Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  But now Hawthorne’s characters take on a life and a passion of their own. Dimmesdale lashes himself with voluptuous passion until his brain reels with spectral visions; his guilt so inflames his sermons that young women swoon with a pale fervor they mistake as religious. The stormy, implacable intransigeance of the birdlike Pearl, Hester’s unruly child, reflects the illicit desire with which she was conceived. And Hester too, despite her punishment, simmers. She would fling off the past, casting aside the scarlet stigma in a moment, should Dimmesdale consent to leave Boston with her and her daughter. Reunited with her lover after seven long years, Hester entreats Arthur in one of the novel’s most heartbreaking moments, “What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! Hast thou forgotten it?”

  Magisterial and fierce, Hester Prynne is both sinning and sinned against, a woman able to love, to yearn, and to endure the consequences of her offense. Poised, she glides through seventeenth-century Boston bearing her punishment in humble silence while advertising her sin like an open secret, as indeed she must. Even more important, she suffers the weakness of those around her. “None so ready as she to give of her little substance to every demand of poverty; even though the bitter-hearted pauper threw back a gibe in requital of the food brought regularly to his door.”

  She persists; she endures. “In all seasons of calamity, indeed, whether general or of individuals, the outcast of society at once found her place. She came, not as a guest, but as a rightful inmate, into the household that was darkened by trouble; as if its gloomy twilight were a medium in which she was entitled to hold intercourse with her fellow-creatures.” Like Hawthorne’s mother, whom she resembles in stature, Hester Prynne lives on the fringes of society, which is where, as we have seen, Hawthorne as artist places himself: an outcast radical who holds dear the rules he has broken: “It is remarkable,” observes Hawthorne, “that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society.”

  Like Hawthorne, Hester is also a quiet rebel whose isolation grants her a certain freedom of thought, particularly concerning the plight of women, with whom she, and he, identify: “Was existence worth accepting, even to the happiest among them,” Hester asks as if she were a doughty Margaret Fuller, deciding that society should be completely overhauled, torn down and rebuilt. In the thirteenth chapter of the book, “Another View of Hester,” she becomes a radical visionary, wishing to free both men and women from the injustice of mean convention: “The world’s law was no law for her mind,” Hawthorne declares.

  It was an age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and rearranged—not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was their most real abode—the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known of it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter.

  Hester’s revolutionary program is just the kind of misty-eyed vision that Hawthorne resentfully censures. To him, the apostate Hester Prynne is a fallen creature punishable not just by parochial Puritans but by him. When she begins to think too much and question too deeply, Hawthorne converts into marmoreal coldness all the tenderness he calls “essential to keep her a woman.” Male or female or both, Hawthorne restrains all such seekers as heartless, friendless, exiled from the human community. And it is with them that he deeply identifies.

  Yet Hester is not a vengeful Chillingworth, an unfeeling Ethan Brand, or even a virtuoso museum keeper who merchandizes history and art. She is ardent, loyal, and so seductive that Hawthorne must bind her once luxuriant hair into her cap much as he binds his passionate prose into a style coolly elegant and austerely composed. For he is not only Hester but Dimmesdale too, repressing the desires of a prodigal nature.

  Then Hawthorne reneged. It was a typical gesture, complicating his work, rendering even his conservatism ambiguous. The sturdiest of Hawthorne’s heroines and the most ably imagined, Hester endures alienation, exclusion, and the forfeiture of her sexuality but relinquishes neither passion nor richness of soul even when, at the story’s conclusion, she sews the scarlet letter back on her breast. To be sure, Hawthorne loved and hated her, admired and punished her, branded and redeemed her and then left her quite as bereft as he likely imagined his mother must have been—as he himself had been. Softly, she stole into his novel, a ghost “beloved, but gone hence,” he writes in “The Custom-House,” “now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.”

  Now he was bereft again.

  Like Hawthorne’s mother, his sister, and Hawthorne himself, Hester Prynne knows herself to be different. “There was wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort nowhere.” If she cannot conceal her difference—just the identity of her lover—she can conform when she again takes up the scarlet letter, “of her own free will.” With the letter voluntarily clamped to her breast as if her very identity depended on it, Hester condoles with the downcast, soothes the afflicted, and tells women in particular of a fairer day when they will live together with men in “mutual happiness.” To some readers, her new employment suggests she represents the fundamental nature of America: working within the social order to change it, she consigns herself to the public trust. More important, she allows Hawthorne to reassert control over his book. But propitious as her last act may appear to be, Hester ultimately triumphs only by taking up the mark—and mask—identifying her as woman.

  Hawthorne too had taken up the mantle of respectability in the rough-and-tumble world of the Custom House, converting his sense of vocational homelessness into camaraderie—only to find the Custom House a symbol of failed purpose. Then, like Hester, he converts a token of shame into an emblem of art, kaleidoscopic and complex, that reveals the shallowness of cultural labels: ambition, atonement, autonomy, and of course American author.

  “A book one reads shudderingly,” Mary Mann described The Scarlet Letter. “Among other things, it reveals Hawthorne.”

  The evening Hawthorne read the last chapter of The Scarlet Letter to Sophia, she went to bed with a terrible headache—a good sign of the book’s success, he said, though he worried about its shadowy darkness. “To tell you the truth,” he confided to Bridge, “—it is positively a h—ll fired story, into which I found it almost impossible to throw any cheering light.”

  In February, Hawthorne sent the last three chapters of the manuscript to Fields. “Mr. Fields!” Sophia blurted. “I expect to hear, after he has read this, that he was exploded & gone off like a sky-rocket—so great was his enthusiasm about the rest of the romance.” Exhilarated, Fields had advised Hawthorne to forget about the other old-time legends and let the story stand on its own. Though skeptical, Hawthorne complied, and suggested that the book’s title be printed in red ink.

  The Scarlet Letter was published on March 16, 1850, to wide and continuous acclaim. Two weeks later, Fields reported to Hawthorne that the first edition of twenty-five hundred copies had sold out and that another two thousand copies of The Scarlet Letter were being printed. Fifteen hundred copies of the second edition sold in three days. Sophia trumpeted Hawthorne’s success. “Nathaniel’s fame is perfectly prodigious,” she crowed.

  “Glorious,” Fields had described the book to Evert Duyckinck, prompting Duyckinck to publish part of “The Custom-House” in his new magazine, the Literary World, in order “to force a little breath among the coals,” said Fields, “& raise a conflagration.” In local quarters, there was one. “The Custom-House” was unmanly and mean-spirited, accused the Salem Register, and Hawthorne a self-important boor to air his
grievance publicly. “If I escape from town without being tarred-and-feathered,” Hawthorne laughed, “I shall consider it good luck.” In the second edition of the book, he prepared a preface and recanted nothing. “The only remarkable features of the sketch are its frank and genuine good-humor,” he deliberately shrugged.

  About the novel, critics were kinder. The Salem Gazette called the book thrilling, and Fields’s well-placed friends, like Evert Duyckinck, also praised the book with genuine admiration. Edwin Whipple wrote the review that Hawthorne admired most, comparing the introductory essay to the work of Joseph Addison and Charles Lamb and then hailing The Scarlet Letter as piercing “directly through all the externals to the core of things.” Another appreciative acquaintance, George Bailey Loring, devoted six pages to The Scarlet Letter in the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, excoriating Dimmesdale’s cowardice and commending Hester’s ability to love. Orestes Brownson, however, complained that Hawthorne misunderstood the meaning of Christian pardon, Christian remorse, and Christian confession, not a surprising lapse in a popular Protestant writer, said Brownson, himself a Catholic convert. The Church Review and Ecclesiastical Register was more direct about Hawthorne: “He perpetrates bad morals.”

  Overall, though, reviewers adopted Hawthorne’s point of view: when judged by The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne’s dismissal from the Custom House must be reckoned a boon to American literature. There was another lesson here: the real world and fairyland don’t mix, except in literature.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Uneven Balance

  This possibility of mad destruction only made his domestic kindness the more beautiful and touching.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Fire-Worship”

  THOU DIDST much amiss, to marry a husband who cannot keep thee like a lady,” Hawthorne lamented to his wife. Nomads once again, they would pack their worldly goods and head westward—western Massachusetts, that is—hoping to recover from the agony of the last months.

  All of them were tired, especially Sophia; she hadn’t even known where they’d be living come spring. And with the children squealing in her ears, her husband lashed to his desk, requests for lampshades multiplying—Elizabeth had even gone so far as to suggest she paint hand-screens—she collapsed with pleurisy shortly after the publication of The Scarlet Letter.

  Life seemed forever changed. The Mall Street household was breaking up. Louisa sorted what to take to Aunt Dike’s, and Ebe went to Manchester, north of Salem, where she could walk along the shore unmolested by busybodies. Hawthorne also wanted to get out of “abominable” Salem. “I detest this town so much that I hate to go into the streets, or to have people see me,” he told Bridge.

  They had investigated Portsmouth, New Hampshire, near Bridge and his wife, but not finding anything affordable, Sophia began to consider a place in the Berkshire mountains. Her friend the wealthy Caroline Sturgis had married the wealthy New York broker William Aspinall Tappan in 1847, and they were staying at Highwood, the estate of Anna and Samuel Ward, in the small village of Lenox, population circa fifteen hundred. Having bought property nearby, the Tappans were building their own cottage—as mansions were called locally—on the acreage known as Tanglewood. Caroline Tappan began to recruit Sophia to the Berkshire community: the writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick lived in Stockbridge among a clan of Sedgwicks that included Theodore, the senator, who paced the village green when not in Washington, and Catharine’s sister-in-law Elizabeth, who superintended a well-known school for young ladies in Lenox. Actress Fanny Kemble had purchased a cottage, the Perch, in the woods; Oliver Wendell Holmes’s grandfather kept a farm in Pittsfield; Fanny Longfellow’s family owned property in Stockbridge. The Hawthornes would not be alone.

  “To give up the ocean caused rather a stifling sensation,” Sophia admitted; “but I have become used to the idea of mountains now.” Hawthorne wavered. Depressed, dreading further debt, and by no means sanguine about earning his keep, he uneasily imagined himself eating food from his own garden and paying the rent with proceeds from the sale of Sophia’s lampshades. But in the Berkshires there would be no real garden, with snow falling early and fast during the bottomless winter.

  Nonetheless, when the Tappans offered the Hawthornes the handyman’s small red house on the edge of their property at no cost, Hawthorne accepted with dignity, stipulating he’d pay fifty dollars for the rent. “I infinitely prefer a small right to a great favor,” he later explained as he folded away his dream of a house by the sea. “Had this wish of his been fulfilled,” Julian would plaintively write years later, “it might have made great differences.”

  At the end of May, the Hawthornes chugged into the airy hills, decamping from the train, their clothes soaked in soot, and descended on the Tappans, who brushed the dust from their garments and put the entire east wing of Highwood at their disposal while the red house was being repaired. Julian rode a hobbyhorse covered with real horsehair, and Una walked through jade-green woods, birds bursting into “ecstatic song” (Sophia’s phrase). Hawthorne, worn and weary, lapsed into a nervous fever, his eyes glazed, his face pale as cement. “Belladonna finally conquered the enemy,” Sophia exhaled in relief, “and though he is not so vigorous yet as in former days before the last day began (it is a year now since he was expelled from the Custom House) yet he is reviving very fast.”

  About ten days later, an old oxcart lugged the Hawthornes’ furniture through the rickety black gate of their new home, a little red box that sat like a district schoolhouse on the northern end of the Stockbridge Bowl (the familiar name for Lake Mahkeenac). The house was one of the poorest, oldest shanties in Lenox, Ellery Channing later remembered, “with uneven floors, and so ill-built that the wind could not be kept out.” Sophia was delighted.

  She hung her reproductions above the mantel and in the bedrooms and halls; she draped crimson curtains over the windows and covered the center table with ruby-red cloth; she placed a purple-and-gold-colored carpet given by Caroline in the small front room and in the low-studded drawing room set out the bowl and pitcher Hawthorne’s father had brought from India. In Hawthorne’s study she arranged the red acanthus-leaf carpet, a secretary, an ottoman, and a cane-bottomed rocker. The rooms were tiny; the house was tiny, but its views were fresh and breezy, and the dining room window, like the one in the upstairs bedroom, looked out on the buttery lake, its color changing by the hour. In the background loomed Monument Mountain, a headless sphinx draped in a rich Persian shawl.

  “My house is an old red farm house, (as red as the Scarlet Letter),” Hawthorne wrote to Zachariah Burchmore, a friend from Custom House days. He might as well have been living on the moon as in Lenox. The air was pure, too pure. “I find it very agreeable to get rid of politics and the rest of the damnable turmoil that has disturbed me for three or four years past,” he said; “but I must plead guilty to some few hankerings after brandy and water, rum and molasses, an occasional cigar, and other civilized indulgences of the like nature.”

  Come to visit, Horatio Bridge cleared out the barn and hen coop, and he hammered bookshelves and mended tables, but he didn’t think rural solitude healthy for Hawthorne. “He has gone to Lenox, where I fear he will settle down for three or four years,” Bridge confided to Frank Pierce. “Perhaps he may remain there unless, at the end of this administration, he should have a good office tendered him,” he hinted. Released on bail after the Cuban fiasco, O’Sullivan surprised the Hawthornes when he knocked at the red shanty’s door. Hawthorne stayed grumpy. “Mr. Hawthorne thinks it is Salem which he is dragging at his ankles still,” Sophia remarked.

  Moody under the best of circumstances, Hawthorne had left friends and family in the wake of embarrassment, penury, and spleen, having endured what Sophia considered the most trying year of his life. It wasn’t quite over. In July came news of Margaret Fuller’s death. She had gone to Europe in 1846 as the New-York Tribune’s foreign correspondent, and once in Italy, set about writing an eyewitness history of the Roman revolution, “the d
aily bulletin of men and things,” she said. To proper Bostonians, though, Fuller’s name continued to raise eyebrows no matter what she did, even marrying, particularly since she concealed her marriage from friends, who tried to squash vicious gossip. That she gave birth to a son whet the appetite of scandalmongers even more: Fuller’s child must be illegitimate, his father an uneducated bumpkin without talent of any kind. “Think of the dry, forlorn old maid changed into a Marguerita Marchesa d’Ossoli!” snickered Fanny Longfellow. Fuller drew herself up. “I pity those who are inclined to think ill,” she retorted from a distance, “when they might as well have inclined the other way, however let them go.”

  With her son ill, the revolution in shambles, and the pope restored, Fuller decided to come home. She sailed with her family from Leghorn on the ill-fated Elizabeth. En route, its captain died of smallpox; and that wasn’t the worst of it. Approaching Fire Island, New York, in the wee hours of July 18, the Elizabeth, hitting a southwestern gale, was dashed into a sandbar. A cargo of Carrara marble split the ship’s hold, and the boat began to crumple into a mass of planks and swollen splints. Women and men jumped overboard, and the crew desperately clung to wooden planks, but Fuller, it was said, refused to leave the deck. Some think that Ossoli had already drowned and she was suicidal. Sophia pictured her sitting with her hands upon her knees, waves breaking over her water-soaked nightdress.