This essay focuses on two very different authors – Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) and Theodore Winthrop (1828–1861) – whose novels show a wide range of intense, perverse, or unruly emotional and erotic attachments. The essay contrasts these authors to highlight the emergence of forms of shame, punishment, and discipline that were becoming dominant in the mid-nineteenth century. But the essay also shows the emergence of affective and erotic communities that were collective, sharing a coded language, forms of self-protection, and cultural companionship. These novels, in other words, demonstrate sexuality’s emergence not only in terms of individual bodies but also in those collective bodies known as subcultures.

This chapter thinks about the risks of becoming enchanted by Whitman’s writing. Under crisis neoliberalism, “risk” has become sutured to a phobia of being exposed as naïve; it is often risky to not have some explanatory framework or incisive critique at the ready. Of increasing resonance at this political juncture is what this chapter thinks of in terms of Whitman’s “grammar of risk.” To read Whitman’s poetry now is to feel the jolt of a form that momentarily suspends a language of looking through or beyond what is in front of us. This is not to advocate a “surface reading” that necessarily cancels political depth, but rather to think in terms of a surface consciousness that always imbues a moment of contact with the dignity it might deserve. This is an attitude towards others that continually risks disappointment, but it might also be the only nonviolent way forward we have.

“Marvelous”

The House of the Seven Gables is obsessed with law. In his preface, setting out the distinction between novels and romances, Hawthorne associates the former with realism, in which imagination, denied the possibility of fanciful transformation, becomes enslaved to “the probable and ordinary course of man's existence.”Romance, on the contrary, need not “rigidly subject itself to laws,” but, demonstrating “a very minute feeling”for “the possible,” is able “to mingle the Marvelous” (ii: 1) with the probable events of everyday life. “Law” functions here for Hawthorne on several levels. Most immediately, he means “convention,” the things “normal” people expect to happen in a “typical” day, life lived, not as a possibility for invention, but within the comfort of predictable pattern. Yet Hawthorne also attaches convention to more recognizable legal constructs, such as contracts: the preface itself takes on a contractual tone, establishing the terms that, if readers agree to them, will enable the romance to be understood and enjoyed. Hawthorne also invokes the legal protection of property, “by laying up a street that infringes upon nobody's private rights, and appropriating a lot of land which had no visible owner, and building a house of materials long in use for constructing castles in the air” (ii: 3). In the preface, then, Hawthorne attaches the juridical functions of law (the contractual protection of property rights) to the conventions of everyday life (the predictable life-patterns carried out, presumably, within the privately owned home), both laws represented in the plot by the officious, grasping, and literal-minded lawyer, Jaffrey Pyncheon.