Between the Scaffold and a Private Room : Reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's Works as Metafictional Commentaries on Writing Novels

Abstract

As many critics investigating the history of the novel in the United States maintain, urbanization across the country brought changes to the prevailing forms of American literary works-from public recitation to private consumption, from dramatic performance and poetry reading in the presence of an audience to fiction reading in a secluded room. This new mode of reception led such fiction irresistibly to acquire a new function: that of a peephole into another's private space. Suddenly thrown into the din and bustle of a rapidly urbanizing space, city-dwellers came to fear the fact that almost all of their neighbors were complete strangers to them. They could never know what their neighbors were thinking and doing in spite of their close vicinity, and so they began to harbor a growing desire to look into the private spaces of those neighbors. By means of the omniscient narrator in novels, people enjoyed gazing into these "closed rooms" otherwise shut off from the world. In that sense, novel writers of the 19th century, even if their works were not set in the city, could not help but be conscious of the reality that industrial urbanization was the very foundation of the novel as a genre. In other words, a novel written in that period, especially one set in an urban area, inevitably assumes a metafictional character, for it refers to the condition upon which the novel itself depends. Hawthorne's "Wakefield", which depicts a protagonist who runs away from his home and lives in the next street to observe what happens to his wife, is one of the earliest examples of such stories: using metropolitan London as a setting, and hence, in the way described above, as a prerequisite for the story, it can be clearly read as a metafiction, in that the narrator presents an outline is developed into the story proper. Wakefield's surreptitious gaze into a private room is similar to that of the author himself, for the author also peeps into Wakefield's private room to show it to the reader. Hawthorne considered his occupation as author to be sinful, because of this immorality of this gaze into other people's private spheres. His sense of guilt gives The Scarlet Letter a curiously metafictional aspect: the story embodies the shift in the mode of literary reception from a public recitation in the presence of the Puritan community (as of the appreciation of a picture) to a physician's private interrogation of the hidden interior of his patient's heart in a solitary room (as of reading a novel), and once again back to a public recitation (as of watching a drama onstage). It is due to this sense of guilt for his novelist's avocation that Hawthorne throughout this romance wavers between guilt-free public recitations and guilt-laden private readings; when he finally abandons the latter, it is as if to denounce the literary form of fiction.