Tracing Blackness in Hawthorne and His Mosses

After reading Toni Morrison’s literary criticism Playing in the Dark, I became sensitive to the use of blackness in author’s works. Morrison discussed the theory that historically, white male authors simply ignored the role of the ‘Africanist’ in their works. But Morrison began to read the works again from the standpoint of the writer to understand better the use of blackness. On closer inspection, she began to “contemplate how Africanist personae, narrative, and idiom moved and enriched the text in self-conscious ways, to consider what the engagement meant for the work of the writer’s imagination” (15-16).
In Melville’s Hawthorne and His Mosses, is there an explicit reference to the mystery of blackness, especially in the line “but this darkness but gives more effect to the ever-moving dawn, that forever advances through it, and circumnavigates his world.” This generates the idea that blackness and Hawthorne’s whiteness are both necessary and critical to the other’s existence. Hawthorne’s use of lights and shades interplays between light and darkness, hinting at perhaps a “Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin.”
Morrison explains how “whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable.” (pg. 59). Without darkness, light has no meaning. Without sin, grace is not something sought after. The use of blackness in Hawthorne’s works places an extreme emphasis on the unknown. “But there is the blackness of darkness beyond; and even his bright gildings but fringe, and play upon the edges of thunder-clouds.” This unknown, or the darkness that sin plays on the soul as well an in the world, is perpetuated in Hawthorne’s use of blackness in the darkness.