Hawthorne:The Indian connection
By Darshan Singh Maini

WHEN in the late eighties, I happened to offer a course on the 19th and 20th century American novelists at New York University, one of the novelists, Nathaniel Hawthorne, became, as I soon discovered, a point of involved interest for me as much as for my graduate class. Though familiar with the Puritan aspects of Hawthorne criticism vis-a-vis his plunge into the darker aspects of sexuality and sin, most of the students had little idea of Hawthorne’s "Orientalism" as such, and, therefore, took such ideas and motifs in his work as an extravagance of an American romancer.

To be sure, several American and Indian critics had, from time to time, sought to understand the involvement of Hawthorne in the deeper patterns and symbology of Oriental thought, but for a fuller, well-documented and well-argued discourse, we had to wait till Luther S. Luedtke’s Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Romance of the Orient (1989) who, incidentally, had spent a couple of year in India as Director of the American Studies Research Center at Hyderabad.

Since the Indian themes and icons, when closely examined, appeared to me as skilful variations on Hindu thought, superstitions and beliefs, teaching became a challenge and a point of stimulation. And as the lectures progressed, it became clearer and clearer that Hawthorne’s "passage to India" was his way of dramatising his own ambiguities. It may, however, be added that the romancer’s vicarious journey to our shores puts him, albeit differently, in the company of such American writers as Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman — the celebrated trinity of American orientalists in the 19th century.

Before I take up Hawthorne’s involvement in the Indian exotica, and its deeper meanings, I think, it’s important to keep in mind the American attitudes towards India in general, particularly at a time when this ancient land of fable, song and story was either a part of the Oriental mystery, or "a jewel in the British Crown" on the one hand, and an obscure part of the globe, far out of the line of public vision to be of any interest in America.

It is amazing how images of countries and continents, or of people and races, acquire a certain aspect in alien eyes over a period of time, an aspect often tending more to fiction than to fact. However, such is the power of even petrified images that the responding imagination fed by song and story, by fable and fantasy, seeks inevitably to authenticate its own secret urges through transference, as it were.

Of course, in a general way, the pattern of perceptions inheres in the tales of the returning travellers, seafarers, and other adventurers of that kidney, and even the stereotypes do sport an air of authenticity amidst a good amount of report, rumour, and invention.

Thus, the East, for instance, has generally figured in the Western mind as something mysterious and intriguing, romantic and beguiling, almost a feminine persona teasing the imagination out of thought, and drawing the pragmatic, rational, and action-oriented Occidental male into the limits of human experience.

And when such an image gets translated into the metaphors of art, or structured into the dialectic of fiction and fabulations, it tends to inveigle even the critical imagination into a fantasia of interpretation and deconstruction. Only the wariest critics manage to read the subtext, and to link historical fact to aesthetic statement.

Appropriately, then, Hawthorne’s affair with the Orient has its genesis in his family’s Indian connection, going back to the novelist’s sailor-father who, as first mate on the American Herald had sailed to Calcutta in 1800, and kept a steady and interesting account of his observations in the Herald log. Presumably, it is those old entries in the log — exotic names of ships and ports and lands answering to fabulous constructions, and the merchandise of gold and diamonds and pearls, of aromatic herbs, peacocks, and sandalwood, of silks and muslin, and such other Oriental bric-a-brac — that set Hawthorne’s eager and youthful imagination on a quest that in the end acquired phenomenological and aesthetic dimensions.

And thus he lapped up whatever scrap of Orientiana he could gather, and the Salem athenaeum served handsomely to enrich his literary sensibility in that direction. Hawthorne’s "Orientalism" was chiefly a fabulist’s paradise, and had little affinity with the Orientalism of the American transcendentalists whose basic concerns were religious and metaphysical.

It is the Orient of fables and folklore, of The Arabian Nights, and of such other eastern classics, not the Bhagavad Gita or the Upanishadas or the Koran, that finally gave Hawthorne some of his themes and symbols, and a distinctive mode of narration. Indeed, it is the freedom, inventiveness, free flow, and fey charm of the Oriental storyteller that caught Hawthorne’s fancy more than anything else. In other words, the Orient figures in Hawthorne’s work as a catalytic agent, as a matrix of motifs, and as a furnisher of the forms of fabulation. As a chief exemplar of the American Romance, he imports a good deal of his baggage from those alien shores that he beheld from afar as a distant dreamer and voyager.

Because of Hawthorne’s stringently Puritan background and New England ethic of transgression and punishment, his stories work primarily within Christian parameters. For, the stern and scowling forebears of Hawthorne commanded a code of absolutes, and the artist in him would again and again, resist the imperialism of such edicts and imperatives. And this predicament, which creates aesthetic tension is perhaps best reflected in Hawthorne’s wonderful tale, "The Artist of the Beautiful," which revolves round the idea of the artist’s need to plunge into the destructive element of sin to meet the assault of reality. Thus, the Oriental aspect catered to the imagination of dissent in a subtle and subversive way. It performed the balancing trick in Hawthorne’s extended dramatics.

Hawthorne had collected over the years scores of volumes on Orientalism. And, it is amazing to find that one of the books was The Life of Mohammed (1830) by one George Bush and another was Luiz de Camoes’s epic, The Lusiad or, The Discovery of India, a title that Jawaharlal Nehru later used for his famous book. The Portuguese epic modelled after the Aeneid celebrates the historic discovery of the route to India by Vasco da Gama, and its English translation by William Julius Mickle apparently touched Hawthorne’s imagination in a radical manner.

Other literary intermediaries included the English writers ranging from Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and Robert Southey to Lord Byron, Shelley, and Thomas Moore. In their works, the East is mirrored in rich detail as the cradle of civilisation, or as "the Land of the Morning", in George Meredith’s memorable phrase, and also as a courtesan ministering to the erotic fantasies of man. At the same time, there are hints of the "barbarous" East, and its irremediable tyrannies of self, state, and society. All these strains merge into patterns of Gothicism — a form that appears in Hawthorne’s fiction in various guises.

In his very first novel, Fanshawe (1828), a book he later disowned as an unworthy offspring, the tale is patterned after Johnson’s rasselas, emphasizing in Gothic form "the stoicism of the East". And that popular long story, "The Gentle Boy," whose hero carries the Muslim name of Ibrahim, stresses the ideas of Oriental courtesies and hospitality and religious tolerance. And in the tales of "The Story Teller," Hawthorne imitates, and adapts to his own purposes and requirements the techniques of the Arabian Nights narrative, using the role of the narrator and of the raconteur along with the concept of the story within the story in the manner of the Chinese box.

Again, some of the allegories and religious fables of the East built round the pilgrimage theme find a sympathetic echo in Hawthorne.

During those early years at the Manse, "a perfect Eden", his tales focus increasingly on "the pleasure domes and fairy castles of the East." And, undoubtedly, his fabulation, now drawing heavily on the resources of the arabesque and the grotesque, becomes ever more fantastic and compelling. It is helpful, however, to remember that the patina of Eastern romance in Hawthorne does not disturb his American moorings, it is often a gloss on the Puritan problematics of life, above all, of sexual sin.

Among other things, Hawthorne employed eastern iconography, hieroglyphics, and riddles to sound the depths of Western experience. Certain symbols, such as those of the cavern and the veil, are used to probe the mysteries of the human heart and the miseries of the Puritan conscience. Similarly, the ideas of alchemy and elixir motifs in such well-known tales as Rappaccini’s Daughter, The Birth-mark," and Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment clearly come from his oriental studies.

Many a complex human problem is sought to be presented through an elaborate and, at times, stretched and overwrought symbolism. No wonder, some symbols, particularly in the long romances such as The Scarlet Letter, The Marble Faun, and The Blithedale Romance fail to carry the full freight of Western ambiguities, and begin to creak.

Some critics tend to see the Hawthorne’s marriage to Sophia Peabody in the middle years of his life, certain Oriental graces and airs. Hawthorne was, however, pursuing the Dark Lady frisson, a sexual theme with a long literary history in the West, and encountered at the acutest in Shakespeare’s sonnets. In the American context, Leslie Fielder in his classic study, Love and Death in the American Novel, defined "the Fair Lady" and "the Dark Lady" archetypes at great length, and described the hold of the latter on the American imagination.

Thus, Hawthorne’s evocation of the femme fatale as a dark beauty rich in Oriental airs and delights falls into a familiar paradigm. Luedtke, in particular follows the exotic trail to secondary sources with care and insight, and builds up a fairly convincing thesis regarding a couple of major Indian influences in this regard. For instance, the whole idea of the vish-kanya, or the poison-damsel, in Rappaccini’s Daughter, going back to the times of Alexander the Great’s Indian adventure, appears to be well-argued, though the suggested similarity between Beatrice’s garden symbolism and "the sisterhood of Shakuntala with the blossoming Madhvi-creeper" in Kalidasa’s play strikes me as a somewhat fanciful exercise. For one thing, Kalidasa’s heroine is too pure a figure of romantic love and spousal mysticism to bear comparison with Hawthorne’s dark lady, whose angelic and sexual-demonic dialectic remains unresolved till the end.

As for his three major "Oriental" women, Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter, Zenobia of The Blithedale Romance, and Miriam of The Marble Faun, their names resonate back to Biblical, Asiatic, and Eastern origins.

Hester, to quote Hawthorne, had "in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic," and her sexual ethic running counter to the Law of Moses inclines her toward a freedom from the iron edicts of her race. And, there’s also in her "a tendency to speculation," which puts her on the side of her "Eastern sisters". Similarly, Zenobia too recalls the Syrian queen who had dared to make Palmyra "the mistress of the Roman Empire," while Miriam, we understand, rose out of Hawthorne’s fancy after a fleeting encounter with a Jewish beauty that he happened to see at the Lord Mayor’s banquet in London as a resident U.S. Consul.

That Hawthorne cultivated his Orientalism with care and conviction like so many other writers in England and America, and tended it in his emblematic art would thus be readily granted, though the Freudian side of the story in the context of American pronenness to voyeurism in general, I think, remains to be fleshed out in Hawthorne’s own case. Also, the thesis of Edward said in his study, Orientalism needs to be taken up in some critical detail. It is Said’s view that Orientalism was a form of hegemony, and a cultural imperialism, and that the Orient represented the Occident’s "deepest and most recurrent images of the Other," I wonder if Hawthorne’s case fits into this frame.