2. The ambiguous representation(s)
of the daguerreotype in
The House of the Seven Gables
If one considers the possibilities inherent in the new medium and the
ambiguities that surround it, it is easy to understand why Hawthorne was
fascinated by the daguerreotype. Throughout his career as a writer, Hawthorne
grappled with one central paradox: how can one represent the "truth of
the human heart" (1) if he only can perceive the outer appearance of  things?
If one tries to to penetrate the outer surfaces, i.e. becomes personally
involved with the people one is interested in, one loses the objectivity
of the uninvolved observer, and therefore the truth. This is the central
paradox of many of Hawthorne's writings: the more one becomes involved
with others, the more subjective and warped becomes the view one has of
them. On the other hand, the more detached one stays, the less one can
know at all.
Hawthorne's little sketch "Sights
from a Steeple" offers a perfect illustration of this paradox. An unnamed
narrator climbs up into a church steeple and looks out over a town, and
observes the meeting of lovers, the commerce of the wharves and the line
of a funeral procession. He is thus an detached observer. His position
on the steeple marks the distance between himself and the things he observes.
Like a little God he can perceive a lot of things, but there is a barrier
which he cannot cross. This becomes obvious in his remarks about a young
man whose motives the narrator speculates: "Is he in doubt or in debt?
Is he, if the question be allowable, in love? Does he strive to be melancholy
and gentlemanlike? - Or is he merely overcome by the heat?" [14]
From his detached position, the narrator would never
be able to answer these questions. He can see and describe the young man's
appearance, but he can never arrive at a true conclusion about the man's
motives. Nevertheless, when the man meets two sisters and walks away with
them, the narrator spins a little story about the young man being in love
with one of the sisters. But is this the truth? This is doubtful because
his guess is in fact a projection of his own prior attraction to the woman.
As soon as he is personally involved in the scene, the possibility of distortion
and subjective interpretation appears. But without the risk of distortion,
storytelling would not be possible at all. Truth does not seem to be attainable.
The narrator is clearly conscious of this dilemma when he thinks,
the most desirable mode of existence might be that of a spiritualized
Paul Pry, hovering invisible round men and women, witnessing their deeds,
searching their hearts, borrowing brightness from their felicity, and shade
from their sorrow, and retaining no emotion peculiar to himself.[15]
All-seeing but emotionally uninvolved: this is Hawthorne's
ideal of the writer who wants to represent the truth of the human heart.
If the daguerreotype was an apparatus which allows nature to make an imprint
of itself without human meddling, it was precisely the "spiritualized Paul
Pry" which the unknown narrator and Hawthorne were looking for. It thus
remains to be seen if Hawthorne indeed took the daguerreotype to be an
agent of absolute truth, and if not, what his reservations were.
There is another formal reason why Hawthorne was fascinated
by the daguerreotype. All of Hawthorne's writings are marked by ambiguity,
i.e. the absence of clearly identifiable truths. The classic example of
Hawthorne's ambiguous style is the letter "A" in his novel The Scarlet
Letter. The interpretations of this letter which are offered in the
course of the novel range from "adultery" to "angel". The reader has to
reach his own conclusions about the meaning of the letter, and therefore
about Hester's character. The novel offers no certain evaluations.
As we have seen, the daguerreotype in Hawthorne's time
was a deeply ambiguous apparatus. Agent of absolute truth or invention
of the devil - the range of interpretations it allowed was as great as
that of the letter "A" in The Scarlet Letter. So by making the new
machine the central focus of his novel, Hawthorne introduced a set of ambiguities
in his narrative without having to construct them. Both extreme (but common)
interpretations are clearly present in the novel. Rather than attempt to
arrive at a conclusive interpretation of the novel, I will take a closer
look at the ambiguities which govern it, especially those which surround
Holgrave and his daguerreotypes. |
