Holgrave, hipsters and race

In which an attempt is made to bridge criticism of the nineteenth-century and criticism of the twenty-first century within the figure of Holgrave.

In addition to all Holgrave's radical comments previously expressed, he has this to say: "The truth is, that, once in every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors" [1].

In her article "The Transformation of American Family Property in The House of the Seven Gables," Holly Jackson makes the claim that Holgrave's statement is emblematic of the shift America was undergoing at the time of the book's writing: "the transition from a system of social relations based on real property to a system of symbolic estate" [2]. For Jackson, that "symbolic estate" was blood status based on the concept of race. She argues that The House of the Seven Gables "registers a shift in historical conceptions of kinship between "the collapse of this aristocratic dynasty and its displacement by the domestic family," in particular a white domestic family [3].

She views Hepzibah's sale of the Jim Crow cookie at the beginning of the novel as a symbol of the new hierarchy in society. Even though Hepzibah has had to renounce her hereditary aristocracy and move down in the world, her involvement in market capitalism places her in a higher status than African Americans, represented as property here in the form of the Jim Crow. She writes that "Hawthorne reveals the subjection of African Americans to be at the center of the modernization of the white American family that attended the emergence of market capitalism" [4]. So even though ancestry in terms of property was phased out in mid-19th century America, ancestry remained a key element of American identity, this time in terms of race. Jackson asserts that "the emergence of scientific racism created a new kind of national family property, indeed a new conception of the family itself" [5]. As we will see, Holgrave accepts this new/old order of things by participating in his new family life at the end of the book. 

Like the establishment of the new Maule-Pyncheon family, contemporary hipster culture has a complicated relationship with race. According to Mark Grief, the term "hipster" originally referred to "a black subcultural figure of the late forties." A decade later, the hipsters were white and aimed to appropriate elements of black culture for their own subculture. These hipsters, Grief writes, were "explicity defined by the desire of a white avante-garde to disaffiliate itself from whiteness, with its stain of Eisenhower, the bomb, and the corporation, and achieve the 'cool' knowledge and exoticized energy, lust and violence of black Americans" [6]. 

He characterizes the reemergent hipster at the turn of the 21st century as a "White Hipster," someone who, in their style and trappings, "fetishized the violence, instinctiveness, and rebelliousness of lower-middle-class 'white trash'" [7]. Now instead of appropriating blackness, they were reasserting their whiteness. In 2004, the "white hipster" transformed into the "green hipster," where "the points of reference shifted from midwestern suburbs to animals, wilderness, plus the occasional Native American"[8]. However, while race has perhaps ceased to be the defining factor in hipster identity, hipster culture is still primarily seen and portrayed as white, as the popular blog "Stuff White People Like" can attest. 

[1] Hawthorne 128
[2] Jackson 271
[3] Jackson 278
[4] Jackson 285
[5] Jackson 280
[6] Grief 3
[7] Grief 4 
[8] Grief 6