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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2005 Solitary blessings: solitude in the fiction of Hawthrone, Melville, and Kate Chopin Virginia Massie Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Massie, Virginia, "Solitary blessings: solitude in the fiction of Hawthrone, Melville, and Kate Chopin" (2005). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 3057. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3057 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. SOLITARY BLESSINGS: SOLITUDE IN THE FICTION OF HAWTHORNE, MELVILLE, AND KATE CHOPIN A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Virginia Zirkel Massie B.A., University of Florida, 1961 M.Ed., University of South Alabama, 1982 December 2005 To My Mother ii Acknowledgments In thankful appreciation to the following persons with whose help, support, and loving compassion this degree is made possible: my husband, Walt Massie; my sons, Mike, James, and Brian Dorgan; my sister, Jo Ann Spagnuolo; Professors Bainard Cowan, Malcolm Richardson, James Borck, Sarah Liggett, and Daniel Mark Fogel; Christine Cowan and Martha Strohschein; Stephen Lindsey, M.D., Arnold Feldman, M.D., Charles “Chuck” Williamson, M.D., and Ed Adams, O.D. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgments ......................................................... iii Abstract .................................................................. v Chapter 1. The Shape of Solitude: A Folding and an Unfolding ...................... 1 Chapter 2. Review of the Literature of Solitude: The Poet-Thinker .................. 33 Chapter 3. The Scarlet Letter: To “Catch the Sunshine in the Wilderness” ............ 77 Chapter 4. Melville’s Solitary Men: Bartleby, Pip, and Ishmael .................... 101 Chapter 5. The Awakening: A Parrot, a Mockingbird, and a “Bird with a Broken Wing” ............................................... 129 Chapter 6. Conclusion .................................................... 164 Works Cited ............................................................ 169 Vita ................................................................... 176 iv Abstract “Solitary Blessings: Solitude in the Fiction of Hawthorne, Melville, and Kate Chopin” examines a construction of solitude in which nature is alien and perilous, the self confronts rejection and death, the subject is subordinated to an unknown, and the revealed truth is experienced as both gift and curse. Arising out of fictional portraits of people under duress, this interpretation counters a more dominant construction in American literature, enunciated by Edwards, Emerson, and Thoreau, that shows solitude as composed and calming, subordinating nature to mind, and revealing an underlying truth in presentable form. Solitude has been equated with privation and exile since antiquity; the Christian era added a contrasting context of interior communion with God. Romanticism revived and secularized both connotations, mixing the joy of inner communion with the potential for dark, destructive discoveries. Further analysis of solitude in this study employs concepts from authors Virginia Woolf and Albert Camus, cultural theorist Victor Turner, philosopher Gaston Bachelard, psychoanalyst Anthony Storr, and composition theorist Linda Brodkey. In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne balances the sympathetic portrayal of Hester Prynne with her presentation by a narrator respectful, even fearful, of Puritan authority, thereby keeping the experience of rejection and privation active in constructing the meaning of her experience. Hester’s solitude leads her through self-condemnation and rebellion to a clear- sighted sympathy and an alternative authority of her own. v Melville’s characters confront solitude radically. Bartleby seems to possess the hard- won wisdom of solitude already in an absolute form, and the lawyer-narrator must come to terms with it. Pip’s episode in Moby-Dick presents the encounter with solitude at its most condensed: forced into an extreme, inexplicable confrontation with nature and death, stripped of sanity, the sufferer of solitude achieves a God-like wisdom of indifference. Edna Pontellier’s quest for solitude in Chopin’s The Awakening causes her to withdraw gradually from everything including herself as she becomes the poet-thinker alone. She takes charge of the process of self-discovery in solitude, outlining a path to autonomy, but her quest for a truth of the self without limits leads to the ultimate limit of death. vi Chapter 1 The Shape of Solitude: A Folding and an Unfolding There is a solitude of space A solitude of sea A solitude of death, but these Society shall be Compared with that profounder site That polar privacy A soul admitted to itself– Finite Infinity. --Emily Dickinson, #1695 Walden Pond and Ishmael Solitude admits the person who experiences it to a profound and challenging experience of self. As Emily Dickinson avows, space, the sea, and even death furnish only stages for enacting this encounter. American literature testifies that solitude continues to be a formidable and pervasive force both in literature and in life. Throughout history, individuals have sought solitude for a variety of reasons, since leading a solitary life can have many and varied results. The concept of solitude has multiple definitions according to the solitary seeker’s interpretation, life style, frame of reference, and the times in which he or she lives. Although two familiar definitions include being alone, as in existing separately from other people, and simply being alone in thought, the concept of solitude is much more complex than either of these definitions. Change in the individual often results from experiencing solitude. 1 2 What, then, is solitude? What is its origin? What kinds of change resulting from a solitary condition manifest themselves in what particular ways? And why? Although this study primarily will examine in depth literature from nineteenth-century America, the implications of leading a solitary existence suggest many answers for many times. The problems resulting from a study of solitude may best begin with a quintessential name, Henry David Thoreau, and his famous place, Walden Pond, and what often occurs at Walden Pond now. “By noon the small beach was towel to towel,” lamented the New York Times in 1996. Journalist Sara Rimer described the Walden Pond park area as one that fills up with tourists before mid-morning and which sees “2,000 to 3,000 visitors a day, according to the State Park Service.” Hordes bring disposable diapers and coolers, boom boxes and strollers, and even an occasional book to read. A mother of five-year-old triplets, one Mrs. Hurkett, “absorbed in motherhood, could not wait to see a little civilization in Walden. She was amazed, she said, by all the young women with tattoos: butterflies and roses adorning ankles.” George Carroll, a Latin teacher at the Boston Latin School, said, “I don’t think Thoreau would have been pleased to have his sanctuary so populated,” but added later, “Walden [. .] is as much a state of mind as anything else. [. .] It’s a lovely place to be on the 22nd of July--in God’s nature.” But Rimer concluded with the words from a state park supervisor: “We try not to guess what Thoreau would have thought about all of this; I’m not sure he would have stuck around” (12). Thoreau came a century earlier and stayed two years, and during that time he was not entirely alone; he had visitors, too, and they deterred him from his meditations but not for long. The 3 scene at Walden in 1996 serves as an announcement to our time: solitude has become an endangered species, at no little peril to our psychological health and cultural creativity. In fact ecocritic Lawrence Buell notes, as part of the current troubled scene of environmentalism, that “Walden Woods in Concord, Massachusetts, has become a legal battleground because Thoreau’s writings have led many to perceive it as sacred space that should be kept in its ‘natural’ state” (3). This study aims to reconstruct what was discovered about solitude in calmer times, in hopes of contributing to its future preservation. Hordes of people descend on Walden Pond annually, whether to experience solitude or to bask momentarily in an aura of historical sacredness. Herman Melville provides another reason why people flock to a site of solitude near lake or sea, as he has his romantic narrator Ishmael draw the reader’s attention to the edge of the water in Chapter 1 of Moby-Dick: “Look at the crowd of water-gazers there” (12). Ishmael continues: Once more. Say, you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there

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