Class, Culture, and the Trouble with White Skin in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables

Class, Culture, and the Trouble with White Skin in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables David Anthony* (bio) "What's that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Maule? . . . And what for do you look so black at me?" "No matter, darkey! . . . Do you think nobody is to look black but yourself?" —Exchange between Young Matthew Maule and Scipio, slave of Gervayse Pyncheon, in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851) In May of 1850, while still composing The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Nathaniel Hawthorne made a lengthy journal entry in which he recounts a visit to the National Theater in Boston for a performance of "Jack the Giant Killer." 1 Hawthorne describes the performance as "somewhat heavy and tedious," but he nevertheless seems to have found the experience intriguing, in particular because of the audience, which he depicts as "more noteworthy than the play." As he explains, The theater itself is for the middling and lower classes; and I had not taken my seat in the most aristocratic part of the house, so that I found myself surrounded chiefly by young sailors, Hanover-street shopmen, mechanics and other people of that kidney. It is wonderful the difference that exists in the personal aspect and dress, and no less in the manners, of the people in this quarter of the city, as compared with others. . . . It was a scene of life in the rough. (American Notebooks, 501–2, 503) Going on to describe the shabby dress and uncleanliness of various individuals in the crowd, the heat and over-crowding within the theater itself, and the noise kept up throughout the performance (the audience members "calling to one another from different parts of the house, shouting to the performers and singing the burthens of songs"), Hawthorne makes it clear that cultural consumption of the kind practiced by the lower classes at the theater is all but completely alien to him, in particular because it seems so intimately tied to the visceral, bodily presence of the viewing audience (American Notebooks, 502–3). This is especially evident in his description of two women standing near him, one of whom surprises him by nursing her child in the theater, and the other of whom he finds striking for how dirty and unkempt she appears. The latter of the two is particularly notable to Hawthorne for wearing what he portrays as "the vilest gown—of dirty white cotton, so pervadingly dingy that it was white no longer, as it seemed to me." Hawthorne goes on to say that "she must have had a better dress at home," but he seems unable to shake the image he has of her as excessively unclean (American Notebooks, 502). Musing on the differences between the two women, he finally comes to the conclusion that the alleged negative qualities of the [End Page 249] dirtier woman may best be attributed to race: she was, he says in a kind of summation, "so dark that I rather suspected her to have a tinge of African blood" (American Notebooks, 503). Coming just a year after the 1849 Astor Place Opera House riot in New York, a conflict which crystallized distinctions between working-class audiences of lowbrow productions such as melodramas or minstrel shows and the city's elite purveyors of highbrow productions such as the opera, the journal entry is a useful example of how anxieties over class and gender emerging at mid-century were sometimes managed by aesthetes such as Hawthorne. 2 The entry suggests not only that such concerns were being negotiated in the realm of cultural production and aesthetic "taste," but also that these differences were often mediated via the third term of racial blackness. Unsettled by the image of working-class embodiment a large and "dirty" woman so clearly represents to him, Hawthorne seems to wish to imagine her difference as the result of "black" blood. Indeed, the designation even has the effect here of informing his curiously overdetermined description of her clothing as "white no longer." Merging the markings of class into the metaphorical marks of racial difference, Hawthorne seems to be seeking the means by which to come to terms not only...