Establishing Authorship: A Comparative Reading of Hawthorne's “The Artist of the Beautiful” and Melville's “The Bell-Tower”

Abstract

Provided that the author is an ideological product who participates in the dominant social discourse produced in the nexus of power and knowledge, as Michel Foucault argues, a literary work, after all, can be a cultural product by a writer under specific circumstances. In this vein, this paper attempts to explore how Hawthorne and Melville were struggling with the idea of authorship in the mid-nineteenth-century American cultural context, by a comparative reading of Hawthorne's “The Artist of the Beautiful” and Melville's “The Bell-Tower,” a piece considered to be most greatly influenced by Hawthorne. The literary situation in which Hawthorne and Melville wrote can be characterized by a conflict between the concept of art as a Romantic pursuit solely legitimized by the autonomy of an artist and the utilitarian and practical demands of the society. Under the circumstances, Hawthorne and Melville shared a deep concern with how to resolve the conflict. “The Artist of the Beautiful” and “The Bell-Tower” provide a different rendition of each writer's struggle with the Romantic idea of authorship, portraying Owen Warland and Bannadonna, the artist figures who strive against the social demands of utilitarian values. As a result, Hawthorne ironically questions artistic aspirations totally isolated from social demands by distancing himself from the protagonist who vouches for the Romantic concept of art in the ending. By contrast, Melville glorifies the value of an extreme pursuit of the artistic ideal even at the complete cost of social values by suggesting the protagonist's death as more tragic. In brief, Hawthorne does not seem to accept the Romantic idea of art wholly, whereas Melville seems to persistently stick to the Romantic idea of autonomous authorship.