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• W2022892842 abstract "CONSIDERING POSSESSION IN THE SCARLET LETTER Ellen Weinauer University of Southern Mississippi In the much-discussed first line of The Custom-House, Nathaniel Hawthorne announces not only his text's complicated attitude toward its audience , but also its even more complicated treatment of issues of demonic possession. It is a little remarkable, Hawthorne writes, that—though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends—an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public.1 This line is interesting, of course, for what it suggests about Hawthorne's discomfort with the autobiographical mode. It is also interesting, I think, for the particular and peculiar trope with which Hawthorne figures that discomfort. In suggesting that the desire to disclose has taken possession of me, Hawthorne intriguingly presents himself as the resistant victim of a sort of witchcraft, as one whose subjective mastery has been undermined by an apparently irresistible and demonic force. Nor do these associations end here: indeed, the trope of demonic possession that is launched in this line makes insistent, one might even say obsessive , re-appearances in The Custom-House. This old town of Salem, Hawthorne tells us early in the sketch, possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here (11). Hawthorne attempts to explain this hold by describing ancestral connections, noting that the figure of that first ancestor . . . still haunts me (12), and that he feels tied to Salem as by a spell (14). Later, when he has found the scarlet letter in the second story of the Custom House but cannot, as he articulates it, bring the dead corpses of the narrative characters to life, those corpses stare at him with a fixed and ghastly grin: 'What have you to do with us?' that expression seemed to say. 'The little power you might once have possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone!' (34). Hawthorne cannot create: a wretched numbness held possession of me (35). He is haunted by a suspicion that [his] intellect is dwindling away (37) and that he has lost the poor properties of his mind (39); he suggests that the man in civil service is, if ejected from office, haunt[ed] by a hope that he will be restored to office (38); having himself been ejected from his position as Custom-House surveyor, he describes his now positionless and figurative self as one who has been decapitated and is writing from beyond the grave (42). With these descriptions, Hawthorne provides us with a return to and redaction of one of his most prevalent themes: the perils of authorship, which 94Ellen Weinauer he variously figures in his sketches, short stories, and novels as both dangerously powerful and dangerously disempowering. It is precisely in the context of issues of craft and creativity—in the context of issues of literary power— that critics such as Millicent Bell, Maria Tatar, and Samuel Chase Coale have read Hawthorne's treatment ofwitchcraft, mesmerism, spiritualism, and other popular supernaturalisms.2 Hawthorne himself makes an explicit link between his authorship and witchcraft, in a letter commenting upon the furor that ensued in Salem in the wake of the publication of The Custom-House. Writing to Horatio Bridge, Hawthorne noted that my preliminary chapter has caused the greatest uproar that ever happened here since witch-times. Through his authorship of this apparently incendiary sketch, Hawthorne becomes in his own configuration much like the Salem witches—a heretic who will only with great good luck be able to escape from town without being tarred-and-feathered.3 It is undeniable, I think, that Hawthorne's use of metaphors of witchcraft and demonic possession signals complex attitudes toward the act of literary creation; but it is also worth noting that, unlike in his letter to Bridge, in The Custom-House Hawthorne is, for the most part, not the witch but the victim of witchcraft, not the demonic possessor but the demonically (dis)possessed. Taking note of this, I want to offer another way of reading the issue of witchcraft in The..." @default.
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• W2022892842 title "Considering Possession in The Scarlet Letter" @default.
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