After the birth of Una, Hawthorne’s anxiety increased. “I find it is a very sober and serious kind of happiness that springs from the birth of a child,” he confided to George Hillard. “It ought not to come too early in a man’s life—not till he has fully enjoyed his youth—for methinks the spirit never can be thoroughly gay and careless again, after this great event.”
It had been a difficult year. Guests to the Manse that summer admired the new baby—the daughter of a “holy and equal marriage,” Fuller had purred—and tried not to notice the Hawthornes’ poverty. The house was so pretty and clean, the child so affectionate, the hospitality so gracious. One could bring a gift as humble as a new potato or a baby’s rattle and be treated like royalty.
Fuller colored the old gray Manse in ruddy prose, and if she saw the lines furrowing Hawthorne’s brow, she didn’t comment but instead reclined lazily in the Pond-lily and gazed moonward as he rowed. “I love him much,” she wrote in her journal, “& love to be with him in this sweet tender homely scene. But I should like too, to be with him on the bold ocean shore.” A single woman, depressed that summer and perennially disappointed by the men she liked, Fuller found in Hawthorne a companion “mild, deep and large.” Together the two of them explored the twisted woodland paths near the Manse, getting lost and sharing confidences while Sophia stayed home with the baby. Trying to find words for their special relationship, Fuller uncannily settled on the fraternal image Sophia had once used: “I feel more like a sister to H. or rather more that he might be a brother to me than ever with any man before.”
Hawthorne was troubled by his friendship with Fuller; he may have sensed that she thought him attractive, and he may have been attracted to her himself. He had found her intriguing at Brook Farm, though in an unquiet way. As quick as Ebe and as biting, as supportive as Elizabeth Peabody and as taxing, and as alone as Martha Hunt, Fuller embodied Hawthorne’s idea of the modern woman—oppressed, confused, intelligent—who makes an appearance, nameless, in his 1844 story “The Christmas Banquet,” another in the “Allegories of the Heart” series. “A woman of unemployed energy,” Hawthorne describes her, “who found herself with nothing to achieve, nothing to enjoy, and nothing even to suffer. She had, therefore, driven herself to the verge of madness by dark broodings over the wrongs of her sex, and its exclusion from a proper field of action.”
The characterization is Hawthorne’s imaginative response to Fuller’s Dial essay “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men; Woman versus Women,” a first draft of the more provocative Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Fuller and Hawthorne agreed that “those [women] who would reform the world must show that they do not speak in heat of wild impulse,” as Fuller writes; “their lives must be unstained by passionate error; they must be severe lawgivers to themselves.” Hawthorne sympathizes with the iconoclastic, heroic woman who poses a danger to herself or others. In fact, this modern woman stands at the center of “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” a story of tangled perceptions Hawthorne wrote shortly after Fuller’s summertime visit.
Hawthorne observes his protagonist, Beatrice Rappaccini, from afar but knows her intimately, empathizing with her, identifying with her, and condemning her all at the same time. Her father, the renowned horticulturist Dr. Rappaccini, has raised her on a diet of poisonous plants in a poignant, stupid attempt to make her self-sufficient, and so she lives walled within his garden, strong, beautiful, but a danger to anyone not bred on the same poisons as she. Is she deadly? Hawthorne doesn’t quite say. She is a threat to men, that’s sure; and yet Hawthorne respects her, cursing himself, it seems, for fearing her, for desiring her: it’s his version of the family romance.
Like most of Hawthorne’s fiction, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a biographical palimpsest. Dr. Rappaccini is Sophia’s father and Waldo Emerson. (Concord busybodies said Lidian Emerson was poisoning herself with medicine extracted from several plants.) Rappaccini is also Fuller’s father, whose stiff-backed education of Margaret was as destructive, if as well intentioned; he’s Uncle Robert, another horticulturist of decided purpose; and he’s Hawthorne, the father-gardener, who fusses over his wife’s diet and her health. Yet Hawthorne erases most of his sources, even the discernible literary ones—his recent reading of Montaigne’s essays, Eugène Sue’s fiction, Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico, and Shelley’s The Cenci. “He has to contrive as hard to leave out as to put in,” Sophia explained to her mother how her husband wrote his stories, “—& in every one, he circum-sails the universe for a true result.”
For that “true result,” Hawthorne typically settles on a single opaque image—a fire, a letter, a black veil, even a woman—around which he builds his plot. In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” the image is of Beatrice in the garden; the plot concerns Giovanni Guasconti’s attempt to determine her true character. Giovanni, a student, has fallen in love with Beatrice or thinks he has. Vain and shallow, Giovanni transfers his unspoken misgivings about himself onto her. “What is this being?—beautiful, shall I call her?” he stews, “—or inexpressibly terrible?” His landlady, Dame Lisabetta—Ebe?—helps feed his doubt, as does the vituperous Professor Baglioni, Dr. Rappaccini’s archrival. And all of them conspire in the eventual death of Beatrice, destroyed by Giovanni’s lack of faith. For like Aylmer of “The Birth-mark,” Giovanni demands Beatrice drink a potion to purge her of evil. “Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?” Beatrice implores as she swallows the fatal draft. It’s the story’s central question. Destroyed like Aylmer’s wife by irresolute men, Beatrice represents a woman’s struggle to free herself from the Rappaccini-like garden in which she’s confined.
What’s a woman to do? “It somewhat startled me to overhear a number of ladies, highly respectable in appearance, proposing to fling their gowns and petticoats into the flames, and assume the garb, together with the manners, duties, offices, and responsibilities of the opposite sex,” Hawthorne’s narrator quips in the satire “Earth’s Holocaust,” about a bonfire set to purge the world of folly. The narrator is nervous, justly so: prior to overhearing these respectable ladies, he witnessed a neglected American author toss his pen and paper into the blaze. If women are wearing trousers, the narrator seems to ask, whatever will become of men, especially men of questionable manliness, like those who write for a living?
And so Hawthorne flays his weak male characters—Goodman Brown, Reuben Bourne, Roderick Elliston, Giovanni; they are repressed, insecure, cold, and self-deceived. But not necessarily Monsieur de l’Aubépine (Hawthorne), the prodigious, unknown, and fictitious French writer that Hawthorne pretends to be the “real” author of “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” In Hawthorne’s short preface to the story, he claims to have translated de l’Aubépine’s story, and with this gimmick he transforms “Rappaccini’s Daughter” into one of those found objects, like Grandfather’s chair, he likes to pretend he’s stumbled upon. Alas, poor Monsieur de l’Aubépine, Hawthorne opines, that neglected author of Contes Deux Fois Racontées [sic] and such recent work as “L’Artiste du Beau; ou, Le Papillon Mécanique,” published in La Revue Anti-Aristocratique: “As a writer, he seems to occupy an unfortunate position between the Transcendentalists (who, under one name or another, have their share in all the current literature of the world), and the great body of pen-and-ink men who address the intellect and sympathies of the multitude.”
Neither fish nor fowl, transcendentalist nor popular pen-and-ink man, Monsieur de l’Aubépine is Hawthorne’s derelict romancer, a writer of nonsense—in French, no less. (Irked by the novels of Charles Paul de Kock, which she hadn’t read, Sophia put the matter squarely. “I think France is the most corrupt of all cultivated nations.”)
Monsieur de l’Aubépine: foreign, a bit disreputable, and an acquired taste. What else can a scribbler without a niche hope to be?
Poverty.
It picked Hawthorne out of his study and dropped him into the kitchen, the writer as scullery maid. “My husband’s time is taken u
p with housewifery,” Sophia told her mother. “We have no woman yet, because Nathaniel feels as if he could not afford to pay one just now, & it is an ease to his mind to have as few expenses as possible.” Rising before dawn, he lit the fire, took his fishing pole to the river, and then returned to prepare breakfast and wash the dishes. “He actually does everything,” Sophia said.
To help, John O’Sullivan, Una’s godfather, suggested Hawthorne buy the unsold copies of Twice-told Tales (six hundred sets) and reissue them through O’Sullivan’s brother-in-law, Henry Langley, current publisher of the Democratic Review. O’Sullivan offered to raise the money himself. Cautiously, Hawthorne agreed. “I wish Heaven would make me rich enough to buy the copies for the purpose of burning them,” he said. The plan lurched forward without much success until O’Sullivan approached James Munroe with the same offer (to raise money for the unsold volumes, undertaking the financial risk himself). But when Munroe finally reissued the books, there was no profit for Hawthorne.
He tried to work off his debts by selling apples, potatoes, and grass but earned just a few dollars after applying the rest to his rent. His only chance at a real income was another government job. Otherwise he was sure to end in the almshouse.
“My husband says that he will consent to cease to be kitchen-maid since Polk is chosen,” Sophia remarked after the election. Since Louisa had heard a political appointment might be afoot, the Hawthornes decided it was a good time to show off Una in Salem while Nathaniel made himself available to local Democratic chieftains. No offers came. Instead the pastor of the First Church, Charles Wentworth Upham, circulated embarrassing stories about Hawthorne’s indigence.
Demeaned and despondent, Hawthorne wanted to get back to Concord as soon as possible, “else we shall be said to have run away from our creditors,” he told Sophia. “GOD gives us all that is eternal worth,” she reassured him. “Sweetest husband—has He put a very heavy yoke on us?”
Though happy in marriage and fatherhood—“I am a husband!—I am a father!”—Hawthorne despaired; he couldn’t provide for his little circle. “At any rate, something satisfactory shall be done for you,” O’Sullivan kept encouraging. He asked Evert Duyckinck, now literary editor of the New York Morning News, to write an article on Hawthorne for the Democratic, and suggested Hawthorne sit for a daguerreotype. “By manufacturing you thus into a Personage, I want to raise your mark higher in Polk’s administration,” O’Sullivan explained.
A daguerreotype taken around this time captures the hunger in Hawthorne’s gaunt face, the body taut and poised for flight. “A man in the midst of all sorts of cares and annoyances—with impossibilities to perform—and almost driven distracted by his inadequacy,” Hawthorne confided to his notebook. O’Sullivan heard the cry. “Hawthorne is in a state of extreme anxiety, not to say, distress,” he informed George Bancroft in the spring of 1845. But Hawthorne’s name didn’t sit well among Democrats, several of whom alleged the writer hadn’t so much as voted during his two years in Concord.
Bancroft fiddled. Positions at the Watertown Arsenal, the Cambridge post office, the Chelsea Hospital, the naval store in Portsmouth, New Hampshire—all came and went. In April, Duyckinck’s essay on Hawthorne appeared in the Democratic. “The poet lives and starves,” Duyckinck accused, recommending that a Literary Pension Fund be established for writers. “The principle has been already recognized by our Government.” Duyckinck named the government posts occupied by Washington Irving, Alexander Everett, even the mighty Bancroft himself, now Polk’s Secretary of the Navy. Still nothing.
O’Sullivan was frantic. “Hawthorne is dying of starvation,” he exploded in May.
That month two ministers of providence, as Sophia called them, arrived in Concord. Horatio Bridge and Franklin Pierce waltzed up the long avenue to the Manse, waving their hats in the air, come to buck up their pinched and harried friend. A job would be forthcoming, they soothed, their arms tightly wound around the rawboned writer. Bridge loaned him one hundred dollars, and Pierce begged Bancroft to send Hawthorne to the Salem post office. No reply.
O’Sullivan was livid. “It sounds badly that something fitting & worthy was asked for in vain for such a man as Hawthorne!” Bills unpaid, rent owing, Hawthorne realized he’d have to vacate the Manse.
Where to go?
Bancroft proposed an assignment in the West Indies. O’Sullivan scoffed at such “Robinson Crusoe solitude of Santa Rosa Island, away from the civilization of New England, for a pittance barely adequate, at the highest sum, to support life.”
As Hawthorne’s most vociferous ambassador, O’Sullivan worked tirelessly on his behalf. Countering Bancroft’s absurd offer, he suggested Hawthorne be sent to the Custom House in Salem, and if the position could be managed, O’Sullivan volunteered to take care of Hawthorne himself in the interim. “There could not possibly be a better appointment in itself—one more popular with all parties—more creditable to the P[resident] & to you—more contentedly acquiesced in by rival candidates,” O’Sullivan coaxed, “—and by making the promise in advance, all the difficulties are obviated of subsequent judgment between competing claims.”
In August, Bancroft responded. He offered Hawthorne the clerkship at the Charlestown Navy Yard for nine hundred dollars a year. Hawthorne rejected it.
“Such is his character,” O’Sullivan defended his friend, “—he would rather live on a mouldy crust than take a place below his dignity & conscious claims.”
Bancroft must have been furious.
For then there was an even longer silence.
Longfellow had also approached Evert Duyckinck about a job for Hawthorne in New York. About to launch a semijingoistic project, the Library of American Books, and another venture, the Library of Choice Reading, for the publishers Wiley and Putnam, Duyckinck was flexing the literary arm of Young America. The radical wing of the Democratic Party, Young America was the antidote to Whiggish transcendentalism: libertarian, imperialistic, shortsighted, and short-lived, it backed bank reform, low tariffs, copyright reform, workingmen, and American authors. Its de facto political leader was John O’Sullivan; its literary representative, the slim New York bibliophile Evert Duyckinck, who owned one of the largest private libraries in America.
Though he had no job for Hawthorne, Duyckinck immediately recruited him to write something for the new series. Declining, Hawthorne said he had nothing to contribute himself but instead offered up Horatio Bridge’s travel journal, which he’d been editing. Bridge had been serving as purser under the command of Matthew C. Perry on the USS Saratoga, whose mission was to patrol the African coast to suppress the illegal slave trade. Hawthorne had suggested Bridge keep a record of his experiences, which Hawthorne would help publish on Bridge’s return. Bridge would pay $125 and sign over the copyrights to Hawthorne. Hawthorne would receive all profits.
The project could be a godsend. Democrats had been challenging Hawthorne’s commitment to the party, and with Bancroft dragging his feet about an appointment, Bridge’s memoir could bolster Hawthorne’s credentials, particularly since Bridge had much to say on the slavery problem. In fact, his support of colonization as the solution to the slavery question might actually placate antislavery Democrats and pacify southern ones at the same time.
Established in 1816 by associates of Matthew Perry’s family, the American Colonization Society offered emancipated slaves passage to Africa. The proposal appealed to men like Hawthorne and Bridge and even the young Abraham Lincoln, men averse both to slavery and to any action organized to end it. To them, emancipation, if it was to occur at all, must occur gradually—and somewhere else. That colonization had been blasted as segregationist and racist by antislavery’s evangelist William Lloyd Garrison did not dissuade them. Rather, they figured that a nonviolent repatriation of displaced Africans promised opportunities under the law that could never exist in America. “In this point of view—as restoring to him his long-lost birthright of equality—Liberia may indeed be called the black man’s paradise
,” Horatio Bridge wrote. Or Nathaniel Hawthorne, his editor, did.
In the acrimonious climate of 1845, colonization was a quaint idea, out of the question. Western Democrats bent on expansion and southerners wishing to extend slavery into the territories had been pushing hard to annex Texas. When Democratic presidential contender Martin Van Buren opposed annexation, he lost his party’s nomination to James K. Polk, a Tennessee slaveholder. But when Polk proceeded to move toward Texas and open southern territory to slavery, John Quincy Adams, a Whig, managed to lift the congressional gag order that had blocked a slavery debate since 1834. Pandora’s box was finally open.
“My husband says he has not wholly thought out the subject of the annexation of Texas,” Sophia answered her mother’s anxious inquiries, “but he does not think it such a calamity as many do.” Sophia’s remarks suggest she was trying to mollify Mrs. Peabody, a staunch Conscience (antislavery) Whig. “He says he should be glad of the separation of the South from the North, for then he should feel as if he had a country, which he can never do while that weight of slavery hangs on our skirts. He does not believe it will make any difference about perpetuating Slavery.”
According to Sophia, Hawthorne didn’t—couldn’t—approve of slavery in America, but he didn’t think annexation a “calamity,” believing or hoping that slavery would wither on the vine when it inched into the far reaches of Mexico, where it wouldn’t last, or where its existence didn’t bother him. This was O’Sullivan’s position. As the slave’s labor “becomes less and less valuable,” O’Sullivan charged in the Democratic Review, “emancipation, gradual, progressive, at last universal, will pass him over the Southern border to his more appropriate home in Mexico and the States beyond.” Slavery would crawl to its inevitable end sometime, say, in 1926.
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