Fictions of Panoptican Prison and Utopia in Works of Hawthorn

F t n f th P n pt n: Pr n, t p , nd th t P n t ntn th r f N th n l H th rn

E. Shaskan Bumas

American Literature, Volume 73, Number 1, March 2001, pp. 121-145(Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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E. ShaskanBumas

Fictions of the Panopticon:Prison, Utopia, and the Out-Penitentin the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne

The great utopian writers from Plato throughThomas More explained their social worlds by contrasting them withimaginary, transcendent, perfect societies; but increasingly sinceMichel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975), the prison system hasserved as metaphor for and immanent microcosm of society. Boththe prison and utopia are well-developed structures in the fiction ofNathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter’s first chapter is ‘‘The Prison-Door,’’ the second sentence of which reads, ‘‘The founders of a newcolony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they mightoriginally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliestpractical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a ceme-tery, and another portion as the site of a prison,’’ the latter a ‘‘blackflower of civilized society.’’ 1 Such new colonies would have includedthe nineteen Praying Indian communities founded in the seventeenthcentury by the Reverend John Eliot, who was greatly admired by Haw-thorne, visited by Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter, and taken as arole model in The Blithedale Romance by the prison reformer Hollings-worth. Blithedale’s narrator, Miles Coverdale, is excited by the idea ofa cemetery and Hollingsworth by the idea of a prison, with which hewould like to replace the utopian colony of Blithedale. More’s apoc-ryphal Utopia, however, had no prisons; a two-tiered justice systemprovided pleasant slavery for a first offense and execution for a two-time loser.2 The approach to managing criminals in More’s sixteenth-century Utopia is like the one Foucault finds in the nineteenth-centurychain gang: ‘‘The ideal would be for the convict to appear as a sortof rentable property: a slave at the service of all. ’’ 3 What’s more, in

American Literature, Volume 73, Number 1, March 2001. Copyright © 2001 by DukeUniversity Press.

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122 American Literature

Utopia the punishment is so just and humane that a convict wouldrather be a slave than free in another country with a different socialorganization.4 (Here one imagines More drawing from Plato ratherthan from life.) Perhaps the relation of utopia and prison occurs inHawthorne’s fiction because of his interest in how society works, par-ticularly in how his nation works. And according to Foucault’s Chro-nology, the idea of the nation emerged at approximately the same timethat modern states were defined by their prison systems.5

Systems of punishment figure prominently in Hawthorne’s ro-mances. The title The Scarlet Letter refers to Hester Prynne’s socialexile; The House of the Seven Gables relates the story of Clifford Pyn-cheon after his release from prison and his subsequent move intoa more gothically arranged, enclosed space; The Blithedale Romancecenters itself around the figure of the prison reformer Hollingsworth;and The Marble Faun concludes with the imprisonment of the flesh-and-blood faun. In the three American romances, Hawthorne dealswith temporally specific forms of punishment. Hester Prynne’s physi-cal humiliation on the scaffold (an official version of Major Molineuxtarred and feathered) reminds readers of days before the penitentiary.6

The scaffold, the narrator explains, ‘‘was held, in the old time, to beas effectual an agent in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever wasthe guillotine among the terrorists of France,’’ though in the coun-try where people were titled ‘‘citizen,’’ citizenship and punishmentwould have had different meanings (SL, 58).7 In The House of the SevenGables, Clifford’s imprisonment is a more ‘‘humane’’ punishment thanHester’s (in Hester’s day he would have been executed), despite itsincorrect justification: he is guilty only of blundering between a morepowerful man and the object of that man’s greed. But prison has bro-ken him, rendering him a quivering old man afraid to venture outside;it has not reformed him, because he was no murderer to begin with,and the only lesson he needed to learn is to avoid dead bodies thatcould be attributed to his hand. His association with the young couple,Phoebe Pyncheon and Holgrave, however, makes him a slightly moreproductive member of society. Of course Clifford is constantly in dan-ger of being locked away again, not because of any crime or paroleviolation but because he is suspected of being insane, a condition func-tionally analogous, from the point of the view of the state, to being acriminal.

In The Blithedale Romance, Hollingsworth proposes a humane

Prison, Utopia, and the Out-Penitent in Hawthorne 123

prison system that will treat the souls of criminals as something to becorrected by appealing to their potential virtue.8 Hollingsworth’s mis-sion, like that of the Apostle John Eliot, is christianizing savage crimi-nals and saving their souls—that is, making them conform.9 Whetheror not this correction of the soul is possible, ‘‘success’’ probably wouldhave seemed to Hawthorne too much like the mesmerism he ab-horred, in which one person draws too close to the soul of another.10

One strand of prison reform in the United States and Europe grewout of religion; indeed, the term penitentiary is borrowed from reli-gious discourse. This type of reform began with the idea of innatedepravity, so dear to the Puritans, who in consequence of their elec-tion considered themselves a bit less depraved than others but boundto be more penitent. Two centuries later, the Puritan view remainsevident in prison structures that copy the architecture and organiza-tion of the monastery, presumably to bring prisoners closer to God byencouraging a more contemplative life, which in turn would producebehavior approved by the state, the church, and social reformers. InHawthorne’s allegorical ‘‘A Select Party’’ (1844), the architecture ofthe ‘‘Castle in the Air,’’ the home of ‘‘A Man of Fancy,’’ resembles thatof a monastery or a state prison, as well as a utopic, even paradisaicalplace: ‘‘[T]he airy castle looked like a feudal fortress, or a monasteryof the middle ages, or a state-prison of our own times, rather than thehome of pleasure and repose he intended it to be.’’ 11 In Hawthorne’s‘‘Castle in the Air,’’ monastery and prison architectures converge toafford protection, impose order, and facilitate spiritual contemplation.In Utopia, More configures a similar social withdrawal as the meansfor self-improvement and closeness to God; implicit in the dialogue ofUtopia is More’s own conflict between living a productive public lifeand longing to withdraw from the world, like a cloistered monk, inavoidance of sin.12 The nineteenth-century prison reform movementaimed to construct a hyper-organized utopian environment that wouldforce withdrawal from the world and encourage devotion to God, lead-ing to the elimination of sin.

When creating his prison reformer in the utopian community ofBlithedale, Hawthorne would have known of the sin-no-more styleof reform advocated by the New York Prison Association so belovedof Margaret Fuller.13 Fuller makes the connection between the Puritanpast and 1840s prison reform in an article for the New York Tribune inwhich she proposes reflecting on the Pilgrims’ intentions: ‘‘Yet how


much nobler, more exhilarating and purer would be the atmosphereof that circle if the design of its pious founders were remembered bythose who partake [in] this festival.’’ 14 In the shadow of the Puritans,she finds much of life in the United States unworthy, but ‘‘for thispresent day appointed for Thanksgiving, we know of causes not soloudly proclaimed why we should give thanks’’ (MFJ, 178). Althoughprison reformers’ goals and the Puritans’ idea of the soul’s depravityseem fundamentally in opposition, Fuller uses Thanksgiving Day tounite them across two centuries:

We recognized as a happy omen that there is cause for thanksgivingand that our people may be better than they seem, [given] the meet-ing last week to organize an Association for the benefit of Prisoners.. . . The prisoner, too, may become a man. Neither his open norour secret faults, must utterly dismay us. We will treat him as if hehad a soul. . . . We will give him some crumbs from the table whichgrace from above and parent love below have spread for us, and,perhaps, he will recover from these ghastly ulcers that deform himnow. (MFJ, 179)

Criminality, then, is the symptom of something curable. Many of Full-er’s pro-reform articles for the Tribune, based on her outings withthe Reverend Channing, discuss both prisons and asylums together.The conditions of prison and asylum inmates provided her with op-portunities to criticize the organization of her society, as Foucaultwould do in confronting his own. Both institutions, according to Fuller,seemed to prevent not just the inmate but the citizen from becoming‘‘a man’’ by implicitly denying ‘‘he had a soul.’’ 15 If the prisoner hada soul, he could be saved; he could be controlled. And the conditionsof all citizens could be improved. For the Puritans, misdeeds couldbe punished, not cured; Fuller uses the Puritan legacy for her ownpurposes, reforming the Puritans through historical revision by bor-rowing their idea of a ‘‘cause for thanksgiving.’’

In The Blithedale Romance, Hollingsworth has a ‘‘strange, and, asmost people thought it, impracticable plan for the reformation of crimi-nals, through an appeal to their higher instincts’’ (BR, 36). In his plan’sdependence on the influence of good will, it seems as impracticableand void of common sense as any utopian system—and susceptible tothe abuses of ill will. Coverdale is not interested in Hollingsworth’sscheme because it deals with socially marginal people, whereas Cover-


dale is trying to reform the bourgeoisie by transforming their urbanexistence into something more bucolic. Hollingsworth’s idea forprison reform is in keeping with the conclusions Fuller attributes to‘‘the Matron of the Female Department at Sing-Sing,’’ Eliza WoodBurnhans Farnham (1815–1864), who specifies that ‘‘no punishmentcould be more severe than the unseen, quiet restraints of a moral sys-tem’’ (MFJ, 107). The most effective reform the matron finds is ‘‘theuse of books, the daily chapel reading and personal instruction’’ (MFJ,109). If Hollingsworth is radical in his ideas for reform, he is not alone.16

To understand why prison may have seemed, to Hawthorne, an aptmetaphor for U.S. society, we should remember that the first greatcommentator on the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville, visited from1831 through 1832 specifically to observe the U.S. prison system forpossible adaptation to French needs. Tocqueville took note of theeffects of democratic equality on the nation at large, including so-cial changes he realized would soon sweep the world. His observa-tions widened into the two-volumeDemocracy in America (1835, 1840),though only once in the first volume does he mention prisons. TheUnited States is, Tocqueville fears, too open to change. Looking backto when ‘‘for the first time [in the United States] the idea of reform-ing as well as punishing the delinquent formed a part of prison disci-pline,’’ he finds prison reform haphazard.17 With reformers’ attentionturned primarily to the new, model prison systems, the great majorityof prisons, he predicts, will become even more barbaric, and giventhe rapid rate at which laws change in a democracy, he fears themajority’s tyranny. With change toward equality inevitable, he seesequality as a threat to individualism. (The word individualism firstenters English when Tocqueville’s book is translated.) In the prisonreform movement, then, Tocqueville finds proof that ‘‘[i]n Americathe pressure for social improvements is vastly greater, but less continuousthan in Europe,’’ and therefore democracy is more likely to becometyranny.18 Reform, in fact, might breed tyranny.

In the late eighteenth century, according to Larry Sullivan’s ThePrison Reform Movement, the stated aim of penology was to ‘‘eradi-cate evil human behavior and cleanse the soul of sin.’’ 19 While WilliamJames Forsythe maintains in his study of English prison reform that‘‘the reformatory purpose’’ is usually only part of the ‘‘prison regime’’and of varying import ‘‘within a prison system at any point of his-tory,’’ 20 from the 1820s on, prisons were associated with reform. The


cultural supposition that prisons should change as well as confinecriminals set up an interesting microcosm for those teetotalers, aboli-tionists, and utopians who were interested in improving all of society.Emerson’s distance from the reform movements of his day was neces-sary, he said, because he wanted to reform the reformers.21 But Emer-son’s desire is similar to what the prison reform advocates wanted: toreform the system of reforming criminals.

According to Sullivan, the problem with prison reform is its fun-damental deception: ‘‘Punishment—the revenge ritual—is the actualgoal of the penal system; but reformers have continuously deceivedthemselves with the goals of deterrence and rehabilitation. They haveattempted to ameliorate or cleanse society by reforming its deviants;and since the late-eighteenth century, the primary method of reformhas been imprisonment’’ (PRM, 2).22 Early prison reformers wantedcriminals to deviate no more. To Foucault, the modern penal systemin its attempt to control deviance is a form of hegemony; Sullivan, how-ever, disagrees, arguing that reformers don’t want to control people,‘‘only to uplift those who [have] fallen’’ (PRM, 4). What the reformerslikely called the Fear of God may have seemed more like the Fear ofthe State to Foucault. Hawthorne, too, was wary of the state’s powerand skeptical about relying on its judgments for enforcing morality.The threat of Clifford Pyncheon’s reincarceration, for example, comesfrom his cousin, the powerful Judge Pyncheon, who seems on hisway to becoming governor of Massachusetts. While Hester Prynne isoften the subject of official religious sermons, she makes a plausibleantinomian case that her adulterous relationship with the ReverendDimmesdale had ‘‘a consecration of its own,’’ a case that points to theinability of the state and church to identify variations of original sin aswell as exceptions to the rule (SL, 179). Yet the scarlet letter adorningher breast successfully reforms her in the eyes of those who have thepower to make her wear it, and even in her own.

In Hawthorne’s time, revenge as the justification for punishmentwas being replaced by the desire to cure criminality, although it is notclear how a cure was to result from the longer sentences reformersdemanded.23 Some criminologists, such as Sullivan, are not convincedthat reformation is possible under any circumstances, believing thatjust punishment should be provided according to the severity deemedappropriate by the society. Foucault charts the shift from punishmentas a spectacle for all (as with Hester Prynne) to the viewing of crimi-


nals only by the powers that be (as with Clifford, who is evaluated byJudge Pyncheon). In Blithedale, Hawthorne deals with the transitionaltime when public torture or humiliation was being replaced by whatseemed a more civilized, more Christian, and more scientific type ofpunishment, one that would directly attack not the body so much asthe corruption of the criminal soul in order to create a new man. Fou-cault uses the term individual for the soul: ‘‘The two great ‘discoveries’of the eighteenth century—the progress of societies and the genesesof individuals—were perhaps correlative with the new techniques ofpower’’ (DP, 4). Although he offers a version of the individual thatHawthorne might have seen as one of the horrors of the modern era,his concerns are directly in line with Hawthorne’s when he writes:‘‘This book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul andof a new power to judge’’ (DP, 23).

Although Hawthorne could not have known that what he was wit-nessing in the reform movements of his day, especially in prison re-form, was the creation of the modern soul, he was certainly concernedthat the sanctity of the Christian soul was jeopardized by the coer-cively judgmental aspects of people like Hollingsworth, who proclaimsMiles Coverdale a savage and considers Zenobia (Coverdale believes)a witch (BR, 130, 214). Hawthorne observed that social organization,which determines how people view each other, was changing. Con-sequently, the ‘‘punishment’’ he contrives for Hollingsworth for the‘‘murder’’ of Zenobia—for misleading her in the service of his owndesires, until the day of her apparent suicide by drowning—works di-rectly on Hollingsworth’s soul, as the newer punishments were said todo, in an appeal to what Hollingsworth himself refers to as his ‘‘higherinstincts.’’ His marriage to Priscilla, Zenobia’s half sister, after thelatter’s suicide, means that in living daily with Priscilla he will bereminded of the part he played in Zenobia’s death. When Coverdalelater encounters Hollingsworth, he finds him frozen in the posture ofshame, ‘‘his eyes still fixed on the ground.’’ Coverdale implies thatHollingsworth has been trying to reform himself, ‘‘a single murderer’’(BR, 243). Because this passage was added late to the manuscript, oneimagines Hawthorne saw it as clarifying (even if by problematizing)his story. The criminal, even if there be only injury and no crime, musttry to reform himself if his repentance is to be genuine. The effect ofsuch atonement on other people is provided in another of Hawthorne’slate additions, in which Coverdale’s response to Hollingsworth’s


contrition is compassion: ‘‘[T]he tears gushed into my eyes, and Iforgave him’’ (BR, 342). In this older type of reform—through re-morse—Hollingsworth seems to have been made an example of thetransformation Sullivan says a penitentiary can effect: ‘‘deterrence, re-habilitation, and punishment or revenge’’ (PRM, 1). Married, Hollings-worth will likely be deterred from leading a woman to ruin again;undergoing rehabilitation of his despicable egotism, he will no longerattempt to recreate life in his own image. And Zenobia has had herrevenge in his resulting misery. In short, although he hasn’t gone toa penitentiary, Hollingsworth is penitent—an out-penitent.

The soul, for Foucault, demonstrates the power of the state overthe body, over the individual. Hawthorne probably would not haveaccepted the terminology of the paradigm shift Foucault describes:‘‘This is the historical reality of the soul, which, unlike the soul repre-sented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punish-ment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervisionand constraint’’ (DP, 29). Yet Hollingsworth expects to rule throughpower over the body, as becomes clear when Zenobia threatens torebel. (She believes, as Hester Prynne can’t, that she may effect so-cial change. ‘‘If I live another year,’’ Zenobia declares, ‘‘I will lift upmy own voice, in behalf of woman’s wider liberty,’’ a concept she per-haps lacks the time to elaborate.) That Hollingsworth the reformer iswilling to use punishment as deterrence—in this case to deter womenfrom demanding rights—is signaled as his open palm, used for fund-raising, clenches into a fist, threatening all women who dare doubtmale supremacy (BR, 120). Hollingsworth’s powerful aggression sug-gests Hawthorne’s concern about threats to the soul, the sanctity ofwhich he cherished long before hearing about mesmerism.

Hollingsworth’s schemes to transform Blithedale from an experi-mental commune to an experimental prison parallel the connectionFoucault draws between strict disciplinary systems and utopianthought. Foucault notes: ‘‘Historians of ideas usually attribute thedream of a perfect society to the philosophers and jurists of the eigh-teenth century: but there was also a military dream of society’’ (DP,169), the shadow of which is present in both Blithedale and in Haw-thorne’s retelling of Reverend John Eliot’s encounter with the Indiansin the children’s primer Grandfather’s Chair. That all the Indians whofollowed Eliot were killed in the war between England and the non-Praying Indians—mostly by other Indians—seems to have brought a


certain dismay to Hawthorne, as evidenced by the child Laurence’soutburst: ‘‘ ‘Oh, Grandfather, tell us all about that Indian Bible! . . .I have seen it in the library of the Athenaeum; and the tears cameinto my eyes, to think that there were no Indians left to read it.’ ’’ 24 Inthe 1840s of The Blithedale Romance, the land surrounding the natu-ral pulpit—the stone at which Eliot preached and at which Hollings-worth stands two centuries later—is, though changed, still wild. Indescribing it, the narrator mentions in a parenthesis, as though thefact had snuck into a story concerned with white Christians, thatall the Indians are now gone: ‘‘[I]t was still as wild a tract of wood-land as the great-great-great-great grandson of one of Eliot’s Indians(had any such posterity been in existence) would have desired, forthe site and shelter of his wigwam’’ (BR, 118). Historians of a sort,Laurence and Grandfather note: ‘‘ ‘[N]ow the language and the peopleare gone!’ ’’ (GC, 49). History, for Miles Coverdale, is present as it isto the Nietzschean suprahistorical actor: he imagines Hollingsworthas a new version of Eliot standing on the same spot, a more compas-sionate and reform-minded Pilgrim than those church fathers of TheScarlet Letter.25 This time-traveling presumably occurs on every occa-sion that Hollingsworth places himself in Eliot’s spot: ‘‘[W]ith my eyesof sense half shut, and those of the imagination widely opened, I usedto see the holy Apostle of the Indians, with the sunlight flickeringdown upon him through the leaves, and glorifying his figures with thehalf-perceptible glow of transfiguration’’ (BR, 119).

Hawthorne placed John Eliot between the extremes of John Endi-cott and Thomas Morton. Unlike the French, who supposedly becamesavages when they mixed with the Indians, or the ‘‘Romish’’ Spanish,who baptized without religious meaning, Eliot, through love, madeChristians of the Indians he encountered and, in so doing, ‘‘civilized’’them.26 Hollingsworth’s plan for civilizing prisoners is similar. Eliotdid not anticipate the outcome of his philanthropy. Nor does Hollings-worth, whose plan is doomed.

Foucault’s central metaphor is the panopticon, the prison system de-signed by Jeremy Bentham in which a ringed building divided intosingle occupancy cell blocks forms a circumference with an obser-vation tower in its center. This design allowed for total supervisionof the inmates, who themselves remained always unable to see each


other or their guards. Although Foucault seems to have exaggeratedthe importance of the panopticon within the prison system of Franceand Europe, the accuracy of his image of the tower as a metaphor forwhat he calls a panoptic society resonates.27 But the panopticon is notjust a metaphor. Describing the geometry of the panoptic ring, Fou-cault links this prison plan with the ordered societies called utopias:‘‘Among all the reasons for the prestige that was accorded in the sec-ond half of the eighteenth century to circular architecture, one mustno doubt include the fact that it expressed a certain political utopia’’(DP, 174). In short, Foucault describes what seems an attempt to makeeveryone live in glass houses, perhaps to discourage the throwingof stones. Eerily, this description coincides with philosophical ideasof living in truth, including Hollingsworth’s plan to live visibly on ahillside or, as I’ve demonstrated, to replace the city on the hill witha penitentiary, though a city on a hill is inevitably something of aprison already. Hollingsworth wants to be susceptible to observationbut presumably only within the panoptic tower—in the way Coverdalepresents himself observing the other characters from the window ofhis room.

The idea that a prison could reform people goes back at least to 1596when the Rasphuis prison in Amsterdam was designed to turn con-victs from evil toward good. Other types of reforming prisons—notbased on the pillory and the virtually exclusive method of execution—included Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Prison of 1790, influenced bythe Quakers, who believed that the prisoners had to have their soulsrighted by exclusive contact with moral administrators. Prisoners inthis system had to work because ‘‘idle hands are the devil’s workshop’’and because in Genesis all were condemned to labor. In 1804 Massa-chusetts set up a prison based on the model of Walnut Street, whichwas soon superseded by a more cost-effective system. In the early-nineteenth-century United States, the two great models of prison re-form were the penitentiaries of Auburn, New York, and Philadelphia,though Hawthorne is vague enough to collapse those two categoriesinto one in Hollingsworth’s appeal to criminals’ ‘‘higher instincts.’’According to Foucault, whatever model of prison reform was to bepracticed, prison was regarded ‘‘as an apparatus for transforming indi-viduals’’ (DP, 233). Hollingsworth wants to transform prisoners intowhat he believes himself to be: upright and honest, more Christianthan thou, and more civilized than society itself.


Two theories of moral improvement through imprisonment were be-hind both the solitary and the congregate systems. When the AuburnPrison was built in New York, it had no solitary confinement; soli-tary cells were added in 1819. Because prisoners in solitary often ex-perienced severe mental distress, the practice of solitary confinementended in 1822, replaced by what became known as the congregatesystem, or Auburn system: ‘‘congregate labor in complete silence dur-ing the daytime and solitary confinement at night.’’ The ‘‘method ofdiscipline [consisted in]: downcast eyes, lockstep marching, absolutesilence, . . . supervised work, [and] . . . unsparing use of the whip’’(PRM, 10). This prison turned a good profit due to the prisoners’ cheaplabor. The Auburn prison was, to Foucault, monastic, a ‘‘microcosmof a perfect society,’’ based on isolation, with strict hierarchy and norelations among the prisoners (DP, 233). This system was taken upby Louis Dwight, founder of the Boston Prison Discipline Society,and judging from geography, may be in part the reformed systemthat Hollingsworth wants to re-reform. The Auburn system was fol-lowed by the model of Sing-Sing, so admired by Margaret Fuller inthe 1840s, though she seems to have devoted most of her visits towomen’s prisons.

A different system was proposed after the Walnut Street Prisonfailed in the 1810s. Quakers, who had great influence in its replace-ment, felt that the congregate system had worked poorly—less likea reform school and more like a finishing school in crime, whichconvinced criminals that the error of their ways was to have beencaught—and they thought that prisoners needed to reflect in solitary.As Sullivan puts it, ‘‘The battle between the two prison systems—Auburn and Philadelphia—raged from the 1820s until the outbreak ofthe Civil War’’ (PRM, 11). Yet Auburn seemed destined to succeed inproducing copies of itself in the early mercantile-capitalist era. Be-cause it was cheap and included forced labor, it was rather profit-able and always self-sufficient. Either system could have served asHollingsworth’s model—he had plenty of Zenobia’s money and couldhave attempted a Philadelphia-style penitentiary—because both pro-fessed interest in saving the souls of criminals.

Sullivan notes that ‘‘[a]ntebellum reform activity culminated in thefounding in 1844 of the New York Prison Association (NYPA). Led bythe usual blend of humanitarian merchants, lawyers, and other pro-fessionals, these middle-class reformers were imbued with a brand


of romantic perfectionism that reflected the stern Calvinism of . . .the Boston Prison Discipline Society’’ (PRM, 15). It was this organi-zation that Margaret Fuller singled out in her Tribune column aboutThanksgiving Day. Intellectually, Fuller was attracted to the NYPA’simplication of the environment in the creation of criminal behavior,since she was particularly (and bravely and radically) interested inthe causes of women’s prostitution. Aesthetically, she appreciated theorder of the new prisons and their lack of obvious misery. The NYPA’smotto, ‘‘Sin no more,’’ may have seemed a particularly good idea. Thisis the type of prison reform with which Hawthorne was likely to havebeen most familiar—through Fuller’s journalism—which is not to sayhe would have understood it any better than he and the Concord circleunderstood any of Fuller’s projects during her post-Concord incarna-tions. Hawthorne is enticingly vague about the reforms Hollingsworthwould like to institute in his prison, thus making his narrative a dis-cussion of reform in general and his description of the soul in prisona generic description of the soul itself.

The evangelical prison reformers of England that Forsythe de-scribes sound rather like Hollingsworth, with his conservatism andbelief in the innate depravity of men: ‘‘Pointing to what they con-ceived to be man’s natural inclination to sinfulness and disobedience,evangelicals argued that the economic changes in Britain and politi-cal ideas emanating from France were destroying the ancient stablebasis of society.’’ 28 Humanity’s sinful inclinations lead to Hollings-worth’s vehement rejection of the French ideas of Fourier, who wasnot willing to squash sinfulness but shockingly wished to accommo-date it. Hollingsworth believes that the bucolic setting of Blithedalewill restore stability to prisoners’ lives. His ideas of prison reform arebasically associationist, placing ‘‘the formation of human attitude andconduct in terms of the impact of experience upon the individual,’’ asthough orderly environments make orderly minds.29 Hollingsworth’shubris, perhaps, lies in his belief that deviants can be made into sinlessindividuals by observing and living with him.

Foucault’s idea of the panopticon stresses the disciplinary and con-forming aspects of visibility. Prison inmates were to live in ‘‘so manycages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectlyindividualized and constantly visible’’ (DP, 200). This description mir-rors Coverdale’s desire to see everything about his associates in orderto know them, his desire to think of Zenobia as an actress, and his


intention of placing Hollingsworth behind a church’s proscenium andlectern. It also evokes his spying habits and his experience of watchingPriscilla, behind a veil, stand on a stage while the mesmerist Wester-velt manipulates her soul. If the panopticon is ‘‘a machine for dis-sociating the see/being seen dyad’’ (DP, 201–2), so, for that matter,are certain types of narration, although dialogically, Miles Coverdalesometimes does allow the other characters to see and judge him. Oneof Hawthorne’s accomplishments in fiction was to identify how powerworks in societies and in relationships; in Blithedale, he shows the vir-tually historiographic power of a narrator over narrated events andpeople, and he judges this power as barren but not much differentfrom other forms of power. In Coverdale, the spy, the voyeur, and theobserver overlap. ‘‘[I]t does not matter what motivates’’ the panopticobserver, Foucault maintains. It might be ‘‘the curiosity of the indis-creet, the malice of a child, the thirst for knowledge of a philosopherwho wishes to visit this museum of human nature, or the perversityof those who take pleasure in spying and punishing’’ (DP, 202). Allof these motivations pertain to Miles Coverdale’s uncurbable impulseto spy in his quest to discover some big Secret as he manipulateshis friends experimentally, his heart as light as ‘‘a peaceful-bosomednaturalist’’ (BR, 205).

Coverdale’s pursuit of an ideal omniscience contrasts markedlywith the theme of Blithedale and with the idea of the novel or romanceas a genre interested in the limitation of knowledge.30 The novel isa polyvalent site preserving uncertainty, stressing that all cannot beseen, known, or controlled. Despite the will to power of omniscience,the novel retains its liberatory dialogic tendency to the extent thatit allows a certain amount of not-knowing: Who murdered Zenobia?Had she been married? What secrets of Priscilla’s did Hollingsworthprotect? Why did Blithedale fail? What is the relation between Blithe-dale and Brook Farm, between the novel and the world, betweenutopia and society? Because these questions cannot be definitively an-swered, and because Hawthorne certainly did not invite readers totrust his narrator Coverdale, The Blithedale Romance is neither pan-optic nor utopic.

Nor did Foucault miss the unintentional utopic-dystopic aspects ofpanopticism: ‘‘[Jeremy] Bentham presents it as a particular institu-tion, closed in upon itself. Utopias, perfectly closed in upon them-selves, are common enough’’ (DP, 205). In history, says Foucault,


‘‘[P]anopticism is regarded as not much more than a bizarre littleutopia, a perverse dream—rather as though Bentham had been theFourier of a police society, and the Phalanstery had taken on the formof the Panopticon. And yet this represented the abstract formula ofa very real technology, that of individuals’’ (DP, 225). Although Fou-cault’s dates appear backward, it is possible that the Phalanstery andPanopticon take on a bit of each other’s functions: ‘‘The disciplinary in-stitutions secreted a machinery of control that functioned like a micro-scope of conduct’’ (DP, 173). Coverdale’s machinery puts his friends‘‘under a microscope,’’ as he studies their behavior and their historiesto judge what is invisible to the naked eye: their souls.31

If not just Utopia but modern life is to be figured as a penitentiary, isthere any escape from this modern prison short of hiding out from allhumanity in ever more distant solitude? Given Hollingsworth’s—notto mention Hawthorne’s—revulsion to Fourier, most likely becauseof his enthusiasm for free love, one wonders what the ex-blacksmithwould have said about Fourier’s ideas of criminality as positive. Arti-cles from the Fourierite La Phalange from 1836 through 1840 positioncriminals as a class of superior and significant rebels against society:

Although, in their view, crime is a result of ‘‘civilization,’’ it is also,and by that very fact, a weapon against it. . . . ‘‘The social orderdominated by the fatality of its repressive principle continues to killthrough the executioner or through prisons those whose natural ro-bustness rejects or disdains its prescriptions.’’ . . . [T]he existenceof crime manifests ‘‘a fortunate irrepressibility of human nature’’;it should be seen not so much as a weakness or a disease, as anenergy that is reviving, an ‘‘outburst of protest in the name of humanindividuality.’’ 32

Though perhaps an excessively romantic view of criminals, this moralSaturnalia would be one way out of the Blithedale bind: how to make autopian society something other than a prison. The Blithedalers couldidentify how they have been treated in the past—as though in prison—and in that insight express their individuality. But Hawthorne is moreinterested in drawing from life as he has observed it than in speculat-ing on an inverted moral system, though he occasionally allows HesterPrynne and Zenobia to do so.

Hollingsworth may not be the only utopic prison guard. The penalsystem itself and panopticism can be understood, in Foucault’s phrase,


as technologies of power. In an increasingly panoptic society, mecha-nisms of power try to ‘‘frame the everyday lives of individuals’’ sothat their society ‘‘assumes responsibility for and places under surveil-lance their everyday behavior, their identity, their activity’’ (DP, 77).This is not just a utopian conception but one that bears a resemblanceto the sense of authority closest at hand in a novel, that of author-ship. Miles Coverdale’s system of narration seems rather like the oneFoucault finds throughout contemporary society but especially in theprison: ‘‘Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique ofa power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments ofits exercise’’ (DP, 170). Because this objectification of people is partof Zenobia’s critique of Coverdale, neither the entire novel nor theentire genre can be condemned. Foucault’s definition of discipline, infact, seems applicable to the novel as a genre, but a novel, of course, isnot about real people. To observe real people is invasive, so we mustuse instruments like Zola’s experimental French novel, in which char-acters are invented to suffer, separate from readers who judge them,so that their privacy may only be hypothetically violated, as readerskeep their hands clean of all but the blood of ink.

The movement from epic to novel has been described as democra-tizing in its embrace of people of all social ranks, a textual corollary tothe French Revolution’s idea of equality and the often qualified ideain the United States, later echoed throughout Latin America, that allare created equal. The Yugoslavian writer Danilo Kiš has marvelouslyyoked the rise of the novel and the French Revolution in his The En-cyclopedia of the Dead.33 In Kiš’s story, the apocryphal Encyclopedia,begun after the French Revolution, has an entry for every person whoever lived and died. Functioning like a novel, each entry lists enoughinformation about every dead person to differentiate him or her as anindividual. Found in Stockholm, Sweden, in the basement below thelibrary of the Academy in which the Nobel Prize winners are decided,The Encyclopedia of the Dead is meant to commemorate and honor theindividuality of all those people deemed unimportant by the cultureat large.

The assumption of a novel is that every human life is precious andimportant, yet in the context of Foucault’s description of a state inter-est in the details of everyone’s daily life, this democratic literaturesuddenly seems totalitarian: ‘‘For a long time ordinary individuality—the everyday individuality of everybody—remained below the thresh-


old of description. To be looked at, observed, described in detail, fol-lowed from day to day by an uninterrupted writing, was a privilege.The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, writ-ten as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of power’’ (DP,191). The movement from ballads singing the praise of criminals asvictims, saints, and martyrs to a warden’s files seems to mimic themove from epic to novel, described by the Russian formalist MikhailBakhtin, in a terrible and distorted fashion: ‘‘This turning of real livesinto writing is no longer a procedure of heroization; it functions asa procedure of objectification and subjection’’ (DP, 192);34 the moreobserved, the less individual one becomes. The move from epic tonovel would then involve a decline of individualization ‘‘inscribed inthe formation of a disciplinary society’’ (DP, 193). The police are inthe details.35 Still, if the novel as an historic formation can be arguedto arise out of this modern form of discipline, does it mean that thenovel is limited to exercising this form of power?

In a work supplemental to Foucault’s, John Bender describes thestructural similarities between the penitentiary system and the novelin eighteenth-century England, from where, he hypothesizes, the ideaof the modern penitentiary comes. (One may be tempted to use thetardy entry of the United States into the industrial revolution as thebasis for applying similar theories, but by the 1850s, literature andthe prison system in the United States seem to have been on a parwith those in Britain.) Bender bases most of his argument on whatmay be only a quibble with the work of Bakhtin: I would argue thatthe polyvocal novel is in fact written by one person and, in my formu-lation, merely points the way to understanding a many-voiced worldthrough imagination. To Bender, novels are a way of rigidly emplottingcharacters’ lives in a method that will be repeated by the reformistconception of penitentiaries.36 Bender applies his formulation not toall the novels in his century and country of study but only to a few byDefoe and one by Fielding, plus the graphics of Hogarth and a play byGay. His theory might not work so well with novels more in the spiritof Cervantes, such asTristram Shandy, that revel in the discontinuitiesin reality and in attempts to understand and represent it. To Bakhtin,the novel represents freedom; to Bender, the penitentiary, but Bakh-tin is talking about freedom for readers and writers and Bender aboutcharacters. Actually, the trouble Bender has with Bakhtin one mighthave with any formalist (though Bender identifies the Russian as a so-


cialist critic) if one is not totally convinced of the autonomy of worksof art.37 The limitation of Bender’s argument is that he uses Foucaultto condemn the genre of the novel. A more fruitful, less general way tounderstand the relation of prison and society is to consider Foucaultand Hawthorne as two authors with similar interests in the punish-ment system and in social organization, who write in different forms atdifferent times and with different conceptions that make supplementalinsights possible as they observe similar tendencies.

While making stories is an omnipresent human activity, in Cer-vantine novels that partake in what Carlos Fuentes has named ‘‘thecritique of reading,’’ the process of emplotment is made explicit.38

Blaming the novel for circumscribing freedom seems odd; a critic’sinclination just as easily could make one think of literature as a typeof nomadic, antistate thought, as Deleuze and Guattari regard it.39 Dopeople not put the world into narrative form, whether they are reform-ers looking at convicts’ lives and trying to emplot them as conversionstories or novelists succumbing to the conventions of plot, as Haw-thorne does when his nonconforming woman drowns? 40 The novelsBender discusses are grouped under the rubric of realism, with its‘‘willing suspension of disbelief,’’ whereas when Hawthorne says he iswriting a romance and not a novel, he may, for the purpose of my dis-cussion, be understood to be writing a novel that does not conform tothe unambiguous suspension of disbelief involved in the realistic novel(in the hope of presenting a more ambiguous reality). Hawthorne isnot exclusively interested in the city of realism but also in its suburbsand bedroom communities, its underground passageways and attics.While the novels Bender studies may be considered realism—thoughthey predate by a century the 1826 introduction in French literarycriticism of the term réalisme—they are not reality; one would ex-pect a bit more subtlety in differentiating reality from literary realism.Certainly Hawthorne was responding to literature that comes withinBender’s focus—the classics of eighteenth-century British fiction—and to its use of prisons. Yet The Blithedale Romance has no omniscientnarration, the transparent system that Bender finds totalitarian.

Hawthorne seems to sidestep critics like Bender by the claims ofindeterminacy in his preface, where he indicates exactly where in thereal world his readers should not be looking. In a letter to GeorgeWilliam Curtis, he assures the travel writer, who spent some of hisyouth at Brook Farm, that Blithedale has nothing to do with that com-


munity, just as his House of the Seven Gables is a house of fiction built‘‘of materials long in use for constructing castles in the air.’’ 41 Benderdoesn’t seem to accept characters as characters when he says that wesee people in life as characters in fiction.42 If we compare a prisoner inthe world to a character in a novel and determine that both are slaves,we have begged the question about the difference between reality andliterature. Hawthorne says from the beginning that his types are notreal people. Do we willingly suspend disbelief when considering thesocial system? Bender says, ‘‘In first-person narratives like Defoe’sor in epistolary fictions like Richardson’s, we may question what acharacter says or does but not the concept of character itself.’’ In Haw-thorne, character is less stable. An oddity in Bender’s argument is itsfailure to take into account the fact that fiction says it is fiction but peni-tentiaries say they are real.43 Even if the penitentiary has rules that are‘‘one and the same as those that govern consciousness itself,’’ manyreaders would probably rather have a consciousness than a twenty-year sentence.44 It is less likely that the novel imprisons charactersthan that the critical eye, metaphorically speaking, imprisons a genreon trumped-up charges. In any event, the novel is likely to break out.

In nineteenth-century England, Bender argues, philosophers likeBentham used novelistic conceptions to explain ‘‘the paradoxical mod-ern conception of a self at once isolated and transparent to view,’’based on the idea that ‘‘[t]ransparency is the convention that both au-thor and beholder are absent from a representation.’’ 45 Hawthorne,however, prefers translucency, presenting Blithedale to his readers inat least two authorial guises, the author of the preface and the poetMiles Coverdale, who would like to be omniscient but whose authorityis questioned by both the other characters and attentive readers whopick up the contradictions in his story. And yet there is only one au-thor of Blithedale, Nathaniel Hawthorne. The narrative is, like much ofHawthorne’s fiction, about the omnipresence of prisons, real and imag-ined, their inevitability. But it is also about the possibility of escape.

New Jersey City University

Notes

I am grateful to Wayne D. Fields for much-needed help and encouragementwith this essay.1 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, vol. 1 of The Centenary Edition of


the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus:Ohio State Univ. Press, 1962), 47, 48; further references to The ScarletLetter will be to this volume and will be cited parenthetically in the textas SL.

2 Thomas More, Utopia. 2d ed., ed. and trans. Robert M. Adams (1516; NewYork: Norton, 1992), 62.

3 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 109; further references will beto this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as DP.

4 If happy slavery does not stretch the bounds of plausibility in More’s fan-tastic creation, there is also the practice of having slaves wear chainsof gold in order to discourage the rest of the population from greed andthe desire for individual wealth (Utopia, 59). A runaway slave laden withgold chains might indeed do very well outside the island of Utopia.

5 See Foucault,DP; and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflec-tions on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso,1991). Not that Hawthorne needed either theorist. The quick construc-tion of prison doors in the new world is clear enough. As for the relationof utopian communities and the state, according to Ralph Waldo Emer-son in ‘‘The Young American,’’ the alternative communities in Massa-chusetts came about through dissatisfaction with the State: ‘‘Witness toothe spectacle of three Communities. . . . These proceeded from a varietyof motives . . . in a great part from a feeling that the true offices of theState, the State had let fall to the ground’’ (Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essaysand Lectures, ed. Joel Porte [New York: Library of America, 1983], 235).

6 Hawthorne also incorporates the private, unofficial torture of Dimmes-dale by Chillingworth, which occurs at a time when punishment waspublic so as to involve the community in the process.

7 Likewise, in the story ‘‘Endicott and the Red Cross,’’ there ‘‘appearedthat important engine of Puritanic authority, the whipping-post,’’ as wellas the pillory, stocks, sandwich labels, tongue restraints, halters, andevidence of judicial mutilation and branding. (Hawthorne, ‘‘Endicott andthe Red Cross,’’ in Twice-Told Tales, vol. 9 of The Centenary Edition ofthe Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. [Columbus:Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974], 434).

8 What precisely Hawthorne wanted to say inThe Blithedale Romance aboutsocial reform is not clear from the narrative. Indeed, the difficulty thecharacters have in renaming Blithedale is oddly mirrored in Hawthorne’strouble and anxiety in naming the book. The first page of Manuscript573 of the Pierpont Morgan Library’s collection reads, in Hawthorne’sbold hand: ‘‘Hollingsworth: a Romance.’’ This title is crossed out just asboldly, then reinscribed, ‘‘The Blithedale Romance.’’ In a letter of 2 May1852 to Edwin Percy Whipple asking for help with the manuscript andwith choosing a title, Hawthorne explains that he had settled on ‘‘Holl-


ingsworth’’ for a title because the blacksmith turned prison reformer hadbeen the impetus for his fictive meditations: ‘‘I wish, at least, you wouldhelp me to choose a name. I have put ‘Hollingsworth,’ on the title-page,but that is not irrevocable; although, I think, the best that has occurredto me—as presenting the original figure about which the rest of the bookclustered itself’’ (The Letters, 1843–1853, vol. 16 of The Centenary Editionof the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. [Colum-bus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1985], 536). Hollingsworth is the last of themajor characters to enter the narrative, and he does so dramatically, firstbecoming de facto spiritual leader of the Blithedale project, then causinginstability. The novel’s conclusion focuses on Hollingsworth’s fate in rela-tion to his grandiose dreams. What was Hawthorne’s intention in almostchoosing as the title for his narrative about community ‘‘Hollingsworth:A Romance’’? What is implied in Hollingsworth’s vocational shift fromblacksmith to reformer of the penal system? How does the creation of autopia ‘‘cluster itself’’ around the idea of prison reform? Could this novel,almost titled for a character who preaches from the same stone pulpit asJohn Eliot, the seventeenth-century Apostle to the Algonquins, be readas a nineteenth-century version of the life of Eliot?

9 The relation between the reform of criminals and the loss of the soul’s au-tonomy is made explicit in the much later and less realistic A ClockworkOrange. In this futuristic novel of a Russified Britain, fifteen-year-old pris-oner Alex is treated for his criminality and cured by a chemical remedymore efficient than the state jail (Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange[1962; New York: Penguin, 1972]). Alex later becomes an object on dis-play, ‘‘a little machine capable only of good’’ (122)—an ideal subject ofthe State. Hawthorne’s famous ambivalence might have applauded thereformation of criminals, but he would have accused of evil those whodid such reforming.

10 More than social reform movements, mesmerism can be seen as a dis-arming use of the power of community, most distasteful when it apesand exceeds the intimacy of romantic love and dangerously sinful whenit threatens to breach the boundaries of the individual by ‘‘reading’’ themind and controlling the will. Because the characters’ participation inthe Blithedale communal experiment begins and ends with public mes-merism, all the events are bathed in its suspect glow.

11 Hawthorne, ‘‘A Select Party,’’ in Mosses from an Old Manse, vol. 10 ofThe Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. WilliamCharvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1985), 53, 57.

12 More said, ‘‘[I]f it had not been for my wife and ye that be my children(whom I account the chief part of my charge) I would not have failed longere this to have closed myself in as straight a room, and straighter too’’(quoted in William Roper, The Mirrour of Vertue in Worldly Greatnes, or


The Life of Sir Thomas More, Knight, sometime Lord Chancellor of England.[1626; London: De la More Press, 1902], 74).

13 Margaret Fuller is among Hawthorne’s contemporaries who appear inThe Blithedale Romance; in fact, Fuller’s presence so hovers over thenovel’s proceedings that when Priscilla delivers to Coverdale a lettersupposedly from Fuller, Priscilla suddenly looks, Coverdale reports, likeFuller herself (The Blithedale Romance, in ‘‘The Blithedale Romance’’ and‘‘Fanshaw,’’ vol. 3 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Haw-thorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press,1964), 52; further references to The Blithedale Romance will be to thisvolume and will be cited parenthetically in the text as BR.

14 Margaret Fuller, ‘‘Thanksgiving,’’ New York Tribune, 12 December 1844;reprinted in Margaret Fuller’s New York Journalism: A Biographical Essayand Key Writings, ed. Catherine C. Mitchell (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennes-see Press, 1995), 177; further references to this source will be cited par-enthetically in the text as MFJ.

15 Foucault’s point is similar but expressed in opposite terms. For him, thebirth of the prison is also the birth of the individual soul—but a type ofsoul that would have horrified Fuller or Hawthorne.

16 Although prison historians describe many similarly radical reformers,Kent Bales claims that Hollingsworth’s ideas are rare (see ‘‘The BlithedaleRomance: Coverdale’s Mean and Subversive Egotism,’’ Bucknell Review21 [fall 1973]: 60–82).

17 Alexis de Tocqueville,Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Henry Reeve,Francis Bowen, and Phillips Bradley, 2 vols. (1835, 1840; reprint, NewYork: Vintage, 1990), 1:257.

18 Ibid., 1:257. Both Phillips Bradley and Daniel J. Boorstein point outTocqueville’s introduction of the word individualism (x, xiv).

19 Larry E. Sullivan, The Prison Reform Movement: Forlorn Hope (Boston:Twayne, 1990), 2. The subtitle ‘‘Forlorn Hope’’ is a reference to what thelegislative committee member Stephen Allen said about the desire to re-form confirmed villains (10); further references to this source will becited parenthetically in the text as PRM.

20 William James Forsythe, The Reform of Prisoners 1830–1900 (New York:St. Martin’s, 1987), 3.

21 See Emerson, ‘‘Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England’’(1883), in vol. 10 of The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–04), 352. Seealso The Bostonians, in which it is said of Basil Ransom, ‘‘He, too, had aprivate vision of reform, but the first principle was to reform the reform-ers’’ (Henry James, The Bostonians [Oxford, Eng.: Oxford Univ. Press,1992], 16). Ransom is at once a Coverdale and a Hollingsworth figure.

22 There is perhaps little reason to be convinced by Sullivan’s claim, since


calling an outcome ‘‘the actual goal’’ is not a rigorous method of proof,but his conviction that society craves revenge forms a rhetorically usefulbalance to the ideas of reformers who posit a society of compassion.

23 Foucault and Michael Ignatieff were ‘‘distrustful of those engaged in re-formatory endeavors, and they consistently doubted that these were inserious ways dedicated either to the human value of their charges orthe importance of the social inclusion of prisoners’’; ‘‘ ‘counter-reformists’. . . have accused [Ignatieff] and Foucault of mistaking reformist propa-ganda for actual development’’ (Forsythe, Reform of Prisoners, 7). For-sythe thinks the reformists, though, did have substantial influence. SeeIgnatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revo-lution, 1750–1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

24 Hawthorne, Grandfather’s Chair, in True Stories from History and Biogra-phy, vol. 6 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne,ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1972), 212.Further references to Grandfather’s Chair will be to this volume and willbe cited parenthetically in the text as GC.

25 In Hope Leslie, Catharine Maria Sedgwick defines the Pilgrims as ‘‘a com-munity of professed reformers,’’ perhaps thinking of the Reformation(Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts, ed. Mary Kelley [1827;New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987], 27). In Sedgwick’s ver-sion, Eliot is seen as no more than a slight contrast to the ruling Puri-tans—jovial men—but he is placed within the story as the opposite ofThomas Morton, who is pictured as a seething maniac. The fictive nar-rator of Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok states: ‘‘In this enlightened andliberal age, it is perhaps too fashionable to look back upon those earlysufferers in the cause of the Reformation, as a band of dark, discontentedbigots’’ (Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians, ed. Carolyn L. Karcher[New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1986], 6).

26 Part of the Spanish state’s justification for baptizing Indians was that itmade them (as Moors were not) subject to church law. Reforming Catho-lic clergy, such as Bartolomé de las Casas, were opposed to mass baptism.

27 In The House of the Seven Gables, even after his release from prison, Clif-ford, as well as Hepzibah, cannot go out: ‘‘They could not flee; their jailorhad but left the door ajar, in mockery, and stood behind it, to watch themstealing out. . . . What jailor so inexorable as one’s self!’’ (The House of theSeven Gables, vol. 2 of the The Centenary Edition of the Works of NathanielHawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. [Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press,1964], 169). The self should be a jailor; if not, there are buildings. In thetwentieth century, Superman is the being with X-ray eyes who makes thePanopticon unnecessary. In the last line of the first movie in the series,Superman says: ‘‘Don’t thank me, Warden. We’re all part of the sameteam.’’

28 Forsythe, Reform of Prisoners, 8.


29 Ibid., 11.30 Much ink has been spilled differentiating novels and romances in the

English-speaking world. Criticism that does not make this distinction,such as that of Mikhail Bakhtin, is underused in the study of romances.It may be that Hawthorne calls his work a romance in the way that, a cen-tury later, writers would claim to write ‘‘antinovels’’ (which were novels)and ‘‘antiplays’’ (which were plays) in order to slough off conventions ofreading and writing associated with a genre.

31 This new exercise of power would not have to be in the architecturalform of the panopticon. Gossip would do as a panopticon either in theold form of folks talking behind each other’s backs or in the journalismthat would eventually include even the upper class in Henry James’s TheReverberator: ‘‘[P]ower had to be given the instrument of permanent, ex-haustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible, as longas it could itself remain invisible. It had to be like a faceless gaze thattransformed the whole social body into a field of perception: thousands ofeyes posted everywhere’’ ( James, introduction to The Reverberator [1888;New York: Grove, 1979], 214).

32 DP, 289. Foucault’s quotations are from La Phalange, 10 January 1837and 1 December 1838.

33 Danilo Kiš, The Encyclopedia of the Dead, trans. Michael Henry Heim(1989; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1991), 37–66.

34 Bakhtin observes that in the plot of many novels, ‘‘Everyday life is thelowest sphere of existence from which the hero tries to liberate himself’’(The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emersonand Michael Holquist [Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981], 121). Unlike[his] counterparts in forms like the epic, the novel’s hero builds an un-official world view that applies only to himself: ‘‘In the epic there is oneunitary and singular belief system. In the novel there are many such beliefsystems, with the hero generally acting within his own system’’ (334).

35 What Foucault in Discipline and Punish and Hawthorne in The BlithedaleRomance do not quite acknowledge—perhaps because of the importanceof publishing to both their lives, and of lecturing to Foucault’s—is howmuch some people like to be observed and how much they tend to ob-serve themselves.

36 Bakhtin, John Bender complains, ‘‘largely neglects the containment ofheterodoxy effected within the realist mode, where narration itself in-visibly controls, contains, and becomes authoritative’’ (Imagining thePenitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-CenturyEngland [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987], 213). Bakhtin discussesnovels outside realism because they are more heteroglossic. Benderstates: ‘‘I deny Bakhtin’s rather romantic insistence that the novel tran-scends the hegemony of official culture. I stress, instead, the ways inwhich realism, and especially the convention of transparency, enables the


novel to participate in the containment, control, and reformation of so-cial life’’; ‘‘narrative coherence forged from multiple voices delineates au-thority, government, and reality itself’’ (257 n. 136). Certainly if Bakhtinclaims that ‘‘the novel transcends . . . official culture,’’ this is a ‘‘romantic’’claim, in that transcendence is associated with romanticism. But Bakhtinthinks the novel can complicate the simplicity of ‘‘official culture.’’

37 To borrow Bakhtin’s formulation, the difference between formalism andsocialism is not written in heaven. Bakhtin insists that ‘‘[f]orm and con-tent in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is asocial phenomenon’’ (Dialogic Imagination, 259).

38 Carlos Fuentes, Don Quixote or, The Critique of Reading [Austin, Tex.:Institute of Latin American Studies, 1976]; reprint, ‘‘Cervantes, or TheCritique of Reading,’’ in Myself with Others: Selected Essays [New York:Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988], 49–71). The title ‘‘Cervantes, or TheCritique of Reading’’ works much better in the Spanish, Cervantes, o lacritica de la lectura, because of the last word’s resemblance to locura,or madness. Bender’s structuralism, in this respect, seems rather quix-otic. His condemnation of the novel, based on a few realist apples, createsstereotypes rather than precise distinctions.

39 These philosophers point out that, in putting their books together, eachof them wrote as if they were many authors at once (see Gilles Deleuzeand Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987], 3).

40 Hawthorne’s drowned woman seems to come out of the used image shopof romanticism rather than from his memory of seeing a drowned girl’scorpse at Brook Farm. Englishman Thomas Hood’s poem ‘‘The Bridgeof Sighs,’’ which configures the social phenomenon of the abandonedwoman’s suicide (Collected Poems [1854; reprint, Oxford, Eng.: OxfordUniv. Press, 1970], 167), inspired an outpouring of literary and artis-tic representations of the drowned body of the abandoned woman (seeLinda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power, and Other Essays [New York:Harper, 1988]). In an article on the reformation of prostitutes, MargaretFuller praised Hood’s poem as ‘‘more touching and forcible than any thingthat has been or is likely to be written on this subject’’ (NYJ, 96). Haw-thorne’s description of Zenobia’s corpse mirrors Hood’s description ofthe dead woman’s face: a ‘‘Last look despairing / Fix’d on futurity.’’ Thosewho find her body are told to ‘‘Cross her hands humbly, / As if prayingdumbly’’(lines 100–101, 92–93). Hawthorne’s drowned woman, however,is not to be dolled up funeral-parlor style—over her dead body, as it were.Her hands, frozen in a prayer-like pose, suggest that if there will be anattitude of prayer, she will be responsible for it, not the men who findthe corpse; thus her prayer will be mixed with resistance. Both women,though, will look toward ‘‘futurity’’—Hood’s woman apologetically at hermaker, Zenobia toward the future of struggle.


41 Hawthorne to George William Curtis, 14 July 1852, Letters, 1843–1853,569. Michel de Certeau notes: ‘‘Haunted places are the only ones peoplecan live in—and this inverts the schema of the Panopticon’’ (The Practiceof Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall [Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ.of California Press, 1984], 108).

42 Bender seems to have a paranoiac’s view of the history of the novel,whereas a writer like Thomas Pynchon, who has a paranoiac’s view ofhistory, places great faith in the possibilities of the novel.

43 Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, 212. Bender could have made a moreinteresting comparison by exploring why in English a prison term isnamed for the basic grammatical unit: a sentence. William H. Gass’s char-acter William Kohler does so in The Tunnel, when he says he is ‘‘Sen-tenced to sentences’’ and then tries to use all types of sentences as escapetunnels (New York: Knopf, 1995), 482.

44 Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, 228. He also notes: ‘‘[P]enitentiariesassumed novelistic ideas of character . . . to reconstruct the fictions ofpersonal identity that underlie consciousness’’ (2). If this is true, theyassumed particularly vulgar ideas about novels.

45 Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, 201.

Documents

Fictions of Panoptican Prison and Utopia in Works of Hawthorn