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VEILING AND UNVEILING HAWTHORNE’S FULLER MYSTERY Volume II A Dissertation by THOMAS R. MITCHELL Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 1994 Major Subject: English VEILING AND UNVEILING HAWTHORNE’S FULLER MYSTERY Volume II A Dissertation by THOMAS R. MITCHELL Submitted to Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved as to style and content by: (Member) Lawrence Mitchell (Head of Department) August 1994 Major Subject: English Ill TABLE OF CONTENTS Volume I Page ABSTRACT iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v TABLE OF CONTENTS vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: THE "RIDDLE" OF MARGARET FULLER 1 II THE "SCANDAL" OF MARGARET FULLER 16 III "THIS MUTUAL VISIONARY LIFE": THE HAWTHORNE-FULLER FRIENDSHIP 56 IV "RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTER" AND THE VOICE OF BEATRICE.... 124 V "SPEAK THOU FOR ME!": THE "STRANGE EARNESTNESS" OF THE SCARLET LETTER 169 Volume II TABLE OF CONTENTS iii CHAPTER VI "SILKEN BANDS AND IRON FETTERS": FULLER AT FIRE ISLAND AND HAWTHORNE AT LENOX 221 VII DREAMING "THE SAME DREAM TWICE": THE GHOST STORY OF THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE 248 VIII CONCLUSION: THE VENUS OF THE TRIBUNE AND THE PEARL DIVER IN THE MARBLE FAUN 315 REFERENCES. 357 VITA 369 221 CHAPTER VI "SILKEN BANDS" AND "IRON FETTERS": FULLER AT FIRE ISLAND, HAWTHORNE AT LENOX "The bands, that were silken once, are apt to become iron fetters, when we desire to shake them off. Our souls, after all, are not our own. We convey a property in them to those with whom we associate, but to what extent can never be known, until we feel the tug, the agony, of our abortive effort to resume an exclusive sway over ourselves. Thus, in all the weeks of my absence, my thoughts continually reverted back, brooding over the by-gone months, and bringing up incidents that seemed hardly to have left a trace of themselves, in the passage. I spent painful hours in recalling these trifles, and rendering them more misty and unsubstantial than at first, by the quality of speculative musing, thus kneaded in with them. Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla! These three had absorbed my life into themselves." —Coverdale (3:194) Early in The Blithedale Romance, Zenobia confronts Coverdale, asking him to explain the source of his constant, intense gaze. '"’I seem to interest you very much,’" she tells him, "’and yet—or else a woman’s instinct is for once deceived—I cannot reckon you as an admirer. What are you seeking to discover in me?’" Because he is "surprised into the truth by the unexpectedness of her attack," Coverdale confesses, "’The mystery of your life . And you will never tell me’" (3:47). Zenobia indeed does not tell him, but she does allow him, as Beatrice did Giovanni, to "look into her eyes, as if challenging" him "to drop a plummet-line down into the depths of her consciousness." As Giovanni with Beatrice, so Coverdale with Zenobia--he cannot meet her challenge. "’I see nothing now,’" he tells her, "’unless it be the face of a sprite, laughing at me from the bottom of a deep well’" (3:48). The site of Coverdale’s gaze remains fixed at the end where, we discover, it had been from the first. As he concludes his tale, he directs our attention to the place where he started, the place where we have been all along. The "deep well" of Zenobia’s eyes isnow veiled by her deeper grave, but Coverdale has stood by that grave from the beginning, haunted every bit as much as Hollingsworth by Zenobia’s ghost, still trying to fathom her "mystery," still feeling the "tug, the agony" of his "abortive effort to resume an exclusive sway" over himself (3:194). But, as he has come to realize, "our souls, after all, are not our own" (3:194). 222 A part of him lies buried in that grave. In the winter of 1851-1852, through his surrogate, ’’translator," Miles Coverdale, Hawthorne still pondered the "mystery" that Fuller, as Zenobia, remained for him, but the "plummet-line" that Hawthorne would have to drop in order to penetrate that mystery could no longer be in Fuller’s "eyes" but in the "deep well" of her grave at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Five months after the publication of The Scarlet Letter, Fuller, Ossoli, and their baby drowned within a hundred yards of the shores of America in the wreck of the Elizabeth. Fuller never had the chance to read Hawthorne’s "scarlet letter" to her, but in one peculiar passage in The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne covertly acknowledges Fuller’s association with The Scarlet Letter while seeming only to pay an overt tribute to her memory as "one of the most gifted women of the age." When Priscilla brings Coverdale a night-cap that she has made him, she also brings him "a sealed letter." After she offers it to him and he does not take it, she draws it back and holds "it against her bosom, with both hands clasped over it." At precisely that moment, Coverdale is "forcibly struck" by her resemblance to Margaret Fuller—not to Fuller’s "figure" nor her "features," he is careful to note, but to "her air." "Strangely enough," as Coverdale says, the letter is from Fuller, and when Coverdale tells Priscilla that she had reminded him of Fuller, Priscilla asks,"’How could I possibly make myself resemble this lady, merely by holding her letter in my hand?”’ Coverdale admits that "’it would puzzle me to explain it”' and then tries to deny that there is anything to explain by dismissing the letter’s role in triggering his association of her with Fuller, insisting that "’it was just a coincidence—nothing more”’ (3:51-52). Priscilla hands Coverdale the letter, but Coverdale does not tell us its contents. Hawthorne, however, just has. The letter that Priscilla clasps to her bosom reminds Coverdale of Fuller because Hawthorne, if we follow the logic of his self-directed pun, had had another character resembling Fuller place Fuller’s "letter" on her breast. The Scarlet Letter itself had been written on one level as something of a "letter" to Fuller, but after 19 July 1850 only Hawthorne would be left to break its seal.1 If in "Rappaccini’s Daughter" and The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne had taken great care to conceal both his and Fuller’s presence, he takes little such care in The Blithedale Romance. From the moment of its publication 223 to the present, readers have detected the spirit of Fuller inhabiting Zenobia’s character just as easily as they have identified a significant part of Hawthorne given voice in Miles Cover dale.2 Surely Hawthorne knew that they would. But perhaps he knew that they would hear another Dimmesdale-like confession which they would once again fail to really hear. Or, perhaps, if they indeed heard this time, he no longer really cared as much as he had. An examination of the context surrounding the writing of The Blithedale Romance helps to explain why that last possibility merits serious consideration. Among other things, such an examination will explain why in Coverdale, Hawthorne is not so much writing about what he was in danger of becoming, had he remained a bachelor, but about what he had become. It will also explain why Zenobia’s grave marks the site of Fuller’s presence in Hawthorne’s discontent and guilt. 2 On the day after finishing the "h-11 fired story" of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne admitted to his friend Horatio Bridge that he was physically and mentally exhausted. His health, he claimed, had not been what it once was "for many years past," and he did not believe that he could "long stand such a life of bodily inactivity and mental exertion" as he had "led for the last few months" (18:312). He had hidden his concerns from Sophia, he admitted, and he instructed Bridge not to allude to the matter in future letters. The past year had exhausted Hawthorne, and just at the moment that he was to receive the general acclaim that had so long alluded him, at forty-five he was feeling decidedly middle-aged, his "lack of physical vigor and energy," he said, beginning to affect his mind (18:312). Were he "anywhere else" but Salem, he was confident, he should "at once be entirely another man." His problems, however, were deeper than exhaustion and place. Twenty-five years after graduating from college and dedicating himself to literature, he had still not fulfilled his artistic ambitions nor had he consistently been able through his literary work to support himself, much less his growing family. He felt himself a failure. When he received a collection of five hundred dollars from George Hillard and other, unnamed friends through the mail in January of 1850—only days after submitting all but the last three chapters of The Scarlet Letter to Fields—he 224 described in his letter of acknowledgement the tears that had risen to his eyes at the Post Office. In what Edwin Haviland Miller has termed the ’’unusual candor” with which he reveals "the exacting creed by which he lived—and punished himself," Hawthorne then expressed a deeper sense of shame and bitterness over his plight than humility and gratitude would seem to warrant:3 Ill success in life is really and justly a matter of shame. I am ashamed of it, and I ought to be.