Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  Even Hawthorne’s friend George Hillard, flat-footed defender of the Constitution, began to sweat, so troubled was he by the violation of Latimer’s civil rights. The Latimer case sparked a violent outburst against returning fugitive slaves to their putative masters, with John Greenleaf Whittier composing abolitionist verse and the old guard nervously defending the letter of the law. Slavery had seemed an abstraction, something odious practiced somewhere else. Now white slaveholders prosecuted fugitive slaves in the capital of Boston, and slavery had come home.

  Yet many New Englanders persisted in thinking slavery a southern problem, which is how Hawthorne largely regarded it. And he didn’t give a fig for abolition, laughing at it in his sketch “The Hall of Fantasy,” in which an abolitionist brandishes “his one idea like an iron flail.” In this satire, Hawthorne also surrounds Emerson with fawning acolytes, “most of whom,” Hawthorne gibes, “betrayed the power of his intellect by its modifying influence upon their own.” By contrast, the narrator of the sketch, a newcomer to the Hall of Fantasy, is a Democrat who archly claims to “love and honor” such men as Alcott and Jones Very and Washington Allston; maybe he does, but only when he praises John O’Sullivan’s opposition to capital punishment does he drop his supercilious tone.

  Hawthorne had no close friends in Concord, and its residents, men like Emerson, good and intelligent men of serious purpose, struck Hawthorne as somewhat pretentious and spoiled, or like Ellery Channing, as amiable featherheads. Hawthorne sighed. “These originals in a small way, after one has seen a few of them, become more dull and common-place than even those who keep the ordinary pathway of life.”

  Displaced, Hawthorne took aim at his public-spirited neighbors, the poets, reformers, and woolly transcendentalists of sanguine persuasion, and assailed by errant knights, vegetarians, Adventists, Grahamites, and abolitionists—residue of the evangelical movement known as the Second Great Awakening—he salted his prose with misanthropic sarcasm. In “The Procession of Life,” the narrator caustically sorts people into categories, a strange pastime under any circumstance, though in this case the criterion isn’t rank or achievement, just disease, sorrow, crime, and dislocation. And lambasting financiers, social distinctions, or silk-gowned professors, he mocks American democracy. “These factory girls from Lowell,” he declares, “shall mate themselves with the pride of drawing-rooms and literary circles—the bluebells in fashion’s nose-gay, the Sapphos, and Montagues, and Nortons of the age.”

  His astringency reveals a deep, pervasive pessimism originating not just in his earlier reading of Swift and Mandeville, satirists of deep dye, or his recent perusal of Voltaire but in Hawthorne’s perception of himself as an outsider removed, in this instance, from the shallow fuzziness of reform. Hawthorne’s was a world of hard angles, first and forever.

  Winter grew cold. Louisa hoped her brother might be selected for the Salem post office, and though Hawthorne doubted he would, he assured his family that he’d receive a political appointment in a matter of months. He and Sophia ate their first Thanksgiving dinner alone, fortified by one another. In the next months, while she gaily slid on the frozen river, he skated, darting away from her in long sweeping curves. Or, wrapped in his cloak, he was sometimes joined on the ice by Thoreau and Emerson. Sophia watched them. But on a snowy afternoon, the sky leaden, the light in the Old Manse slanted downward.

  “All through the winter I had wished to sit in the dusk of Evening, by the flickering firelight, with my wife, instead of beside a dismal stove. At last, this has come to pass; but it was owing to her illness, and our having no chamber with a stove, fit to receive her.”

  In February 1843 Sophia suffered a miscarriage. Fast recovering, she chirped that “men’s accidents are God’s purposes.” Hawthorne scribbled the consolation into his journal, and like childish vandals, he and Sophia scratched it onto the window of his study.

  Hawthorne now sat at his desk in earnest. With no government job forthcoming, he didn’t appear in public until two in the afternoon, when he trudged through the piled-up snow to the Athenaeum and read for an hour. After peeking his head into the post office, he walked back home for an early tea and to chop the wood he could not afford to buy. Mornings, often before dawn, he skated—“like a schoolboy,” he told his friend Margaret Fuller—and evenings, he read to Sophia as usual. A cold house was no place for guests so the couple entertained one another. “I do suppose that nobody ever lived, in one sense, quite so selfish a life as we do,” Hawthorne admitted, content.

  Each day he returned to his study “with pretty commendable diligence,” he noted with satisfaction, even though he disparaged what he did there. “I might have written more, if it had seemed worth while; but I was content to earn only so much gold as might suffice for our immediate wants, having prospects of official station and emolument, which would do away the necessity of writing for bread.”

  His pockets stayed empty. “It is rather singular that I should need an office,” Hawthorne complained to Bridge; “for nobody’s scribblings seem to me more acceptable to the public than mine; and yet I shall find it a tough match to gain a respectable support by my pen.” Epes Sargent had offered Hawthorne five dollars per page for anything he might submit to the New Monthly Magazine, and Hawthorne tried to charge the same amount to James Lowell, editor of the recently founded Pioneer, but Lowell couldn’t pay anywhere near that, and what he could pay, he paid slowly. So did Sargent and the Democratic Review, where Hawthorne earned only twenty dollars each for articles like “The Old Apple-Dealer” or a story like “The Antique Ring.” And because he himself owed money, he couldn’t send funds to his sisters or mother. His paltry finances kept him close to home, unable even to go to Boston. “It is an annoyance; not a trouble,” he swaggered for Sophia’s benefit in their jointly kept journal, though he did regret his meager income—and meager output—as well as the fact that no one remunerated him fairly for what he did manage to provide.

  Hawthorne wanted to write two juvenile storybooks under O’Sullivan’s auspices, believing New York a lucrative venue for publishing. But he didn’t. Nor could he motivate himself to write anything for Poe’s projected magazine, Stylus. He turned down the chance to compose more stories for the Boys’ and Girls’ Magazine, which had published his children’s fable, “Little Daffydowndilly” (about dillydallying), and though he consented to contribute to the popular Graham’s Magazine, hoping to pocket its generous fee, he dawdled. Pressure made him tense.

  “Could I only have the freedom to be perfectly idle now—no duty to fulfil—no mental or physical labor to perform—I could be as happy as a squash, and much in the same mode,” he scribbled in his journal. “But the necessity of keeping my brain at work eats into my comfort as the squash-bug do into the heart of the vines. I keep myself uneasy, and produce little, and almost nothing that is worth producing.” More likely Hawthorne did not quite know what he wanted to do, and he still hoped for a political appointment, traveling to Boston and Salem when he could afford to go to jockey for it.

  But nothing eased his sense of failure. Either he accused himself of not writing enough or he considered what he wrote trivial: the busy conscience was a cruel taskmaster, impossible to please. Still, through 1843, Hawthorne’s sketches and tales appeared regularly, and by the end of the year, with Sophia six months pregnant, Hawthorne sat in his study all morning and in the afternoon until sunset, having stocked the pages of the Democratic with stories like “The New Adam and Eve,” “Egotism; or, The Bosom-Serpent,” “The Procession of Life,” “The Celestial Rail-road,” “Buds and Bird-Voices,” and “Fire-Worship.” Though his pace slackened slightly in 1844, he did publish “Earth’s Holocaust” in Graham’s and “Drowne’s Wooden Image” in Godey’s Lady’s Book. Destitution and the imminent birth of a child had smashed through his inhibitions, or what he often termed his torpor.

  But stories printed for a few dollars a page could not feed a family. Sometime after leaving the Old Manse, he quipped that he
had hoped “at least to achieve a novel,” if not some more serious writing while he lived there. He wrote no novel. Yet he did start what may have been conceived as a book of interrelated tales, subtitling two of them “From the Unpublished ‘Allegories of the Heart.’ ”

  He’d been speculating about the project for quite a while—the heart allegorized as a cavern, he jotted in his notebooks. “At the entrance there is sunshine, and flowers growing about it. You step within, but a short distance, and begin to find yourself surrounded with a terrible gloom, and monsters of divers kinds; it seems like Hell itself.” But with a series of tales about the misalliances of men and women, Hawthorne was writing stories unlike those about bachelors, wanderers, and masqueraders, and different too from his recent satiric sketches.

  Take “The Birth-mark,” published in Lowell’s Pioneer and written not six months after his marriage, during Sophia’s first pregnancy. A young scientist insists on removing the crimson birthmark on his wife’s left cheek that galls and obsesses him; it’s the “sole token of human imperfection,” says he. With sexual anxiety thinly disguised as cosmetology, he prepares a stupefying concoction, which his wife obediently drinks. The fatal red mark disappears, but the potion kills her: the ideal cannot exist in disembodied form. This is the lesson that Aylmer, the scientist, has to learn. “Our creative Mother,” Hawthorne writes, “while she amuses us with apparently working in the broadest sunshine, is yet severely careful to keep her own secrets, and, in spite of her pretended openness, shows us nothing but results. She permits us indeed, to mar, but seldom to mend, and, like a jealous patentee, on no account to make.”

  A slap at Emerson and transcendentalism, “The Birth-mark” is also a murder story in which a man confronts marriage, and hence sexuality, with horror. Equally, he wants to prevent a birth. In this sense, Hawthorne’s story is also a fantasy of abortion. The scientist kills his wife and what she produces so that he in some way can remain alone, untrammeled, asexual, and free from responsibility.

  The deadly ambivalence about women and, more broadly, sexual bodies and fatherhood suffuses most of the stories that Hawthorne wrote in these years. Another example, though far less accomplished—and less sadistic—is another tale in the projected “Allegories of the Heart” series, “Egotism; or, The Bosom-Serpent.” Revamping a popular sixteenth-century legend, Hawthorne coils a snake about the heart of the Poe-like Roderick Elliston, the tale’s main character, who understandably shuns the general population because of his bizarre affliction. Soon, though, he wants to be noticed. “All persons, chronically diseased,” writes Hawthorne, “are egotists, whether the disease be of the mind or the body.”

  To Hawthorne, the desire for recognition is a curse. Ambition, fame, and la gloire are sins of commission in Hawthorne’s world. Thus, the greater Roderick’s fame, the greater his torment: it’s as if Hawthorne was writing the allegory of himself, an ambitious guest unhappy under his dark veil and miserable without it.

  So Roderick Elliston seeks the solace of fellow sufferers. Searching for the symptoms of his own disease in everyone he meets, Roderick hopes to “establish a species of brotherhood between himself and the world,” for he needs to believe that he does belong somewhere, that he’s not a complete monster or deformed oddball; that he is, in effect, a man. Yet what is manhood? Elliston sees his masculinity grotesquely mirrored in ambitious statesmen, distinguished clergymen, and wealthy merchants, each of whom harbors a secret serpent. Even the envious author, who disparages the books he could never write, nurtures his own slimy snake, one that, Hawthorne jests, “was fortunately without a sting.”

  By seeking this fraternity, Roderick is able to sidestep the implications of his condition: Roderick is pregnant. For though Hawthorne states early in the story that the bosom-serpent symbolizes jealousy, he never bothers to make the nature of Roderick’s jealousy concrete or believable—unless procreation is its primitive source. That is, Roderick’s bosom-serpent isn’t just a symbol of his manhood; the snake transforms Roderick into a woman, with a creature alive inside him that’s “nourished with his food, and lived upon his life.”

  Written during Sophia’s first pregnancy and miscarriage, Hawthorne’s story conveys all the fears of coming fatherhood: that the creature about to be born is predatory, threatening; that the miracle of creation is mixed with sex and death; that a man can never do what a woman does, despite, in Hawthorne’s case, an unsettling, overwhelming identification with women: his mother, his sisters, even Sophia. It’s no surprise that Hawthorne’s Roderick cannot be rid of his serpent until his wife, Rosina, appears almost willy-nilly at the story’s hasty conclusion. But the ending is psychologically astute. Rosina rescues Roderick by reassuring him of his masculinity.

  Bosom-serpents within the body and birthmarks on it refer again to Hawthorne’s obsession with disclosure, or that which is written and borne on the body. In another story, the superbly intricate “The Artist of the Beautiful,” published in the Democratic in 1844 but written around the time his first child was due, Hawthorne admixes sexuality and childbirth into a parable of art and artistry. The artist of the story’s title is the watchmaker Owen Warland, renowned for the delicate ingenuity applied “always for purposes of grace, and never with any mockery of the useful.” Loving “the Beautiful” and attempting to render a perfect depiction of it, “refined from all utilitarian coarseness,” Owen might just as well have been a poet, a painter, or a sculptor, or so the story’s narrator tells us. He might even have been Hawthorne, whose “demand is for perfection,” said Sophia, “& nothing short can content him.”

  There is something self-centered about Owen, something infantile, insulated, and vain. With his diminutive frame, his ladylike fastidiousness, and his flapping nerves, Owen Warland is an effeminate anomaly in a world that gauges manliness, and hence productivity, by the girth of a blacksmith’s big arm or the heft of his wallet.

  When Annie Hovenden, whom Owen thinks he loves, marries the good-natured, thick-skinned blacksmith Robert Danforth, Owen becomes ill, gains weight, grows plump—after which episode he does eventually succeed in crafting (giving birth) to a beautiful little thing, a mechanical butterfly, perfect, lifelike, the consummation of his dreams. He brings his creation to Annie and Robert, themselves now the parents of a sturdy little child. The lovely butterfly flickers about the room, and just when it’s ready to land, the child snatches it and crushes it in his little fist.

  Owen is presumably defeated, his creation smashed, his butterfly vanquished not by Danforth or Annie or her scornful father but by a human child. Nature’s real creation, suggests Hawthorne, threatens to overshadow, if not utterly destroy, the artist’s.

  After a winter of fierce cold, scant food, and little money, on March 3, 1844, Sophia Hawthorne endured ten hours of labor. She finally gave birth to a baby girl and named her Una, for Spenser’s vision of purity. She had red hair.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Repatriation

  Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter”

  AT ABOUT TEN O’CLOCK on the night of their third wedding anniversary, Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne were roused by a loud pounding at the front door. It was Ellery Channing, pale and upset. Something terrible had happened: a young woman had drowned herself in the Concord River. Her bonnet and shoes, neatly arranged, had been found on the shore. Hawthorne’s boat was needed to dredge for the body.

  With Channing at the oars and Hawthorne paddling, the men arrived downstream quickly. Several other townsmen had gathered, lanterns swinging, and two of them boarded Hawthorne’s small boat. Hawthorne navigated, intermittently letting the boat drift while the men slowly combed the water with pronged hay rakes.

  “I’ve got her,” one man suddenly cried, and heaved his pole. In the brackish water Hawthorne saw the outline of a dress and then a bod
y, half submerged, which the men towed to shore, banking it near a large tree. They held up their lanterns. Several men moved closer, but Hawthorne, startled, stood back. Blood oozed from the dead woman’s nose and eyes. An old carpenter bent down to wipe away the thick streams, which seemed to keep flowing. One of the men fainted.

  “Her arms had stiffened in the act of struggling; and were bent before her, with the hands clenched,” Hawthorne later recalled. “And when the men tried to compose her figure, her arms would still return to that same position.” One man had placed a large foot on her arm to force it down, but as soon as he’d moved his foot, the arm sprang back.

  They wrapped her in an old quilt, and Hawthorne helped lift her onto a makeshift bier to carry her body to her father’s house, a half mile down the hill. “I suppose one friend would have saved her,” he fantasized; “but she died for want of sympathy—a severe penalty for having cultivated and refined herself out of the sphere of natural connections.” In death as in life, he supposed, such is woman’s clenched defiance—and her punishment.

  Hurrying back to Sophia that unlit night, Hawthorne might easily have been warning himself against the perils of isolation. In the water he had seen a distorted image which, with stiffened arms and distended legs, spurned all Concord’s pretty homilies of life and death: a poor lonely girl, homegrown expatriate, plunged beneath the river’s veil.

  Hawthorne knew nothing, really, of this woman, only that her name was Martha Hunt, that she was nineteen, the superintendent of a district school, and was said to be of “melancholic temperament,” or so he noted, “and accustomed to solitary walks in the woods.” Just like him.