Letters Turned to Gold: Hawthorne, Authorship, and Slavery

LETTERS TURNED TO GOLD: HAWTHORNE, AUTHORSHIP, AND SLAVERY Teresa A. Goddu Vanderbilt University In her "Cuba Journal," a series of letters written home about her daily life on a Cuban coffee plantation, where she traveled for a rest cure in 1833, Sophia Peabody describes Cuba as a realm of romance imbued by moonlight. Recounting an evening when she joined King Salvador, one of the plantation's slaves and a former African king, in conversation about his "former kingdom & subjects," she writes: I think the splendor of that evening surpassed anything I have yet seen in Cuba. The air was soft as the down of a dove's breast and delicately perfumed with the jessamine fragrance of the coffee blossom & the moon was so dazzling that to look straight at it gave me a shooting pain through the head—like that caused by the sun's direct rays. ... It does indeed seem palpable & like an intelligent presence—Every object looked as ifthe heavens had snowed pearls & diamonds___ Even the ordinary share in the royal profusion & magnificence of beauty which showers down, & are for the time [en]folded and robed in loveliness as in a mantle. The "disembodied spirit" of the moonlight, coupled with the fragrance of coffee blossoms, transforms the actual into the imaginary—simple objects into things of wealth, magnificence, and beauty, slaves into kings. Cautioned by her sister Elizabeth Peabody in an earlier letter to "drive slavery from [her] thoughts," Sophia mystifies the slave economy: she masks the power dynamic between master and slave behind polite conversation and detaches the labor of slavery, as figured by coffee, from its political and economic meanings by transforming it into a picturesque backdrop. Sophia's moonlit evening depends upon, even as it obscures, the economy of slavery.1 The "magic moonshine" that produces Hawthorne's realm ofromance in "The Custom-House" has much in common with Sophia's moonlit evening.2 It also "spiritualize[s]" (CE 1 :35) the everyday objects of domestic life, converting them into "things ofintellect" (CE 1:35) and "snow-images" (CE 1:26). By translating the actual into the imaginary, Hawthorne's moonlight aestheticizes everyday life and transports it to the literary realm of romance. Like Sophia's description ofCuba, Hawthorne's formulation ofromance converts a material economy into a symbolic one. Despite his efforts to obscure the relationship between these two economies, in order to establish his romance as separate from the commercial marketplace, Hawthorne recognizes their intimate relationship: he insists upon the "coal-fire" as an "essential influence in producing" the moonlight's effect (CE 1:36) and he repeatedly 50Teresa A. Goddu describes the scarlet letter as a "rag" (CE 1:31), thereby emphasizing its relation to the raw materials of the writer's trade in the 185Os—paper made of reconstituted cotton fibers (CE 1:25).3 The traces of "gold embroidery" in the letter's "fine red cloth" figure Hawthorne's art in both aesthetic and economic terms: the golden needlework is meant to earn him cultural as well as commercial capital, a literary reputation as well as a livelihood (CE 1:31). Similarly, Hawthorne seeks to mystify the economics of his authorship in order to claim cultural prestige in an increasingly commodified and professionalized literary marketplace. Through the fiction of his early obscurity and the persona ofthe withdrawn writer, Hawthorne attempts, as Meredith McGiIl argues, to situate his authorship as free of the marketplace. Yet, as McGiIl shows, this withdrawal from the market is itself a market strategy, the way he "renegotiates a relation to the reading public" and redeems his minor fiction "by the success of his later work."4 Hawthorne finds his place in the literary marketplace by standing apart from it. He manipulates the literary marketplace even as he veils his commercial affiliations to it. While a number of critics have begun to disentangle the fictions of Hawthorne's authorial self-construction from the economic realities of his authorship, I want to pay particular attention to how the slave economy operates in Hawthorne's understanding of—and place within—the literary marketplace .5 Although Hawthorne never wrote the novel about slavery in Cuba from Sophia's journal that Mary Peabody proposed...