| While Nathaniel Hawthorne's uses of history have been well-documented, and his politics have been ably explored more recently, fewer critics have investigated the ways in which a discussion of place is closely intertwined with his concerns with history and politics. Hawthorne consistently writes about both his own relations to those places where he dwells and characters' relations to spaces within his fictional works, but he finds the connection to place as something to be resisted rather than embraced. Insofar as a relation to place can be an inheritance, a "rootedness" given as a condition for life, what appears to be a "natural" relation can counterintuitively become a means of displacement, of predetermining one's relation outside of any agency to act. Therefore, Hawthorne hopes to denaturalize this relation in order to fight against ossified identities and to allow and cultivate political agency. Using the framework of Hannah Arendt's concept of the "space of appearance" as the ground for any meaningful political activity, this project reads several of Hawthorne's works, including the canonical "The Old Manse," "The Custom-House," and The House of the Seven Gables and the less-discussed Whole History of Grandfather's Chair and "Septimius" manuscripts, to follow the ways in which Hawthorne promotes an idea of mobility and the freedom of movement as a means both to denaturalize such inherited relations to place and to modify notions of community and belonging. This is both a thematic concern within Hawthorne's writing and an element of the very form of his Romance, which he defines in "The Custom-House" as a space where the "familiar" can "become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet" (I: 36). This allows us not only to reconstruct the frame in which we approach the debates regarding Hawthorne's politics, including his presentations of race and gender, but also to reconsider the role of place as a category of political theory. |
