The Outcast of the Outskirts: Space and Alienation in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s and E.L. Doctorow’s “Wakefield”
Barney Warf and Santa Arias, scholars who specialise in the spatial turn and human geography, state that “space is a social construction relevant to the understanding of the different histories of human subjects and to the production of cultural phenomena” (1). They explain that “geography matters, not for the simplistic and overly used reason that everything happens in space, but because where things happen is critical to knowing how and why they happen” (1). Following this line of thought, it is worth considering why Nathaniel Hawthorne, an American writer associated with New England, sets “Wakefield” in London. Similarly, it should be noted that E. L. Doctorow sets his contemporary reinterpretation of Hawthorne’s tale back in the United States, outside the New York City, somewhere in the suburbs.
At the time when Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales were published, London was the largest city in the world and the heart of the Industrial Revolution. According to Andrea Chiurato, apart from being a “symbol of modernity forging ahead” (237), London was the locus of birth of the modern subject. It is characterised by a precarious ontological status as a result of the “progressive disintegration of the bonds of identity and attachment, of the sense of belonging” (237). Chiurato argues that Hawthorne’s Wakefield is an example of such an alienated and uprooted subject. For Hawthorne London, more of a mental construct or a symbol than a real place, functions as a testing ground for literary simulation. In no other city could a man disappear for twenty years while living a stone’s throw from his home, for no other city could make a man so disoriented — in London “the traditional paradigms of identity” (Chiurato 233) were questioned. The character of Wakefield, then, is a hyperbolic embodiment of social and psychological upheavals triggered by the Industrial Revolution and living in an emergent “busy and selfish” (Hawthorne 119) megacity.
In Chiurato’s opinion, Hawthorne “anticipate[s] many of the future contradictions of urbanization that were to develop in [his] homeland in the second half of the 1800s” (250). E.L. Doctorow’s reinterpretation of Hawthorne’s tale is largely augmented, but at its core is the same disturbed, uprooted character not fully aware of what determines his behaviour. Doctorow’s short story can be interpreted as a contemporary representation of what Hawthorne may have vaguely anticipated.
Inevitably, in the process of transposition Doctorow introduces a set of changes to the hypotext. One of the most significant alterations is the spatial transfer from London to the American suburbs. It appears that there is no need for Doctorow to use a foreign setting because the future not only has arrived in, but has been appropriated by the United States. New York has become the new symbol of modernity. Doctorow's choice of the setting may also reflect the fact that the condition of the modern subject has become more common and widespread, dispersed from the urban area to the suburbs.
Though popularly associated with stability and banality of middle-class existence, the suburbs can be seen as a liminal space with a precarious ontological status. Usually the suburbs are neither urban nor rural; moreover, they can be easily absorbed and transformed by the metropolis, to which they are inseparably linked. Built hastily as a result of economic burgeoning of the cities and their subsequent overpopulation, the suburbs are never fully autonomous, even if they develop their own municipal structures. They are defined by their proximity to the metropolis.
In Doctorow’s “Wakefield” the “[passage] from a stable situation to a growing state of disorder” (Chiurato 239) commences when the usual movement between the metropolis and the suburb is unexpectedly halted, i.e. when the character’s daily commute is disrupted. This disruption is followed by another “disconnect”: a power outage in the commuter town. Wakefield is unwilling to ascribe a cause and effect relationship to these events and his strange behaviour; nonetheless, these occurrences foreshadow what is to come in his life. “Under an unnaturally black sky” Wakefield feels defamiliarized from his own neighbourhood, which now, candle-lit, appears to him “exaggerated” and “arbitrary”. He goes on to wonder “why here rather than somewhere else?” which highlights the lack of sense of belonging mentioned by Andrea Chiurato. If one frames the suburb as an in-between space that predominantly is devoid of an identity of its own due to its subjugation to the metropolis, one sees that it is a space in which one simply cannot belong.
Out of the quantitative changes to the hypotext, the theme of alienation from nature is the most visible one. In Hawthorne’s “Wakefield” nature is altogether absent. Apart from deeming light pollution natural, in Doctorow's short story the main character's disconnectedness from nature becomes apparent when he feels mocked by a maple that covered him in spring buds on his walk home. Incensed by a misbehaving tree, Wakefield proceeds to acting aggressively territorial when he notices a raccoon on his possession. This reaction brings into question his claim that the neighbourhood “lived with animal life” – one may surmise that it was not a peaceful coexistence, let alone a symbiosis. Wakefield explains this outburst by his special dislike for racoons which to him are uncanny (in the Freudian sense of ‘strangely familiar’): “more than the ape, it has always seemed to me a relative”. Semi-urban and semi-rural, in Doctorow’s short story the suburbs can be framed as a new “imaginary space where the modern subject experiences the estrangement of the familiar and the disturbing presence of Otherness” (Chiurato 233).
In the morning after these events, Wakefield goes to his back yard where he has an epiphany: nature is autonomous and autotelic. It is a promising realisation: “for the first time, it seemed, [he] understood the green glory of this acreage as something indifferent to human life and quite apart from the Victorian manse set upon it”. The authenticity and stability of nature perceptibly contrasts with the liminality and transitivity of the suburbs. In comparison to green life, human life is anything but glorious: Wakefield’s thoughts drift towards marital issues he has been experiencing. He looks at his house and realises that in fact it is a prison.
Unfortunately, soon enough, like many overwhelmed modern men before him who yearn for a “release into another world”, Wakefield embarks on his own primitivist project, fancying himself the suburban Robinson Crusoe: “this strange suburb was an environment in which I would have to sustain myself, like a person lost in a jungle, like a castaway on an island”. This idea may be seen as an attempt to infuse the underlying emptiness of the suburb with meaning. Conceptualising the suburb as an uncivilised island makes it possible for Wakefield to begin his life anew. By means of his dexterity and effort, he should make it a place of his own so that it has some identity.
Wakefield’s primitivist fantasy is pervaded by the romantic notion of wilderness, a social construct rooted in the nature-culture dualism and anxiety of the modern subject. William Cronon in an essay titled “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” suggests that the wilderness construct is “the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires” (7). One may surmise that in both Hawthorne’s and Doctorow’s texts Wakefield’s deepest desire is to get away from himself, i.e. his social status, function and responsibilities that they entail. Living in a society is perceived by Wakefield as a burdensome performance imposed upon him by the overarching system and its social structure. He longs for a new beginning: “I felt the stubble on my chin. Who was this fellow? I had not even thought about what I had left behind in my law office – the cases, the clients, the partnership. I became almost giddy”. The wilderness then appears as “an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial modernity, the one place we can turn for escape from our own too-muchness” (Cronon 7).
Wakefield's frantic behaviour may be also a result of alienation. Modern Western society is often conceptualised as a machine in which a man loses his individuality and the sense of agency. In a reaction to feeling like a cog in a machine, Wakefield succumbs to atavistic sentiments: “I felt uncharacteristically defiant, as if I were about to roar and pound my chest”. In the wilderness Wakefield sees the promise of a space where a man can rebuilt his sense of selfhood, find his roots and seek self-fulfilment. Obviously, Wakefield does not realise that his Robinsonade is a performance, too, a cliché. All of this is a result of an underlying disappointment with and fear of modernity.
Apart from parodying the Robinsonade tradition, Doctorow probably alludes to Henry David Thoreau, Hawthorne’s contemporary. At one point Wakefield is forced to leave his territory: “with a keen sense of dispossession, I wandered out of the neighbourhood to find some place to sleep, and discovered that I had barely begun to use the resources available to me when I came upon an undeveloped piece of land as wild as I could wish” — a local nature preserve. There he attempts to live by the pond, like in Thoreau's Walden, but he is not used to being so close to nature: “a constant stirring of unknown life around [him]” (i.e. bugs, birds, and mosquitoes) makes him feel uncomfortable; so he gives up on the idea of sleeping outdoors, in the wilderness, and goes back to his “garage den” as soon as it becomes possible. In addition, his alienation from nature is mirrored in the sheer way he automatically frames the nature preserve as an objectified resource that serves to human ends.
Significantly, American nature preserves have their roots in the will to save the fading frontier. William Cronon highlights that such preserves are “the last bastion of rugged individualism” (13). They protect the kind of environment in which the American identity was forged. There is an assumption in the American culture that the experience of the frontier is crucial to the maintenance of the American spirit; thus, according to Cronon, national parks and nature preserves were founded in part to provide future generations with this experience, or at least its simulacrum. One of the incentives was also the gendered conviction that “the comforts and seductions of civilized life were especially insidious for men, who all too easily became emasculated by the femininizing tendencies of civilization” (Cronon 14). This belief was especially common among the rich; the poor continued to associate the wilderness with hardship, not the sublime and freedom:
the curious result was that frontier nostalgia became an important vehicle for expressing a peculiarly bourgeois form of antimodernism. The very men who most benefited from urban-industrial capitalism were among those who believed they must escape its debilitating effects. If the frontier was passing, then men who had the means to do so should preserve for themselves some remnant of its wild landscape so that they might enjoy the regeneration and renewal that came from sleeping under the stars, participating in blood sports, and living off the land. The frontier might be gone, but the frontier experience could still be had if only wilderness were preserved (Cronon 14).
Doctorow’s Wakefield fits the description: he is a Manhattan lawyer, alienated from his twin daughters, slightly contemptuous of women and their “ambiguous” behaviour. Once he casts out the mother raccoon and her cubs from his back yard, he feels “absolutely secure” and complete, “as if the several phantom images of [him]self had resolved into the final form of who [he] was – clearly and firmly Howard Wakefield [he] was meant to be”. To him the suburb is now the new frontier, where he exercises self-reliance. After the incident with the raccoons, he again fights an uneven battle with an antagonist female scavenger, this time human, and her sons; scavenging is their source of income. Ironically, it occurs that Wakefield trespasses on their territory, i.e. that the suburb in fact is not his own uncivilised island. Even more ironically, it is civilisation that saves him when he falls sick — two mentally deficient teenagers cure him. (One of them, though, a girl, probably harasses him when he is asleep, which is surely an emasculating experience).
Like most utopian projects, Wakefield’s suburban Robinsonade is also a failure. This time it was not torpedoed by a harsh winter but a weakening commitment to the cause. Wakefield is gripped by homesickness, loneliness and jealousy. He comes back to reclaim his household and his wife from the hands of an old adversary in courtship. In fact, his project seemed doomed from the beginning. It is because in the back yard, the morning after the “night of the raccoon” he identified the roots of his mid-life crisis wrongfully. Detaching from one’s family and responsibilities does not entail detaching from the system; conversely, ghosting one’s wife and children is just another step in the “progressive disintegration of the bonds of identity and attachment, of the sense of belonging” (Chiurato 237). In other words, Wakefield shot himself in the foot — unwittingly he reinforced the process of atomisation which has been already taking place and which has debilitating effects on the modern society. Similarly, becoming a scavenger and relying on the excess of trash that the system produces has little to do with self-reliance and autonomy — it makes one a bacterium in the complex metabolism of capitalism.
Wakefield lacks resolution to go all the way through the transitional process from being the in-group member of a modern Western capitalist society to being its out-group member, whatever that would mean and require. He gets stuck in between and then he takes a cowardly step backwards, for which he is punished with even greater alienation than he experienced in the first place. To conclude, one becomes “the Outcast of the Universe” (Hawthorne 120) when one wants to have the best of both worlds.
Literature — selected topics
Dr Michał Palmowski
16 September 2019
Minor stylistic improvements added to the text: 17 April 2023
Works Cited
Chiurato, Andrea. “The Outcasts of the Universe: Longing and Belonging in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s and Edgar Allan Poe’s London Tales”. Spaces of Longing and Belonging: Territoriality, Ideology and Creative Identity in Literature and Film. Eds. Le Juez, Brigitte, and Bill Richardson. Brill, 2019, pp. 233-251.
Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”. Environmental History, vol. 1, no. 1, 1996, pp. 7-28. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3985059.
Doctorow, E.L. “Wakefield”. The New Yorker, 14 January 2008, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/01/14/wakefield.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Wakefield”. Twice Told Tales. 1837. EPUB ed., Project Gutenberg, 2004, pp. 111-120.
Warf, Barney, and Santa Arias. “Introduction: The Reinsertion of Space in the Humanities and Social Sciences”. The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Eds. Warf, Barney and Santa Arias. Routledge, 2009, pp. 1–10.
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