2.2. Holgrave: Recording Angel
or Mesmerizing Wizard?
In the preface of The House of the Seven Gables Hawthorne
adopts a photographic metaphor not to support the realistic novel but to
describe the romance. The romance, Hawthorne insists, like the novel or
any "work of art [...] must rigidly subject itself to laws", but the romance
author has more "latitude" than the novelist to veer from a "very minute
fidelity" to nature, so long as he does not "swerve aside from the truth
of the human heart." Moreover, "if he think fit, also, he [the romancer]
may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights
and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture." (1) Here Hawthorne uses
a photographic metaphor to define the romance. To the concept of realistic
mimesis he counterposes the writer's right to present "truth under circumstances
of [his] own choosing or creation", a deliberate "managing" of the medium
- be it fictive or photographic.
Hawthorne's association of the daguerreotype with the
imaginative freedom of the romance strongly contrasts with Holgrave's claims
for the ultimate truth of the daguerreotype. Though the novel as a whole
seems to corroborate Holgrave's claims by revealing the Judge to be an
evil figure, it remains to be seen why it is Holgrave who makes this revelation.
After all, he is really a Maule in disguise, who only at the very end of
the novel reveals his true identity. Why is it that one masked man insists
on unmasking another?
Even before she learns that Holgrave operates under an
assumed name and identity, Phoebe is alarmed by what she perceives as Holgrave's
artistic voyeurism, and his tendency to be interested in others' lives
only as a kind of artistic material:
You talk as if this old house were a theatre; and you seem
to look at Hepzibah's and Clifford's misfortunes, and those of the generations
before them, as a tragedy [...] played exclusively for your amusement!
I do not like this. The play costs the performers too much - and the audience
is too cold-hearted! (217)
What Phoebe (and with her the reader) finds dubious about
Holgrave, is what the German theologians found dubious about Daguerre's
invention in general: Holgrave is playing God - not because he takes pictures
but because he presents them as unmediated truth. Unlike the unnamed narrator
who invents tales on top of a church steeple, also a kind of God-like position,
Holgrave fails to reveal his own identity - his implicated subject position.
The man on the steeple relates a convincing love-story, but he also reveals
the subjective source from which the story stems: his own infatuation with
the girl. Though much more is at stake for him (revenge, wealth, love),
Holgrave presents his works as objective truth.
Thus, the reader is confronted with a strong ambiguity
in view of Holgrave's character. Questions arise: Why is he in the house?
What are his intentions? Does he really want to help the Pyncheons, or
he is he only seeking revenge? As we will see, these questions do not have
a definitive answer. If one assumes that Holgrave is really the good hero
of the book who is looking for the truth through the viewfinder of his
camera, one aligns him with that part of the contemporary discourse which
held daguerreotypes to be imprints of nature. Holgrave's pictures of the
Judge then are really agents of truth. They are faithful not only to the
man's outer appearance, but also to his hidden motives, his essential self.
Holgrave would be a recording angel, who has no influence upon the outcome
of the daguerreotypes - as he himself claims is the case.
But the ambiguity of Holgrave's character reaches deeper.
The embedded story of Alice Pyncheon, which he tells Phoebe, raises further
questions as to the integrity of Holgrave's character. When Holgrave reads
Phoebe his story, an "incident of the Pyncheon family-history", which he
has put "into the form of a legend" (186), a strange transaction takes
place: a (undisclosed) Maule recounts how one of his ancestors mesmerized
a Pyncheon - and in the process (almost) repeats that act. The legend describes
how his ancestor, another Matthew Maule and a descendant of the first one,
made Phoebe's ancestor, Alice Pyncheon, into a prisoner through his powers
of mesmerism. "While Alice Pyncheon lived", Holgrave reads aloud to Phoebe,
"she was Maule's slave, in a bondage more humiliating, a thousandfold,
than that which binds its chains around the body." (208) This spell is
almost again at work in the present, as Phoebe becomes mesmerized by Holgrave's
account: "It was evident, that, with but one wave of his hand and a corresponding
effort of his will, he could complete his mastery over Phoebe's yet free
and virgin spirit." (211/212) Holgrave is fully aware of his power, but
unlike his ancestor, he declines to exercise it.
Though in the end the narrator does seem to exonerate
Holgrave because he does not bring Phoebe under his spell, it becomes clear
that he has mesmerizing powers. After all, all Maules are wizards, so why
should he not be one too? As we have already seen, he himself owns up to
his role by the end of the novel: "[I]n this long drama of wrong and retribution,
I represent the old wizard, and am probably as much of a wizard as ever
he [Matthew Maule] was." (316) All these associations with wizardry become
all the more weighty, if one considers the common belief in the soul-captivating
powers of the daguerreotype. All of a sudden, the camera appears not as
an instrument which is beyond human manipulation, but as a machine which
lends itself to machinations and intentions of the worst kind. The camera
allows Holgrave to gain control over other people. Not just those he photographed,
but also those, like Phoebe, to whom he presents his photographs as the
truth. If his apparatus indeed adds to his demonic gifts, the "happy end"
can be read in a completely different way - as the victory of a revengeful
wizard over his enemies. |
