I Think Therefore I Am

As I mentioned in a previous post, the concept of the individual has been with us for only a relatively short period of historical time.  Obviously, as distinct biological organisms, we have been around for tens of thousands of years.  But the notion that each one of us has an identity separate from all others like us, and that that identity has a right to certain pursuits and certain standards of recognition (to paraphrase the language of John Locke and our own Declaration of Independence) is pretty darn new.

The historical period and events that mark the development of the concept of the individual and individual rights is commonly known as the Age of Reason.  Generally, that period spans the late 17th century through much of the 18th century.  And as is so often the case in American literature and American culture,  we borrowed the principles of the Age of Reason from Europe and adapted them to our own purposes.  (For example, as we'll see later, Jefferson and the other composers of the Declaration of Independence borrowed liberally from John Locke, but made a very significant change.) 

Now, even summarizing the Age of Reason would take a while, so I'll cover other aspects in a subsequent post.  For this post, I'm going to focus of the primary instigator in the Age of Reason: science.  In a nutshell, what science was able to do that created the paradigm shift known as the Age of Reason was to make the world knowable.  This, naturally, was not an instantaneous moment, but a process extending over centuries.  The work of scientists like Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo chiseled away at the mystery of how things happened.  This process culminated in probably the most significant scientific figure of the Age of Reason, Isaac Newton.  For our purposes, there's no need to go into the specifics of their theories and discoveries.  What we need to recognize simply is that the cumulative work of these scientists took processes and events traditionally viewed as the mysterious workings of God and demystified them, measured them and codified them.  So now one could predict certain physical behaviors, rather than passively sit back and say "what will happen is God's will."  Something as simple as the law of gravity changes the dynamics of how we move through the world.  Things fall not because God casts them down, but because there are physical laws independent of any divine being that make things fall.  (And as you can tell from the following illustration, not everyone was keen on this.)

Well, so what?  So everything.  If something is knowable and predictable, then something is controllable.  By us.  We are no longer at the mercy of a mysterious force that seems to have a will of its own.  So when things happen, or something needs to be done, we don't have to implore for the intercession of that mysterious force.  Because we now know the rules, the laws, the behaviors, we can fix things ourselves, we can do things ourselves.  We come to realize that we have control over our own lives.

To get some discussion started, what I would like you to think about are the connotations of the crucial word here: Reason.  How do you define and understand reason?  What does it mean to you to say that something is Rational (and, conversely, Irrational)?

I Did It My Way

Few concepts are as precious to Americans--and I would say that no concepts are--as that of individualism.  We have unquestioningly held to the notion that autonomy rooted in our own idiosyncratic identities is a right that comes from the simple fact of being human.  (Something that in another context would be called a Natural Law.) 

Within the larger context of history, however--both American and World--individualism is a baby of a concept, and for most of history the notion of individuality would have been a head-scratcher and often downright subversive.  In a future post I will delve more into the Age of Reason and how that particular period in history fundamentally manifested and codified the concept of the individual.  For this post, however, I will dwell on the earliest perceptions of individuality in our literature as they get played out in an historical event that inspired Hawthorne's "The May-Pole of Merrymount:"  the confrontation between the Puritans and Thomas Morton of Merrymount.

One point to keep in mind when reading the two different and competing narratives that Morton was not a Puritan, yet the Puritan leadership felt no hesitation about attempting to bring him in line.  A major reason for that would be that Bradford and the Puritans perceived Morton and his shenanigans as a threat to the community.

Also keep in mind that as a writer, Morton had more options about how he told the story than Bradford did.  As I indicated in earlier posts, the Puritans had very clear ideas and restrictions about the role of the writer.  Morton operated under no such restrictions.  Morton could engage in satire and mockery, modes of discourse not available to Bradford. 

The maypole, which was a centerpiece of the dispute, was a longstanding English tradition, but one which the Puritans banned.  You can imagine then how immigrants from England, completely disconnected from everything they knew and loved, would take this effort to forbid a tradition that would connect them to home.  Yet somehow the individualistic behavior of Morton, and the symbolic power of the maypole, were seen as dire enough threats to warrant clamping down on Morton and his activities.

So in what ways do you think Morton presented a threat to the Puritans?  And in what ways would the maypole present a threat to that community?

I Would Prefer Not to Write this Blog

In my previous entry on Melville, I had mentioned that he had a long-running antagonism with formal religious structures.  Melville, however, was an equal-opportunity curmudgeon, and he tended to deride virtually any kind of institution.  For Melville, institutions created two major issues.  First, institutions were necessarily authoritarian, meaning that their existence depended upon the obedience and compliance of any who belonged to the institution or who used its services; second, they usually got what they wanted because people were fundamentally sheep that did not want to be challenged or aggravated.

Illustration for Typee, by Mead Schaeffer

Melville's issues were to a large degree personal.  He  began his writing career as a popular writer, writing about his adventures in the South Seas (e.g., Typee and Omoo).  His novel Typee became a sensation, not the least reason being that it contained episodes of exotic sexuality among the natives he encountered in the South Seas.  (Hence churches looking dimly upon his work.)  So he was on his way to becoming that rarity--a writer who could actually make a good living as a writer.  (Something Hawthorne desperately wanted.)  So what's the problem?  Well, Melville was not content churning out soft core porn for the masses--he want to challenge himself and his readers narratively and philosophically.  It didn't help that Melville's philosophical penchant was for exploring darker, more disturbing themes.  You can probably tell where this is going--Melville's work became increasingly more difficult, and his readers became increasingly more--sparse.

Melville eventually became so frustrated with what he saw as mouth-breathing readers and editors that he gave up writing fiction by his mid-30s.  As he wrote, "What I feel most moved to write, that is banned--it will not pay.  Yet write the other way I cannot."  And so--he didn't.  In essence Melville saw himself as akin to a prophet crying in the wilderness, with the wilderness being a culture that had become incapable of confronting complex and challenging ideas.  It was a culture full of citizens that had become complacent, compliant, the perfect cogs in the machines of authoritarian institutions.  (To see another good example of that, read his story "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids"). 

So how does this help us with "Bartleby, the Scrivener"?  One of the more central aspects of this story is how Bartleby responds to authority.  For some, Bartleby isn't simply a disgruntled slacker--he's a revolutionary, perhaps even a fictionalized version of Melville himself.  What do you think?  What are the implications of his oft-repeated phrase, "I would prefer not to"?

While we're at it, though, let's not overlook an often-overlooked aspect of this story.  The story is told from the first person by Bartleby's boss, one of those authority figures.  Everything we know about Bartleby--everything--is filtered through that narrator's eyes and perceptions.  Let's also not overlook another often-overlooked aspect of this story: as much as we might find Bartleby irritating--his boss lets him get away with it, and in fact goes to extraordinary lengths to keep Bartleby functioning.  Why?  Assuming the boss is no sucker (and since he manages a successful business, there's no reason to think he is), why tolerate the likes of Bartleby to the point that he moves the entire office rather than kick Bartleby out?

Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanity!

The first thing to take note about "Bartleby, the Scrivener" is the subtitle--a Tale of Wall Street.  The power of this story--and indeed, this is one of the great short stories in American literature, and in literature period--derives not only from the complex interactions between Bartleby and the narrator, but also that they occur smack in the center of venality, where human worth is measured in terms of commerce.  Melville's choice of settings is purposeful, because for many in the mid-19th century (when this story was written and set) few places in America symbolized the degradation of American character more than Wall Street.

Much as now, Wall Street was the financial center of New York City, though not quite yet the financial center of America and the rest of the world.  However, while we have been so long immersed in the capers of Wall Street that we barely give them a thought, when Melville was writing Wall Street was still a relatively new concept--and for many a deeply troubling one.

Wall Street, 1850

You see, then as now one made money on Wall Street through speculation; that is, one fundamentally "guessed" at the potential profitability of a company, and if one guessed right, one could soon be living large.  For us this isn't a problem, and to a degree we can even be in awe of this ability.

But for Melville and others, this was a troubling turn in American character.  Remember our friends, the Puritans?  Well, among their many cherished values was a work ethic, one in which work actually produced something tangible, and produced something that would also benefit the community.  Work for the Puritans had moral value, and one's work (or lack of it) reflected one's character.  While the Puritans as a clearly identifiable group had disappeared by the mid-19th century, their values (as I have emphasized multiple times) persisted and have always been at the core of American character.  Consequently, the "work" of Wall Street stood against everything many Americans--particularly those of a religious bent--valued about work.

First, one did not produce anything that benefited the needs of the community; in fact, one did not actually produce anything at all on Wall Street.  One made money through speculation, not labor.  (The Puritans had no problem with people making money, but they could have problems with how.)  Second, one profited through speculation, which was simply another term for gambling.  To use a more current reference point, those who looked dimly at Wall Street would have had the same misgivings about playing the lottery.  Speculation meant trusting to luck rather than God.  Finally, someone who profited on Wall Street profited by someone else's work.  In short, a Wall Street speculator was little more than a cultural parasite.

Herman Melville

Now, Melville himself was anything but a Puritan.  In fact, Melville bristled at just about anything that smacked of religion, or at least organized religion.  Years of church leaders condemning Melville's work as immoral had deeply embittered him towards religion.  It also didn't help that Melville may have been bi-sexual or homosexual (there are some indications in Hawthorne's personal writings, for example, that Melville may have had romantic interest in Hawthorne); while that's not absolutely certain, since the private Melville is very elusive, if he were that would further exacerbate his relationship with formal religions, which would be quite intolerant of this.  (The one exception may have been Unitarianism, which tended to have a live-and-let-live philosophy.)  But in spite of his animosity towards religion and dogma associated with religions, he was nevertheless one of our most moral writers, at least in terms of his social consciousness.  Unlike many of his Romanticist contemporaries, Melville was deeply attuned to social injustice and cultural oppression.  So while he may have been metaphorically bedding down with assorted religious leaders in his disdain for Wall Street, Melville's concern wasn't particularly religious.  He did see Wall Street as a potent force in the destruction of human character.

A Lamentable Spectacle

"The Maypole of Merrymount" is based on an actual historical event--the dispute between the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and a man named Thomas Morton, who was neither a Puritan nor lived in the colony.  You have, in fact, the advantage of having access to two different tellings of the original story, each from a different point of view.  You can find William Bradford's take on this in ch. XIX of Of Plymouth Plantation, and then get another point of view of the events from Morton himself, beginning in ch. 7 of New England Canaan.  (Both of these are in your text.)

The fact that the Puritans would care about what someone was doing somewhere else gives further evidence of just how profoundly they valued community--profoundly enough that they felt perfectly justified in expelling Morton.

Destroying the Maypole at Merrymount

This confrontation between the community and the individual makes this story a natural for Hawthorne.  Of course, he makes some significant changes to the original story, moving the focus away from the Bradford/Morton smackdown (Bradford: "You mindless hedonist," Morton: "You self-righteous prig") and towards a confrontation between the sacred and the profane, civic duty and self-centeredness, age and youth, the spiritual and the carnal.  You can almost see Hawthorne drooling at the opportunity to sink his teeth into this one.

Generally the kinds of events that Hawthorne describes are historically accurate (though historical accuracy was not uppermost in Hawthorne's mind).  Let's not forget that the settlers originally came from England, and so naturally carried some English traditions with them, including that of the maypole.  But what Hawthorne was primarily interested in was the symbolic implications of the maypole (and maypole dancing) and how they would play out in a land in which the Puritans were major players rather than a minor sideshow.  The ritual of the maypole is highly charged with sexual symbolism.  (All you need to keep in mind is the Freudian phallic imagery of something that's longer than it is wide.)  Because of the sexual context of the maypole, naturally churches tended to look askance at the ritual.  (And just to dispel some more common misperceptions of the Puritans, no, they were not anti-sex.  As with most societies, sex was a normal part of their lives, and the kinds of problems that extended from that--adultery, unwanted pregnancies, teen sex, sex outside of the bounds of marriage, etc.--were hardly unknown to the Puritans.)

A Maypole Dance

You also may remember that in my post on Hawthorne I mentioned that he sometimes had an off-color sense of humor.  You're seeing an example of that in this story--specifically the title.  The actual place he's describing was called "Mar-e-mont" ("Sea and mountain," loosely translated), which eventually came to be known as Merrymount.  Well, break the word into two, and think about the different connotations for the second part....

Of course, Hawthorne didn't write this story to indulge in any burlesque fantasies.  Fundamentally, sexuality is about self-indulgence.  As you read and think about this story, think about it in terms of under what conditions can sexuality can be construed as a "threat" to the community.

A Tale of a Shrewd Young Man

There are two key elements to keep in mind when reading "My Kinsman, Major Molineaux."  First, always remember that Robin is a very young man, who is visiting the big city (so to speak) for the first time.  It's worthwhile also just to think of the implications of his name--"Robin."  Hawthorne frequently chooses the names of his characters for their symbolic implications, and such is the case for Robin.  So one way to get a handle on this story is to think about the associations we make with that word.

Second, more than once in the story Robin is referred to as "shrewd."  While a meaning of that may immediately leap to all of our minds, --no doubt the word is quite familiar to all of us--we may not completely know the full possibilities of what that word means (and I can pretty much guarantee you that Hawthorne would--he is one of our more careful writers).  So here's a link that will take you to a definition of the word--make sure you note all of the possible meanings, as well as the origins of the word:

Definition of "shrewd"

Generally, Hawthorne is using a common narrative model for this story--a coming-of-age tale.  At its simplest, "My Kinsman, Major Molineaux" is a tale about a young man gaining knowledge about the world, and in the process losing his innocence.  It's a type of story that has been told thousands of times in the history of literature (and the history of culture), which can tell you how significant that process is to human beings and human culture.  It is as old as the Adam and Eve story (in the Western Christian tradition), as familiar as To Kill a Mockingbird, and as current (and odd) as The 40-Year Old Virgin.  (No, forty is not typical of coming-of-age tales.  But as one critic of the movie pointed out, the main character may be chronologically 40, but about 15 mentally.)

So what Hawthorne is doing here is neither new nor unfamiliar.

 

Boston Harbor in the 1700s

                                                  

Furthermore, the "direction" of Robin's movementa are also common to this type of story: moving from a country/rural setting to an urban/city setting.  In our imaginations the city has long stood as a place to gain knowledge--of many different sorts (which is what can make the city so problematic for many, as is the case in American literature and culture.  In looking ahead a bit, don't lose sight of the fact that "Bartleby, the Scrivener" is set in the city.)

Another aspect of this story to keep in mind, and again something common to Hawthorne, is the setting of the story in the historical past (i.e., Hawthorne's historical past).  In this case, the story is set in pre-Revolutionary America, roughly in the 1730s.  So one thing to think about is why choose this particular time frame?  Certainly Hawthorne was capable of writing a coming-of-age tale that would be contemporary to his readers.

Tar and Feathering in Colonial America

By choosing this setting, Hawthorne is choosing a time close to a mythic cultural event--the Revolutionary War (and here by "mythic" I mean culturally iconic, not false), an event with which his readers would be quite familiar.  (Keep in mind that for his readers, the Revolutionary War was still relatively fresh.)  He and his readers would know that what's coming, in the time frame of the story, was an event that fundamentally turned us into a democracy and distributed power into the hands of the people.  (At least, that was the ideal.)  Thus, one way to think about this story is to see it as a democratic parable, in which Robin represents the new nation (or what would be the new nation) embarking into the world of self-governance.

But nothing is ever straighforward with Hawthorne.    You need to think about the "new democracy" we see towards the end of the story, we need to think about Robin's purposes in coming to the big city, and most importantly, we need to think about Robin's reaction to seeing his kinsman Major Molineux and most especially, the final comment by the gentleman at the very end of the story.

A Stern, A Sad, A Darkly Meditative....

Few writers in our history have been as interested in the dynamics of the community as Nathaniel Hawthorne.  With few exceptions, his literature has almost always featured a confrontation between an individual and a community.  And so it is with our next two stories, "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" and "The Maypole of Merrymount."  In future blogs I'll provide some background into those particular stories.  Here I simply want to provide some background to Hawthorne himself.

                                                                                      Nathaniel Hawthorne

Probably for many of us, our most common experience with Hawthorne has been The Scarlet Letter, and since we're often required to read it, the experience can be unpleasant.  Let's face it, in the 21st century (and 20th), novels as steeped in issues of morality and guilt, topped off with a grim Puritan setting, aren't usually going to climb to the top of a must-read list.  And in Hawthorne's works generally, there is no shortage of guilt and morality.  Consequently Hawthorne tends to be perceived as a stern, grim narrator of every weakness and failure a human being can encounter.  In short,  not a lot of chuckles in Hawthorne.  It hasn't helped that he had (as a writer) little interest in social or political issues, and in our own time his reputation as a person has suffered a hit from his comment about his contemporary women writers.  (He called them "damned female scribblers," resulting in his being tagged as a typical dead white male author.  Though he wasn't dead at the time he wrote that.)

This, of course, is an unfair reading of the man.  For one thing, if we believe that the apparent grimness and obsessiveness of his work reflect the man, then we would be wrong.  Hawthorne himself was a private, kind and gentle man, by all reports a loving husband and father, with, yes, a sense of humor, even an off-color sense of humor (that does, in fact, show up in his writing).  In other words, he wasn't anything like the moral obsessives he frequently wrote about.  Even his circle of friends, which included some of the greatest writers and thinkers in American history, were more than a bit--idiosyncratic: Thoreau, Melville, and Emerson, to name a few.  Even his choice for his wife--Sophia--showed Hawthorne's resistance to doing what he was "supposed" to do (a common theme in his literature).  Sophia was not, to use modern terminology, a catch, in the sense that she had health problems and so was something of a project.  As you can probably tell from the image, Hawthorne was also considered quite handsome, so he had many options for relationships and marriage (unlike his friend Thoreau, who was considered ghastly looking).  His own family opposed his relationship with Sophia.  But Sophia was who he wanted, and Sophia was who he married.  And his remark about women writers?  That had everything to do with Hawthorne's resentment of the popularity of the writers of sentimental romantic novels, who were making it difficult for him to make a living as a writer.  His resentment had more to do with economics than gender.

                                                                                          Sophia Hawthorne

Nonetheless, guilt, morality, communal obligations vs. individual needs, etc., are central to his work.  Much of that had to do with the changes that had occurred in our country and culture by the time Hawthorne was crafting his stories.  I'll speak about the Age of Reason and the era of the American Revolution in a later blog.  For our purposes here, it's sufficient to know that the concept of individualism that we know and revere was a product of the revolutionary movements of the 18th century.  By the time Hawthorne was writing in the early to mid 19th century, we had developed a culture within which the moral rigidity and profound community values of the Puritans, the values that anchored our beginnings, were struggling with the values of individualism that had come roaring to the front during the Age of Reason.  Romanticism--the literary term used to describe the kind of writing Hawthorne and his contemporaries were doing--has nothing to do with love or courtship.  Romanticist literature focuses on the internal feelings and thoughts of its characters, and re-defines "truth" as a function of individual perceptions.  (We'll really see this in Poe.)