Hawthorne's Graveyard Humor: “Chippings with a Chisel”

Abstract

As both literary critics and social historians have recognized, nineteenth-century American culture was noteworthy for the prominent place of death and bereavement within its prevailing ideologies of sentimentality and domesticity. Manifestations of sentimentality thus appeared in the abundant literature of mourning, including poetry, sermons, essays, manuals, and anthologies; in the prescribed exhibition of sympathy-inducing mourning garments, which a woman wore as formal attire and a man as a crape band for hat or arm; and in the production of a plethora of memorial portraits, photographs, albums, embroidery, quilts, hair weavings, brooches, lockets, rings, gloves, spoons, and other "tokens" and "keepsakes" that commemorated the deceased. So, too, the pervasive domestication of death can be found in such developments as the rural, or garden, cemetery movement that began in the early 1830s and created a picturesque pastoral retreat for communing with the dead; in the rise of the Spiritualist movement in the late 1840s providing consolatory communication with the deceased; and in the common literary and cultural representation of heaven as a place for family reunions in a glorified celestial parlor. Integrally related to all these trends was the emphasis on maintaining a close affective attachment to the deceased and the preservation of meaningful emotional contact through memorial items and a suitably inscribed gravestone, all creating what might be called a "cult of memory" for the dead. (1) In keeping with these widespread cultural trends, a significant portion of Hawthorne's fiction performs a somber negotiation with the varied psychological, religious, and philosophical implications of human mortality. Yet in his early sketch "Chippings with a Chisel," Hawthorne presents a refreshingly humorous treatment of antebellum Americas sentimental preoccupation with death. Previous commentators on Hawthorne's distinctive variety of ironic comedy in his shorter works of fiction and non-fiction have variously characterized it with such terms as "dismal-merrymaking" (Janssen) or Calvinist humor (Dunne); but in the case of "Chippings with a Chisel," the concept of "graveyard humor"--or dark comedy framed within the existential limits of human mortality--would literally seem most appropriate. As such, the sketch merits a careful examination for its distinctive comic and satirical devices, literary allusions and associations, and cultural and biographical resonances. "Chippings with a Chisel" consists of both entertaining character delineation and a comic exercise in the moral picturesque using the versatile and popular medium of the literary sketch pioneered by Washington Irving (Hamilton). Hawthorne's sketch consists of a series of vignettes of the unnamed narrator's multiple visits, over a few weeks of the summer, to the workshop of an itinerant New England stone carver working in Edgartown on the island of Martha's Vineyard. Considering the elderly carver of mortuary art and epitaphs as a fellow artist whose trade accords with his own, the self-effacing narrator enjoys the stimulating company of the carver as well as the varied demands and attitudes of his customers. The topical nature of the sketch, which would have appealed to contemporary readers, arises from the fact that it was written in the midst of the rural cemetery movement during a period of reform in the commemoration and disposal of the dead, when Romantic and evangelical beliefs were displacing older Puritan traditions of mortality (Farrell ch 1). The product of an undocumented summer visit by Hawthorne to Martha's Vineyard in the mid-1830s, "Chippings with a Chisel" was first published in the September 1838 Democratic Review and then appeared in the second, two-volume edition of Twice-Told Tales in 1842. (2) As Arlin Turner first noted, Hawthorne's article on "Martha's Vineyard" in the April 1836 issue of The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge alludes to the writer's month-long visit to the island, which he manifestly used as the basis for both his article and his later sketch. …