"Feeling out of Place: Affective History, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Civil War"

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ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Volume 59, Number4, 2013 (No. 233 O.S.), pp. 519-551 (Article)

P bl h d b h n t n t t n v r tDOI: 10.1353/esq.2013.0031

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519ESQ | V. 59 | 4TH QUARTER | 2013

justine s. murison

Feeling out of Place: Affective History, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Civil War

“No genuine loyal man would write thus.” So sums up the Liberator review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anonymously pub-lished Atlantic Monthly essay, “Chiefly About War-Matters. By a Peaceable Man” (1862), a narrative of his visit to Washington D.C. and Virginia in 1862. Far from inspiring a “peaceable” response, Hawthorne’s article gets the Liberator downright hot headed. The review distinguishes the narrator’s impulse to “indulge in merriment while others are shudderingly affect-ed” as the height of his disloyalty, a tendency toward a “flippant and heartless treatment of the present tremendous national convulsion.” According to the judgment of the Liberator, Haw-thorne has transgressed acceptable expression with his “trea-sonable sentiments” and his desire to “whitewash the conduct of the traitors.” Yet Hawthorne’s treason is not quite located in the literal text. Instead, it is an affective, nearly ephemeral element that irks the Liberator: his “merriment” and “flippant and heartless” account; his ability to write “automatically, as though his veins were bloodless.”1 According to the Liberator, Hawthorne toys with serious matters and refuses an appropri-ate emotional engagement with the Union and the war.

The Liberator has not been alone in its judgment of Haw-thorne’s politics. Indeed, very few nineteenth-century writ-ers seem so out of step with the felt urgency of the century’s

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political issues as Hawthorne did during the Civil War. Haw-thorne, of course, had earned himself a paradoxical political reputation long before Fort Sumter: both fully entrenched in the spoils system of the Democratic Party yet insisting on his separation from it, “being so little of a politician that he scarcely feels entitled to call himself a member of any party,” as he apologizes in The Life of Franklin Pierce (1852).2 Thus by the outset of the Civil War, Hawthorne had already represented himself as uninterested in (if not recoiling from) the issues of partisanship, slavery, and secession, a reputation he contin-ues to hold to this day. That seeming indifference, even apa-thy, has been a chronic interpretation of Hawthorne since the Liberator denounced his disloyalty. As F.O. Matthiessen once famously remarked, “Hawthorne’s distrust of purposive ac-tion presents a wide-open target,” a point that has not grown rusty with age.3 While Hawthorne was once said to “evade his-tory” by way of romance, more recent criticism transmuted it into an evasion of politics.4 Hawthorne came to represent “the limits of American democracy, the willingness to make peace with the forces of corruption, as in Hester’s return or in Hol-grave’s end,” as Gordon Hutner puts it.5 To be sure, recent work on “War Matters” by scholars such as Randall Fuller and Arthur Riss have deepened our appreciation of that compli-cated text beyond evidence of Hawthorne’s inability to divine the catastrophic weight and moral imperatives of the fight over slavery. Yet Hawthorne continues to elude, in Michael Borgstrom’s striking words, conforming to whom “we want (and even need) him to be.”6

The relationship between Hawthorne’s affective engage-ment with the Civil War and our scholarly investments in him occasions the argument of this article. Rather than interpret-ing his Civil War writings, Our Old Home (1863) and “Chiefly About War-Matters,” as evidence of Hawthorne’s indiffer-ence to national politics or unwillingness to inspect his own, I see them as ideal texts to query the relation of affect to history. On display in the reception of Hawthorne’s Civil War texts is a disjunction between affective qualities and discursive mean-ing, and this disjunction instructively echoes the fundamen-tal theoretical problem of affect. There persists an impasse

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between affect and the work of literary historicism, one that, I argue, is central to the current preoccupation with “affect” as a theoretical concept. In critical parlance, “affect” denotes the substratum of lived experience that supports and shapes consciousness, and it often implies the impulses of the body that lead to feeling, emotion, and understanding.7 “Affect” tends to be a fuzzy term in its application, a replacement for feelings or emotions, yet the embrace of “affect” also evinces more than this. Often when scholars select it they mean to call attention to embodied experiences rather than the psychologi-cal associations that feelings and emotions evoke. Yet this very emphasis on embodiment poses a critical issue. The problem literary scholars face, particularly those working in histori-cally distant periods, is that affect theory, in general, is not particularly interested in history. Theorists of affect seek in-stead to reenliven the category of the biological in contempo-rary debates. The question lingers, therefore: how can affect support the textual and historicist work of literary scholars?

In this article, I argue for the importance of affect to historical interpretation and model a way to read affect his-torically through Hawthorne’s Civil War writings. Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests that producing an “affective history” de-pends on a hermeneutic tradition in which a “loving grasp of detail in search of an understanding of the diversity of human life-worlds” can occur.8 Although Chakrabarty does not de-pend on the recent “affective turn” for this definition, I want to extend and deepen his invocation of “affective history.” By attending to aesthetic detail—tone, genre, and form—liter-ary scholars glean the affective aspects of a text; in doing so we can also usefully complicate what counts as “historical.”9 Affects are historical positions, not just because they occur in time (like all phenomena) but because they often emerge textually in response to temporal order and its narration in history. Indeed, affects tend to cause texts to shift away from the synchronic social or political present in ways that para-doxically imbue the text with resonances of tone and meaning unavailable within the text’s synchronic setting. Affects there-fore force us to redefine what “historical context” means and

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allow us to consider how the role of embodied experiences can resist contextualization even when they seem to locate a subject “in place.” Hawthorne’s Civil War writings and their reception exemplify the affective resonances of history and the affective work of an historical archive. As such, they of-fer a useful test case for the intersection of affect and history. My argument ultimately suggests that while the affective and the historical may not always neatly fit together, the produc-tive tension between the two enriches our interpretations by offering a literary history attentive to political and cultural responses alive in the archives we study.

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affect and the problem of history

Three days before South Carolina seceded from the Union, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote English landscape paint-er Henry Bright a long letter from the Wayside, congratulat-ing him on his engagement, suggesting that Bright spend his honeymoon in the United States (to see the “Union in its death-throes”), and waxing nostalgic for his time in England. “I find,” he concludes, “that I staid [sic] abroad a little too long, and as a consequence, have lost my home-feelings for the present, if not forever.”10 Though ascribing this loss of home feelings to his seven years in Europe, Hawthorne re-acts here to the breakdown of the Union. On his return from abroad in 1860, Hawthorne found himself in a new coun-try, one in which partisan and sectional rifts had left him un-moored. That fall the election of 1860 sped up the dissolution of Hawthorne’s old, familiar Democratic Party, and the Civil War nearly smashed it beyond repair. Nor was he alone in his expression of affective displacement, a sense that the United States could no longer quite constitute “home.” The Civil War itself exemplifies how political geographies can shift in ways that tangle people’s affective relations to a government that claims sovereignty over the territory in which they live. The crossed affections of geography and state, in fact, produced campaigns to expose disloyalty in the North and Unionism

The Copperhead Party in Favor of a Vigorous Prosecution of Peace! 28 February 1863. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USZ62-132749.

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in the South, to uncover spies like Rose O’Neal Greenhow in the midst of Washington D.C. and to jail or exile politicians north and south, like Clement Vallandigham in Ohio or Wil-liam Brownlow in Tennessee. People and their affections were suddenly out of place.

The context for Hawthorne’s Civil War writings was there-fore one in which political, emotional, and geographic con-texts themselves proved a topic of heated debate rather than a backdrop to be assumed. The contextual ground of Civil War writing is thus particularly troubled, challenging the task of literary historicism. When literary scholars invoke “context,” we often implicitly mean the cultural and political world into which the text first appears. To be sure, no one would assume that world to be ideologically or culturally coherent, yet as Jef-frey Insko argues, “the historicist tendency is to treat literary characters and their creators alike as the property of the mo-ment in history that called them into existence,” a process that can impose “a certain conception of history on the texts of the past,” even on texts that are “intent on calling into ques-tion precisely that concept.”11 Insko focuses not on whether to offer a synchronic or diachronic archive, but how assump-tions about what constitutes “context” shape our inquiries. The critical commonplace about context omits, as Lloyd Pratt explains, the “idea of several sustainable and competing tracks of history—not all of which are linear.”12 The spatial assump-tions of modern time—that it is linear and progressive—can obstruct scholars’ ability to assess texts that operate outside of or in resistance to that very structure. The tight connection between “history” and synchronic context in literary meth-od risks thwarting competing definitions of what might be termed “historical,” a point that is necessary for interpreting Civil War literature in general and Hawthorne’s very strange productions in these years in particular.

I would add to these assessments that “affect,” in its in-vocations of biological and aesthetic responses, further chal-lenges what we mean by “historical” and how literary scholars approach history. After all, as Hawthorne’s letter attests, it is an affective relation to the nation that is at stake in 1860. At first glance, affect theory seems the last place to go for such


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insight, though. As Ruth Leys argues in her trenchant critique of it, in much affect theory “the disconnect between ‘ideology’ and affect produces as one of its consequences a relative indif-ference to the role of ideas and beliefs in politics, culture, and art in favor of an ‘ontological’ concern with different people’s corporeal-affective reactions.”13 Leys does not state so direct-ly, but this shift away from ideology—away from ideas, politics, art, and culture—has also betrayed a lack of sustained inter-est in history. The Affect Theory Reader, for instance, tellingly has entries neither for “history” nor “historicism” (or any similar cognates). Yet to refuse the potential that we might glean from affect theory because, on the surface, it seems “ahistorical,” would be to adhere rigidly to only one definition of “history,” an equally persistent problem for scholars of literature, as In-sko and Pratt observe.

Taking into account Leys’s important critique, I pursue here a rapprochement between text and history, on the one hand, and affect, on the other. To do so requires rethinking how affect theorists have cordoned off the historical and how we might bring history back into the conversation. Though divided by closer or looser ties to neuro- or cognitive scienc-es, most affect theorists orient their theories toward the pres-ent and the future, not the past. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth acknowledge this temporal organization in their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader. Affect theory, they sug-gest, is “casting illumination upon the ‘not yet’ of a body’s doing, casting a line along the hopeful (though also fearful) cusp of an emergent futurity, casting its lot with the infinitely connectable, impersonal, and contagious belongings to this world.”14 We see this temporal orientation most clearly in the works of those theorists indebted to neuroscience. Brian Massumi, for instance, positions history as the conclusion of processes set in motion by the affective realm. Once affects emerge, once they rise to the level of discourse, they “define normative or regulatory operations that set the parameters of history (the possible interactions of determinate individu-als and groups).”15 Political potential resides not in the play of ideas (as Leys critically assesses) but in the pre-ideational, the moment of biological possibility. History, for Massumi, is

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determinate; it is nearly the opposite of the shimmering po-tential of affect. Teresa Brennan offers a strikingly similar use of history when she suggests that to counter the psychologi-cal and somatic effects of negative affects, one must step away from their immediacy through “discernment,” the ability to “unpack the history out of which I am composed, history gath-ered in affective clumps of memory.”16 For both Massumi and Brennan, affect and history are oppositional terms. These ar-ticulations of history as shaped by but resistant to the biologi-cal possibilities of affects, though, do not quite answer how to interpret affective qualities in texts, that is, after “capture and containment.” Indeed, if affect precedes discourse, as both claim, it fundamentally resists the work of literary scholars, whose evidence is discursive, aesthetic, and, above all, textual.

Brennan adds an important third term—memory—to the dyad of history and affect, one that is often invoked by literary scholars to get out of this methodological bind. Memory for Brennan is the affective experience of history, the individual’s access to history, which allows her to invoke a past without the constraints of history, as such. Aligned with affect and opposed to history, memory, as Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed have recently argued, “allows for the ar-chiving of acts, affects, and attitudes often denied the status of historical record but because it is incomplete, fragmented, affect-saturated” they are therefore “open to the imagina-tive process of rearticulation, reinvention, and adaptation.”17 This use of memory has operated more recently to bring a historical perspective back into the conversation about affect. It is the backbone of Lauren Berlant’s artful articulation of a “history of the present” in Cruel Optimism.18 As she puts it, “the affective work of memory is just one among many forces that together constitute what gets refracted as the present: mem-ory and the past emerge in mediated zones of visceral pres-ence distributed across scenes of epistemological and bodily activity.”19 What seems to be implied in these invocations of memory as the affective vehicle of history is that historical discourse is always normative and that to locate divergent or subversive affects one needs to look to “memory,” an unof-ficial (and ephemeral) accounting of the past. What does not


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seem as obvious is whether a text like Hawthorne’s “War Mat-ters” constitutes a historical record or a memory? Or, to put the question differently, do we need to oppose “history” and “memory” in this way? The assumption that history is always “official” belies what literary scholars implicitly know: that texts happen in history but are not collapsible to that history; and conversely, that texts may offer a glimpse of something we might call “memory” but, if published, they are also officially available as part of a public record of sorts.

It may not be necessary to position history as merely nor-mative in this way if we keep in mind how an archive speaks and feels aesthetically. In her articulation of a “history of the present,” Berlant provides scholars who work on the history of the past (so to speak) suggestions for reading that attends to affect. She notes that “too often we derive a sense of a time, place, and power through historical archives whose job it is to explain something aesthetic without thinking the aesthetic in the sensually affective terms that conventions of entextu-alizing always code, perform, and release.”20 The historical archive itself—and not just the memory of individuals—can be a source of affective entanglements, and these affects emerge in aesthetic registers that bring to the foreground the “sen-sual” aspects of the archive, ones located in historically spe-cific aesthetics. A historical archive, in this way, resists its own normativity, and affect is the location where this tension gets produced.

To model this version of affective history, I concentrate on how affect shapes the archive through two aesthetic quali-ties in particular: tone and genre. Sianne Ngai is particularly incisive in regard to tone. She defines tone as the “affective relay between subject and object” and between speaker and lis-tener.21 Notoriously difficult to define, tone is a negotiation that occurs between the text and the reader rather than an eas-ily locatable reference within the text. Tone, in other words, enacts affect precisely because it eludes literal discourse, and, in so doing, it tantalizes a reader with a meaning that cannot be located entirely in the text itself. Genre too is affective, or as Berlant puts it, is an “affective contract,” but one that, like tone, eludes as much as it defines.22 Hans Jauss’s definition of

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genre as “a preconstituted horizon of expectations” points to the incomplete nature of the categorical impulse: texts nev-er fully belong to their genre even if they promise a reader they will.23 The gap between generic expectations and text is, I would argue, as redolent with affects as tone. My goal in the rest of this essay is to consider the tonal and generic effects of Hawthorne’s Civil War texts as an affective experience of history—both in terms of Hawthorne’s own account of history and as constitutive of an affective archive of the Civil War. Our Old Home and “War Matters,” more than any other of Haw-thorne’s works, provoked outsized responses even though, at first glance, they do not register as emotional texts.

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affective history; or, how to be disloyal without even trying

To map the affects in Our Old Home and “War Matters” and how they provoke responses, I delve first into the history of a particular affective investment—namely, Union loyalty—one that is decidedly not on display in Hawthorne’s works. Haw-thorne strikes, above all else, a disloyal tone in Our Old Home and “War Matters” through his ironic narrative voice and the nostalgic tone associated with the genre of the tour memoir, the genre both texts invoke. Irony and nostalgia indirectly challenge attempts to discipline loyalty. Loyalty and disloy-alty, to say the least, are perennial problems in times of war, but more so for the United States in 1861 than for many na-tions. Before the Civil War, America was far from enacting a coherent “imagined community”; indeed, local, state, and sectional ties often far outweighed national ones, so much so that, as historian Robert Wiebe puts it, “the symbols of the union—its flag, its holidays, its heroes—had tremendous emo-tive power not because they reasserted a government’s pres-ence but because, in effect, they were its presence.”24 To be sure, the “soft glow” associated with the federal Union had an emotional tinge, but it was not necessarily the same as loy-alty to a nation-state as the ultimate figuration of political sentiment.25 Hawthorne directly acknowledges this in “War

Civil War Envelope Showing American Flag and Cannon with Message: “Shoot the First Man that Attempts to Pull Down the American Flag.” Between 1861 and 1865. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. LC-DIG-ppmsca-31705.

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Matters” when he opines, “In the vast extent of our country,—too vast by far to be taken into one small human heart,—we inevitably limit to our own State, or, at farthest, to our own section, that sentiment of physical love for the soil which ren-ders an Englishman, for example, so intensely sensitive to the dignity and well-being of his little island.”26 On the eve of the Civil War, and indeed one prompt toward it, local, state, and regional loyalties trumped national ones.

Far from a legal practice, loyalty itself is really an affective tone, which is precisely why it is so hard to regulate. We have already seen that the Liberator looks at “War-Matters” and hears a disloyal tone precisely because of its affective and frankly amused orientation to the war. The Liberator is consistent with more mainstream Union sentiment on loyalty. As Elizabeth Duquette explains, “loyalty was an affect,” much like antebel-lum versions of sympathy, however it was “one that coupled rational commitment to an ideal with a sentimental attach-ment to one’s country.”27 Union propagandists sought to walk this tightrope between the rational call for loyalty and the familiar language of the heart that Duquette describes. For instance, Horace Bushnell outlined what amounts to disloy-alty in 1863 by signaling it not as an action but a sentiment. He separates disloyalty from active treason, so that, as he ex-plains, the “meanest kind of disloyalty is that which keeps just within the law and only dares not perpetuate the treason it wants to have done; which takes on airs of patriotic concern for the Constitution, when it really has none for all the wrong that can be done it by enemies openly fighting against it.”28 Likewise, Francis Lieber, the head of the Loyal Publication Society of New York, explains that, “by loyalty we mean a can-did and loving devotion to the object to which a loyal man—a loyal husband, a loyal friend, a loyal citizen—devotes himself.” When he specifies the last of those roles, he calls it “patriotism cast in the graceful mould of candid devotion to the harmless government of an unshackled nation.”29 If loyalty is a style of subjection to free government, disloyalty, on the other hand, sounds a lot like Hawthorne: “[T]raitors to their country in the hour of need—or those who allow themselves to be misled by shallow names, and by reminiscences which cling around


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those names from by-gone days, finding no application in a time which asks for things more sterling than names, theo-ries, or platforms.”30 Disloyalty clings to reminiscences and prior associations, the party platforms and politics of bygone days. According to both Lieber and Bushnell, disloyalty is an affective orientation that clings to the past while skirting ac-tive treason. The emerging discourse of loyalty betrays at every turn the way looking back to the past is an incorrect affec-tive orientation in a time of civil war.31 This backward glance, though, is exactly Nathaniel Hawthorne’s.

In their reactions to his texts, Hawthorne’s contempo-raries ranged from mild disapproval to outright shock, but the pattern is consistent: Hawthorne refuses to display ap-propriate feelings about the war. As the Liberator puts it, “War Matters” recounts “a visit made apparently for no other pur-pose than to demonstrate his secession proclivities, or, at least, his incapacity to comprehend the nature and necessity (philosophically speaking) of the struggle now rending the nation asunder.”32 It should come as no surprise that the Lib-erator recoiled from Hawthorne’s “peaceable” perspective, but theirs was not the only irate reaction. A writer for the Inde-pendent, for instance, opines that the essay “made me shud-der by its brilliant indifference to the interests involved in the great contest between the rebels and the nation. If it had been the work of an inhabitant of Saturn, just alighted upon the earth, it could not have been more chillingly impartial.”33 A Harper’s Weekly review of Our Old Home lauds the “contemplative and subtle humor” of the book but expresses frustration over the “tone of doubt and indifference, occasionally insinuated, as to the tremendous struggle of civilization and barbarism which convulses his country,” and the review ends with a par-ticularly remarkable analogy: Hawthorne’s tone is “so painful, that the reader is in danger of being invincibly repelled, as a man would be by the most charming companion who should prove to have no objection to infanticide.”34

The controversy swirling around Our Old Home also fo-cused on Hawthorne’s sentimental dedication of the book to Franklin Pierce, perhaps his most apparent nostalgic—and thus disloyal—note. This dedication, on one hand, makes

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perfect sense. A life-long friend of Pierce’s since their years at Bowdoin College, Hawthorne wrote Pierce’s now infamous campaign biography, and Pierce, in turn, appointed Haw-thorne to the Liverpool Consulate that became the inspira-tion for Our Old Home. Yet as the president who presided over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and who was an advocate for peace at the outset of the war, Pierce embodied disloyalty for most northerners in 1863. Hawthorne’s dedication thus caused nail-biting among his friends and outrage from many New England abolitionists: Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote to James T. Fields demanding, “Do tell me if our friend Hawthorne praises that arch traitor Pierce in his preface & your loyal firm publishes it,” and Emerson cut the dedication out of his copy of the book.35

Why do readers perceive a tone so chilling, even painful, in Hawthorne’s Civil War writing? Why must Emerson cut up Hawthorne’s book in order to keep it? The reason is rooted in the affective expectations of loyalty, but it exceeds these ex-pectations as well, spilling over into questions of affects and national history. If we can call Hawthorne’s Civil War writings an “archive of feeling” (to borrow Ann Cvetkovich’s phrase) these feelings are located in his representations of history, and this is why these texts failed to sit well with his contemporary readers.36 In great part, what Hawthorne’s readers objected to is not just the fact that he dedicated Our Old Home to Pierce, but what that dedication demonstrates about Hawthorne and his text: both are decidedly out of place aesthetically and af-fectively to their wartime context. The Pierce dedication is symptomatic of the larger problem with Our Old Home. In the dedication, Hawthorne evokes his own sense of alienation from the present: “The Present, the Immediate, the Actual, has proved too potent for me. It takes away not only my scanty faculty, but even my desire for imaginative composition, and leaves me sadly content to scatter a thousand peaceful fantasies upon the hurricane that is sweeping us all along with it, pos-sibly, into a Limbo where our nation and its polity may be as literally the fragments of a shattered dream as my unwritten Romance.”37 Hawthorne’s dedication poses a similar relation to history as that found in much affect theory. The present is


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the moment of affect, and history is its escape. While Haw-thorne cannot write his romance of English history, he can write a tour narrative.

The tour, unlike the romance, is a narrative of immersion into the historical past through an embodied experience of the present. Tourism suggests a “light” perhaps even “shallow” experience, and the tour genre is romantic about the location of the tour but not deeply invested in that place. Yoking the tour narrative to a memoir—in which nostalgia is often the key affective orientation—Hawthorne chooses a genre that studies an elsewhere and elsewhen to the United States during the war, and evokes an attachment to the past that, as we have seen, suggests without outrightly stating a disloyal orientation to the present. The choice of genre thus promises, at first glance, a flight from the “hurricane” of the present into English his-tory, and, indeed, in many scenes of Our Old Home, Hawthorne delivers a typical, sometimes even tedious, version of a histor-ical tour. The very point of a tour is the experience of English history as it resonates in the present, and through that en-counter Hawthorne considers how history is not the realm of dead affects but living embodiments. In Hawthorne’s hands, then, the genre itself transmutes and cannot fulfill its role as escapist.

In Warwick, for instance, Hawthorne discovers a newly renovated street that serves as “an emblem of England itself” in the adaption of that which is newly built to older structures. “The new things,” he expounds, “are based and supported on sturdy old things, and derive a massive strength from their deep and immemorial foundations, though with such limi-tations and impediments as only an Englishman could en-dure.” From this description of architecture, Hawthorne moves imperceptibly to bodily structures: “But he likes to feel the weight of all the past upon his back; and, moreover, the antiquity that overburdens him has taken root in his being, and has grown to be rather a hump than a pack, so that there is no getting rid of it without tearing his whole structure to pieces.”38 Hawthorne approves of the anachronistic and nos-talgic process by which new additions to the street are made to look old, but the affective register changes as he shifts to the

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embodiment of this history. At the risk of taking a metaphor too seriously, I would suggest that Hawthorne’s glide into an assessment of English “being” produces an ambivalent tone. The English “like the weight of all the past” upon their backs; their approval of their “humps” is in stark contrast with the American embrace of novelty, which, one can presume, pro-duces a lightness of being. This lightness, though, sits un-comfortably (and perhaps threateningly) close to the image of backs humped by the weight of history. On the street, the text suggests, the accretion of history is aesthetically pleasing, but in the body it is disfiguring. The disjunction in Hawthorne’s assessment arises from his insistence that the embodiment of history cannot be reconciled with American character, which, earlier in the passage, Hawthorne equates with the newness of an “American street.” If the delight for an American tour-ist in England consists of perceiving that country’s embrace of antiquity, its fearful aspect is the potential disfigurement of the self. Metaphorically speaking, history gets inside peo-ple, changes their very embodied experiences, but this effect of history is, at first, safely cordoned off from Americans in Hawthorne’s tour. Americans can still escape present passion by indulging in another nation’s history.

Hawthorne sets up an expectation throughout Our Old Home that history is a matter of weighty contemplation unfamiliar to the American visitor, a cliché of the American tourist by 1860 (as it remains today), yet he undercuts this association by the end of his tour. In doing so, he critiques his own flight to history as an escape from the affective confusions of the present moment. Visiting an English pensioner who displays an American flag won by the British in the War of 1812, Haw-thorne veers into a reflection that most certainly resonated with his readers in 1863, and probably not comfortably. He begins by noting that it is “a good method of teaching a man how imperfectly cosmopolitan he is, to show him his coun-try’s flag occupying a position of dishonor in a foreign land.” Geographically dislocated, Hawthorne impulsively responds patriotically (noting the limits of his “cosmopolitanism”) to a flag from 1812 only to end on a note suspiciously disloyal for 1863:


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But, in truth, the whole system of a people crowing over its military triumphs had far better be dispensed with, both on account of the ill-blood that it helps to keep fermenting among the nations, and because it operates as an accumulative inducement to future gen-erations to aim at a kind of glory, the gain of which has generally proved more ruinous than its loss. I heartily wish that every trophy of vic-tory might crumble away, and that every remi-niscence or tradition of a hero, from the be-ginning of the world to this day, could pass out of all men’s memories at once and forever.39

What makes this turn in the passage compelling is not so much its indictment of war culture, though in 1863 that might ran-kle earnestly patriotic readers, but Hawthorne’s seeming em-brace of the view of history he had indicted as naïve in his romances, including most famously in The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables in which Hester returns and Holgrave ends the narrative engaged to Phoebe and dreaming of stone houses. Throw off military souvenirs and stop celebrating war stories, Hawthorne implies, and we can dispense with war it-self. This glib claim that art can dictate affects masks the com-plexity of Hawthorne’s representation, in which things and feelings of the past cannot be so easily discarded. The light satiric tone of the scene skids the surface, but the depth of nostalgia for an American character unburdened by history not only makes more potent the present conflicts but also re-veals the falsity inherent in considering the Civil War as the moment of lost national innocence. The flag from 1812—the material remnant of another war archive—is no escape hatch from an affective present; rather, the enduring presence of history imbues the present with its affective qualities. If loyalty demands a break with the past and proof of an attachment to the present moment, without the nostalgic glance backward, Hawthorne suggests that there is no now that exists that is not resonate with the longings of and for the past.

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of fauns and other august subjects

Like Our Old Home, “War Matters” is a tour memoir, albeit of the United States at war, and it too seems to offer a de-tached, perhaps even indifferent, narrator. As we have seen, “War Matters” provoked a heated response even as (or more correctly, because) the narrator, the Peaceable Man, keeps his cool. Both texts likewise obsessively return to history rather than remain in their historical present. If Hawthorne suggests the inability to escape present passions through a return to his-tory in the pensioner scene in Our Old Home, he turns the focus around in “War Matters.” History is unleashed in the present, often humorously. Hawthorne’s musings return to the May-flower (apocryphally, as the ship delivering both the Pilgrims and the first slaves to the continent), dresses George McClel-lan as a medieval jouster puncturing a balloon, and imagines soldiers of the Union army as barbarians, drinking from their enemies’ skulls. In bringing the war to the forefront of his representations, though, Hawthorne also challenges his read-ers’ affective investments much more directly and controver-sially, and his method for doing so is located in the relation of genre and form to affective work. “War Matters” stages the aesthetic relation of affect to text but in a way that seems, at first blush, incongruent: by showing the role of ironic indif-ference in the production of affective engagements.

No scene in “War Matters” produces more extreme responses as that when the Peaceable Man lights upon fugitive slaves escaping the South. Indeed, Hawthorne’s narrative tone applied on a point of political urgency seems utterly indifferent to present suffering, as most critics of it attest.40 In this scene, he recasts the African Americans he meets as fauns reminiscent of Donatello in The Marble Faun (1860): “[s]o rudely were they attired,—as if their garb had grown upon them spontaneously,—so picturesquely natural in manners, and wearing such a crust of primeval simplicity, (which is


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quite polished away from the Northern black man,) seemed a creature by themselves, not altogether human, but perhaps quite as good, and akin to the fauns and rustic deities of olden times” (50). This scene has long provoked Hawthorne’s readers because it highlights race and slavery only to dislocate their material realities to a historical romance. But as Arthur Riss argues, “the essay seems to mock the reliability of the materialist logic that underwrites aesthetic racialism” even as Hawthorne reveals, in the turn of his aesthetic gaze, an anxiety over admitting African Americans to the position of “person” and “citizen” before the law.41 In Riss’s argument, the Peaceable Man’s aestheticizing operates in the service of attaching more acutely the “Negro” to “the aesthetic,” and in doing so, this scene betrays Hawthorne’s unconscious racialist assumptions.

The ostensible politics do not fully account for the affec-tive registers in this scene, however. In fact, it may be that Riss and other critics read this representation too readily as a van-tage on a historical-political context. Riss, for instance, refers to “War Matters” as Hawthorne’s “only piece of journalism,” thus misrecognizing the genre and aesthetics of the piece as a whole.42 The scene’s seeming displacement of political urgen-cy (or refusal of basic sympathy) occurs through the intermin-gling of genre and tone, yet the generic qualities typical of the nineteenth-century picturesque—the unity of part to whole, emphasis on the natural and pastoral as opposed to the indus-trial and urban—do not quite achieve what they ought to in this scene. While picturesque representations of fugitive slaves abounded in the period, Hawthorne’s fugitive slaves carry an affective disturbance. They certainly do not put the Union back together, an aspect of the scene that can be glimpsed by looking at its opening and closing emphases. “One very pregnant token of a social system thoroughly disturbed was presented by a party of Contrabands escaping out of the mys-terious depths of Secessia,” the Peaceable Man explains, “and its strangeness consisted in the leisurely delay with which they trudged forward, as dreading no pursuer, and encountering nobody to turn them back” (50). Hawthorne positions read-ers at the outset to sense the limitations of the genre of the

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picturesque, though it will later come to predominate and reconcile the harsh conflicts of the war, as Timothy Sweet has argued.43 If the picturesque attempts to prescribe the viewer’s contemplation by focusing it on the traces of history and the unified impression of a scene, Hawthorne’s version calls self-conscious attention to that genre’s limitations, peopling the scene with rustic deities that only serve to reinforce not a uni-fied contemplation but a “strangeness” about the whole.

Hawthorne redoubles this strangeness by marrying a banal representation of African Americans as picturesque to a tone equally flat, one that hovers at the intersection of bemuse-ment and indifference. In doing so, he evokes in the runaway slaves a mirror of his own travels. Indeed, one “strangeness” consists of the fact that, just like Hawthorne and his friend, English writer Edward Dicey, the slaves seem to be affectively disengaged from the political struggles of loyalty and seces-sion. Everyone in the frame, in other words, lacks affective engagements. Dicey, though, recalled a much more engaged interaction. He recounts how they provided the fugitives with food, wine, and money and arranged passage on a train north for them. Yet, as he remembers it, “Hawthorne turned to me with the remark, ‘I am not sure we were doing right after all. How can those poor beings find food and shelter away from home?’”44 In Dicey’s recollection, we still see Hawthorne’s inability to imagine the North as home to African Americans, but Hawthorne rewrote this scene to seem even more indiffer-ent than the “reality” upon which it is supposed to be based. While he retains his own ambivalence, he removes the active aid. The Peaceable Man doesn’t simply betray Hawthorne’s own indifference to slavery and racism, he does something that should seem counterintuitive: he hyperbolically enacts that ambivalence, tipping into indifference.

The indifference of the narrator is a crucial feature of the affective work of “War Matters,” particularly in this scene. By withholding emotion and yet rehearsing the picturesque, the Peaceable Man (and the text) invites affective responses on the part of readers. The text, then, reaches beyond the page and depends on, and even anticipates, reader responses. In fact, the Peaceable Man even muses, “I wonder whether I shall


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excite anybody’s wrath by saying this?” (50). The Liberator, for one, was willing to take the bait: “We must take his words for it that he ‘felt most kindly towards these poor fugitives,’ and his confession of uncommon stupidity or stoical indifference in ‘not knowing precisely what to wish in their behalf, nor in the least how to help them’!! There’s a philosopher, philanthro-pist, and patriot for you—of the genuine democratic stripe! ‘A fig for your kindly feelings,’ might the escaping fugitives say to him.” The review concludes by reimagining the fugi-tives’ affective investment: “But the fugitives, it seems, had no difficulty whatever in determining, ‘on their own account,’ whether to remain in the house of bondage or to come out of it; for they were marching hopefully on, showing exceed-ing good sense in coming to such a decision.”45 The Peace-able Man’s inaction in this scene impels this reviewer to fill in an affective investment, both on the part of the slaves (who march “hopefully”) and for himself as a reader. The excla-mation points, satiric quotations, and imagined dialogue all evince a frustration with how Hawthorne has chosen to nar-rate this encounter. The tone is too neutral, too calm. The Liberator voices an outrage that insists on correcting indiffer-ence on the part of both the Peaceable Man and, surprisingly, the fugitive slaves.

The high stakes of the contraband scene point to a more pervasive issue at the intersection of affect and text in “War Matters,” one that is most apparent in Hawthorne’s use of the editorial footnotes. Hawthorne amplified his humorous cri-tiques not just through tone but also through a complicated, almost deceiving form. “War Matters” puzzled and angered Hawthorne’s contemporaries in large part because of its di-alogic structure: the narrator, the “Peaceable Man,” lacks a correctly loyal engagement with the Union while an anxious and overwrought editorial voice—also written by Hawthorne—critiques this lack in footnotes to the narrative. Hawthorne wrote the footnotes in response to James T. Fields’s initial re-fusal to publish the article unrevised. Hawthorne’s irreverent sketch of Abraham Lincoln was the most objectionable part.46 In his footnotes, Hawthorne creates the persona of the loyal editor, outraged by the Peaceable Man’s musings and insistent

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on omitting representations that appear disloyal. While the Peaceable Man ruminates on the effects of the war dispassion-ately and ironically, the editor voices a staunch, inflexible, ideological attachment to the emerging definition of Union loyalty. Their humorous edge, though, was lost on many of its readers, suggesting just how well Hawthorne represented the doctrine of loyalty.47 When the Atlantic Monthly first published the essay, readers and reviewers were unsure whether Haw-thorne wrote the notes (though it was generally understood that Hawthorne wrote the narrative). The Liberator ascribed the notes to the Atlantic Monthly editors, but Moncure Conway recalls how he discovered Hawthorne’s authorship. Irate at the nerve of the magazine’s emendations, Conway thrust it into Ralph Waldo Emerson’s hands, who “read the censori-ous notes and quietly said, ‘Of course he wrote the footnotes himself.’”48

The most prominent footnote in the critical reception of “War Matters” has been the one indicating the removal of the Lincoln anecdote. The editor writes: “* We are compelled to omit two or three pages, in which the author describes the interview, and gives his idea of the personal appearance and deportment of the President” (47). Though “a not inaccurate impression of its august subject,” the editor faults the Peace-able Man’s lack of “reverence, and it pains us to see a gentleman of ripe age, and who has spent years under the corrective in-fluence of foreign institutions, falling into the characteristic and most ominous fault of Young America” (47, emphasis in original). The footnote chastising the Peaceable Man for his description of Lincoln enacts the affective struggles over loy-alty (the Peaceable Man irreverently and disloyally looks back-ward to Young America), and at the center of that contest is a literalized body politic, that of the President. The suggestive import of the note’s meaning rests in the juxtaposition of “a not inaccurate impression” with Lincoln as an “august sub-ject.” The double negative is, aptly, indirect, a wink to the reader indicating that, of course, the missing pages would have drained the “august” from the “subject.”

In this way, Hawthorne’s footnotes both obscure and, paradoxically, help us see what are usually ephemeral in texts:

Up a Tree. Caricature of Abraham Lincoln at tree as raccoon threatened by “Colonel Bull” with gun. Wood engraving. 1862. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USZ62-48737.

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affects. They deftly enact a critique of wartime censorship without representing it directly. In fact, by omitting his rep-resentations here, he effectively amplifies the Peaceable Man’s tone of ironic amusement and nonchalant indifference. Considering the widespread visual presence of caricatures of Lincoln (both North and South), it may not be important to the affective impact of the article for Hawthorne to include his description. While Hawthorne has a bit of fun describ-ing Lincoln’s homeliness and sense of humor in the omitted scene, the description may well pale in comparison to what a reader could imagine in its absence. The omission, along with the editor’s scolding, amplifies the power of the supposed caricature rather than diminishes it. To reinstate the Lincoln anecdote, as the editors of the centenary edition do (for in-stance), calls too much attention to censorship while draining this moment in the original article of its affective and political power. In other words, the quest to replace the missing pages mistakes the genre—here we have satire, not journalism.

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asterisks, archives, affects

In quoting from “War Matters” in the previous section, I have been careful to reproduce the footnote’s asterisk, of-ten omitted when critics draw from this text. The mark of the asterisk on the page (both of the Atlantic Monthly and this one) ought to be retained, I argue. It does two things: it reminds the reader that “War Matters” is not journalism as such; and it suggests that the archive remains open in a way that even the footnote cannot complete or cancel out. Most apparently, the footnotes are not there to provide context or support for claims in the main text. While the footnotes at the beginning of “War Matters” explain supposed editorial omissions, the editor soon abandons this role. In fact, from the omission of the Lincoln anecdote until the end of the essay, there are no more redactions—instead, they all express affective responses. More often than not, the notes comment on tone, and most ultimately seek to shame (“* We do not thoroughly compre-hend the author’s drift in the foregoing paragraph, but are


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inclined to think the tone reprehensible, and its tendency impolitic” [49]; “* Can it be a son of old Massachusetts who utters this abominable sentiment? For shame!” [54]). Haw-thorne thus shifts the editor’s intrusions away from explaining narrative omissions and toward commenting on the Peaceable Man’s affect. The editor’s goal, in other words, is to pin down the Peaceable Man’s affective meaning, a difficult task consid-ering that the Peaceable Man resists such affective positioning through his studied indifference.

The full effect of the mise-en-page of “War Matters” there-fore depends on the editorial notes not simply as a disciplining device but as a textual joke that allows Hawthorne to redouble the affective waywardness of the text, its inability to sit still and be correct. We can see these effects best in what may be one of the least notable of the footnotes: the second editorial note, which emends the Peaceable Man’s turn to Lincoln’s cabinet. The Peaceable Man again begins with attention to bodies (so objectionable in the Lincoln anecdote): “Secretary Seward, to be sure,—a pale, large-nosed, elderly man, of moderate stat-ure, with a decided originality of gait and aspect, and a cigar in his mouth,—etc., etc.*” followed by a line of periods: “. . . . . .” The asterisk after the second “etc.” points the read-er to the following: “* We are again compelled to interfere with our friend’s license of personal description and criti-cism. Even Cabinet Members (to whom the next few pages of the article were devoted) have their private immunities, which ought to be conscientiously observed,—unless indeed, the writer chanced to have some very piquant motives for violating them” (47). The editor is nothing if not utterly contradic-tory here; he refuses to hear political dissonance but welcomes scurrilous gossip. The satire of this footnote, though, is sub-tle; it depends on picking up on the multivalence of “piquant motives.” The vague suggestion does more to imply private or public corruption than Hawthorne’s representations prob-ably would, if we judge based on the description of Seward. In this way and throughout the rest of the piece, tone and struc-ture work together to recreate those parts of the text otherwise excised. In other words, they are affectively present but discursively

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omitted. Or, to be more exact, the words on the page do not solely create the affective aspects of the text.

Textual devices such as the asterisk have long been a part of the publication history of satire. As Christopher Fanning argues, the Scriblerians were especially adept at the use of tex-tual marks like the asterisk and the dash: “At the presentation level, at the level of the printed book as object, the satiric text itself becomes a communicative object—breaking down (or coming out—there is a definite printerly exuberance at work) into nonverbal, printerly gestures.”49 Yet Hawthorne’s use of textual devices could not be called “exuberant,” and they cer-tainly do not operate in the way the devices do in A Tale of a Tub (1704) and The Dunciad (1728). Rather than stand out, Haw-thorne’s notes blend in, or else how could Moncure Con-way have missed the joke? The Atlantic Monthly consistently used asterisks to indicate footnotes throughout the magazine. For instance, the first article in the same issue in which “War Mat-ters” appeared is John Weiss’s “Some Soldier-Poetry,” which offers footnotes that expand the argument (“* There is a little volume, called Voices from the Ranks, in which numerous letters written by privates, corporals, etc., in the Crimea, are col-lected and arranged”) or further references (“* See transla-tions of Von Zedlitz’s Midnight Review …”).50 Weiss’s footnotes, clearly written by him, supplement his meaning or provide citations and further references, as do other footnotes in At-lantic Monthly articles. Weiss’s notes are consistent in tone with his serious appraisal of war poetry, past and present, and they offer an aura of authority to the main body of the ar-ticle. Hawthorne’s humor and its effect, then, reside not in the outrageous textuality of the asterisk but in its uniformity with the sober textual presentation of the Atlantic Monthly more broadly. Of course, the very sobriety of the asterisk—its quiet mark on the page—contrasts with the editor’s chastising tone, and this juxtaposition, in the end, provides the satiric effect for which Hawthorne strives.

The debate between the Peaceable Man and the editor therefore offers a visual corollary to the affective history rep-resented in Our Old Home. “War Matters” itself becomes an ar-chive of affective engagements. By aligning two voices on the


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space of the page, the essay produces a third perspective on the affective struggles of the war, that of the reader’s multi-directional engagement with the piece, thus denying (or, at least, potentially upsetting) a truly partisan reading experi-ence.51 Whenever the editor omits paragraphs or denounces the Peaceable Man’s sentiments, Hawthorne provides both a footnote—the supplement—and a textual break with asterisks. It is not just then a break and detour into a different voice but a pause and a space on the page. Literally in a place, this is not a “rational” or “objective” view from nowhere, yet in repre-senting the struggles over political affections, Hawthorne asks readers to readjust tone and expectations continually and to do so in a nonlinear fashion, as their eyes scan up and down the essay outside of the linearity of the Peaceable Man’s nar-rative. Just as Hawthorne confronts his own limitations in England by facing an American flag from the War of 1812, he asks his readers to experience the same dislocations of nation, history, and affect in “War Matters.”

To conclude, I see the reading process begged by “War Matters” as emblematic of the affective work of history. Our Old Home and “War Matters” are texts of affective history, both in their representations of history and in the cascading re-sponses to them through their textual histories. Hawthorne’s alienation from a loyal response to the Union, his inability to have a “correct” political affect, turns into more than a simple unease with the nation or indifference to slavery. The great irony of Hawthorne’s investment in the nexus of history and affect in these texts seems to be that he produced texts that ap-pear indifferent, provoking readers to respond with intense reactions, including those that Hawthorne himself predicted by writing the footnotes. His Civil War texts are funny and, at times, tedious in their details; they are also politically chal-lenging to Union consensus in the 1860s and to political lib-eralism today. In other words, his texts are concerned with affect, they inspire affective, sometimes involuntary respons-es, but they do not, at first glance, register as emotional texts in the way that, for instance, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) would. An affective text like “War Matters,” then, doesn’t depend on hyperbolic emotionality; it instead invests

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in the methods for sparking such responses. In this way, texts and archives remain open to and productive of affects.

Hawthorne’s asterisks remind us that no text or archive is complete, just as no political stance is ever uniform. This incomplete quality resides in how these affective resonances refuse to be disciplined. By drawing upon Hawthorne as a model, we see how affective history is history that will not sit still. Affects seep out of, and not just into, the historical ar-chive through such elements as tone, genre, form, and recep-tion. If an archive can be said to be complete (and thus history contained and enclosed), it occurs not in the text itself but through the reader, a process imbued with affective invest-ments and mistakes. This is why I call such attention to the reception of Hawthorne’s Civil War texts. What Hawthorne’s Civil War texts point to, then, is what affective history allows us to glimpse: that history itself is a process of both embodi-ment and displacement, of being both here and elsewhere si-multaneously. If we think in terms not of history qua history, but the quirks of particular archives, we can theorize affect as part of our historical sources; reading for the affective cloud around texts and archives can be a way to access the rich and unpredictable aspect of history as it was experienced, in all of its bewildering qualities.

While Hawthorne moves back and forth diachronically in Our Old Home and “War Matters,” I have purposefully kept my eye on a synchronic archive for elucidating these texts’ af-fective elements. Doing so risks reinstating the problem with which I began, that of what we mean by “historical context” and its relation to affect. I chose that archive to speak directly to the way “history” has been represented as a containment, a conservative impulse in affect theory. Even when restricting my archive to Hawthorne’s Civil War texts and their recep-tion, history operates as a force that multiplies affects rather than constrains them. As the example of Hawthorne’s Civil War prose demonstrates, by tracing the affective resonances of the historic archive, we can maintain history as open to affects and productive of them, a source as open as the formal logic of “War Matters.”


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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

notes

I would like to thank Jennifer Greenhill, Jordan Alexander Stein, Stepha-nie Foote, Gordon Hutner, Lilya Kaganovsky, Irene Small, Nicholas Bro-mell, Shirley Samuels, and Jim Hansen for their generous feedback, which helped me think through and shape this argument.

1. “The Thorn that Bears Haws,” The Liberator 32 (1862): 102. A foot-note indicates what the title (the pun on “haws,” the red fruit of haw-thorns) implies: the reviewer knows the author to be Hawthorne.

2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Life of Franklin Pierce in Miscellaneous Prose and Verse, Vol. 23 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Co-lumbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1994), 273-376: 273.

3. F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford UP, 1941), 317. Michael Gilmore re-cently reaffirmed this consensus in “Hawthorne and Politics (Again): Words and Deeds in the 1850s,” in Hawthorne and the Real: Bicentennial Essays, ed. Millicent Bell (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2005), 22-39. Michael Borgstrom has canvassed how Hawthorne comes un-der the same critique for his passivity in the face of politics as does his narrator in The Blithedale Romance in “Hating Miles Coverdale,” ESQ 56 (2010), 366-369.

4. See for instance, Jean Fagan Yellin, “Hawthorne and the Slavery Question,” A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Larry J. Reyn-olds (New York: Oxford UP, 2001), 135-164: 135, 147, 152; Eric Cheyfitz, “The Irresistibleness of Great Literature: Reconstructing Hawthorne’s Politics,” American Literary History 6 (1994), 539-558: 545.

5. Gordon Hutner, “Whose Hawthorne?” The Cambridge Companion to Na-thaniel Hawthorne, ed. Richard H. Millington (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 251-265: 258.

6. Michael Borgstrom, “Hating Miles Coverdale,” 366.7. For a more detailed definition of “affect” as preceding emotion, feel-

ing, and understanding, see Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the ‘Death of the Subject’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001), 4-5; Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke UP, 2002), 27-33; Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004), 3-6.

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8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Histori-cal Difference (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), 18. Chakrabarty ac-knowledges his debt for the term to Homi Bhabha.

9. Lauren Berlant argues that criticism on the historical novel by Georg Lukács, Frederic Jameson, and Benedict Anderson has long been at-tuned to the affective dimensions of history. I seek here to consider the relation of those two registers outside of that self-consciously his-torical genre. See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke UP, 2011), 64-65.

10. Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry Bright, 17 December 1860 in Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Letters, 1857-1864, ed. Thomas Woodson, et. al. (Co-lumbus, OH: Ohio UP, 1987), 354-357: 354, 356.

11. Jeffrey Insko, “Anachronistic Imaginings: Hope Leslie’s Challenge to Historicism,” American Literary History 16 (2004), 179-207: 180.

12. Lloyd Pratt, Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2010), 68. My under-standing of the role of assumptions in historicism has also been great-ly informed by Valerie Rohy, “Ahistorical,” GLQ 12 (2006), 61-83.

13. Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011), 434-472: 450-451. Perhaps the most insightful portion of Leys’s ar-gument is her return to the scientific studies used by Massumi, ques-tioning his conclusions with a more attentive reading of the science.

14. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shim-mers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Sei-gworth, eds. (Durham: Duke UP, 2010), 1-25: 4.

15. Massumi, Parables, 10.16. Brennan, Transmission, 128. 17. Christopher Castliglia and Christopher Reed, If Memory Serves: Gay Men,

AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012), 23.

18. That Berlant concentrates on a “history of the present” signals her af-finity with the temporal orientation to the contemporary period that is the hallmark of affect theory.

19. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 52.20. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 67.21. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005), 46.22. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 66.23. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti

(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982), 79.


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24. Robert H. Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Con-stitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1984), 354.

25. Wiebe, Opening, 355. For more on nationalism in the United States before and during the Civil War, see Wilbur Zelinsky, Nation Into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988); Liah Greenfield, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), chapter 5, “In Pur-suit of the Ideal Nation: The Unfolding of Nationality in America”; Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999); Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forg-ing a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence, KS: UP of Kansas, 2002); Peter J. Parish, The North and the Nation in the Era of the Civil War, eds. Adam I. P. Smith and Susan-Mary Grant (New York: Fordham UP, 2003); Elizabeth Duquette, Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-Century America (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2010), chapter 1. For a critique of Benedict Anderson’s theory of nationalism in light of print culture, see Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (New York: Columbia UP, 2007).

26. [Nathaniel Hawthorne], “Chiefly About War Matters. By a Peaceable Man,” The Atlantic Monthly 10 (1862), 43-62: 48. All other references to “War Matters” will be in parenthetical citations.

27. Duquette, Loyal Subjects, 37. Duquette argues that loyalty oaths during the war and Reconstruction sought to collapse “historical difference” and thus “reconfigure[] national time into a series of repetitions, projecting the present into the future and replacing the changes of time with a consistency that seems to guarantee security” (47). This collapsing of time as a guarantee of security is markedly different from Hawthorne’s affective uses of history, further alienating his views from the common doctrine of loyalty.

28. Horace Bushnell, “The Doctrine of Loyalty,” New Englander and Yale Re-view 22 (1863), 560-582: 577.

29. Francis Lieber, “No Party Now, but All for Our Country,” (Philadel-phia: Crissy & Markeley, 1863), 2.

30. Lieber, “No Party Now,” 3.31. In this way, disloyalty sounds quite similar to Heather Love’s articu-

lation of “feeling backward” in terms of texts that register the “cor-poreal and psychic costs of homophobia” in the “coming of mod-ern homosexuality.” This archive of feeling is marked, first of all, by

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nostalgia, an affective response that is synchronically out of step. See Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007), 4.

32. “The Thorn that Bears Haws,” The Liberator 102.33. “The Death of Hawthorne,” The Independent 26 May 1864: 1.34. “Literary,” Harper’s Weekly 21 November 1863: 739. It is not completely

outlandish for this review to mention infanticide. In Our Old Home, Hawthorne offers a Swiftian solution in his chapter on “English pov-erty,” that it “would be a blessing to the human race” and to the chil-dren themselves if every one of the children in the alms-house in London “could be drowned to-night, by their best friends, instead of being put tenderly to bed.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches, vol. 5 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1970), 304-305.

35. Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford UP, 1994), 314; Brenda Wineapple, “Nathaniel Hawthorne, Writer; or, The Fleeing of the Biographied,” Hawthorne and the Real, 181-198: 183.

36. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cul-tures (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003). Cvetkovich defines an “archive of feelings” as “cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions, which are encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception” (7).

37. Hawthorne, Our Old Home, 4.38. Hawthorne, Our Old Home, 69, 70.39. Hawthorne, Our Old Home 257.40. I do not have the space in this essay to canvass fully the complexities

of Hawthorne’s opinions on race. This scene, though, has garnered some of the most intense focus from scholars. For developed read-ings of its racial politics, see Cheyfitz, “The Irresistibleness of Great Literature”; Nancy Bentley, The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), chapter 2; Ar-thur Riss, Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Litera-ture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), chapter 5; Randall Fuller, “Hawthorne and War,” The New England Quarterly 80 (2007), 655-686.

41. Riss, Race, Slavery, and Liberalism, 146.42. Riss, Race, Slavery, and Liberalism, 136.43. Timothy Sweet, Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of Union (Bal-

timore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990), see chapter 5, “Barnard and the American Picturesque.”


551

44. Edward Dicey, “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” in Hawthorne in His Own Time, eds. Ronald A. Bosco and Jillmarie Murphy (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2007), 115-123: 119. Dicey found Hawthorne’s response remark-able for its ambiguity: they provide for the slaves materially but Haw-thorne sees the slaves as traveling away from “home.” Considering Hawthorne’s description of England as “our old home,” one made entirely of a “fervent hereditary attachment,” Dicey may not have registered the paradox Hawthorne encapsulates by the word “home”: both entirely emotional and yet thoroughly imaginary. Hawthorne, Our Old Home, 40.

45. “The Thorn that Bears Haws,” 102.46. For more on the exchange between Fields and Hawthorne, see Grace

E. Smith, “‘Chiefly about War Matters’: Hawthorne’s Swift Judgment of Lincoln,” American Transcendental Quarterly 15 (2001), 149-161: 154-157; and Shirley Samuels, Reading the American Novel, 1790-1865, chapter 2, (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

47. The structure of “War Matters” continued to pose interpretive and editorial challenges since that first publication. James Bense argues that Hawthorne intended to omit the passage about meeting Lincoln that the editors of the centenary edition reinstated. See James Bense, “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Intention in ‘Chiefly About War Matters,’” American Literature 61 (1989), 200-214. Grace E. Smith, more recently, has disagreed with Bense’s assessment, claiming that there is no proof in Hawthorne’s letters that he chose to make the major omissions (particularly of Lincoln), though it is clear that he crafted the notes.

48. Moncure D. Conway, Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Scribner and Welford, 1890), 204.

49. Christopher Fanning, “Small Particles of Eloquence: Sterne and the Scriblerian Text,” Modern Philology 100 (2003), 360-392: 370. For an example of the exuberant use of textual marks in the 1860s, see Jen-nifer Greenhill, “Humor in Cold Dead Type: Performing Artemus Ward’s London Panorama Lecture in Print,” Word & Image 28 (2012): 257-272. Jennifer Greenhill also helped me expand this part of my argument, for which I am grateful.

50. John Weiss, “Some Soldier-Poetry,” The Atlantic Monthly 57 (1862), 1-16: 2.

51. I am indebted to Michael Rothberg for the term “multidirectional” here. See Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009), 3.

"Feeling out of Place: Affective History, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Civil War"

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