Active Agencies of Compromise

Taking the cue from some of Melville’s most intense epistolary exchanges with Hawthorne, this essay highlights the two writers’ different codes of heroics to revisit “the heroism of compromise” in The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. It argues that this version of cultural heroism – allegedly, a unique aesthetic and political achievement of Hawthorne’s romances (Bercovitch 1993; 1991; 1988) – may in fact be reassessed within the broader debate on the novel as a romantic form of art in 19th-century aesthetics and genre theory. In Hegel’s terms, Hawthorne may be said to have dramatized the common “collisions” of the “novel in the modern sense,” so as to adopt and put the typical solution of the classical Bildungsroman (“the education of the individual in the actual world” and his/her reconcilement with “the order of things”) at the service of the American ideology. By so doing, he hybridizes his American romances with all the limits and aporias of the European novel. He transforms his New-World modern knights into Old-World-like middle-class conformists, exposing his plot resolutions to a contentious dispute over the balance of aesthetic gains and ideological losses in literature as cultural work.