New England's Buried Life: The Transcendental

Spirit in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables

Masahiko Narita

"But, in old houses like this, you know, dead people are apt to

come back again!" - The House of the Seven Gables-

"But often, in the world's most crowded streets, /But often, in the

din of strife, /There rises an unspeakable desire/After the

knowledge of our buried life; /…/A longing to inquire/Into the

mystery of the heart which beats/So wild, so deep in us…"

-Matthew Arnold, "The Buried Life"-

"Neither Emerson nor any of the others was a real observer of the

moral life," T.S. Eliot once said discussing 19th-century American literature; "Hawthorne was, and was a realist."1) To our ears which are

used to hearing that Hawthorne is a romance writer whose literary

sphere is not in daylight reality but in what he calls the neutral territory where the Actual and the Imaginary meet, this comment sounds

strange. We would rather agree with Henry James, who says, "It

cannot be too often repeated that Hawthorne was not a realist"2) than with Eliot. However, reading The House of the Seven Gables (1851),

we strongly feel that there is a certain kind of rich and complicated

reality elaborately depicted in this work. Set in his contemporary 19th-Century New England, this romance is often regarded as one of the

most "realistic" works of Hawthorne with its many direct references to

the money-oriented society, the rise of democracy, and representative human types of the age. Yet Hawthorne is a realist here in a much

deeper sense of the word, for one of his major objectives is to delineate

the psychological or spiritual reality of the New England psyche, or, to use Allen Tate's terms, to write "the drama of the Puritan soul."3) In

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this romance, through telling the story of the old Pyncheon family, Hawthorne shows the deeper stratum and structure of the New

England Puritan mind, its historical origin and development, and its

spiritual reality in his contemporary New England. With the decline of Puritanism, the 19th-century New England is

characterized by new spirits, ideas, social movements, and reforms,

among which Transcendentalism occupies a distinguished and represen-tative position. Although unlike The Blithedale Romance (1852), The

House of the Seven Gables does not directly discuss the philosophical movement on the surface, Hawthorne subtly but with a deep insight

describes its origin in the context of the New England psyche. As is

often the case with him, he also argues the essence of the Transcenden-tal spirit in a less discernable way here. "When romances do really

teach anything…," he says in the preface, "it is usually through a far

more subtile process than the ostensible one."4) When Eliot calls him "a real observer of the moral life" and "a realist ," he refers to Hawthorne's exquisite depiction of the moral truth done in this

shadowy niche in his work. "The work of Hawthorne is truly a criticism," Eliot argues, "of the Puritan morality, of the Transcendental

morality, and of the world which Hawthorne knew" and "It is a

criticism as Henry James's work is a criticism of the America of his times, and as the work of Turgenev and Flaubert is a criticism of the

Russia and the France of theirs."5) The aim of this essay is to see how

valid this comment of Eliot is, focusing on how Hawthorne views the Transcendental spirit in terms of the New England's cultural and

historical context in The House of the Seven Gables. Transcen-

dentalism is often referred to as an antithesis to Puritanism, a social

and philosophical movement deeply influenced by English Romanticism, German idealism, and Oriental mysticism, but we will see that more

than anything else, Transcendentalism is a product of his native soil

and a revival of New England's buried life to Hawthorne.

I

Talking about the historical origin of the Pyncheon house, Hawthorne symbolically sketches the fundamental psychological

structure of the New England mind at the beginning of this romance.

So much of mankind's varied experience has passed through this house

which is "itself like a great human heart, with a life of its own," (27) he

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says, that if one tries to form a narrative about it, the story would "fill

a bigger folio volume… than could prudently be appropriated to the

annals of all New England." (6) Thus Hawthorne implicitly connects the history of the Pyncheon house with that of New England. This "great human heart" is also the one which ceaselessly keeps beating

beneath the New England soil.6) The house of the seven gables was originally erected on the land of which the first Pyncheon had deprived

Matthew Maule, a plebeian, with his political power. In the 17th century, Matthew Maule first cleared a tract of land in order to build

his humble house on in a New England wilderness. Yet thinking of the

tract as an ideal land for his mansion for some reason, Colonel Pyncheon plundered Maule of the right to the land by putting him under

a false charge that he was a wizard. As a result, Maule was executed

as a wizard cursing at Colonel Pyncheon, "God will give him blood to drink!" (8) Introducing the Pyncheon-and-Maule feud in this way,

Hawthorne adds that this wizard's curse was handed down from

generation to generation casting an uncanny shadow on the Pyncheons. Critics have interpreted the meanings of this oppression of Maule by

the first Pyncheon variously but usually within a socio-economic context, and with good reason. Since this is a case of an aristocrat's

exploitation of a plebeian, we can see "the social sinfulness of

aristocracy" here as Lawrence Hall points out.7) Or, taking into consideration that the later materialistic New England society is to

grow out of this greediness and cruelty of Colonel Pyncheon, we may find, together with Harry Levin, the seed of the capitalism as the

original sin in this power structure.8) These interpretations are

certainly valid, for it is undoubtedly one of Hawthorne's major

purposes in this romance to openly criticize the materialistic greediness and the aristocratic pride in his times. In 1848, Hawthorne intensively

read the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We would not be surprised

if Hawthorne said that Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

(1755), for instance, influenced the fictional creation of the Pyncheon-Maule feud. "The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land,

thought of saying 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society," Rousseau says in this

book; "How many crimes, wars, murders… the human race would have

spared if someone… cried out to his fellow men: 'Beware of listening to

this impostor。'"9) We can find a foreshadowing of Colonel Pyncheon in

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this "first man." Yet since Maule is a mere plebeian too powerless to

cry out, "Beware of listening to this impostor," he cannot be that someone who may spare crimes and murders following the first

Pyncheon's sin in The House of the Seven Gables. However, the more important thing about this paradigm of

oppression is that Hawthorne implies here that there is a coercive

repression done at the deep stratum of the New England Puritan mind. Colonel Pyncheon and Maule are not so much representatives of the

socio-economic governing and the governed class as the two insepa-

rable aspects of one culture's psyche. Colonel Pyncheon is described with the images of powerful masculinity, iron will, greediness, and

unmercifulnes; he is such an "iron-hearted Puritan" and "relentless

persecutor" that he can cruelly destroy the weak without any compunc-tion to achieve his ends. Besides, these characters are handed down

from generation to generation as if they were imperishable on earth and "each inheritor of the property

… commit [s] anew the great guilt of his

ancestor." (20) That is, these traits have been a continuous dominating

force throughout the several generations of the Pyncheons, ceaselessly repressing Maule's unpeaceful soul beneath its homestead. On the

other hand, interestingly, Matthew Maule is not only a mere plebeian

but referred to in conjunction with the images of Nature, mystery, a heretic, and the unconscious. Hawthorne says that the Maules "were

half-believed to inherit mysterious attributes; the family eye was said

to possess strange power." "Among other good-for-nothing prop-

erties and privileges, "he continues," one was especially assigned to them, of exercising an influence over people's dreams." (26) In contrast

to the Pyncheons, who represent a daily-life worldly principle or the conscious, the Maules govern the world of dreams or the realm of the

human unconscious. However haughtily the Pyncheons bear them-

selves in the noonday streets, Hawthorne adds, they "are no better than

bond-servants to these plebeian Maules, on entering the topsyturvy common-wealth of sleep." (26) Thus, we can clearly see that the

relationship between the Pyncheons and the Maules is extremely

similar to that between the conscious and the unconscious of the human soul.

It is no wonder that, as Hawthorne says, the Maules know the most

interior life of the Pyncheon family as well as a large dim looking-glass hanging in the house and reflecting every incident there, and that in a

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later generation one Maule spiritually enslaves Alice Pyncheon, a proud

and delicate aristocratic lady, through his mesmerism, for psychologi-cally considered, the Maules are nothing but the repressed unconscious

of the Pyncheon family. So the history of the Pyncheons is the history

of the powerful repression of the subterranean drives the Maules represent. Interestingly, Hawthorne also repeatedly refers to close tie

between the Maules and Nature. Originally, Matthew Maule hewed a

tract of land, of which the Colonel Pyncheon was later to deprive him

using his political authority, out of the primeval forest "with his own toil." (7) According to the law of Nature, Maule's occupation of the land is far more justifiable than that of the first Pyncheon, for it is the

product of his honest physical labor. Hawthorne mentions that as soon as Colonel Pyncheon began to build his mansion on this land, the water of Maule's Well, a natural spring of soft and pleasant water, had

suddenly grown hard and brackish. This is a special fountain "which

Nature might fairly claim as her inalienable property, in spite of whatever man could do to render it his own." (88) Apparently, this is

a symbolic incident to indicate that Colonel Pyncheon's greedy iron-

heart trampled on not only Matthew Maule but the life of Nature. Here, Hawthorne implies that at its radical base the New England

Puritan mind has repressed Nature's life as well as the unconscious

drives with extraordinary sternness. Furthermore, the New England psyche incarnated in the old

Pyncheon house experiences another repression in a later generation. The next violence inflicted on the soul is metaphorically described in

Jaffrey Pyncheon's persecution of his cousin Clifford Pyncheon. About thirty years before this story begins, one Pyncheon was murdered, and certain circumstances attending the crime brought the deed irresistibly

home to a nephew of the deceased Pyncheon, Clifford. As a result of

that, Clifford has been imprisoned since that time. In fact, however, we are told in the course of the story that Clifford's imprisonment was

unjustly caused by Jaffrey's fabrication of evidences of his crime

because Clifford was actually perfectly innocent. That is, it is Jaffrey, later Judge Pyncheon, who has buried Clifford's youth in a dark prison

for thirty years. Exactly like his ancestor Colonel Pyncheon, Judge

Pyncheon is greediness itself with an iron heart. He is brutally

masculine, politically powerful, and feels no hesitation at all in trampling on the weak if it is essential to his ends though he looks like

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a "model… of high order of respectability" (56) on his appearance.

Again like his ancestor, the Judge is also an oppressor of females and

has sent his wife to a burial ground as a result of abusing her like a

slave. Meanwhile, Clifford is a child-like man extremely sensitive, almost

feminine, imaginative, and always seeking art and the beautiful. In

him, Hawthorne says, there were his mother's feminine traits vividly alive when he was young. So, thinking of the injustice of his imprison-

ment, Hepzibah, his old sister, says to herself, "they persecuted his

mother in him!" (60) This is an interesting comment because it implies that Jaffrey Pyncheon's persecution of Clifford is symbolically an action

of brutal masculinity having trampled on femininity. Actually, however, this persecution is a symbolic action of the psychological

repression not only of femininity but of all the traits Clifford represents

-ssensitivity, imagination, and the love for art and the beautiful. As the second step following the original repression of the unconscious

drives and Nature, Hawthorne hints, the New England mind has also

expelled these spiritual features. As far as we can see in Hawthorne's exploration of the New

England soul, we can tell that he considers that materialistic greediness has had a great influence in forming the New England spirit, repressing

Nature, the mysterious unconscious drives, imagination, spirituality, feminine principles, and the artistic aspiration for the beautiful.

Probably, it is dangerous to say that this picture of the New England

mind is perfectly real. However, living in the 19th-century America, Hawthorne could not but regard his money-oriented contemporary

society as a faithful development of the Pyncheonesque original sin of

greediness. In his short story, "The Sister Years," a dialogue among

years personified as sisters, 1838 says, "the moral influence of wealth,and the sway of an aristocratic class… from an era far beyond my

memory, has held firmer dominion [in Salem] than in other New England town."10) Certainly, Hawthorne felt sick of the "moral influence of wealth" in his native town; we can see these characteristics incarnated in the Pyncheon family.

Though Hawthorne's sketch of the New England mind thus strongly reflects his personal antipathy towards money-oriented Salem, it also reveals some essential features of the mind rather objectively. In his essay, "From Edwards to Emerson," Perry Miller argues, "The New

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England tradition contained a dual heritage, the heritage of the troubled

spirit and the heritage of worldly caution and social conservatism."11) By "the troubled spirit," he means a mystical or pantheistic tendency of

Puritanism as seen in Emerson, while the other heritage refers to an

ideal of social conformity or worldly success. Here, Miller points out that "Transcendental" mysticism and American secular and materialis-

tic concerns are not unrelated to each other but the two sides of the

same coin-Puritanism. Somewhat, his argument reminds us of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5),

which discusses the close tie between the Puritans' strict morality and

their economic success. In any event, Miller's view is similar, if not the same, to Hawthorne's picture of the New England psyche in which

there is a big discrepancy between the Pyncheon's concern for worldly

success and the Maules' mystic traits or Clifford's artistic and imagina-tive character. Also in Hawthorne's view, the New England mind has

a dual heritage: beneath the worldly, materialistic, and masculine Pyncheon heritage, there are the buried lives of the mysterious or

uncanny Maules and shadow-like Clifford Pyncheon.

II

"What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us ," Emerson says, "is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842."12) For him, New England Transcendentalism is not an idea deeply rooted exclusively in

his native soil; it is a philosophical turn of the mind universally

observed throughout the human history. "This way of thinking," he continues, "falling on Roman times, made Stoic philosophers; falling on

despotic times, made Catoes and Brutuses;… on prelatical times, made

Puritans and Quakers; and falling on Unitarian and commercial times,

makes the peculiar shades of Idealism which we know."13) To some

extent, Emerson's definition of this philosophical movement is correct. We know that Transcendentalism has much in common with neo-

Platonism and it is even compared to Gnosticism or Orphism by Harold

Bloom.14) However, we need to note that as a central Transcen-dentalist himself, Emerson's definition is itself transcendental. Just as

he likes to regard each individual as the Universal Soul's property,15) so

he naturally prefers to consider New England Transcendentalism as a derivative of universal "Idealism." Yet, in The House of the Seven

Gables, although he agrees with Emerson in that New England

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Transcendentalism has appeared in "Unitarian and commercial times,"

Hawthorne firmly believes that it has erupted out of his native soil as

a revival of New England's buried life. He portrays the Transcenden-tal spirit through two eccentric characters, Holgrave and Clifford.

Hating the burden of the past and absorbed in radical ideas, Holgrave is a representative Emersonian young American of the 19th

century. Together with his strange companions of reformers, temper-

ance-lecturers, or philanthropists, this young man has engaged in various kinds of jobs and even participated in a community of

Fourierists like Hawthorne. With his youthful ambition, Holgrave

wants to "enjoy an original relation to the universe,"16) but this world is, he thinks, too deeply imbued with the influence of the foregoing

generations:

"Shall we never, never get rid of the past!… It lies upon the

present like a giant's dead body! In fact, the case is just as if a

young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long

while ago, and only needs to be decently buried. Just think, a

moment; and it will startle you to see what slaves you are to by-

gone times-to Death, if we give the matter the right word!" (182 -83)

To Holgrave's eyes, the shadow of the past looks hanging on the

world so weightily that he cannot touch reality with his own hands. "We laugh at Dead Men's jokes

, and cry out at Dead Men's pathos," he continues, "We worship the living Deity, according to Dead Men's

forms and creeds!" (183) Yet he has a youthful ambition to create the

world anew and thinks that "the moss-grown and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of the way, and their

dead corpses buried, and everything to begin anew." (179) Emerson

once called himself "an endless seeker with no Past at my back."17) It is not inappropriate at all to call Holgrave in the same way. Further,

Holgrave's appeal also reminds us of Emerson's or Theodore Parker's

claim to save "the living Deity" from the hands of lifeless institutions in their "The Divinity School Address" and "A Discourse of the

Transient and Permanent in Christianity." We can distinctly hear an

echo of Transcendentalism in Holgrave's radicalism.

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On the other hand, Clifford is an old figure who has nothing to do with Holgrave's youthful energy and optimism. Having just returned

to his sister Hepzibah in the old Pyncheon house after thirty-year imprisonment, he is somewhat mentally disordered , apt to be depressed and afraid of the gloomy pressure of this dark mansion and the

presence of his greedy, powerful, relentless, and iron-hearted cousin Judge Pyncheon. On the surface, this extremely sensitive, almost feminine, and imaginative battered man is the last person that can be

called a Transcendentalist. Yet the sudden death of the Judge, who has attempted to trample on Clifford's soul once again for the

restoration of the old deed to the vast Pyncheon territory in Maine, magically and instantly transforms Clifford into a transcendental

philosopher. Filled with mysterious ecstatic joy and excitation, he flees with Hepzibah from the dark time-honored Pyncheon house, wherein the corpse of Judge Pyncheon is still sitting in a chair. It

looks as if the flight of these "two owls" were the one from time or

history itself. Although he is actually an old man, while he is on the run holding his sister's hand in the stormy wind and rain, Clifford is an

Adam, who knows no burden of the past. To a passenger whom he has happened to meet on a train, Clifford

begins to talk about the idea of man's progress. "You are aware, my

dear Sir," he says, "that all human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve." (263)

According to him, "The world is growing too ethereal and spiritual" and "the harbingers of a better era are unmistakable." (263) We can

never imagine that that mentally battered old man in the house of the

seven gables could be so filled with life and enthusiasm as to be thus optimistic. Conversely, however, this indicates how much the dark

and gloomy house and the iron-hearted Judge have been psychologi-

cally oppressing him. He is now experiencing an ecstatic joy of life totally released from any restriction such as history or society.

Clifford goes on to say that what is called house or home that fastens

our lives on a certain spot for a long time is "the greatest possible stumble-blocks in the path of human happiness and improvement."

(261) By living in a "house," we are transformed into social and historical beings, for our home is the very entrance to human society and history. Yet Clifford implies here that human happiness lies in "transcending" these social and historical "stumble -blocks ." Although

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his view of man's progress is rather abstract, we can see in it the idea

quite similar to Emersonian "spiral" progress, the transcendental impulse to go beyond society and history into mystic ecstacy, and its ideal of freedom. Thus, implicitly, Hawthorne caricatures some ideas shared by the Transcendentalists through Clifford as well as Holgrave.

At this point, we need to note one significant fact: both of these transcendental spirits are the characters who have been long repressed under the Pyncheon patriarchs' powerful sway. As mentioned already, Clifford has been unjustly imprisoned for thirty years due to Jaffrey Pyncheon's evil plot. Meanwhile, Holgrave is the last descendent of the Maules, whose life was literally buried under the Pyncheon homestead. That is to say, both Clifford's and Holgrave's "transcen-dental" views are the expression or eruption of their long-buried lives. Like his ancestors who could exercise "an influence over people's dreams," Holgrave also has a mysterious power of controlling other

people by mesmerism. This means that he also has the secret key to the human unconscious. Besides, he has a close tie with Nature. As a daguerreotypist, he is familiar with the enigmatic power of sunshine, Nature's richest source of light, which can detect, he believes, man's innermost secret. He is also a care-taker of the Pyncheon garden wherein "Nature, elsewhere overwhelmed and driven out of the dusty town, had here been able to retain a breathing-place." (87) Nature and the unconscious drives, which have been long repressed, have revived themselves in Holgrave and erupted in his transcendental radicalism.

The same thing can be said of Clifford, too. With the death of the

Judge, the brutal greedy conscious which threw him into a dark dungeon, Clifford's lost youth, "the mother" in him, powerful imagina-tion, and "love and necessity for the Beautiful" have all at once been liberated and formed themselves into his transcendental statement about human progress. In this respect, we cannot emphasize the significance of the Judge's death too much. As Frederick C. Crews argues, his death is "the central event of the plot, enabling one couple to have a euphoric escape and another couple [Holgrave and Phoebe] to marry and become rich."18) However, the Judge's death has much more importance than as the biggest turning-point of the plot. It is not only one villain's death but that of the Father figure as the guardian of one rigid value system, which nurtures materialistic greediness, capitalism, and despotic male dominance. Jacques Lacan would call

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this the collapse of the-Name-of-the-Father or the symbolic order.

No wonder "child-like" Clifford experiences the feeling of perfect

liberation almost to the point of ecstacy. As in the case of Holgrave,

Clifford's liberation represents an eruption of long-repressed undercur-

rent of the New England psyche. In this romance , Hawthorne thus implies that the transcendental spirit is the revival of New England's

buried life.

III

As a writer, Hawthorne considered himself "to occupy an unfortu-

nate position between the Transcendentalists… and the great body of

pen-and-ink men who address the intellect and sympathies of the multitude," for he was "too remote, too shadowy, and unsubstantial in his modes of development to suit the taste of the latter class, yet too

popular to satisfy the spiritual and metaphysical requisitions of the former."19) Though written in a comical way, this comment well

illustrates his relationship with Transcendentalism. Attracted as he

was by its optimistic idealism, Hawthorne considered that it was too "shadowy and unsubstantial" to have any concrete impact on reality . In The House of the Seven Gables, depicting the transcendental spirit as

an eruption of New England's buried life, he favorably reacts to it. It

is his own ideal as an American artist to restore the repressed heart to new life, attune man's life to the rhythm of Nature, and give lively

expression to imagination as transcendental Holgrave and Clifford

declare, breaking down the oppressive dominance of the iron-hearted Pyncheon heritage. However, Hawthorne never believes that his

contemporary world-materialistic, capitalistic, and male-dominated New England-can so easily be recreated into a Paradise system by

Transcendentalism. The transcendental spirit of Clifford and Hol-

grave is doomed to be crushed by the gigantic vulgar power of reality. Hawthorne exquisitely implies this fate in his depiction of the ending of

Clifford and Hepzibah's flight.

The transcendental spirit and ecstatic exultation suddenly depart from Clifford when he and Hepzibah get off the train at a solitary way-

station at the terminus of their flight. Left all alone in this dreary

country-side, these two old wanderers apprehensively gaze around them and find two dilapidated structures in the distance. "At a little

distance," Hawthorne explains, "stood a wooden church, black with

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age, and in a dismal state of ruin and decay, with broken windows, a

great rift through the main-body of edifice, and a rafter dangling from the top of the square tower." In addition to this, "Farther off," he

continues, "was a farm-house in the old style, as venerably black as the

church, with a roof sloping downward from the three-story peak to within a man's height of the ground." (266) Clifford shivers from head

to foot and completely loses his former wild effervescence of the mood at the sight of them. This description is based on the same two ruined

buildings as Hawthorne himself saw near the train station at New

Castle as he wrote in The American Notebooks.20) Yet, of course, this description is significant not so much for its "realistic" detail as for its

symbolic meaning. We may simply explain Clifford's shock by the fact

that these two deserted buildings have reminded him of the old Pyncheon house whose gloomy influence he has escaped from. But it

is also possible to think that Hawthorne symbolically depicts the

collapse of a traditional American value system in these images. The

church suggests the American religious heritage, especially Puritanism, while the farm-house can be associated with the traditional agrarian

ideal, or to put it more specifically, a Crevecoeurian or Jacksonian "American farmer ." What has more struck these "two owls," how-

ever, is undoubtedly this deserted house of God.

In this church "in a dismal state of ruin and decay," Clifford and

Hepzibah have probably seen the moral waste land of the 19th-century New England concretely revealed. With the decline of Puritanism,

this age witnessed that its religious strictness, narrow-mindedness, and

gloomy world view had been replaced by the praise of secular values, man's reliance on his reason, and the capitalistic worship of money.

Just as a company of little figures in the mahogany case of an Italian organ-grinder dance to one music in the chapter "The Arched Window," so people in this time also danced to one music called

capitalism. In spite of the pompous surface, however, the breakdown

of Calvinism also meant the loss of a stable moral system. Haw-thorne's "contemporaries constantly felt a moral uneasiness," Philip

Gura argues, "brought on by their living in an age in which the

possibility of religious faith seemed to be ever decreasing."21) Although Puritanism required strict moral life of people, it also created

peace and harmony in man's psyche, for the Puritan theocracy had

given, as Allen Tate says, "final, definite meaning to life, the life of

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pious and impious, of learned and vulgar alike" and "an heroic

proportion and a tragic mode to the experience of the individual."22) In other words, the Puritan moral system had enabled people to experi-

ence spiritually deeper and more fulfilling lives. Yet, now, New England had almost lost it. "Oh, God-Our Father- ," Hepzibah ejaculated facing this ruined church, "are we not thy children? Have

mercy on us!" (267) Here we can hear a helpless cry of the lost American Fatherless child of this age.

However dazzling the transcendental world view might seem,

Hawthorne could not consider that it could instantly provide a solid moral system which might fill the vacuum of the 19th-century New

England psyche. Instead of transcending his morally-suffering con-temporary world, he chose to return there to directly face the situation . This is why the transcendental enthusiasm of Holgrave and Clifford is

only temporal. In spite of his previous hatred of the past's influence, Holgrave suddenly and a little unnaturally submits to conventional

ideas through his love of Phoebe. "I have a presentiment, that,hereafter, it will be my lot to set out trees, tomake fences,… perhaps,

even, in due time, to build a house for another generation," he says, "in

a word, to conform myself to laws, and the peaceful practice of

society." (307) Since Phoebe's love has taught him that "permanence" is "essential to the happiness of any moment

," (315) this previous lawless radical decides to strike a deep root in man's society and history

together with Phoebe. Meanwhile, after thunder-struck by the deserted church, Clifford returns to the old Pyncheon house led by

Hepzibah. Awakening from his "transcendental" dream, he also has no place to go except sober reality. As already discussed, Hawthorne

actually shares with the Transcendentalists such ideals as the regenera-

tion of the repressed heart, man's close tie with Nature, or the emphasis on imagination rather than reason. However, New England's buried

life can be revitalized, he believes, only gradually through man's daily

life or, more specifically, through the compassion and love among human beings and the human time itself.

As the symbolic matrix of the mysterious communion between the

human hearts, Hawthorne finds the possibility of regenerating New England's buried life in the marriage of Holgrave and Phoebe.

Interestingly, this is the ultimate union of the Pyncheons and the

Maules. It cannot be emphasized too much that Phoebe is the last

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descendent of the Pyncheon family. Although Hawthorne has emphas-ized the greediness, brutal masculinity, and iron-heart of the Pyncheons

throughout this romance, we should not forget that there also flows a

holy undercurrent of love, which Phoebe as "a Religion in herself" (168) represents, in this old New England Puritan family. That is to say,

Christian love is also a Pyncheon or Puritan heritage. In the marriage

of Holgrave and Phoebe, Hawthorne implies that the Maule's buried life will be gradually revived together with that of Clifford through

Phoebe's heart. Unlike the Transcendentalists' "shadowy and unsub-

stantial" world view, this romance writer always stresses the significance of the solid foundation in reality. Man cannot live away

from human society and history. So, it is to him mere illusion to instantly regenerate New England's buried life-the repressed human

heart, man's harmony with Nature, the powerful unconscious drives,

and the life of imagination-by "transcending" time and space. However, when man goes deeper into concrete reality, Hawthorne

hints, he will paradoxically find a mysterious liberating power in the

human heart as Holgrave has found in Phoebe. In the same manner, Hawthorne believes that the human time itself

has a mysterious power which enables man to establish the balance

between man's world and Nature, the head and the heart, and the

conscious and the unconscious. Unlike Emerson in "Nature," who instantly experiences a mystic union with Nature in his ecstatic joy,

Hawthorne trusts only the power of history. If man wants to establish

a harmonious relation with Nature, Hawthorne considers, he must deeply immerse himself in the human time. The old Pyncheon house

proves the validity of this paradoxical idea more persuasively than anything else:

The lines of the tufts of green moss, here and there, seemed

pledges of familiarity and sisterhood with Nature; as if this human dwelling-place, being of such old date, had established its

prescriptive title among primeval oaks, and whatever other objects, by virtue of their long continuance, have acquired a

gracious right to be. (285)

There is an implication here that like this old Pyncheon mansion, man can also establish an intimate relationship with Nature not by escaping

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from man's world but gradually acquiring familiarity with it through

accumulating man's time sincerely like Uncle Venner in human society.

Although Hawthorne is skeptical of Transcendentalism, this paradoxi-

cal way of transcending time and space is the only "Transcen-

dentalism" he can accept.

Notes

1. T.S. Eliot, "Book Review on The Cambridge History of American Literature," The Athenaeum, 25 April 1919. Quoted by F.O. Matthiessen, The Achievement

of T.S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p.24.

2. Henry James, Hawthorne (London: Macmillan and Company, 1879), p.124. 3. Allen Tate, "Emily Dickinson," Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical

Essays, ed. Richard B. Sewall (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1963), p.18.

4. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, The Centenary Edition, Vol. II (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965), p.2. All the subsequent

references to this novel correspond to this edition. 5. Eliot, p.24.

6. John P. McWilliams calls the Pyncheon house "the house of New England history." See his Hawthorne, Melville, and the American Character: A looking -glass business (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p.108.

7. Lawrence Sargent Hall, Hawthorne: Critic of Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), p.161.

8. Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), p. 81.

9. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality," Rousseau: Selections, ed. Maurice Cranston (New York: Macmillan Publishing Com-

pany, 1988), p.57. 10. Hawthorne, "The Sister Years," Twice-Told Tales, The Centenamy Edition,

Vol. IX (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1974), pp. 338-39. 11. Perry Miller, "From Edwards to Emerson," Errand into the Wilderness

(Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956), p.192.

12. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Transcendentalist," Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957), p.192.

13. Emerson, "The Transcendentalist," p.197. 14. See Harold Bloom, "The Central Man: Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace

Stevens, "The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p.225; "Emerson: The

American Religion," Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 158-59.

15. Emerson, "Nature," Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, p.32. 16. Emerson, "Nature," p.21.

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17. Emerson, "Circles," Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, p.176. 18. Frederick C. Crews, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological

Themes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p.175. 19. Hawthorne, "Rappaccini's Daughter," Mosses from An Old Manse, The

Centenary Edition, Vol. X (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), p.91. 20. Hawthorne, The American Notebooks, The Centenary Edition, Vol. VIII (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1972), p.487.

21. Philip Gura, The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the New England Renaissance (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,

1981), p.148. 22. Tate, p.17.

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