Yes, my friends, it's true. Phoebe and I are getting married, and inheriting a house from the Judge, and moving to the country, and starting our own happy little family in the suburbs. Just like that, I've changed overnight.
Please don't think too ill of me, and don't worry too much about trying to figure me out. Everybody I've told about this so far has been weighing in with their opinion on my decision. Barnes, for instance, since he thinks everything I do is just imitating Orestes Brownson, thinks that my twist is all just a parody of that whole situation--how Brownson converted to Catholicism and renounced his old friends and a lot of his old ideas. But look, I can't knock the guy. He was always searching for the right belief system, and frankly, even though he ended up as a conservative, wasn't that also being a nonconformist among his whole transcendentalist circle?
Gilmore thinks that my final act of photographing the dead judge and making that photo public parallels Hawthorne's final decision to submit to the pressures of the marketplace and write a crowd-pleasing happy ending. But since according to Temple's interpretation, I was never really removed from the marketplace at all, how could I not submit to it? If not inevitable, it should at least not be surprising.
And then you've got the people like Baym and Cohen, who both think the ending shows the forces of death confronting me for the first time. Yes, yes, I can see what they're getting at, what with a mysterious daguerreotype taken of a dead man in a dark room, and marrying into the Pyncheon family, which we basically all agree is generally awful.
In response, let me just say: for the duration of this blog, we have been going with the conceit that I am (or could have been) a real person--at least, as much as a fictional character being double-fictionalized and de-temporalized by a metafictional blog such as this can be--and, if that's the case, don't real people change their minds about things all the time? Especially 21-year-olds! And if you accept the common criticism by non-hipsters that hipsterism is mostly just an affectation, you might be somewhat justified in assuming that I was never a true, deeply rooted transcendentalist at all, but rather just an idealistic young man swept up by a fad.
Of course, I don't think that of myself, but I'm just saying that, if you accept that I represent a person who might have lived around 1850, then could what I said above be just as plausible an explanation than that of those learned scholars?
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