— a 'terrific chasm' of a mouth, 'a pair of prodigious ears,' 'huge goggle eyes' amazed at 'their own enormity.' In The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845), caricature accelerates to metamorphosis when the long-dead Valdemar suddenly rots away on his bed — 'a nearly liquid mass of loathsome — of detestable putridity.'
The distorting violence of Poe's imagination can take caricature an additional step to cruelty and revenge. Hop-Frog, court jester to a brutal king, is both a dwarf and a cripple, who can move along the floor 'only with great pain and difficulty.' The extreme anguish and abasement of his life (synopsized, as it were, by his deformities) bring him to hoist the king and seven counselors on a chandelier during a -81- masquerade party and burn them alive. And thus a narrative that begins, 'I never knew anyone so keenly alive to a joke as the king was. He seemed to live only for joking,' ends with 'The eight corpses swung in their chains, a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass.' An ominous idea of joking encompasses 'Hop-Frog' (1849): Poe twists it through stages of cruelty, uses a masquerade party to reverse its direction, and finally has it consummated by an act of revenge — for which Hop-Frog, incidentally, pays no penalty.
Edward Davidson has suggested that the camouflaged crudeness in Poe's early work — his coarse pun on the name Abel-Shittim in the first version of A Tale of Jerusalem (1832), the Shandean play on noses in Lionizing (1835) — may have come from an almost compulsive tendency to get even with his society, to ridicule an audience that could be at once amused and fooled. A compulsive aggression against his audience seems indeed to pervade Poe's work, both early and late. And one of its manifestations is the prevailing invitation of Poe's narrators to witness an act of vengeance. In a society that prized the domestic and valued the didactic for its moral utility, Poe became militantly antididactic, mischievously antidomestic. The narrator of The Black Cat (1843) presents the garish revenge of his tale as 'a series of mere household events.' The narrator of The Cask of Amontillado (1846) exults in the memory of revenge taken fifty years before — although some readers, uneasy at the amoral calisthenics of this tale and unwilling to accept Poe in undiluted form, see the narrative as confessional rather than celebratory.
In some of his best-known work Poe explores the intricate and baffling nature of the perverse. Characteristically, he uses narrators who seek to destroy the 'I' — the self driven by an 'unfathomable longing' to offer violence to 'its own nature' (as we read in 'The Black Cat'). Obsessed by the 'eye' of his victim, the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) decides 'to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.' Given Poe's fondness for puns (and his disdain for the transcendentalists' emphasis on self), it is tempting to substitute an 'I' for an 'eye' in this context.
Poe's longest fiction, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), is sustained by the spirit of self-destruction and recurrent strategies of revenge on the reader. We are at the mercy of Poe's imagination in Pym — the power of his words is paramount: hot and -82- cold, black and white, are what Poe says they are. Against all odds, Pym battles through to the final dream vision; as it progresses, his narrative casts off and subverts experience. And Poe is not above playing a trick to speed the voyage. He stages his scene of cannibalism brilliantly, in a way that maximizes its horror. The proof of Poe's power as a writer is that he makes us believe him in this scene; he engages us as members of a civilization that regards cannibalism as fearful and regressive, the ultimate sickening gesture to sustain life. And then he sandbags us. After the sailor Parker has been murdered, eaten, and his blood drunk, Poe has Pym remember the whereabouts of an ax with which he can chop through the deck and obtain food. After leading us to credit the terrible extremity of the situation, Poe subverts our reactions by quickly setting things back to 'normal.' But after this scene we are a good deal less sure where we are. In retrospect, we can see that we are taking a journey into a vengeful imagination.
Hawthorne's use of caricature differs from that of Poe when it depends for its validity on the perceptions of characters. What Giovanni sees in Rappaccini's garden (evidence of Beatrice's poisonous nature) may be the product of his skepticism and inability to love. What Young Goodman Brown sees in the forest (evidence of evil in those he reveres) may be the result of specter evidence. What various people see, and don't see, on Arthur Dimmesdale's breast at the end of The Scarlet Letter tells us something about the spectators, something about ourselves, and a lot about Hawthorne — inventor of the first multiple-choice test in the romance.
But Hawthorne, like Poe, can use caricature for his own purposes. And since the distorting effects of monomania produce psychological and spiritual caricature, Hawthorne's work contains what may be a peerless array of figures such as Richard Digby in The Man of Adamant (1837), Aylmer in The Birth-mark (1843), Ethan Brand in Ethan Brand: A Chapter from an Abortive Romance (1850), and of course Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter. Out of a belief that only he can be saved, Richard Digby forswears society, disdains the young woman who (for some reason) loves him, and lives his self-intent life in a cave. Obsessed with his desire for perfection, Aylmer kills his loving wife (who for some reason married him) in the course of a great experiment and thus rejects the best the earth can -83- offer. Ethan Brand confronts the absolute even more starkly than these two destructive protagonists. The sole issue in this tale is whether a human being can commit an unpardonable sin, a sin so grievous that it exceeds God's capacity for mercy. Can Ethan Brand triumph over God? On such an absolute question does Hawthorne construct his 'Chapter from an Abortive Romance,' a story bleak, intense, formed out of the protagonist's monomania, his presumption, and his final despair and suicide.
Whereas Melville came to Moby-Dick (1851) after a burst of activity that included Mardi, Redburn (1849), and White-Jacket (1850), Hawthorne turned to The Scarlet Letter after being fired from the Salem Custom House. Whereas Melville would later present such sportive caricatures as Turkey and Nippers in Bartleby, the Scrivener (1856), one temperamentally unable to work in the morning, the other in the afternoon, Hawthorne had long before examined the hallucinatory and even cruel aspect of revolutionary fervor in My Kinsman, Major Molineux (1832) and presented as 'A Parable' the resolute mystification of the Reverend Mr. Hooper in The Minister's Black Veil (1836). But the two writers saw their consummate stories of revenge published only a year apart. The Scarlet Letter, of course, came first; and so impressed was Melville with that romance and Hawthorne's earlier work that he inscribed Moby-Dick to Hawthorne 'in Token of my admiration for his genius.'
Vengeance in The Scarlet Letter reaches out to affect the entire fabric of the fictive world. The Puritan community, as we know, metes out public punishment to Hester Prynne the sinner. But Chillingworth undertakes a private search for Hester's partner in adultery, and Hawthorne handles the development of his obsession by giving us a virtual anatomy of revenge. Chillingworth begins his search with a sense of objectivity, as if the matter were a problem in geometry rather than one 'of human passions, and wrongs inflicted on himself.' Gradually, however, what Hawthorne calls 'a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce, though still calm, necessity' comes over him. Ultimately, his revenge becomes more intense, more involved, more personal, an obsession that feeds upon itself. When Hester asks if he has not tortured Dimmesdale enough, Chillingworth replies, 'No! — no! - He has but increased the debt.' Part of Hawthorne's achievement in The Scarlet Letter lies in his ability to demonstrate the re-84- flexive nature of revenge, to show convincingly that Chillingworth has caught himself on a vicious blade of vengeance that cuts two ways. Though there can be no getting even, the avenger must intensify his torture; yet the more he does so, the more he destroys himself.
Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, of course, make each other possible in The Scarlet Letter. Just as Chillingworth lives to torture, Dimmesdale lives to be tortured. Yet the fundamental falseness of the minister's position yields an idiom of anguish that stands him very well in his professional life. His sermons, for example, are models of efficacy: the more he reviles himself as a sinner (in general terms, from the security of the pulpit), the more his congregation elevates him to new heights of spirituality (as he knows it will) and thinks comparatively of its own unworthiness. His anguish is convincing, compelling, and genuine, although it springs from and compounds his hypocrisy — even because of his awareness that it springs from and compounds his hypocrisy.
Dimmesdale clearly suffers from an excess of self. His weakness and suffering throughout most of the romance have tended to blur for some readers the fact of his pride, which, like his scarlet letter, lies beneath and gives special form to his mask of saintliness. Selfcondemnation, self-abnegation, and self-loathing are the stimulants of his psychic life; they constitute as well the price he must pay if he would not strip away the self
