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E. Shaskan Bumas

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

(Article)
Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/al/summary/v073/73.1bumas.html

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E. Shaskan
Bumas

Fictions of the Panopticon:

Prison, Utopia, and the Out-Penitent
in the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne

he great utopian writers from Plato through

Thomas More explained their social worlds by contrasting them with
imaginary, transcendent, perfect societies; but increasingly since
Michel Foucaults Discipline and Punish (1975), the prison system has
served as metaphor for and immanent microcosm of society. Both
the prison and utopia are well-developed structures in the ction of
Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letters rst chapter is The PrisonDoor, the second sentence of which reads, The founders of a new
colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might
originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest
practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison, the latter a black
ower of civilized society. 1 Such new colonies would have included
the nineteen Praying Indian communities founded in the seventeenth
century by the Reverend John Eliot, who was greatly admired by Hawthorne, visited by Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter, and taken as a
role model in The Blithedale Romance by the prison reformer Hollingsworth. Blithedales narrator, Miles Coverdale, is excited by the idea of
a cemetery and Hollingsworth by the idea of a prison, with which he
would like to replace the utopian colony of Blithedale. Mores apocryphal Utopia, however, had no prisons; a two-tiered justice system
provided pleasant slavery for a rst oense and execution for a twotime loser.2 The approach to managing criminals in Mores sixteenthcentury Utopia is like the one Foucault nds in the nineteenth-century
chain gang: The ideal would be for the convict to appear as a sort
of rentable property: a slave at the service of all. 3 Whats more, in
American Literature, Volume 73, Number 1, March 2001. Copyright 2001 by Duke
University Press.

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Utopia the punishment is so just and humane that a convict would

rather be a slave than free in another country with a dierent social
organization.4 (Here one imagines More drawing from Plato rather
than from life.) Perhaps the relation of utopia and prison occurs in
Hawthornes ction because of his interest in how society works, particularly in how his nation works. And according to Foucaults Chronology, the idea of the nation emerged at approximately the same time
that modern states were dened by their prison systems.5
Systems of punishment gure prominently in Hawthornes romances. The title The Scarlet Letter refers to Hester Prynnes social
exile; The House of the Seven Gables relates the story of Cliord Pyncheon after his release from prison and his subsequent move into
a more gothically arranged, enclosed space; The Blithedale Romance
centers itself around the gure of the prison reformer Hollingsworth;
and The Marble Faun concludes with the imprisonment of the eshand-blood faun. In the three American romances, Hawthorne deals
with temporally specic forms of punishment. Hester Prynnes physical humiliation on the scaold (an ocial version of Major Molineux
tarred and feathered) reminds readers of days before the penitentiary.6
The scaold, the narrator explains, was held, in the old time, to be
as eectual an agent in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was
the guillotine among the terrorists of France, though in the country where people were titled citizen, citizenship and punishment
would have had dierent meanings (SL, 58).7 In The House of the Seven
Gables, Cliords imprisonment is a more humane punishment than
Hesters (in Hesters day he would have been executed), despite its
incorrect justication: he is guilty only of blundering between a more
powerful man and the object of that mans greed. But prison has broken 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 that
could be attributed to his hand. His association with the young couple,
Phoebe Pyncheon and Holgrave, however, makes him a slightly more
productive member of society. Of course Cliord is constantly in danger of being locked away again, not because of any crime or parole
violation but because he is suspected of being insane, a condition functionally analogous, from the point of the view of the state, to being a
criminal.
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 be

corrected by appealing to their potential virtue.8 Hollingsworths mission, like that of the Apostle John Eliot, is christianizing savage criminals and saving their soulsthat is, making them conform.9 Whether
or not this correction of the soul is possible, success probably would
have seemed to Hawthorne too much like the mesmerism he abhorred, in which one person draws too close to the soul of another.10
One strand of prison reform in the United States and Europe grew
out of religion; indeed, the term penitentiary is borrowed from religious discourse. This type of reform began with the idea of innate
depravity, so dear to the Puritans, who in consequence of their election considered themselves a bit less depraved than others but bound
to be more penitent. Two centuries later, the Puritan view remains
evident in prison structures that copy the architecture and organization of the monastery, presumably to bring prisoners closer to God by
encouraging a more contemplative life, which in turn would produce
behavior approved by the state, the church, and social reformers. In
Hawthornes allegorical A Select Party (1844), the architecture of
the Castle in the Air, the home of A Man of Fancy, resembles that
of a monastery or a state prison, as well as a utopic, even paradisaical
place: [T]he airy castle looked like a feudal fortress, or a monastery
of the middle ages, or a state-prison of our own times, rather than the
home of pleasure and repose he intended it to be. 11 In Hawthornes
Castle in the Air, monastery and prison architectures converge to
aord protection, impose order, and facilitate spiritual contemplation.
In Utopia, More congures a similar social withdrawal as the means
for self-improvement and closeness to God; implicit in the dialogue of
Utopia is Mores own conict between living a productive public life
and longing to withdraw from the world, like a cloistered monk, in
avoidance of sin.12 The nineteenth-century prison reform movement
aimed to construct a hyper-organized utopian environment that would
force withdrawal from the world and encourage devotion to God, leading to the elimination of sin.
When creating his prison reformer in the utopian community of
Blithedale, Hawthorne would have known of the sin-no-more style
of reform advocated by the New York Prison Association so beloved
of Margaret Fuller.13 Fuller makes the connection between the Puritan
past and 1840s prison reform in an article for the New York Tribune in
which she proposes reecting on the Pilgrims intentions: Yet how

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much nobler, more exhilarating and purer would be the atmosphere

of that circle if the design of its pious founders were remembered by
those who partake [in] this festival. 14 In the shadow of the Puritans,
she nds much of life in the United States unworthy, but for this
present day appointed for Thanksgiving, we know of causes not so
loudly proclaimed why we should give thanks (MFJ, 178). Although
prison reformers goals and the Puritans idea of the souls depravity
seem fundamentally in opposition, Fuller uses Thanksgiving Day to
unite them across two centuries:
We recognized as a happy omen that there is cause for thanksgiving
and that our people may be better than they seem, [given] the meeting last week to organize an Association for the benet of Prisoners.
. . . The prisoner, too, may become a man. Neither his open nor
our secret faults, must utterly dismay us. We will treat him as if he
had a soul. . . . We will give him some crumbs from the table which
grace from above and parent love below have spread for us, and,
perhaps, he will recover from these ghastly ulcers that deform him
now. (MFJ, 179)
Criminality, then, is the symptom of something curable. Many of Fullers pro-reform articles for the Tribune, based on her outings with
the Reverend Channing, discuss both prisons and asylums together.
The conditions of prison and asylum inmates provided her with opportunities to criticize the organization of her society, as Foucault
would 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 had
a soul, he could be saved; he could be controlled. And the conditions
of all citizens could be improved. For the Puritans, misdeeds could
be punished, not cured; Fuller uses the Puritan legacy for her own
purposes, reforming the Puritans through historical revision by borrowing their idea of a cause for thanksgiving.
In The Blithedale Romance, Hollingsworth has a strange, and, as
most people thought it, impracticable plan for the reformation of criminals, through an appeal to their higher instincts (BR, 36). In his plans
dependence on the inuence of good will, it seems as impracticable
and void of common sense as any utopian systemand susceptible to
the abuses of ill will. Coverdale is not interested in Hollingsworths
scheme because it deals with socially marginal people, whereas Cover-

Prison, Utopia, and the Out-Penitent in Hawthorne 125

dale is trying to reform the bourgeoisie by transforming their urban

existence into something more bucolic. Hollingsworths idea for
prison reform is in keeping with the conclusions Fuller attributes to
the Matron of the Female Department at Sing-Sing, Eliza Wood
Burnhans Farnham (18151864), who species that no punishment
could be more severe than the unseen, quiet restraints of a moral system (MFJ, 107). The most eective reform the matron nds is the
use 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 apt
metaphor for U.S. society, we should remember that the rst great
commentator on the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville, visited from
1831 through 1832 specically to observe the U.S. prison system for
possible adaptation to French needs. Tocqueville took note of the
eects of democratic equality on the nation at large, including social changes he realized would soon sweep the world. His observations widened into the two-volume Democracy in America (1835, 1840),
though only once in the rst volume does he mention prisons. The
United States is, Tocqueville fears, too open to change. Looking back
to when for the rst time [in the United States] the idea of reforming as well as punishing the delinquent formed a part of prison discipline, he nds prison reform haphazard.17 With reformers attention
turned primarily to the new, model prison systems, the great majority
of prisons, he predicts, will become even more barbaric, and given
the rapid rate at which laws change in a democracy, he fears the
majoritys tyranny. With change toward equality inevitable, he sees
equality as a threat to individualism. (The word individualism rst
enters English when Tocquevilles book is translated.) In the prison
reform movement, then, Tocqueville nds proof that [i]n America
the pressure for social improvements is vastly greater, but less continuous
than in Europe, and therefore democracy is more likely to become
tyranny.18 Reform, in fact, might breed tyranny.
In the late eighteenth century, according to Larry Sullivans The
Prison Reform Movement, the stated aim of penology was to eradicate evil human behavior and cleanse the soul of sin. 19 While William
James 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 history, 20 from the 1820s on, prisons were associated with reform. The

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cultural supposition that prisons should change as well as conne

criminals set up an interesting microcosm for those teetotalers, abolitionists, and utopians who were interested in improving all of society.
Emersons distance from the reform movements of his day was necessary, he said, because he wanted to reform the reformers.21 But Emersons desire is similar to what the prison reform advocates wanted: to
reform the system of reforming criminals.
According to Sullivan, the problem with prison reform is its fundamental deception: Punishmentthe revenge ritualis the actual
goal of the penal system; but reformers have continuously deceived
themselves with the goals of deterrence and rehabilitation. They have
attempted to ameliorate or cleanse society by reforming its deviants;
and since the late-eighteenth century, the primary method of reform
has been imprisonment (PRM, 2).22 Early prison reformers wanted
criminals to deviate no more. To Foucault, the modern penal system
in its attempt to control deviance is a form of hegemony; Sullivan, however, disagrees, arguing that reformers dont want to control people,
only to uplift those who [have] fallen (PRM, 4). What the reformers
likely called the Fear of God may have seemed more like the Fear of
the State to Foucault. Hawthorne, too, was wary of the states power
and skeptical about relying on its judgments for enforcing morality.
The threat of Cliord Pyncheons reincarceration, for example, comes
from his cousin, the powerful Judge Pyncheon, who seems on his
way to becoming governor of Massachusetts. While Hester Prynne is
often the subject of ocial religious sermons, she makes a plausible
antinomian case that her adulterous relationship with the Reverend
Dimmesdale had a consecration of its own, a case that points to the
inability of the state and church to identify variations of original sin as
well as exceptions to the rule (SL, 179). Yet the scarlet letter adorning
her breast successfully reforms her in the eyes of those who have the
power to make her wear it, and even in her own.
In Hawthornes time, revenge as the justication for punishment
was being replaced by the desire to cure criminality, although it is not
clear how a cure was to result from the longer sentences reformers
demanded.23 Some criminologists, such as Sullivan, are not convinced
that reformation is possible under any circumstances, believing that
just punishment should be provided according to the severity deemed
appropriate by the society. Foucault charts the shift from punishment
as a spectacle for all (as with Hester Prynne) to the viewing of crimi-

Prison, Utopia, and the Out-Penitent in Hawthorne 127

nals only by the powers that be (as with Cliord, who is evaluated by
Judge Pyncheon). In Blithedale, Hawthorne deals with the transitional
time when public torture or humiliation was being replaced by what
seemed a more civilized, more Christian, and more scientic type of
punishment, one that would directly attack not the body so much as
the corruption of the criminal soul in order to create a new man. Foucault uses the term individual for the soul: The two great discoveries
of the eighteenth centurythe progress of societies and the geneses
of individualswere perhaps correlative with the new techniques of
power (DP, 4). Although he oers a version of the individual that
Hawthorne might have seen as one of the horrors of the modern era,
his concerns are directly in line with Hawthornes when he writes:
This book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and
of a new power to judge (DP, 23).
Although Hawthorne could not have known that what he was witnessing in the reform movements of his day, especially in prison reform, was the creation of the modern soul, he was certainly concerned
that the sanctity of the Christian soul was jeopardized by the coercively judgmental aspects of people like Hollingsworth, who proclaims
Miles 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. Consequently, the punishment he contrives for Hollingsworth for the
murder of Zenobiafor misleading her in the service of his own
desires, until the day of her apparent suicide by drowningworks directly on Hollingsworths soul, as the newer punishments were said to
do, in an appeal to what Hollingsworth himself refers to as his higher
instincts. His marriage to Priscilla, Zenobias half sister, after the
latters suicide, means that in living daily with Priscilla he will be
reminded of the part he played in Zenobias death. When Coverdale
later encounters Hollingsworth, he nds him frozen in the posture of
shame, his eyes still xed on the ground. Coverdale implies that
Hollingsworth has been trying to reform himself, a single murderer
(BR, 243). Because this passage was added late to the manuscript, one
imagines Hawthorne saw it as clarifying (even if by problematizing)
his story. The criminal, even if there be only injury and no crime, must
try to reform himself if his repentance is to be genuine. The eect of
such atonement on other people is provided in another of Hawthornes
late additions, in which Coverdales response to Hollingsworths

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contrition is compassion: [T]he tears gushed into my eyes, and I

forgave him (BR, 342). In this older type of reformthrough remorseHollingsworth seems to have been made an example of the
transformation Sullivan says a penitentiary can eect: deterrence, rehabilitation, and punishment or revenge (PRM, 1). Married, Hollingsworth will likely be deterred from leading a woman to ruin again;
undergoing rehabilitation of his despicable egotism, he will no longer
attempt to recreate life in his own image. And Zenobia has had her
revenge in his resulting misery. In short, although he hasnt gone to
a penitentiary, Hollingsworth is penitentan out-penitent.
The soul, for Foucault, demonstrates the power of the state over
the body, over the individual. Hawthorne probably would not have
accepted the terminology of the paradigm shift Foucault describes:
This is the historical reality of the soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision
and constraint (DP, 29). Yet Hollingsworth expects to rule through
power over the body, as becomes clear when Zenobia threatens to
rebel. (She believes, as Hester Prynne cant, that she may eect social change. If I live another year, Zenobia declares, I will lift up
my own voice, in behalf of womans wider liberty, a concept she perhaps lacks the time to elaborate.) That Hollingsworth the reformer is
willing to use punishment as deterrencein this case to deter women
from demanding rightsis signaled as his open palm, used for fundraising, clenches into a st, threatening all women who dare doubt
male supremacy (BR, 120). Hollingsworths powerful aggression suggests Hawthornes concern about threats to the soul, the sanctity of
which he cherished long before hearing about mesmerism.
Hollingsworths schemes to transform Blithedale from an experimental commune to an experimental prison parallel the connection
Foucault draws between strict disciplinary systems and utopian
thought. Foucault notes: Historians of ideas usually attribute the
dream of a perfect society to the philosophers and jurists of the eighteenth century: but there was also a military dream of society (DP,
169), the shadow of which is present in both Blithedale and in Hawthornes retelling of Reverend John Eliots encounter with the Indians
in the childrens primer Grandfathers Chair. That all the Indians who
followed Eliot were killed in the war between England and the nonPraying Indiansmostly by other Indiansseems to have brought a

Prison, Utopia, and the Out-Penitent in Hawthorne 129

certain dismay to Hawthorne, as evidenced by the child Laurences

outburst: Oh, Grandfather, tell us all about that Indian Bible! . . .
I have seen it in the library of the Athenaeum; and the tears came
into my eyes, to think that there were no Indians left to read it. 24 In
the 1840s of The Blithedale Romance, the land surrounding the natural pulpitthe stone at which Eliot preached and at which Hollingsworth stands two centuries lateris, though changed, still wild. In
describing it, the narrator mentions in a parenthesis, as though the
fact had snuck into a story concerned with white Christians, that
all the Indians are now gone: [I]t was still as wild a tract of woodland as the great-great-great-great grandson of one of Eliots Indians
(had any such posterity been in existence) would have desired, for
the site and shelter of his wigwam (BR, 118). Historians of a sort,
Laurence and Grandfather note: [N]ow the language and the people
are gone! (GC, 49). History, for Miles Coverdale, is present as it is
to the Nietzschean suprahistorical actor: he imagines Hollingsworth
as a new version of Eliot standing on the same spot, a more compassionate and reform-minded Pilgrim than those church fathers of The
Scarlet Letter.25 This time-traveling presumably occurs on every occasion that Hollingsworth places himself in Eliots spot: [W]ith my eyes
of sense half shut, and those of the imagination widely opened, I used
to see the holy Apostle of the Indians, with the sunlight ickering
down upon him through the leaves, and glorifying his gures with the
half-perceptible glow of transguration (BR, 119).
Hawthorne placed John Eliot between the extremes of John Endicott and Thomas Morton. Unlike the French, who supposedly became
savages when they mixed with the Indians, or the Romish Spanish,
who baptized without religious meaning, Eliot, through love, made
Christians of the Indians he encountered and, in so doing, civilized
them.26 Hollingsworths plan for civilizing prisoners is similar. Eliot
did not anticipate the outcome of his philanthropy. Nor does Hollingsworth, whose plan is doomed.

Foucaults central metaphor is the panopticon, the prison system designed by Jeremy Bentham in which a ringed building divided into
single occupancy cell blocks forms a circumference with an observation tower in its center. This design allowed for total supervision
of the inmates, who themselves remained always unable to see each

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other or their guards. Although Foucault seems to have exaggerated

the importance of the panopticon within the prison system of France
and Europe, the accuracy of his image of the tower as a metaphor for
what he calls a panoptic society resonates.27 But the panopticon is not
just a metaphor. Describing the geometry of the panoptic ring, Foucault links this prison plan with the ordered societies called utopias:
Among all the reasons for the prestige that was accorded in the second half of the eighteenth century to circular architecture, one must
no doubt include the fact that it expressed a certain political utopia
(DP, 174). In short, Foucault describes what seems an attempt to make
everyone live in glass houses, perhaps to discourage the throwing
of stones. Eerily, this description coincides with philosophical ideas
of living in truth, including Hollingsworths plan to live visibly on a
hillside or, as Ive demonstrated, to replace the city on the hill with
a penitentiary, though a city on a hill is inevitably something of a
prison already. Hollingsworth wants to be susceptible to observation
but presumably only within the panoptic towerin the way Coverdale
presents himself observing the other characters from the window of
his room.
The idea that a prison could reform people goes back at least to 1596
when the Rasphuis prison in Amsterdam was designed to turn convicts from evil toward good. Other types of reforming prisonsnot
based on the pillory and the virtually exclusive method of execution
included Philadelphias Walnut Street Prison of 1790, inuenced by
the Quakers, who believed that the prisoners had to have their souls
righted by exclusive contact with moral administrators. Prisoners in
this system had to work because idle hands are the devils workshop
and because in Genesis all were condemned to labor. In 1804 Massachusetts set up a prison based on the model of Walnut Street, which
was soon superseded by a more cost-eective system. In the earlynineteenth-century United States, the two great models of prison reform were the penitentiaries of Auburn, New York, and Philadelphia,
though Hawthorne is vague enough to collapse those two categories
into one in Hollingsworths appeal to criminals higher instincts.
According to Foucault, whatever model of prison reform was to be
practiced, prison was regarded as an apparatus for transforming individuals (DP, 233). Hollingsworth wants to transform prisoners into
what he believes himself to be: upright and honest, more Christian
than thou, and more civilized than society itself.

Prison, Utopia, and the Out-Penitent in Hawthorne 131

Two theories of moral improvement through imprisonment were behind both the solitary and the congregate systems. When the Auburn
Prison was built in New York, it had no solitary connement; solitary cells were added in 1819. Because prisoners in solitary often experienced severe mental distress, the practice of solitary connement
ended in 1822, replaced by what became known as the congregate
system, or Auburn system: congregate labor in complete silence during the daytime and solitary connement at night. The method of
discipline [consisted in]: downcast eyes, lockstep marching, absolute
silence, . . . supervised work, [and] . . . unsparing use of the whip
(PRM, 10). This prison turned a good prot due to the prisoners cheap
labor. The Auburn prison was, to Foucault, monastic, a microcosm
of a perfect society, based on isolation, with strict hierarchy and no
relations among the prisoners (DP, 233). This system was taken up
by Louis Dwight, founder of the Boston Prison Discipline Society,
and judging from geography, may be in part the reformed system
that Hollingsworth wants to re-reform. The Auburn system was followed by the model of Sing-Sing, so admired by Margaret Fuller in
the 1840s, though she seems to have devoted most of her visits to
womens prisons.
A dierent system was proposed after the Walnut Street Prison
failed in the 1810s. Quakers, who had great inuence in its replacement, felt that the congregate system had worked poorlyless like
a reform school and more like a nishing school in crime, which
convinced criminals that the error of their ways was to have been
caughtand they thought that prisoners needed to reect in solitary.
As Sullivan puts it, The battle between the two prison systems
Auburn and Philadelphiaraged from the 1820s until the outbreak of
the Civil War (PRM, 11). Yet Auburn seemed destined to succeed in
producing copies of itself in the early mercantile-capitalist era. Because it was cheap and included forced labor, it was rather protable and always self-sucient. Either system could have served as
Hollingsworths modelhe had plenty of Zenobias money and could
have attempted a Philadelphia-style penitentiarybecause both professed interest in saving the souls of criminals.
Sullivan notes that [a]ntebellum reform activity culminated in the
founding in 1844 of the New York Prison Association (NYPA). Led by
the usual blend of humanitarian merchants, lawyers, and other professionals, these middle-class reformers were imbued with a brand

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of romantic perfectionism that reected the stern Calvinism of . . .

the Boston Prison Discipline Society (PRM, 15). It was this organization that Margaret Fuller singled out in her Tribune column about
Thanksgiving Day. Intellectually, Fuller was attracted to the NYPAs
implication of the environment in the creation of criminal behavior,
since she was particularly (and bravely and radically) interested in
the causes of womens prostitution. Aesthetically, she appreciated the
order of the new prisons and their lack of obvious misery. The NYPAs
motto, Sin no more, may have seemed a particularly good idea. This
is the type of prison reform with which Hawthorne was likely to have
been most familiarthrough Fullers journalismwhich is not to say
he would have understood it any better than he and the Concord circle
understood any of Fullers projects during her post-Concord incarnations. Hawthorne is enticingly vague about the reforms Hollingsworth
would like to institute in his prison, thus making his narrative a discussion of reform in general and his description of the soul in prison
a generic description of the soul itself.
The evangelical prison reformers of England that Forsythe describes sound rather like Hollingsworth, with his conservatism and
belief in the innate depravity of men: Pointing to what they conceived to be mans natural inclination to sinfulness and disobedience,
evangelicals argued that the economic changes in Britain and political ideas emanating from France were destroying the ancient stable
basis of society. 28 Humanitys sinful inclinations lead to Hollingsworths vehement rejection of the French ideas of Fourier, who was
not willing to squash sinfulness but shockingly wished to accommodate it. Hollingsworth believes that the bucolic setting of Blithedale
will restore stability to prisoners lives. His ideas of prison reform are
basically associationist, placing the formation of human attitude and
conduct in terms of the impact of experience upon the individual, as
though orderly environments make orderly minds.29 Hollingsworths
hubris, perhaps, lies in his belief that deviants can be made into sinless
individuals by observing and living with him.
Foucaults idea of the panopticon stresses the disciplinary and conforming aspects of visibility. Prison inmates were to live in so many
cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly
individualized and constantly visible (DP, 200). This description mirrors Coverdales desire to see everything about his associates in order
to know them, his desire to think of Zenobia as an actress, and his

Prison, Utopia, and the Out-Penitent in Hawthorne 133

intention of placing Hollingsworth behind a churchs proscenium and

lectern. It also evokes his spying habits and his experience of watching
Priscilla, behind a veil, stand on a stage while the mesmerist Westervelt manipulates her soul. If the panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad (DP, 2012), so, for that matter,
are certain types of narration, although dialogically, Miles Coverdale
sometimes does allow the other characters to see and judge him. One
of Hawthornes accomplishments in ction was to identify how power
works in societies and in relationships; in Blithedale, he shows the virtually historiographic power of a narrator over narrated events and
people, and he judges this power as barren but not much dierent
from other forms of power. In Coverdale, the spy, the voyeur, and the
observer overlap. [I]t does not matter what motivates the panoptic
observer, Foucault maintains. It might be the curiosity of the indiscreet, the malice of a child, the thirst for knowledge of a philosopher
who wishes to visit this museum of human nature, or the perversity
of those who take pleasure in spying and punishing (DP, 202). All
of these motivations pertain to Miles Coverdales uncurbable impulse
to spy in his quest to discover some big Secret as he manipulates
his friends experimentally, his heart as light as a peaceful-bosomed
naturalist (BR, 205).
Coverdales pursuit of an ideal omniscience contrasts markedly
with the theme of Blithedale and with the idea of the novel or romance
as a genre interested in the limitation of knowledge.30 The novel is
a polyvalent site preserving uncertainty, stressing that all cannot be
seen, known, or controlled. Despite the will to power of omniscience,
the novel retains its liberatory dialogic tendency to the extent that
it allows a certain amount of not-knowing: Who murdered Zenobia?
Had she been married? What secrets of Priscillas did Hollingsworth
protect? Why did Blithedale fail? What is the relation between Blithedale and Brook Farm, between the novel and the world, between
utopia and society? Because these questions cannot be denitively answered, and because Hawthorne certainly did not invite readers to
trust his narrator Coverdale, The Blithedale Romance is neither panoptic nor utopic.
Nor did Foucault miss the unintentional utopic-dystopic aspects of
panopticism: [Jeremy] Bentham presents it as a particular institution, closed in upon itself. Utopias, perfectly closed in upon themselves, are common enough (DP, 205). In history, says Foucault,

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[P]anopticism is regarded as not much more than a bizarre little

utopia, a perverse dreamrather as though Bentham had been the
Fourier of a police society, and the Phalanstery had taken on the form
of the Panopticon. And yet this represented the abstract formula of
a very real technology, that of individuals (DP, 225). Although Foucaults dates appear backward, it is possible that the Phalanstery and
Panopticon take on a bit of each others functions: The disciplinary institutions secreted a machinery of control that functioned like a microscope of conduct (DP, 173). Coverdales machinery puts his friends
under a microscope, as he studies their behavior and their histories
to judge what is invisible to the naked eye: their souls.31
If not just Utopia but modern life is to be gured as a penitentiary, is
there any escape from this modern prison short of hiding out from all
humanity in ever more distant solitude? Given Hollingsworthsnot
to mention Hawthornesrevulsion to Fourier, most likely because
of his enthusiasm for free love, one wonders what the ex-blacksmith
would have said about Fouriers ideas of criminality as positive. Articles from the Fourierite La Phalange from 1836 through 1840 position
criminals as a class of superior and signicant 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 order
dominated by the fatality of its repressive principle continues to kill
through the executioner or through prisons those whose natural robustness rejects or disdains its prescriptions. . . . [T]he existence
of crime manifests a fortunate irrepressibility of human nature;
it should be seen not so much as a weakness or a disease, as an
energy that is reviving, an outburst of protest in the name of human
individuality. 32
Though perhaps an excessively romantic view of criminals, this moral
Saturnalia would be one way out of the Blithedale bind: how to make a
utopian society something other than a prison. The Blithedalers could
identify how they have been treated in the pastas though in prison
and in that insight express their individuality. But Hawthorne is more
interested in drawing from life as he has observed it than in speculating on an inverted moral system, though he occasionally allows Hester
Prynne and Zenobia to do so.
Hollingsworth may not be the only utopic prison guard. The penal
system itself and panopticism can be understood, in Foucaults phrase,

Prison, Utopia, and the Out-Penitent in Hawthorne 135

as technologies of power. In an increasingly panoptic society, mechanisms of power try to frame the everyday lives of individuals so
that their society assumes responsibility for and places under surveillance their everyday behavior, their identity, their activity (DP, 77).
This is not just a utopian conception but one that bears a resemblance
to the sense of authority closest at hand in a novel, that of authorship. Miles Coverdales system of narration seems rather like the one
Foucault nds throughout contemporary society but especially in the
prison: Discipline makes individuals; it is the specic technique of
a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of
its exercise (DP, 170). Because this objectication of people is part
of Zenobias critique of Coverdale, neither the entire novel nor the
entire genre can be condemned. Foucaults denition of discipline, in
fact, seems applicable to the novel as a genre, but a novel, of course, is
not about real people. To observe real people is invasive, so we must
use instruments like Zolas experimental French novel, in which characters are invented to suer, separate from readers who judge them,
so that their privacy may only be hypothetically violated, as readers
keep their hands clean of all but the blood of ink.
The movement from epic to novel has been described as democratizing in its embrace of people of all social ranks, a textual corollary to
the French Revolutions idea of equality and the often qualied idea
in the United States, later echoed throughout Latin America, that all
are created equal. The Yugoslavian writer Danilo Ki has marvelously
yoked the rise of the novel and the French Revolution in his The Encyclopedia of the Dead.33 In Kis story, the apocryphal Encyclopedia,
begun after the French Revolution, has an entry for every person who
ever lived and died. Functioning like a novel, each entry lists enough
information about every dead person to dierentiate him or her as an
individual. Found in Stockholm, Sweden, in the basement below the
library of the Academy in which the Nobel Prize winners are decided,
The Encyclopedia of the Dead is meant to commemorate and honor the
individuality of all those people deemed unimportant by the culture
at large.
The assumption of a novel is that every human life is precious and
important, yet in the context of Foucaults description of a state interest in the details of everyones daily life, this democratic literature
suddenly seems totalitarian: For a long time ordinary individuality
the everyday individuality of everybodyremained below the thresh-

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old of description. To be looked at, observed, described in detail, followed from day to day by an uninterrupted writing, was a privilege.
The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of power (DP,
191). The movement from ballads singing the praise of criminals as
victims, saints, and martyrs to a wardens les seems to mimic the
move from epic to novel, described by the Russian formalist Mikhail
Bakhtin, in a terrible and distorted fashion: This turning of real lives
into writing is no longer a procedure of heroization; it functions as
a procedure of objectication and subjection (DP, 192);34 the more
observed, the less individual one becomes. The move from epic to
novel would then involve a decline of individualization inscribed in
the formation of a disciplinary society (DP, 193). The police are in
the details.35 Still, if the novel as an historic formation can be argued
to arise out of this modern form of discipline, does it mean that the
novel is limited to exercising this form of power?
In a work supplemental to Foucaults, John Bender describes the
structural similarities between the penitentiary system and the novel
in eighteenth-century England, from where, he hypothesizes, the idea
of the modern penitentiary comes. (One may be tempted to use the
tardy entry of the United States into the industrial revolution as the
basis for applying similar theories, but by the 1850s, literature and
the prison system in the United States seem to have been on a par
with those in Britain.) Bender bases most of his argument on what
may be only a quibble with the work of Bakhtin: I would argue that
the polyvocal novel is in fact written by one person and, in my formulation, merely points the way to understanding a many-voiced world
through imagination. To Bender, novels are a way of rigidly emplotting
characters lives in a method that will be repeated by the reformist
conception of penitentiaries.36 Bender applies his formulation not to
all the novels in his century and country of study but only to a few by
Defoe and one by Fielding, plus the graphics of Hogarth and a play by
Gay. His theory might not work so well with novels more in the spirit
of Cervantes, such as Tristram Shandy, that revel in the discontinuities
in reality and in attempts to understand and represent it. To Bakhtin,
the novel represents freedom; to Bender, the penitentiary, but Bakhtin is talking about freedom for readers and writers and Bender about
characters. Actually, the trouble Bender has with Bakhtin one might
have with any formalist (though Bender identies the Russian as a so-

Prison, Utopia, and the Out-Penitent in Hawthorne 137

cialist critic) if one is not totally convinced of the autonomy of works

of art.37 The limitation of Benders argument is that he uses Foucault
to condemn the genre of the novel. A more fruitful, less general way to
understand the relation of prison and society is to consider Foucault
and Hawthorne as two authors with similar interests in the punishment system and in social organization, who write in dierent forms at
dierent times and with dierent conceptions that make supplemental
insights possible as they observe similar tendencies.
While making stories is an omnipresent human activity, in Cervantine novels that partake in what Carlos Fuentes has named the
critique of reading, the process of emplotment is made explicit.38
Blaming the novel for circumscribing freedom seems odd; a critics
inclination just as easily could make one think of literature as a type
of nomadic, antistate thought, as Deleuze and Guattari regard it.39 Do
people not put the world into narrative form, whether they are reformers looking at convicts lives and trying to emplot them as conversion
stories or novelists succumbing to the conventions of plot, as Hawthorne does when his nonconforming woman drowns? 40 The novels
Bender discusses are grouped under the rubric of realism, with its
willing suspension of disbelief, whereas when Hawthorne says he is
writing a romance and not a novel, he may, for the purpose of my discussion, be understood to be writing a novel that does not conform to
the unambiguous suspension of disbelief involved in the realistic novel
(in the hope of presenting a more ambiguous reality). Hawthorne is
not exclusively interested in the city of realism but also in its suburbs
and bedroom communities, its underground passageways and attics.
While the novels Bender studies may be considered realismthough
they predate by a century the 1826 introduction in French literary
criticism of the term ralismethey are not reality; one would expect a bit more subtlety in dierentiating reality from literary realism.
Certainly Hawthorne was responding to literature that comes within
Benders focusthe classics of eighteenth-century British ction
and to its use of prisons. Yet The Blithedale Romance has no omniscient
narration, the transparent system that Bender nds totalitarian.
Hawthorne seems to sidestep critics like Bender by the claims of
indeterminacy in his preface, where he indicates exactly where in the
real world his readers should not be looking. In a letter to George
William Curtis, he assures the travel writer, who spent some of his
youth at Brook Farm, that Blithedale has nothing to do with that com-

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munity, just as his House of the Seven Gables is a house of ction built
of materials long in use for constructing castles in the air. 41 Bender
doesnt seem to accept characters as characters when he says that we
see people in life as characters in ction.42 If we compare a prisoner in
the world to a character in a novel and determine that both are slaves,
we have begged the question about the dierence between reality and
literature. Hawthorne says from the beginning that his types are not
real people. Do we willingly suspend disbelief when considering the
social system? Bender says, In rst-person narratives like Defoes
or in epistolary ctions like Richardsons, we may question what a
character says or does but not the concept of character itself. In Hawthorne, character is less stable. An oddity in Benders argument is its
failure to take into account the fact that ction says it is ction but penitentiaries say they are real.43 Even if the penitentiary has rules that are
one and the same as those that govern consciousness itself, many
readers would probably rather have a consciousness than a twentyyear sentence.44 It is less likely that the novel imprisons characters
than that the critical eye, metaphorically speaking, imprisons a genre
on trumped-up charges. In any event, the novel is likely to break out.
In nineteenth-century England, Bender argues, philosophers like
Bentham used novelistic conceptions to explain the paradoxical modern conception of a self at once isolated and transparent to view,
based on the idea that [t]ransparency is the convention that both author and beholder are absent from a representation. 45 Hawthorne,
however, prefers translucency, presenting Blithedale to his readers in
at least two authorial guises, the author of the preface and the poet
Miles Coverdale, who would like to be omniscient but whose authority
is questioned by both the other characters and attentive readers who
pick up the contradictions in his story. And yet there is only one author of Blithedale, Nathaniel Hawthorne. The narrative is, like much of
Hawthornes ction, about the omnipresence of prisons, real and imagined, 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 encouragement
with this essay.
1
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, vol. 1 of The Centenary Edition of

Prison, Utopia, and the Out-Penitent in Hawthorne 139

2
3

the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus:

Ohio State Univ. Press, 1962), 47, 48; further references to The Scarlet
Letter will be to this volume and will be cited parenthetically in the text
as SL.
Thomas More, Utopia. 2d ed., ed. and trans. Robert M. Adams (1516; New
York: Norton, 1992), 62.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 109; further references will be
to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as DP.
If happy slavery does not stretch the bounds of plausibility in Mores fantastic creation, there is also the practice of having slaves wear chains
of gold in order to discourage the rest of the population from greed and
the desire for individual wealth (Utopia, 59). A runaway slave laden with
gold chains might indeed do very well outside the island of Utopia.
See Foucault, DP; and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso,
1991). Not that Hawthorne needed either theorist. The quick construction of prison doors in the new world is clear enough. As for the relation
of utopian communities and the state, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson in The Young American, the alternative communities in Massachusetts came about through dissatisfaction with the State: Witness too
the spectacle of three Communities. . . . These proceeded from a variety
of motives . . . in a great part from a feeling that the true oces of the
State, the State had let fall to the ground (Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays
and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte [New York: Library of America, 1983], 235).
Hawthorne also incorporates the private, unocial torture of Dimmesdale by Chillingworth, which occurs at a time when punishment was
public so as to involve the community in the process.
Likewise, in the story Endicott and the Red Cross, there appeared
that important engine of Puritanic authority, the whipping-post, as well
as the pillory, stocks, sandwich labels, tongue restraints, halters, and
evidence of judicial mutilation and branding. (Hawthorne, Endicott and
the Red Cross, in Twice-Told Tales, vol. 9 of The Centenary Edition of
the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. [Columbus:
Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974], 434).
What precisely Hawthorne wanted to say in The Blithedale Romance about
social reform is not clear from the narrative. Indeed, the diculty the
characters have in renaming Blithedale is oddly mirrored in Hawthornes
trouble and anxiety in naming the book. The rst page of Manuscript
573 of the Pierpont Morgan Librarys collection reads, in Hawthornes
bold hand: Hollingsworth: a Romance. This title is crossed out just as
boldly, then reinscribed, The Blithedale Romance. In a letter of 2 May
1852 to Edwin Percy Whipple asking for help with the manuscript and
with choosing a title, Hawthorne explains that he had settled on Holl-

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ingsworth for a title because the blacksmith turned prison reformer had
been the impetus for his ctive meditations: I wish, at least, you would
help 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 occurred
to meas presenting the original gure about which the rest of the book
clustered itself (The Letters, 18431853, vol. 16 of The Centenary Edition
of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. [Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1985], 536). Hollingsworth is the last of the
major characters to enter the narrative, and he does so dramatically, rst
becoming de facto spiritual leader of the Blithedale project, then causing
instability. The novels conclusion focuses on Hollingsworths fate in relation to his grandiose dreams. What was Hawthornes intention in almost
choosing as the title for his narrative about community Hollingsworth:
A Romance? What is implied in Hollingsworths vocational shift from
blacksmith to reformer of the penal system? How does the creation of a
utopia cluster itself around the idea of prison reform? Could this novel,
almost titled for a character who preaches from the same stone pulpit as
John Eliot, the seventeenth-century Apostle to the Algonquins, be read
as a nineteenth-century version of the life of Eliot?
The relation between the reform of criminals and the loss of the souls autonomy is made explicit in the much later and less realistic A Clockwork
Orange. In this futuristic novel of a Russied Britain, fteen-year-old prisoner Alex is treated for his criminality and cured by a chemical remedy
more ecient than the state jail (Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
[1962; New York: Penguin, 1972]). Alex later becomes an object on display, a little machine capable only of good (122)an ideal subject of
the State. Hawthornes famous ambivalence might have applauded the
reformation of criminals, but he would have accused of evil those who
did such reforming.
More than social reform movements, mesmerism can be seen as a disarming use of the power of community, most distasteful when it apes
and exceeds the intimacy of romantic love and dangerously sinful when
it threatens to breach the boundaries of the individual by reading the
mind and controlling the will. Because the characters participation in
the Blithedale communal experiment begins and ends with public mesmerism, all the events are bathed in its suspect glow.
Hawthorne, A Select Party, in Mosses from an Old Manse, vol. 10 of
The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William
Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1985), 53, 57.
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 long
ere 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

Prison, Utopia, and the Out-Penitent in Hawthorne 141

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 Hawthornes contemporaries who appear in
The Blithedale Romance; in fact, Fullers presence so hovers over the
novels proceedings that when Priscilla delivers to Coverdale a letter
supposedly from Fuller, Priscilla suddenly looks, Coverdale reports, like
Fuller herself (The Blithedale Romance, in The Blithedale Romance and
Fanshaw, vol. 3 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press,
1964), 52; further references to The Blithedale Romance will be to this
volume and will be cited parenthetically in the text as BR.
14 Margaret Fuller, Thanksgiving, New York Tribune, 12 December 1844;
reprinted in Margaret Fullers New York Journalism: A Biographical Essay
and Key Writings, ed. Catherine C. Mitchell (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1995), 177; further references to this source will be cited parenthetically in the text as MFJ.
15 Foucaults point is similar but expressed in opposite terms. For him, the
birth of the prison is also the birth of the individual soulbut a type of
soul that would have horried Fuller or Hawthorne.
16 Although prison historians describe many similarly radical reformers,
Kent Bales claims that Hollingsworths ideas are rare (see The Blithedale
Romance: Coverdales Mean and Subversive Egotism, Bucknell Review
21 [fall 1973]: 6082).
17 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Henry Reeve,
Francis Bowen, and Phillips Bradley, 2 vols. (1835, 1840; reprint, New
York: Vintage, 1990), 1:257.
18 Ibid., 1:257. Both Phillips Bradley and Daniel J. Boorstein point out
Tocquevilles 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 the
legislative committee member Stephen Allen said about the desire to reform conrmed villains (10); further references to this source will be
cited parenthetically in the text as PRM.
20 William James Forsythe, The Reform of Prisoners 18301900 (New York:
St. Martins, 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 Miin, 190304), 352. See
also The Bostonians, in which it is said of Basil Ransom, He, too, had a
private vision of reform, but the rst principle was to reform the reformers (Henry James, The Bostonians [Oxford, Eng.: Oxford Univ. Press,
1992], 16). Ransom is at once a Coverdale and a Hollingsworth gure.
22 There is perhaps little reason to be convinced by Sullivans claim, since

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25

26

27

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calling an outcome the actual goal is not a rigorous method of proof,
but his conviction that society craves revenge forms a rhetorically useful
balance to the ideas of reformers who posit a society of compassion.
Foucault and Michael Ignatie were distrustful of those engaged in reformatory endeavors, and they consistently doubted that these were in
serious ways dedicated either to the human value of their charges or
the importance of the social inclusion of prisoners; counter-reformists
. . . have accused [Ignatie] and Foucault of mistaking reformist propaganda for actual development (Forsythe, Reform of Prisoners, 7). Forsythe thinks the reformists, though, did have substantial inuence. See
Ignatie, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 17501850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
Hawthorne, Grandfathers Chair, in True Stories from History and Biography, 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 Grandfathers Chair will be to this volume and will
be cited parenthetically in the text as GC.
In Hope Leslie, Catharine Maria Sedgwick denes the Pilgrims as a community 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 Sedgwicks version, Eliot is seen as no more than a slight contrast to the ruling Puritansjovial menbut he is placed within the story as the opposite of
Thomas Morton, who is pictured as a seething maniac. The ctive narrator of Lydia Maria Childs Hobomok states: In this enlightened and
liberal age, it is perhaps too fashionable to look back upon those early
suerers in the cause of the Reformation, as a band of dark, discontented
bigots (Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians, ed. Carolyn L. Karcher
[New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1986], 6).
Part of the Spanish states justication for baptizing Indians was that it
made them (as Moors were not) subject to church law. Reforming Catholic clergy, such as Bartolom de las Casas, were opposed to mass baptism.
In The House of the Seven Gables, even after his release from prison, Clifford, as well as Hepzibah, cannot go out: They could not ee; their jailor
had but left the door ajar, in mockery, and stood behind it, to watch them
stealing out. . . . What jailor so inexorable as ones self! (The House of the
Seven Gables, vol. 2 of the The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel
Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. [Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press,
1964], 169). The self should be a jailor; if not, there are buildings. In the
twentieth century, Superman is the being with X-ray eyes who makes the
Panopticon unnecessary. In the last line of the rst movie in the series,
Superman says: Dont thank me, Warden. Were all part of the same
team.
Forsythe, Reform of Prisoners, 8.

Prison, Utopia, and the Out-Penitent in Hawthorne 143

29 Ibid., 11.
30 Much ink has been spilled dierentiating 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 century later, writers would claim to write antinovels (which were novels)
and antiplays (which were plays) in order to slough o conventions of
reading and writing associated with a genre.
31 This new exercise of power would not have to be in the architectural
form of the panopticon. Gossip would do as a panopticon either in the
old form of folks talking behind each others backs or in the journalism
that would eventually include even the upper class in Henry Jamess The
Reverberator: [P]ower had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible, as long
as it could itself remain invisible. It had to be like a faceless gaze that
transformed the whole social body into a eld of perception: thousands of
eyes posted everywhere ( James, introduction to The Reverberator [1888;
New York: Grove, 1979], 214).
32 DP, 289. Foucaults quotations are from La Phalange, 10 January 1837
and 1 December 1838.
33 Danilo Ki, The Encyclopedia of the Dead, trans. Michael Henry Heim
(1989; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1991), 3766.
34 Bakhtin observes that in the plot of many novels, Everyday life is the
lowest sphere of existence from which the hero tries to liberate himself
(The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist [Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981], 121). Unlike
[his] counterparts in forms like the epic, the novels hero builds an unocial world view that applies only to himself: In the epic there is one
unitary and singular belief system. In the novel there are many such belief
systems, with the hero generally acting within his own system (334).
35 What Foucault in Discipline and Punish and Hawthorne in The Blithedale
Romance do not quite acknowledgeperhaps because of the importance
of publishing to both their lives, and of lecturing to Foucaultsis how
much some people like to be observed and how much they tend to observe themselves.
36 Bakhtin, John Bender complains, largely neglects the containment of
heterodoxy eected within the realist mode, where narration itself invisibly controls, contains, and becomes authoritative (Imagining the
Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century
England [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987], 213). Bakhtin discusses
novels outside realism because they are more heteroglossic. Bender
states: I deny Bakhtins rather romantic insistence that the novel transcends the hegemony of ocial culture. I stress, instead, the ways in
which realism, and especially the convention of transparency, enables the

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novel to participate in the containment, control, and reformation of social life; narrative coherence forged from multiple voices delineates authority, government, and reality itself (257 n. 136). Certainly if Bakhtin
claims that the novel transcends . . . ocial culture, this is a romantic
claim, in that transcendence is associated with romanticism. But Bakhtin
thinks the novel can complicate the simplicity of ocial culture.
37 To borrow Bakhtins formulation, the dierence between formalism and
socialism is not written in heaven. Bakhtin insists that [f]orm and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a
social 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 The
Critique of Reading, in Myself with Others: Selected Essays [New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988], 4971). The title Cervantes, or The
Critique of Reading works much better in the Spanish, Cervantes, o la
critica de la lectura, because of the last words resemblance to locura,
or madness. Benders structuralism, in this respect, seems rather quixotic. His condemnation of the novel, based on a few realist apples, creates
stereotypes rather than precise distinctions.
39 These philosophers point out that, in putting their books together, each
of them wrote as if they were many authors at once (see Gilles Deleuze
and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987], 3).
40 Hawthornes drowned woman seems to come out of the used image shop
of romanticism rather than from his memory of seeing a drowned girls
corpse at Brook Farm. Englishman Thomas Hoods poem The Bridge
of Sighs, which congures the social phenomenon of the abandoned
womans suicide (Collected Poems [1854; reprint, Oxford, Eng.: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1970], 167), inspired an outpouring of literary and artistic representations of the drowned body of the abandoned woman (see
Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power, and Other Essays [New York:
Harper, 1988]). In an article on the reformation of prostitutes, Margaret
Fuller praised Hoods poem as more touching and forcible than any thing
that has been or is likely to be written on this subject (NYJ, 96). Hawthornes description of Zenobias corpse mirrors Hoods description of
the dead womans face: a Last look despairing / Fixd on futurity. Those
who nd her body are told to Cross her hands humbly, / As if praying
dumbly(lines 100101, 9293). Hawthornes drowned woman, however,
is not to be dolled up funeral-parlor styleover her dead body, as it were.
Her hands, frozen in a prayer-like pose, suggest that if there will be an
attitude of prayer, she will be responsible for it, not the men who nd
the corpse; thus her prayer will be mixed with resistance. Both women,
though, will look toward futurityHoods woman apologetically at her
maker, Zenobia toward the future of struggle.

Prison, Utopia, and the Out-Penitent in Hawthorne 145

41

42

43

44

45

Hawthorne to George William Curtis, 14 July 1852, Letters, 18431853,

569. Michel de Certeau notes: Haunted places are the only ones people
can live inand this inverts the schema of the Panopticon (The Practice
of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall [Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ.
of California Press, 1984], 108).
Bender seems to have a paranoiacs view of the history of the novel,
whereas a writer like Thomas Pynchon, who has a paranoiacs view of
history, places great faith in the possibilities of the novel.
Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, 212. Bender could have made a more
interesting comparison by exploring why in English a prison term is
named for the basic grammatical unit: a sentence. William H. Gasss character William Kohler does so in The Tunnel, when he says he is Sentenced to sentences and then tries to use all types of sentences as escape
tunnels (New York: Knopf, 1995), 482.
Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, 228. He also notes: [P]enitentiaries
assumed novelistic ideas of character . . . to reconstruct the ctions of
personal identity that underlie consciousness (2). If this is true, they
assumed particularly vulgar ideas about novels.
Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, 201.