Kate Klebes Dr. Stephanie Smith English Honors Thesis 16 April 2010 Women in Hawthorne’S Life and Fiction

Kate Klebes Dr. Stephanie Smith English Honors Thesis 16 April 2010 Women in Hawthorne’s Life and Fiction

Hawthorne as Interpreter of the Female

Nathaniel Hawthorne, born in 1804, grew up in a predominantly female household, where he formed deep bonds with his female relations. These early relationships with the opposite sex, grounded in support, inspiration, and guidance, were fundamental in initiating his vocation as a writer and heralded the enduring role that women would play in his literary career. Hawthorne is known as a writer of the romance—a genre that he would define as representing the truth but “under circumstances, to a great extent, of the author’s own choosing or creation” (Pearson 3). Hawthorne’s own sense of truth cannot be separated from his conception of the opposite sex, which he believed to possess the most worthy of traits: “warmth, imagination, intuition, and love” (Baym 250)—necessarily the material for noble art. Indeed, Hawthorne devoted much of his work to portrayals of the female sex and “portrayed, with supreme accuracy, the condition of women in the nineteenth century and the psychological processes of men who could not tolerate the notion of female equality” (DeSalvo 121). And yet his portrayals are accompanied by a disturbing ambivalence and authorial tendency to give in to gender and social stereotypes.

Hawthorne’s work stands apart from that of his counterparts in his development of “complex female characters, drawn partly from his depth of understanding and partly from literary conventions” (Idol 10). He was perpetually “drawn into the role of a male ‘interpreter’ of feminine mystery” (Mitchel 119), but while his life-long communion with and dependence upon women made him an ideal interpreter, it certainly did not make him a feminist reformer. This paper will examine several of Hawthorne’s most significant relationships with women, noting his contradictory stances on and representations of the opposite sex, and paying particular attention to females such as Elizabeth Peabody, who played a foremost role in instigating and sustaining his literary career. This paper will culminate with an analysis of the complex relationship between Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia Peabody, an artist herself, and the role that she played in his work. Ultimately, I seek to investigate the influences that encouraged Hawthorne to produce “fiction does not speak from any unambiguously feminist position even while it poses many of that feminism’s key questions” (Easton 97).

Hawthorne’s portrayal of women in his writing, like his conception of women in real life, is often complex and difficult to align with any particular viewpoint. Many of his female protagonists are developed into ethical and intelligent women only to meet tragic and seemingly preordained fates, as I will explore explicitly in my close reading of “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” If Hawthorne seems often to be at odds with himself, it is because he is so. Nathaniel was deeply sympathetic to the female and the role that she was allotted in society; however his own societal and gender roles separated his interests from those of the opposite sex: “his position . . . was distinct from women’s, and while a striking number of his contemporaries commented on his ‘feminine’ qualities, this certainly did not mean that he identified with women” (Easton 82). He did choose as a writer to work at home, “in more continuous contact with what deemed the female sphere” (Easton 82), but he was not subjugated to the home and didn’t feel any need to alter the status quo of female domesticity. In fact, he had much to gain from conservative notions of the feminine, which kept his closest female relations at home, serving to assist and inspire him.

Hawthorne was deeply interested by the construction of the sexes, and in examining the role of biology as well as the role of society in this construction. He “‘concurred with the judgment that the life of a woman in society was slavery’, but he was more interested in discussing ‘the warping and distortion of women’s minds under the unremitting pressure of . . . male myths’ than in exploring social issues and possible changes that could be made in the social order” (Desalvo 35). In the “dualistic gender culture” (Easton 82) of his time, Hawthorne had to choose sides, but his identification with the masculine does not mean that he viewed the female sex as inferior. Much of his writing, both personal and professional, suggests that he regarded women as superior to men. Hawthorne nonetheless insisted that women’s place was in the home, but that was because he thought that “women’s truest life [was] lived, not in the world, but on some other, more spiritual plane” (5). His own experience had proven to him the capability of the female sex, but his understanding of society and his deeply engrained social prejudices convinced him that the division of the sexes was, if not natural, at least necessary.

The precarious nature of his own role as a male writer, which “involved some fascinatingly unstable gender and class boundaries” (Easton 80) further complicated his relationship with the female sex. Hawthorne had already entered into a “female world” in “becoming a writer rather than a businessman or politician (qtd. in Baym 11), and his choice of genre, the romance, further linked him to the feminine literary tradition. He was “competing in a market full of women writers,” in which the women seemed often to be doing better and earning more money than him. Women represented not only his competition, but his readership as well and it was often women who were first to review his books.

Hawthorne’s connection to women writers, constantly shifting during his career and frustrating to grasp, is of foremost importance in understanding him as a writer and in particular as a writer obsessed with women’s lives. His professed opinions of female writers, at times hostile, at others extolling, indicate his own conflicting feelings, and prefigure his construction of female protagonists who are defy easy understanding. In considering Hawthorne’s varied responses to female writers, one can see where he felt comfortable acknowledging merit and where he felt compelled to revert to stereotyping and derogation to make himself feel more secure. Hawthorne’s vacillation between realism and fantasy is significant not only in the case of women writers, but also in his relationship with his wife, Sophia, as I will discuss. Just as Hawthorne tended to divide female writers into groups and to label them according to his own preconceptions, so he would often try to categorize his wife and his female protagonists. While this might seem like a gross objectification of women, it might be better understood as Hawthorne’s mode of uniting his intimate understanding of women with socially constructed ideas of gender and his own unstable role as an emasculated male writer. Thus, Hawthorne’s reaction to female writers somewhat embodies his conflicted feelings toward the sex in general.

Literary critics have often interpreted Hawthorne’s strongly expressed opinions on women writers as evidence of his misogynistic tendencies, and Hawthorne’s female protagonists have inevitably been viewed in light of such alleged misogyny. For these reasons, I want to discuss Hawthorne’s relationship with female writers at least briefly here, although I will return to the topic when discussing particular women in Nathaniel’s life. Let’s begin with the infamous phrase, which in its “independent career” (Baym 21) removed from its original context, has wreaked havoc on Hawthorne’s reputation and provided ample fodder for feminist critics seeking to situate him alongside other chauvinistic male writers of his era. The legendary phrase, of course, is “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash—and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the Lamplighter, and other books neither better not worse?—worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the 100,000” (Idol 21-or see NH’s letter book).

Attempting to defend such an unequivocally sexist admission is not an easy task. However, I will attempt to place it in context, literally, in terms of what came before and after it, and more broadly, in terms of Hawthorne’s actual knowledge and experience of female writers (which I will explore in much further detail when discussing Elizabeth Peabody, Grace Greenwood, and others). In her essay, Again and Again, the Scribbling Women, Nina Baym does a remarkable job of explaining how exactly Hawthorne came to write these controversial lines. Hawthorne made his remark about the “scribbling women” to his friend and publisher, Ticknor, as part of “an epistolary discussion of Hawthorne’s two careers as author and professional democrat” (Baym 22). Hawthorne was consul at Liverpool at the time and threatened with financial insecurity because of a consular bill that would greatly reduce his income. He wrote to Ticknor, and Horatio Bridge as well, for some months during this affair seeking advice and possibly assistance. His derogatory comment on female writers came toward the end of this epistolary exchange, when it seemed apparent that the consular bill would not pass and Hawthorne would be financially secure for a few more years and would not need to return to writing for money. As Nina Baym explains, “the scribbling women, then, come up among several reasons Hawthorne offers for deferring a return to authorship” (23). Such a context perhaps softens the blow of these words, but it does not take away their meaning. However, I would suggest that one can, and should, question the sincerity behind his statement.

There are several reasons to believe that Hawthorne’s statement about the scribbling women does not truly reflect his feeling toward female writers, and certainly not his overarching opinion. First off, as I have already stated, he was writing this letter to a Ticknor who had a stake in his literary career, so one might suggest that “this rationale was apparently cooked up to placate a publisher” (Baym 23). Second, he was quick to retract his statement, writing in his very next letter to Ticknor, “In my last, I recollect, I bestowed some vituperation on female authors. I have since bee reading ‘Ruth Hall’; and I must say I enjoyed it a good deal” (Baym 23). Hawthorne’s regard for the Fanny Fern, the author of Ruth Hall, is evident, even though he occupies the rest of the letter comparing Ruth Hall to other works by females that he finds greatly inferior. His issue seems to be less with female writers and more with what some females write.

Hawthorne indicates a particular dislike for sensational writing, especially that outpouring of “underclass literature that had emerged . . .in tandem with the growth of urban and industrial culture” (Baym 26). Hawthorne is thereby directing his derogation at a particular sect of female writers, namely those that churned out popular writing that he conceived as trashy. It is perhaps not coincidental that this group of writers often represented Hawthorne’s most acute competition, and Hawthorne was surely “jealous of the women’s success and pleased to account for it as a function of debased public taste” (Baym 24). It is difficult to separate Hawthorne’s beliefs from his emotional opinions—to draw out his personal truths from underneath his petty professional resentments.

Hawthorne knew many great female writers, and in several instances acknowledged their talent as being superior to his own or, in some cases, superior to males in general. Nina Baym lists off at least twelve female contemporaries of Hawthorne that he would have known and recognized as “politically and historically informed” (Baym 28) female writers. I would add that his closest female contacts, who I will discuss in further detail, were women who wrote and wrote well (his sister, Elizabeth Hawthorne, his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Peabody, and his wife, Sophia Peabody). It is useful to consider one particular female writer here, Grace Greenwood, because “Hawthorne’s letters and journals single her out as the paradigmatic female writer” (Baym 29). Hawthorne’s response to Grace and her work was at once derogatory and admiring, and it serves as an excellent example of the author’s conflicted feelings toward female writers and the motivation behind them.

Hawthorne criticized Grace, and her periodical for children, “The Little Pilgrim,” in a letter in 1854 to none other than Ticknor, insisting that he was “getting sick of Grace” and that “Ink-stained women are, without a single exception, detestable” (Baym 25). He was displeased with her travel book, Haps and Mishaps, as well. It is thus surprising that Hawthorne had written to Greenwood a few years earlier lauding her work. In an 1852 letter to Greenwood, Hawthorne not only praised her epistolary book, but he wrote that her letters were “the best that any woman writers—of course, better than any man’s” (Baym 31). It is very strange that Hawthorne should change his tune so drastically in such a short span of time; however, it is noteworthy that “The Little Pilgrim” was a moralistic, domestic tract, while the book of letters that he praised was a heated political commentary. As Nina Baym explains, if Hawthorne “had looked at Greenwood’s letters with any care at all, he could not possibly have escaped awareness of their openly political and fundamentally public nature” (31-32) Baym brings this point home by arguing that in saying that Greenwood’s letters are superior to those of any man’s, Hawthorne “goes beyond granting the propriety of women publishing letters, beyond even the propriety of their publishing on political topics, to suggest that women are superior political commentators to men” (Baym 31).

It would seem then, assuming that Hawthorne had actually read Greenwood’s work, that he preferred her politically forthright and controversial letters over her sentimental and pious fiction. It is difficult to know just how to interpret Hawthorne’s “self-contradictory discourse on women,” which more often than not “multiples contradictions rather than resolves them” (Baym 25), but his very inconsistencies stand as evidence that he didn’t hold too tightly to one view. If his comment on the scribbling women suggests his hostility toward female writers, then his retraction of that comment, his continuing to read female writers, and his praise of writers such as Grace Greenwood, suggest his recognition that he had spoken too hastily or that his opinions had been too much guided by authorial rivalry and gender resentment. Perhaps Hawthorne simply said things that he didn’t really believe, out of jealousy and insecurity, and as a means of undermining the competition. In spite of his mixed feelings, Hawthorne was not naïve to the influence women that women retained over his own career. He wrote, in an admission perhaps as extreme as that about the “scribbling women,” Whatever success I have is part of theirs; the rising tide floating their boats, is also floating mine; without them, I should have no success at all” (Idol-Bay, 33). The issue of the scribbling women serves as a good introduction into the study of Hawthorne and his relationship with the female sex. I want to move on now to more specific female relationships. I seek to develop an analytical biographical framework that chronicles Nathaniel’s most significant relationships with women, especially in terms of his literary portrayals of the female sex. This biography will be less concerned with careful chronology and more interested in making connections and marking differences. Hawthorne’s experience with women is a layered one and must be treated as such. That is, it is fruitless to lump all of the women in Hawthorne’s life in one category when the historical record makes it evident that Hawthorne’s female relationships were diverse, and best understood in context. He regarded his mother and two sisters in a very different manner than he did the “mob of scribbling women” that he feared as direct competition, however both groups significantly impacted his view of women, and the course of his career.

Thus, my biographical analysis will emphasize context, especially when treating controversial subject matter, such as Nathaniel’s apparently misogynistic commentary on female writers. I will also group my analyses of certain individuals together to illuminate the way in which these persons affected Hawthorne as a cohort (for example, his mother and two sisters played a particular role just as the Peabody sisters did). My historiography will not be an exhaustive recital of Hawthorne’s life, but a detailed account of some of the most significant relationships that he shared with the female sex. Furthermore, I do not seek to draw explicit parallels between life and fiction so much as to use biographical historiography as a device for recreating the social and historical climate within which Hawthorne developed his understanding of the feminine.

I intend to use this biographical frame as a lens through which to approach Hawthorne’s portrayal of the female protagonist in his story “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” My close reading will be largely dependent on my discussion of Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia Peabody, who clearly inspired her husband’s depiction of the central character in the story, Beatrice. Beatrice represents one of many women in Hawthorne’s fiction who is remarkably good and strong, and yet peculiarly ill fated. As Louise DeSalvo notes, “although Hawthorne may present portraits of extraordinary powerful women in his fiction, his narrative stance towards those women is one of extreme ambivalence, if not outright hostility” (24). In his construction of Beatrice, Hawthorne employs nineteenth-century stereotypes and emphasizes strict gender categories. Still, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” illuminates Hawthorne’s own struggle to conceive of the feminine and to understand the divide between the socially constructed female, which he apparently accepted, and the reality of the female, which he intimately knew. It is startling to witness Hawthorne’s intuitive representation of the female coupled with his “graphic and unrelenting view of the tragic results of feminine powerlessness” (DeSalvo 119). But a proper understanding of Hawthorne’s life experience serves to situate and contextualize the representation of the feminine in his fiction.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was exposed to several very different female figures in his earliest childhood, each of which would contribute distinctly to complex understanding of women and perhaps enable him to develop the female dichotomies that play such a major role in his works. Nathaniel’s father, a ship’s Captain, died in 1808, just four years after his only son’s birth. Nathaniel was nurtured by an “inner circle” (to use Gloria Erlich’s terminology) of females, comprising his mother, Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hawthorne, and his two sisters, Ebe and Maria Lousia. These three intelligent women adored and cared for Hawthorne and he relied greatly upon them in return: “he longed for and idealized his mother’s and Louisa compliance and Ebe’s intellectual stimulation” (Erlich 61). These immediate family members provided the ultimate support system for his writing career.

Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hawthorne occupied the inmost center of the Hawthorne family circle in her role as mother. She lived her life within a sphere that was “narrow by modern standards” (Erlich 62)—she married her neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, at a very young age and after several years of courtship. Upon marriage, she moved across the street to live with her husband’s mother and sisters. She was a widow by the age of 28 and was never to possess the autonomy that comes with being the true head of a household; in fact, after her husband’s death, she chose to move back into her parental home. Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne was not a commanding figure, and despite her apparent beauty and intelligence, she tended to “insulate herself in secure and familiar circumstances” (Erlich 63). She was also subject to frequent ill health, often marked by the pulmonary disorders and headaches that ran in her family.

Elizabeth Hawthorne’s “intrinsic insecurity” (Erlich 63) extended to the well being and safety of her children, particularly to her only son, Nathaniel, who she feared would become a sailor and endanger his life at sea. Her fear was so acute that she even tried to stop Nathaniel from learning how to swim. There is little in the historical record that describes exactly how Elizabeth was with her children, largely because of the insular nature of her family life, but one can imagine the kind of impact that her extreme insecurity and reclusive tendencies must have had on the youthful Hawthorne. One of Nathaniel’s closest college friends, Horatio Bridge, wrote: “Hawthorne, coming as he did from a family of exceptionally recluse habits, gained there his first practical knowledge of the world. . . . he formed few intimacies and rarely sought the friendship of others.” (qtd. in Erlich 66). Bridge is one of several of Hawthorne’s biographers who has underscored this link between Elizabeth Hawthorne’s dependency and hermitage and Nathaniel’s own recluse habits as an adult.

Despite her apparent faults, Elizabeth Hawthorne was still “gentle and affectionate” (Erlich 65) and Nathaniel was very attached to her. Nathaniel’s relationship with his mother was more than a relationship based on mutual dependency and comfort. He recognized his mother’s intelligence, and perhaps more significantly, the financial and emotional hardship—“the cruel impoverishment of single women” (Idol 4)—that she had to face as a widower with children. While Elizabeth Hawthorne is characterized as being worrisome, submissive, and reclusive, it cannot be forgotten that, as a young widower and financially dependent mother, her adult life ended before it really started. In any case, Nathaniel put great weight on his mother’s opinions regarding his work. Nathaniel’s very first audience was his mother and two sisters, and it was by there indulgence that “he began his lifelong pattern of writing for women” (Idol 3) at the age of thirteen.

As a youth, Nathaniel dreaded being separated from his mother more than anything, and deeply resented the many times he was sent away from her, as early as age twelve, on bequest of his Uncle Robert. When Nathaniel’s uncle sent him to board in Stroudwater, Maine, for the purpose of attending a school nearby, he wrote to his mother declaring himself extremely homesick: “Why am I not a girl that I might have been pinned all my life to my Mother’s apron” (Myerson 27). Despite their frequent separations, Hawthorne maintained regular correspondence with his mother throughout his childhood. In fact, while living with his grandmother in Salem he wrote to his mother “usually weekly” (Idol 5). Nathaniel resented his Uncle’s Robert, “who seemed so often to step between himself and his mother” (Erlich 68), perhaps feeling it his duty to “untie the lad from the maternal apron” (72). Nathaniel’s letters to his mother are often nostalgic and indicate feelings of severe deprivation at being forced to live apart from her.

Nathaniel had an enduring childhood fantasy of the restoration of his immediate family, safe from the interference of his Uncle Robert and his grandmother Manning, both from his mother’s side. When his mother moved temporarily to Raymond, Maine, he pleaded that she would stay there: “If you remain where you are, think how delightfully the time will pass, with all your children round you, shut out from the world, and nothing to disturb us. . . . It will be a second Garden of Eden. . . .” (qtd. in Erlich 75). Nathaniel was apparently desperate to preserve some modicum of the past—to shut his mother and sisters up safely away from the world, in a safe haven where he could always return to them.

Nathaniel’s time apart from his mother was not successful in affecting any permanent severance between mother and son. Nathaniel would choose to move back into his maternal home upon return from Bowdoin College, at the youthful age of twenty-one, and would stay with his mother for the next twelve years. Hawthorne had returned home from school to “consider what pursuit in life [he] was best fit for” (qtd. in Erlich 80), and it is significant that he chose his mother’s domain as the suitable place to do this. As an individual who had been exposed to many different residences—various educational institutions, his grandmother’s home, his uncle’s home—and who sought to take up an uncertain profession—Nathaniel’s seems to have gravitated toward his mother as a source of stability, familiarity, and asylum.

Nathaniel’s attachment to his elder sister, nicknamed Ebe, was very different from the bond that he shared with his mother—however it would prove as a lasting. It was a relationship based less on dependency and insecurity and more on intellectual stimulation and friendship. He regarded his “dark- haired, beautiful, imperious, opinionated, and brilliant” (Erlich 84) sister with a mixture of fear and awe. Hawthorne once admitted: “The only thing I fear is Elizabeth’s ridicule” (qtd. in Erlich). Ebe had great difficulty, and often outright refused, to conform to the norms attached to her as a female member of a household: “she slept late, read long hours in her room, took walks at odd times, often after dark, and resisted all forms of housework” (Erlich 85). She was apparently so resolute in doing as she pleased that the other members of the household, notably her younger sister, Sophia, let her alone.

Hawthorne greatly appreciated Ebe’s intelligence, which he admittedly deemed to be superior to his own: “She is the most sensible woman I ever knew in my life, much superior to me in general talent . . .” (qtd. in Erlich 85). Nathaniel and Ebe were “colleague(s) and intellectual peers” (Idol 6) throughout their lives. They engaged in many scholarly projects together, a few of which I will discuss, and always made an effort to support each other in their work. Elizabeth served also as her brother’s muse, in that their conversations, which were often grounded in “her own interest in the imagination, psychology, and aesthetics,” inspired Nathaniel’s own work. Elizabeth was also an avid reader, and carefully selected books for herself and her brother at the Salem Athenaeum.

Elizabeth played a foremost role in all of the early stages of Hawthorne’s literary career: as his collaborator in childhood projects, as his tutor in preparation for college at Bowdoin, and as his consistent reader and critic. While Hawthorne’s schooling often separated him physically from his sister, he still made a special point of incorporating Ebe into his writing life, keeping her updated on the novel that he was working on, requesting that she read his latest work, and inquiring for feedback on her ideas regarding a new novel. Nathaniel’s return from Bowdoin bought him even closer to Elizabeth, both literally and professional speaking, as the two were once again living under the same roof in their mother’s house on Herbert street. Nathaniel asked that Ebe work with him on his first paid job as an editor, from January to August of 1836, for the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, and on his second as well, Peter Parley’s Universal History on the Basis of Geography, for the Use of Families. On this second job, Ebe likely performed “the bulk of the work since [Nathaniel] gave her his pay for the job” (Ponder and Idol 6). The two worked together as equal and mutually respectful partners.

Nathaniel’s insistence on pulling Ebe into his first literary ventures reflects his unwavering respect for and reliance upon her intellectual and creative abilities. He was more comfortable collaborating with Ebe, at least in his early years, than he was working without her. Perhaps their partnership made him feel more confident about the quality of his work. Nathaniel would continue to depend upon Elizabeth for advice and feedback, asking for her opinion of his work even after his marriage to Sophia Peabody. However, Elizabeth’s intense dislike and feelings of jealousy toward her brother’s wife, Sophia, and Nathaniel’s acquaintance with intelligent new women, such as the writer and activist Margaret Fuller, forged a chasm between brother and sister that would never be entirely restored.

Nathaniel’s powerful connection with his mother and his oldest sister, while particularly important to his understanding of women, does not undermine that which he shared with his younger sister, Maria Louisa. Louisa was light-hearted and amicable and possessed many attributes thought to be appealing and appropriate in a young lady. She was a “capable cook and an excellent seamstress . . . sociable and affectionate, she loved plants and animals, was very ‘feminine’ in the nineteenth-century sense and yet always girlish in her sense of herself” (Erlich 83). In contrast to the reclusive nature of her mother and elder sister, Louisa enjoyed parties and dancing, and would be more prone to spend her money on pretty things than books. Still, Nathaniel didn’t seem to think any less of Louisa for being more traditional and conventional than his older sister Elizabeth.

Nathaniel’s treatment of his younger sister is significant, because it shows the general esteem that he felt toward the female sex. While he greatly admired Elizabeth’s “genius,” he was not blind to Louisa’s “honour and good sense” (Myerson 26), which he commended her for in an 1819 letter. Nathaniel’s letters to Louisa are just as honest and affectionate as those that he wrote to Elizabeth. In fact, it is Louisa that he wrote to in 1824, when eager to return home from Bowdoin, to plead for assistance in converting the family to his way of thinking. Nathaniel’s letters to Louisa often indicate his interest in what she is reading, so that he might make recommendations, and solicit her help in looking over his work.

The three women that I have described, comprising Hawthorne’s innermost circle, were not by any means to be the only women in the author’s personal and professional life. However, I have paid particular attention Hawthorne’s mother and two sisters, because they effectively and inevitably shaped his conception of women and propelled him in his literary career. They taught him to respect women and to trust and even depend on female guidance. But they also instilled in him a sense of his potency as a male. They catered to him and coddled him, thereby reinforcing the “cultural standard of femininity” (Erlich 100). In Sophia Peabody, who would become Hawthorne’s wife, as well as his advocate, friend, and intellectual peer, we see an extension of the feelings that he shared with his immediate family—the unwavering love and respect, but also the emotional dependence and artistic reliance. Gloria Erlich calls Nathaniel’s matrimonial choice “an additional derivative of the natal soil” (99). And Sophia Peabody would certainly prove to be “Nathaniel’s most devoted admirer” (Hurst 45). She wrote to her sister in 1845, “If I could help my husband in his labors, I feel that would be the chief employ of my life” (Idol 45).

The Peabody family, including Mrs. Sophia Peabody and her daughters Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia, was a matriarchal clan, devoted to female education and social interaction within the intellectual community in Boston. Mrs. Peabody ran a successful school out of her home, thereby supplementing the family’s income, and Mary and Elizabeth traveled extensively within the Boston area in order to set up several additional schools. The Peabody sisters’ schools catered to the “most affluent and influential circles in New England,” ingratiating them with several important families, including the Gardiners, the Vaughans, and the Ellery Channings (Valenti 17). The breadth of the Peabody’s social circle would be play a significant role in the social and professional life of the artistic young Sophia, as well that of her future husband. The Peabody women would become “just as interested in Hawthorne’s literary career as the women in his own family” and would succeed in immersing Nathaniel into “important publishing networks and the artistic and philosophical communities in which Hawthorne needed to be known if he [was] to succeed as a writer” (Idol 7).

Nathaniel Hawthorne was first introduced to the Peabody family by way of the eldest daughter, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who had mistakenly attributed his work in the New England Magazine to his older sister Ebe. Nathaniel’s sister gladly set Elizabeth Peabody straight, and energetic young woman thereby “instantly conceived a cause for [Nathaniel’s] genius and soon began to promote his work” (Idol 37). Elizabeth quickly sought to extricate this talented and still reasonably young man from the “hermitage of recluses” (Idol 37) where he had sought abode for over a decade. She would do just this— taking it upon herself to launch, promote, and sustain Hawthorne’s literary career over the course of several decades.

Elizabeth Peabody, as the oldest of the three Peabody sisters, was an impressive and dynamic woman, a “galvanizing, passionate advocate involved with all the major reform movements of the nineteenth century (Reynolds 22). Her many achievements made her friendship invaluable to the unknown and private Hawthorne. In the 1830’s, she became an active member of the Transcendentalist movement, as part of which she became well acquainted with George and Sophia Ripley and Margaret Fuller and published the Dial between 1841 and 1843 (Bosco 18). Elizabeth played a central role in the Peabody family’s schools for girls, as I’ve said, but she was also involved in independent ventures devoted to education. She “operated a bookshop and circulating library on West Street in Boston in the 1840s” (Bosco 18), which enabled her, for a period of time, to publish Hawthorne’s works herself. By the time Hawthorne was formally introduced to Elizabeth, in 1837, she had a diverse range of accomplishments under her belt and a prominent circle of friends and colleagues, both of which contributed to her ability, not only to appreciate Hawthorne’s writing, but also to truly further his career. She made use of her Transcendentalist ties to introduce Hawthorne’s work to Thoreau and his friends, as well as other important figures, such as the aforementioned Margaret Fuller. She also called upon her brother in law, educational reformer Horace Mann, to persuade him that “Hawthorne should be enlisted to write books for schoolchildren” (Idol 37). When she found Mann’s response to be less enthusiastic than she had hoped, she purchased Hawthorne’s children’s books herself: Grandfather’s Chair, Famous Old People, and Liberty Tree all bear her imprint.

Elizabeth’s publishing career wasn’t particularly successful, but this didn’t keep her from engaging in new scholarly pursuits and continuing to promote Hawthorne as “a writer capable of meeting the nation’s spiritual needs” (Idol 39). She was willing to do everything in her power to keep Nathaniel and his “genius” afloat, including helping him and his wife, Sophia, out of financial straits. She garnered him a position as a civil servant so that he might catch up on his finances, spoke up when she thought that Hawthorne’s publishers were cheating him of his fair earnings, and even, following the death of his mother, took up residence in Salem so that she might baby-sit his two children, Una and Julian. She was confident that Hawthorne was America’s “first literary heavyweight” and she “worked energetically to engender and empower” him. Unlike the previous female figures in Hawthorne’s life, such as his sister Elizabeth, Elizabeth Peabody was able to assist him, not just in the domestic sphere, but in the public sphere as well. Despite their occasional differences of opinion, which Hawthorne seemed much more irritated by than his future sister-in-law, Elizabeth’s lively and intelligent nature made her an ideal and enduring champion for the reserved and solitary Hawthorne. She is also a striking example of female dynamism, tact, and strength.

While Elizabeth might have “rung the bell that summoned others to the School of Hawthorne” (Idol 43), Hawthorne was not as interested in her as he was in her younger sister, Sophia. Sophia was perhaps less socially and politically active than her two older sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, but she was not less passionate in her own way. Recent scholarship, such as Patricia Valenti’s, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, emphasizes Sophia’s artistic and literary talent and indicates the vital role that she played in Hawthorne’s life. Her support for Hawthorne was less blatant and public than that of her sister, but in its constancy and selflessness it stands apart from that of any other woman in his life. Sophia signified sublime comfort and safety to Hawthorne, as his mother had for a large portion of his life, but she also offered the kind of inspiration that he has garnered from his older sister and uncompromising professional support like that which he received from Elizabeth Peabody. Upon her marriage to Nathaniel, Sophia determined to give her life to her husband and her soul to his professional ambition. Her sacrifice was not one of ease, but one of female love and female might.

Sophia’s life did not begin with her marriage to Nathaniel. She had an exciting and intellectually stimulating life beforehand, one that continued to evolve during the three years of her courtship. Sophia’s health was early on determined to be more fragile than that of her two older sisters. Her mother worried particularly about Sophia’s headaches and sought to confine her to the domestic sphere. Many scholars have interpreted Sophia’s headaches as a “ruse employed by the entire family to constrain her activities” (Valenti 21), especially by her mother, who had a selfish motive in wanting to keep at least one of her daughters with her at home. Sophia’s physical frailty, however genuine or exaggerated, did not prevent her from engaging in numerous activities both in and outside of her home. She embraced all aspects of her life with great zeal: “Her studies, her family, her friendships, her religion, each were sources of extreme identification and pleasure” (Valenti 23). She was unwilling to detach or isolate herself from those around her, especially when it came to her greatest passion, her art. This is, of course, in stark contrast to her future husband, who would oftentimes insist on cultivating his art in seclusion, and who would need to be coerced into bringing his work out into the public sphere. Sophia was no “lady painter” dabbling in art as one might dabble in crocheting or other leisure activities of the well-bred lady. Her artwork was taken seriously by some of the leading painters of the era. While still in her twenties, Sophia was mentored by several prominent artists, including Francis Graeter, Chester Harding, Washington Allston, and Thomas Doughty. Sophia had very personal relationships with each of her mentors, and was encouraged by all four to “move beyond copying to become a serious, professional artist, an indication that none of these men cultivated her talent solely as a favor to their friends” (Valenti 23). Sophia’s most significant mentor was Washington Allston, who stands as “the most important painter to emerge from this period of American art” (Valenti 27), and who recognized great talent in his female pupil. Allston encouraged Sophia to travel to Europe to develop her talent. He also suggested that, instead of only copying paintings of the great masters, she begin to create her own original art. Sophia did indeed begin to create, and with the excitement and vitality that characterized her nature.

Sophia was a true artist in that she was uniquely inspired and agitated from within. She wrote to her sister Mary: “I wonder if there are many people who live thus as it were by drawing up buckets of life with hard labour from the well of the mind” (Valenti 29). And Sophia’s work was not amateurish by any means. She was a recognized professional and her work was exhibited at the Boston Athenaeum in 1834. Sophia never let her devotion to her work or her physical incapacitation get in the way of having dynamic social and intellectual life. Against her mother’s judgment, Sophia greatly enjoyed venturing out into the public sphere, often visiting personal acquaintances and friends of the family for several months at a time or taking up lodgings in boardinghouses (as her sisters often did as well). She particularly benefited from the environment within the boarding houses, where she was able to interact with other young and aspiring artists, as well as numerous activists and intellectuals of the period. According to Valenti, Sophia “relished the society of intelligent, productive peers” (33), whom she found encouraging, not intimidating. Sophia found comfort in reaching out and indulging her mind and its passions. She loved and appreciated her family, but she never tried to hide behind them, nor did not depend upon them for emotional security or comfort. Sophia had a remarkable sense of her own person and a confidence that she was capable of achieving and maintaining her own well-being.

In 1833, at the age of only twenty-four, Sophia had already worked under the tutelage of some of the foremost American painters, ingratiated herself in Boston’s intellectual circles, and seen her own original work displayed the Boston Athenaeum. It was at this point, perhaps the most productive and inspired of Sophia’s life, that she ventured to Cuba, where she would record her experiences in the Cuba Journal. She traveled to Cuba ostensibly to improve her health, but her own narrative suggests that she was much more intent upon exploring a new country and indulging her cultural curiosity. She stayed at the Morrell family’s plantation while in Cuba, where her sister, Mary, was employed as governess. Unlike her sister, Sophia embraced the culture, quickly becoming fluent in Spanish and eagerly getting to know the Cubans that were friendly with the Morrell family. Her Cuba Journal is a “nearly nine-hundred page collections of the letters written to her mother detailing Sophia’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences for these eighteen months” (Valenti 52), and it paints a vivid and engaging portrait of Hawthorne’s future wife.

While Sophia’s writing indicates that she was not particularly interested in the political turmoil that was transpiring in Cuba, including Spain’s control of Cuba and the issue of slaveholding, her entries are nonetheless artistic, passionate, and empathetic. Thus, while she certainly did not take up the slave issue as fervently as her sister did, “her descriptions of slaves are engaging portraits of multi- dimensional human beings, and like many women, Sophia responded most forcefully to the ‘barbarous contact’ when she saw its effect upon mothers” (Valenti 53). And yet Sophia was apt to distance herself from the issue, as she had gone to Cuba with “the avowed purpose of restoring her health” and thus “consciously or unconsciously, ignored all that might disquiet her” (Valenti 54). In the name of her health, “Sophia was free to roam, paint, and read, at her leisure” (Pamela Lee 164), and her unfettered autonomy coupled with the beauty surrounding her did have a miraculous effect on her health.

Free of her exasperating headaches, Sophia was able to thoroughly enjoy the “exciting abundance of sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and tactile experiences” (Valenti 55). Sophia’s accounts are child-like in their preoccupation with sensual pleasures. For example, she describes the perfume of the orange blossoms as an “intellectual enjoyment” and is delighted by the “resonating torrents” of rain and its wonderful feel on her skin (Valenti 56). Sophia’s entries are disarmingly candid, and seem to harbor an undercurrent of sexual energy—such as when she describes the “sensation of bodily pleasure” that she feels while taking a bath or the ecstatic pleasure that she finds in the beauty and scent of the tropical flowers. Cuba seemed to open up a new world for Sophia and she often conceived of her new sensual and tactile experiences as a reflection of the divine: “(we) do not remember the god like here but we think of GOD himself” (Valenti 57).

Sophia’s improving health and the pleasure that she took in the Cuban environment did not prevent her family back home, namely her mother, from worrying that she was too enthusiastic, overly affected by the environment and its sensual pleasures. Mrs. Peabody “repeatedly expressed the fear that Sophia was being overstimulated and counseled her to be more dispassionate” (Valenti 58); but Cuba did not produce passions in Sophia, as much as it awakened her intrinsic nature. As Megan Marshall explains in her recent, revisionist book on the Peabody sisters, Sophia was in a consistent “struggle against restrictions wherever she met them” (74). She desired freedom of person and expression, and her frequent illness seems to have brought her closer to her beloved autonomy by granting her an impressive degree of power over those around her.

Megan Marshall alludes to Sophia’s remembrance of running away one day as a child—“It was glorious,” Sophia said, “The sense of freedom from all shackles was intoxicating” (75). Indeed, it must also have been glorious to be in Cuba, excused from toil, and checked only by regular letters from home. The judgment of Sophia’s family did not prevent her from rising early to go horseback riding alone, indulging in a flirtation with a charming Cuban peninsulare named Ferninando, waltzing in the evenings until she was dizzy and even drunk. What is remarkable about Sophia’s voice in the Cuba journal is that she is just as blatant in expressing the controversial as she is the ordinary. Her voice remains steady as she details many divergent experiences, although perhaps becoming more “vivid and engaging” (Valenti 63) over the course of her stay.

When it came time to return to Massachusetts, Sophia admitted in her letters to feeling depressed. She was deeply upset at the prospect of leaving Cuba and the many people that she had grown attached to during her stay (most notably Fernando). She had been able, quite literally, to run free in Cuba, and the natural environment suited her open and spiritual nature. The Cuba Journal, which the Peabody family would pass around to family friends and acquaintances for nearly two decades, including Mr. Hawthorne, gained Sophia relative celebrity on her return to Salem in 1835. It is interesting to consider, if only as a side note, that Sophia actually contradicted much of her Cuba experience in letters to her sisters in late 1835. She was depressed at her return and “clearly, she sought to disassociate herself from the person she presented in the Cuba Journal” (Valenti 86).

Sophia’s disinclination to own the passionate and social self that she put forth in the Cuba Journal is best interpreted as her way of dealing with the difficult reentry into New England Society. She was no longer unchecked in her sensual indulgences, and had to find a way to rechannel her energy and renew her lagging spirits. Sophia’s depressed mood did not last long, as she soon turned back to her art. In 1839 the Peabody’s moved to Charter Street in Salem, and Sophia took up the front room as her studio, where she returned to copying and sketching illustrations for engravings (both of which were practical in turning “her talent in art to practical, market-driven uses” (Valenti 90)). Despite the encouragement of her many fine mentors, she was unable to return to creating original art, as she had prior to her sojourn to Cuba. Valenti suggests, “even Sophia’s desire for exhibition had its limits!” (Valenti 89). Sophia also started teaching art, largely for financial reasons, as she would have preferred to devote all of her time to her own work. In 1836 Sophia recorded a list of her income from teaching and paintings sold over the year, a total figure of $355. As Valenti emphasizes, “[Sophia] could support herself at the level of many other professionals, both male and female,” and it is from this autonomous and self-sufficient position that she would commence her friendship and romance with the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Having unraveled Sophia’s personal history and confirmed her independent and adventurous spirit, it seems strange that it was perhaps Sophia’s prescribed role as the homebound Peabody sister that made her so initially attractive to Hawthorne. When they first met, in 1837, she was living on Charter Street in Salem, quite literally next door to Nathaniel, and “wearing the white wrapper of her sickroom” (Erlich 99). Gloria Erlich suggests that Sophia’s “virginal, sisterly-daughterly demeanor was peculiarly compatible with (Nathaniel’s) earliest impression of womanhood” (100). Elizabeth Peabody noticed Nathaniel’s “intense scrutiny” of his sister and his apparent fascination with her person. During one of Hawthorne’s early visits to the Peabody’s, Elizabeth took the liberty of giving Nathaniel a copy of Sophia’s Cuba Journal, which “afforded Nathaniel a uniquely congenial opportunity to begin to know Sophia Peabody . . .She was exposed and revealed, whereas he was required to expose and reveal nothing (Valenti 117). Sophia’s writing would indeed play a vital role in the development of her relationship with Hawthorne, revealing to him her intuitive nature, her profound sense of beauty, especially in terms of art, and her graceful and intelligent person.

Despite the mutual fondness generated in their very first meeting, Sophia and Nathaniel would spend another year apart pursuing their own passions. Sophia’s introduction to Hawthorne in 1837 marked the beginning of a new era in the writer’s life—he was finally ready to come out from behind the walls of his mother’s house and overcome “his sensitive shyness” (qtd. in Valenti 109). He entered into his first relationship during this period, not with Sophia, but with Mary Crowninshield Silsbee. Mary misled and manipulated the inexperienced Hawthorne and their affair came to an “unpleasant conclusion” in 1838, with Hawthorne confessing that he had never really loved Mary and that there was no sympathy between the two of them.

After his sour affair with Mary, Hawthorne turned back to his musings over Sophia and the Cuba Journal and both took a great hold on his imagination. In his notebook entries and conversations with Sophia during their early acquaintance, Hawthorne made it clear that “he regarded Sophia’s literary and artistic productions as a potentially rich source of narrative” (Valenti 117), and her inspiration is apparent in his work during this period, including “Edward Randolph’s Portrait,” in which Hawthorne incorporated elements of Sophia’s experience restoring a painting. Nathaniel and Sophia’s “mutual recognition” quickly “flowered into a rapturous union” (Erlich 99-100), and into a secreted engagement. By the beginning of 1839, both were living in Boston and seeing each other on a daily basis, their bond firmly cemented.

Sophia’s transition from single to married life was drawn out in her lengthy engagement to Hawthorne. Hawthorne’s hesitation to commit himself in marriage might be attributed to his precarious financial situation, after all,” only as a self-sufficient man might his courtship culminate in marriage” (Valenti 156). He took up work at the Boston Custom House where he “measured salt and coal by day and at night wrote love letters to the semi-invalid Sophia, who liked to say that she could never marry” (Reynolds 23). Thus, Sophia’s apparently poor health stood as another obstacle in the way of her marriage, although her active lifestyle and professional development suggest otherwise. But Larry Reynolds seems to be getting at something closer to the truth when he suggests that “Hawthorne could not yet reconcile his bifurcated view of women: independent, defiant, brilliant, on one hand, and passive, meek, and adoring, on the other” (23). Indeed, Sophia was at once a robust, cultured, and intelligent woman and an “angelic Victorian fiancée of delicate sensibility”—she was “Naughty Sophia Hawthorne” and she was “Dove” (Reynolds 23). Perhaps, Hawthorne was somewhat frightened by this vocal and artistic young woman, who was as fearless of the world as Hawthorne was fearful.

The two were secretly affianced for three years, although it was really only Nathaniel who sought to keep the engagement a secret. Sophia told her family and friends immediately, but “Nathaniel hid his courtship even from his mothers and sisters, never indicating his intentions to marry Sophia until two months before their wedding” (Valenti 160). Hawthorne even limited his public appearances with Sophia and instructed her to address her letters to him at the Custom House “using a more masculine hand” (Valenti 161), so not as to arouse any suspicion about their romance. Hawthorne and Sophia spent the majority of their courtship apart, often living in to different cities, but they shared a rich epistolary relationship. What is remarkable about their letter writing, like their engagement itself, was Hawthorne’s insistence upon privacy and discretion. It is difficult to thoroughly gauge their epistolary relationship because Hawthorne destroyed almost all of Sophia’s letters to him.

One might imagine that Sophia’s letters “indicate her passionate rather than prudish nature” and that although Hawthorne recognized “the unique excellence of Sophia’s letters” (Valenti 158), he felt the need to destroy them lest they should signify too much of his “Naughty Sophia Hawthorne.” That Hawthorne himself was the “agent of this annihilation” signifies his desire to see his wife represented in a certain way—to force outsiders to “construct their portrait of her from his portrait of her” (Valenti 159). Sophia's letters were apparently captivating to Nathaniel, and destroying them may have served to sanctify and conserve that captivation, while preserving his wife’s pure and untouched status.

However successful Hawthorne may have been in guarding the privacy of his newly established tie with Sophia, he was not able to control the other aspects of her life. Sophia’s “status as an engaged woman did not preclude her pursuit of the friendships and activities, such as horseback riding, that had rewarded her for years” (Valenti 150); in fact, her engagement was a time of artistic growth for her, during which she “expanded her repertoire” (Valenti 152). Sophia’s artistic endeavors during this period are diverse: she illustrated a scene from Hawthorne’s story The Gentle Boy, painted a pair of oil paintings of Lake Como, that Hawthorne professed to worship, and became proficient in the unfamiliar and trying medium of clay. Thus, while Sophia’s drawn out engagement was at times unpleasant to her and seemed to have an ill effect on her delicate health (she suffered many headaches, colds, and fevers), she did not withdraw from her social life and she continued to evolve as an artist.

Nathaniel was not as productive during these three years. In 1839, as I mentioned earlier, he began working at the Boston Custom House, a post which he quit in 1841 to join the Brook Farm Community. He was apparently searching for the answer to his financial insecurity at the Custom House, but his work there bored him and stifled his authorial creativity. His experience at Brook Farm, a transcendentalist commune, did not meet his expectations either. He had cherished the hope of financial security by way of investment in the project and had “shared, in part, the dreams of the Brook Farmers, for their notions promised to catapult him above class and release him from the conventions of gender—ideally, so he could write” (Reynolds 24).

His interest in the Brook Farm experiment, especially so close to his impending marriage, speaks to his desire to obtain financial security as well as his need to come to terms with his gender role and his role as an artist, especially as each contrasted with the role of his fiancé. Sophia perplexed him with her delicate femininity, her successful artistic career, and her unabashed sensuality, and Brook Farm promised an environment that transcended gender, that would dissolve such gender contradictions. Nonetheless, Nathaniel left Brook farm after only six months and returned to Boston and Sophia. Nathaniel’s courtship years had added little to his authorial reputation, and in 1842 he was finally ready to take the step that he had been lingering upon for years.

Nathaniel and Sophia were married, after one final postponement, on July 9, 1842.

Both Hawthorne and Sophia described their union in an idyllic and quixotic manner, as the fated joining of two perfectly matched soles. Their first days and months together reflected their high aspirations as two “creative partners whose passion would consecrate their work and themselves to each other” (Marshall 404). Hawthorne had high hopes that “his relationship with Sophia would elevate him to a domain radically and ideally disconnected from his former existence” (Valenti 188), and despite the romanticism of this notion, their union seemed to do just that. The newlyweds moved almost immediately into their new home, called the Old Manse, and woke the next day to find a “perfect Eden” around them, “feeling like ‘Adam and Eve,’ with no one else in sight” (Marshall 10). The couple’s exaggerated optimism in their “perfect Eden” (Marshall 434) is worrisome, and while it paints an attractive picture, it should not be blindly accepted as a wholly accurate portrayal of their union.

Nathaniel and Sophia kept a family notebook called the “Honeymoon Journal,” in which they recorded their impressions of life at the Manse, particularly the natural world. Valenti notices that “although each spouse frequently contributes comments on the same topic, tonal and philosophical differences between Sophia and Nathaniel are immediately conspicuous. In Nathaniel’s view, nature is essentially bifurcated into polarities that undermine its harmony, whereas Sophia’s vision holds potential opposites together in a transcendental unity” (183). Hawthorne’s conception here, exactly opposite to that of his wife, plays a major role in his depictions of female characters. He was inclined to see purity and unity of being as representing the ideal, while Sophia encouraged him to see that “a more perfect reality was attainable by yoking, in her own words, ‘the power of counterforces’” (Valenti 191). Sophia had no trouble appreciating the beauty of the surface, while sustaining her “unflappable awareness of what lies beneath” (Valenti 191). Her idealistic imaginings coupled with her willingness to accept, even embrace, contradiction, whether in human beings or in nature, made for a unique and enlightened perspective. Her husband had more difficulty justifying disunity or finding its beauty. Theirs may have been a marriage of mutual adoration, but it was not always one of shared perspective.

Sophia was as ecstatic at the prospect of sharing her life with Nathaniel as he was with her, however her ambition to serve him in his career to the best of her ability should not be equated with newfound submissiveness or the taming of her passionate disposition. The Honeymoon Journal, itself, serves as evidence that Sophia had not lost touch with her passion for nature. It is frequently suggested, by such scholars as Gloria Erlich, that marriage between Nathaniel and Sophia provided the former with “intimate human contact and links to normal human experience” and pulled the latter out of her “chronic invalidism” (101). While this is perhaps partially true, It is a gross oversimplification to characterize Sophia as a homebound invalid, lucky enough to have found a mate and improve her health so that she might bear children, when in fact Sophia was a world traveler, a skilled equestrian, and an accomplished artist.

It would perhaps be more candid to represent Sophia as Hawthorne’s savior—an individual who recognized Hawthorne’s talent as well as his propensity to thwart it by retreating into himself, suffering from lack of inspiration and passion, or worrying about finances. Megan Marshal intuitively suggests that Sophia may have been, if only partly, “yielding to the temptation . . . to ‘shine by borrowed light’” (26). It seems likely that in her devotion to her husband, the talented and inspired Sophia sought to cultivate genius, even if it wasn’t to be her own. What is certain is that her domestic role was by no means confined to domestic duties. She was consistently stimulating and supporting Hawthorne in his professional work.

Sophia did seek to make the Old Manse an ideal work environment for her husband, a duty that she would gladly perform at each of the homes that they lived at together. But while the biographical material detailing Sophia’s role as a housewife is overwhelming, it is not wholly accurate. It emphasizes her role as homemaker at the expense of her other roles, and fails to properly situate her behaviors, such as her concern with her husband’s study, in the context of her own values and interests and her unique relationship with her husband. In her essay, The Chief Employ of Her Life, Luanne Jenkins Hurst suggests that Sophia’s “greatest contribution to her husband’s literary career was her concern for the sanctity of his study” (45). Hurst explains how Sophia “decorated” Nathaniel’s study with famous works by European masters, as well as her own paintings of Lake Como, but she doesn’t explain the remarkable significance of these latter paintings.

Sophia sent Menaggio and Isola to Nathaniel in 1840, and he cherished the two works, which he interpreted as a representation of himself and her. He guarded them by locking them in a closet and even placing them behind a veil, but “cultivated his private pleasure in these paintings ‘by all sorts of light—daylight, twilight, and candle-light’ which brought him ‘truly infinite enjoyment’” (qtd. in Valenti 152). Thus, in the case of hanging the paintings, as well as many of Sophia’s other domestic activities, such as allowing her husband to write undisturbed every morning, I would suggest that Sophia was performing a duty that transcended her role as wife. She was acting as a fellow artist, sensitive to the whims of art and aware that inspiration required constant nourishment. She had herself been gripped by the arm of inspiration and had felt positively compelled to paint.

While Sophia’s unerring domestic efforts at the Manse likely contributed to this “enormously productive” period in Hawthorne’s career, arguably “the most productive” in his life (Valenti 182), I would suggest that Sophia’s own person left a more indelible mark upon his work than any helpful action that she performed. Her passion, rendered so vividly in the Cuba Journal as well as the Honeymoon Journal, indicates that Sophia was truly “Queen of all she surveyed,” (Lee) and Hawthorne was at once mystified by his wife’s perception of the world, especially the natural world, and enthralled by it. He wanted to capture Sophia’s sense of life, to harness it for inspiration, and ultimately to incorporate it into the very body of his own work, but he felt compelled to alter it as he saw fit. Sophia’s spirit was too contradictory and enigmatic for easy expression, so he chose to distinguish only the parts of it that he deemed most worthy and ideal.

I have paid much attention to Sophia’s history prior to marriage, because I feel that she has been too often represented only in terms of her role as Hawthorne’s wife—an identity largely constructed by Hawthorne himself and then imitated by a series of biographers. Also, in order to truly gauge Sophia’s role in Hawthorne’s work, and to contrast her voice from her husband’s voice over, it is critical to have a firm understanding of Sophia’s character and personality. In my discussion of Hawthorne and Sophia’s epistolary relationship, I emphasized how easy it is to misconstrue and warp Sophia’s character by trying to conceive of it solely in terms of Hawthorne’s letters to her (without, of course, her own voice). Likewise, it is all too simple to accept Sophia in Hawthorne’s image, especially when he had motives to “reinvent her history” (Valenti 169). In fact, Hawthorne’s letters to Sophia during their protracted engagement “contain drafts of the female characters that would dominate his subsequent work.

Hawthorne used language as his instrument for reconstructing Sophia’s in a less threatening image that reinforced his masculine role as author and protector. Nathaniel may have developed “comforting linguistic constructions of [Sophia’s] weakness, debility, and illness” (Valenti 168) in his writing to her, but Sophia herself was never significantly encumbered by her ill health. Such inconsistencies between Sophia’s actual person and Nathaniel’s representation of her abound, and these whimsical reinventions inevitably crop up in his writing. For both Hawthorne and Sophia, there was a fine line between fantasy and reality, and it seems that both were willing, to an extent, to discard the mediocre for the quixotic in their imaginings of each other and their life together. I want to turn now to a few of Hawthorne’s works, not with the intention of searching for an explicit likeness to Sophia, but with the objective of noticing where her shadow crops up. In the style of Hawthorne himself, I am interested in discerning the way in which Sophia’s ghost “haunts” Hawthorne’s works.

Alluding to Nathaniel’s letters to Sophia, Valenti writes: Out of Sophia Peabody, “Nathaniel formed two kinds of women—one the ethereal, spiritual, ideal entity who might elicit from a man his highest potential; the other was the earthly, practical, willful being who might threaten his sense of manliness” (Valenti 168). Of course, Sophia was neither of these women, although she possessed traits characteristic of both of them. Hawthorne’s manifestations of Sophia are far more indicative of his sentiments and motives than hers. He wanted to believe in his wife as an angel figure—untouched, inexperienced, and tame—an otherworldly muse figure. However, Hawthorne’s interior knowledge that his wife was too colorful and imaginative to fit such a role, and further, that her own worldly experience might easily trump his, often prevented him from presenting a wholly believable portrait of female purity.

Hawthorne wrote many stories during the Manse period, but I want to focus on one that evokes Sophia’s voice in the Cuba Journal, and that was written only a few years into their marriage, in 1844. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” tells the story of a young student, Giovanni Guasconti, who moves from southern Italy to pursue his studies at the University of Padua. He is relatively poor and forced to take up abode in the “high and gloomy chamber of an old edifice,” which remarkably “[exhibits] over its entrance the armorial bearings of a family long since extinct” (1), reminding one of Hawthorne’s own extinct line of Puritan ancestors. What is remarkable about this dismal chamber is that it overlooks an illustrious garden with an old but lively fountain at its center. Giovanni observes the gigantic leaves and “gorgeously magnificent” flowers of the plants scattered around the fountain. He admires one plant in particular with its “profusion of purple blossoms, each of which has) the lustre and richness of a gem.” He describes how this plant is “so resplendent” that it seems itself to “illuminate the garden” (2). Giovanni speaks of the plants as if they were willful beings; he is at once enamored by their beauty and shocked by their capacity to creep “serpent-like along the ground” or to reach great heights, “using whatever means of ascent was offered them” (2).

There are two other characters that play a central role in the story and who soon enter into the garden, where Giovanni is able to watch them from above, his presence being unknown. The first is the owner of the garden, Signor Giacomo Rappaccini, a famous Doctor, who wears gloves to tend to the plants and treats them as specimens. The second is his daughter, Beatrice, who emerges from inside “arrayed with as much richness of taste as the most splendid of the flowers, beautiful as the day, and with a bloom so deep and vivid that one shade more would have been too much . . . redundant with life, health, and energy; all of which attributes were bound down and compressed, as it were, and girdled tensely, in their luxuriance, by her virgin zone”(4). Hawthorne makes Beatrice out to be lively and energetic, but he also makes sure that these traits are properly restrained. Giovanni’s initial reaction to Beatrice is fascinating; while he acknowledges her undeniable beauty, he is overwhelmed by the morbid notion that this young woman is “another flower . . .more beautiful than the richest of them—but still to be touched only with a glove” (4). There is a wonderful dichotomy between Giovanni’s attraction to Beatrice and his repulsion from her—he can’t take his eyes from her, but the more he sees, the more he fears.

Giovanni’s scrutiny of Beatrice in the garden parallels Hawthorne’s own fascination with Sophia and her “long-standing relationship with flowers” (Valenti 216). Sophia’s attraction to plants and flowers was strong enough to factor into Nathaniel’s conception of her. He once remarked that when giving flowers to his wife, it seemed as if he were “introducing her to beings that [had] somewhat of her own nature in them” (217). Sophia did indeed treat flowers, as well as other elements of the natural world, as she might treat a dear friend. During a walk in the first spring of her marriage, she discovered the blue eye of a violet and promptly “fell upon the ground and ‘kissed the precious little stranger’” (Valenti 217). Hawthorne had been long familiar with Sophia’s unique connection to nature. Her zealous behavior and excited letters, as well as her vivid accounts in the Cuba Journal, all spoke to her passion for the natural world, a passion that Hawthorne had had ample time to recognize and consider. It is interesting to note that while Hawthorne acknowledged Sophia’s relationship to nature, most especially flowers, he didn’t entirely understand it. His own anxiety about tending to the vegetable garden while Sophia surveyed her flowers speaks to his discomfort with the natural world.

“Rappaccini’s Daughter” embodies Hawthorne’s most pressing concerns and fears at such an early time in his marriage. As Valenti aptly notes, “The gardens, the woman so luxuriantly portrayed and intimately associated with flowers . . .these are the circumstances Nathaniel experienced at the Old Manse with Sophia” (218). In both instances, the identity of a lovely young woman is conflated with that of the beautiful but overpowering flowers that she tends to. The set-up of the story also mimics Hawthorne’s reading of the Cuba Journal. Just as Giovanni watches Beatrice from the privacy of his balcony, so Hawthorne read the Cuba Journal in the privacy of his home. In both instances, the male is privy to the most intimate nature of the female, without being forced to expose himself. Also, the knowledge that comes from this observation—Beatrice’s unnatural connection to plants, Sophia’s unrestrained passion—is at once titillating and terrifying. Nonetheless, Giovanni, like Nathaniel, feels compelled to “encounter the object of his gaze and determine the nature of what he has seen” (Valenti 219).

These blatant parallels between fiction and reality make the plot of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” a bit unsettling. After all, Giovanni’s admiration for Beatrice is soon overtaken by “dark surmises” about her nature. Upon his second viewing of Beatrice in the garden, he begins to notice some peculiarities. He watches in amazement as Beatrice approaches a shrub, and in a dramatic gesture reminiscent of an impassioned Sophia, “(throws) open her arms, as with a passionate ardor, and (draws) its branches into an intimate embrace; so intimate, that her features (are) hidden in its leafy bosom, and her glistening ringlets all intermingled with the flowers (8). Giovanni literally witnesses the joining of woman and plant and begins to wonder what it means. He witnesses several other strange events, namely the death of a lizard and a butterfly that come in close contact with Beatrice. Giovanni is perplexed by what he has witnessed and asks himself: “What is this being?--beautiful, shall I call her?--or inexpressibly terrible?” (9). Whatever she is, he is unwilling and unable to turn away from her, perhaps because of the “fierce and subtle poison” (10) that she had instilled in him.

Indeed Giovanni describes his attraction to Beatrice as if he had been put under a spell. He explains that “the instant he was aware of the possibility of approaching Beatrice, it seemed an absolute necessity of his existence to do so . . . It mattered not whether she were angel or demon; he was irrevocably within her sphere” (14). Giovanni determines to meet Beatrice and approaches her in the garden. She is kind to him and remarkably honest, commenting that while she admires the beauty of the flowers, some of them “shock and offend” (15). This encourages Giovanni to hint at his secret knowledge of her, to which she responds with “queen-like haughtiness,” that sometimes what is “true to the outward senses” may be “false in its essence” (16). Giovanni is surprised and delighted by Beatrice’s candor and his fear and doubt subsides as he senses her “transparent soul” (16). Such dramatic shifts in Giovanni’s feelings toward Beatrice occur constantly, but her actual presence, her cheerful attitude and interested nature, has a soothing effect on him.

As the story progresses, Hawthorne’s descriptions of Beatrice more and more resemble those of his Sophia: the communing with nature, the upbeat and open nature, even the zealous proclamations about the weather and other ordinary things. Just as Hawthorne found himself increasingly attached to Sophia during their courtship, so Giovanni finds himself progressively more intimate with Beatrice until their relationship becomes “the whole space in which he might be said to live” (18). Thus, as the plot develops, Giovanni, at first the over-awed observer, becomes the admiring and passionate lover. As his connection with Beatrice intensifies, so do his qualms. His entry into the Garden serves to confirm Beatrice’s “girlish womanhood” (18) and beauty, but it also brings him near to the unnatural monstrosities that surround her. Beatrice functions unharmed amid noxious, polluted elements” (Valenti 225), plants that taint the very atmosphere that surrounds her (a notion that I will return to).

On several occasions, Giovanni desires and attempts to reach closer to Beatrice, “but so marked [is] the physical barrier between them” (19) that he is never successful. Beatrice’s desire for their physical separation prompts a vicious cycle of doubt in Giovanni. He is overcome by “horrible suspicions that [rise], monster-like, out of the cavern of his heart” (19). However terrible such suspicions might seem, they are always short-lived and quickly overcome by Giovanni’s renewed confidence that he knows Beatrice’s soul “with a certainly beyond all other knowledge” (19). Beatrice’s role is constantly changing as Giovanni reinterprets her character. Beatrice’s goodness or badness is shaped by Giovanni’s imperfect perspective, thereby endowing him with a peculiar and dangerous power over her.

I would suggest that Nathaniel Hawthorne exercised a similar power over his own wife, Sophia, in his inclination to appropriate her person and shape it according to his own ideals. We saw this in his letters to her, in which he more or less constructed his own versions of Sophia Peabody (emphasis on plural versions). And more relevant to the topic at hand, Nathaniel Hawthorne requested the Cuba Journal from the Peabody family just prior to beginning his work on “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and the descriptions within his story “owe an obvious debt to his wife and her writing” (Valenti 223). But once again, there is an issue of perspective at hand. Nathaniel might take his wife’s words, but he undermines the voice behind them: “he shapes to his own purposes the material from the Cuba Journal—its descriptions of redolent, gorgeous, and gigantic scenery and the woman who was so at one with these wonders of nature” (Valenti 223). There is a disservice done to Sophia in usurping her perspective and incorporating it into “Rappaccini’s Daughter” “through the eyes of the male observer whose perception causes the wondrous to mutate into the monstrous” (Valenti 223). Sophia’s accounts in the Cuba Journal are not underlain by suspicions and doubts about the purity of the natural world, and yet they are used to instigate such misgivings.

I want to turn back to the Garden and consider why it might be portrayed as a source of such evil and taint, and furthermore how and why Beatrice might be “tainted” by way of association with the flowers. Valenti contextualizes Giovanni’s distrust of the Garden by framing it within nineteenth-century concepts of sexuality and the natural world. One is reminded of Sophia’s entries in the Cuba Journal, which detail in very sexual language her “passionate ardor” for and “intimate embrace” (Valenti 225) of the magnificent flowers all around her. The flowers in Cuba are unlike those that Sophia cultivated and admired in New England, and the flowers in Rappaccini’s garden resemble these staples of the Cuban landscape. Valenti explains that “many nineteenth-century writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne among them, saw hybrid, enormous, irregular wildflowers as signs of adulteration, blight, and monstrosity” (Valenti 225). The flowers in Rappaccini’s garden take on a special significance, simultaneously representing femininity and impropriety, beauty and deformity, purity and licentiousness. Valenti further suggests that such “suspicions of an unnatural essence applied as well to efforts to classify the nature of woman” (224). And Giovanni does just this when he “[resolves] to institute some decisive test that should satisfy him, once for all, whether there were those dreadful peculiarities in her physical nature, which could not be supposed to exist without some corresponding monstrosity of soul” (23).

As the story progresses, we learn that Beatrice is actually a monster of sorts, but not in the way that Giovanni proposes. Giovanni’s suspicions are confirmed when he becomes infected with Beatrice’s peculiar disease, and notices that his own breath has become deadly. He confronts Beatrice in a state of fury and disgust, cursing the “monstrous” woman under his breath. However, when he actually reaches her, he finds that her “bright and loving eyes” and his “recollections of the delicate and benign [harmless] power of her feminine nature” somewhat subdue his rage. Beatrice explains that she was the victim of her father’s experiments at an early age, and has since lived in isolation among his plants, at least until Giovanni’s arrival. Giovanni has little sympathy for the “accursed” Beatrice, who has made him like her. She avers that she only meant to love him, and pleads for his mercy to no avail. She continues to have faith in Giovanni’s love, but she is afraid of his anger, which he seems unable to control. In a moment of desperation, Giovanni proposes that they both drink a medicine that he has acquired from a “wise physician,” but it is Beatrice who insists upon drinking first so that Giovanni might “await the result” (27-8). The medicine proves lethal and Beatrice accepts her fate to go where the evil which her father has “striven to mingle with [her] being, will pass away like a dream” (28). Thus, Giovanni’s lethal herb mixture simultaneously kills Beatrice and cures her of her male-inflicted impurity. Beatrice can only achieve perfection by way of death.

This final exchange between Beatrice and Giovanni is critical in grasping Hawthorne’s intentions for his story. Giovanni reflects on his many memories of Beatrice, but he lacks the “high faith” (24) to overcome his doubt and fear. Of course, “had Giovanni known how to estimate” his recollections, he would have realized that “whatever mist of evil might seem to have gathered over her, the real Beatrice was a heavenly angel” (24). Beatrice, who has been a source of suspicion throughout the story, is partially, but not entirely, vindicated in its ending. As she lies dying before Giovanni, she tells her untrue lover, “Thy words of hatred are like lead within my heart--but they, too, will fall away as I ascend,” and questions, “Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?” (28-9). The narrator renounces, if only for the moment, his sympathy for Giovanni and instead illuminates the character’s narrow-minded thinking. Giovanni is so preoccupied with his suspicions of Beatrice over the course of the story and so overwhelmed with his hate and revulsion when he learns the truth about her, that he tramples on her genuine love and overlooks her relative innocence. He is solely concerned with the negative impact that Beatrice might have on him, and is oblivious to Beatrice’s own acute suffering.

I have drawn frequent parallels between Beatrice and Sophia throughout my close reading of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” to drive home the significance of its ending in terms of Hawthorne’s relationship with his wife. Hawthorne portrays Beatrice less as a portrait and more as a caricature of Sophia Peabody. As I have discussed, Sophia did not have any difficulty “dissolving the boundary between the human and the natural” (Valenti 247), because she observed a profound truth in the naturally discordant fibers of life that Nathaniel wasn’t able to grasp or appreciate. Accordingly, and in contrast to their male observers, neither Sophia nor the fictional Beatrice consider “commingled elements to be pernicious” (247). While Hawthorne evidently used “Rappaccini’s Daughter” as a medium through which to explore his discomfort with female passion and the evil that he attributed to feminine mystery, he does, toward the end of the story, at least entertain an opposing perspective. In his marriage to Sophia, Hawthorne sincerely sought to appreciate his wife’s perspective. Their conversations about nature and their shared Honeymoon Journal detailing the environment around them at the Old Manse indicate Hawthorne’s enthusiasm for playing the role of “student in a Socratic dialogue where [Sophia’s] comments serve to persuade him and to adjust his vision to hers” (Valenti 247). Realistically however, Hawthorne was more intrigued by Sophia’s easy acceptance of nature’s discordance than convinced by it; he still preferred the ideal image and accepted it as the “truer reality” (Valenti 250).

Hawthorne remains relatively true to the material that he uses as inspiration in “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” For example, his portrayal of Beatrice amid the flowers almost perfectly mirrors Sophia’s descriptions in the Cuba Journal—both females treat the flowers as sisters. Further, Giovanni’s suspicions that Beatrice shares her nature with the flowers reflects Hawthorne’s own avowal that flowers had “somewhat of [Sophia’s] own nature in them” (qtd. in Valenti 218). But Hawthorne’s accurate recital of facts does not preclude his from making insinuation about how those facts should be interpreted. Hawthorne could not accept at Sophia’s passionate communing with nature at face value until he could make himself understand it. He tried to make sense of it in his own way by transforming it into something that it was not, by implying that it was somehow unnatural. Sophia’s complex understanding of the natural world, like her own personality, was not amenable to categorization. She believed in transcending boundaries—natural boundaries, gender boundaries, societal boundaries, and professional boundaries—and possessed the confidence to do so.

Patricia Valenti concludes her recent biography on Sophia Peabody with the notion that “Sophia had expanded her husband’s imaginative horizons, but he had constricted hers” (252). It is true that with her marriage to Nathaniel, Sophia’s career as an artist had essentially come to its end, and her new legacy was apparently to become the inspiration for and motivation behind several of her husband’s female protagonists. This is perhaps an unfortunate role for the lively and dynamic Sophia. Even if Hawthorne assures us that Beatrice is morally vindicated in death, she still remains fixed in the text as an anomaly—a monster figure. In Nathaniel’s work, we see Sophia’s “life reflected, but its elements distorted” (Valenti 252). She is allotted the role of Eve in Hawthorne’s re-imaginged Eden, but this ultimately confines her to playing the role of the pure and spotless virgin or that of the fallen woman— the temptress luring the male to sin.

I chose to focus on “Rappaccini’s Daughter” not only because of its particular relevance to Sophia, but because it is a story that illuminates Hawthorne’s broader relationship with the female sex. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” has also been interpreted, by critics like Thomas R. Mitchell, in his article “Rappaccini’s Garden and Emerson’s Concord,” with Margaret Fuller in mind. Margaret Fuller was an influential feminist and transcendentalist “determined to define and redefine . . .the nineteenth- century’s constricting demarcations of the feminine” (Mitchell 1). Hawthorne developed an important friendship and intellectual communion with Fuller that deserves more attention than I can give to it here.

I mention Fuller, if only briefly, to emphasize that Hawthorne’s conflicting feelings toward his wife and her many talents, extend to other women as well who Hawthorne perceived as both extraordinary and threatening. Mitchell suggests that Beatrice is a portrait of Fuller, explaining that Fuller was known to wear a flower in her hair and to make frequent allusions to the natural world when explaining human nature. Fuller also composed several sketches in which she writes about a “flower with the mythic beauty and creative force of the feminine, powers which the male featured in each sketch fails to comprehend and thus rejects” (Mitchel 82). Mitchel interprets Hawthorne’s story in light of Fuller’s sketches, suggesting that “Rappaccini’s Daughter” can be read as the response of a patriarchal society in which men are both attracted to and appalled by feminine power and feel the need to restrain and control it.

While I don’t find Mitchel’s theory regarding Margaret Fuller as compelling as the one that I have put forth regarding Sophia, it is nonetheless interesting and useful. Mitchel intuitively suggests that “the riddle of Beatrice had become for Hawthorne inseparably bound, as he writes of Giovanni, with the ‘mystery which he deemed the riddle of his own existence’” (75). For Hawthorne, writing was an exercise in coming to terms with the feminine so that he might better grasp his own role. Whether “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is read with Sophia or Margaret Fuller in mind is ultimately irrelevant. Beatrice represents both, and perhaps the peculiar fascination of Hawthorne as well, as the personification of the misunderstood and distorted female. She is at once feared and beloved, admired and hated, and precariously situated in the purgatory of Hawthorne’s mind, waiting to ascend to heaven as an angel or fall in shame as a devil.

In his first months of courtship with Sophia Peabody, Hawthorne revealed his secret name for her, the name that embodied her special meaning to him and that his heart bid him call her. Her wrote to her in 1839, “‘Dove’ is the true word after all; and it can never be used amiss, whether in sunniest gaiety or shadiest seriousness” (Myerson 57). While Hawthorne’s term of endearment might be interpreted as evidence of his overzealous desire to objectify and idealize his wife, I would suggest that it is just as important to consider other possible meanings. A close reading of Hawthorne’s letters to Sophia indicates the meanings that he attributed to her “Dove-like” character. He wrote to his fiancé, “The charm of your letters does not depend upon their intellectual value, thought that is great, but on the spirit of which they are the utterance, and which is a spirit of wonderful efficacy.” He goes on to describe the influence of her character over him—“purifying his aims and desires, enabling him to realize that there is a truer world than this feverish world . . .teaching him how to gain daily entrance into that better world” (Myerson 51).

Hawthorne’s description of Sophia and her almost divine spirit and goodness makes one think that he had a white dove in mind when he nicknamed his wife. One imagines the dove flying up high, able to transcend earthly problems and reside in a heavenly atmosphere. “You are absolutely inspired, my Dove,” Hawthorne wrote, “and it is not my stupid self that inspires you; for how could I give you what is not in me” (Myerson 57). I mention Sophia’s nickname in the closing of my paper because the dove offers an important visual image, one that calls to mind many of the different meanings that Hawthorne attributed to the female sex: purity, goodness, guidance, constancy, safe-haven, fidelity, etc. The image of the dove is also uniquely relevant to the relationship between Hawthorne and Sophia because it is a bird that has been idealized and too often imagined as a purely white creature, when in fact most Doves are grey. I think that Sophia was very aptly nicknamed Dove, because she had a remarkable imagination and eagerness to embrace life like a bird taking flight, but she was also, like the dove, used as a symbol by her husband. Her true identity was warped for the sake of an ideal. Hawthorne could not help making women central to his writing, because he was made profoundly uneasy by the “question of women” (Easton). In his fiction, as well as in his letters to family and friends and to his beloved wife, we witness Hawthorne’s “fervid attempts to close the gap between ideology and experience” (Easton 80)—to join Ebe’s eccentric habits with her rare intellect, Sophia’s frailty and propriety with her passion, or the fictional Beatrice’s childlike innocence with her monstrous secret. Hawthorne was skeptical about and opposed to any kind of alteration in traditional gender constructions, and yet he couldn’t resist deconstructing gender himself. There is a “curious ambivalence” in his “apparently conservative notion of femininity” (Easton 80); he seems at once to glorify it and to call it into question. This is apparent in Hawthorne’s relationships with all of the women discussed in this paper, but most particularly Sophia, who he portrayed as an angel, but seemed to disbelieve all the same.

Hawthorne was not a feminist and he was not reformer, but he had remarkable talent for depicting life in a way that illuminated truth. Hawthorne served as a voice for women in the mid- nineteenth century, perhaps inadvertently, merely by representing their lives. He invoked the contradictions inherent in nineteenth-century constructions of the feminine, and forced inconsistencies and quandaries into the light. His hesitance to act on or actively acknowledge these contradictions doesn’t change the fact that he put them on the table and made their presence known. Bibliography

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