Comical Reflections and Delayed Affect in The House of the Seven Gables

In telling Phoebe the tragic story of Alice Pyncheon's captivity and death, Holgrave mesmerizes her, bringing her body under his control. Because Holgrave is the novel's writer figure and the body is the apparent locus of emotion, this scene fictionalizes what Hawthorne imagined to be a real threat of sentimentality: its capacity to move the body against the reader's will. The idea of the novel as a natural product that organically grows out of the artist's mind corresponds to an idea of native emotionality, the opposite of sunshiny feelings.5 Instead of expressing his confidence in his novel's integrity, Hawthorne's characterization of the novel as a natural outgrowth of his mind defends against his viewing himself as a Maule, a calculating possessor of his readers' bodies, or as a scribbling instrument of the marketplace. Because of Hawthorne's anxieties about the sunshine he believed he needed to incorporate in his novel, he strategically uses subtle humor (rather than guffaw-provoking humor, which would be another means of taking over another's body), including irony that responds to mechanical rigidity, to counteract what he saw as the alienations of sentimentality.6 Henri Bergson's theory of the comic as "something mechanical encrusted upon the living," which laughter or the social response corrects, reveals the appropriateness of the comical intervention in The House of the Seven Gables (37, original italics). [...]in an aside within this passage, Hawthorne makes his own self-deprecating joke to snap his reader out of any spells he might have cast: describing Phoebe's "certain remarkable drowsiness" in response to Holgrave's story, the narrator jokes that it is "(wholly unlike that with which the reader possibly feels himself affected)" (3:211). Like Holgrave's self-deprecating joke, comical irony here situates readers outside narrative time but still within history, so readers become aware of the pressures shaping the story and Hawthorne's reservations about engaging with his new market. Because of Hawthorne's understanding of sentimentality as the mass producer of what ought to be intrinsic to the individual, it is not surprising that slowdowns and interruptions of the novel's plot occur in the form of reflections on the mechanical and on alienations of mind from body.