SHOWING AND TELLING:

VISUAL CULTURE AND ITS IMPACT ON THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE OF

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE AND EDITH

WHARTON’S SUMMER

A Thesis

Presented to the Faculty of the Department of English

California State University, Sacramento

Submitted in partial satisfaction of

the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

in

English

(Literature)

by

Juan Espinoza

SPRING

2020

ii

© 2020

Juan Espinoza

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

iii

SHOWING AND TELLING:

VISUAL CULTURE AND ITS IMPACT ON THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE OF

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE AND EDITH

WHARTON’S SUMMER

A Thesis

by

Juan Espinoza

Approved by:

__________________________________, Committee Chair

Nancy Sweet

__________________________________, Second Reader

Susan Wanlass

____________________________

Date

iv

Student: Juan Espinoza

I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University

format manual, and that this thesis is suitable for electronic submission to the Library and

credit is to be awarded for this thesis.

__________________________, Graduate Coordinator ___________________

Doug Rice Date

Department of English

v

Abstract

of

SHOWING AND TELLING:

VISUAL CULTURE AND ITS IMPACT ON THE NARRATIVE STRUCTURE OF

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE AND EDITH

WHARTON’S SUMMER

by

Juan Espinoza

In her 1934 autobiography, A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton admonished

critics of her 1917 novel Summer who viewed the novel as a “pleasing romance of

summer life.” Wharton saw her novel as part of the same Dark Romantic literary

traditions of New England established by authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne. This project

moves beyond Wharton’s connections of genre and geography to explore how both

Hawthorne’s and Wharton’s literary works were intimately situated within their

respective era’s popular culture and how popular entertainments of each era shaped the

form, style, and worldview of each author’s literary works. I begin by analyzing how

Hawthorne’s 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance is narrated as though it were a series of

tableaux vivant or “living pictures,” antebellum entertainments with a moral message,

though they were also often an excuse to skirt censorship laws. I then explore how, in

much the same way, Wharton’s Summer uses the circus freakshow, a form descended

from the tableaux vivant that displayed Otherness as a medical and scientific

vi

entertainment. In Summer the freakshow is used with disturbing effect as a way to

deliver an otherwise simple “seduced and abandoned” plot. Together these novels

suggest that literary fiction is shaped by the popular culture that surrounds it. As that

popular culture evolves, so too does the form of literary fiction. Large changes in

popular culture, like those between tableaux vivant and the freakshow, are mirrored by

minor differences in the narratives of literary fiction like those between The Blithedale

Romance and Summer.

_______________________, Committee Chair

Nancy Sweet

_______________________

Date

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This Master’s Thesis was made possible by many, many people. I would like to thank

the following people:

Dr. Nancy Sweet and Dr. Susan Wanlass for their support throughout this process and

throughout my master’s degree.

My family, especially my mother Traci Johnson and my father Luis Espinoza, who

supported me throughout this entire journey.

My brothers, José and Carlos Espinoza.

My friends, especially Anthony Perez and Catalina Carapia-Aguillon, and Ambyr Gage,

Ademidun Adejobi, David Ng, Sophia Louie and so, so many others.

My colleagues, for supporting me in my many other endeavors.

And Dora Monterroza, for putting up with me, for supporting me, for inspiring me, for

pushing me to be the best person I can be.

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... vii

Chapter

1. INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE STAGE ...............................................................1

2. HUSH, POSE, AND YOU WILL BELIEVE: TABLEAUX VIVANT AND

BLITHEDALE .............................................................................................................25

3. THE GREATEST SHOW IN NEW ENGLAND: FREAKSHOW, CIRCUS, AND

SUMMER ....................................................................................................................58

4. STRIKING THE SET: CONLCUSIONS AND NOTES FOR FURTHER

READINGS AND VIEWINGS ..................................................................................92

Works Cited ....................................................................................................................106

1

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE STAGE

In her 1934 autobiography, A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton admonished

critics of her 1917 novel Summer. Critics of the time were excited for the release of

Summer. Many reviews drew a comparison between Wharton’s earlier work Ethan

Frome and Summer, with the Nation favoring the former and the Times Literary

Supplement seeing the two novels as equals (Rattray xvi). To Wharton, Summer was

squarely in the dark, regional traditions of fiction established by authors like Nathaniel

Hawthorne. Wharton felt, for good reason, that her critics were instead expecting

Summer to be “the reflection of local life in the rose-and-lavender pages of their favourite

authoresses” (Wharton, A Backward Glance 294). After all, the New York Times Book

Review naively titled their review “Summer a Pleasing Romance of Village Life” (xix).

Wharton’s stab at her reviewers is a less emphatic rebuke of “women’s writing” than

Hawthorne’s own scorn of the “damned mob of scribbling women” he felt was ruining

the critical reputation of his own work in 1855 (Wagner-Martin 243). Hawthorne’s 1852

novel The Blithedale Romance came before his “scribbling women” phase, but some of

the reviews of the novel are no less damning than those he would receive—and comment

on—later. The Norton Critical Edition of Blithedale contains one review, by an

anonymous reviewer for the Westminster Review, declaring that Blithedale “will never

attain the popularity which is vouchsafed…to some of its contemporaries” and which

went on to say that “Hawthorne has a rich perception of the beautiful, but he is sadly

2

deficient in moral depth and earnestness” (262, 263). Reviews of Blithedale fall into

roughly two camps. One camp identifies Blithedale as a roman à clef for the real-life

Brook Farm. The Penguin Classics Edition quotes a review from the Christian Examiner

that states emphatically that “Mr. Hawthorne is presenting…a delineation of life and

character” at Brook Farm (x). Orestes Brownson, father to a Brook Farm participant, was

often reluctantly roped into the roman à clef reading but tried, in his reviews, to lead the

other camp that saw Blithedale “connected with some of [his] friends” but ultimately

showing “very little of the actual persons engaged in it” (x). Though the reviews were

decidedly mixed for each novel, it is interesting that the two authors, connected through

time and genre, share a connection through their novels’s similar persistent misreadings.

However, it is also easy to see that the novels share a similar narrative structure.

Blithedale is the story of failed love at a failed socialist utopian community. It follows

three main characters: Zenobia, a proto-feminist and author; Hollingsworth, a criminal

reformer; and Miles Coverdale, a minor romantic poet and flaneur who narrates the story

after the fact. The love triangle that develops between the three is complicated by the

introduction of Priscilla and Westervelt. Summer follows Charity Royall in her love

affair with the urbane Lucius Harney, who is visiting North Dormer to sketch colonial era

houses. The love affair is complicated by Lawyer Royall, Charity’s adoptive ward.

When Charity becomes pregnant by Harney and Harney leaves her for the beautiful

Annabel Balch, Charity runs away to the outlaw community on the Mountain, her

ancestral home. Lawyer Royall brings the exhausted Charity back to town and promptly

3

marries her. Each novel has very similar characters. Hollingsworth and Lawyer are the

brooding older men, Coverdale and Harney the feckless young men, Priscilla and Charity

the delicate but brooding young women, and Zenobia and Annabel Balch the

“temptresses.” Besides complicated sexual/romantic relationships, each novel deals with

themes of power and control. More specifically, the male characters use their power to

control, confine, judge, and punish women. In Blithedale, the gaze is each male

character’s, but especially Coverdale’s, main means of control. In Summer, that male

gaze is suffused into an Orwellian panopticism lorded over by Lawyer Royall.

Though the similarities in critical receptions and the narrative structures are

intriguing, simply put, I find Wharton’s claim of literary kinship with Hawthorne the

most intriguing. Wharton’s genealogical claim establishes her roots in both a

geographical space, New England, and a generic vein, Dark Romanticism, a dark

counterpoint to Romantic literature often conflated with the Gothic because of its

fascination with the irrational, demonic, and grotesque, as opposed to Romantic

literature’s focus on the sublime and euphoric. With this project I will add another

category to the connection between Hawthorne and Wharton: performance. By this I

mean two things, the actual performances within the novels and readings using a

performance studies lens. I take this approach because both novels include detailed

accounts of and slight references to a range of actual performances and actual popular

entertainment spectacles of their respective eras. I use the term performance

interchangeably with entertainment and spectacle because historical accounts of these

4

performances stress both the performer, the spectacle, and the entertainment value of

each performance. Indeed, it seems, in reading historical accounts, that performance,

spectacle, and entertainment are inextricably linked and not distinct categories. A

performance genealogy can be traced through strictly literary works1. Hawthorne’s 1860

novel The Marble Faun could be read as blending sculpture, painting, and architecture

with popular forms of Gothic and travel writing. Wharton’s The House of Mirth, with its

spectacular, fantastical, and infamous tableaux vivant scene could be read as a blending

of popular stage performances with the popular novel. However, Blithedale and Summer

do not just feature performance, they use performance as a frame with which to deliver

their narratives. Hawthorne uses performance, the nineteenth-century fad of tableaux

vivant2 specifically, as a frame for his first-person narrator, Miles Coverdale, to deliver

Blithedale. Wharton similarly uses performance to deliver Summer through her third

person narrator. That performance, the freakshow or circus sideshow, is a direct

descendant of the tableaux vivant used in Blithedale.

Thus, this project is as much a study of Hawthorne and Wharton as it is a study of

popular culture and how both high and low entertainment together form a dynamic

1 For a discussion of this literary connection using both literature and tableaux vivant, see

“Tableaux Vivants: Masculine Vision and Feminine Reflections in Novels by Warner,

Alcott, Stowe, and Wharton” by Grace Ann and Theodore R. Hovet.

2 It is important to note a seemingly trivial concern before proceeding too far forwards:

spelling. Many modern critics use the proper French spelling of tableaux vivant for the

plural, as I do. However, it seems to be common practice to also use the Americanized

tableaux vivants, which, when referring to 19th century writing, seems to be the preferred

method. When quoting, I retain the spelling of the author or critic; however, when

writing, I will use the French version of the term.

5

entertainment ecosystem that evolves over time. In this respect, my work taps into the

same critical vein as Mark Storey’s critical work, which suggests that nearly any

combination of works by Henry James could be included as literary intermediaries

between Hawthorne and Wharton. Storey reads James’s works as exemplify how

literature can participate in the evolution of visual culture from the straightforward

theatrics of antebellum stages to the kaleidoscopic three-ring circuses of postbellum

entertainments. Blithedale and Summer serve as more intriguing points along the

evolutionary timeline than Storey’s readings of James’s works because the two novels are

both far enough apart to not be bogged down with the minutiae of change (as Storey’s

study of James is) and close enough together to not fall victim to grand historical

oversimplifications. In other words, they are situated at the right distance to establish a

valid overarching evolutionary narrative. Too, the connections between Hawthorne and

Wharton and tableaux vivant and freakshow are well documented; Blithedale and

Summer allow me to suture the authors and the entertainments together into one unified

narrative. In examining these two points along the evolutionary timeline, this project also

proposes a way for current readers and scholars to understand literature’s place in their

current entertainment ecosystem.

As mentioned above, the entertainments I will focus on will be the tableaux vivant

and freakshow. Both are now functionally extinct, existing in some form within our

modern entertainments but not existing on their own as they did in past centuries. Along

with studying these actual performances, this project also uses “performance” as it is used

6

by varying fields of study. For instance, this project uses a performance studies approach

to read each novel. Tracy C. Davis, in her introduction to The Cambridge Companion to

Performance Studies, sees a timeline of academic “turns”—vogueish philosophies or

stances of studying that supposedly shook up academia—of which the “performative

turn” is the most recent in line. The performative turn itself acknowledges “how

individual behavior derives from collective, even unconscious, influences and is manifest

as observable behavior, both overt and quotidian, individual and collective” (1). The

“performative turn” was built first from the “linguistic turn” of theorists like Jacque

Derrida. In linguistics, a performative is what J. L. Austin calls an utterance that does

things with words. For example, promises, oaths, and naming utterances are not

necessarily true or false, but are actions done through words. Stanley Cavell takes up this

notion and expands performativity to also include the ability for language to carry and

thus perform emotion3. The performative turn subsequently built from the “cultural turn”

of Michel Foucault (1). The more well-known definition of performativity comes from

the “cultural turn” approach of Judith Butler. Butler’s concept of “performativity of

gender” argues that identities are “performed,” as in made up of many actions and

costumings. Gender, in turn, can be replaced by any number of other terms to suggest

that our reality and identities are made up of actions, costumes, and roles. For example,

3 This is, of course, not the entire history of linguistic performativity. Scott Lash

conducts a thorough and easy-to-read interview in Theory, Culture & Society with

philosopher John Searle on linguistic performativity titled “Performativity or Discourse?

An Interview with John Searle.”

7

Nicholas Ridout argues that democracy is a performative act because we must play the

role of a member of the polis. However, Davis also points out that key terms pertaining

to the field of performance studies have a certain “heterogeneity” to their definitions and

uses (7). One key contention within performance studies is between “adherents of

performance studies” and those “making use of the power of ‘performance’ as an

explanatory metaphor without regard for…‘limits’ to the performative” (1). This project

will use the “heterogeneity” of the term “performance” to explore the many layers of

performance in each novel and will push the boundaries of the performative metaphor by

moving beyond the performer/audience dichotomy of many performance studies to

include director, critic, and theatre space.

However, I feel that if I am to fully explain the connection through performance,

it is necessary to provide here some historical context for this project. The following

sections proceed chronologically, delving into the history first of tableaux vivant and then

of freakshow. Along with the history, I provide some technical, cultural, and critical

information of each performance type. This historical section serves as a basis from

which to begin excavating the connections between Hawthorne and Wharton. In fact,

even here certain themes emerge that both historians of the performances and critics of

the novels hold in common. Critics of both the entertainments and the novels discuss the

dynamics of the gaze and the many attempts to subvert the power of the gaze. Another

common theme is mixture. Critics of performance inevitably talk about the mixing of

8

audience and stage, viewer and viewed, while critics of the novels talk about the mixture

of reliable and unreliable narration, objective and subjective reality.

Hawthorne begins his introduction to Blithedale by declaring that, “In short, [his]

present concern with the Socialist Community is merely to establish a theatre…where the

creatures of his brain may play their phantasmagorical antics” (Hawthorne 1). Even

before the play begins, readers are cued to seek out the theatrical, to favor the subjective

over the objective, in The Blithedale Romance. Critics have taken this cue to discuss the

most spectacular theatre genres of the novel: mesmerism and masque. Michael S.

Martin’s and Samuel Coale’s separate investigations into masque and mesmerism

respectively argue for theatre not as an innocent entertainment but a phantasmagorical,

almost psychotropic, exploitative performance. In Blithedale, the two argue,

performance is a way to challenge reality or a way to exercise one’s power over others,

the narrative, and, to an extent, reality. However, masque and mesmerism are only two

examples from the breadth of theatric and performative references in Blithedale that stem

from Hawthorne’s “interest in large-scale nineteenth-century American spectatorship and

entertainment” (Martin 85). Though Hawthorne’s particularly contentious relationship

with mesmerism does provide a fertile ground for critical readings, this project explores

the rest of the ecosystem of entertainments that Hawthorne could have drawn from.

Equally prevalent, and equally odd, as mesmerism and masque are the tableaux

vivant, or living pictures, put on by the inhabitants of Blithedale Farm before the

“Zenobia’s Legend” chapter (Hawthorne 106). Like the masque, tableau has a long

9

history. It is important to note here that tableaux vivant were not a homogenous

performance type nor were they singularly an American experience during Hawthorne’s

life. In fact, the tableau, like most theatrical traditions that originated in Europe, “carries

a long history dating to the early Renaissance” though it can be traced even further back

to medieval morality plays, where, “at important moments in [the] morality plays,

[performers] often used a tableau to give the central personage (together with the

audience) a moral insight” (Patterson 616, Bussels 239). Even in these pre-modern

performances, the form’s basic themes, and contradictions, are clearly present. Stijn

Bussels discusses the extensive use of tableaux vivant in the “joyous entry” ceremonies

of the Lowlands. The joyous entry was a performance staged by the town to welcome a

new ruler but to also deliver a political message to the ruler regarding what the town saw

as the moral, ethical, and legal relationship between state and city. However, the

tableaux of the joyous entries did not draw solely on the medieval performance traditions

of the morality play. They drew extensively from Classical and medieval treatises on the

rhetoric of painting and theatre. Bussels suggests that, at least “In 1458,” tableaux were

“an ideal means to experiment with the capacities of both [theatre and painting] to present

the political relation between” the town and the visiting ruler (Bussels 238). This pre-

modern history presented by Bussels suggests that tableaux, from the beginning, were

performances that freely mixed media to serve a certain end and communicate a certain

message concerning power relations between two parties, in this case the ruler/audience

and the town/performer. An important caveat is, as Bussels points out, that the tableaux

10

of the joyous entry were not always easy for the audience, whether ruler or townsperson,

to decode. In Bussels’ history, this difficulty is inherent in the tableaux’s mixed-media

formant. Combining the rhetorics of painting and performance led to a product that was

overladen with meaning. Though the historical consequences of this for the Lowlands

are not important to this project, the concept of overdetermined meaning is, as will

become clear.

What became the popular tableaux vivant of the later nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries “can be traced to the eighteenth-century Neapolitan drawing room

displays”—or attitudes—“by Lady Emma Hamilton…who famously covered her

seminude form with shawls” (Assael 746). These attitudes were performed “for private

and aristocratic entertainment” (Patterson 616). One of those aristocrats, who is often

credited in the historical and critical literature for popularizing tableaux in Europe and

subsequently America, was Goethe who showcased tableaux in his novel Elective

Affinities (Patterson 616). For his part, Goethe thought Lady Hamilton’s performances

were inspired by religious tableaux, which Peter McIsaac, in his discussion of Goethe and

tableaux, traces back to renaissance Italy (McIsaac 155). McIsaac also argues that,

beyond simply popularizing tableaux, Goethe was also responsible for popularizing the

linking of several tableaux into a kind of cycle to create more complex meanings. By

juxtaposing several tableaux, the performer could suggest a narrative (156) without

actually moving or acting. Goethe is also credited by McIsaac and Cynthia Lee Patterson

as the originator of many of the gender issues present in later tableaux. Goethe

11

effectively rendered tableaux performance feminine and viewing—and thus decoding—

tableaux masculine. However, the tableaux still were not easily decoded by the audience.

McIsaac suggests that Lady Hamilton’s performances were often mediated by Lord

Hamilton who provided “suggested interpretations” in the form of “commentary or poetic

passage” (McIsaac 157). Lady Hamilton’s “attitudes” bring up several interesting points

absent in earlier tableaux. For one, audiences of Lady Hamilton’s were often unsure of

just who they were looking at. On the one hand, it was Lady Hamilton in front of them.

On the other hand, “once [her shawls] dropped, she was said to portray a series of grand

gestures as if the statues she represented, like Helena, Cassandra, and Andromache, had

come to life” right there in the parlor (Assael 746). McIsaac furthers this by saying

“whereas the figure frozen in a pose is the presented ‘material,’ she can likewise be

recognized as the creative instance” (McIsaac 157), i.e. Lady Hamilton blurred the line

between artist and art object.

That Lady Hamilton’s body was displayed so brazenly—ostensibly as art—was in

stark contrast to another practitioner of the tableaux at the time: Stéphanie de Félicité, the

Countess of Genlis who advocated for the tableaux’s pedagogical uses. Specifically, the

Countess of Genlis “advocated a strict, religiously based method that avoided the use of

theoretical explanations” in favor of “historical scenes [that] were enacted as tableaux

vivants in the hopes that bodily emulation of certain poses would transmit proper morals,

politics and Bildung well before young minds could grasp those abstract concepts”

(McIsaac 165). Though McIsaac does not speculate as to why this split between the

12

artistic and the instructive occurred, it is possible to see how the tableaux’s uncertain and

uneven past in politics, theatre, and painting could lead to such a bifurcation. The

tableaux of the joyous entries could just as easily be split between their political and

moral exigencies and their artistic exigencies. What is most important about Lady

Hamilton, the Countess of Genlis, and the eighteenth-century period is, simply, the

bifurcation. It is the bifurcation of tableaux production, viewership, and criticism into

pedagogical and artistic camps that defines the rest of the history of both the tableaux

vivant and the freakshow as well as both performances’ critical receptions.

The nineteenth century saw tableaux move from the courtly home and into

popular public venues, though the form continued to have a strong presence inside the

home. Robert Lewis corroborates much of the above history of tableaux, suggesting that

the home sphere “constituted protected space, a sanctuary and refuge from the fray, and

from the frenzy of modern, commercial urban life” and that “in the select company of

family and invited guests, there could be some pretense that entertainments were

‘instructive,’ ‘improving,’ character-developing rather than ‘dissipating’” (Lewis 282).

Lewis’s work adds, however, that “in aristocratic society in early nineteenth-century

England, the favorite tableaux subject was art, either classical sculpture or Renaissance

painting” (Lewis 283). The early “parlor” tableaux, those performed in the homes of

aristocrats, often mimicked the “attitudes” of Lady Hamilton. Lewis suggests that it was

these parlor tableaux that initially moved from Europe to America when “American

visitors on the Grand Tour witnessed [these] ‘attitudes’ and were duly impressed” (Lewis

13

283). In America, the parlor tableaux were often “clichéd examples of American

Victorian taste…striving for melodramatic effect” because “knowledge of the fine arts

was not widely disseminated” in America as it was in Europe (285, 284). With the

invention of chromolithography Americans had more and more colorful access to

classical works of art (284). Lewis is sure to point out that parlor tableaux evolved into

ever more complex productions, often taking up the entire parlor so that the audience had

to view the tableaux from the front room through the doorway between the two rooms

(287). This move from small attitudes to grandiose productions mirrored the same

evolution in public tableaux discussed by McCullough.

One critic suggests that outside the home, “the earlier nineteenth century versions

of the tableau vivant took place in disreputable venues and were seen as lewd

entertainment for those who had little or no pretense to be lovers of ‘high art’” like Lady

Hamilton (Huxley 220). However, this claim cannot be taken as altogether true. For one,

public tableaux performances could still be passed off as “moral” even if they could not

be passed off as “high art.” In the mid-1800s, Louis Godey used popular tableaux as

inspiration for illustrations in his magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Magazine4. “Godey’s match

plates”—illustrations juxtaposing moral and immoral actions such as industry and

idleness—“proved quite popular during the 1840s and 1850s, many enacting a

performative morality reminiscent of the popular stage tableaux vivants, and moral

4 For a continued discussion of Godey’s and literature, see Monika M. Elbert’s “Striking

a Historical Pose: Antebellum Tableaux Vivants, ‘Godey’s’ Illustrations, and Margret

Fuller’s Heroines.”

14

melodramas also captivating audiences at mid-century” (Patterson 614). These match

plates were often illustrated first then made more robust with the addition of a story or

essay from prominent writers. Moral melodramas themselves “involve[ed] scene-

opening and -ending dramatic tableaux, accompanied by music” (616). The ending

tableaux was especially powerful because it “presented the core melodramatic truth to the

audience” (617) similar to the medieval morality play tableaux. Tableaux were also

being performed on their own as well. It is important to note that “while the dramatic

tableau freezes action in a melodrama or other stage performance, the tableaux vivants

provide the opposite effect, bringing to life on the stage scenes taken from painting or

sculpture” (616). These tableaux were initially actors and circus performers posing as

classical statues. Over time tableaux showcased pictures or “scenes” whose “productions

had shifted to a more grandiose style involving whole companies of performers”

(McCollough 19). Tableaux attempted to imitate a piece of art as closely as possible and

yet remained obviously theatric, blending realism, fantasy, and theatre together.

Tableaux, like the mesmeric performances covered by Coale, involve “an erotic tension

between male ‘persons of taste,’ who are bearers of the look, and female signs of ‘the

beautiful,’ who are their object” (Chapman 31). And like mesmerism, “there was a ready

and eager market for tickets, and there were entrepreneurs, legitimate and otherwise, who

were ready to exploit that part of the public which was more interested in the

‘proportions’ of the female artists than the ‘classical’ works of art they represented”

(McCollough 29).

15

However, the same bifurcation between Lady Hamilton and the Countess of

Genlis persisted into the nineteenth century. Though there were dubious practitioners

whose tableaux more closely resembled pornography, “supporters [of tableaux] could

inscribe tableaux vivants with aesthetic registers, allowing them to be claimed for

respectability rather than immorality—to be upheld as art rather than obscenity” (Assael

745). Brenda Assael quotes from The Daily Graphic, a nineteenth-century newspaper,

which said “it was good for the public to see at least ‘a fac similie’ of high art” (751)

suggesting that critics understood the erotic tensions of tableaux, but understood that

even copies of art could provide some benefit and instruction to the public. Detractors,

however, argued that tableaux were solely an excuse to ogle the female body. If the

tableau itself and the public reception of tableaux were always inherently a complicated

and contradictory affair, so too were the laws regarding public tableaux performances.

Nudity—real or implied—was only allowed if the model was still. Any movement on the

model’s part would result in a charge of indecency. Though this seems easy enough to

regulate, complaints of indecency levied against tableaux led to strict government

oversight. A line from Assael is instructional: “Contemporaries, unable to discern

whether what they were viewing was ‘nude’ or ‘naked,’ ultimately concluded that

prohibition was inappropriate” (745). Regulators could condemn a tableau just as easily

as they could condone one. The slippery distinctions between “naked” and “nude” left

lawmakers and moralists with no real ground to make a stand on. Instead, tableaux seem

to have been dealt with on a case-by-case basis, with performers and directors occupying

16

both the moral and immoral spheres equally. The odd mixture of moral and immoral

tableaux presented during the nineteenth century suggest that the form was malleable to

the whim of the director or advertiser, the audience, and even the venue it was being

performed in. However, as the Godey’s example suggests, tableaux were so popular that

they transcended even the visual medium and inspired, if not infiltrated, the written

medium of fiction. It is into this ecosystem of entertainment that Hawthorne would have

entered and written Blithedale and, indeed, it is this ecosystem that Blithedale and

Coverdale imitate.

Wharton, writing a half-decade later, would participate in an entertainment

ecosystem evolved from Hawthorne’s, one that would include the freakshow. No one

exemplifies the historical progression from the tableaux to the freakshow quite like

Phineas Taylor Barnum. Though P.T. Barnum is famous for his part in Barnum and

Baily Circus, his exploits in entertainment run the full gamut between tableaux and

freakshow. Patterson discusses P.T. Barnum, almost in passing, as one of several

“museum theatre” owners who ran moral-reform melodramas and small historical

reenactment theatres fit for respectable ladies and families (617). As mentioned

previously, a moral-reform melodrama used a tableau at the end of a scene to highlight

and convey the moral message in all of its weight and power. However, fully

understanding how the tableaux led to the freakshow requires exploring a concurrent

ecosystem of entertainment, one that combined spectacle with the sciences of the day.

This is a slight, but important, detour from Barnum, one that illuminates his role in

17

American entertainment. Nadja Durbach connects the Early Modern era’s proclivity

towards collection and display to the display of “freaks” in the Victorian/Antebellum era.

What were originally “museums and cabinets of curiosity in the early modern period

institutionalized the display of natural wonders and in the process connected the culture

of an emerging scientific profession to that of spectacular entertainment” (56-7).

Durbach goes on to say that “in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these collections

and catalogues of anomalous animals, plants, and minerals expanded to include human

monstrosities, both whole and in parts” (57). However, the cabinet of curiosity is really

nothing more than an archive of artefacts to be looked at and perhaps studied and there is

no inherent narrative or message in the display of a deformed person or part in an

archival cabinet of curiosity5. Robert Bogdan points out that in displaying human

deformity, showmen did their best to control the messages associated with the freaks in

the show, especially “pity” because audiences did not want to associate amusement with

negative emotions. Moral messages, often used in early freakshows, quickly gave way to

other messages. Instead of relying on a moral message, the displays were examples of

the era’s other proclivity: the application of new fields of science to help categorize—and

thus understand—the world. Durbach is emphatic when proclaiming that the evolution of

science and medicine in particular is “inextricably linked to the show world” (60). The

line between collecting, studying, and entertaining was, without a doubt, a very thin one

5 The distinction between annal, archive, and narrative history is well laid out in Hayden

White’s “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.”

18

and, like the tableaux, was ripe for exploitation by promoters more interested in money

than scientific discovery. Even the line between voyeur and scientist seems to be just as

miniscule. Whatever the motive, the freakshow seemed to fill a niche during its height of

popularity from the 1850s to the 1940s (Bogdan). By providing the public and the

professional with examples beyond established categories recognized by science, the

freakshow helped to expand not just what constituted illness or monstrosity but what

constituted normalcy. What the tableaux did for the moral message of a stage

melodrama, the freakshow did for the medical and scientific message of the cabinet of

curiosity, it created and sustained the image and narrative of a normal body through

spectacle6.

Examples of Barnum’s own participation in this ecosystem of entertainment are

instructive. The smallest example is his “Feejee Mermaid,” the top half of a monkey

sewn to the bottom half of a fish and passed off as a mummified example of an exotic

animal. The mermaid was purported to be a hybrid animal, defying the classifications of

the animal kingdom. This defiance made it exotic and unique. However, as the

description implies, it was obviously a fake, two preserved halves sewn together to create

the illusion of a creature uncategorizable by the understandings of biology and zoology.

On the other end of the spectrum were Barnum’s largest and most ambitious

entertainments, his “hippodromes” and their “ethnological congresses.” As the name

6 For a more in-depth discussion of how that message was received and constructed by

audiences, see Jan Alber’s “Narratology and Performativity: On Processes of

Narrativization in Live Performances.”

19

implies, the ethnological congress grew out of the study and classification of races of

people. Barnum’s hippodromes purported to include presentations of all the people of the

world and, in reality, employed over 600 diverse people to maintain the hippodrome and

perform the various “races” of the congress (Adams).

And between these two extremes were Barnum’s actual freakshows. Though the

line between entertainment and scientific pursuit is thin, it divides critical readings of the

freakshow. On the one hand is Robert Bogdan who, in his work in disabilities studies,

brings to light how the Barnum freakshow linked freak “exhibits with science [which]

made the attractions more interesting, [and] less frivolous to Puritanical anti-

entertainment sentiments” (541) similar to how tableaux used a veneer of artistic integrity

to avoid charges of indecency. Bogdan essentially claims that freakshows participated in

scientific discourses in order to downplay their sensationalism and upsell their

instructional value. To legitimate the performance, many freakshows used “museum” in

their titles to play up the “association of this form of entertainment with natural sciences”

(Bogdan ). Similarly, the street barkers who tried to rope in passersby often called

themselves “professors or doctors” (541). The performances, according to Bogdan, were

draped in show business artifice as they showcased people with actual medical

conditions. Much of the scenery and plot for the exhibits was taken from “the scientific

reports and travelogues of 19th and early 20th century natural scientists” as well as

“pseudo-scientific writing on classification and anthropological reports about the ‘races

of man’” (541). Of course, in the exhibit “the odd, bizarre, erotic, and savage were

20

highlighted” (541) instead of the scientific. These traits helped to play up the Otherness

of the freaks and the exoticness of the foreigners on display. However, some of the

exhibits and promotions focused on how the freak “was [an] upstanding, high status

citizen with extraordinary talents of a conventional and socially prestigeful nature”

despite their particular condition (542). Bogdan points out that it was advancements in

science that led many people to move past the superstitious stigmas surrounding the birth

defects of the freakshow performers. This allowed the emphasis of the presentation to be

on “how the abnormality was a discrete condition and not a reflection on the integrity or

morality of the exhibit or his or her parents” (543). In other words, changing cultural

attitudes allowed the show to focus on the scientific instead of the moral. Freaks no

longer were freakish as punishment for a sin, but for some “scientific” reason.

On the other hand, Lisa Kochanek and Nadja Durbach both separately point to

how the freakshow was an integral part in the evolution of actual medical science. In

fact, the freakshow was just one performance type out of the many, often found in the

fairground and in the circus, that played a part in medical science. Indeed, “since the

Renaissance, dissections [had] been performed in anatomy theatres that were in many

cases open to the public and thus encouraged a degree of performativity that linked them

to the playhouse” (Durbach 44). Indeed, the worlds and rhetorics of the freakshow and

the medical community borrowed heavily from each other. As discussed above,

freakshow barkers called themselves doctors to lend an air of respectability and often got

“doctors” to comment on the uniqueness of the freaks on display. Kochanek uses a “Dr.

21

Kahn” as an example of the London medical freakshow: “the most infamous Leicester

Square exhibition, however, was Dr. Kahn's Museum, with its live and waxen

monstrosities and its lectures on male and female anatomy, supplemented by inexpensive,

explicit pamphlets on sexual hygiene” (Kochanek 227). Doctors, on the other hand,

borrowed heavily from the freakshow world. Durbach quotes from a 1902 manual by

J.W. Ballantyne that shows the British obstetrician comparing “congenital hypertrichosis

(the superabundance of hair)” to “the Sacred Hairy Family of Burma,” a famous

freakshow exhibit (Durbach 55). Both authors quote heavily from case studies published

in Victorian editions of the British Medical Journal and the Lancet that exhibit “the

professional need to distance medical looking from sideshow voyeurism” (Kochanek

231). Each case study “establishes the need for a physician’s presence, gives empirical,

factual definition of the situation, allows the doctor to speculate about causes for the

abnormality, and supplements verbal description with graphic representation” (Kochanek

233). Without the written medical account, the engravings were almost indistinguishable

from freakshow handbills and often “reproduce[ed] many of the tropes of anatomical

illustrations dating back to the Renaissance that…aestheticized and sometimes even

eroticized the écorché” (Durbach 64). Again, like tableaux, even these medical accounts

and their often eroticized and aestheticized graphic representations have a long history

from the Anatomical Venuses of the renaissance to the “Sleeping Beauties” of the late-

nineteenth and early-twentieth century travelling fairs (Hoffmann).

22

Like the tableaux, the freakshow appeared in many forms in many places. It is

important to point out, as Hoffmann does, that at some point the freakshow would more

than likely not have been a separate, independent entertainment. Instead it more than

likely would have been a part of a larger circus or travelling show. Even as far back as

the 1860s and 1870s, the freakshow was appearing in fiction. Hildegard Hoeller argues

that the Ragged Dick character created by Horatio Alger had much in common with

Barnum’s own Tom Thumb. Both were “charming miniature [men]” (190). While Tom

Thumb entertained middle class viewers with his body, Ragged Dick entertained them

with his story and allowed them “to face and appease fears about pressing social issues”

(190). Hoeller goes so far as to say that Dick’s rise to wealth is as true as any

“Barnumesque humbug” (190). However, the freakshow enters into Wharton’s fiction at

a much less ambivalent time. By the time Wharton wrote Summer the freakshow had

also absorbed the rhetoric of the eugenics movement. Bluford Adams sees eugenicist

politics creeping into the freakshow as far back as Barnum’s hippodromes. In fact,

Adams compares Barnum’s two hippodromes and finds that the later version more

obviously denigrated foreign cultures and subordinated those cultures to the Anglo and

American cultures presented at the hippodrome. However, the medical spectacle was still

very much a part of the freakshow ecosystem during Wharton’s time writing Summer. In

this way, the freakshow actually doubled back to its earliest tableaux predecessors and

actually began to include a kind of morality founded on the eugenics movement’s push

for a racial hierarchy. By displaying and studying the body of the racially Other, an

23

Anglo-American audience member could conclude the reasons for the racially Other’s

supposed moral and intellectual inferiority.

The freakshow drew on many staging elements of the tableaux. A highly

decorative stage and highly evocative costumes each highlighted the freak’s (often

erroneously ascribed) Otherness. The freakshow also borrowed from the tableaux’s

narrativizing tendencies, presenting a freak as a medical anomaly one day and a missing

link in human evolution the next. Both forms of entertainment played into the American

popular appetite for spectacle and entertainment. From this brief history of the tableaux

and the freakshow, several important points emerge that will be important for

understanding Blithedale and Summer. Perhaps the most important point is that the

actual history and experience of these entertainments would have been much less

organized and much less linear than the history presented above. Indeed, both the

tableaux and the freakshow would have existed alongside many other entertainments as

their own independent shows. However, they would have also existed as parts of many

different kinds of entertainments. The tableaux, as mentioned, was an integral part of the

melodramatic theatre and the freakshow was an important part of travelling shows and

circuses as well as “museums” like Barnum’s American Museum in New York. The

tableaux, especially in its moralistic form, existed in different spaces and different media,

as a dramatic pause in a melodrama, in Godey’s match plate illustrations and stories, and

likely as a home tableaux production. The freakshow could present itself in multiple

forms at the same time, as both an ethnological congress for early practitioners of

24

anthropology and as Wax Venuses, Sleeping Beauties, and live performers at various

places for curious onlookers with a penchant for medical sensationalism and progressive

health crusades. Thus, there is no stable timeline or definitive performance with which to

relate Blithedale to tableaux and Summer to freakshow. Instead, the novels embrace the

messy, irregular, and often contradictory histories, messages, and performances of

tableaux and freakshow. In doing so they demonstrate that any one entertainment is

simply a part of a larger, dynamic ecosystem of entertainments, that each entertainment is

inspired by and inspires the others, that each entertainment exists, comingles, and

competes with the others.

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Chapter 2

HUSH, POSE, AND YOU WILL BELIEVE:

TABLEAUX VIVANT AND BLITHEDALE

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, to reiterate the introductory

chapter, is a story of failed love at a failed socialist utopian community. It follows three

main characters: Zenobia, a proto-feminist and author; Hollingsworth, a criminal

reformer; and Miles Coverdale, a minor romantic poet and flaneur who narrates the story

after the fact. The love triangle that develops between the three is complicated by the

introduction of Priscilla, who turns out to be the mesmeric Veiled Lady, and Westervelt,

her show promoter and mesmerist. The novel has inspired many, often contradictory,

readings in part because its narrator, Miles Coverdale, is trying, through the act of

narrating his memoir, “to compose a self, to locate in retrospect an authenticity that

continues to elude him” (Millington “American Anxiousness” 299). As Tony Tanner, in

his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics Edition, states, authenticity continues to

elude Coverdale because “the atmosphere of Blithedale has been saturated with artifice of

all kinds from the start” because “everybody is, more or less, posing…and at least

Coverdale knows he is posing” (x, xxxii). The complicated relationship between

Blithedale and authenticity has led readers and critics of Blithedale to fall into two

camps, both spurred on by Hawthorne’s introduction to his novel in which he declares

that he “availed himself of his actual reminiscences” of his time at Brook Farm in writing

Blithedale, but counters himself by saying “his whole treatment of the [Brook Farm]

26

affair is incidental to the main purpose of the Romance” (Hawthorne 1) The first camp

sees, or actively tries not to see, Blithedale “as a roman à clef, in which the feminist

Zenobia may stand for Margaret Fuller, who visited Brook Farm; the reformer

Hollingsworth (or the mesmerist Westervelt) for Albert Brisbane, the community's

‘apostle of Fourierism’; and the narrator, Coverdale, for Hawthorne himself” (White 78).

Hawthorne acknowledges this reading in his introduction to the novel, saying that “many

readers will probably suspect a faint and not very faithful shadowing of Brook Farm”

(Hawthorne 1). The roman à clef reading is intriguing because the history and the social-

sexual politics of Brook Farm, Fourierism, and reform so closely mirror those presented

in Blithedale.

From April to November of 1841, the then thirty-seven-year-old Nathaniel

Hawthorne lived and worked at Brook Farm, a Transcendentalist utopian community

about eight miles outside of Boston near West Roxbury (Wineapple 24). The enterprise

itself lasted only six years until 1847. Hawthorne obviously did not live at Brook Farm

for all six years, and his patience with the enterprise was even shorter lived. After only

two months, Hawthorne wrote his then fiancé, Sophia Peabody, “in exasperation, ‘A

man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap or in a furrow of the field, just as

well under a pile of money” (24). Though he portrays himself as a skeptic of utopias and

reform, Hawthorne’s relationship with Brook Farm is much more complicated. He was a

“full-fledged member” who spent “$1,500 in all (the full amount of his earnings for the

previous year)” to build a house and purchase two shares of the community (23, 24). The

27

chronology presented in the Cambridge Companion points out that Hawthorne was a

trustee and director of finance for Brook Farm and hoped to bring Sophia there with him.

Hawthorne shared more than his money with the enterprise, sharing in the sentiments of

George Ripley, the founder of Brook Farm, and the literati of 1840s Boston that Brook

Farm could demonstrate “a way of life that would be a beautiful, sustainable, and humane

alternative to the competitive, exploitative world that, these experimenters felt, an

emerging market capitalism was already producing all around them” (Millington

“Introduction” xiii). Brook Farm began as a “simple cooperative joint stock venture

attempting a kind of agrarian socialism” (Kolodny 253n27) during Hawthorne’s tenure.

In either 1843 (according to Norton) or 1844 (according to Oxford), Brook Farm took on

aspects of Fourierism, a form of anarchist/socialist theory named after French social

theorist Charles Fourier (Dugdale 251n52). Fourier’s theories “attracted great interest

and sparked debate among reform-minded American intellectuals” because they offered a

“scathing critique of the inequities of modern life and devised a complex system of

communal living and working designed to achieve complete social harmony” (Norton

183). More than fifty Fourierist communities sprang up across America between the

1840s and 1850s (Tanner xxiv), attesting to the widespread utopian and reformist

movements of those decades. American reformists often elided Fourier’s more radical

sexual theories when they presented his work to the public and yet, to many in the

American public, Fourierism was synonymous with radical free love (Tanner xxiv) and

Brook Farm, after its alignment with Fourier’s theories, was always and already

28

synonymous with Fourierism (Kolodny xv). In fact, even the novel’s inception mirrors

its narration, lending at least a patina of credibility to the roman à clef reading. Since he

was not there while Brook Farm was Fourierist, Hawthorne had to borrow several

volumes of Fourier’s works from a Brook Farm associate in preparation for writing

Blithedale in 1851, a whole decade after he had left Brook Farm (Kolodny xiv). Some

critics go so far as to read Blithedale together with Hawthorne’s 1852 campaign

biography of Franklin Pierce as proof of Hawthorne’s virulent skepticism of reform

(Beauchamp 39) while several others do so to tease out more nuanced understandings of

Hawthorne’s sentiments.7

The other camp is equally spurred on by Hawthorne’s introduction and his

“present concern…to establish a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary

travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their phantasmagorical antics”

(Hawthorne 1). Michael S. Martin focuses his critical attentions to Blithedale’s many

allusions to Milton’s masque Comus and the mythological and fantastical overtones those

allusions lend the novel. However, many scholars focusing on the theatrics of the novel

tend to focus on mesmerism, a medical and scientific theory and performance where

entranced mediums “having submitted to the trance, supposedly discovered new insights,

wisdom, and revelations he or she may have been consciously unable to discover” (Coale

274). Richard H. Brodhead suggests that Hawthorne, in grouping the mesmeric Priscilla

with the reform-minded Zenobia and Hollingsworth, saw the cultish overtones of

7 See Robert Levine’s “Sympathy and Reform in The Blithedale Romance.”

29

mesmerism as part of a larger cultural milieu that mixed pseudoscientific and

philosophical theories with social theories. Brodhead specifically suggests that

Hawthorne saw mesmerism in the same league as many of the utopian movements and

popular reform movements of the time, specifically citing Swedenborgianism, women’s

rights, and criminal reform.8 However, for a novel so infatuated with performance,

Coverdale does seem to miss a lot of the performances going on around him. Brodhead

must ask, “did a book ever miss so much of the story it purports to tell?” Coverdale

mistakenly walks into the middle of the masque, the actual tableaux happen as a matter of

fact without our seeing them, and the story only starts after Coverdale leaves a mesmeric

performance of The Veiled Lady. Performance, to Brodhead, is central to Blithedale but

it is also “imperfectly knowable” (339). Indeed, Tanner points out that, even if he does

eventually witness a performance, “Coverdale is usually too far away in some sense or

another…out of earshot or eyeshot” to know fully what is happening (xxxii). This, in

essence, is the world of entertainment as Hawthorne’s America came to know it. The

entertainment world of the 1850s began to develop a sense of commercialization, one that

actively advertised entertainments into popularity. That commercial engine, as Brodhead

argues, was visible enough for the public to know it existed, but “that [it shut] the public

out from detailed knowledge of its motives or arts of contrivances” (340). In other

words, the audience was always out of earshot or eyeshot of the burgeoning business of

8 W.D. King’s “‘Shadow of a Mesmeriser’: The Female Body on the ‘Dark’ Stage”

provides a detailed analysis of mesmeric performances and their cultural connections.

30

entertainment and thus only knew the incomplete narratives of what they were shown or

told. To this end, Brodhead and Tanner equally declare that Coverdale is “pre-eminently

an observer” (Tanner xxix), “he exists only in and as a watcher” (Brodhead 341) not as a

practitioner of the entertainment business. Coverdale’s specific spectatorness—Brodhead

goes so far as declare all spectatorness in the antebellum period—mirrors performances

like Priscilla’s own static mesmeric spectacle. In his static position, Coverdale can watch

and observe Priscilla’s performances, the performances of the Blithedalers, and, more

importantly, he can watch his own recollections of his experiences at Blithedale Farm.

However, Coverdale is not aware of the larger machinations of those scenes that he

witnessed.

The Coverdale who narrates, whom I will refer to as Coverdale the Elder when it

is necessary to distinguish, relates Blithedale after the fact. In doing so, he sets his

younger self (i.e. Coverdale the Younger), his former compatriots, and Blithedale farm in

a series of tableaux vivant. These entertainments were, like Priscilla’s mesmeric

performances, static representations of virtues and vices, depictions of classic art, or

allegorical figures. Too, they were incorporated into melodramatic theatre to heighten

the plot by freezing it just as it reached its moral apex. Since a tableau is a static

performance, Coverdale can remain immobile and observant though he also remains

ignorant of the larger issues surrounding the tableau like those discussed in the

introduction. Tableaux often contained an overabundance of symbolism and, if they were

performed outside of respectable venues, often relied on moral imagery to shield their

31

performance from the censors. A tableau thus would have added extra layers of

interpretation and uncertainty on top of that already established by Brodhead. An

audience member at a tableau would have to sift through the layers of meaning and

(false) moral messaging—not to mention the maze of show business propaganda—to

even begin to approach a singular message or insight in a tableau. However, it is

important to recognize that Coverdale, though static, is not inactive. “He is…a shameless

fetishist” (Tanner xxiii), actively collecting mementos—physical and mental—

throughout the story that hold deep and abiding significance to his understanding of his

experiences at Blithedale, to the tableaux that he stages in his narrative. Tanner

complicates this too by declaring that Coverdale is “a late product of that Puritan-

Transcendentalist line of American thought which requires a second order of justifying

meaning behind the merely materially visible and palpable” (Tanner xxxvi). So, each

and every image Coverdale recollects is not just an image, it is laden with significance for

Coverdale, his understanding of himself, his sense of ethics, and his narrative of his

experiences at Blithedale. Although he is an active audience of his own tableaux, he

often will not stop analyzing the scene for meaning. Tanner further complicates this by

pointing out that “the original [Miles] Coverdale was the first translator of the Bible, in a

version reputedly pretty inaccurate” (xxiii). Not only is the tableaux form itself fraught

with inconsistencies and overburdened images, Blithedale’s Miles Coverdale, the one

who translates each of the tableaux he presents, is himself spectacularly inconsistent and

inexpert at doing so.

32

With this in mind, this chapter explores how Coverdale, in recollecting his

experiences at Blithedale, narrates his scenes as though they were tableaux vivant

performances. As evidences in the introductory chapter, tableaux did not have a singular,

master form. Instead, tableaux encompassed a range of forms, from the parlor theatrics

of bourgeois homes, to the moral climax of melodramatic theatre productions, to stand

alone representations of allegories and ancient paintings, to seedy theatres who used

tableaux to skirt censorship laws, to reformists who staged allegorical tableaux

representing their cause. Coverdale equally does not stick to one particular form of

tableaux, but instead draws from the entire range of tableaux productions in his attempts

to glean an understanding of himself and his experiences. The catch, as there always

seems to be with Blithedale, is that Coverdale is ultimately unconvinced by his own

search and his own discoveries. Coverdale, Millington declares, possesses “the ability to

elude the implications of experience” (“American Anxiousness” 315). Where melodrama

would lead Coverdale to a moral conclusion and mesmerism would lead him to a

supernatural conclusion, the tableaux leads Coverdale to a conclusion he can

simultaneously accept and reject, believe in and question. The tableau is the perfect form

for Coverdale’s elusion because it is so overburdened with moral, allegorical, and

theatrical meaning and so overburdened with its own sensationalist history as to almost

be meaningless in and of itself. In this sense, Coverdale can—and does—avoid coming

to any worthy conclusion at the end of his search for self and meaning.

33

Coverdale, at the beginning of the novel, is working mainly in the melodramatic

tradition of tableaux. This is not to say that his tableaux or his motives carry the same

moral weight and authenticity that a melodrama might suggest. Upon leaving a mesmeric

performance by The Veiled Lady, Coverdale runs into Old Moodie, who has a mysterious

and unnamed favor to ask of Coverdale. The favor, a “very great one” at that (Hawthorne

7), irks Coverdale, who is in a rush to leave for Blithedale Farm. However, Moodie

piques Coverdale’s interest by suggesting that “some older gentleman, or…some

lady…who may happen to be going to Blithedale” may be better suited to the favor (7).

It is not the mystery of the errand, but the mystery of the woman involved in the errand

that draws Coverdale in. In the tableaux reading of this project, the mysterious favor has

already been given meaning by Moodie: only Moodie knows what the favor is, and he is

withholding that information. With the woman, on the other hand, Coverdale sees a

blank stage, ready to have a meaning placed upon her by his directorial hand. In terms of

the tableaux history, Moodie and Coverdale are playing for a spot as Lord Hamilton, the

male voice explicating the mysterious female form of Lady Hamilton’s attitudes. Moodie

recognizes that Coverdale, as a young man, would be interested in the female form

instead of the performance and so suggests, to Coverdale’s dismay, that an older man or

woman would be better suited to the favor because presumably neither would be seeking

a pseudo-sexual gratification in directing the woman in question.

After being turned down for the favor, Coverdale returns home. The scenes in his

“bachelor apartment” are instructive for several reasons. For one, Coverdale reveals

34

definitively that he is narrating the novel after the fact. For another, he makes his

directions (and the fact that he is directing) explicitly clear. Coverdale the Elder reveals

his narration at the very start of Chapter II. Not only does he reveal that he is temporally

well removed from his experiences at Blithedale, he also reveals the kind of narrator he

is. He likes to expound on certain images, in this case a fire. Though the scenes of the

chapter are staged on the day he leaves for Blithedale, Coverdale begins by recollecting

the fire at Blithedale Farm on the first “April afternoon, but with the wintry gusts of a

snow-storm roaring in the chimney” (9). The image comes back to Coverdale only after

he “rake[s] away the ashes from the embers in [his] memory” (9). The Blithedale fire,

burning only faintly, is compared to the “phosphoric glimmer, like that which exudes,

rather than shines, from damp fragments of decaying trees” (9). Around “ such chill

mockery of a fire” (9)—which at once refers to the phosphoric glimmer of Coverdale’s

simile, his fading and perhaps false memory, and the actual roaring fire in the Blithedale

hearth—Coverdale imagines sitting “talk[ing] over [their] exploded scheme for beginning

the life of Paradise anew” (9). The subtext and references that this small tableau refer to

are only revealed much later in the novel, so the tableau does not make perfect sense to

the reader here. However, this tableau does indicate that Coverdale not only inscribes the

images in his memory with poetic meaning, he over-inscribes them with meaning leading

to a confused, jumbled message being relayed to the audience of the tableau. This small

tableau also reveals that Coverdale does not maintain a strict timeline for his narration.

35

The Coverdale the Elder inserts himself in the narrative to comment on and philosophize

on the experiences of his younger self.

By revealing himself as the narrator, Coverdale the Elder is adding a layer of

uncertainty to the narrative on top of Hawthorne’s own layers of historical and authorial

uncertainty added in the introduction. Kenneth Marc Harris sees Coverdale’s and

Hawthorne’s uncertainties as two of the almost infinite layers of obfuscation and ironic

posturing in the novel. It is hard to argue that Blithedale is not rife with irony and thus

holds the reader at several removes from the Truth, but where Harris’s reading focuses on

the distance itself—or rather why Coverdale/Hawthorne might choose that distance—the

tableaux reading focuses on the way the distance is constructed by Coverdale. Following

Coverdale’s overdetermined fireside speech, he describes his bachelor apartment and his

actions as his younger self prepares to leave for Blithedale. The simple narrative of the

scene—the narrative that is never really shown or experienced by the reader so much as it

is told to the reader—is that Coverdale drinks the rest of his liquor with a friend and

smokes a few cigars and then leaves in a blizzard. The narrative is mediated by

Coverdale, who chooses to focus on the moral choices motivating his actions instead of

the actions themselves. As he relates the scene and action, Coverdale the Elder provides

deliberate images and pauses to pose the actor (i.e. himself) to create a poetic meaning

out of a mundane scene. In the background of the tableau, the snow is falling outside the

apartment. But it is not just snow; it is a snow that is both “dreary” and “dingy,”

impressed with “an old conventionalism” (11). The blizzard itself has a “business-like

36

perseverance” and has “guarantee from a thaw” (10). The blizzard is not just snow; it is

an urban, capitalistic snow opposed to the Paradise of Blithedale. In the foreground is

Coverdale himself. The action we see is his deliberating on leaving; he does not say if he

is literally on the threshold, but he might as well be. In the middle ground, his apartment,

“one of the midmost houses of a brick-block,” is “partaking of the warmth of all the rest”

of the apartments along with the “sultriness of its individual furnace heat” (10).

Obviously, the quarters are comfy, but they are also convivial. His quarters come with

the finer things in life, like Coverdale’s closet full of claret. What is important to note is

that Coverdale the Younger does not expound on the poetic image of leave taking; it is

Coverdale the Elder who provides the poetic commentary. This distinction becomes

clear when, during his expounding, Coverdale questions leaving for “the better life” (10).

“Possibly, it would hardly look so now” like the better life, Coverdale the Elder says,

reminiscing (10, my emphasis). The above phrase is the lead in to two paragraphs of

poetic expounding on one paragraph of tableau imagery. Coverdale takes this space to

mull over his choice to leave. He tries to convince himself that the choice to leave for

Blithedale was heroic, that it was the very real possibility of Blithedale’s failure that

explicitly made his choice to leave heroic. His leaving for Blithedale stands as an

example of his good deeds compared to his life of listless flânerie: “whatever else [he]

may repent of,” Coverdale implores some audience (the reader, God, himself), “let it be

reckoned neither among [his] sins nor follies” that Coverdale once believed in the

perfectibility of society (11). Staying or leaving does not become of choice between a

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warm room and a blizzard. Instead, it becomes a moral, almost biblical choice with

complex consequences for Coverdale. It is important to note the pattern of Coverdale’s

thoughts here. He moves from concrete images to a moral quandary to a philosophical or

ethical stance. However, it is the still image of his preparing to leave that launches the

whole tract. Like a tableau, the scene is not simply a man’s leaving a nice apartment in a

blizzard. The image of leaving during a blizzard is supposed to convey the moral weight

of concepts like heroism and human perfectibility to the audience. In essence, Coverdale

skirts around Harris’s questions regarding Truth in favor of moral and ethical questions

(was leaving for Blithedale right and good?), the answers to which can only come out of

careful examinations of subjective experiences.

In his bachelor apartment, Coverdale establishes some of the basic processes he

goes through to turn a scene into a tableau. The scenery of the apartment launches

Coverdale into an extended philosophical treatise, or as Patricia Ann Carlson puts it in

her study of Hawthorne’s settings, inspires Coverdale to “swell the actions of a single

time and place to a universal meaning” (195). One way that Coverdale swells the action

is by blurring the line between his past and present selves, the self that acts and the self

that expounds. However, the apartment tableau is still in the “scene ending”

melodramatic tradition. As the action swells, it is the action itself that gains

philosophical significance in the apartment tableau. Coverdale is, after all, taking his

final leave of his apartment and so the action is ripe for heightened, melodramatic

commentary. In a tableau vivant, however, the single time and place of the still image is

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brought to life and impresses upon the viewer a sense of life and, in keeping with its

penchant for allegory, a sense of timelessness and universality. Thankfully, Coverdale

does not wait long to provide a good example of a tableau vivant.

Coverdale takes leave of his apartment and climbs into a carriage with three other

gentlemen bound for Blithedale Farm. They leave the windows open despite the blizzard

because they cannot contain their excitement. Riding by “snow-encrusted…deserted

villas, with no footprints in their avenues” on his way to Blithedale farm, Coverdale

“virtually consumes the rural landscape in a single sentence” as if the landscape was one

large tableau for him to enjoy (Hawthorne 12, Carlson 193). But if Coverdale consumes

the scene, he also digests it. Coverdale transmutes the scenes into a moral tableau,

denigrating the immoral cityscape and elevating the pure countryscape. He laments the

“track of old conventionalism” stamped into the city snow by feet and city smoke but

relishes the empty “wave-like drifts” of snow that fall through the “country fires, strongly

impregnated with the pungent aroma of peat” (Hawthorne 11, 12). The irony is lost on

Coverdale that the snow still falls through smoke in either locale, but then that is not the

point for Coverdale. For him, the country is symbolic, even allegorical, of a sort of

Arcadia apart from the morally corrupt city. The air of the country has, after all, not been

“spoken into words of falsehood, formality, and error like all the air of the dusky city”

(11). The city/country dichotomy brings to mind the match plates of Godey’s that

contrasted virtue and vice. Both Coverdale and the match plate artists can do this

because they utilize allegorical references that help to provide a larger significance than

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the image might suggest alone. What makes this scene particularly difficult to parse out

is that Coverdale the Elder explicitly states that he is remembering this moment. The

question becomes, then, if transmutation of the scene is done by the Elder, in retrospect,

or by the Younger to be recollected by the Elder. To whom did Coverdale address his

aside and almost describe the snow as dingy? Us or his fellow carriage riders? The

ambiguity of the scene suggest that Coverdale, the Elder and Younger, are partaking in

one allegorical still image not bound by any temporality.

The other way Coverdale swells the action of a single time and place is by using a

similar strategy to his apartment tableau and suggesting a more complete narrative than

the images actually represent (Chapman 26). After arriving at the Blithedale farmhouse,

or what Coverdale calls “Paradise,” he is seated inside with his fellow travelers around a

fire “built up of great logs…that farmers are wont to keep” (Hawthorne 12-3) since they

cannot be sold as lumber. All the faces around the fire are “a-blaze” with “the past

inclemency and present warmth” (12) of the evening. The faces imply both the warm fire

of the farmhouse but also the snowstorm the men recently came in from. The image that

ties the two times—the present around the fire and the past in the blizzard—is the melting

snow in the men’s beards. The image of snow melting by the fireside becomes symbolic

of past hardships melting away. Similarly, Coverdale also implies some nameless but

universal “farmer” is somewhere present to provide the logs. However, Coverdale really

swells the time and place when he suggests that a “family of the old Pilgrims might have

swung their kettle over precisely such as fire” as Coverdale is sitting around at Blithedale

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(13). This combined with the obviously biblical reference to Paradise and Coverdale’s

penchant for calling the farmhouse “Eve’s bower” “adds depth and breadth to his tale by

supplying an innuendo both of mythological significance and of the endless flux of

eternity” (Carlson 195). Coverdale’s image does not just encompass his present and

immediate past, it encompasses the Pilgrims and Biblical times, characters, and locations.

I would call these first few tableaux quite innocent and morally sound, especially relative

to Coverdale’s tableaux that follow. For now, Coverdale is concerned with

understanding his actions as moral decisions and with understanding his original euphoria

at joining Blithedale. These first tableaux help Coverdale to analyze his past by staging

and viewing his past but also by connecting incidents in his past to other incidents (even

those we as readers have not encountered in the novel yet) and larger storylines like the

Bible and American history.

From there, Coverdale’s tableaux devolve into the current conception of tableaux:

theatrical productions “simultaneously celebrated as a means of promoting virtue and

denigrated as a licentious display of semi-nude women in public” with audiences “more

interested in the ‘proportions’ of the female artists than the ‘classical’ works of art they

represented” (Chapman 26, McCollough 29). This is because Coverdale encounters

others who try to direct the narrative of Blithedale. Until this point, we were given only

Coverdale’s directorial vision. For example, we had no reason (beyond simple distrust of

the narrator) to assume that Blithedale was not a Paradise. However, Zenobia,

Coverdale’s first directorial opponent, is quick to put the Blithedale-as-Paradise tableau

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into question. Zenobia’s “deliberate theatricality” may bring “out everyone else’s

unconscious feigning” (Harris 137) but it especially exposes Coverdale’s attempts to

direct. As her first move, Zenobia assigns “the domestic and indoor part of the business”

to the women and work “afield” to the men (Hawthorne 16). Coverdale, incensed by

Zenobia’s directorial power grab, counters with his original concept of Blithedale-as-

Paradise. In his directorial vision, women’s work is “that which chiefly distinguishes

artificial life—the life of degenerated mortals—from the life of Paradise” (Hawthorne

16). Zenobia counters by asking Coverdale for all the “material signs that could betoken

the moral qualities possessed” by a Paradise including figs, pineapples, and bread-fruit

(Chapman 31, Hawthorne 16). As discussed previously, a tableau’s moral power comes

through inductively, i.e. the scenery and set pieces of a tableau are what suggest the

larger moral position or lesson. Zenobia’s counterargument makes it clear that without

the proper scenery—the tropical fruits—the tableau absolutely cannot function the way

Coverdale conceives of it.

This is not to say that Zenobia fully dismisses the Blithedale-as-Paradise tableau.

Like an Eve, Zenobia does introduce elements of sexuality into the tableau, blurring the

line between the pornographic and the morally instructive. Coverdale, in deriding

Zenobia’s gendered division of labor, laments that the women will have to tend to the

washing even though “Eve…had not clothes to mend, no washing-day” (Hawthorne 16).

To this, Zenobia responds by saying “as for the garb of Eden, I shall not assume it till

after Mayday,” which she accentuates with a playful shiver (17). The shiver sends

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Coverdale—the Younger and, it seems, the Elder—into a fervor. In reality, Zenobia’s

“admirable figure” and “fine intellect” are “so fitly cased” in a dress “in an American

print…with a silken kerchief, between which and her gown there was one glimpse of a

white shoulder” (15). What “a great piece of good-fortune that there should be just that

glimpse” of Zenobia’s body (15) because, as the shiver indicates, she knows there is “an

erotic tension between ‘persons of taste,’ who are bearers of the look, and female signs of

‘the beautiful,’ who are their object” and she actively exploits that tension between her

and Coverdale (Chapman 31). Zenobia’s directorial power, like that of Lady Hamilton’s,

comes from her costumes which she uses as “an adjunct to [her] action[s] in order to

assert her power over the supernumeraries in her self-directed drama” (Carlson 202). To

Coverdale, Zenobia’s shiver suggests the most powerful costume of all: her “fine,

perfectly developed figure in Eve’s earliest garment” (Hawthorne 17). By exploiting the

tension between the male look and the female object inherent in tableaux, Zenobia is able

to wrest control of the directorial powers from Coverdale. She does not outright dismiss

his Blithedale-as-Paradise vision. Instead, she revises it with her in the center, dictating

her part, those of the supernumeraries around her, and, most importantly, her audience of

male lookers.

However, Coverdale and Zenobia are not entirely opposed to each, nor can they

afford to be. On the one hand, they can co-exist, though it is an uneasy coexistence to

say the least. After the playful shiver, Zenobia exits the sitting room to “the ‘homey’

kitchen and parlor of the farmhouse [that] provide her with a mise en scène appropriate to

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her act of ‘rustic hostess’” (Carlson 203). The dinner table and the space of the kitchen

and parlor is Zenobia’s own domestic tableau separate from Coverdale’s homosocial

tableau around the hearth. In her own space, Zenobia can appear “to be the very picture

of the spirit of hospitality” (203). As Zenobia planned, the two have separate spaces to

direct their various tableaux. On the other hand, they both accept—willingly, grudgingly,

playfully—that they will continue to compete over the directorial powers of Blithedale.

Zenobia recognizes that Coverdale will continue to attempt to direct the narrative of

Blithedale. Early in their time at Blithedale, Coverdale laments that “the clods of earth,

which [they] constantly belabored and turned over and over, were never etherealized into

thought” (Hawthorne 66), or in other words, that his farm labor leaves no time or energy

for poetry. Zenobia teasingly deflates Coverdale’s poetic lament by suggesting

Coverdale will, in his old age, turn into Silas Foster, the cantankerous old farmer teaching

the Blithedalers to farm, and not into a revered poet. Though she accepts his version of

Blithedale in that moment, she cannot help but point out, as she did in their first meeting,

the absurdity at the logical end of Coverdale’s poetic passages. At other times, Zenobia

mocks Coverdale’s poetry as a way for her to understand the narrative of Blithedale and

her place within that narrative. After learning of her tragic fate, Zenobia suggests that

Coverdale will be “turning this whole affair into a ballad” (223). She only demands that

the moral “shall be distilled into the final stanza, in a drop of bitter honey” (224). For

Zenobia, Coverdale’s predictable balladry provides certainty for Zenobia where her lived

experience does not. Similarly, Coverdale recognizes Zenobia’s own artistic endeavors

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and powers. He is quick to point out, even before leaving for Blithedale, that “Zenobia,

by-the-by…is merely her public name; a sort of mask in which she comes before the

world” (8). Zenobia’s real name is never revealed to the reader, so it is safe to assume

that Coverdale respects the part of Zenobia’s directing that concerns herself. Coverdale

also seems to accept the fact that Zenobia leads the actual “tableaux vivants” and other

“occasional modes of amusement” at Blithedale Farm (106) and that, generally, she holds

more sway over the Blithedalers. In essence, Coverdale must admit Zenobia’s tableaux

into his own tableaux, subsuming them but never quite controlling them. Whereas

Coverdale can contract or expand his own temporality by blending his past and present

selves, Zenobia’s tableaux dilate and contract the aperture of the narration. In these

moments of actual performance and moments of Zenobia’s direction, we become privy to

the depth and breadth of the world of performance that is only a small part of Coverdale’s

tableaux. We also come to realize just how narrow Coverdale’s gaze is, or as Brodhead

puts it, how much Coverdale actually misses.

However, the Coverdale and Zenobia are in competition for more than just the

narrative of Blithedale. The two are in competition for the most valuable artistic

territory: a woman. After his convalescence, Coverdale meets Zenobia and Priscilla “a-

maying together” (58), with Zenobia “decking out” Priscilla in a “variety of sylvan

ornament[s]” of flowers and blooming boughs (59). In Priscilla’s bouquet “had been

stuck a weed of evil odor and ugly aspect, which…destroyed the effect of all the rest” of

the flowers (59). Coverdale soon deduces, from Zenobia’s “eye, which seemed to

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indicate a slightly malicious purpose in the arrangement” (59), that Zenobia had inserted

the weed. Zenobia jokingly asks Coverdale if Priscilla is “worth a verse or two” (59).

Coverdale points out that “there is only one thing amiss” and Zenobia flings away the

weed. The scenery suggests to Coverdale that Priscilla is, as a woman should be,

“happier than any male creature” (59), but to Zenobia, Priscilla “provokes one’s malice”

at “see[ing] a creature so happy—especially a feminine creature” (59). In this instance,

the moral being conveyed is dictating the scenery. Zenobia, seeing an object of malice,

inserts the weed of evil odor; Coverdale, seeing an object of childlike wonder, removes

the weed to better complete the effect. In the middle is Priscilla, the innocent model

supposedly at the whim of both directors.

Priscilla, though, is being pursued by more than just Coverdale and Zenobia, and

this is why the two directors cannot exist purely as antagonists. Hollingsworth, the

philanthropic criminal reformer who brought Priscilla to Blithedale, is equally interested

in directing the meaning of Blithedale and Priscilla. Coverdale and Zenobia both

understand on the first day that Hollingsworth makes no secrets of his plans for

Blithedale: to use the farm for his criminal reform project. The two make a sort of pact

on the first day before Hollingsworth even arrives to “systematically commit at least one

crime a piece” in order to appease Hollingsworth (Hawthorne 22). Implicit in the pact is

that Hollingsworth directs his world through the lens of his moral-reformist message and

that for Zenobia and Coverdale to pose in a tableau for Hollingsworth they will need to

make the stuff of that tableau—namely themselves as the models—match the moral

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message. However, Coverdale and Zenobia are not prepared for Hollingsworth’s intense

directorial style. Nowhere is this more apparent than at Eliot’s Pulpit. If for no other

reason, the history Coverdale provides for Eliot’s Pulpit gives the scene a façade of

tableau-like allegorical meaning. Though the story goes that “the venerable Apostle Eliot

had preached there, two centuries gone by, to an Indian auditory” it is also true that “the

old pine forest…had fallen, an immemorial time ago” (118). The Apostle Eliot, or John

Eliot, was a pastor who, in 1651, “founded the first community of Praying Indians”

(Kolodny 256n65). He was also known for preaching to slaves and for translating “the

Bible and a catechism into the Indian tongue” (256n65). The man was real enough, but

Coverdale’s confused timeline—“two centuries” versus “immemorial time ago”—

suggests that the scenery is like somewhere the Apostle Eliot would have preached and

that is good enough for the tableau. Again, the exact historical details are not important.

The moral details are important, and it is important that the scenery match the moral

message of the tableau. The foliage grows out of the “shattered granite boulder, or heap

of boulders with an irregular outline and many fissures…as if the scanty soil, within

those crevices, were sweeter to their roots than any soil” (118-9). The foliage thus

provides an allegory of ascetic living. The canopy of a large birch tree “serve[s] as a

sounding-board for the pulpit” (119) while the floor serves as the pew where the Indians,

and in this case Coverdale, Zenobia, and Priscilla, sit to listen to their respective

Apostles.

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The sermon, though led by Hollingsworth, is usually taken up by the others who

would talk afterwards “around [the exhausted Hollingsworth], on such topics as were

suggested by the discourse” (119). Coverdale and Zenobia seem to ignore the religious

imagery of Eliot’s pulpit. Stripped of its religious imagery, the scene resembles a kind of

theatre pit and the group the “unclassified miscellany that [make] up the pit” (Grimstead

55). The pit at a theatre, according to David Grimstead, was a democratic and

indefinable lower-middle-class area that had no real directing force, social or theatrical,

save for their own “relative seriousness and intensity of…interest” in theatre (55). It was

the boxes that usually housed the respectable middle-class theatergoers, the ones more

obviously directed by mandates of “taste,” or, as Grimstead phrases it, “pretensions to

quality” (55). Within the less socially self-policing space of the pit, Coverdale and

Zenobia are free to discourse on women’s rights, the topic of the day. Coverdale, in his

usual eloquence, declares his desire “to have all government devolve into the hands of

women” (Hawthorne 121) while Zenobia does her best to convince him of his own

shortsightedness and implicit desire for young, beautiful women to govern over him.

Priscilla, concerned, asks Hollingsworth’s opinions on the matter. And does he ever

deliver. It is important to note that Coverdale and Zenobia both assume the space of

Eliot’s Pulpit is a space of equal opportunity, but this is an illusion as much as the

historicity of the place is an illusion. Just as “democracy freed drama from its literary

conventions” and theatre from its class conventions it also “begot a conformity or

voluntary compliance with other conventions that was at least as strict as anything

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imposed before” (Grimsted 171). In other words, even though the pit seemed like a

miscellaneous but roughly egalitarian mass of humanity, it eventually succumbed to the

same pressures of “taste” and “convention” of the boxes. Hollingsworth is the avatar of

that conservative “taste” that tamed the pit. His rub with the group is that the discussion

does not fit his moral message. Zenobia, and Coverdale, for that matter, “do not seem to

‘belong’ to men—they have neither husbands nor fathers” and thus can move and

converse freely within what they perceive to be a democratic theatre pit (Chapman 38).

In other words, they do not have a punitive social guide to observe their actions and so

feel free to act as they see fit. Hollingsworth sees a feminist radical and as anti-reformist

stirring in his church pews discussing how to upend the gendered order of his world.

Hollingsworth, in his sermon damning the proto-feminist discussion, “call[s] upon [his]

own sex to use its physical force, that unmistakable evidence of sovereignty” to force the

“petticoated monstrosities” back to “their proper bounds” (Hawthorne 123). By “some

necromancy of his horrible injustice,” Hollingsworth deploys, doubly so, the conventions

of tableau (“silence and immobility” [Chapman 31]) onto the scene and forces the tableau

directions from Coverdale and Zenobia, who are both cowed into silent submission at

Hollingsworth’s feet while Priscilla acts the part of “ the gentle parasite, the soft

reflection of a more powerful existence” that Hollingsworth desires of women

(Hawthorne 124, 123). Using the language of Mary Chapman, Hollingsworth “mans”

each of the other characters. Priscilla and Zenobia both have their looks forced towards

Hollingsworth in adoration and humility respectively while Coverdale is forced into

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submission by the despotic Hollingsworth. In fact, Coverdale is forced out of the tableau

space altogether and becomes nothing more than an audience member gazing passively

on Hollingsworth’s tableau of “true manhood.” To add to the insult, Coverdale is then

forced to watch Hollingsworth’s tableau of his phalanstery after the troupe walks away:

Zenobia and Hollingsworth standing prominently on the hill above the whole farm on the

prominent land where Hollingsworth wishes to build his phalanstery, Priscilla in the

wooded background.

What is important about the Eliot’s Pulpit scene is that Coverdale is forced to

inhabit a space outside the tableau proper by Hollingsworth. However, there are several

instances where Coverdale exists—of his own volition—outside the main tableau or as

something other than the director of the tableau. Through all of chapters VI and VII

Coverdale is laid up in bed recovering from a sickness. At first, he is delirious and

incoherent; Hollingsworth and Zenobia pose around Coverdale as they try to nurse him

back to health. However, this does not mean that Coverdale the Elder is not framing the

scenes as tableaux. In fact, tableaux seem to be the only way that Coverdale can make

any sense of the other characters and construct a narrative of the time he was unconscious

in a feverish daze. That is to say that tableaux are a way for Coverdale the Elder to fill in

the blanks of his memory from the few incidents he can recall. Zenobia is construed as

both a mediocre nurse and a beautiful but mocking sprite. The two images exist in the

same person such that a tableau is the only way to combine the two. Just as tableaux in

real life purported to be moral but often objectified beautiful women, so too does

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Coverdale’s tableau try to reconcile the two images of Zenobia. Hollingsworth’s image

is more straightforward. Coverdale recasts Hollingsworth as a caretaker of his soul,

someone who may not feed Coverdale with “gruel [that] was very wretched stuff” (48),

but someone who acts as a confidant and spiritual guide. Hollingsworth is seen as

praying over Coverdale and even receives Coverdale’s fever-dream confession that

Zenobia is not who she seems.

As Coverdale is convalescing, it makes sense that he is not out directing

Blithedale farm towards his artistic image. That role is given up to Zenobia and

Hollingsworth. During his time in bed, “there had been a number of recruits to [the] little

army of saints and martyrs” at Blithedale (62). After Coverdale wakes up—or rather

decides that laying around longer would be “nonsense and effeminacy” (58)—he wakes

up to a farm that is made under Hollingsworth’s directions. Hence Coverdale’s

complaint mentioned previously about his art not being able to coexist with his labor.

Coverdale cannot write versus because, as Hollingsworth notes, Blithedale is now a

tableau of good labor and earnest living: “There is at least this good in a life of toil, that is

takes the nonsense and fancy-work out of a man, and leaves nothing but what truly

belongs to him” (68). Where Coverdale sees Blithedale as a “modern arcadia” fit for

lounging shepherds and bards, Hollingsworth sees a farm where labor refines the man

and saves the soul. This tension is something that Coverdale’s other tableaux try to

explain and understand. As Coverdale, Hollingsworth, and Zenobia rest at the end of

their day—after posing in the tableaux of good work—Hollingsworth derides Coverdale,

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saying the poet “is not in earnest, either as a poet or a laborer” (68). Though Coverdale

tries to defend himself by saying his “bones feel as if [he] had been earnest[ly]” laboring

(68), the charge of idleness has been leveled against him and he spends several extended

passages constructing tableaux in hopes of figuring out just what it is he earnestly

believes and is willing to do.

One of the most important tableaux Coverdale stages in his quest for self-meaning

and purpose is the tableau of his “hermitage,” or a “kind of leafy cave, high upward into

the air, among the midmost branches of a white-pine tree” where “a wild grapevine, of

unusual size and luxuriance, had twined and twisted itself up into the tree” and, in the

process, “caught hold of three or four neighboring trees, and married the whole clump

with a perfectly inextricable knot of polygamy” (98). I include much of the initial

description because even there Coverdale shows his directorial motives more clearly than

he can amongst the others at Blithedale. The natural and the human, the stand of trees

and the polygamy, come together in the perch. The trees are brought together in a kind of

free love but also by the grapevines that Coverdale allegorizes further in his other self-

tableaux. In setting up his hermitage, Coverdale opens “loop-holes through the verdant

walls” of grapevines turning his hermitage into both a “turret” and an “observatory”

(Hawthorne 98, 99). Coverdale’s hermitage, his director’s seat, is a place to see and

comment on the images of the other Blithedalers. “Through one loop-hole” he is able to

see the river, some Blithedale workers digging peat, and a cart road where Hollingsworth

is working a “yoke of oxen hitched to a drag of stones, that were to be piled into a fence”

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(99-100). As Coverdale watches Hollingsworth, he asks, “are we his oxen” and “what

right has [Hollingsworth] to be the driver” (100). Coverdale, “at [his] height above the

earth” (100), labels Hollingsworth’s directorial vision “philanthropic absurdities” (100).

In fact, from his height above the earth he declares the whole of Blithedale, from the

mundanity of daily work to Hollingsworth struggling against the “stubborn, stupid, and

sluggish,” absurd but Hollingsworth’s end goal of criminal reform and his tyrannical

means are especially ridiculous given that there “is enough else to do” instead of

“dragging home the ponderous load of” Hollingsworth’s dogma (100). Turning slightly,

Coverdale can also see Priscilla in Zenobia’s window, though with the distance he must

rely on the “eye of faith” to be sure that it is Priscilla (100). She is simply knitting, but

Coverdale allegorizes Priscilla’s needle work into a mythical tale “of her fragile thread of

life…inextricably knotted” together with “other and tougher threads” (100).

However, Coverdale only assumes it is Priscilla there and admits he has “idly

decked her out” in “fancy work” (100), directing her, needlessly, in her costume, action,

and meaning. Taking in the whole scheme with his “bodily eye,” Coverdale realizes,

from his vantage point, that Blithedale “looked so ridiculous that it was impossible not to

laugh aloud” despite the joke being “a little too heavy” (101). Coverdale’s senses and his

“eye of faith” lead him to “disbelief in moral beauty or heroism, and a conviction of the

folly of attempting to benefit the world” (101). However, he quickly retracts his

statements upon hearing Westervelt, the devilish showman, coming up the path beneath

the hermitage. Westervelt’s “disagreeable characteristics,” namely his worldly and “cold

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skepticism [that] smothers what it can of our spiritual aspirations, and makes the rest

ridiculous,” have tainted Coverdale’s perceptions of Blithedale (101). Coverdale tries to

convince himself that he actually sees the “essential charm” of the Blithedalers; that

Hollingsworth’s dreams are “glorious, if impractical,” that Zenobia’s character possesses

a “noble earthiness,” and that Priscilla’s grace “lay so singularly between disease and

beauty” (101). But, as he laments, a part of himself agrees with Westervelt’s worldly

skepticism. There are several important things happening in these moments. Coverdale

is taking in the images of Blithedale and transmuting them into a dialogue on morality

and the perfectibility of humankind. However, the scene he gazes upon can be

interpreted in multiple ways: the “coldly skeptic” or the romantic. Coverdale comes to

understand that he possesses both natures, that he is both a romantic and a skeptic.

Coverdale does not stop there, however. He is also looking to understand more

than just his own nature; he wants to know what it is that he believes in if he is skeptical

of every other Blithedaler’s utopian vision. To help himself understand, Coverdale

creates another tableau where he poses on the fringes, just outside the image proper. In

his other hermitage, a corner booth in a tavern, Coverdale takes “a boozy kind of pleasure

in the customary life that was going forward” in his tavern tableau (175). His tableau of

“second stage drinkers” and “staunch, old soakers” might as well be of the gold-fishes

swimming in the tiny bar fountain that “any freakish inebriate” could empty his glass

into. The drinkers might as well be like the goldfish: “[inhaling] jollity with the essential

element of [their] existence” (178). To explain the connection between the drinkers and

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the goldfish, Coverdale declares that “human nature has a naughty instinct that approves

of wine” (175), which for Coverdale means moments of “renewed youth and vigor, the

brisk cheerful sense of things present and to come” (178) that alleviate the tyranny of

“the worldly society at large, where a cold skepticism smothers what it can of our

spiritual aspirations, and makes the rest ridiculous” (101). Finally, able to put into words

his feelings about Blithedale, Coverdale summarizes his tavernal philosophy by declaring

that reformers “must do away with evil by substituting good” (175). It does no good, for

Coverdale, to save a soul by working to death as Hollingsworth would prescribe. Instead,

to truly reform someone, they must experience the good in life. Despite—or in spite of—

the “temperance-men” and their sermons, Coverdale believes the “cold and barren world

will look warmer, kindlier, mellower, through the medium of a toper’s glass” (175). If he

had his way, Coverdale would appear to the Blithedalers as the “allegorical figure of rich

October.” He is impatient for the grapevines of his hermitage to ripen, what he calls the

“abundance of his vintage,” out of which a “wine might be pressed” that would be

“endowed with a new kind of intoxicating quality,” a wine he might give to Blithedale to

assuage some of “the curse of Adam’s posterity,” a wine that “gives substance to the life

around us” (99, 208, 206). Coverdale’s reformist mission is summed up in one fabulous

tableau of inebriation and salvation.

However, Coverdale is not quite convinced of his own philosophy. In his tavern

tableau, Coverdale cannot help but note the presence among the paintings of sirloins and

salmons of a painting “in an obscure corner” of a “New England toper, stretched out on a

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bench, in the heavy, apoplectic sleep of drunkenness” (Hawthorne 176). The only

comfort the painting provides comes in “forced reflection, that, real as he looked, the

poor caitiff was but imaginary, a bit of painted canvass, whom no delirium tremens, nor

so much as a retributive headache, awaited, on the morrow” (176). While Coverdale tries

to initiate himself into his inebriate’s philosophy, he cannot help but remember the

overbearing temperance morality embodied by its “death-in-life” mascot, the toper. The

world and reality that Coverdale occupies does not allow for any ecstatic, Dionysian

revelry. Whereas Coverdale’s Arcadian tableaux of early Blithedale can be easily

corrected by simply removing a stinking weed from Priscilla’s bouquet, Coverdale’s

tavernal tableau cannot be directed away from the performances of the temperance

movement. The world provides a kind of memento mori: instead of remembering that

one must die, one must remember they have to come back to reality, that drunkenness can

only last so long and should not be drawn on forever, a memento sobriatate one could

say. As a preeminent observer, Coverdale cannot help bringing in this memento, as a

moralist he cannot ignore it, and as an equivocator par excellence he cannot help but use

it to undermine his newfound moral stance. Coverdale uses his experiences elsewhere to

help him make sense of the New England toper. Earlier, before leaving Blithedale,

Coverdale allegorizes a pen of pigs as though they too were under his directorial control.

The pigs, “symbols of slothful ease and sensual comfort,” enjoy a “ponderous and fat

satisfaction of their existence” (143, 144). To Coverdale “they alone are happy” because

the pigs “were involved…and buried alive, in their own corporeal substance” (144). And

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yet Coverdale cannot leave on that allegoric note. Silas Foster invites him to “eat a part

of a spare-rib” (144) when he returns to Blithedale. The pigs then become a symbol of

fleeting youth and vigor fully feasting on their corporeal bounty; Silas Foster cannot help

but remind Coverdale of the death in life of the pigs. Even Coverdale’s hermitage “had

been formed by the decay of some of the pine-branches, which the [grape] vine had

lovingly strangled with its embrace” presenting Coverdale’s “one exclusive possession”

that “symbolized [his] individuality” as much life-in-death as the toper (98, 99).

Coverdale, contrary to Kenneth Marc Harris’s argument, does not mistake his

mental projections of toperism and Rich October for reality. Instead, Coverdale

grudgingly admits his projections are inconsistent with the pain of human life and so

must settle for keeping that pain “at a supportable distance through [dramatic] irony”

(Harris 120). Or rather, it may be better to say that Coverdale the Elder does not mistake

his projections for reality. Again, reality is not the point of the narrative for Coverdale

the Elder. The point is the moral and philosophical meaning of his personal narrative.

Coverdale, charged by Hollingsworth with believing nothing, excavates his past in search

of something to believe in. To excavate the moral and philosophical meanings of his

past, Coverdale narrates his past and sets himself, in hindsight, in his own tableaux for

him to look upon from his present moment. Coverdale is “immobilized” in his hermitage

and in his tavern booth, sat perfectly still for the viewer—himself in the present

moment—to gaze upon. However, he is not posed femininely with eyes lifted in

adoration, eyes dropped in submission, or bare shoulders shivering. Instead he exists

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outside of the frame of the tableaux—his hermitage literally frames both images while his

booth exists outside the “customary life that was going forward” in the tavern (175). By

dilating the aperture of his memory this wide, Coverdale can do more than just question

the images his younger self is seeing. By viewing a tableau of himself looking at a

tableau of Blithedale or the tavern, Coverdale can compare and contrast his younger self

(and older self) to those images in order to excavate an understanding of his relationship

to Blithedale and his compatriots. In his hindsight, Coverdale is trying to provide himself

“access to the virtues represented by [his] individual tableaux” in order to “[actualize] a

newer, better” self in the present (Chapman 28, 29). In other words, he is trying to not

just understand his past self but is trying to piece together something resembling a belief

system for his present self. Unlike traditional tableaux, Coverdale is not trying to install

virtue into his character but instead is trying install a purpose into himself, both past and

present. Though he jokingly will join any cause “provided, however, the effort did not

involve an unreasonable amount of trouble,” Coverdale the Elder is quick to point out

that the “reader must not take [his] own word for it” (Hawthorne 246, 247). Though

purpose, “the want of which…has rendered [Coverdale’s] life all an emptiness” (246), is

still missing in Coverdale’s life, he at least has a method—directing his memory as

though it was a series of tableaux—for creating a meaningful purpose out of the disparate

images and scenes of his past. Whether he cares to do so is another question entirely.

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Chapter 3

THE GREATEST SHOW IN NEW ENGLAND:

FREAKSHOW, CIRCUS, AND SUMMER

Wharton, writing her autobiography eighty-two years after Hawthorne’s The

Blithedale Romance, would swell the action of her own narrative, connecting herself with

Hawthorne as she herself looked back over her experiences and into the mythical history

of New England literature. It was through her 1917 novel Summer specifically that

Wharton felt connected to Hawthorne’s writing. To reiterate, Summer follows Charity

Royall in her love affair with the urbane Lucius Harney, who is visiting North Dormer to

sketch colonial era houses. The love affair is complicated by Lawyer Royall, Charity’s

adoptive ward. When Charity becomes pregnant by Harney and Harney leaves her for

the beautiful Annabel Balch, Charity runs away to the outlaw community on the

Mountain, her ancestral home. The next day, Lawyer Royall brings the exhausted

Charity back to town and promptly marries her. However, Wharton only really

connected herself to Hawthorne through genre and place. This chapter explores how, like

Hawthorne’s Blithedale, Summer uses the entertainment of the era to develop and

complicate the narrative. Where Hawthorne uses the tableaux vivant, its complicated

history, and its complex presentations and receptions to accentuate his narrator’s

ambiguous morality and desires, Wharton uses the freakshow to give her narrative the

kaleidoscopic feel of a circus or carnival midway, to develop a pervading atmosphere of

horror and disgust, and to play with our ability as readers to identify with and be repelled

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by characters. As this long list suggests, Wharton, like Hawthorne, did not confine her

use to one form of freakshow only. Instead her narrative utilizes the wide variety of

freakshow performances to explore many aspects of freakishness.

This approach, though similar to Hawthorne’s, implications unique to Summer.

For one, Blithedale’s first-person narration, delivered as it is by the always-obfuscating

Coverdale, heightens and intensifies the novel’s themes of indeterminacy and

unknowability. As readers, we must confront Coverdale as we read and grapple with him

as a narrator. In Summer, readers are presented with a third-person narrator who will, at

times, use free indirect discourse to enter into the psyche of Charity. In these moments, I

argue, we identify with Charity, at least the part of her that resembles us, and at times we

are doubly repulsed by her as she returns our gaze. At other times we observe Charity

from afar, seeing her through an unaffiliated third person narrator. In these instances, I

argue, she is posed like a freak, generally immobile, removed from the audience on a

decorated stage not unlike a tableau performer, under the watchful, amateur

medical/scientific gaze of the audience. For another, the entertainments and show

businesses of Hawthorne’s era are not entirely erased but are instead evolved into a

different form. This is not to say that the tableaux vivant was extinct by the time

Wharton was writing; it would still have been a popular entertainment. Indeed, the

tableaux vivant plays a central role in Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth. As

described in the introductory chapter, the freakshow is a term for several related

entertainments where people with exceptional attributes—skin color, physical and mental

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deformities, diseases—were exhibited to audiences eager to “study” the performers. To

this category of “born” freaks, Janet Davis adds the category of “made” freaks, those with

body modifications and those with spectacular acts like fire or glass eating. The

freakshow was descended from tableaux vivant in that the performer is usually posed

with symbolic decorations that, like a tableaux vivant, suggest certain kinds of

freakishness or with a narrative mediating the audience’s interpretation of the performer

the same way Lord Hamilton would have mediated Lady Hamilton’s attitudes. Where

the tableau dealt in morality and social enlightenment, the freakshow dealt with education

and the new sciences of genetics, evolution, anthropology, and “ethnology,” though it

could easily adopt a moral register in discussions of freakish women, certain deformities,

and sexual maladies. Too, Brodhead’s description of the commercialized entertainment

industry of the 1850s would also have been relevant in Wharton’s time. In fact,

Brodhead’s examination of the relationship between P.T. Barnum and the performer

Jenny Lind holds true in understanding the interests and motivations uniting show

promoters, especially Barnum, and freakshow performers.

Of the critical attention paid to Summer—which is scant compared to the attention

paid Wharton’s other works—very little addresses the performances in the novel.

Instead, most critical readings of Summer focus on Wharton’s use of freakishness in

Summer. Or, to be entirely true to the critical material, the critical attention has been

focused around the critics’ own disgust, and in some cases their morbid curiosity, with

the novel and its characters. Gary Totten’s approach to reading Summer is an instructive

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example. Using race and eugenic theories popular around the time Summer was written

(and popular with Wharton), Totten sees the Mountain people as a mix of dysgenic

savages who live in animalistic, grungy squalor. Totten also sees Charity, who is

originally from the Mountain, as a racialized and Othered abomination in the

oppressively Anglo-normative town of North Dormer. Though Totten never outright

discusses the novel or the characters in terms of freakishness, the implication is surely

present that the world of the novel and many of its characters are radically different—

physically, mentally, racially, socially, and so on—from Totten’s presumed reader and

from the normative Euroamerican characters of the novel (i.e. Lucius Harney, Lawyer

Royall, Annabel Balch). In Summer, that radical difference is not just present, it is put on

display to examine and judge. It is also important to recognize that the audience of this

display is not only in the novel but includes the reader as well. Readings like Totten’s

have been consistent from the novel’s initial publication. In her introduction to the

Oxford World’s Classics edition, Laura Rattray suggests that the novella was “like its

protagonist…regarded for many years as a product of ‘tainted origin’, an illegitimate

child in the author’s oeuvre” (Rattray xiii). Rattray argues that critics of the 1910s were

excited to see the kind of novel Wharton would produce out of her time in Europe during

World War I. Expecting—unfairly, as Wharton would later argue—something in the

generic vein of what Nancy A. Walker calls the “seduced and abandoned” novel, critics

were surprised that Wharton and Summer did not blindly follow generic conventions.

Wharton does begin with the “seduced and abandoned” formula. In Summer, Charity

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Royall is seduced by, has a torrid affair with, and is ultimately abandoned by the urbane

Lucius Harney, a young Bostonian architect visiting Charity’s small town of North

Dormer to sketch colonial houses. However, Walker is quick to point out in her critical

reading that Wharton quickly throws aside the façade of genre. With such a radical shift

away from the moral novel formula and towards a more gothic novel, it may not be

surprising that critics were disgusted with Summer and how it differed from their generic

expectations. T.S. Eliot, in a review of Summer, wrote that the novella would “certainly

be considered ‘disgusting’ in America” (xvi) presumably for the overt themes of

sexuality and incest. Many modern critics have continued talking about Summer with

disgust. Kathy Grafton takes a Freudian psychological approach and labels Charity and

Harney as sexually deviant and perverse. Karen Weingarten takes a particularly

interesting approach to Wharton’s treatment of abortion. Weingarten combines Hannah

Arendt’s political theories concerning war refugees together with Wharton’s history

aiding refugees in World War I. Only those lives recognized and embraced by the law,

Weingarten argues, are actually “legible.” Charity, in her search for a home and a life, is

a haunting, unhomed, illegible figure who is only made legitimate when she marries

Lawyer Royall.

Each critic discusses some aspect of Summer that is disgusting, distasteful,

grotesque, abject, or abhorrent to them as readers and yet they cannot help but to analyze

those aspects. Indeed, it is the repulsion/attraction behind the critical work that further

suggests the freakshow reading. There is both a taboo and a spirit of inquiry motivating

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the audience’s gaze, and that gaze and its attendant motives are returned by the freak

performer. The freakshow need not be spectacular, but the audience needs to knowingly

gaze upon something or someone that transgresses normality with a sense of curiosity.

And to be perfectly clear, the critical literature stops short of labelling Summer and its

characters freakish. However, the way that the disgusting elements of Summer are

showcased suggests that the world of the novel is constructed like a freakshow. The best

illustration of this freakshow is the scene in the brown house. Charity and Harney go to

the swampy, dilapidated home of Bash Hyatt at the base of the Mountain so that Harney

can sketch its colonial architecture. Before going to the Mountain, Harney learns from

Charity, Lawyer Royall, and some other unnamed source about the Mountain and its

people. The people of North Dormer, according to Charity, “took the Mountain for

granted, and implied its disparagement by tone rather than explicit criticism” (Wharton

33). That is, Charity thinks this until she overhears Lawyer Royall explicitly telling

Harney that the Mountain is a “blot” full of “scum” who “herd together like heathens”

(36). The “gang of thieves and outlaws” living on the Mountain are, according to Lawyer

Royall, living within town limits but without “a sheriff or a tax collector or a coroner”

that are requisite for civilized life (36). Lawyer Royall’s comments suggest that the

Mountain is a negative space, everything the town is not. Harney, in his own research,

thinks the first Mountain people “are supposed to have been men who worked on the

railway” (33). Combined with Charity’s own “swarthy” features (3) and Lawyer

Royall’s “thieves and outlaws” comment (36), the Mountain people are an example of

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what Totten calls the era’s “variegated whiteness” (Totten 70). Harney’s comments bring

to Totten’s mind the “many Irish immigrants [who] settled in western Massachusetts

between 1850 and 1900,” many of whom “worked on the railroads during the late

nineteenth century” (71). Charity’s and Lawyer Royall’s comments lead Totten to

believe the Mountain people may also be “[drawn] from stereotypes associated with the

Italian immigrants who settled in Western Massachusetts at the turn of the century,”

stereotypes specifically concerning “popularly held beliefs about the dubious intellect and

character of Italian immigrants” (70). In modern terms, these people would be white, but

Totten points out that eugenic discussions of Wharton’s era considered Nordic peoples to

be white and other Europeans to be less white the further south they originated.

The Mountain people are not only culturally abject Others, they are racially abject

Others. North Dormer is made all the whiter by the racial freaks of the Mountain.

Specifically, the people on the Mountain are a peculiar kind of freakshow called the

ethnological congress. Janet M. Davis argues that American “zoological proprietors

pioneered [the] systematic, full-blown exhibits of exotic people with animals” (118).

According to Davis, “located inside the menagerie tent, the ethnological congress of

‘strange and savage tribes’,” such as the potentially Irish and Italian immigrants,

“physically collapsed human and animal boundaries in a spectacular act of Otherness”

(118). Davis’s reproductions of lithographs show “well-appointed Euroamerican families

viewing the display of the ‘strange and savage tribes’ as an instructive exercise” (119) on

not just the natives but on their own Euroamericanness. Examples abound in the brown

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house scene of animal language applied to the freaks. The young woman of the house is

an “unkempt creature,” the old man’s face is “so sodden and bestial” (Wharton 42, 43).

The family live “like vermin in their lair” and are referred to by the collective phrase

“poor creatures” (44, 45). Like any good freakshow, the Hyatts display not only their

“‘born’ (for the congenitally deformed or racially exotic)” freakishness, but their “‘made’

(when the acts involved conscious bodily disfigurement…)” freakishness as well (Davis

118). The little girl has “a scar across her cheek,” and the old woman with the kitten is

referred to later as a “half-witted old woman” (43, 49). However, the Hyatts’ Otherness

and the town’s contempt for people like the Hyatts do not make for a freakshow, only for

freakish characters. The brown house scene makes for a show by positioning Charity and

Harney as viewers of the Hyatts, not just as guests of the Hyatts. After they are allowed

to stay to wait out the storm, Charity and Harney “[sit] down on a bench made of a board

resting on two starch boxes” (Wharton 43). They are literally positioned as audience

members would be positioned watching the Hyatts and their awkward cultural practices

such as not “rousing the sleeping man” in the corner (43). Charity and Harney both try to

interact with the Hyatts but are cut off each time. Charity tries to beckon two

apprehensive children to come to her when she sees them peeking through a doorway.

Harney, on his initial entrance, enters the brown house with “a general ‘How are you?’ to

which no one responded” (43). If it were not for a few civilized actions by the Hyatts, the

brown house could be read as a tableau. To help quell Charity’s shiver—her dress is

drenched by the storm after all—the younger woman brings her a broken teacup full of

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whiskey. The younger woman is playing her part, a savage playing at being civilized.

This gesture also brings money into the already theatric staging of the scene. Harney

feels as if he should pay, or at least tip, for the whiskey that he drinks. He “feel[s] in his

pocket for a dollar and draw[s] it out” (44) in an attempt to pay the performers/Hyatts for

their performance of civility. For Harney, no show of civility or savagery is free of cost.

As Davis shows in her study of the ethnological congress, the show at the Hyatts’

reinforces Harney’s own Euroamericanness and to an extent enforces Charity’s own

white-like identity. The Hyatts and their savagery are contained within the brown house,

ostensibly the stage of the freakshow. The Hyatts are under Harney’s and Charity’s gaze.

At a safe remove, Harney and Charity can, as Davis puts it, “judge for [themselves] what

the freaks ‘had’” that made them outlaws and thieves or “why [the freaks] came down to

that fever hole” brown house (Davis 118, Wharton 45). The most obvious example of

diagnosis involves the old man sleeping in the corner. On the one hand, Charity can

piece together the relationship between the sleeping man and the actions of the other

Hyatts to diagnose why the scene is so oppressively silent. The children, “it occur[s]” to

Charity, are afraid of waking the old man, and “probably the woman shared their fear”

(Wharton 43, emphasis added). Charity cannot be certain; she can only make a

hypothesis as to why the room is silent. Charity can take the minute details of the scene

and piece together something of a “reason” for its construction just as a freakshow

audience would amateurishly guess at the source of the freak’s condition. On the other

hand, Harney cannot quite make the same kind of diagnosis, though he does make two

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diagnoses. There is a suggestion in the scene that Harney diagnoses the old man’s

alcoholism, though Harney remains seemingly blind to the old man’s violence. Though

Charity quietly shrugs away the whiskey in the broken teacup, Harney takes it, drinks it,

and makes a motion to pay for it. In contrast to the old man, Harney can hold his liquor

and goes through the socially acceptable sequence of actions for drinking liquor. In this

sense, Harney’s diagnosis is that the old man drinks the wrong way, i.e. to excess and to

stupor, while his own drinking habits are diagnosed as the right way, i.e. polite and paid

in full. However, this is only a superficial diagnosis on Harney’s part. Harney also

leaves still wondering why the family moved to the “fever hole,” the answer to which

Charity can easily supply: because the “fever hole” is an improvement to the mountain.

In addition, Harney actually more gravely misdiagnoses the Hyatts as a dashingly roguish

“handful of people who don’t give a damn for anybody” (33). However, on the ride back

to North Dormer, Harney is unsettled. He looks “oppressed by what he had seen” at the

brown house (45). Harney and Charity have an awkward, stilted discussion about him

trying to pay for the whiskey. He only really says “I wasn’t sure—” to which Charity

fills in with the real diagnosis, that “[he] knew they were [Charity’s] folks, and thought

[she’d] be ashamed to see [him] give them money” (45). In the moment when Harney

puts the dollar back in his pocket, he has correctly diagnosed Charity as being freakish

like the Hyatts, as being not entirely “normal.”

Interestingly, Charity (at least in the brown house moment) is made all the more

human, white, and American by way of comparison to the Hyatts. However, as Davis

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puts it, despite Charity’s differences, during the live performance “the relationship

between self and Other is constantly in flux…because as an entertainer, [the freak]

returns the audience’s gaze with [their] own, thus undermining the controlling function of

the gaze” (Davis 27). The squalor of the brown house brings to Charity’s mind the

“kitchen at the red house, with its scrubbed floor and dresser full of china” (Wharton 44).

The “smell of dirt and stale tobacco” inside the Hyatts’ brown house brings to Charity’s

mind “the peculiar smell of yeast and coffee and soft-soap” (44). Importantly, Charity is

clear in declaring that “she always hated” those smells and the images of the kitchen, but

in light of the brown house ethnological congress, the aspects of the red house “now

[seem] the very symbol of household order” (44). In other words, the brown house

reveals to Charity how white and how right her experiences are in the red house she lives

in with Lawyer Royall. Returning to the teacup of whiskey, every instinct and habit

learned while living in the red house informs Charity’s head shake and maintains her

distinct position within the audience of the performance. To accept the cup, itself a

grotesque version of her own wares and its contents would be to accept her inheritance as

a “child of a drunken convict” (37). Yet Harney gladly takes the cup and drinks because

for him the cup is nothing more than a peace offering from a savage. As with any good

service, Harney feels the need to tip the younger woman and pulls a dollar out of his

pocket only to put it back. Charity “guessed that he did not wish her to see him offering

money to people she had spoken of as being her kin” (44, emphasis added). The

emphasis is added here to highlight the swirling relations between Charity, Harney, and

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the freakish Others. Had Harney gone through with his action, the boundary between

audience and performer could have been replaced. However, by putting the dollar back,

Harney shows (to Charity) he understands that Charity is both abject freak and normal

citizen, that she has some affinity with the freaks and could take offense to his actions.

Harney’s gesture and Charity’s conjecture together reveal that although the “stage could

contain the racial Other, the ethnic threat [that makes] the nonwhite body safe through the

trappings of the freak show” (Fahy 56), the inviolate boundary between spectator and

horrible spectacle is only an illusion. Harney realizes that Charity has been a freak

passing as human this entire time.

While the freakshow allows Harney the opportunity to haphazardly explore his

curiosity, it has the effect for Charity of redoubling the normalness of her middle-class,

Euroamerican experience in the red house. However, in tandem with Harney’s diagnosis

of Charity as a freak, the brown house scene begins to come undone as a strict analogue

to a freakshow. Specifically, Charity is highlighted as a liminal character somewhere

between object and viewer, consumer of the show and player in the show. She is

reminded of her normal experiences in the red house but is also reminded of her

Otherness in relation to Harney. What the brown house scene ultimately brings into

consideration is that the world of Summer is a freakshow, but that the show is not strictly

contained and constrained to a limited space, i.e. a stage. The freakshow as a socially and

culturally normative performance, indeed the ability to view any Other as a tableaux-like

performance, according to Joseph Boone, relies on “the illusion of some ineffable but

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inviolate boundary dividing spectator and spectacle, subject and object, self and other”

(93).9 Though the boundaries of the freakshow as a strictly staged performance break

down in the brown house, that does not mean that the freakshow of Summer ceases to

exist, nor does it mean that it loses its function as a cultural norming practice. On the

contrary, it means Charity and Harney are not the only audience viewing a freakshow and

that the freakshow is being performed in various places. The brown house scene

suggests, actually, the opposite of a neatly contained freakshow: that Harney has entered

into a space, North Dormer and its surroundings, defined by its freakshowness and that

there is a larger audience of the much larger freakshow. In her introduction, Laura

Rattray points out the “prevalence of disabilities among the women who make up the

background of Summer” (xxi). Allie Hawes has an “uneven, limping step” (81). Verna

Marsh, the lady hired to do the cooking at the red house, is deaf with “old deaf-looking

eyes” (80). Though she is never seen, Carrick Fry’s wife is paralyzed (38). Each

character is linked to their physical disability, whether “born” or “made.” Since we are

not given much history of the women, a viewer (or reader) can only attempt to diagnose

what each “has.” However, Miss Hatchard is given a more extended show. Miss

Hatchard, Harney’s cousin, is “too lame to come around” the library (Wharton 8). She

obviously has a physical disability like the other secondary characters. However, she

also has a mental disability. After Lawyer Royall tries to force his way into Charity’s

9 Judith Sensibar uses Boone’s work in her chapter “Edith Wharton as Propogandist and

Novelist” to argue that Wharton’s travel writing resembles tableaux.

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bed and after he asks Charity for the first time to marry him, Charity goes to Miss

Hatchard to ask for a job to earn some money to get away or to hire a woman to help

keep house. The implication is that Charity needs another woman present to help ward

off Lawyer Royall’s advances. However, Miss Hatchard’s response is milquetoast at

best: “The… the housework’s too hard for you, I suppose?” Miss Hatchard’s inability to

overtly discuss the matter of sex, rape, and incest looming in the red house leads Charity

to feel “compassion for Miss Hatchard’s long immaturity” (15). Charity decides Miss

Hatchard must “be talked to like a baby” (15). The effect of this realization makes

Charity feel “incalculably old” (15). Miss Hatchard, despite her age, is diagnosed by

Charity as having the mental and emotional capacity of a child. Charity’s diagnostic gaze

if reflected back to her by Miss Hatchard. In that moment, standing across from Miss

Hatchard, Charity experiences something akin to progeria, a disease that prematurely

ages children,10 that makes Charity feel “incalculably old” despite her age. “Alone” with

a “deeper sense of isolation,” Charity realizes that her sense of feminine comradery with

Miss Hatchard was only a childish myth. With that myth proven false, Charity’s identity

as an adolescent quickly disappears, replaced with an old, supposedly wise and resolute

woman.

However, it is not just the world of North Dormer that is freakish. Charity is

made even more freakish because, just like her own experience in the brown house, the

10 For a more in-depth discussion of “literary progeria” see Conan O’Brien’s “The ‘Old

Child’ in Faulkner and O’Connor.”

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boundary dividing Charity and the reader is not inviolate. Like Winegarten, I see

Wharton’s work during World Way I as an instructive lens to explore Charity’s

freakishness. Wharton did many odd jobs during World War I, among them was

propagandizing. Thomas Fahy argues that “WWI propogandists recognized the power

(as well as the draw) of” freakshow performers and “enfreak[ed] the enemy” in their

propaganda. By depicting the enemy as freakish and inhuman, propagandists appealed to

fear and hatred of the enemy in the American public. But, unlike the safely staged show,

propogandists “didn’t want to contain the threat” (56). Instead, “they wanted to remove

the safety net that freakshows offered and to depict the Other as unleashed on American

soil” (56). These elements combined gave recruitment efforts a powerful urgency and

served to legitimize the war efforts. Wharton does something similar with Charity,

unleashing her miscegenated freakishness on North Dormer. It is important to note that

Charity is not necessarily a racial freak to the reader, though she is still an abjection of

the reader. Charity is marked as a freak within the novel by the same animalistic

language used to describe the Mountain people. The animal language used to describe

Charity is less distasteful than the language used to describe the Mountain people, for

example when “a kind of animal secretiveness possessed her” and “the secretive instinct

of the animal in pain was so strong in her” (Wharton 52, 80, emphasis added). However,

Charity is also described as a freakish and bestial sexual deviant. On the night that

Harney fails to show for supper at the Royall house, Charity ventures out after dark to

find him. It is weird enough that “the darkness drew her” on that night, but it also draws

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on her animal instincts and pulls her to “the hill and…the larch-wood above the pasture”

(51). Instead, she spots Harney’s light on in Miss Hatchard’s house and is pulled towards

him. Besides the “animal secretiveness [that] possessed her” (52), she is made animal by

the way she moves towards Harney: “crouch” and “crept” (54, 55). She even stalks

Harney like a predator stalking prey. She notices Harney had “taken off his coat and

waistcoat, and unbuttoned the low collar of his flannel shirt” and particularly notices the

“vigorous lines of his young throat, and the root of the muscles where they joined the

chest” (53). This would be erotic if Charity was not stalking “softly on the short grass,

and keeping so close to the house that [Harney], even if roused by her approach, would

not be able to see her” (52). Her epiphany is that she could easily rouse Harney and do

“the thing that did happen between young men and girls” (54), but she gives up the

position of hunter/dominator and declares that Harney “must seek her: he must not be

surprised into taking her” (55). She must be the prey, not the hunter.

Charity’s freakishness extends beyond even North Dormer. Charity is cast as

freakish to the reader. In the above example, Charity is “aroused…by the clandestine

nature of” stalking Harney and “doing something taboo” (Grafton 357, 359). The

passage is focalized through Charity. The boundary between reader and Charity is

dissolved so that the reader is in contact with Charity at her most erotic as she considers

her “sensual urges” and “the forbiddenness of her own actions” (358). Our inquisitive

gaze is returned to us as we find ourselves, figuratively speaking, hunched next to Charity

in the bushes. However, Charity’s most abject and freakish trait is her ignorance. Robert

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Bogdan, in his taxonomy of freakshow performances, argues that when freaks were

presented as “exotic,” advertisers “appealed to people’s interest in the culturally strange,

the primitive, the bestial, the exotic” with “the emphasis on how different and, in most

cases, how inferior to person on exhibit was” (540, 542). This is in comparison to

Bogdan’s “aggrandized mode” of promotion where advertisers would tell the public “the

‘freak’ was highly educated, spoke many languages, and had ‘snobbish’ hobbies like

writing poetry or painting” (542). Charity is presented to us throughout in the exotic

mode and thus her ignorance is an extension of her bestiality. She decides not go to

school so that she can stay with the lonely Lawyer Royall, and what little interest is

stirred in her for knowledge is quickly doused: Charity “found it easier to take North

Dormer as the norm of the universe than to go on reading” (Wharton 4). For Charity,

reading and knowledge are associated with death and imprisonment; there is a sort of

taboo about them for Charity. Charity calls the Honorius Hatchard Memorial Library a

“prison-house” (6) where Charity “wondered if [Honorius] felt any deader in his grave

than she did in his library” (6). Though she is “blind and insensible of many things, and

dimly knew it” (10), the reader is all too aware of the weight, and irony, of “her

ignorance of life and literature” (19). Charity is not a classically tragic figure doomed by

her ignorance, the way, say, The House of Mirth’s Lily Bart is doomed by her pride.

Instead, Charity’s ignorance is an abjection of the reader’s knowledgeable position.

Consider Nancy A. Walker’s structuralist argument that Summer is a reworking of a

“seduced and abandoned” novel. Walker’s argument is based on knowledge gleaned

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from reading: of novels, historical texts, the writings of other knowledgeable readers, etc.

Walker—as well as the presumably mistaken contemporary reviewers of Summer—

approaches Summer with knowledge that Charity very clearly lacks because of her

aversion to reading. That is to say, Charity is the abjection of the reader, a sort of

illiterate and uninformed freak. If the boundary between the abject freak and the

audience/reader is dissolved in the voyeur scene discussed above, then it is re-established

in places where the narrator takes over the narrative. For example, the narrator evaluates

Charity’s relationship to Harney and concludes that “there had been nothing, therefore, in

the outward course of events to raise in Charity’s breast the hopes with which it

trembled” (Wharton 38). The intrusion of the narrator brings back the division between

Charity and the reader by commenting on the narrative facts, bringing back into sharp

relief the constructed nature of the narration.

The ill-defined stage of the freakshow extends even further out to include even

Harney, though Harney would arguably be presented to us in the aggrandized mode. As

Kathy Grafton argues, Harney is freakish in his sexual proclivities. A large portion of the

critical literature, including Grafton’s work, focuses on Charity’s sexuality and for good

reason. Returning to the scene between Charity and Miss Hatchard, Charity more openly

expresses her sexual situation. Compared to Miss Hatchard, Charity brazenly brings up

the issue of rape, incest, and sex where normally those issues would be silenced. Though

in this example it might be unfair to label Charity a sexual deviant, her blatant sexuality

and knowledge of sex is the reason for her freakishly premature aging in the presence of

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Miss Hatchard. However, as Grafton points out, Harney has his own sexual proclivities

that make him stand out as freakish. Harney is a freak because he is uncanny. If Charity

is the abjection of the reader because of her ignorance, then Harney is the mirror image of

the reader because of his erudition. However, that mirror image, like many of the mirror

images in Summer, is actually distorted like a funhouse mirror. Lucius Harney occupies,

in a broad application of Carol Wershoven’s work, the place of the “female intruder,” a

trope Wershoven identifies in much of Wharton’s fiction. For Wershoven, a Wharton

narrative is most often made dramatic by a female character who “intrudes” upon the

until-then peaceful world of the protagonist. However, in Summer, it is Harney who

intrudes into the world of North Dormer. This casts Harney in a kind of literary drag,

occupying a male position within Summer, but a female position within Wharton’s

oeuvre and to the erudite reader. Too, he is uncanny because despite his urbane and

erudite character he is positioned as a near-equal rival to Charity. The two compete for

Annabel Balch, or “the patriarchal ideal, the ‘fixed and upright’ womanhood that both

Charity and Harney want to possess” (Fedorko 73). To put it another way, the beautiful

Annabel Balch is someone Charity wants to be, and Harney wants to be with. Kathy A.

Fedorko goes even further to argue that Charity and Harney are two halves of a single

self, the male and female, intellect and sensuality, some kind of Siamese twin on display

for the reader.

However, Harney is able to perform in more ways than the freakshow. For

example, as established previously, he is a drag queen to the erudite reader. When

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glancing backwards at Hawthorne’s works, Harney can be seen to have the same effect

on Charity as Westervelt has on Priscilla. Within the novel Harney is a kind of

mesmerist or hypnotist over Charity. Harney is often linked with the spiritual world as

either a sort of mesmerist or connected to death. He suddenly appears, seemingly from

nowhere, “as if he were a vision” (Wharton 84) when Charity tries to escape North

Dormer. For a man who is often described as shortsighted, Harney’s vision is often

disturbingly described. As Charity spies on him in the night, Harney lays on the bed

“motionless and with fixed eyes, as though following his vision to its bitter end” (55). He

is looking towards the ceiling of his room, but his eyes see through the ceiling towards a

vision of the future. In that moment, Charity is reminded of similar scene where Harney,

looking up towards the afternoon sky, seems to be focused elsewhere than in the moment.

His eyes also have a hypnotic effect on Charity. Harney’s shortsighted eyes widen and

deepen “as if to draw [Charity] down into them” in a trance (102). His touch also sends

her into a catatonic state somewhere between the waking realm and the pseudo-spiritual

realm supposedly accessed by mesmerists. The mesmeric/hypnotic performance was

often erotically charged as male performers often enacted their performance on female

subjects. Harney exhibits his fair share of sexuality and does so more often and in more

extreme language than Charity does. Kathy Grafton argues that Harney, in Freudian

fashion, needs “a certain kind of degradation of Charity to occur before he can find her

sexually accessible” (350). As a degraded object of sexual desire (compared to the

elevated object of love, i.e. Annabel Balch), Charity is often acted upon by Harney.

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Though Grafton focuses on each character individually, together the two suggest a

relationship based on power plays over and under one another. Harney’s habit of kissing

Charity involves “push[ing] the hair from her forehead, bending her face back…and

leaning over so that his head loomed black between her eyes and the paleness of the sky”

(Wharton 96). Compared to Charity’s predatorial infatuation with Harney’s throat,

Harney’s kisses are practically vampiric as he goes “feeling for the curve of her throat

below the ear, and kissing her there, and on the hair and eyes and lips” (110). Harney’s

embraces have a kind of “spell” (112) over Charity that binds her to him. As Charity

runs away from the red house, Harney catches up to her and exclaims: “Did you think

you could run away from me? You see you weren’t meant to” (85). Before Charity can

say anything, he kisses her. From that point onwards, Harney looks at Charity but rarely

hears her. In fact, his “kiss blotted…all out” (93), and only “at stated hours, the ghost of

[Charity] came back” to town (94). The “new world” of Harney’s that Charity comes

back from is an “abyss” (110) where she is “suspended in the void” (90). As in their first

kiss, Harney’s world is one of darkness, or as Charity puts it, one on “the other side of the

grave” (81). Not only is he intimately linked with the Memorial Library, which Charity

already links with death, but his hands that he continually wraps around Charity’s hands,

face, and hair convey a touch that is “lifeless” (63), returning to Charity early on the

feeling of abjection, disgust, and terror similar to what she gets from touching her dead

mother’s body. The death-in-life aspect of Harney’s spiritualist persona is reminiscent of

several different performance types. For example, he could be said to do a kind of

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somnambulist performance in the vein of “Sleeping Beauty” displays. Kathryn A.

Hoffmann’s discussion of the “Sleeping Beauty” focuses on static displays of women

ostensibly for medical and scientific educational purposes similar to how the ethnic

freaks were showcased for anthropological education. The somnambulist supposedly

performed in a mythical or pseudoscientific realm between life and death. Too, Harney’s

death-in-life qualities resemble the real life case of Julia Pastrana who was, in life,

displayed as a “hairy woman” freak but who, in death, was exhibited in London with the

handbill proclaiming her a “NEW AND UNPARALLELLED DISCOVERY in the ART

OF EMBALMING, Whereby the Original Form and Almost Natural Expression of Life

are Retained” (Durbach 39, 38, original emphasis). Though it seems safe to assume there

were probably examples of male “sleepers” and male freaks displayed after death, it is

interesting that Hoffmann and Durbach both focus on female performers. This reinforces

Harney’s drag performance discussed earlier but refocuses that performance inside the

novel rather than outwards towards the reader. Harney’s performances suggest that the

world of Summer is not a one-dimensional performance, but rather a plethora of

performances all contained in a sprawling geographic space.

With this in mind, I again want to refine the term “freakshow.” Though

exhibitions like the one displaying Julia Pastrana existed mostly independent of larger

fairs and circuses, it seems to be that the opposite was more common. Looking at

Hoffmann’s work on “Sleeping Beauties,” rarely were the exhibitions of medical models

and somnambulists spectacular enough to exist independently of the larger circuses and

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fair. Hoffmann is clear in explaining that the individual exhibition might travel, but that

in their various stops they existed largely as one of the attractions in a larger fair or

circus. Similarly, even discussions of Julia Pastrana in London reference specific

neighborhoods in London and other large towns known for their sordid performance

venues.11 Harney’s various performances point to the same kind of entertainment

ecosystem existing in Summer. In other words, the sum of the performances equals a

world that is circuslike. To be clear, the term is not carnivalesque but circuslike. The

concept of the carnivalesque comes out of pre-modern festivities wherein normal law and

order were suspended, upended, and comically reversed. On the one hand, this allowed

common people a modicum of freedom to resist the power of the church and royalty,

while, on the other hand it allowed the church and royalty to maintain power by giving

the people an illusion of freedom. The circus is very much not of this dynamic. Though

the circus can be traced back to the same carnival tradition, the circus is more aptly

described as a leisure activity, enjoyed by people for the purpose of entertainment.

Further, the circus was also a capitalistic venture that continually worked to monetize

leisure time and entertainment. Brodhead points to the 1850s as the emergence of a

“more massively publicized order of entertainment…by which artistic performance

(broadly understood) came to reach larger and more stabilized mass publics” (334-5).

Along with the publicizing machine, Dana Anderson notes a similar pattern bombarding

11 For more information on Britain’s various entertainment districts, see Lisa A.

Kochanek’s “From Sideshow to Science” in Victorian Periodicals Review

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Americans in the mid- to late-1800s wherein trolley companies of the time, looking to

maximize profit, “realized that encouraging weekend family excursions [on their trolley

lines] was their best chance” at maximizing ridership and profit (3). The sudden influx of

riders to parks and gardens led to a boom in entertainments to fill the otherwise “bucolic”

space (3). Enter P.T. Barnum. Barnum was intimately associated with this culture of

monetized leisure. In a study of circus literature, Yoram S. Carmeli quotes the circus

book author William S. Bosworth as saying of Barnum “When he could not discover a

genuine wonder he manufactured one and he also adroitly mixed the real and the faked

that the visitor could not tell the false from the true” (Carmeli 216). Barnum publicized

the exhibition and subsequent autopsy of the supposedly 161-year-old former slave Joice

Heth in the 1830s (Reiss), legitimized his display of the “Feejee Mermaid” with lectures

from a “Dr. Griffin” in the 1840s (Levi), and publicized the opera singer Jenny Lind’s

tour of America in the 1850s (Brodhead). Barnum’s hippodromes of the 1870s,

precursors to his more famous circus, featured the “Congress of Nations.” With its

“roster of nearly 1000 performers” the Congress of Nations was “an epitome of ‘well-

regulated labor’” (Adams 39). While the showrunners like Barnum were busy

publicizing the entertainments, other laborers worked with the express purpose of

creating a well-regulated experience for patrons.12 While this construct may have

12 Frederickx et al and Bigné, Andreu, and Gnoth both conduct empirical studies of the

theme park experience, specifically how emotions of pleasure and arousal are

manufactured by theme park promoters. Durrant et al and Chaim Noy both conduct

qualitative studies of patrons interacting with park infrastructure. Finally, Stephen Lyng

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provided some opportunities for freakshow performers to experience a “normal” life with

normal freedoms, the critical readings suggest that the paying public would rarely if ever

have seen anything but the highly mediated circus performance.13 Summer exhibits its

entertainments in several different ways. Throughout the novel there are slight allusions

to circuslike entertainments embedded in several motifs. Too, there are scenes that can

be read as circus-like entertainments because they so closely resemble the entertainment.

In a much more obvious sense, Summer, like The Blithedale Romance, is full of actual

entertainments and performances. However, the most spectacularly circus-like instance

is the Fourth of July at Nettleton, a larger, more prosperous town near North Dormer.

Beginning with the circus-like entertainment, one of the major motifs in Summer

is mirrors and reflections. These images begin simply enough but devolve into more and

more bizarre and ultimately nightmarish visions. The progression of reflections suggests

that the motif is more appropriately read as a house of mirrors and not simply as

reflection. At the beginning of the novel the reflection motif can be read as an extension

of the novel’s preoccupation with looks. For instance, on the very first page, Wharton

sets up this motif as Charity, upon realizing Harney is new to town, scuttles back into the

red house ostensibly to look for a key she already had, but really to hide from the city

fellow. In the entranceway Charity looked at her reflection in “a narrow greenish

writes a compelling psychological study of how park promoters play into patrons’ desires

for novelties and thrills. 13 Brottman and Brottman pg. 93 provides a well laid out description of the myth of the

noble freak and ethnographic research that dispels that myth.

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mirror…hung on the passage wall” (1) and “wished for the thousandth time that she had

blue eyes like Annabel Balch” (1). This passage can be read as simply one of several that

bring forward Charity’s Otherness by way of her complexion. However, the mirrors do

not always show the same swarthy girl when Charity looks into them. Later, in Nettleton,

Charity is still unsure of her own image, but with Harney’s blue brooch she walks out of

the restaurant dressing room “with her head held high” (70). She is taken aback by “the

glow of her face under her cherry-coloured hat, and the curve of her young shoulders

through the transparent muslin” of her dress (70). This progression of reflections

suggests that the mirrors do not always objectively reflect reality but instead reflect a

subjective experience of reality. The reflection motif is not so simply about looks, but

about experiences. In this sense, the reflection motif is more aptly read as a house of

mirrors than simply reflection. As the narrative progresses, the reflections become more

and more distorted. On a boat ride on a lake in Nettleton, the reflection on the water

becomes twisted up with “the inverted tree-tops interwoven with the green growths of the

bottom” (73). Later, while riding back at night to the red house on bicycles, the stars

“looked as faint as their own reflections in water” (96). The reflections are disoriented

and disorientating, mixing up and inverting up and down. Late in the novel, finally

married to Lawyer Royall, Charity looks at the mirror above the dressing table in their

marital suite and sees “the high head-board and fluted pillow-slips of the double bed and

a bedspread so spotlessly white that she had hesitated to lay her hat and jacket on it”

(147). The reflection does not reflect the entirety of the bed tableau. It leaves out the

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large engraving of a lake scene “full of drowsy midsummer radiance” with two lovers

boating “on a lake overhung with trees” (147) that reminds Charity, cruelly, of her Fourth

of July with Harney. The final reflection is so nightmarish because from Charity’s initial

vantagepoint it only shows the incestual bed and not the engraving that reminds her of

Harney and Nettleton. Ironically, instead of a warped image, Charity is seeing a sliver of

her new reality clearly reflected back to her.

In a similar vein, there are also distinct passages that read like close analogues to

performances. The passages are contained within several pages, not sprawled throughout

the novel, giving them a sense of a limited experience. In this case that limited

experience is one peep show and one cabinet of curiosity. After hearing that Harney is

leaving North Dormer, Charity brazenly leaves the red house at night and muses on

“climbing the hill and plunging into the larch-wood above the pasture” (51). Instead, a

light in Miss Hatchard’s house catches her eye and convinces Charity that Harney is

there. She sneaks over to the house and peeps into the window. Charity sees Harney

trying to sketch “quietly sitting at his drawing-board” (52). In a fit of frustration, Harney

flings away his sketches and sullenly rests his chin on his hands at his desk. “He had

taken off his coat and waistcoat, and unbuttoned the low collar of his flannel shirt” so that

Charity could see “the vigorous lines of his young throat, and the root of the muscles

where they joined the chest” (53). Charity has an unobstructed—though voyeuristic—

view of Harney in his private state of semi-undress. The extreme attention to detail,

looking in at the connections of his muscles, suggests that Charity is not just looking at

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him but studying him and his body. In a gender reversal, Charity is peeping backstage at

Harney hoping to catch a glimpse of him undressed just as several circuses would often

have a “‘Gentlemen Only’ ‘cooch’ show” where they “could pay an extra twenty-five

cents to stand in a small enclosed area watch” so that “they might see nude women”

(Davis 5, 126, 5). Instead, Charity is the voyeur looking in on Harney.14 Another scene

closely resembling a performance is Charity’s visit to Dr. Merkle’s office after she first

discovers that she is pregnant by Harney. The office begins with a “Stuffed fox on his

hind legs proffer[ing] a brass card-tray to visitors” (Wharton 117). The rooms are full of

“gold-framed photographs of showy young women” and Dr. Merkle herself is dressed

extravagantly in a “rich black dress, with gold chains and charms hanging from her

bosom” (117). The whole room gives off the air of a cabinet of curiosity. The stuffed

fox done up like a greeter resembles any one of Barnum’s humbugs while the over-

whelming number of pictures and chains and charms—not to mention the that Dr. Merkle

“get[s] so many things of that kind” (150)—suggests that Dr. Merkle is a collector of

some kind. Though she might not collect deformed specimens, she does collect and

showcase the girls she works on and the collateral they put up for their abortions.

Similarly, it would not be too far of a stretch to suggest that Dr. Merkle’s office is a kind

of medical sideshow, one like the “wax venus” shows of medical models of women used

14 Davis does discuss “female impersonators” and several gag cooch tent performances in

which audiences were duped into watching men perform; see ch. 5 in The Circus Age.

For a more in-depth discussion of semi-nude male performances see David Huxley’s

“Music Hall Art: La Milo, Nudity, and the Pose Plastique 1905-1915”

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ostensibly to explain medical procedures and educate audiences on the dangers of sex.

These shows combined science and pornography into one show, much the way Dr.

Merkle combines her medical practice with gilded displays of her patrons.

Even more obviously, there are numerous actual performances throughout

Summer. In an attempt to run away from the red house, Charity leaves North Dormer and

along the road comes across a gospel tent that she initially mistakes for a circus tent in

town for the Fourth of July. When the preacher asks Charity to repent and lay her sins

before God, she quickly derides him and says “[she] only wish’t [she] had any to lay”

(84). The exchange is brief but important. On a much larger scale is the North Dormer

Old Home Week,15 a big production featuring songs, dances, speeches, and a town dance.

Though Charity takes part in the production work and has a part on the stage, it is Lawyer

Royall who takes over most of the actual performance. His oration transfixes the crowd

in the stuffy town hall, and even when the set breaks apart and Charity faints from the

heat the crowd cannot help but remember Lawyer Royall’s speech. However, it is the

Nettleton Fourth of July that is the biggest and most spectacular performance of them all.

While the rest of the performances happen sporadically or are so diffused as to be almost

imperceptible, the Nettleton Fourth of July is one large scene of performance after

performance that congeals into one dizzying site similar to a fair midway. Though it

might be surprising to see a whole town done up like a fair midway, the idea of a leisure

15 For more on Home Weeks and historical pageants, see David Glassberg’s American

Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century

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park at the end of a short train ride was not something unheard of in the early twentieth

century. In plotting the history of the roller coaster, Dana Anderson discusses how “the

proliferation of attractions such as coasters and assorted carnival rides materialized from

the commercial exchange between trolley companies and the power syndicates which

provided their electricity” (4). Trolley companies seeking to make money on weekends

when they were still being charged for electricity would build parks at the end of their

trolley lines to attract people onto the trolleys: “Investors descended upon gardens, parks,

and other typical bucolic leisure locales and enlivened them with enough shows and rides

to pique the interest of the most sedentary families” (4). Again, there are several types of

performances throughout the Nettleton Fourth of July, some obviously performances and

some analogues to performances. As discussed earlier, there is the boat ride that Charity

and Harney take on the lake. There are also several food options just off the main street,

one of which is discussed as the house of mirrors previously. Charity and Harney see a

movie where “all the world has to show seemed to pass before” Charity (Wharton 72).

Upon leaving the movie, Charity and Harney climb into an electric run-about. The driver

offers to take them to the ballgame, which is happening on the outskirts of the town.

Charity and Harney stay in Nettleton for the fireworks show: “From every point of the

horizon, gold and silver arches sprang up and crossed each other [and] sky-orchards

broke into blossom, shed their flaming petals and hung their branches with golden fruit”

(76). Despite the dazzling fireworks display, Charity is even more excited to see that on

the lake is a boat done up as a set piece of “Washington crossing the Delaware” (76), an

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example proving that tableaux were not extinct. In between the fireworks, “the velvet

darkness settle[s] down” around the crowd (76). Charity and Harney are watching all of

this on a set of bleachers, Harney one seat above Charity with his knees around her. In

the darkness, Harney clasps Charity’s head with both his hands, draws it backwards, and

kisses her, revealing to Charity “an unknown Harney…[one] who dominated her and yet

over whom she felt herself possessed of a new mysterious power” (77). The fireworks

display can be read as a kind of dark ride, where riders are led through a cavernous tunnel

full of wonders or horrors. Besides the obvious entertainment, “a significant purpose…is

to provide a cover of darkness for activities on the part of its riders” since the darkness of

the ride “gives opportunity for an immediate change to behaviors which are socially

unacceptable in other [brighter] contexts” (Kwaitek 10, 127). Harney, sensing the liberty

of the darkness around him, takes his chance and kisses Charity. However, the dark ride

also narrativizes the experience it provides riders, often using either kitschy love

symbolism or supposedly horrific hell symbolism. Unfortunately for Charity, the

Nettleton dark ride uses hell symbolism in the form of a drunken Lawyer Royall.

As the couple tries to leave on a boat heading up the lake, they run into Julia

Hawes again, a scandalized woman from North Dormer who was rumored to have visited

Dr. Merkle and fallen into a life of ill repute. She ominously tells Charity that the Fourth

of July was “a family party” (Wharton 77). From behind Julia Hawes comes Lawyer

Royall, drunkenly trying to steady “himself on the hand-rail in a desperate effort at

erectness” (78). He moves a bit closer to Charity and Harney and, drawing “himself up

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in the tremulous majesty of drunkenness” (78), declares for all to hear that Charity a

“bare-headed whore” (78). And this is ultimately why the world of Summer is a circus

and not a carnival, because Lawyer Royall is everywhere exerting and declaring his

power. He is the ringleader, the P.T. Barnum to the world of Summer.16 Not only does

he show up at Nettleton in Charity’s happiest moment, he shows up throughout the novel

to direct the events even though he is rarely seen. Looking back towards the beginning of

the novel, Miss Hatchard has to consult the select-men of North Dormer when Charity

asks for another woman in the house or a job to earn enough money to leave (16).

Ultimately, Charity is gifted both a female maid and the job by Lawyer Royall, who

declares Charity the next librarian of the Honorius Hatchard Memorial Library. Later,

Lawyer Royall gifts Charity the money he makes from renting his buggy to Harney. It is

Lawyer Royall who resides over the Old Home Week. It is Lawyer Royall who shows up

at Nettleton. It is Lawyer Royall who shows up at the dilapidated old house the young

couple uses for their trysts. And ultimately it is Lawyer Royall who saves Charity. After

confirming her pregnancy, Charity writes the absent Harney and gives him permission to

marry his true sweetheart, Annabel Balch. Without anything to keep her in North

Dormer, Charity decides that she will have her baby in her ancestral home, on the

Mountain. On her trek up the mountain, Charity is caught in a storm and so must ride

with the town preacher up the Mountain. To her surprise the preacher is going up the

16 For a further discussion of the power that Lawyer Royall holds of Charity and North

Dormer, please see William E. Hummel’s “‘My Dull-Witted Enemy’: Symbolic Violence

and Abject Maleness.”

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Mountain to watch over Charity’s mother, who is on her death bed. Charity makes it just

in time to see her mother pass. Charity stays the night on the Mountain to wait out the

storm, but the conditions are so rough, and Charity has eaten so little that she can barely

even stand in the morning. In fact, she can barely even think. In her stupor, she is

rescued by Lawyer Royall, who was alerted by the preacher and travelled all night to

reach the Mountain. However, in her stupor, Charity is little more than a walking corpse,

little more than the real-life freak Julia Pastrana or the supposedly 161-year-old ex-slave

Joice Heth, still posing at the commands of her exhibitors even in death. Perhaps most

disturbingly, we are paralyzed in the face of Lawyer Royall’s actions. In these final

moments, the narrative is focused through Charity. The abundance of ellipses in the

stream of the narration suggests that it mirrors Charity’s thoughts. And so, we are,

narratively speaking, in close proximity to her. Instead of some grandiose, kaleidoscopic

circus entertainment, we are seated front and center to the exhibition of Charity’s death-

in-life performance, so close, in fact, that we can see Lawyer Royall directing, or rather

manipulating, Charity. The food that Lawyer Royall secures for them after coming back

down the Mountain helps her to “feel like a living being again” (141), except that “the

return to life was so painful that the food choked in her throat” (142). Charity’s

“consciousness [grows] more and more confused and immaterial, [becomes] more and

more like the universal shimmer that dissolves the world to failing eyes” (143).

However, she is still somewhat alive with the feeling that “if she ceased to keep close to

[Lawyer Royall], and do what [Lawyer Royall] told her to do, the worlds would slip

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away from beneath her feet” (146). In order to keep herself alive, Charity submits and

gives Lawyer Royall what he has been lusting after since the beginning of the novel: she

marries Lawyer Royall. The freak can never really escape the circus.

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Chapter 4

STRIKING THE SET:

CONLCUSIONS AND NOTES FOR FURTHER READINGS AND VIEWINGS

I would like to conclude by more deeply exploring the reading of The Blithedale

Romance and Summer I have just provided. I examined Blithedale for traces of tableaux

vivant within the narrative and Summer for traces of freakshow. My goal, in doing this

reading, is to argue that visual culture and literary culture evolved hand-in-hand on one

cultural timeline. In a way, I glanced backward, like Wharton, to explore this new,

unified timeline of entertainment culture. Where Wharton was concerned with

geography and genre, I was concerned with how each author was influenced by his and

her era’s visual and entertainment landscape. Wharton’s argument has its own logic and

narrative, tracing a genealogical line backwards from herself to Hawthorne, her generic

predecessor. I have done something similar, looking back at two points, i.e. the two

novels, to suggest that there is, indeed, a singular, unified timeline of American

entertainment culture, one that addresses both visual and literary culture together. As Jan

Alber argues, I have looked backwards and “made a narrative by the sheer act of

imposing a narrative on” the history of Hawthorne, Wharton, and American literary and

entertainment culture. Hayden White’s discussion of narrative and recorded history helps

to explain why, after providing my reading, I want to more deeply explore my reading of

the two novels, the two authors, and the two entertainments. According to White,

different kinds of historical records have different degrees of narrativity. The annal is

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simply a sequence of events that lists events by date without any comment on their

significance, and the chronicle begins to narrativize dates and events but is “usually

marked by a failure to achieve narrative closure” (9). A history, on the other hand,

provides a fully realized narrative account of events. And if a history is a story, and

If every fully realized story, however we define that familiar but conceptually

elusive entity, is a kind of allegory, points to a moral, or endows events, whether

real or imaginary, with a significance that they do not possess as a mere sequence,

then it seems possible to conclude that every historical narrative has as its latent

or manifest purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats. (White 17-

18)

The desire to moralize, for White, is the desire “to identify [events] with the social

system that is the source of any morality we can imagine,” or put differently,

narrativizing, as a moralizing act, glues together real events and social meaning (18). In

other words, to create a narrative out of disparate events is not simply a nonchalant

activity, but instead is a complex rhetorical act, one that is brought about by the desire for

significance and that alters our understanding of events, of “reality, not by direct

application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality

through the mediation of thought and action” (Bitzer 4). If historical narratives are

rhetorical, it follows that we should “examine [historical] narratives and other

communicative acts in the pragmatic context of the intent of their producers” (Nielson et

al 64). I have done this with Coverdale in Chapter One and have done this, to an extent,

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with Wharton’s autobiography in the Introduction. I propose to do this to myself, here, as

well.

I would like to think that this project has some affinity with Coverdale, making

much out of a seemingly trivial, small phrase. I have, after all, built this project from one

passage in Wharton’s autobiography. In doing so, I believe that I, like Coverdale, have

come to see both “the narrative potential of life” and that “events do not offer themselves

as stories” (Ryan 377, White 8). We, as “spectators” of events, have each “construct[ed]

a narrative structure as a way to rationalize” the events we have witnessed. However, I

like to think that I have been more forthcoming with my motives than Coverdale. My

goal was always to suture each novel to its respective moment in the history of visual

culture. In doing so, I have identified the novel (the event, as White would say) with a

social system, both the novel’s own social system (albeit strictly of entertainments) and

my own social system of New Historical literary criticism. My purpose—as I found

during the writing of large portions of this project—in doing this twice to novels sixty-

five years apart is to develop a valid and credible evolutionary narrative. Here, I would

like to also consider the reliability of the way of reading that I present in this novel. That

is to say, that I wonder what would happen if a similar reading to mine was conducted

with a novel and entertainment further down the timeline. I wonder if, and how, a recent

novel might reveal a similar relationship between literature and visual culture and how a

recent novel might further our understanding of the evolution of literary and visual

culture.

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I would like to dig further into this notion of evolution. Though I suggest that my

timeline is an evolutionary timeline, I would argue as well that it maps more than just the

evolution of Romantic literature and/or visual culture. Instead, it might be more accurate

to use the term “ecological” evolution, or a broad study of the interaction between

individual cultural objects and their human and physical environments. This notion of

“ecology,” even loosely applied as it is here, provides a deeper understanding of my

project. In terms of ecology, to view a novel in isolation would be to examine it as an

induvial. Wharton, in her glance backward to Hawthorne, was looking at her literary

work in relation to Hawthorne’s literary work as a population of similar individuals (i.e.

novels). To view an individual (the novel) in relation to a different kind of individual

(tableaux vivant) would be to study a community of interrelated types (of entertainment).

To then study those communities in relation to every other community and to every other

cultural artefact would be something like the project of New Historicism, seeking out the

extended web of connections between even the most mundane cultural artefacts. Indeed,

my project limits its discussion to a community of entertainments, but it also considers

the ways in which consumers consume and producers produce entertainment. To view

either novel or either performance in isolation would be to ignore the complex

relationships between entertainments that existed in those historical moments. To view

those relationships only in one moment would ignore the dynamism of entertainment. To

ignore the ways in which audiences viewed entertainments and the ways showbusiness

shaped entertainments ignores potential cultural and economic understandings of each

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era. For example, as mentioned in the Introduction, tableaux vivant existed as several

different performances at the same moment and even infiltrated literary and magazine

writing, and to ignore that would be to ignore the complex interrelated media landscape

of Hawthorne’s world. Further, to ignore the lineage of the freakshow, specifically its

roots in tableaux, would be to ignore the audience/performer dichotomy specific to the

freakshow and to several scenes in Summer. Ignoring showmen like P.T. Barnum, whose

work spanned the era between Hawthorne and Wharton, and his penchant for

manipulating each entertainment to lure in his patrons would be to ignore a significant

aspect of the history of entertainment.

Of course, the full extent of this complexity is incredibly difficult to record in one

definitive source. Too, this project does not intend to act as the definitive source for

recording the full extent of the complexity of ay era. This project only uses Blithedale

and Summer as evidence of that complexity. This is not to say that the novel is some

zenith of entertainment or some paragon of artistry. Instead, this is to say that the novel,

as a dialogic medium, can and does have the unique ability to carry multiple, often

contradictory elements in its narrative. In other words, the novel is a medium that can

represent multiple versions of tableaux vivant or freakshow within the text itself. The

novel is, then, a kind of archive in which to study Hawthorne’s and Wharton’s eras, one

that enables a reading like mine to happen at all. However, this project also considers

how communities of entertainments change over time. Again, the Introduction lays out

how tableaux evolved from parlor theatrics for bourgeois Europeans into the circus

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freakshow. Thankfully, Wharton explained the connection between herself and

Hawthorne. However, if this evolutionary stance is to be considered reliable, then one

should be able to extend both the visual cultural timeline and the literary cultural timeline

forward beyond the freakshow and Wharton respectively. Having done that, one should

also be able to take a novel from somewhere on that extended timeline and conduct the

same experiment I have: suturing together the visual and literary entertainment timelines

through a close reading of a novel. Indeed, both timelines do extend beyond the limits of

this project.

There is a through line from tableaux vivant to freakshows to cinema, one that

necessarily includes the circus. Thought the circus is maybe not “dialogic” in the same

sense as a novel, it did contain multitudes of entertainments under a common producer’s

name. Indeed, it is “well-documented by both film and circus historians that cinema

shared not only its subject matter but its first venues with fairgrounds and circuses, so the

audiences were often literally the same” (Stoddart 3). Vanessa Toulmin explores this

relationship between film and circus travelling shows in Britain, where “bioscope” or

“Theatrograph” operators first appeared in 1896 and played to provincial audiences and

music hall patrons alike (219). These early films had motifs that clearly point to their

genealogy. In their examination of the early films of Georges Méliès, Vito Adriaensens

and Steven Jacobs point to “films made shortly before and after 1900 [that] often make

explicit the contrast between the new medium of film and the traditional arts by means of

the motif of the statue or the painting coming to life” (41). In other words, early

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filmmakers had an affinity for tableaux vivant. By filming a perfectly still model, the

film maker could make it seem like the statue had come to life. Since this was before

major advances in editing, the trick shot could be easily completed without much special

direction. Helen Stoddart, on the other hand, explores the relation between circus and

cinema, in general and in America, noting that early films tended to favor circus

performances because they were so spectacular. Early circus films simply recorded the

circus act “for its own sake” (Stoddart 3). The clunky film technology often kept film

from fully embracing the “colorful, fast-moving, and spatially dynamic acts of the circus”

(Stoddart 6). However, Stoddart points to films made after 1913 that “began to move

away from pure exhibitionism to ‘narrativisation’ and thus…from attempts to show or

capture circus acts to telling stories about them” (6). Stoddart sees this move towards

narrativization as a move towards using editing techniques to mimic the movements of

circus performances, relying on editing to show the trick or tumble instead of simply

recording and displaying the act itself.

Daniel Weigand takes a slightly different approach, examining the cultural impact

of early cinema, specifically how cinema “reformers” and variety theatre “reformers”

shared similar ideologies and both fit into larger reform movements of the time.

According to Weigand, “like the cinema reformers, the variety reformers were concerned

with elevating forms of entertainment that originated among and addressed the lower

classes—such as circus shows—in order to lend them a semblance of art for middle-class

audiences” (15). In the above example, the traces of tableaux vivant’s early, moralistic

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practices can be found in early cinema, as cinema itself was viewed as a similar tool for

moral improvement. Looking much further beyond the eras covered in the project,

tableaux can still be seen in modern film. Judit Pieldner explores magical realism in

Hungarian and Romanian cinema and how that cinema uses tableaux vivant to create a

sense of the fantastical. Pieldner even begins her exploration in Hungarian prose works

of the 1990s. For Pieldner, the aesthetic of a tableau lends itself to the magic realist

mode, as both are concerned with “excess…saturation and density” of images and the

“dialogue between the ‘real’ and its artistic rendition” (99). With so much of the circus

and variety theatre still present in modern cinema, it is easy enough to say that these early

entertainment types have “spilled over into and, indeed, have been significantly extended

by the mechanized and technologically complex twentieth- and twenty-first-century

popular pleasures of cinema” (Stoddart 1). In other words, they have not vanished so

much as they have influenced and, in some cases, been subsumed by more modern,

technological entertainments.

However, the legacies of circus and tableaux are fairly innocuous. The

freakshow, on the other hand, has a more troubled legacy. There is, of course, the 1932

film Freaks directed by Tod Browning, director of 1931’s Dracula. Freaks was

controversial on its release because it cast real freakshow performers as its main

characters. Joan Hawkins quotes a 1932 audience member’s review of Freaks as a movie

“so loathsome I am nauseated thinking about it” (143). Indeed, the bodily grotesque and

horror of Freaks can still be found in many horror movies. The films of David

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Cronenberg and Guillermo Del Toro each revel in the same bodily horror and grotesque

of Freaks, their shock and horror coming from the display of their freakish monsters.

Mikita and David Brottman draw a more formal through line from freakshows to modern

entertainment. On the one hand, they see a very prominent role for freaks “in the

clandestine outlets of subculture, such as hard-core pornography” (106). Less

sensationally, they also see the freakshow present in “human interest documentaries”

about exceptional humans, in late-night talk shows that display tragic human interest

stories for the audience’s “perverse voyeurism in the guise of thoughtful and

understanding sensitivity” (95), and in the tabloids and punk culture of the 1990s.

Brottman and Brottman also make an interesting case for ethnographic freakshows

showing up in academic discussions of tribal peoples who “are isolated in the ‘zoos’ of

research papers” (94). Too, they point to sensational “mondo ‘documentaries,’” like

those found on supposedly educational television networks, “with their ‘realistic’

depictions of bizarre human behavior and strange cultural practices” (94). The many

iterations of the freakshow are still present though they have “been (unhealthily)

repressed, or else channeled into popular cultural outlets” (106). Like tableaux, the

freakshow is still very much with us today.

Too the literary timeline can be extended beyond Wharton herself. Susan

Goodman argues that “Wharton wanted to be remembered in two traditions: one of

mostly male English and European prose masters, the other of fascinating women” (16).

However, that tradition, in genre at least, includes the likes of the fascinating American

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prose master F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, like Wharton, wrote from the notion that “the most

significant kind of reality is to be found in the observed manners of the immediate social

group” (Way vii-viii). For Brian Way, the “subtle artistry” of Wharton’s and Fitzgerald’s

fictions, the way both fictions examine “the point where a character’s inner life and

[their] social life blend together,” suggest that Fitzgerald should be viewed in the shadow

of Wharton. Way even mentions the actual moment that Fitzgerald stood in Wharton’s

shadow, sending copies of The Great Gatsby to Wharton for her to review and the

subsequent meeting over tea. If one takes Wharton’s other initial criteria from her

autobiography, namely geography, then Goodman’s discussion of the expatriate artist

community in France is instructive. Goodman’s understanding is that “Wharton may

have come [to France] more as a supplicant to the French aristocrats and academicians on

the Right Bank and [Gertrude] Stein as a pasha to the American artists and collectors on

the Left” (118). It was “the salon [that] gave them both a stage” from which to minister

to their artistic circles (118). Wharton shared her expatriate experience with many

American artists of the time and should be seen in light of that movement. The line from

Hawthorne, however, is similarly laid out. Samuel Coale, in his book-length work In

Hawthorne’s Shadow, sees Hawthorne as the prime example of American Romance

fiction. Coale argues that Hawthorne “the romancer,” in his attempt “to lure the reader

into his dark art,” “must create a spell” with his fiction (9). Coale sees the same

“spellbinding” qualities in “[William] Faulkner’s winding sentences, [John] Cheever’s

dark corners, [Joyce Carol] Oates’s breathless prose, and [Joan] Didion’s chantlike style

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of incantation” (9). Coale also argues that the “Manichean vision” of Hawthorne’s work

was perhaps most prevalently replicated in the fiction of the 1960s. More interestingly,

Coale sees Hawthorne’s works as diametrically opposed to “novels of character” by

authors like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike, and Paul Theroux. Instead, novelists

who “write fables of vision in which characters are subordinated to the author’s more

public visions of society in general, of a world in arbitrary flux, a wasteland, a realm of

ultimate conspiracy” more closely resemble Hawthorne’s work. These modern

romanticists, according to Coale, include Thomas Pynchon, John Hawkes, and E.L.

Doctorow. Emily Miller Budick, in her study of female Romance authors Engendering

Romance, similarly sees Hawthorne’s legacy carried on by female authors, specifically

citing Wharton but also Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Toni Morrison.

Again, if this project is reliable, one should be able to take a novel and a popular

visual entertainment from the above timelines and see evidence of that visual

entertainment within the novel. It is important to stress that this action, connecting a

novel to a visual entertainment, connects an event with a social system. Perhaps this

project is connecting “novel reading” in a general sense with a specific sense of media

communities and New Historical criticism of this current moment. This current moment

includes media phenomena like “extended universes,” right- and left-wing media spheres,

and even fully immersive or interactive media. It would seem that the “extended

universe” model, where a story unfolds over movies, tv shows, comics, novels, web

shorts, and so on, would be (deliberately and knowingly) made for a wide-ranging

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analysis of the kind practiced by New Historicists. However, I would caution that an

examination of deliberately multimedia storylines is actually incompatible with this

project. Instead, a more compatible reading would be to examine how multimedia

“universes” have shaped fictional narratives and narrativity. I would also caution that

there are certain elements of my current moment that this project only touches on for the

sake of space. As Brodhead argues, Hawthorne and Coverdale represent a new form of

audience, one that sits quietly and observes. The nature of the audience shifts slightly in

Chapter Two with my analysis of the freakshow to an audience who deduces. Extending

this project to include recent history might be better served by exploring in more detail

what the audience is constructed to be (or instructed to do) by current entertainments.

However, Brodhead’s work also suggests that, if there was a new way for an audience to

gaze upon entertainment, then there must be some new understanding of gazing itself.

Performance thus became a phenomenon not simply isolated on a stage but rather one

suffused into the culture. In examining a recent novel, considerations of recent cultural

understandings and usages of “performance” might prove fruitful.

This brings to light another potential outcome of this project, this time concerning

the theoretical approach. Performance studies and studies of performativity attend to

issues of gaze, culture, and objects of the gaze. However, the trend in the performance

studies literature seems to be for performance studies to ignore any agent who controls

the performance and thus controls how that performance is viewed and interpreted. In

other words, performance studies seems to ignore the director. As far as this project is

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concerned, performance in Blithedale and Summer suggests that the entirety of the

performance should be considered because the performance is directed by someone.

Coverdale directs the “creatures of his brain” in tableaux, and Lawyer Royall is revealed

to be directing the action of North Dormer. Too, in Summer an unnamed narrator

infiltrates the narrative to direct the audience’s understanding of the events and

characters. These directors are not apolitical. They have motives and agendas and they

have the power to enact those motives. Despite Tracy C. Davis’s admonition, this project

suggests that the performative metaphor should be extended beyond its current

boundaries to include the whole machine of performance including the director. This

project makes a similar, though less passionate, case for including physical space into the

performative metaphor as well. Performance studies already attends to space but only

when that space is the performance. As David Turnbull argues, people perform space as

they move through and interact with space. The tableaux and the freakshow, and their

descendants in film too, each deliberately use the physical attributes of their exhibition

space to heighten their performance. From competing tableaux and freakshow exhibits

on the same city block to special lighting techniques and stagecraft in the performance

halls, each performance uses physical space for the performance itself. This project also

implies a question of degree of performativity. Indeed, Blithedale is far and away more

obviously influenced by performance than Summer. The amount of critical literature on

Blithedale’s infatuation with performance—and the lack of the same for Summer—

supports this premise. It would seem, then, that Blithedale could be considered more

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performative than Summer, or at least it more readily lends itself to a performance studies

reading. Marie-Laure Ryan suggests that novels can be categorized by their degree and

kind of narrativity. Perhaps novels—anywhere on the unified timeline of American

entertainment culture—can also be categorized by their degree and kind of performativity

as well. Finally, this project brings into consideration what happens if reading is

understood as gazing. Alber argues that audiences make sense of live performances by

narrativizing them. This project flips that, asking instead what happens with readers

make sense of a novel by watching it like a performance.

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