Hawthorne's Genealogy of Madness

THE REFORMER, A RECURRENT CHARACTER IN HAWTHORNE'S FICTION, is a figure who, whatever his patent medicine, often exerts the dangerous, diabolic control of a political hubris disguised as idealism. Recent ideological criticism of Hawthorne's major novels, however, has neglected Hawthorne's own discomfort with antebellum reformparticularly in the production of subjectivities. In the Pierce campaign biography, Hawthorne qualifies the expressed liberal faith in the closed progress of history with a more strongly worded skepticism about contemporary reform movements.' Although Hawthorne does assert that slavery will be remedied by Providence in its own good time, he justifies such a disavowal of collective political action with a resigned pragmatism: there is no instance, in all human history, of the human will and intellect having perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adapted to that end.2 Hawthorne, in the Pierce biography, gives only faint endorsement to the gradual progress of liberty-one held with so timid a conviction that it needed a leap into Providential faith to have any solidity at all. What resonates more strongly in this passage than progressive pieties is an antipathy for the methods of the moral reformers, methods he would investigate most fully in The House of Seven Gables' genealogy of madness. While recent literary historians have set the works of Hawthorne

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