat aloof, within your circle of gentility, while the rest of
the world was fighting out its battle with one kind of necessity or
another. Henceforth, you will at least have the sense of healthy
and natural effort for a purpose, and of lending your strength be
it great or small—to the united struggle of mankind. This is success,—
all the success that anybody meets with!(31)
Hepzibah’s first customer is an urchin, Ned Higgins, who is given a free
gingerbread man and immediately comes back for another. He wants, in
fact, to exploit an individual who out of generosity and out of
aristocratic reluctance to go into trade ignores the laws of a free market
economy and gives instead of barters. It is no accident, surely, that the
gingerbread man is Jim Crow, the colloquial, demeaning name for
blacks. The urchin unceremoniously swallows both Jim Crow
gingerbread men. This is a comic but telling image of an oppressive
caste and class society.
The gingerbread incident leads Hepzibah to change her mind about the
class system, and she comes “to very disagreeable conclusions as to the
temper and manners of what she termed the lower classes, whom,
heretofore, she had looked down upon with a gentle and pitying
complacence, as herself occupying a sphere of unquestionable
superiority.” At the same time she finds herself fiercely resentful of the
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idle aristocracy to which she has herself recently belonged. Seeing an
expensively dressed lady floating along the streets, she wonders: “Must
the whole world toil, that the palms of her hands may be kept white and
delicate?” Now in trade as well as desperately poor, she has a new, sour,
view of the oppressive and discriminatory social system that keeps some
idle while many toil and suffer. It takes some time, therefore, for her to
realize the truth in Holgrave’s remark to her that in working for a living:
“you will at least have the sense of healthy and natural effort for
a purpose, and of lending your strength be it great or small
to the united struggle of mankind. This is success,—all the
success that anybody meets with!”
Hepzibah did undergo “the invigorating breath of a fresh outward
atmosphere, after the long torpor and monotonous seclusion of her
life.”(36-37) But the experience was transitory. She retained her
aristocratic arrogance, and inwardly despised the people by whose
pennies she hoped to be sustained. The democracy she still repudiated
failed to provide for her because she tried to take it in on her own
conditions, to pervert it to her own undemocratic ends. Hepzibah, “the
recluse of half a lifetime,” proved pathetically incapable of merging with
humanity in the common struggle for existence. The childish, ineffectual
Clifford exemplifies a maladjustment like his sister. But he too had
moments in which he felt the regenerative urge to burst from the inner
prison of himself into the stream of life. “With a shivering repugnance
at the idea of personal contact with the world, a powerful
impulse still seized on Clifford, whenever the rush and roar of
the human tide grew strongly audible to him.” (126) On one such
occasion he was watching from a window of the House of the Seven
Gables when a political parade went by in the street below. It seemed
“one broad mass of existence,—one great life,—one collected body
of mankind,
with
a
vast,
homogeneous
spirit
animating it. But, on the other hand, if an impressible person, standing al
one over the brink of one of these processions, should behold it,
not in its atoms, but in its aggregate,—as a mighty river of life,
massive in its tide, and black with mystery, and, out of its depths,
15
calling to the kindred depth within him.” (126-127) So strong was the
influence on him to join in the march of his fellow men that it affected
him as a sort of primal madness, and he could “hardly be restrained from
plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies.” He was
impelled, Hawthorne suggests, by “a natural magnetism, tending
towards the great centre of humanity.” Breathlessly he remarked to the
terrified Hepzibah that had he taken the plunge and survived it, it would
have made him another man. Hawthorne interpolates again by saying
that he “required to take a deep, deep plunge into the ocean of
human life, and to sink down and be covered by its profoundness,
and then to emerge, sobered, invigorated, restored to the world
and to himself.”(127) In his desire shortly after this incident to join the
villagers going to church on Sunday, he displayed a “similar yearning to
renew the broken links of brotherhood with his kind.” Yet he and
Hepzibah were unable to go through with it once they stood on the front
step in plain sight of the whole town and all its citizens. They retreated
into the gloom of the house which was the historical and material
symbol of the isolation of their hearts, “For, what other dungeon is so
dark as one’s own heart! What jailor so inexorable as one’s self!” The
novel is making the point that unless we escape from the past and accept
our common, democratic, yet independent lot, we remain shackled to it.
3.Conclusion
Through the carnival and carnivalesque literature, a ‘world upsidedown’ is created, ideas and truths are endlessly tested and contested, and
all demand equal dialogic status. The ‘jolly relativity’ of all things is
proclaimed by alternative voices within the carnivalized literary text that
de-privileged the authoritative voice of the hegemony through their
mingling of high culture with the profane. For Bakhtin it is within
literary forms like the novel that one finds the site of resistance to
authority and the place where cultural, and potentially political, change
can take place. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables
has its origin in the Puritan culture of the seventeenth-century America
which is considered, in Bakhtin’s terms, a ‘monlogical culture.’
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According to Bakhtin the heteroglossic form of the novel allows for the
challenging and subverting of monologic and authoritarian discourse. In
this novel heteroglossic language and carnivalized action create
polyphonic exchanges in which power relations between characters are
negotiated. This novel exposes the ruptures and grotesqueness of the
American Puritan culture. The Salem street and the marketplace in The
House of the Seven Gables are public domains where diverse economic,
gender, and ethnic groups are present. It is the site of carnival, a place in
which the ruptures and grotesqueness of the American Puritan culture is
exposed and people are seen as equals.
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Works Cited
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Caryl Emerson. Theory and History of Literature 8. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1984.
---. Rabelais and His World.(1968) Trans. Helen Iswolsky. Cambridge,
Mass., MIT Press. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington IN: Indiana UP, 1984.
Bloom, Harold. Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Bloom’s Literary
Criticism, 2008.
Dentith, Simon. Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader. London:
Routledge, 1995.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. New York:
Pocket Books, Inc., 1950.
Knowles, Ronald. Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin. London:
Macmillan Press Ltd, 1998.
LaCapra, Dominick. Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts,
Contexts, Language. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983.
Leitch, Viencent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. new
york: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.
Lodge, David. After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London:
Routledge, 1990.
Millington, Richard, H. The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel
Hawthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.
Person, S. Leland. The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel
Hawthorne. Cambridge: www. Cambridge.org.
Stallybrass, Peter. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. New York:
Cornell University Press, 1986.
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