Nathaniel Hawthorne's Distractions

This essay proposes that Walter Benjamin might have used Nathaniel Hawthorne rather than Baudelaire and early cinema to work out his seminal concepts of shock, the aura, and “reception in distraction.” Looking first at Hawthorne’s European notebooks, it shows how he represents a crucial exception to nineteenth-century America’s “disciplinary” models of attention—ones that saw distraction as an “evil” or a problem to be overcome. Turning then to The House of the Seven Gables (1851), it examines how Hawthorne not only thematizes distraction’s possibilities through his characters’ “modern psychology” but also makes distraction and shock into formal principles of the novel itself. Ultimately, it reads Hawthorne as resisting rather than promoting his era’s disciplinary imperatives, complicating our picture of modern America’s intertwined histories of distraction and discipline.