"The Forgotten Art of Gayety": Masquerade, Utopia, and the Complexion of Empire

E. SHASKAN BUMAS "The Forgotten Art of Gayety": Masquerade, Utopia, and the Complexion of Empire Early in the nineteenth century, several U.S. literary authorities called for an American epic, by which they meant a national epic. Nathaniel Hawthorne mocks this idea in "A Select Party," an allegorical tale that takes place in "A Castle in the Air" in which an American poet appears: "the Master Genius, for whom our country is looking anxiously in the mist of time, as destined to fulfil the great mission of an American literature, hewing it, as it were, out of the unwrought granite of our intellectual quarries. From him, whether moulded in the form of an epic poem, or assuming a guise altogether new, as the spirit itself may determine, we are to receive our first great original work, which shall do all that remains to be achieved for our glory among nations" (10: 66). He might scoff at the idea of a national epic, but his work often explored what he considered national characteristics , though it was largely about the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts and their descendents. His short stories included what he considered key formations of national character in Massachusetts history: Endicott's removal of the cross from the British standard, the persecution ofQuakers, the Boston Tea Party, the Revolutionary War. His tales for children, to make them grow up to be good citizens, included such English history as the story of the Puritan Protector Oliver Cromwell and such local history as the Reverend John Eliot, the Apostle to the Indians, converter of the Algonquians. In his last completed novel, The MarWe Faun, Hawthorne could highlight the American traits of his Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 4, Winter 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 E. Shaskan Bumas protagonists by setting his story in Rome, where they would stand out in bright contrast to the Old World. Until then he had spent most of his career looking back at the inception of settlement in seventeenthcentury Massachusetts and at present-day nineteenth-century Massachusetts as a repeat of the seventeenth-century settlement. So in The Scarlet Letter, set in the seventeenth century, Hester Prynne sounds in the woods like a nineteenth-century transcendentalist, whereas in his contemporary American Romances, The House of the Seven Gables and The BlitheL·le Romance, the characters Judge Pyncheon and the prison reformer Hollingsworth, respectively, sound like the harshest of Pilgrims . To complicate the latter case, Blithedale is narrated by a character who has written a slim volume of lyric poetry but plans to record the events of the founding of the experiment in socialist living in the form of epic, but that form, and the socialist experiment, are soon abandoned. The epic was unlikely for Hawthorne in part because of the nagging suspicion that history could have gone the other way, toward a non-Puritanical culture, though as he rehearses the same conflicts in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, he finds that a second chance for history would lead to equivalent catastrophe. For instance, the short story, "The May-Pole of the Merry Mount," seems for Hawthorne paradigmatic of the evolution of the American character. Set in the seventeenth-century settlement that so angered and threatened the Massachusetts-Bay Puritans, it stages the historical conflict between the pious and homogeneous Puritans and the carnivalesque Merry Mountaineers, a conflict in which, Hawthorne tells us, "Jollity and gloom were demonstrates for an empire" (9: 54). As Hawthorne's narrative concludes, the Puritans triumphed in this conflict over the direction of the future empire. Thomas Morton's joyous Merry Mount (or Ma-re Mount) festival is subverted, as Governor Bradford had reported, by the Puritans who proclaimed it illegal, destroyed it, and even renamed the community Mount Dagoon in a sign that it was now subject to their laws and that gloom would prevail. In portraying this story, though, Hawthorne elevates the now-submerged historical legacy of Merry Mount to the level of equal competitor to the Puritan legacy, until again vanquished in fiction. His narrator's statement that "the future complexion of New England was involved in this important quarrel" gives credence to the...