CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY SAN MARCOS

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THESIS SUBMITTED FOR PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE

MASTER OF ARTS

IN

LITERATURE AND WRITING STUDIES

THESIS TITLE: "I Can Love Both Fair and Brown: Representations ofWomen

in Hawthorne s Letters and Fiction"

AUTHOR: Helen H. Gunn

DATE OF SUCCESSFUL DEFENSE: December L 2006

THE THESIS HAS BEEN ACCEPTED BY THE THESIS COMMITTEE IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN LITERATURE AND WRITING STUDIES.

Dr. Lance Newman THESIS COMMITTEE CHAIR SIGNATURE ~ Dr. Susie Lan Cassel /.l/!ft~ THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER DATE Dr. Susan Fellows ~yvoc THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER D T

I Can Love Both Fair and Brown: Representations of Women in Hawthorne's Letters and Fiction

Helen H. Gunn Abstract

A major change occurred in the fiction ofNathaniel Hawthorne when he wrote his first noveL The Scarlet Letter. This work included several frrsts for Hawthorne: the advent of a completely new female character type-a dark lady-represented by Hester

Prynne, and Hawthorne's placement of this character' front and center-his frrst female protagonist. One wonders what motivated Hawthorne to create this new female type.

A primary source of information regarding Hawthorne's attitudes toward women before this change is the plethora of letters he wrote to his wife, Sophia

Peabody Hawthorne. Within these letters, Hawthorne constructed idealized versions of

Sophia to serve his own personal needs. A series of personal crises, however, changed

Hawthorne's ability to retain his belief in the ability of those fictional characters to meet his needs.

As a result, Hawthorne began to experiment with the dark lady character. This character is independent, strong, creative and most importantly, unconventional. By opening up to new possibilities, by being willing to inhabit a space of uncertainty and thereby imagine a new kind of woman, Hawthorne was able to achieve a level of artistic success he had never achieved before.

Keywords: Nathaniel Hawthorne, feminism, dark lady, fair lady, essentialism, letters, novels. Table ofContents

Introduction 1

Chapter One 16

Chapter Two 51

Conclusion 82

Appendix. A 92

Bibliography 120 Introduction

Feminism and individualism were not invented by individuals. Like literature, they were and are dynamic cultural and historical group events. - NinaBaym

The appearance of Hester in The Scarlet Letter heralded a significant turning point in Nathaniel Hawthorne's career. Hester is a completely new character-type for

Hawthorne, an anti-heroine, a "dark lady." She reflects a change in Hawthorne's perception of women and, represents in Hawthorne's personal life, the very thing he constructed her to represent for the Puritan community of Boston-a new way of looking at the role of women in society. Through Hester's trials and sorrows, the reader sees Hawthorne sympathetically investigate the status of women, "the dreary burden of a [woman's] heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought," and the belief that the "whole relation between man and woman [should be established] on a surer ground of mutual happiness" (Scarlet Letter 241). The Scarlet Letter introduces this new type of female character, and at the same time, moves Hawthorne into a whole new realm of artistic expression.

The Scarlet Letter is deemed Hawthorne's best work by critics and readers alike, and the concurrence of the dark lady and his elevated level of artistry is no coincidence. Over time, he came to doubt his earlier belief in an idealized domestic angel which drove him to experiment with other forms of womanhood. Opening up to new possibilities, moving away from a conventional and static belief, created a space of uncertainty that allowed for growth. Spurred into a new creativity by this failure of the 2 fair lady to meet his expectations, Hawthorne achieves his greatest literary success only because he is able to compassionately construct a completely different female type.

During the nineteenth-century, first-wave feminism1 was growing in strength and Hawthorne was acutely aware of the movement. He personally knew many of the feminists of that period such as Margaret Fuller and his sister-in-law Elizabeth

Peabody, and was fully versed in their philosophies. However, the story behind

Hawthorne's realization of Hester, of this new type of womanhood, is far more than a reflection of the women's movement and its influence upon the author. No era is represented by only one trend of thought. At the same time the feminist movement was growing in strength in some arenas, an increased idealization of the domestic angel was occurring in others. A major influence on this trend was the onset of industrialization which forced men to work outside of the home. This in tum created a greater need for a caretaker responsible for the smooth operation of the home and the care of the children. There was a driving economic need for someone to manage the household-and to do it without pay.

Industrialization also brought about changes in the social relationships among men. Generations of men who had previously worked together toward maintaining a homestead were now dispersed into less personalized employments. In Dearest

Beloved, T. Walter Herbert tells us: "the deferential dependence of young men on established elders ... ceased to predominate" (77). The close emotional and practical relations of younger to older men were becoming less of a support system. At the 3 same time, along with a tum toward a more humanist form of religious belief, came a diminution of the governing role played by the church. The importance of man's relation to the church decreased in importance as his relationship to the outside world increased. To fill this spiritual vacuum, ''white male religious leaders in America were .

. . engaged in making the domestic angel the most powerful Christian goddess since the medieval Virgin," and it was "male need that imparted a religious force to the domestic angel" (Herbert 74). The emergence of the ideal of the domestic angel was a response to changes in man's relationship with man, and man's relationship with god, as well as to his outside place of employment. This feminine standard of perfection, driven by the needs of men, was dangled in front of women to lure them with a false sense of importance and glamorization into acceptance of this male construct.

So, two primary philosophies regarding the status of women existed simultaneously: support of equal rights for women and belief in a glorified domestic angel. There is a long and interesting history behind the debate over which of these philosophies was preferred by Hawthorne. During his lifetime, and for several decades following, educated women embraced Hawthorne as a strong supporter of women's concerns. For example, women greatly admired his "gentle" style of writing. Margaret

Fuller described his story "The Gentle Boy" as ''marked by . . . much grace and delicacy of feeling that I am very desirous to know the author, who I take to be a lady"

(LMF 108). Other women also commented on Hawthorne's "delicate" manner of writing as well, revealing a shared expectation by educated women of the times that no 4 man was capable of writing such a sensitive tale. Women also identified with

Hawthorne's subject matter; he wrote about everyday issues rather than heroic narratives in which women played only supporting roles or were excluded all together.

Women considered these everyday issues about which Hawthorne wrote to lay within their sphere, within their own lived experience. And fmally, Hawthorne wrote about women, placing female characters front and center in his novels. That a white male author used a woman as protagonist was an extraordinary and revolutionary choice.

Female readers believed they had fmally found a white male champion.

However, early in the twentieth century, the woman-friendly view of

Hawthorne began to disappear; he came to be read in an almost exclusively patriarchal fashion. No longer seen as supportive of greater roles for women in society,

Hawthorne was now interpreted as a proponent of the status quo which designated essentialist roles for women and opposed any who tried to break free from those roles.

These critics judged Hawthorne's purpose by the punitive endings created for his female characters or by switching emphasis from the female to the male characters.

(See Appendix A for a more detailed history of the feminist vs. patriarchal readings of

Hawthorne). The onset ofNew Criticism, the predominance of male literary critics, as well as the slight retreat in general from the women's rights movement of the nineteenth-century, all influenced this new patriarchal reading of Hawthorne.

Today, however, Hawthorne is viewed both as feminist and as patriarch, although the majority of critics still lean toward belief in his patriarchy. The primary 5 credit for re-claiming Hawthorne as supportive of women's issues belongs to Nina

Baym, Professor of Literature and scholar of early American literature. As she entered the world of academia in the 1960s, Baym decided it was once again time to read

Hawthorne from a feminist point of view. In a multitude of essays and books, Baym has engaged in a critical conversation with earlier literary critics, and has assailed their patriarchal readings of Hawthorne. Baym's training had been conventiona~ but she quickly realized that critics ofAmerican literature, perceived as interpreters of universal truths, "favored things male, (whaling ships over sewing circles)," preferred satires on

stereotypical women over those on stereotypical men, and produced irresponsible readings oftexts because of their patriarchal world view. So Baym determined she would re-vision the nineteenth-century American literary canon by providing it with a feminist voice. She labels her work ''revisionary efforts in American literary history"

(Feminism and American Literary History x). Baym's goal is to provide new readings of nineteenth-century American literature which had been interpreted for the past half century solely through the narrowly-focused lens of the white-male gaze.

In her 1970 essay "Passion and Authority in The Scarlet Letter," Baym reclaimes Hawthorne as feminist, and Hester as protagonist rather than merely the seducer of Dimmesdale who leads him away from his Puritan path of righteousness.

She has continued to support this assertion throughout her career, even as other feminists read Hawthorne as highly patriarchal. To support her position, Baym looks primarily to the female characters of Hawthorne's novels. She notes the change that 6 occurred in Hawthorne's writing with his composition of The Scarlet Letter. She says this is when he began to use the literary convention of"dark lady" vs. "fair lady,"

(conventions I will also use), where the dark lady represents the unconventional and

creative, and the fair lady represents the unquestioning status quo. Baym tells us,

"Smart, independent women like Hester, Zenobia and Miriam [became] his heroines"

(116). Women, she insists, are now the central characters ofhis fiction. She

acknowledges Hawthorne provides no happily-ever-after endings for these women, but believes the endings "offer limited, incremental change, although often at a great cost to

the agent of such change" (116). Perhaps more importantly, Baym believes

Hawthorne points the fmger ofblame for the difficulties experienced by women at the

male characters who cannot see beyond their personal needs to the world outside them.

The end resuhs for the protagonistas may be punitive, but it is the men as

representatives of society who inflict the punishment-not the women who deserve it.

When I frrst re-read The Scarlet Letter as an adult, I was astounded by the

accusations of''rnisogyny" I heard heaped upon Hawthorne. For me, Hawthorne's

admiration and respect for women was plain. Hester, Zenobia and Miriam--or the

Georgianas and Beatrices ofthe tales- are all good and admirable women. Where was

the misogyny? Fortunately, I quickly discovered Baym's feminist interpretation, and

thereby had support for my belief that Hawthorne resides within a female-friendly

ideology. I now had credible corroboration ofmy perception of a feminist Hawthorne.

However, as in any debate over universal issues, nothing is ever quite that 7 clearly cut and dried, and the same is true with Hawthorne's attitudes toward gender.

Delighted with Hawthorne's fiction, I branched out to his journals, and then to his letters-at which point my assumptions about his feminist leanings ran head-on into a huge obstacle. I encountered the frrst in a painfully endless line of letters to his future wife, Sophia Peabody. The Hawthorne of these letters was not my Hawthorne. Where was his feminism? Where were the magnificent Resters and Zenobias and Miriams?

These cloying letters to Sophia were more than just an overly-sentimental ode to a conventional and boring fair-lady type; they dictated an absolute space of powerlessness for Sophia to inhabit once she was married. The letters provide a major challenge to his status as feminist, a challenge which absolutely must be addressed if one is to understand Hawthorne's ideology regarding gender. The text is damning and

I was finally forced to admit the dependent and submissive Sophia I had previously loathed was in fact a Hawthornian construct. These letters place Hawthorne squarely within the role of patriarch.

Baym has not considered these letters as carefully as she should although the omission is understandable. Fellow second-wave feminists would not have responded positively to Hawthorne's treatment of Sophia in the letters. They were certainly not favorably disposed to view male treatment of women in the nineteenth-century generously. But a more important influence on her choice to ignore the letters may be her role as a literary scholar. In this capacity, Baym views Hawthorne primarily in his role as an author of fiction. She would automatically look to his fiction for answers to 8 any questions. When investigating the ideology of a writer of novels and tales, Baym may not have considered personal letters to be of great enough consequence.

However, I believe these letters are far too significant to be ignored. Even ifwe consider only their quantity, we can view the letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne to his wife

Sophia as a significant text. One hundred and ninety of these letters are extant and there were more that no longer exist today. Of course, most of these letters were composed before their marriage in July of 1842, but even after the marriage, writing remained a significant means of communication between the two, whether in letters or journals such as their Family Notebook. These numerous letters, written over an

extended period (from 1839 to 1863), provide the reader with the unique opportunity to study one major aspect of Hawthorne's life-his relationship with the most important woman in his life-over a long period of time.

Obviously, quantity alone does not make a text significant. In the manner of

literary texts, Hawthorne's letters contain various rhetorical strategies, and their

structural details can be equated to the construction of his fiction. Within the letters are

found recurring themes and metaphors, artfully crafted passages, and most important,

fictitious characters, meticulously and purposefully constructed. Common themes invoke angelic women who serve men as moral guides, and male/female relationships that are divinely ordained. Throughout, metaphors of "dove," "angel," and "divine guide" are used to describe Sophia. These very themes and metaphors are similarly found in Hawthorne's fiction (e.g. Hester serves Dirnmesdale as moral guide, and 9

Hilda is frequently compared to a dove). Like his fiction, these letters are not constructed in a haphazard manner. Apparently, Hawthorne saw his and Sophia's life together as a fiction, ''Nothing like our story was ever written-or ever will be ... but if it could be told, methinks it would be such as the angels might take delight to hear"

(15:398). But of course the story was told-and at least in part by him-it was created within the letters. They reveal how Hawthorne imagined the idea~ nineteenth-century mamage.

Most importantly, the male/female characteristics of the personae he created within the letters reveal Hawthorne's ideal of the perfect male and female types, perfected husband/wife roles for himself and his wife to emulate. To contextually understand this information, it is important to always keep in mind the fictitious nature of the letters and of these characters. They are not realistic depictions of Hawthorne and Sophia; they are as fictitious as the characters he creates for his novels. This fictitious nature has been noted by others. Edward Miller, author of Salem is My

Dwelling Place, acknowledges the ''verbal fictions" within the letters as well as their allegorical nature. Miller points out that within the letters, Hawthorne began "to create stories, sometimes as allegorical as his published writings," and the characters allegorically represent Hawthorne's ideals of man- and womanhood (175, 177). These letters are a fiction created by Hawthorne, carefully crafted to provide guidelines for

Hawthorne and Sophia to follow in their marriage.

Other clues point to the fictional nature of these characters as well. For 10 example, this idea is supported by Hawthorne's frequent use of the thud person when speaking ofthem. In one letter Hawthorne writes, "Your husband will go to the Post­

Office, like a dutiful husband as he is, to put in this letter for his belovedest wife"

(15:416). Use of third person distances the author from the characters s/he creates and allows space for creative construction outside of reality. That both Hawthorne and

Sophia embraced these characters does not make them more real. The characters of the letters are improbably idealized and glamorized; the absolute rigidity oftheir

construction reveals their apocryphal nature. The letters have been read as touchingly romantic or, more typically in recent times, as sentimentally idealized- much like other nineteenth-century fiction. But however they are judged, the male/female traits given the characters are significant because they were so carefully manufactured by

Hawthorne.

Multiple aspects ofthese characters need to be remembered- not just their

fictional nature. The reader must look to exactly what they are representing, as well as

why Hawthorne was motivated to create them. Within these letters Hawthorne

constructs the ideal male and female personae he imagines will form the perfect marriage for himself and Sophia Peabody. Two different, yet not opposing, characters

are created for Sophia: the Dove, a moral guide and religious icon, and little Sophie

Hawthorne, an idealized version of the eternal feminine constructed primarily to serve men. The characters created to depict himself seem an allegorical representation of one of his particular needs or desires which then drives the creation ofvarious traits in the 11

Dove/little Sophie characterizations.

In the letters, I am unable to find any trace ofthe independent and strong women of the novels. Power in the Hawthorne/Sophia relationship ofthe letters is absolutely one sided, and resides with the Hawthornian male presence. The idealized and implausible Sophia ofthe letters has nothing in common with a woman like Hester

Prynne. And yet in 1850, Hawthorne published what would become known as his greatest work, The Scarlet Letter, and its main character has become synonymous with courage and strength ofwill. The Scarlet Letter dramatizes the life of an intelligent and capable female protagonist who is condemned to a life of oppression by the selfish acts oftwo men. But one must ask, what brought about this different characterization of womanhood in Hawthorne's writing? What had changed?

Several major events occurred at this time in Hawthorne's life, and most likely

all ofthem served as some form ofcatalyst for this newly emerging female type. In

June of 1849, Hawthorne was fired as Surveyor ofthe Custom House in Salem,

Massachusetts. He was furious over the firing, and worried about his ability to support his growing family. At one point he was forced to borrow money from friends just to get by. After three years ofrelative economic security, Hawthorne's existence became plagued with insecurity and selfdoubts.

Then just one month later, in July of 1849, Hawthorne's mother died. He had

always had an extremely close relationship with his mother and was thoroughly distraught by her death. Because his father had died when he was four, his mother was 12 his sole parent and he had always been emotionally dependent upon her. Besides, the realization ofhis and his mother's inability to openly share emotions and discuss difficult personal issues lingered between them, adding to Hawthorne's feelings of angst when she died.

Life for Hawthorne was becoming messier and more uncertain. Now, when he needed it most, the idealized marriage he had imagined in the letters, the relationship where he could always find solace, did not meet his expectations. The honeymoon is most definitely over. Hawthorne and Sophia now have two children and no source of

income. Because they live with members ofhis mother's family in a single household, there is no chamber in which the socially shy Hawthorne can find seclusion. Sophia is busy managing the children and dealing with household events just as prescripted in the

letters. Loyally carrying out these duties, she is unable to maintain the illusion of the

idealized domestic angel ofthe letters able to assuage her husband's every care. It became difficult for him to sustain the pretense; no real marriage could hold up to

Hawthorne' s vision. With many negative outside forces simultaneously affecting his

life, it is no wonder Hawthorne became disenchanted (whether consciously or no) with the perfect ideal ofwomanhood he had constructed to take care ofhim. His own

inability to maintain any resemblance to his own imaginary patriarch has been made

obvious by outside circumstances.

The uncertainty and anger brought on by this convergence ofdramatic and

stressful events, however, creates a prime space for creation. In September 1849, 13 disappointed in the reality of his domestic ange~ Hawthorne begins writing The Scarlet

Letter, and the persona of the dark lady, (which he will again use in The Blithedale

Romance and The Marble Faun), emerges. The ideal woman, the eternal feminine, has not held up under pressure. It is not Sophia who was failing, however, but the persona he had constructed in the letters to represent her. Hawthorne's glorified domestic angel has failed him; something else was needed "in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness." To address these doubts, Hawthorne begins to experiment with different male and female types in his novels, often contrasting his idealized fair lady of the letters against a newly conceived dark lady. Investigating the interactions of these dramatically different women with each other, as well as with the men around them, became the primary focus throughout his novels.

Unlike Hawthorne's novels, his letters are unsatisfying because they are static.

Within them, the characters remain frozen, never evolve, and are one-dimensional in nature. There is no sense of complex humanity: of triumph over devastating odds or of ignominious defeat at the hands of life's vicissitudes-nothing like the realities of real­ life people. Compared to the vibrancy and complexity of the novels, the letters are simplistic and enervating. The difference needs to be investigated. Is there a causal link between the flatness of the letters and the richness of the novels?

Because the domestic angel failed to satisfy Hawthorne, he began to experiment with a whole new type of female persona in his fiction. To understand the depths of 14

Hawthorne's disappointment, and the strength ofhis motivation to arrive at some new understanding ofthe relation between men and women, we'll first examine the letters in detail before turning to the novels. Within the letters Hawthorne expended a noticeable effort constructing a fantasy world inhabited by the perfect man and woman.

The unlikely characterizations of Sophia within the letters must be analyzed in order to glean some understanding ofthe unrealistic demands placed upon her. The perfect husband character he visualized for himself must also be deconstructed to understand the motivation that drove the creation of the female characters. Primarily, attention will be paid to the political relationship-the relationship ofpower he constructed for these two characters--in order to determine its success or failure.

Finally, the novels will be studied and compared to the letters. Their contrasting female characters will be examined, as well as the relationships between the disparate male and female types. Similarities and differences between the characters of the letters and those of the novels will also be looked to as well. Can the differences between the fair- and dark-lady types be traced to any particular agency? What is the significance of that difference? What did it mean for Hawthorne? What did it mean for Sophia?

The difference between the female characters of the letters and those ofthe novels is especially noticeable. It is true that Hawthorne also utilizes differing male types, but their differences seem primarily designed to highlight conventional social response to contrasting versions ofwomanhood. The interactions between the 15 characters in both letters and novels-differing motivations, choices made, and final resolutions- reveal telling information about Hawthorne's changing attitudes toward gender. When his earlier belief in the nineteenth-century domestic angel failed him, when he came to understand that the fictional woman he had created from his own imagination and needs was not capable of smoothing away all of his problems, it created a space of uncertainty, a dialectic of opposing beliefs that allowed for greater creativity within his fiction, and would change the central focus of the novels. Chapter One: The Constructed Angel Falls from Grace

Woman is the flower, man the bee. She sighs out melodious fragrance, and invites the winged laborer. He drains her cup and carries off the honey. She dies on the stalk; he returns to the hive, well-fed, and praised as an active member of the community. -Margaret Fuller in "Fragmentary Thoughts"

The letters ofNathaniel Hawthorne to his (future) wife Sophia Peabody are a significant source of information about his attitudes toward gender roles in general, and what traits he was looking for in a wife in particular. They are like critical pieces to a puzzle, without which, the "big" picture ofhow he views the roles of women cannot be fully comprehended. Within the letters, Hawthorne constructs idealized characters for himself and his wife to inhabit. He expends an extraordinary effort on creating and maintaining these characters, and bases his personal happiness upon his life's successful imitation of the fictional marriage depicted within the letters. In the characterizations Hawthorne constructs for Sophia within these letters, there is no sign of strong, independent womanhood. Hawthorne carefully constructs two primary personae to represent Sophia: one of these personae is an ethereal and saintly angel; the other represents the myth of the Eternal Feminine. Both aspects of her fictional personae serve only to promote Hawthorne; the power is absolutely one-sided.

Though meticulously and artfully crafted, these utopian characters set up an impossible ideal for Hawthorne and Sophia to emulate. Hawthorne's dream of a perfect marriage is doomed to self-destruct, brought down by its own inability to deal with the pressures of everyday life. After a closely-spaced series of stressful events, the illusion of this ideal begins to crumble, and Hawthorne starts to question the viability of the perfectly conventional and idealistic characterizations he has created. 17

The primary key to understanding the multiple characterizations who represent

Hawthorne and Sophia within the letters is realizing their fictitious nature-they were created by Hawthorne to serve various purposes for Hawthorne. In Dearest Beloved,

T. Walter Herbert says the ''Nathaniel and Sophia [of the letters] formed a single person, namely Nathaniel" (87). In other words, these letters are really all about

Hawthorne-not about Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody. Even when he appears to offer support to Sophia, the primary emphasis is his own need: "you shall lean upon it

[his arm] as much as you choose ... but I would feel as ifyou did it to lighten my footsteps, not to support your own" (15:290). Within the letters, the personal dynamics between the two are always convenient for Hawthorne's purposes. For example, one telling passage reveals his assumption that he knows exactly what makes Sophia tick:

My own Dove, I hardly know how it is, but nothing that you do or say ever surprises or disappoints me ... There exists latent within me a prophetic knowledge of all your vicissitudes ofjoy or sorrow; so that, though I cannot foretell them beforehand, yet I recognize them when they come. Nothing disturbs the preconceived idea ofyou in my mind. (15:378-379; emphasis mine)

This claim to innate knowledge is unlikely and suspiciously fortuitous. Hawthorne even admits he has previously imagined an archetype of Sophia: "I knew Sophie Hawthorne of old ... There was an image of such a being deep within my soul" (15:435). How fortunate indeed that he already completely "knows" Sophia, and therefore will not need to exert any additional effort. Of course, it is the fictional Sophia he knows, not the real one.

Hawthorne continually lets slip the knowledge of his role in the construction of 18

Sophia's characters. He asks, ''What should I do in this weary world, without the idea ofyou, dearest?" (15:399; emphasis mine). Hawthorne already has a pre-conceived ideal of womanhood (an ideal which reflects his personal needs), which he reveals to

Sophia via letters. That Sophia does her best to accommodate him is clearly shown in her own letters as well as in how she ran the Hawthorne household (e.g. Hawthorne's study was always the frrst room organized in their frequent moves, and the children were never to make noise when Papa was writing). And because she tries so hard to emulate the roles he has created for her, she never challenges the inherent presumption-that defming these roles is his right.

Hawthorne created two similar yet distinctly different personae for Sophia: the

"Dove" and "little Sophie Hawthorne," a character also addressed as ''naughty Sophie

Hawthorne." In Salem is my Dwelling Place, Edward Miller tells us "it was

Hawthorne who ... created out of his fantasies and sexual hesitations a split personality which had little to do with Sophia Peabody'' (180). Miller recognizes their fictional nature as well. In general, the Dove character serves as divine woman and angel. In contrast, little Sophie Hawthorne represents earth-bound human woman, although that defmition sounds far more realistic than it actually is. Little Sophie is as improbable as the Dove; she is an idealized production of the nineteenth-century eternal feminine. Not even in straighter-laced Victorian times would this character have actually been considered "naughty." The difference between the Dove and little

Sophie Hawthorne is distinct. The Dove is holy and deserving of worship; she is not 19 on a humanly moral plane. Little Sophie is the perfect wife who takes care of house and home. Both are virtuous, but in different ways. There are other variations on these two personae such as "angel" and "little wife," but they are extensions of the

Dove/little Sophie Hawthorne characters.

These two characterizations, Dove and little Sophie Hawthorne, do not represent good twin/evil twin. Unlike Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, no metamorphosis is required before Sophie can tum into Dove. Both characters are available to serve at

Hawthorne's beck and call; he has access to whichever character best serves the current moment. And because they are solely of his own making, he has the freedom to combine the two when convenient-which occurs frequently. 2 These are not split personalities which can be divided into binary categories. Both female animae are approved by Hawthorne and serve multiple purposes, often simultaneously.

The Dove character is divine, sacred, to be worshiped. Hawthorne tells this incarnation of Sophia that the love he feels for her "converts my love into religion"

(15:317). He frequently refers to this character as "angeV' and places this aspect of

Sophia upon a pedestal so high, no human being could ever dream of living up to it.

Hawthorne expresses his willingness to worship at the feet ofthe Dove, telling her not to let him touch "thy delicate little foot ... without kneeling" (15:521). The Dove is no earth-bound mortal and, as Miller tells us "occupie[s] an otherworldly habitation"

(178). In one letter, Hawthorne tells her "Thou art ten times as powerful as I, because thou art so much more ethereal" (15 :606). With the construction ofthe Dove, 20

Hawthorne asks Sophia not to be human: "I have an awe ofyou that I never felt for anybody else ... I suppose I should have pretty much the same feeling ifan angel were to come from Heaven and be my dearest friend ... in meeting you, I really meet a spirit" (15:317). Hawthorne has constructed a religious icon to worship: the Dove is spirit-not flesh and blood woman. Having this role ofreligious perfection foisted upon her must have sometimes intimidated the flesh and blood Sophia.

Unlike most angels, this particular angeL however, does not exist to serve God, but Nathaniel Hawthorne. For example, when Hawthorne writes ''You make a heaven roundabout you, and dwell in it continually; and as it is your Heaven, so it is mine," as well as, "thy spirit is to mine a pure fountain, in which I bathe my brow and heart; and immediately all the fever ofthe world departs," it tells us the Dove's divinity is to improve the quality of life for Hawthorne (15:358, 487). It informs Sophia ofthis as well. It is her job to create a space ofpurity, a heaven on earth for Hawthorne to inhabit.

Ofcourse, this perception ofwomen as angels was not unique to Hawthorne; rather it was a common ideal among many in the nineteenth-century. Walter Herbert tells us that during this period, "white male religious leaders in America were . . . engaged in making the domestic angel the most powerful Christian goddess since the medieval Virgin," and that it was "male need that imparted a religious force to the domestic angel" (74). Herbert's reasoning reflects the changing role in the social relationships among men ("the deferential dependence of young men on established 21 elders ... ceased to predominate"), as well as the lessening role of the church in many of their lives. Men "needed" women to fulfill this now vacated role-to fill the space left empty by the diminishing importance of the relations of men with men, and men with god (77). Women did not conceive this role to please men. Rather, men created the role based on their own needs. It was described with words of adoration and awe to convince women of its desirability.

An innate problem resides within all of this idealization. With acceptance of the domestic idea~ the ability to confront and deal with problems occurring in typical marriages diminished as admitting to problems became unacceptable. Herbert reveals that, while this ideal seems to best serve men, in fact it served neither men nor women well,

The domestic ideal best served the needs of self-made men-in-the­ making, recruiting women and children into subordinate roles. Yet once manly self-making is complete, the ideal loses its imperative urgency and its power to hold conflicts in abeyance. A woman who bolsters her husband's self-trust fmds her importance diminished as he gains recognition beyond the home. (209)

The woman's role loses importance as her husband's life outside the home increases.

But then, so does the man's: "The self-made husband soon discovers he is only as good as his most recent success and that fulfillment lies in making a self-made self, not in occupying one" (21 0). Included within this idealized construct lay the seeds of its own inability to satisfy. Both sides of the relationship are unfulfilled, yet neither side is allowed to question the very premise behind the relationship. There are only losers here. 22

An enormous paradox exists in this new "whole relation between man and woman." Herbert quotes a letter in which Hawthorne tells Sophia "still I have an awe of you that I never felt for anybody else," and emphasizes the contradiction between this and the thought expressed at the end of the same paragraph: "this awe ... does not prevent me from feeling that it is I who have the charge of you, and that my Dove is to follow my guidance and do my bidding" (15:316-317). Herbert sees the "paradox at the heart of the domestic ideal ... Hawthorne's spirit bows in reverence before a friend who is to do his bidding" (75). This ability to worship, and also to dominate, is not possible among men who are equals, or between man and his Creator. It is a case ofhaving your cake and eating it too. Men can only benefit from this male-constructed ideal.

There are practical benefits to this uneven relationship. Hawthorne uses the

Dove's purity to exclude her from areas ofhis daily life he prefers to maintain as his exclusively. Hawthorne explains to Sophia why he will not involve her in his daily employment in the Boston Customs House: "Sweetest Dove, shouldst thou once venture within those precincts, the atmosphere would immediately be fatal to thee ... thy pure spirit would leave what is mortal of thee there, and flit away to Heaven"

(15:428). Little Sophie is too "pure" and "fragile" to cope with the work Hawthorne must perform everyday. He sugar-coats Sophia's exclusion by glorifying her feminine traits, but then he manipulates this praise in ways that maintain his independence from her. In one example he endows her letters }Vith the power to elevate him above his 23 fellow employees,

Thy yesterday's letter ... arrived .. . I held sweet communion with my Dove. Dearest, I do not believe that any one of those miserable men received a letter which uttered a single word of love and faith ... No beautiful and holy woman's spirit came to visit any ofthem. (15:430)

By placing the Dove on a holy level, Hawthorne manages to remove her from his work, at the same time he elevates himself above his fellow co-workers. Hawthorne masterfully maneuvers the Sophia characters as skillfully as he does the characters in his novels. Years later, Sophia wrote a letter to Horatio Bridge sharing anecdotes of her husband's work at the Salem Custom House. Hawthorne less tactfully manipulated her letters when he appended an almost contemptuous postscript: ''My wife knows no more about these matters [his work at the Custom House] than I do about baby-linen"

(Herbert 171 , 16:194). In spite of the "awe" Hawthorne protests he feels for the Dove, he often quickly and condescendingly puts her in her place, and keeps her out ofhis.

Hawthorne does not accept or treat Sophia as an equal. He does not share the reality ofhis everyday existence with her. The personae he creates for Sophia always serve him.

The sacralization ofthis Dove places an onerous burden upon Sophia.3

Hawthorne descnbes his expectations,

Methinks a woman or angel (yet let it be a woman, because I deem a true woman holier than an angel}-methinks a woman, then, who should combine the characteristics of Sophie Hawthorne and my Dove would be the very perfection of her race. (15:358)

Sophia is to be p erfect, better even than an angel, as when he tells her to "b e as happy 24 as the angels; for thou art as good and holy as they, and have more merit in thy goodness than they have; because the angels have always dwelt in sinless heaven"

(15:492). But the motivation of this eulogistic praise exists to promote Hawthorne's life, not to bolster Sophia's perception of self, "My head desires very much to rest on your bosom. You have given me a new feeling, blessedest wife ... I am insufficient for my own support; and that there is a tender little Dove without whose help I cannot get through this weary world at all" (15:396). While appearing as concerned for

Sophia, Hawthorne ironically places an enormous burden upon his fragile little Dove's shoulders. It is the "tender little Dove's" duty to ensure Hawthorne survives life's trials and tribulations. Hawthorne's praise of the Dove's delicate frailness really serves to hide his desire she assume the lion's share of emotional support in their relationship ..

Though just as idealized, the other role Hawthorne creates for Sophia, "little

Sophie Hawthorne," differs significantly from the sacred Dove. She is less celestial.

She can be "naughty." She can be teased. She can even be treated as corporeal; her lips, her nose, her bosom can be addressed. However, as stated before, little Sophie is just as improbable a character as is the Dove. She is quintessentially feminine as defmed by Hawthorne. I disagree with Herbert whose Freudian reading of the letters sees the Dove as representing the feminine and little Sophie as representing masculine assertiveness and intellectuality (121-122) . This "naughty'' Sophie Hawthorne is far too girlishly cute. She is capable of "playful kisses." Her nose, which he speaks of kissing, shows defiance, but in a passive, non-threatening way: "Sophie Hawthorne' s 25 nose bids defiance without any sound" (15:372). Hawthorne tells cute Sophie she is deftant, but keeps her silent. None of little Sophie's characteristics is masculine in any sense of the commonly-used definitions of that term.

This characterization of Sophia, sometimes referred to as "little wife," is just as concocted and just as convenient as the Dove. The Dove serves as religious icon;

Sophie serves as perfect wife. Both serve Hawthorne. Like the Dove, little Sophie is responsible for his general mood: "Thy husband needs thy sunshine, thou cheerfullest little wife," he tells her (15:504). This is not praise of Sophia's cheerful deportment, but a revelation of his requirements of her. And also like the Dove, Sophie must be perfect: ''Now good bye dearest, Sweetest, loveliest, holiest, truest, suitablest, little wife. I worship thee. Thou art my type of womanly perfection" (15:513). Another time, he describes her as "sinless," "God bless thee, thou sinless Eve-thou dearest, sweetest, purest, perfectest wife" (15:523). This is one of many times Hawthorne combines the traits of Dove and Sophie Hawthorne; his impossible demands of perfection are placed upon both. Yet Hawthorne has ownership of this perfection which he frequently reminds her as when he tells her she is his ''possession forever"

(15:583) or, "God gave you to me to be the salvation of my soul" (15:330).

Hawthorne's ownership of Sophie has been ordained by God which justifies any demand Hawthorne may make of her. He creates an image of feminine perfection and assigns it a submissive role. Sophia is to understand that it is god, not Hawthorne, who ordained the power dynamics of this relationship. 26

Like most idealized versions of femininity in the nineteenth-century, the character Sophie is enormously fragile, a fragility which emphasizes her husband's strength. For example, when Hawthorne writes ''How strange it is, thou tender and fragile little Dove, that the shelter ofthine arms should have become absolutely necessary to such a great, rough, burly, broad-shouldered personage as thy husband!

He needs thy support as much as thou dost his," he tells us more about his need for her strength than her need for his ( 15:51 0). (While Hawthorne addresses this character as

Dove, it is distinctly in the role ofwife to his husband.) Or when he writes,: "I tremble, almost, to think how thy tender frame has been shaken by that continual cough . . . At times, dearest, it has seemed an absolute necessity for me to ... hold thee in my arms .

. . I am afraid thou has needed my kisses very much (15:534). Her fragility places him in the role ofprotector. Her fragility and her perfection remove any hint of sexuality.

The strength ofthese characters serves Hawthorne, and so does their weakness.

Hawthorne can choose to submit or dominate, as his mood dictates.

As Hawthorne does with the Dove, he places a huge burden ofresponsibility on little Sophie. Many ofthe countless demands made ofhis little wife are unreasonable.

For example, when Hawthorne tells Sophia ''where thou art not, there it is a sort of death" or "Stoop down and kiss me-or I die !" he lets Sophia know h e requires her presence or his life ends (15:420, 596). And just as Hawthorne has claimed intuitive knowledge of little Sophie, he demands the same unlikely understanding from her: ''Do not get into the habit of trying to find out by any method save your own intuition, what 27 is pleasing and what displeasing to me" (15:321). In one letter he expresses a dread "of feeling you shrink back from my bosom, and thereby discovering that there was yet a deep place in your soul which did not know me" (15:329). This suggests the naturally uncommunicative Hawthorne does not want Sophia to pester him with bothersome questions in an attempt to get to know him. She should already ''know" him. For

Hawthorne, it makes for an almost perfect relationship that requires little from him, and everything from his wife. I wonder how the real Sophia felt when faced with

Hawthorne's demand she intuitively possess knowledge of all aspects of this enigmatic man. It must have been extraordinarily confusing to receive Hawthorne's ridiculous demands couched in such loving terms.

No matter how adored is this little wife, she is never to play in the same league as Hawthorne. He keeps Sophia in her place through the copious use of praise couched in condescending terms. Sophia was a frequent writer of letters and journals, and at times was even encouraged to publish. Serious writing, however, is

Hawthorne's province and Sophia is never allowed to forget it. For example, in 1840,

Hawthorne describes his desire for a letter: ''I do indeed long to see your delicatest little penwomanship; (what an enormity it would be to call my Dove's most feminine of handwritings penmanship!)" (15:397). His frequent use of diminutives along with his clear separation of men's and women's spheres, are constant reminders to Sophia of his superiority in this arena. Another later example praises her ''pretty descriptions" and suggests "in future years, when thy husband is again busy at the loom of fiction, he 28 would weave in these little pictures" (15:465). Hawthorne is the real writer here who would weave bits of Sophia's descriptive prose into his more consequential works. His frequent use of the word little is enormously condescending as when he refers to her

"little" pictures, or encourages her to ''Take care of thy little self, I tell thee!" (15:675).

Hawthorne's need to exert his authorial superiority did not change over time.

Almost twenty years later in 1859, Hawthorne's publisher of many years, James T.

Fields, suggested Sophia write for publication. Hawthorne describes his negative response in a letter to a friend,

Mrs. Hawthorne had a note from Fields, yesterday, requesting her to become a contributor to the Atlantic Monthly! I don't know whether I can tolerate a literary rival at bed and board; ... However, I make myself at ease on that score, as she positively refuses to be famous, and contents herself with being the best wife and mother in the world. (15:204).

Surely Sophia felt secretly pleased by Fields' suggestion. Publication of her own ;' writing would have been validation of her talents outside of her role as Hawthorne's wife and the mother of his children. By 1859, the children were long past the age of needing constant attention. But the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne is not to be allowed an identity separate from his: "When we are together, thy whole mind and fancy, as well as thy whole heart, is mine," he tells her (15:446). She certainly will not be allowed the role of competitor. It is not unlikely that Hawthorne allowed Sophia to frrst read his letter regarding Fields' suggestion; after all, it was through writing that he informed her of things he might not feel like discussing in person. Her own response to Fields is submissive: ''You forget that Mr. Hawthorne is the Belleslettres portion of 29 my being" (18:202). Sophia reveals her complete capitulation. In the end, his ownership of her is complete because she concedes it.

Hawthorne's creative manipulation of these epistolary characters needs to be re-emphasized. He separates, combines and reassigns particular traits from one

character to another as suits his immediate needs. None ofthe Sophia characters is

strongly independent, strong-willed, independently creative-this "lack" is what they all have in common. Some power is allowed the Dove/Sophie characters (she is his moral

superior), but her submission is first required in order to earn his adoration,

Thou canst not think how infinitely better I know and love Sophie Hawthorne, since, in moments ofour deepest tenderness, she has yielded up [her "dearest" nose]. And, in requital, I yield my whole self up to her, and kiss her beloved foot, and acknowledge her for my queen and liege-lady forever more. (15:621; emphasis mine)

First, she must yield; his reverence will only follow after that. Hawthorne conveniently

provides built-in escapes for any boorish behavior on his part: ''Oh, let me feel that I may even do you a little wrong without your avenging it" (15:357). He constructs

someone who will never confront him with accusations of wrongdoing. Sophia is

always to forgive, without recrimination, any missteps he may take. Hawthorne

attempts to construct a marriage in which he will always come frrst, never be

challenged, and invariably be forgiven. These characters, whether divine or improbably

cute, exist for the sole purpose of serving Hawthorne.

Of course, Hawthorne also constructed fictitious character( s) to represent himself in the letters, although they are not as individual or clearly demarcated as the 30

Dove and little Sophie characters. Hawthorne frequently addresses whichever male persona he is currently utilizing as "thy husband" or some variant of "thy beloved." As with the characters who represent Sophia, Hawthorne's characters are not realistic depictions; they are allegorical representatives of male gender types, each suited to

some particular purpose. Hawthorne's use of third person when referring to himself is

especially prevalent and reveals a strong desire to distance the "actual" Hawthorne from his fictitious constructs. This distance allows him to create an idealized version of himself. It is important to remember these characters are as fictitious as those in his

fiction. They represent whichever role Hawthorne desires to play at the moment. The

Hawthorne characters are simply a causal link to the Sophia characters, and so are

often defmed in terms of how Sophia will serve them. For example, when Hawthorne

experiences a particular need, he creates within the letters a persona of himself which

also has that need. That persona, however, serves primarily to drive the creation of a

complementary female type. We see plenty of evidence of these Hawthorne characters, but we often need to interpret them through the personal traits being assigned to Sophia.

For example, there is a Nathaniel Hawthorne who feels the need of a moral guide and so he creates that persona within the letters. In this role, Nathaniel looks to the Dove as his spiritual leader-or even as a Jesus-type substitute as intermediary to

God. He tells her she is "beloved of Heaven ... [and] bringest a rich portion to thy husband ... even the blessing of the heavenly father" (15:517). It is her job to ensure 31

Hawthorne's entrance into heaven,

I trust that thou has flown abroad, and soared upward to the seventh heaven. But do not stay there, sweetest Dove! Come back for me; for I shall never get there, unless by the aid of thy wings. (15:607)

Again, this is an enormous burden to place upon Sophia who must play some combination of heavenly being and religious advisor. Hawthorne feels the need for redemption, and so he creates a character who the Dove can redeem. These arenas over which Sophia retains dominion have been assigned by Hawthorne-and none have anytlllng to do with life's practicalities: ''I take [my Dove] for my unerring guide and counsellor in all matters of the heart and soul" (15:628). All matters of the heart and soul are Sophia's; the matters of earthly power belong to Hawthorne. He maintains control even while seeming to relinquish it.

Hawthorne defends these improbable roles-the Dove as moral guide, Nathaniel as acolyte-by endowing their relationship with a sacred nature: "the communion which my spirit then holds with yours has sometlllng of religion in it." However, though he labels their connection as consecrated, it always serves Hawthorne's purposes

(15:291). For example, their relationship helps maintain his desire for solitude: "we have been clasped in one another's arms! That holy circle shuts out all the world"

(15:449). With Sophia beside him, the reclusive Hawthorne will no longer have to engage with the world. It also removes any need for him to make choices about the relationship since it has been ordained by God: ''my soul yearns for the friend whom

God has given it-whose soul He has married to my soul" (15:329). It also takes choice 32 out of Sophia's hands: ''you always will be the same to me, because we have met in

Eternity, and there our intimacy was formed" (15:299). Hawthorne has constructed these two characters as helpless in the face of their preordained, holy relationship.

However, it is significant that Hawthorne still managed to extend his engagement to

Sophia for over four years in spite of the sacred inevitability ofthe marriage. Ifthe marriage was truly blessed by god, why wait? Hawthorne's continued stalling reveals an insecurity which belies his alleged belief in its destiny.

The almost religious nature of this marriage serves purposes other than redemption. It also exists to guide Hawthorne through life, to provide meaning for this man so acutely aware of all the "dark caverns ofthe human heart." Sophia is to help him know himself: ''Thou only hast taught me that I have a heart ... Thou only has revealed me to myself ... Now, dearest, dost thou comprehend what thou has done for me?" (15:495). Hawthorne needs someone to protect and guide Hawthorne through the emotional dangers ofthe world, and so he assigns that duty to Sophia: "As I drew nearer ... to the Dove, and opened my bosom to her, and she flitted into it and closed her wings there-there she nestles now and forever, keeping my heart warm, and renewing my life with her own" (15:495). As usual, Hawthorne tells Sophia what duties she is to perform for him. These thoughts sound similar to those ofborn-again

Christians who have accepted Jesus into their hearts. (If analyzed from one point of view, this could be interpreted as a highly feminist attitude. Hawthorne has assigned the role of Savior to a woman.) 33

The emotionally needy Nathaniel requires someone to light his way (another allusion to Jesus in his role of "light of the world") through his daily world: "Art thou not glad, belovedest, that thou wast ordained to be a heavenly light to thy husband, amid the dreary twilight of age?" ( 15 :512). The implication is he will "lose his way" through life without her direction. He would be lost in darkness without her: ''I feel how dark my life would be, without the light that thou shedst upon it-how cold, without the warmth of thy love" (15:517). Sophia is his redemption: ''Dost thou rejoice that thou hast saved me ... it is a miracle worthy even of thee, to have converted a life of shadows into the deepest truth, by thy magic touch" (15 :566). And more drastically, she is responsible for keeping him alive and providing him with substance: "If it were not for my Dove, this present world would see no more of me forever ... it is thou that givest me reality" (15:565). Hawthorne places the burden of his moral, emotiona~ and physical existence upon Sophia, all the while holding the reins on matters he can control. Christian men never had the questionable benefit of commanding their Savior.

In addition to the Nathaniel who needs a way to redemption, there is also a character who needs a manager or secretary to keep his everyday life organized and to ensure his day-by-day happiness. This character who wants someone to ease his way through life inspires the creation of a little wife character who will do so. This

Nathaniel needs little Sophie to deal with events he fmds uncomfortable or simply does not enjoy. Therefore, in some few instances, it seems Sophia is allowed power over 34 certain mundane events, but, once again, this happens only when assigned by

Hawthorne. For example, not in the least interested in handling everyday business details, Hawthorne tells Sophia before their marriage he will "commit all my business transactions to thee, when we dwell together" (15:580). Assigning annoying duties to

Sophia frees up time for Hawthorne to write. In another instance, because he was never at ease among crowds, Hawthorne requires Sophia to take charge at public

events,

Belovedest, ifever thou shouldst happen to hear me lauded on any public occasion, I shall expect thee to rise, and make thine own and my acknowledgments, in a neat and appropriate speech. Wilt thou not? Surely thou wilt-inasmuch as I care little for applause, save as it shall please thee; so it is rather thy concern than mine. (15:606)

Of course as Hawthorne presents it, he is doing Sophia a favor, even as he micro­ manages just how it is to be accomplished-"in a neat and appropriate speech."

Hawthorne's phrasing, ''I shall expect thee to rise ... ,"reveals he is not asking nicely; he is directing. Yet how neatly he turns the tables: he rids himself of an uncomfortable duty, and in so doing, places Sophia in a position of owing him gratitude.

Hawthorne gives over to the characters of the Dove and Sophie responsibility for ensuring his day-to-day happiness and well-being. He may have been known for his dark world-view, but like most of us, he dreams ofhappiness in his personal life, and places responsibility for this happiness upon Sophia: "My only hope of being a happy man depends upon the permanence of our union" (15:305). Elsewhere he writes: "Be happy, dearest; for my happiness must come through thee" (15:460). 35

Hawthorne does not himself strive to be happier; he places the entire responsibility upon Sophia. She is to bring "sunshine" into his life: "My soul is the cloud, and thine the sunshine" (15 :517). Hawthorne insists there will be no happiness for him unless she provides it: ''Thou art my quiet and satisfaction-not only my chiefest joy, but the condition of all other enjoyments" ( 15:611; emphasis mine). Simply by marrying

Sophia, his sense ofpersonal worth will strengthen: ''I intend to improve vastly by marriage" (15:639). Hawthorne is constructing a marriage which requires no effort on his part. If anything does go wrong, even ifhe is merely unhappy, the responsibility is

Sophia's.

It is as ifhe wants her to be all things to him: ''When once we are together

[married], our own world is round about us, and all things else cease to exist," and in another letter he tells her,"Thou art my only reality-all other people are but shadows to me; all events and actions, in which thou dost not mingle, are but dreams" (15:568,

584). And again, "I have no real existence but in thee" (15:596). In a letter to

Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne describes the self-sufficiency of their honeymoon years,

I do suppose that nobody ever lived, in one sense, quite so selfish a life as we do. Not a footstep, except our own, comes up the avenue for weeks and weeks; and we let the world alone as much as the world does us. (15:671)

Hawthorne not only requires the exclusive attention of the heretofore gregarious

Sophia Peabody, he requires no one but her. This serves the anti-social Hawthorne's purposes perfectly. The intensity of Hawthorne's insistence, and the degree of intuitive understanding he requires of Sophia suggest a deep amount of personal insecurity. 36

Within the letters are numerous examples of Hawthorne asking for reassurance.

For example, it is easy to discern emotional neediness when he asks, ''My sweetest, dearest, purest, holiest, noblest, faithfullest wife, dost thou know what a loving husband thou hast? Dost thou love him most immensely?-beyond conception?" (15:437). The beginning of this phrase promises praise, yet once again it ends up being all about him-a man in desperate need of reassurance. There are many similar examples: ''Does thou love me at all?" (15:422). "You love me dearly-don't you?" (15:352). "Dost thou love me?" (15:513). "Dost thou love me infmitely?" (15:466). Traditionally, love

letters offer love through avowals such as "I love you." In contrast Hawthorne's letters

frequently ask for love instead. He acknowledges this insufficiency: "I need thee

continually, at bed and board, and wherever I am" (15:677). Of course, it is Sophie

Hawthorne's role to meet this need. In one letter from Brook Farm, Hawthorne's prompting for reassurance seems almost adolescent: ''I know thou dost not care in the

least about receiving a word from thy husband-thou lovest me not-in fact thou has

quite forgotten that such a person exists" (15:592). Hawthorne easily concedes his

emotional need of Sophia: "thy poor husband ... loves thee infinitely, and needs thee continually" (15:593). He was thirty-seven when he wrote these words, not an age one typically expresses such a need level of insecurity. Of course, it is doubtful Hawthorne would ever admit this need to anyone but Sophia-and to her only through the distance

of letters.

There is one last fictitious role Hawthorne creates for himself. And it is a role 37 that is often contradictbry to the other male characters created. In this role, Hawthorne has absolute authority over the Dove and little Sophie. He appears untroubled by the paradox of being a man who needs a moral guide as well as someone to handle life's daily annoyances, but who then insists upon maintaining control over these guides at all times. Hawthorne concedes an empty moral and emotional superiority to Sophia, but the politics of tangible power are another affair altogether. Hawthorne retains power in areas of daily living over which he can assert control. (Of course, it can certainly be argued that obsession with control is a reflection of insecurity, which would make this persona of Nathaniel similar to the others.). Nathaniel frequently reminds Sophia of his control: "Oh, my poor little Dove, thou dost need a husband with a strong will to take care of thee; and when I have the charge of thee, thou wilt find thyself under much stricter discipline than ever before" (15:633). Hawthorne makes clear his intention to set the rules Sophia must follow once they are married. His determination to exert his dominance is sometimes patronizing, as when he tells her 'Thou art not fit to be trusted away from thy husband's guidance, one moment." Once, when responding to her interest in the possibility of ridding herself of headaches through the then-popular fad of mesmerism/magnetism, he tells her flat out "Thou shalt not do this"

(15:573,589). His commands are often high handed, although he provides built-in

escapes for any boorish behavior on his part: "Oh, let me feel that I may even do you a

little wrong without your avenging it" (15:357). Not only must Sophia submit, she must also forgive his cavalier attitude. Hawthorne has written in an escape clause for 38 himself, but there is no escape for Sophia.

In this particular characterization, Hawthorne sees himself (and presents himself to others) in the role of Sophia's protector. He was known to monitor her mail, sometimes refusing to let her read letters addressed to her if he felt they were not in her best interests (or perhaps in his?) (17:330). He warned her sister Elizabeth not to forward abolitionist tracts (a movement for which he held little sympathy), claiming they were too upsetting to Sophia. In their early and extremely impoverished days together in Concord, Margaret Fuller suggested they allow Ellery Channing and his wife to stay with them to help ease their fmancial burden. The anti-social Hawthorne responded in the negative, claiming the stress of having a guest would be too great for

Sophia: ''I wish to remove everything that may impede [Sophia's] full growth and development ... Perhaps she ought not to have any earthly care whatever" (15:647), as well as "I keep her as tranquil as a summer-sunset" (15:671). Here, Hawthorne acts as protector of his fragile, domestic angel. This appears enormously caring, but knowing his dislike of company, it is easy to see it as a pretext for disguising his true motivation. All of the characters, all of the roles created by Hawthorne-Sophia's Dove and little wife, along with his own man-in-need or authoritarian-were created to construct a marriage in which he hoped all his needs would be met.

But should Sophia be let completely off the hook? Should she not also be held responsible for the failure of these characters? After all, she, at least outwardly, complied with the unbalanced power structure of her marriage. The elaborate role 39 playing of these letters could not have been maintained over the course of so many years ifboth actors had not participated whole-heartedly. Both Herbert and Miller

agree. Miller descnbes Sophia's own "incredible powers of idealization" (Miller 9),

and Herbert believes "Hawthorne found in Sophia a presence capable of assuaging his

deepest anxieties ... by showing no awareness ofthem" (Herbert 87). Herbert claims

Sophia's ability to retain her faith in the ideal "depends ... on the denial of [her

faith's] own psychic anatomy" (269). Denial is a key explanation for her

reactions- Sophia ignored Hawthorne's shortcomings and denied any frustration she

may have felt at being so controlled. Sophia's own words best reveal her enthusiastic

complicity. In one letter to her husband she writes "Oh King by divine right! no one

can love and reverence thee as does thy wife ... Thou art a necessity ofmy nature as

well as its crown ofperfection and voluntary grace•><~ (qtd. in Miller 183). Her

idealization ofHawthorne is as exaggerated as is his ofher. In one letter Sophia

explains to her mother why she has not written lately: "My noble lord has been so

anxious lest I should do too much that he has prevented my sending you another

greeting." In other words, Hawthorne has kept Sophia from writing to her mother on the pretext ofprotecting her health. And yet Sophia ends the same letter with "I have

such rich experience ofhis wisdom in these things, that whatever may be the

inconvenience, I gratefully submit" ( qtd. in Herbert 189). She submits, and submits

completely. In one journal entry, Sophia summed up her thoughts quite simply:

"Behold a true wife's world! It is her husband only" (qtd. in Herbert 149). Sophia 40 was just as aware ofthe women's movement as was her husband. She also knew many first-wave feminists personally, including her own sister Elizabeth Peabody. She was aware ofoptions. Did she not also make a choice?

By extension, it should be asked if Sophia' s whole-hearted participation in this role playing should affect how we view Hawthorne's choices? Did her submission inspire Hawthorne's domination? Perhaps he was simply taking on the role she offered him. But the answer is not that simple. This issue of female responsibility when it comes to the politics ofpower is frequently misunderstood. Simone de Beauvoir, a second-wave feminist Nina Baym credits with being a major influence, addresses this complex situation in her book The Second Sex: ''When man makes woman the Other, we may, then, expect her to manifest deep-seated tendencies toward complicity. Thus, woman may fail to lay claim to the status ofsubject because she lacks defmite resources, because she feels the necessary bond that ties her to man regardless of reciprocity" (257). Sophia Peabody Hawthorne understood that if she were to please her husband, she absolutely must accept her place as "the second sex" in their relationship . Completely immersed in the fiction ofthe letters as well as the reality of the power play, Sophia would not have believed she had a choice.

Of course, these letters serve Hawthorne in multiple other ways- not just as a means of constructing the personae of a submissive little wife and "a burly, broad­ shouldered personage"to do the domination. Hawthorne has total control over what happens in his letters so he can use them to do anything he fmds it difficult to do in 41 person. For example, they provide the remote and reclusive Hawthorne with the opportunity to express passion on multiple levels-religious, emotional and physical.

That Hawthorne was unable to express his emotions freely has been supported by many. Margaret Fuller accused Hawthorne of not fully engaging in life. She claimed the "thinness" of his stories ''bespeaks a want of the deeper experiences," and saw

Hawthorne's characters as ''unsubstantial," a failing which could be corrected "were the genius fully roused to its work ... as to paint with blood-warm colors" (Dial July

1842). She saw him as too remote to endow his work with the passion she would have preferred. Hawthorne, thirty-eight years old when this review was written, was probably not pleased at the suggestion he had yet to fully engage with life.

Fuller believed there was a connection between the lack of intense feeling in

Hawthorne's fiction and his private life. Fuller recognized the remote nature of

Hawthorne, and saw it as a major impediment to the success of his fiction. A later

example of Hawthorne's remote nature is revealed in a passage from a letter written by the Hawthornes' governess while they lived in Italy. She wrote that Mr. Hawthorne was wanting "in the power or the will to show his love. He is the most undemonstrative person I ever knew, without any exception. It is quite impossible for me to imagine his bestowing the slightest caress upon Mrs. Hawthorne" ( qtd. in

Herbert 254 ). Yet compare that image of almost icy reserve to the passion expressed in the letters: "Canst thou devote so much of thy precious day to my unworthiness? ... I

love thee. I love thee" (15:593). Hawthorne once explained to Sophia the reasons for 42 his withdrawn nature, tracing it back to early family history, telling her of the

strange reserve, in regard to matters of feeling, that has always existed among [my family] ... We are conscious of one another's feelings, always; but there seems to be a tacit law, that our deepest heart­ concernments are not to be spoken of ... I cannot take my heart in my hand and show it to them (15:611-12).

The assumption was Sophia must understand and accept Hawthorne's inability to show

emotion. Typically, it was only possible for Hawthorne to share this personal

confession within a letter.

Most telling are the words of Sophia herself who at times was driven to admit to her husband's distant nature. She once remarked to Annie Fields, the meticulous recorder of her own interactions with the Hawthornes, that Nathaniel "hates to be touched more than any one I ever knew" (qtd. in Herbert 254). Yet this man, who so

hated to be touched, also wrote:

I yearn for you, and my heart heaves when I think of you ... heaves and swells (my heart does) as sometimes you have felt it beneath you, when your head or your bosom was resting on it. At such moments it is stirred up from its depths. Then our two ocean-hearts mingle their floods. (15:316)

The physicality of this passage dominates. Though outwardly, Hawthorne was not a physical person, he could express physical passion for his wife through the distancing nature ofletters.

Fields also recorded a poem Sophia wrote as she sat by the body of Hawthorne just after his death:

In the most retired privacy it was the same in the presence of men. The sacred veil of his eyelids he scarcely lifted to himself. Such was 43

an unviolated sanctuary as was his nature, I his inmost wife never conceived nor knew ... To me-himself~even to me that was himself in unity-He was to the last the holy of holies behind the cherubim ... A tenderness so infmite-so embracing-that God's alone could surpass it. It folded the Loathsome leper in as soft a caress as the child of his home affections.5 (qtd. in Herbert 278)

Sophia focuses on her inability to ever truly feel joined with Hawthorne while he lived.

That Sophia's primary thoughts as she sat vigil were ofher husband's intensely private nature, point to the strong effect it had upon her.

Hawthorne was reserved in physical behaviors as well as in the expression of

emotions. Yet within the letters, he allowed himself to behave in dramatic fashion. At times, the writing ofthese letters was performance, sheer and simple,

This forenoon I could not wait, as I generally do, to be in solitude before opening your letter ... So I pressed the Dove to my lips (turning my head away, so that nobody saw me) and then broke the seal. I do think it is the dearest letter you have written ... After dinner ... I ... returned home forthwith, and locked my door, and threw myself on the bed, with your letter in my hand. I [re- ]read it over slowly and peacefully, and then folding it up, I rested my heart upon it, and fell fast asleep. (CE 15:303-304)

Secretly pressing her letter to his lips, locking his bedroom door, then throwing himself

upon the bed is amazingly dramatic posturing. The remote Hawthorne could only

allow himself these passionate histrionics in letters to Sophia. How well-served was

Hawthorne by his inability to express passion except through letters? By defmition,

does not passion seek some form ofphysical expression? Falling to one's knees in

church. Waxing rhapsodic over a great work of art. Passion drives a need to express

itself-passionate~);. To express this level ofpassion in letters, but then refuse to 44 acknowledge it when face-to-face with its object feels impotent-unsatisfying. Perhaps

Hawthorne's inability to express passion outside of letters eventually failed him as much as did the characterizations he constructed for Sophia.

As we've already seen, the letters also serve as a means of providing Sophia with instructions on how to be the perfect Hawthorne wife. Many of these instructions come across as warnings, some even as veiled threats; some regard matters of little note while others address important aspects of their political interactions-{)r, who has the power now? For example, although more than once he wrote to Sophia not to expect too many letters from him, his attitude is different when he does not receive one when expected: "but, sweetest, if thou hadst sent some distinct message, even though not a letter, it would have saved thy husband some disquietude" (15:560). Sophia is to understand he is busily engaged with important matters when he does not write; she, on the other hand, is not to cause him "disquietude." The following suggestion is phrased as if asking her preference: ''Wouldst thou not like to stay just one little fortnight longer in Boston?" (15:678). However, during their marriage, Sophia was sent away from home more than once. In England, she was sent to Lisbon for a period of months,

6 supposedly for her health, even when she practically begged to be allowed to return •

In the letter which attempts to dissuade Sophia from being "magnetized," Hawthorne's instruction addresses the core issue of power between the two, "I know that my deep and earnest feeling upon the subject will weigh more with thee than all the arguments in the world"(15:589). Hawthorne lets Sophia know nothing should carry more weight 45 with her than his feelings.

Finally, the letters provide the opportunity for Hawthorne to practice his craft.

He produced little fiction during the years just before his marriage and so the letters

served to fill the gap, although they are a poor replacement for the real thing.

Hawthorne was always-frrst and foremost-a writer. Though writing was only at times

Hawthorne's occupation (he claimed he was unable to write when employed in some

outside job), it was forever his avocation. Whether composing fiction, letters or journals, Hawthorne was always aware he was writing: every event he witnessed was possible fodder for a tale; every chance to write, an opportunity to practice. Others

recognized this trait as well. For example, Annie Fields saw his journals as similar to a

painter's sketchbook preparing for some masterpiece, and Longfellow wrote in his journal, "Read Hawthorne's Notebooks. If they had been prepared for printing, they

would hardly have been better" (qtd. in Fields 22, 23). Within the journals are found

hundreds of ideas for prospective stories (many of which eventually do become

published tales), or wonderfully descriptive passages of a day's events, passages

carefully worded for the purpose of practicing his trade.

The letters to Sophia also serve as a platform for writing, but differ from the journals and fiction in that they provide a unique space to practice a passionate style of

writing he would never have allowed himself elsewhere. Miller also sees the skill and

art of the letters, and says that, within them, Hawthorne ''play[ ed] like a virtuoso upon

the gift oflanguage" (177). Many passages reflect the beauty we have come to expect 46 from his prose,

Thou only hast revealed me to myself; for without thy aid, my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own shadow-to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions. Indeed, we are but shadows-we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream-til the heart is touched. That touch creates us-then we begin to be-thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity. Now, dearest, dost thou comprehend what thou has done for me? (CE 15:495)

Like his fiction, like his journals, Hawthorne's letters to Sophia are meticulously crafted; the reader is often aware of their artistry.

Because new romantic relationships inspire passion, I initially wondered ifthe style, tone and general ways of thinking in the letters written before he and Sophia were married were representative of their entire relationship-or were they unique to the courtship? Did Hawthorne and Sophia eventually come to accept each other's imperfections and cease needing the idealization of the letters? But even in the later letters, the elaborate fictions first begun so many decades earlier are sustained.

Referring to Sophia as Dove has become an extended metaphor. Many years later, in

1855, Hawthorne wrote, ''What pleasantly surprises me is, that the beauty of thy hand­ writing has all come back ... and [thy letters] seem precisely the same, in that respect that my little virgin Dove used to write me" (17:410). The same characterizations continue to the very end. Some would be incorporated into his novels.

The number of letters taper off dramatically during their stay in Europe, and, partially due to Hawthorne's deteriorating health and his inability to travel, diminish 47 even more after their return to Concord. Though fewer in number, the later letters reveal continued role-playing. Still addressing Sophia as "Best wife in the world" and signing off as ''Thine Ownest, Ownest," Hawthorne, now in his mid-fifties, still writes as if he were a much younger man in the throes of frrst love,

Oh, dearest, dearest, interminably and infinitely dearest-! don't know how to end that ejaculation. The use of kisses and caresses is, that they supersede language, and express what there are no words for. I need them at this moment-need to give them, & receive them. (17:455-459)

The emotional histrionics continue. For Hawthorne, there seems to have been a need to

sustain the illusion of young, passionate love.

The recurring theme that nothing real exists outside of their relationship manifested early and continued throughout the duration of the letters. While in

Europe, he once wrote, "Oh, my wife, I do want thee so intolerably. Nothing else is real, except the bond between thee and me" (17:463-65). Years later, back in Concord and nearing the end of his life, Hawthorne continued use of this motif, 'We get on bravely here in great quiet and harmony," he wrote, "except that life is suspended ... till thou comest back again" (18:406-07). The theme continues but its fictitious nature is hinted at by an entry in Hawthorne's English Notebook, "I never walk through these streets [Liverpool] without feeling as if I should catch some disease; but yet there is a strong interest in such walks; and moreover there is a bustle, a sense of being in the midst of life, and of having got hold of something real, which I do not find in the better streets of the city" (qtd in Miller 400-401). In letters he tells Sophia only she is genuine, yet his journal entry suggests it is life outside his ideal domestic world that is 48 truly real. The years in England came after Hawthorne's realization of the failure of the domestic angel to serve him. Perhaps he recognized the implausibility of the ideal.

In the later letters the rapturous rhetoric does not abate, nor does his manipulation of Sophia. Hawthorne continues to direct Sophia's behaviors toward ways best suited to his needs,

Thou dost insist too strongly upon the inconveniences and discomforts of our present abode. I rather need to have the good side of our condition presented to me than the bad one-being sufficiently prompt in discovering the latter for myself ... I first look at matters in their darkest aspect ... [then] I begin gradually to be consoled ... methinks it would be more advisable [for you] to assist the benigner influence than to range thyself on the side of the sinister demon, and assure me that I am suffering a thousand inconveniences. (Aug 8, 1861)

These thoughts mirror some written over twenty years previously, "It is my impulse to

complain to thee in all griefs, great and small; and I will not check that impulse, if thou wilt sympathize reasonably, as well as most lovingly'' (15:441). Sophia is left with no

options; she is to keep a stiff upper lip, while Hawthorne is allowed to whine.

Over the course of three decades of letters, Hawthorne continues use of the

same themes, metaphors, and exploitation of Sophia to serve his purposes. The

epistolary fiction of a happy marriage continues to the end. Both Miller and Herbert

see the marriage as far removed from the ideal acted out within the letters. Miller

describes the imperfection of the marriage,

With the passage of years there were problems in the marriage-they were there potentially from the very beginning-but externally and publicly there were no dramatic changes ... Very early in the marriage there were problems in communication which, being evaded instead of handled directly, increased. (396) 49

Herbert especially disparages the marriage and believes that, during their years in Italy

(1857-59), the fiction ofthe ideal marriage completely ceased to serve them,

Abiding dilemmas of [Sophia's] life and ofher marriage to Nathaniel now came to the surface; and Nathaniel too was swamped by long­ standing unresolved conflicts called forth in the city of the soul . . . the union ofNathaniel and Sophia was radioactive: the strong forces binding them together were barely capable of restraining the countervailing forces of disintegration: the uncanny divine light that bathed them was the result of nuclear instability. (118, 125)

Their relationship, built upon fiction, was doomed to eventual failure.

When Hawthorne was frred from his position as Surveyor in Salem, not only was his pride assailed, he was also faced with his humiliating inability to support a

growing family. Followed quickly by the death ofhis beloved mother, Hawthorne now

experienced an unsettling combination of anger, grief and insecurity. While this is a painful space to inhabit, it also frequently promotes personal growth. But the

characters ofthe letters are static; they are not flexible enough to evolve. There is no

questioning of gender roles within the letters. These characters certainly are not pliant

enough to respond with resilience to the new stresses within Hawthorne 's life. We see by Hawthorne's life long use of these characters in his letters that he was unable to relinquish these roles he had so meticulously constructed. Perhaps he could not admit

even to himselfa mistake of such enormity. Just as possible was an unwillingness to work out with Sophia the inadequacies of the characters. Both now had many years

invested in the role-playing, and Sophia showed no sign (at least outwardly) of even beginning to question these roles so carefully constructed by her husband. 50

The roles he created for Sophia, the Dove and little Sophie, inevitably failed him. No marriage in which the players must attempt to inhabit idealistic versions of their gender will succeed-especially ifthe scripted marriage does not allow admitting to any problems. However, the failure of these characters to adequately respond to

Hawthorne's changing needs, (and meeting his personal needs had been the motivation

for their construction in the frrst place), did have a positive effect; they served as a

springboard for a completely new direction in his fictional writing. Unable to use the

letters to create new fictional types, Hawthorne is driven to experiment elsewhere­ within his fiction-for new gender possibilities he would fmd more satisfying. The

failure of the limited characters of the letters opens up a world of creative possibilities within his novels. .~ ------.

Chapter Two: There are No Winners but Losers Here

"O~e is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Simone de Beauvoir

A sense of complacency does not inspire human beings on to ever greater achievements; it promotes stagnation instead. A major cause of complacency is the belief one's ideas are correct and need not be questioned. That certainly descnbes the letters ofNathaniel Hawthorne to his wife Sophia. These letters allow no room for

doubt, for questions, or even for discussion of the roles he has created for himself and his wife to play throughout their relationship. Hawthorne declared the fictional marriage he concocted as "ordained by God." End of story. But of course it was not the end of the story. Over time, Hawthorne came to doubt his earlier belief in the idealized domestic angel and this doubt drove him to experiment with other forms of womanhood. Opening up to new possibilities, moving away from a conventional and

static belief, created a space of uncertainty that allowed for artistic growth. Because it is the very opposite of complacency, this dialectic space is key to understanding the change in Hawthorne's writing that occurred with his frrst novel.

An obvious change is the addition of a new type of female character-the dark lady. What makes this significant is the effect this change had on the level of artistry in his fiction. Living through a period ofpersonal pain and self-doubt created within

Hawthorne a new compassion for the current status of women. He began to expand his previous perception of limited and submissive woman as ideal. Hawthorne created his new female character with independence, strength and courage and then experimented 52 with the response of the community to her difference. He allowed himself to imagine

strong and independent womanhood not only as acceptable, but as superior, as sexual,

as admirable. And he placed her front and center. Hester Prynne not only becomes

Hawthorne's first dark lady, she is also his frrst female protagonist as well. Although

he never found a way to allow this new dark lady to triumph, to be accepted by society

while living life on her own terms, neither does he ever point the finger of blame at her.

The Scarlet Letter is considered Hawthorne's greatest work. It is Hawthorne's

compassionate portrayal of Hester's trials and sorrows that allowed him to achieve a

whole new level of artistic expression.

Hawthorne does not omit his version ofthe fair lady when he adds her

counterpart to the novels. Within the interactions of fair- and dark-ladies, as well as the

response of his male characters to both, Hawthorne experiments, attempts to fmd a

resolution for the paradox he encountered when he believed in the fair lady alone. The

fair lady may have been "perfect," but she failed him when he needed her most. To

understand the difference between these two types, and get some idea of Hawthorne's

purpose, the women of the novels must be examined, their differences and similarities

to the female characters of the letters evaluated.

I've chosen to focus on the primary female characters in The Blithedale

Romance, The Marble Faun, and of course, The Scarlet Letter. I've excluded The

House ofthe Seven Gables in this study simply because it is not representative of

Hawthorne-even though it too deals with issues of gender. Its conclusion is incredibly 53 un-Hawthomian, having a contrived, happy ending in which wealth, love, and a strong sense of community fall into the laps of the protagonists, while Jaffrey Pyncheon, the novel's evil antagonist, dies a kannic death. Most Hawthorne scholars do not consider

House to be as significant a text as the other three novels. Many have read House as

anodyne to the darkness of The Scarlet Letter which Hawthorne described as

"positively a h_ll-fired story, into which I found it ahnost impossible to throw any

cheering light." When Hawthorne frrst read The Scarlet Letter to Sophia, she became

so distraught she retired to her room with a "grievous headache." Although, in a letter

to Horatio Bridge, Hawthorne describes the intensity of this reaction as "a triumphant

success: ''he did not believe his reading audience would be interested in a second novel

equally dark (16:311-12r. The other three novels share more parallels and reveal a

serial attempt to fmd different solutions to problems within issues of gender.

The fair ladies of the novels, a type we frrst saw constructed in the letters, are

represented by Priscilla in The Blithedale Romance, and by Hilda in The Marble

Faun. 8 Fair lady characters represent the status quo; they accept-and defend-society's

definition of woman's role, never questioning whether these rules are ')ust." As was

Sophia's, their lives are forever defmed by men. In "Tyranny," Baym states, "They

[Hawthorne's fair ladies] are modem, civilized, utterly conventional, and

programmatically virginal" (258-59). As a result, they represent the patriarchal mind

set of the community.

Hawthorne's dark ladies, on the other hand, represent women who struggle to 54 break free ofthese predefmed and oppressive roles in order to express their

individuality. Unlike the fair ladies, these women have strong, creative personalities

and approach their lives, including the men in their lives, with passion. The dark ladies

have a sexual nature; there is a strong physicality never seen in the fair ladies.

Hawthorne never concocts a dark lady role for Sophia, not even after he has created

them within his novels. It seems he very much did not want to allow this type of

woman into his marriage.

Hawthorne flaunts the usual literary conventions wherein fair lady equals good

and dark lady equals bad (e.g. Dante's fair Beatrice is redemption; Shakespeare's dark

lady is unfaithful). He does not, however, reverse the convention. While his

protagonists are dark ladies, his fair ladies are not evil, malicious or acquisitive; they too

are victims as they represent a patriarchal ideal ofwomanhood, thereby reinforcing the

domination ofwomen by men. Like Sophia Hawthorne, these fair ladies may win the

approval of society in general and of men in particular, but their energies will always be

spent in the service ofmen. Nina Baym calls ''the dark lady a 'real' woman and the

fair lady a 'social myth' invented by patriarchal culture to discipline 'real' women"

(''Revisiting Hawthorne's Feminism" 108). The ironic outcome for men who choose a

fair lady, however, is to be weakened by that choice even though she is their own

creation.

The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne's third novel, is a rich source ofclues

which highlight Hawthorne's changing attitudes towards acceptable roles for women. 55

Baym believes it is the Hawthorne novel "most explicitly concerned with the woman question, and the one whose rhetoric and ideas show the most extensive feminist influence" (''Tyranny" 250-72). In "Eliot's Pulpit," a powerful and astonishing chapter in Blithedale, all four major characters expound upon the ''woman" issue. Through these characters, Hawthorne presents four different viewpoints on gender, some

surprising in their modernity.

In Blithedale, Hawthorne, for the frrst time, uses contrasting pairs of male and

female characters to represent competing gender types (which he will do again in The

Marble Faun). The various characterizations ofHawthorne in the letters have a

parallel in the contrasting male types ofthe novels. Blithedale's narrator, Miles

Coverdale, an insignificant poet, is educated, highly socialized, and plays observer

I • rather than participant in the book's events. Many readers have noted his similarity to

Hawthorne. No character gets off scot-free from Coverdale's wry, sometimes caustic,

observations. His scathing commentary even extends to his own attempts to play social

equal to Silas Foster, the only true farm laborer in the group: "ifever I did deserve to

be soundly cuffed by a fellow-morta~ for secretly putting weight upon some imaginary

social advantage, it must have been while I was striving to prove myself his equa~ and

no more" (Blithedale 23-4). Coverdale's counterpart, Hollingsworth, a former

blacksmith but now an obsessive reformer of prisons, is "massive and brawny" with a

"rude strength" but no social polish (27). Neither ofthese starkly contrasting male

types escapes the sharp judgement of Hawthorne. Ironically, these two very different 56 men make the same choice in the end, preferring the fair lady over the more challenging dark lady. Neither man is able to break free of convention, thereby locking both men into a cycle of restricted growth.

The contrasting female characters are Zenobia and Priscilla. Zenobia is a

fascinating and complex dark lady. Her demeanor is startling and dramatic, certainly not "ethereal" as Hawthorne so frequently described Sophia. Hawthorne is

experimenting with this new type in order to observe her interactions with the male

characters as well as a fair-lady type. Coverdale, the perpetual observer, describes

Zenobia's passionate nature:

Zenobia had a rich though varying color. It was, most of the while, a flame, and anon a sudden paleness. Her eyes glowed, so that their light sometimes flashed upward to me, as when the sun throws a dazzle from some bright object on the ground. Her gestures were free, and strikingly impressive. The whole woman was alive with a passionate intensity, which I now perceived to be the phase in which her beauty culminated. Any passion would have become her well; and passionate love, perhaps, the best of all. (95)

Obviously, Zenobia is no "little wife," being neither meek nor submissive. The

passionate temperament of Zenobia is so startling different from the delicate and

submissive Dove and little Sophie. Zenobia's physical beauty is just as dramatic as her

personality:

Zenobia was truly a magnificent woman. The homely simplicity of her dress could not conceaL nor scarcely diminish, the queenliness of her presence. The image of her form and face should have been multiplied all over the earth. It was wronging the rest of mankind to retain her as the spectacle of only a few. The stage would have been her proper sphere ... I know not well how to express that the native glow of coloring in her cheeks, and even the flesh-warmth over her round arms, 57

and what was visible of her full bust,-in a word, her womanliness incarnated,- compelled me sometimes to close my eyes, as ifit were not quite the privilege of modesty to gaze at her. ( 41)

This is no asexual angel, but a true queen-like a Cleopatra or a Zenobia, the warrior

Queen of Palmyra who, for a brief time during the second century C.E., ruled much of

Syria and Asia Minor. Hawthorne obviously had a certain female type in mind when he selected this name for his dark lady character. Like the real Queen, this fictitious

Zenobia would be almost warrior-like.

I read Zenobia as Hawthorne's most flawed dark lady; her faults are

prominently displayed. For example, her magnificence is countered by "as much native

pride as any queen would have known what to do with" (13). Hawthorne frequently

uses flowers symbolically (consider the rosebush in Letter or the purple and deathly

flower in "Rappacini's Garden"), and the pride of Zenobia is represented by a fresh,

exotic, hothouse flower which adorns her hair everyday. 9 In the midst of a social

experiment focused on equality for all, Zenobia pridefully sets herself apart, revealing

awareness of her unique beauty via this flower. Zenobia is sometimes impatient and,

more rarely, unkind, as when she responds to Priscilla's fawning adoration with

thoughtless cruelty. Zenobia's faults simply make her human. I like her. I understand

her. But in the end, I am frustrated by her choices.

It is Zenobia's final capitulation to the societal demand that a woman devote

herself to man that especially disappoints. At least it disappoints a current day feminist.

But Hawthorne is not pointing a fmger of blame at Zenobia; he is making an important 58 point. Even the strongest and most independent of women, he implies, even those who adamantly profess belief in the inequity ofwomen's status, find it difficult to break free ofthis ultimate expectation ofwomen. Zenobia profoundly believes women both deserve, and one day shall win, greater rights in the world. She also believes women must fight to gain those rights: ''If I live another year, I will lift up my own voice in

behalf of woman's wider liberty!" she exclaims. Then later:

It is my belief ... that, when my sex shall achieve its rights, there will be ten eloquent women where there is now one eloquent man ... The mistrust and disapproval ofthe vast bulk of society throttles us, as with two gigantic hands at our throats! (111-12)

Zenobia is a staunch defender ofwomen's rights.

Yet, enamored of Hollingsworth, Zenobia does not protest his anti-feminist jeremiad. At one point Hollingsworth expounds dogmatically on the true role for

woman:

She [woman] is the most admirable handiwork of God, in her true place and character. Her place is at man's side. Her office, that of the Sympathizer; the unreserved, unquestioning Believer ... Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a monster-and, thank Heaven, an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary monster-without man, as her acknowledged principal! (113-14)

Zenobia's response to Hollingsworth's harangue is disappointingly mild:

She [Zenobia] only looked humbled. Some tears sparkled in her eyes, but they were wholly of grief, not anger. 'Well; be it so,' was all she said. 'I, at least, have deep cause to think you right. Let man be but manly and godlike, and woman is only too ready to become to him what you say!' (115)

Even though her frustrations with the limited role ofwomen in her time run deep, in 59 the end, Zenobia too would acquiesce to a life lived in the service of man. Rejected by the man of her choosing (Hollingsworth), Zenobia does not have the strength of character to continue living an independent life, and commits suicide.

I've questioned the plausibility of Zenobia's suicide: would this magnificently alive woman have ever been reduced to suicide simply by one man's rejection?

Personally, I cannot believe she would ever make that choice. But that is not

Hawthorne's point. He paints the portrait of a woman-beautiful, intelligent, immensely talented-who will never be permitted the life she desires within the confmes of contemporary society as long as she, too, accepts its patriarchal ideals. And he also depicts two very diverse male types (Hollingsworth and Coverdale) who never break free ofthose same confmes to choose a strong woman who challenges them rather than one who always submits. The gender expectations of society take on a cumbersome life oftheir own and move only ponderously, but men, as the dominant constructors of society, are most to blame.

In Zenobia, Hawthorne creates an ideal ofwomanhood contradictory to that ideal portrayed in the letters. At times in Blithedale, Hawthorne even hints at the possibility oftriumph for Zenobia. For example, society (as depicted by Hawthorne) almost accepts Zenobia's magnificent difference: "The sphere of ordinary womanhood was felt [by society] to be narrower than her development required" (175). The whole ofZenobia could not be contained within ordinary expectations. Zenobia lived large, beyond the normal limits set for women ofthe time, and in one glowing description 60 after another, Hawthorne reveals his adnllration, possibly even a sexual attraction to this type of woman, hinted at when Coverdale observes:

We seldom meet with women nowadays, and in this country, who impress us as being women at all, -their sex fades away and goes for nothing, in ordinary intercourse. Not so with Zenobia. One felt an influence breathing out of her such as we might suppose to come from Eve, when she was just made, and her Creator brought her to Adam, saying, "Behold! here is a woman! Not that I would convey the idea of especial gentleness, grace, modesty, and shyness, but of a certain warm and rich characteristic, which seems, for the most part, to have been refmed away out of the feminine system. (17)

This is the antithesis ofNathaniel's little Sophie Hawthorne and Dove. If Zenobia represents a female type whose sex has not faded away, whose warmth and richness have not been removed by societal demands of female behavior, then what does this say about the Sophie Hawthorne created in the letters? Why did he create in Sophie and Dove an asexual character, a distinct fair lady? Hawthorne adnllres Zenobia, is attracted to her strongly sexual nature, but in the end, his choice is the same as

Coverdale's and Hollingsworth's-he chooses the compliant and asexua~ female type that has been created and re-created over and over again by a patriarchal system that wants to retain control.

Therefore it is not surprising that, intermixed within Hawthorne's almost deifying descriptions of Zenobia, we fmd verbal barbs which question the suitability of her character. For example, when Zenobia is quiet, is not fully "on," Coverdale describes her as ''rather indolent." In the same paragraph in which he describes her as

"an admirable figure of a woman," "remarkably beautiful," and as having a "fme 61 intellect," he also labels her as "a little deficient in softness and delicacy" (15). Praise of Zenobia is always attended with reservation. Describing the glow of her cheeks,

Coverdale is reminded of"Pandora, fresh from Vulcan's workshop" (23). Yet underlying this seeming praise of her beauty lays an implied condemnation: like Eve,

Pandora brought evil upon the world of men through her womanly attributes (in

Pandora's case, curiosity). The culmination of this spurious praise is the implication

Zenobia may hide a previous marriage, or even worse, a previous sexual relationship

out of wedlock. Is this the worse sin Hawthorne could imagine for a woman? One

wonders if Hawthorne, to resist his own sexual attraction to this type, endowed his dark

lady with what he would see as sexual misconduct. Hawthorne would believe a woman

of purity, like the Dove, would have no sexual past. Coverdale hints at Zenobia's past:

Ifthe great event of a woman's existence had been consummated, the world knew nothing of it ... It was a ridiculous piece of romance, undoubtedly, to imagine that this beautiful personage ... could have given herself away so privately, but that some whisper and suspicion ... would eventually be blown abroad ... the freedom of her deportment . . . was not exactly maidenlike ...[yet] I strove to be ashamed of these conjectures. (43-44)

Coverdale obviously did not strive very hard as ''these conjectures" continue for

multiple pages. Hawthorne suggests (intentionally or not) that a major difficulty for

men in accepting a greater social role for women is accepting their sexuality.

In Blithedale, Hawthorne acknowledges the unfair state of acceptable women's

roles in society. He has Coverdale, who at least outwardly supports Zenobia's belief in

greater women's rights, unfairly speculate on Zenobia's previous sexual history but also 62 feel guilt for doing so. He points an accusing fmger at Hollingsworth who insists on the naturally submissive state ofwomen. In the end, both men choose Priscilla over

Zenobia. But in so doing, Hawthorne points the same accusatory finger at himself; he, too, made a similar choice.

To play foil for the passionate Zenobia, Hawthorne created a fair lady in the

character ofPriscilla. In Priscilla, we see the same characteristics he created in his

letters for his little wife and Dove. Priscilla has none ofthe passion or sexuality of

Zenobia. Sharply contrasting with Coverdale's vibrant descriptions ofZenobia,

Priscilla does not seem to be fully alive:

... she was seen to be a very young woman, dressed in a poor, but decent gown, made high in the neck, and without any regard to fashion or smartness. Her brown hair fell down from beneath a hood, not in curls, but with only a slight wave; her face was of a wan, almost sickly hue, betokening habitual seclusion from the sun and free atmosphere, like a flower-shrub that had done its best to blossom in too scanty light ... there has seldom been seen so depressed and sad a figure as this young girl's. (26)

The difference between Zenobia and Priscilla is startling; the larger-than-life Zenobia

completely outshines the listless Priscilla.

However, similarities to Priscilla are seen in the wifely characterizations ofthe

letters. Sophia also had spent her adolescence and early adulthood as an invalid,

suffering from chronic, severe headaches and fatigue. Once she was sent to Cuba for

her health, and it had even been assumed by her family she would never marry due to a

lack ofvigorous health (Herbert 39). As Sophia usually remained indoors, frequently

secluded in her bedroom, she met Hawthorne on his second visit to her home when she 63 wandered downstairs from her sickroom (Miller 124). As we've seen elsewhere,

Hawthorne readily assumed the job of protecting Sophia from anything he deemed harmful and always treated her as ifshe were not physically strong (even though, as we have also seen, this was frequently to his own benefit).

Similarly, though Priscilla's health improves somewhat at Blithedale and she finds a form of happiness in her complete devotion to Hollingsworth, she never fully comes to life. There is always a "slight mist of uncertainty'' about her that keeps her

"from taking a very decided place among creatures of flesh and blood" (46). Priscilla remains inept at all of her assigned chores, and yet "everybody was kind to Priscilla." It is easy to believe her appeal lay in her inability "to look after her own interests, or fight her battle with the world" (69). In his article, ''Women in the Novels ofNathaniel

Hawthorne," Jeffrey J. Poelvoorde recognizes the enormous lack of life force in

Priscilla: "It is her lack of substantial character that renders her perfect for Westervelt's hypnotism; she has neither a genuine 'inner life' nor an 'outer life' ... She spends her life drifting like a ghost" (79). Priscilla remains a habitual child, never engaging fully with life. Repeatedly she is descnbed as childlike: she had a "simple, careless, childish flow of spirits" and would clap her hands "with great exuberance of gesture, as is the custom of young girls" (69). As a result, Priscilla is never sexuaL and therefore is not threatening. She has no power and so is easy to dominate. Priscilla herself says, "I am blown about like a leaf ... I never have any free will" (158). Yet it is the insubstantial

Priscilla who is chosen by both extremely different male types. 64

In ''Tyranny," Baym states, ''Priscilla is an exploited automaton, so deprived of personal force that she is almost nothing but the image she has been sacrificed to"

(260). Think of the images created within the letters, and how loyally Sophia adhered to them. Hawthorne understood the gender dynamics of Priscilla because he had originally concocted them in the letters to Sophia. "In Blithedale," Baym tells us, ''the chief quality of manmade woman is passive dependence"(268). The same is true of the Hawthorne-constructed woman of the letters.

As he did in Blithedale, in The Marble Faun Hawthorne attempts once again to resolve the conflicts he sees in gender roles. There is no resolution in Blithedale; the fmal determination for all four characters is unsatisfying for the character, and unsatisfactory for the reader. Priscilla may appear to be the exception, but as noted before, she remains an ''unfmished woman;" she has simply moved from a position of submission to her father and the mesmerist Westervelt, to one of submission to

Hollingsworth. And so in Faun, Hawthorne re-addresses the same issue many years later-and once again fails to fmd a different resolution.

Again, Hawthorne makes use of contrasting pairs of male and female characters. There is an interesting twist in one of the male characters, Donatello, but the other male (Kenyon) and the two female characters (Miriam and Hilda), are remarkably similar to characters in Blithedale. Like Coverdale, Kenyon is an artist (a sculptor) and is highly socialized. Also like Coverdale, Kenyon admires and is attracted to the passion within a dark lady. We understand this through his sculpture of 65

Cleopatra (this novel's equivalent to the historical Zenobia) who we see as an alternate female type-a type the reader infers as representative of Miriam because of Miriam's innate understanding ofthe "truth" ofthe sculpture:

[Cleopatra reclined] in the repose of despair ... there was a great smouldering furnace deep down in the woman's heart ... the face was a miraculous success ... The sculptor had not shunned to give the full, Nubian lips ... Cleopatra's beauty shone out richer and warmer, more triumphantly beyond comparison, than if, shrinking timidly from the truth, he had chosen the tame Grecian type ... [she was] In a word, all Cleopatra- fierce, voluptuous, passionate, tender, wicked, terrible and full ofpoisonous and rapturous enchantment. (Marble Faun !:161­ 62)10

This very much sounds like the descriptions of Zenobia. As both Coverdale and

Kenyon are too remarkably akin to Hawthorne to ignore the similarities, it seems only logical to believe Hawthorne, too, saw the dark lady type in this manner. Kenyon is capable of admiring the passionate dark lady, but, as have all ofHawthorne's other male characters, he prefers the fair lady. Kenyon, (and therefore, by inference,

Hawthorne), acknowledges the male compulsion to choose the conventional over the unique and understands there is a cost. At one point he suggests people lose their capacity for true affection, for experiencing ''the wholesome gush of natural feeling, the honest affection," the more refmed they become (!:36). Yet in spite of his understanding of the limitations of this social indoctrination, Kenyon, as do

Hawthorne's other male characters, chooses a fair lady for himself. The socialized male never breaks through society's powerful demand for convention and adherence to its rules. In Faun, Hawthorne could not work through to a different conclusion for his 66 characters. And as we see with the letters, neither could he see a different conclusion for himself.

Even though Kenyon wins the hand of the fair lady, his end is remarkably

similar to that of Coverdale. Both socialized men, unable to flout custom in their

choice of mate, also remain conventional in their choice of lifestyle. Both return to

society to live unremarkable lives of complacency. Hawthorne cannot imagine the

socialized male (as he would most defmitely have viewed himself), as ever choosing

either an unconventional lifestyle or an unconventional woman.

Kenyon's male counterpart is Donatello, a unique Hawthornian character I

have found no where else in his works. In what he represents, Donatello truly stands

alone. Donatello is the faun of the title, and is frequently compared to that innocent,

close-to-nature creature of mythology. The process ofDonatello's transformation

from almost animalistic to not-quite civilized is followed throughout the novel. 11

Before the climatic event which transforms Donatello, he is described as simple and

natural:

[Donatello] gave Miriam the idea of a being not precisely man, nor yet a child, but, in a high and beautiful sense, an animal- a creature in a state of development less than what mankind has attained, yet the more perfect within itself for that very deficiency. (I: 101)

In contrast to earlier works, a Hawthornian male character-this natural Donatell

actually falls in love with and chooses Miriam, a dark lady. But this is no contradiction

to Hawthorne's general view. The almost animal-like Donatello can choose Miriam

because he is not a conventional construct of society; he is not overly civilized. He is 67

Other. By the end ofthe novel Donatello has been partially transformed by sin, a state not known to animals and representative of society, into a more developed human being capable of "feeling and intelligence" yet who still possesses "the careless graces, pleasant and simple peculiarities" ofthe "antique faun" (ll:249-250). But even though

Donatello has become more civilized, he remains Other. He would not be considered an appropriate husband for a conventional fair lady.

Donatello' s love, and the dark lady of the nove~ is the beautiful and passionate

Miriam, a talented painter in oils. Like Zenobia, Miriam is no pale-faced beauty. She is described as ''possess[ing] beauty in a remarkable degree" and having "a certain rich

Oriental character in her face"-the beauty of a dark lady (1:34-5). Through Kenyon's sculpture of Cleopatra, we understand Miriam's beauty is not "tame," but ''voluptuous" and "triumphant." Also like Zenobia, Miriam is somewhat vain, but her vanity has been moderated by her troubles. "They call me beautiful," she says, "and I used to fancy that, at my need, I could bring the whole world to my feet" (I: 199). Miriam has evolved and learns to be grateful for the simple Donatello who promises her lifelong loyalty.

Miriam also has the passionate nature typical of Hawthorne's dark ladies which contrasts sharply with the refmed personality of Hilda. Miriam's ardent disposition is reflected in her art: ''what [her paintings] lacked in technical merit, they made up for with a warmth and passionateness which ... all the world could feel. Her nature had a great deal of color and in accordance with it so likewise had her pictures" (I:33). 68

Miriam paints powerful portraits of strong women who overcome men, such as Jael12 driving a nail through Sisera's temple, and Judith13 with the head ofHolofernes (!:61).

Miriam desires intensity, rather than refmed affection, from her relationships. She

"demands friendship, love, and intimate communion, but is forced to pine in empty forms; a hunger ofthe heart, which fmds only shadows to feed upon" (ll: 146). Her nature has a freedom and potency not found in the conventional behaviors of young ladies of respectable society. Miriam is a free spirit.

As Hawthorne did with Zenobia, he emphasizes Miriam's difference by hinting at a dark and enigmatic past. Both have become women, shaped by the events of their lives. Hawthorne's dark ladies must all be tainted by a suggestion of sin. This mystery, the allusion to sin, lends these women a depth of character not possible in the sanitized personalities of the fair ladies. The reader's interest is piqued by Hawthorne's hints of possible sexual intrigue: ''No one knew anything about her [Miriam]- neither for good or evil." He then continues to list conjecture after conjecture, all somewhat dramatic, or at least melodramatic, to explain her difference. As with Zenobia, Miriam's companions "never assumed her hidden past was evil," but this very protest, along with repetition of the word "evil," draws attention to and emphasizes Miriam's unknown past (!:32). Hawthorne seems obligated to set his dark ladies outside ofproper society, but it also adds the lure of mystery to their attractive qualities which shine so brightly.

Hawthorne's fair ladies are defenders ofthe status quo. It is his dark ladies who believe in improved rights for women and Miriam is no exception. Her paintings 69 reveal her admiration for women willing to exert power over men when necessary.

The paintings' subjects reveal qualities ofhonor, loyalty, bravery, and perhaps most incredibly, a willingness to kill for what they believe in. Miriam gives a feminist reading ofthe Fall when she blames Adam for "precipitat[ing] himself and all his race" into sin (ll:250-51). The fault is Adam's-not Eve's. Nor does Miriam believe the modem male understands the women they force into the role of domestic ange~ forever reliant upon men. She tells Kenyon:

It is a mistaken idea which men generally entertain that nature has made women especially prone to throw their whole being into what is technically called love. We have, to say the least, no more necessity for it than yourselves; only we have nothing else to do with our hearts. When women have other objects in life, they are not apt to fall in love. (1:155)

Miriam insists on the ability of women to participate in all aspects of life-not just the pleasing of men. Pleasing men will diminish in importance once women are allowed greater access to the world.

Miriam is herself a work of art, magnificent in almost every respect-and, thankfully, still human. She is capable of so much more compassion than is her fair lady counterpart, Hilda, who sees the world within black and white limits. Studying the portrait of Beatrice Cenci, Hilda denounces the-to some, justifiable-murderous act of the young woman. Hilda's inflexible beliefs in right and wrong only allow one judgement ofBeatrice's eventual execution: "Her doom is just" (1:87). In contrast,

Miriam sees Beatrice as a "woman ... still a sister, be her sin or sorrow what they might," then wonders what the painting might portray ifit had been painted by a 70 woman (1:89-90). If there has been an encounter with sin and guilt in Miriam's past, it has provided depths to her personality and a level of compassion unknown by the

14 severe and rigid Hilda • When Miriam is peremptorily cast-off by Hilda for a perceived involvement in a crime, Miriam provides a beautiful defmition of true friendship which Hilda, sadly, rejects (1:257). Miriam would never deny a troubled friend.

Miriam dazzles. Baym describes her as "the most beautiful and appealing woman in the world (and quite probably the best)" ("Thwarted" 72). But as with all of

Hawthorne's dark ladies, Miriam's end is punitive. As it is difficult to fmd her guilty of any real crime, it seems she is punished simply for being who she is-an unconventional, strongly independent woman. Miriam does eventually appreciate Donatello's love, and loves him back. But Donatello is "Other"; he is not socialized, and in the end, she is forced to live her life without him. Miriam is not romantically interested in Kenyon, but at one point she does desperately tum to him for help. However, due to the intensity of her need, and the implied darkness of her past, Kenyon holds back his friendship in Miriam's time of despair. Once again, Hawthorne's dark lady is rejected by the socialized male. Hawthorne simply cannot imagine a loving relationship between an independent woman and a man of society like Kenyon. Though clearly able to admire and appreciate the strength and magnificence of a dark lady as evidenced by his sculpture of Cleopatra, Kenyon, (and as Hawthorne believed, all men like Kenyon which included himself), will always choose a Hilda. 71

The character Hilda reveals a great deal about Hawthorne's attitudes toward innocence and purity. This is basically the same persona he constructed when he created the Dove of his letters. Similarities between the Dove and Hilda are abundant;

Hilda is even referred to as the Dove (1:79, 90). Like the Dove of the letters, Hilda is an angel, a divine creature of God, rather than a practica~ warm-blooded woman. Just as Hawthorne tells Sophia not to let him touch her "delicate little foot ... without kneeling," so Kenyon refuses to kiss a model of Hilda's hand as "it had assumed its share ofHilda's remote and shy divinity" (15:606, 1:156). Later, in St. Peter's,

Kenyon sees the ''beatific" Hilda "coming towards him in the solemn radiance [ofthe church] ... she seemed of the same substance as the atmosphere that enveloped her."

He then compares the beauty of Hilda's "transfiguration" to the beauty of the angels

(II: 165). This is not woman; it is an asexual saint, and reminds us of the ethereal quality Hawthorne vested in the Sophia personae. But Hawthorne does not declare this angel (who can be read either as Hilda or as the Dove of the letters) to be Miriam's superior. His questioning of fair lady characters is what drives this comparison.

Hilda does eventually experience a personal crisis which only comes after her rejection of Miriam, and her withdrawal from Kenyon (as she has sensed something more than friendship on his part). Not surprisingly, Hilda, who has pushed away her friends, then experiences an "awful loneliness!" which:

enveloped her withersoever she went. It was a shadow in the sunshine of festal days ... a chill dungeon, which kept her in its gray twilight .. . She could not escape from it ... Poor sufferer for another's sin! Poor wellspring of a virgin's heart. (II: 125) 72

There is no hint from either the narrator or Hilda that she may be responsible for her own loneliness and despair. Hilda does not recognize the similarity between the loneliness she feels, and the intense loneliness Miriam has experienced since her rejection by Hilda. Hilda's loneliness is far more her own making than is Miriam's: she refuses forgiveness for Miriam who she rebuffs; and she opts not to confide in Kenyon as she fears he feels more toward her than mere friendship. Hilda's virginal sanctimoniousness, her divinely-inspired self-righteousness, are the "wellsprings" ofher own sorrow, although she is never held accountable.

As with the Dove ofthe letters, any acts ofwill on Hilda' s part must be foresworn before she can be worshiped. Hilda has given up creating her own art as she believes God intends for her to paint beautiful copies ofthe works ofthe masters. This is strongly reminiscent of Sophia's refusal to publish. Hilda's copies are descnbed as greater than anything she would have produced "from her own ideas" (1:79-80). She is no longer creative; she is mimetic. The narrator states, "let us recompense her ... by admiring her generous self surrender and her brave humble magnanimity in choosing to be the handmaid of those old magicians instead of a minor enchantress within a circle ofher own" (1:80-81). It is assumed by the narrator the relinquishing ofpersonal power is to be admired in a woman. This is exactly what Hawthorne demanded of

Sophia; Hawthorne was the true creator, Sophia merely the penner of"pretty descriptions" (15:465). Once again, Hawthorne descnbes the removal of a woman's means to individual expression and power in terms ofpraise. 73

Hilda will never be in danger of feeling passion. Once when Kenyon suggests people lose the capacity for true affection the more refined they become, Hilda is shocked, telling him she believes in refmed beauty: "the most delicate beauty [which] may be softened and warmed throughout" (I: 136). It is difficult, ifnot impossible, for modem-day feminists to understand the appeal of this somewhat prim delicacy, this lack of originality in woman, but it would have been viewed and celebrated by many like Kenyon in the nineteenth-century. The narrator admiringly describes Kenyon's spiritual thoughts of Hilda: ''What a sweet reverence is that, when a young man deems his mistress a little more than morta~ and almost chides himself for longing to bring her close to his heart!" (IT: 175). Through his characterization of Hilda, we see Hawthorne never completely moved away from reverencing his ideal of female purity. But he constantly throws it into question by contrasting it with the magnificence of women like

Miriam and Zenobia.

While Miriam is forced to spend the rest of her life penitent and alone, and

Donatello is locked away in some unknown prison, Hilda and Kenyon are allowed to return to America to lead the blandly successful lives of those who do not question the status quo. Away from the freedom allowed to the artist living in Rome, and Rome's unique willingness to ''bestow such liberty upon the [female] sex, which is elsewhere restricted within so much narrower limits," Kenyon is unlikely to create any more

Cleopatras (I:73). Hawthorne's resolution of Kenyon and Hilda's future is telling:

So Kenyon won the gentle Hilda's shy affection, and her consent to be his bride ... for Hilda was ... to be herself enshrined and worshipped 74

as a household saint, in the light of her husband's fireside. (II:282)

When Kenyon appeals to Hilda: "Oh, Hilda, guide me home!" her response is ''I am a poor, weak girl, and have no such wisdom as you fancy in me" (II:282). Hilda willingly relinquishes any individual power in exchange for Kenyon's worship. This is exactly the marriage Nathaniel envisioned for himself and Sophia, a marriage, he must have acknowledged as he wrote The Marble Faun, which had never come to pass.

The last novel to be examined, The Scarlet Letter, is considered by most critics to be Hawthorne's greatest work T. Walter Herbert sees it as: "a masterwork of ravishing beauty and truth" (169), and Nina Baym claims, "Hawthorne ... triumphantly transcended the terms of his art in The Scarlet Letter ... In return for this giving of himself [over to a female protagonist], 'Hester' gave Hawthorne the fullest command of his artistic powers that he had yet known. And, as events proved, the fullest command he was ever to know" ("Thwarted" 72-73). I've saved The Scarlet

Letter for last, simply because it is best.

Blithedale and Faun were remarkably similar in many ways, especially in

Hawthorne's use of contrasting male and female characters. In Letter, there is no fair lady character; Hester, as Hawthorne's frrst dark lady, 15 does not share the limelight.

There are, however, contrasting male types portrayed in Dimmesdale and

Chillingworth. As in the novels previously discussed, these male characters also are weaker than the story's dark lady. In Letter, both of these men lean on Hester, a strong woman. Chillingworth marries Hester for convenience, perhaps affection, but 75 not for love. When he perceives himself to be betrayed by Hester, Chillingworth's self-centered tendency toward scholarliness turns to evil. The remainder ofhis life is spent discovering the identity of Pearl's father, and thereafter, in seeking his downfall.

Once his obsession with revenge no longer has an object (after Dimmesdale's death),

Chillingworth himself quickly dies. He does not have the strength ofcharacter to accept any responsibility for events (after all, he had sent a very young Hester to the colonies alone), or to rebuild a new life for himself.

I see Dimmesdale as the weakest of all Hawthorne's male characters. It is difficult to find within him any redeeming features. That Hester chooses to love this weak man merely reveals her humanity-after all, love is blind. His craven unwillingness to step forward and acknowledge his paternity is never exculpated by the self-torment he endures because of it. When H ester, under verbal frre , refuses to name the child's father, Dimmesdale acknowledges her remarkable courage: "wondrous strength and generosity ofa woman's heart! She will not speak!" (Scarlet Letter 61).

His own weakness of character is thrown into sharp contrast with Hester ' s indomitable restraint. Her continued refusal to name Pearl's father to the Puritan elders constantly looms as an omnipresent judgement to Dimmesdale.

Dimmesdale remains weak throughout; during the forest scene, it is evidenced multiple times. When Hester reveals her husband' s identity to Dimmesdale, he is filled with anger and blasts Hester with blame for his tortured condition: "Woman, woman, thou art accountable for this!- I cannot forgive thee!" (78). After everything he has 76 done, after refusing for years to acknowledge Pearl as his daughter and so not sharing in Hester's condemnation by the community, Dimmesdale has the temerity to blame

Hester for his problems. It is a type of self-centeredness ofwhich Hester would not be capable. This trait is reminiscent ofHollingsworth who cannot see beyond his reformist obsession: "Show me one selfish end, in all I ever aimed at," Hollingsworth demands. Zenobia's response is angry, "It is all self1 ... nothing but self, self, self1"

(Blithedale 201). The only unselfiSh male ofthe novels is Donatello, who is also the novels' only unsocialized male. Dimmesdale's weakness is evident later when he begs

Hester to "Be thou strong for me! .. . Advise me what to do" (180). His uhimate act ofweakness is his death. Rather than leave the community and live a happy life with

Hester and Pearl, Dimmesdale chooses confession to clean his conscience, then death.

Dimmesdale never repays Hester for her many sacrifices.

Hester is a magnificent creation, and there is no doubt she is a Hawthomian dark lady. Like Zenobia and Miriam, Hester's beauty is rich and vital:

[Hester] was tall, with a figure ofperfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam; and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness ofcomplexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. (47-8)

From this hyperbole, we understand Hawthorne's attraction to this type ofbeauty, a type which certainly never belonged to Sophia. One may wonder what thoughts crossed Sophia's mind when she read this description ofher husband's frrst female protagonist. As Sophia would later be able to see herself in the conventional Phoebes 77 and Hildas, she certainly would have realized Hester did not represent her in any form, and yet she must have sensed Hawthorne's admiration.

Hawthorne says that Hester ' 'had in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic" (75). Hester, too, has a passionate nature, which emerges over the course ofthe story. Hester learns and evolves. The young Hester willingly acquiesces to a suitable marriage with an older man she does not love (Chillingworth). At this point, she unquestioningly plays the fair lady role. But forced by her husband to move alone to the colonies, Hester's independence begins to develop, and when passion presents itself, she does not run away; her passion is consummated. No fair lady would ever allow this to happen. Hester has moved from acquiescent maid to self-determined woman; she is no longer the object of someone else's life. Her passionate nature is again revealed when she confronts the community elders to fight for her child. Yet, in spite ofher difference, in spite ofher sin, Hester remains the heroine ofthe novel, albeit an anti-heroine. Herbert agrees, saying, "[Hester] is the antitype ofthe domestic angel" (Herbert 190). Hester is not the Dove. Although she may not b e the Dove, she is endlessly admirable- and Hawthorne painted her that way.

Hester has a towering strength which puts Dimmesdale, as well as the rest of the community, to shame. Without complaint, she bears the stigma ofthe letter and of her illegitimate child who is described as "the scarlet letter in another form: the scarlet letter endowed with life!" (Letter 92). As with Hawthorne's other dark ladies, Hester is set apart from society by her sin and the scarlet letter which has the effect of"taking 78 her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself' (47-8). Hester knows she will never belong in conventional society; she is a true dark lady.

As with Hawthorne's other dark ladies, Hester is rejected by the social male, by two social males in this instance. Chillingworth and Dimmesdale both move easily within and are accepted by society: Chillingworth, a scholar from England, and

Dimmesdale, a Puritan minister. Each of these socially prominent men rejects her twice. Dimmesdale frrst rejects Hester when he refuses to admit to his paternity of

Pearl, then again when he chooses death, over life with Hester and Pearl away from the community. Chillingworth's frrst rejection occurs when he sends his young, recently married wife ahead of him to America and then is not heard of for two years. His second rejection occurs when he refuses to acknowledge Hester as his wife when he finally does return just as Hester and her child are displayed to publicize their shame on the scaffold. Chillingworth refuses forgiveness, refuses to admit any culpability for her ignominy. Both men remain immured in some self-centered focus, and never place

Hester's needs above their own. It certainly is no stretch to read Hawthorne's recognition ofhis own selfishness in these characters. He was never able to place

Sophia's needs before his own.

Nina Baym points out the irony of the effect of all this ostracism upon Hester.

Rather than diminishing her, it drives her into speculation, into the intellect, and thereby into revolutionary thought. This focus of the mind results in Hester moving from the 79 conventional, to the individual ("Tyranny" 262). Bayrn points out Hester's victories: she succeeds as a single mother within a judgmental society, and eventually becomes a valuable member of the community, winning the respect of those who originally judged her. The "A" no longer stands for adulteress, but for able, and angel, and apostle.

Hester has become an activist and effects a positive change upon the community, unlike Dimmesdale and Chillingworth who have little effect at all.

But in the end, Hester is not individual enough to hold on to the freedom she achieves after Dimmesdale and Chillingworth both die within a brief period of time.

She does what is right by PearL removes her from the oppressive community by taking her to Europe. But once Pearl marries, Hester returns to the scene of her sin and re- dons the letter: ''Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow, and here was yet to be her penitence" (240). She has accepted the right of the community to condemn her and that it is her fate. Hester's end, like Zenobia's and Miriam's, is punitive. Hawthorne cannot imagine a life ofjoy for any of his dark ladies, but his admiration for them is obvious.

One has only to read the wonderful passage describing Hester's devotion to the women of her community, to recognize Hawthorne's sympathy with woman's struggle:

Women ... in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion, or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because undervalued and unsought,-came to Hester's cottage, demanding why there were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them, as best she might. She assured them, too, of her fiml belief, that at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it ... a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and 80

woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. (240-1)

No man dead set against the women's rights movement would be capable of writing such a passage. Hawthorne admll-ed the courage of dark ladies like Hester; he supported their desire to establish a more equal relation to man. But though he tried for over ten years, during the period that passed between writing The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun, he was never able to imagine a way to reach that equitable end in the society he saw around him.

In spite of this failure, Hawthorne never gave up on the dark lady-she was also to be included in the two novels he left unfmished. However, she is more than a mere rhetorical strategy used to write a book. She represents Hawthorne's search for a female type who is free to defme herself and be accepted by society at the same time.

As I see Hawthorne's selfishness as innate, there must also be some searching for a different female type who could serve him. Zenobia is flawed but magnificent.

Miriam learns from Zenobia's mistakes and has a higher level of compassion. And unlike Hester, Miriam does not accept the judgement of society as correct although she is forced to abide by it. He may never have given up on the dark lady character, but nor did he ever allow her to ''win."

It is generally agreed that neither The Blithedale Romance nor The Marble

Faun equal The Scarlet Letter in artistry. Both have structural issues that interfere with what we imagine to be Hawthorne's literary purpose. The sense of organic unity achieved within Letter is missing from these two works. Hawthorne achieved his 81 highest level of artistic success with The Scarlet Letter, a success primarily inspired by his willingness to consider a new female type. He then continued to produce these characters because the fair lady type, represented by his wife Sophia, was never able to fulfill his expectations. Although Blithedale and Faun are not as skillfully constructed as The Scarlet Letter, it is the dark lady characters within them who remain most memorable. Their special quality was inspired by Hawthorne's special interest in them.

Although he was never to duplicate that success, he continued to produce unforgettable women characters who strove to live their lives outside of the limits imposed upon them by society. Conclusion

Le secret d 'ennuyer est ... de tout dire. The secret of being a bore ... is to tell everything. -Voltaire

Clearly, Hawthorne's development of characters evolved. He first embraced the domestic angel as representative of ideal womanhood, but eventually came to doubt her ability to serve him. (Isn't this what Wollstonecraft and Fuller had been claiming all along-that men were not better served by submissive women of undeveloped character?) So Hawthorne began to develop a less conventiona~ more independent female character. Within the novels, we see the dark ladies growing and maturing.

Most likely, he began this experiment in an attempt to locate a different female type who could meet his needs. Based on his past record ofthe letters, I see no reason to doubt this. But even ifthis is where he began, it is not where he ended. After all, while the fair lady characters ofthe letters remained static, the dark ladies ofthe novels evolved. Hester Prynne may be the reigning favorite, but Hawthorne did attempt new characteristics with each suceeding dark lady. Zenobia ofBlithedale was far more

VIbrant than Hester. She sparkled. Hawthorne even gave her a touch ofpride and ruthlessness to see how that played out. The next dark lady, Miriam, seemed to learn from Zenobia's mistakes. Like Zenobia, Miriam experienced an uncertain and questionable period in her past. But unlike Zenobia, Miriam learned compassion from her previous troubles. Unlike Hester, Miriam never conceded society's right to pass judgement.

Because Hawthorne never had the dominant male choose a dark lady over the 83 fair, it seems safe to assume he never thought a dark lady would ever be capable of meeting his needs. He certainly never allowed them to triumph, to fmd happiness on their own terms. Each is rejected by the novels' dominant male characters: Zenobia commits suicide, and Hester and Miriam live solitary lives of penance. But while

Hawthorne cannot imagine lives of social privilege for these unconventional women, he sees the problem as not within the women themselves but as residing in society. That these dark ladies do not diminish in their attractiveness reveals they had not lost their appeal to Hawthorne either.

Hawthorne never concedes the superiority of either type. The dark ladies are far more richly constructed and admirable than the fair, yet their ends are always punitive. The fair lady is always chosen by the conventional male, but pales in comparison to the rich magnificence ofthe dark ladies. Within these relatively conventional tales, the level of ambiguity regarding value judgement ofthe women is astounding. And of course, that is why we still take these stories apart and discuss them almost two centuries later. Hawthorne was a master of ambiguity.

This ambiguity returns us to a point of speculation made in the introduction.

Can Hawthorne be considered feminist by nineteenth-century standards? Nina Baym has defended his feminism for years, but many disagree. Yet once again, I think

Hawthorne's ambiguity, rather than his feminism or lack thereof, takes the limelight.

Have we not simply reached an impasse, posing the conservative conventionalism of the letters against the revolutionary experimentation of the novels? In spite of glaring 84 contradictions, I suggest answers have been reached. They are the kind of answers that allow for social construction, for individual choice, for biological influence. The answers are postmodern in their insistence upon reality existing within the dialectic of an individual's life, which should not come as a surprise. Still, these answers chafe when a simple "yes" or "no" would be so much more satisfying. The very complexity of the answers and the tension that surrounds them, end by providing a more realistic picture of Hawthorne and of his humanity.

In determining the state of Hawthorne's feminism-or lack thereof-we cannot ignore the letters-no matter how much we may wish to. They are adamant in their portrayal of a simplistic and improbable ideal of marriage. The fictitious and gender­ essential personae of the letters are meticulously constructed to suit Hawthorne's purposes. His lifelong insistence upon maintaining the fictions tells us these attitudes were never simply a phase he traversed on the way to a more complex understanding of the relations of men and women. The gender ideals portrayed within the letters comprise significant and immutable aspects of Hawthorne's psychic make-up over the course of his life.

While it is arrogant to assume the ability to specifically define what drives another person, speculation is valid as it opens up possibilities that aid in understanding.

Past speculation regarding influences upon Hawthorne's psyche covers a wide range-shame over his harsh puritan ancestors, trauma caused by the death of his father, his family's economic dependence upon his mother's family, his life surrounded by 85 doting, adrrriring women. All ofthese certainly affected Hawthorne in some form, and any combination ofthem could have helped to create Hawthorne's personal need to have a fair lady, and only a fair lady, as a wife. But it is just as important to remember that the fair lady, the domestic ange~ was also a social construct ofthe nineteenth­ century. And so was Hawthorne. One cannot choose to refuse the influence of the social beliefs of one's time; the idealized characterizations ofthe letters were just that- a reflection ofthe times.

So while the letters cannot be ignored, neither can they be allowed to override the abundant evidence which points to Hawthorne's sympathetic understanding of women within the novels. The simple fact a white male author placed strong women characters at the center ofhis novels was a revolutionary social choice. He most certainly grasped the difficult political space women were forced to occupy in the nineteenth-century as evidenced in the conclusion of The Scarlet Letter which offers a compassionate reading ofthe trials ofwomanhood. Hester eventually becomes counselor to the same women ofthe community who previously shunned her. She assures them that "in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground ofmutual happiness" (241). She has become the moral compass ofthe community. It is not

Hester's femininity Hawthorne values (he has Hester become more masculine as she becomes more independent). Nor is it some divine state ofmotherhood he glorifies (he paints Hester as frequently baffled by motherhood and unsure ofher ability to mother 86 wisely.) It is Hester's loyalty, her honor, her courage, her intelligence, her hard work, her selflessness, Hawthorne holds in such high esteem. These are not traits typically associated with the domestic angel. Quite the contrary, these traits would have been more typical of a male protagonist.

Some readers who choose to refute Hawthorne's feminism point to the punitive endings he deals his dark ladies, but as Baym points out, Hawthorne's stories themselves make the case these women do not deserve their punishment. It is an unjust society that prescribes the judgement. Hawthorne points an accusatory finger at a society which will not allow strongly independent women to triumph. In the stories, the blame is not placed upon the women, but on society and men as representatives of society's dominant group. Baym reminds us Hawthorne's male characters do not triumph either. Their choices bind them within the confmes of the socially acceptable-they have limited their potential for growth. Nor does Baym allow

Hawthorne himself to escape recrimination. She believes Hawthorne condemned the obsessions of his male characters-the same characters he saw himself as representing-and so Hawthorne saw himself to blame as well ("Thwarted Nature" 62).

Shortly after I began this study, I developed a binary view of the novels and the letters. After all, binary viewpoints feel safe because they are easy to compartmentalize. I saw the novels as representative of the "public" Hawthorne-the

Hawthorne he preferred to present to the world. The letters, then, depicted the

"private" Hawthorne. This private Hawthorne I initially associated with the "real" 87

Hawthorne. The believer in gender essentialism and ofstrictly defined roles for men and women was the real McCoy, a part ofhis personality which remained constant throughout his lifetime. However, the enormous amount ofevidence within the novels reveals the feminist Hawthorne to be just as real as the essentialist Hawthorne, and so my binary viewpoint ofthe private Hawthorne vs. the public had to be discarded. One must suspend oneself between the two poles in order to move away from conventional boundaries, even though it is unsettling. This may explain why Hawthorne's always scripted unhappy conclusions for his dark ladies-he was unable to pull away from the safety ofgender boundaries defined by society. His dark lady characters pay a price for his reluctance. But as we've seen, he never truly concocted happy endings for any ofhis main characters. Everyone suffered because ofthe conventional standards imposed by society.

Hawthorne's fiction is frequently read as autobiographical because, after all, he too chose a fair lady. He described his fair ladies as moral guides, but because they had no power, they were never able to guide their men beyond the limits imposed upon them by society. Powerless, these fair ladies could not provide real strength or promote creativity; they brought nothing out ofthe ordinary to their relationships. The men who chose them (and this includes Hawthorne) gained nothing from their choice.

Priscilla and Hilda-and Sophia-were safe but empty choices. The men who chose them did not flourish, but remained limited by the boundaries ofconventionalism.

Hawthorne flourished in his literary career because he made a different choice when he 88 concocted his dark ladies. His personal life was a different matter. The later biographies all point to rather grim fmal years. His personal vision and choice of a fair lady did not serve him well.

Other points should also be considered when attempting to determine

Hawthorne's beliefs on gender, perhaps especially his choice to write in his chosen genre. Hawthorne knew his times well; he understood current political trends, and what kinds ofbooks were selling. With his great talent, he could have written many styles of fiction. He was fully aware the majority ofhis readers were women and he could have chosen to write books promoting feminism. Or he could have written sensationa~ sentimental stories similar to current bestsellers. Or he could have written

"transcendental" novels or abolitionist novels, which would have placed him in greater favor with political trends then prevalent in New England. Almost any ofthese might have sold better than his own dark and ambiguous tales. Yet Hawthorne chose to remain focused on exploring the mysterious workings ofhuman behavior-perhaps especially his own. He looked into what he considered matters ofthe human heart, especially focusing on the effects ofoppression and the inequities regarding gender roles. This is what mattered most to him. Baym believes ''the unending struggle between repression and sel:fhood is his major theme" ("Tyranny" 271). He chose to write about gender and repression, even as he attempted to resolve the problems for himself. This does not place him on one side or the other ofthe feminist question.

Hawthorne undoubtably b elieved in essential d ifferences b etween men and 89 women. Even in the novels which extolled the strengths of independent women, he did not paint men and women as identical. However, he did not believe these differences necessitated some hierarchical positioning of men above women. In his novels,

Hawthorne creates strong women eminently capable of walking side-by-side with men, possessing equal amounts of power. As are we all, Hawthorne was shaped by his culture, and belief in essential differences between the sexes was dominant during this period. Most nineteenth-century female supporters of women's rights also believed in essential gender differences. If belief in essential differences excludes membership in the ranks of feminists of the nineteenth-century, then Margaret Fuller must also be excluded. Fuller saw distinct differences between man and woman: ''Were [women] free, were they wise fully to develop the strength and beauty of women, they would never wish to be men, or manlike" (Lawsuit 1636). Fuller did not believe the male and female spheres should merge, but that all paths open to men should also be open to women; the two spheres should be able to exist in harmony (1629). Hawthorne's essentialist attitudes do not exclude him from being a feminist.

Without a doubt, Hawthorne's novels are feminist, and I have strong personal leanings toward declaring him a feminist. I admire the wonderful women of the novels and appreciate that Hawthorne holds society, and man as its representative, as responsible for women living as second-class citizens. His willingness to place strong, independent women center stage and to publicly debate issues of women's rights was remarkable in his time. To me, these factors seem to far outweigh opposing evidence. 90

But opposing evidence there is, and none as damning as the relentlessly patriarchal text of his letters to Sophia. Those letters, without a doubt, are not in the least feminist. I may privilege the feminist reading of Hawthorne, but I cannot deny the fact of the letters and their significance. Even as Hawthorne developed the dark ladies within his novels, he maintained the fiction of the perfect Dove and little wife within his letters.

At the same time Hawthorne was constructing the stately Miriam, he was also attacking the talent and moral character of Margaret Fuller. Perhaps most telling, this portrayer of formidable and independent womanhood was never able to relinquish personal power to his wife.

In the end, Hawthorne cannot be simplistically labeled feminist or patriarch.

He was far more complex than either of these labels would suggest. Hawthorne did not suddenly change philosophies at some point, rather he simultaneously maintained belief in both views of womanhood throughout his life. His doing so is a remarkable example of humankind's ability to sustain opposing ideologies. We are, all of us, the sum of our contradictions. It makes us human. Hawthorne's contradictions make for complexity and depth. Because of his prominent contradictions, his name is practically synonymous with the word ambiguous. And it is his contradictions which tantalize enough to keep us attempting to umavel them even after almost two hundred years.

So, to label Hawthorne either feminist or patriarch is reductive. It forces a one­ or two-dimensional perspective which diminishes the complexity of who he was as well as the meaning within his texts. Hawthorne is so much more than either label implies. 91

He deserves to be allowed his complexities and to be read with an awareness of them.

Perhaps more importantly, to label Hawthorne either feminist or patriarch diminishes us. Like Keats, we are "capable ofbeing in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" (Keats 1). To refuse to reduce Hawthorne to an either/or binary allows us to make ever more significant meaning from his texts.

Besides, we should not view Hawthorne's essentialism as an outdated, nineteenth­ century anachronism; his inability to foresee a society in which women are treated and valued equally with men now seems sadly prophetic.

Hawthorne was never able to imagine a society in which men and women would live as social equals. Disappointed by the idealized characters of the letters, he did attempt, through the characters in his books, to experiment with new gender roles for women. (With the exception ofDonatello, he never actually put his male characters into unconventional roles.) He was willing to consider the possibility of a world in which women could be social equals with men. It was this willingness to experiment, and his refusal to settle for some overly simplistic answer, that allowed him to compose his masterpiece. Appendix A

With the arrival of Hawthorne upon the nineteenth-century American literary scene, an amazing phenomenon took place. A fiercely loyal following of female readers and supporters emerged, and thus began a long history of women who embrace

Hawthorne's work and read his texts as supportive of women. Some saw Hawthorne's work as supportive of the women's rights movement, while others believed the opposite-that Hawthorne was a staunch defender of the status quo when it came to gender roles. For women authors, Hawthorne's work served as inspiration for their own writing. To get a clear picture of the status of Hawthorne's feminist beliefs, it is important to understand why so many of his female contemporaries hailed his fiction as supportive of women.

If we place Hawthorne's work within the context of the nineteenth century, this phenomenon is simple to understand. After all, women must have appreciated a recognized male author who wrote beautiful prose that featured female characters and focused on subject matter meaningful to them. His tales often told stories of life in small towns, included children and young married couples. The novels confront women's issues head-on and place women front and center. In comparison, Cooper's texts in which women play only supportive roles of men and Melville's all-male adventures ignored the issues of women and their lived experience. Neither of these authors generated the female fervor inspired by Hawthorne's texts.

Hawthorne created female characters who were not simply foils for more important male counterparts, but whose concerns and opinions mattered. In 93

Hawthorne tales, a male protagonist doesn't dash in to save the day; usually, the opposite is true; the Hawthorne narrator typically points a fmger ofblame for the difficulties experienced by women at the male characters. Hester is a beloved protagonist whose difficult life is blamed on men: the Puritan patriarchs, Chillingworth and Dimmesdale. It comes as no surprise that female readers took Hawthorne to heart.

He was read by feminists ofthe time as a powerful advocate for their struggles for greater public roles. First-wave feminists were fighting for social and moral equality, wished for fuller participation in the world. They wanted their lived experience to be as valued as that ofmen. The opposing ideology, those women in support ofthe status quo, also claimed Hawthorne. Hawthorne wrote ofhearth and home. He wrote of relationships. Having one's concerns acknowledged by a recognized member ofthe dominant group empowers those who wish to have their concerns recognized as valid.

Both ideologies were prevalently placed in many ofHawthorne's works, and his acknowledgment ofnineteenth-century women's concerns lent them respectability.

Industrialization in the nineteenth-century surged ahead and the gendered spheres separated further. As men went to work in outside factories and offices, women were further relegated to the home. An unexpected benefit for women is directly traced to this separation: women had more time to read than men. The growing number offemale readers helped to increase Hawthorne' s popularity. Not only were more women literate than men, women were also proving extraordinarily successful in the world ofpublishing. Books written by women were, in both numbers 94 and sales, far more popular than those of their male counterparts. (The two best-selling books ofthe 1850s were Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Lamplighter16-both written by women (Baym "Melodramas" 4)). The female reading audience was growing more sophisticated, and book reviews written by women became commonplace. The increasing numbers and growing importance ofthe female literary audience turned women's earnest support of Hawthorne into a phenomenon of some importance.

But women did more than just read Hawthorne. Some female writers, such as

Louisa May Alcott and Rebecca Harding Davis, credited Hawthorne with being a major influence on their writing. They studied his style and subject matter.

Hawthorne's focus provided tacit approval of everyday events-events women regarded as residing within their sphere-as appropriate topics for writing. Other women, like

Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Mary Russell Mitford, strongly believed in his talent and took it upon themselves to foster his career. They not only considered his work to be fme literature, but also deemed it important enough to get before a larger audience.

Viewed in its entirety, the depth of the devotion of Hawthorne's female

17 following appears cult-like in its fervor and there is ample record of this devotion • In extraordinary numbers, educated women of the day claimed him, eulogized him, determinedly took him under their wing to help further his career. During his lifetime and for decades following, fledgling women writers looked to his work for inspiration on subject matter and style. They praised him in their letters, in their journals and in 95 their reviews for magazines and newspapers. It is important to look to these women who knew him and read him in the context of his own time to better understand

Hawthorne's attitudes toward gender roles.

Women in Hawthorne's family were the first fans and supporters of his writing, and many Hawthorne critics emphasize the important influence of these women on his literary career. They point to the important placement of women in his fiction, his lifelong concern with the (perceived) feminine nature of writing romances, and the veneration in which he held women. Some critics like Edwin Miller, author of Salem is My Dwelling Place, focus more on the death of Hawthorne's father when he was only four as the primary affecting event upon his developing psyche (Miller 25-6, 30).

I disagree, however. In those four years, Hawthorne's father, a ship's captain, was seldom at home. Hawthorne lived surrounded by women and would not have had the chance to experience a complete relationship with his father.

Few of Hawthorne's letters or journal entries even mention his father, but a plethora of allusions to the women in his family reveal their close relationships even when he lived away from home to attend school. In weekly letters to his mother, he frequently admonishes her for not writing, or expresses a desire to live closer. In one particularly poignant letter, Hawthorne writes,

I am extremely homesick ... Oh how I wish I was again with you, with nothing to do but to go a gunning. But the happiest days of my life are gone. Why was I not a girl that I might have been pinned all my life to my Mother's apron. (CE 15:117Y 8 96

He was fifteen at the time, not an age one typically expects to hear much of a boy's devotion to his mother. At the age of sixteen, he shares with his mother his first tentative consideration of writing as a profession,

What do you think ofmy becoming an Author, and relying for support upon my pen? Indeed I think the illegibility of my handwriting is very authorlike. How proud you would feel to see my works praised by the reviewers, as equal to the proudest productions ofthe scribbling sons of John Bull. (15 :139).

Nina Baym considers Hawthorne's relationship with his mother to be especially important. In her essay "Hawthorne and His Mother: A Biographical Speculation,"

Baym explains her belief that The Scarlet Letter and Hester are a tnbute to his mother, inspired in part by her recent death.

His sisters Louisa and Elizabeth (herein addressed by her family nickname,

Ebe, to differentiate her from Elizabeth Peabody) were Hawthorne's co-authors, collaborators, critics. In 1820, Louisa, his younger sister, and Hawthorne produced a hand-printed newspaper, The Spectator, a precocious effort, full of family news composed with a flourish ofmischievous wit, and youthfully melodramatic poetry.

Louisa also served as audience to Hawthorne' s off-the-cuff orations. On Nathaniel' s sixteenth birthday, she reported he "delivered a most excellent Oration this morning to no other hearers but me" (qtd. in Miller, 534).

Elder sister Ebe was a frequent collaborator whose opinion Hawthorne valued throughout his life. Just two years before his death, Hawthorne described her as "the most sensible woman I ever lmew in my life, much superior to m e in general talent, and 97 of fme cultivation" (18:456). According to Julian Hawthorne's biography of his parents, Hawthorne and His Wife, Hawthorne clall:ned Ebe "had more genius" than he, and that "The only thing I fear is the ridicule of Elizabeth" (1 :5) . She played a prominent role in Hawthorne's literary career until his marriage (of which she never approved), serving as editor and reader. Ebe's contribution to the early Peter Parley's

Universal History on the Basis ofGeography, for the Use ofFamilies (1837) was so substantial, Hawthorne turned over to her the entire amount of pay for the work. With his usual wit, he explained, "Our pay, as Historians of the Universe, will be 100 dollars the whole of which you may have. It is poor compensation; yet better than the Token; because the kind of writing is so much less difficult" (15:247). Although Hawthorne later wrote, upon the death of his mother, of his family's inability to express emotional closeness and its negative influence upon his writing, his attachment to and reliance upon the women of his family is emphasized over and over again in his letters and journals (15:611-12).

Women outside of immediate family members also supported Hawthorne's career, a support which sometimes bordered on the hagiographic. Hawthorne shared a close acquaintance with two of America's most prominent female literary figures of the nineteenth-century, Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, relationships which have been the source of much speculation. Peabody was a forceful presence among education and literary circles at this time with a staggering list of accomplishments. She was an educator who opened the frrst English-language kindergarten in the United 98

States. She worked along side Bronson Alcott at his famous experimental Temple

School in Boston. In 1840 she opened the West Street Bookstore where The Dial was published and Margaret Fuller held her famous "Conversations." She wrote, edited and published many works, and remained involved with Hawthorne's family long after his death. In Dearest Beloved, T. Walter Herbert describes her as, "one ofthe most forceful and accomplished American women ofthe century, accustomed ... to managing her own life and to setting plans for others to follow" ( 48). While Peabody's relationship with Hawthorne suffered its ups and downs, her devotion and commitment to his career never faltered.

Long before Hawthorne became famous, Peabody sought his acquaintance, and later introduced him to her family. The story ofher visit to the Manning home to meet the author of"The Gentle Boy" is often told but never pales. By 1836, Peabody had deduced that the author of this tale, first printed anonymously in The Token in 1832, was Hawthorne's sister, Elizabeth (Miller 122). Though considered something of a recluse and eccentric, Hawthorne's sister Ebe was also known to be extremely intelligent and well-read, so it was not unreasonable for Peabody to assume Ebe was the writing Hawthorne. When Peabody went to the Hawthorne home to congratulate

Ebe on her published story, sister Louisa set the record straight- the author was

Nathaniel. Peabody's response to this news was to reflect, once and for all, the tone of their relationship, ''But ifyour brother can write like that, he has no business being idle" (Pearson 263) . Elizabeth was intelligent, determined, and meddlesome- a true 99 force with whom to contend.

Throughout their long association, Peabody's meddling usually (though not always) served Hawthorne's best interest. In 1839, she was involved in his appointment as measurer in the Boston Customs House. To accomplish this, she wrote letters to Orestes Brownson, George Bancroft, and then when no response was forthcoming, she even wrote to Mrs. Bancroft in order to ensure the commission. In

1838, she wrote a glowing review of Twice-Told Tales for the New Yorker and in

1840, as Boston's newest publisher, Peabody published Hawthorne's Grandfather's

Chair: A History for Youth. At another time, Peabody negotiated with James Monroe ofBoston for a new printing ofHawthorne's children's books as well as Twice-told

Tales . After Hawthorne was dismissed from the Salem Custom House, Peabody unsuccessfully sought a post for him on Greeley's New-York Tribune. Throughout

Hawthorne's life, she remained a tireless supporter ofhis career.

As noted above, Peabody's meddling was not always welcome- but it was always inspired by sincere devotion. She and Hawthorne would occasionally clash over politics. In one letter, Hawthorne firmly commanded she not send more abolitionist tracts to Sophia (a movement to which he was opposed), and made it clear it was no longer an acceptable topic of conversation between them (17:330). Just ten months before his death, when Peabody learned ofHawthorne's intention to dedicate

Our Old Home to his old friend (and extremely unpopular ex-President) Franklin

Pierce, she warned Hawthorne of ''momentous political consequences."19 She was 100 absolutely right-many New Englanders were outraged this book should be dedicated to a president who had supported the South in its stand to keep slavery lawful.

Hawthorne, however, never regretted his decision. 20

Throughout her very long life, Elizabeth Peabody (1804-1894) remained intensely involved with and dedicated to promoting Hawthorne's career. That she was

Sophia Hawthorne's sister, I believe, had little effect upon her efforts. In fact, it would not be inconsistent with her personality ifshe continued to consider Hawthorne her own personal discovery and responsibility even after his marriage to her sister.

Peabody's enthusiasm for his work was passionate. As she wrote in her review of

Tales,

Talent may tire in its toils, for it is ascending a weary hill. But genius wells up at the top of the hill; and in this instance descends in many streams ... [Hawthorne] will then take his place amongst his contemporaries, as the greatest artist of his line. (New Yorker 1838)

For Peabody, Hawthorne was more than mere talent, he was genius, and deserving of her lifelong devotion.

Margaret Fuller, perhaps the best-known American woman of her time, also avidly promoted Hawthorne's career. Their relationship has inspired a profusion of speculation over the years. Interestingly, this speculation usually revolves, not around

Fuller's response to Hawthorne, but the opposite-what did Hawthorne think of Fuller?

Did she influence his attitude toward gender roles? Did he admire her? Or did he hold her in contempt? Within Hawthorne's journals and letters, there is evidence of both.

Because of the contradictions, this relationship is often looked to for answers to 101

Hawthorne's ambiguous feelings about gender-surely, ifwe could only solve the riddle

21 ofthis Hawthorne-Fuller relationship , we would be able to solve the riddle of

Hawthorne's attitude toward gender. In contrast to Hawthorne's uneven opinions of

Fuller which fluctuate from one extreme to the other, Fuller's response to Hawthorne, both the man and his texts, was more measured and consistent. Her support ofhis career, though not without a few minor caveats, remained enthusiastic and steadfast throughout her career as editor and reviewer.

Like Peabody, Fuller frrst became aware ofHawthorne's work when she read the anonymously published ''The Gentle Boy." And also like Peabody, Fuller assumed its author to be female. Years before she met him, Fuller wrote a letter (actual date unknown) in Which she described ''The Gentle Boy," as "marked by so much grace and delicacy of feeling, that I am very desirous to know the author, who I take to be a lady"

(LMF 108). It is telling that these two experienced and powerful women in New

England literary circles read a feminine hand in the writing ofthis story. If nothing else, it reveals a shared expectation by educated women ofthe times that no man could write such a sensitive tale offamilial sorrow and conflict.

In Fuller's first review of a Hawthorne work, Grandfather's Chair: A History for Youth (1840), she describes Hawthorne as "gifted" and praises his ability to ''raise the tone ofchildren's literature." Fuller shared in the recently popular belief that children represent the height of innocence and their minds should only be presented with the noblest of literature. She found Hawthorne especially suited to author these 102

"noble" texts for the young. ''No one of all our imaginative writers," she writes, ''has indicated a genius at once so fme and rich, and especially with a power so peculiar in making present the past scenes of our own history." She admits his writings for children were not on the same level as "Endicott and the Red Cross" (1838), but admires his ability to switch from the "delicate satire that characterizes his writings for the old, to the simpler and more venerable tone appropriate to his earnest little auditors" (Dial, Jan 1841). That Fuller saw Hawthorne's work as improving upon the quality of children's literature would have been viewed by the public as an important and worthwhile endeavor during this period of changing attitudes toward rearing and educating children.

Fuller's support continued in July of 1842, when she wrote an extended review of Twice-Told Tales . His writing, she said, reflected "the soft grace, the playfulness, and genial human sense for the traits of individual character." In the somewhat flowery fashion typical ofnineteenth-century reviews, Fuller describes Hawthorne's style:

"Like gleams of light on a noble tree ... like slight ripples wrinkling the smooth surface." Interestingly, her praise then becomes somewhat qualified. Fuller refers to

Hawthorne's now-famous ambiguity as something that "seem[s] to promise more, should their author ever hear a voice that truly calls upon his solitude to ope his study door." She claims the "thinness" ofhis stories ''bespeaks a want ofthe deeper experiences," and sees Hawthorne's characters as "unsubstantial," a failing which could be corrected ''were the genius fully roused to its work ... as to paint with blood-warm 103 colors." Fuller did not mention any ofHawthorne's darker tales, preferring the

"studies of familiar life" (e.g., "The Village Uncle," "Chippings with a Chisel") over the

"mere imaginative pieces [in which] the invention is not clearly woven .. . and seems a phantom or shadow, rather than a real growth" (e.g., "The Minister's Black Veil," "Dr.

Heidegger's Experiment") (Dial July 1842). Her preferences, her reservations, all reflect what we know about Fuller today. As revealed by her decision to resign as editor of The New York Daily Herald to serve as a foreign correspondent in Italy,

Fuller preferred actively participating in current events to merely writing about them.

She privileged action, and believed Hawthorne must completely engage with life in order to create characters of substance. It is unlikely Hawthorne appreciated this questioning of his ability to robustly embrace life. While Fuller's review is primarily positive, its implication that Hawthorne has yet to fully participate in the experiences of life must have made him somewhat uneasy. After all, he was thirty-eight at the time.

A short-lived closeness existed between Fuller and Hawthorne during his first tenancy in Concord. In journal entries written while visiting Concord in 1844, Fuller describs Hawthorne as "mild, deep and large." She writes a tender passage of an afternoon spent with him on the Concord River,

H. came down about six and we went out on the river & staid till after sunset. We talked a great deal this time. I love him much, & love to be with him in this sweet tender homely scene. But I should like too, to be 1 22 with him on the bold ocean shore. (Thursday, July l8 h)

Two weeks later she wrote, ''I feel more like a sister to H. or rather more that he might be a brother to me than ever with any man before. Yet with him it is though sweet, not 104 deep k:ID.dred, at least, not deep yet" (Friday August 2nd). Though their relationship was now closer, Fuller recognized the aspect ofHawthorne's personality that forever kept people at arm's length.

In 1844, Margaret Fuller became the first female literary editor of a major

American newspaper, The New-York Tribune. In 1846, she wrote a two-part review of

Mosses from an Old Manse, printing both on the front page of the Tribune. This was impressive recognition ofthe man she would call ''the best writer of the day" in her

Papers on Literature and Art published later in the same year. She expressed her hope the review "might awaken the attention ofthose distant or busy who might not otherwise search for the volume." She blamed Hawthorne's lack of a larger audience on the manner in which his works had been published. She was ready for him to

"collect all his own public about him." It was time for recognition

The Mosses review expressed some ofthe same qualifications as her review of

Tales . She writes, 'We have here to regret that Hawthorne ... lays no more decisive hand upon the apparition- brings it no nearer than in former days. We had hoped that we should see, no more as in a glass darkly, but face to face" and regrets, "he does not lay bare the mysteries of our being." The Transcendentalists certainly were attempting to find answers to those mysteries, but Hawthorne would never believe such answers could be found. In spite ofthis reservation, Fuller's Tribune review is profuse in its praise, and does not question the treatment ofwomen in his tales. In "The Birth Mark" and ''Rappaccini's Daughter," Fuller sees the "loveliest ideal oflove, and the beauty of 105 feminine purity," while ''The Celestial Railroad" has ''wit." In "Roger Malvin's

Burial" she sees the "poetry and religion" ofHawthorne's sou~ and never mentions its darkness or its lack ofhope. Her effuse praise promises "exquisite lilies" rather than darkness for readers of these tales. Interestingly, it is their disturbing ambiguousness which makes these tales among his most popular today (Tribune 1846).

In August of 1846, Fuller sailed to Europe after resigning her editorship and signing on as foreign correspondent. It is telling that in her last weeks in the U.S., a major focus for Fuller was promoting Hawthorne's literary career, (she produced both the Mosses review, as well as her discussion ofHawthorne in Papers and Literature).

This substantial effort as she prepared to leave for Europe reveals the depth ofher belief in his talent. This would also be her final judgement. In 1850, she and her family drowned just off the New York coast as they returned to the U.S. It is sad she never got to read Hawthorne's novels; I'm sure she would have reveled in the strong and enterprising Hester and Zenobia and Miriam.

While Peabody's and Fuller's relationships to Hawthorne are perhaps the best­ known and most-documented, other nineteenth-century women also made public their deep admiration of Hawthorne. Many ofthese women are well-known in their own right, some as writers themselves. Because oftheir habit of committing their daily lives to pen and paper, in letters and in journals, there is plentiful source material that reveals the powerful connection they felt to Hawthorne. For many, Hawthorne's work was a seminal influence on their own writing. 106

Both Louisa May Alcott and Rebecca Harding Davis wrote oftheir childhood fascination with the works ofHawthorne. In her autobiography Bits ofGossip, Davis23 tells of climbing into her tree house with a book oftales, and falling strongly under the influence ofthose by Hawthorne. She credits these tales with the realization she could write about everyday events, a realization which would sanction her future choice in subject matter. Davis describes Hawthorne's place in American literature: "America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer" (Davis 59). As an adult and author in her own right, she visited with an older Hawthorne in Concord where she discovered a political and philosophical connection as well. Neither were Transcendentalists. She labeled Hawthorne "the unfortunate man who saw both sides" of all issues. Davis, who had lived both in and on the border of southern states had, like Hawthorne, a less black and white perspective ofthe Civil War from that ofmost ofNew England. She could not categorize all southerners as evil, and understood that declaring slavery to be illegal would not quickly fix all problems affected by that institution.

Unlike Davis, Alcott differed noticeably from Hawthorne in her attitudes toward the Civil War, but greatly admired Hawthorne both as man and author. Alcott experienced an intense response to The Scarlet Letter, recording her thoughts with each subsequent reading. In her essay "Discord in Concord," Claudia Durst Johnson sees Hawthorne's influence in several ofAlcott's works. Johnson describes Alcott' s theme in Transcendental Wild Oats, as "the power and disjunction between a woman' s 107 work and a man's vocation, the turmoil suffered by the powerful mother, and the disruption in the traditional family," echoing the theme in Letter. Though on differing sides ofimportant political issues, Alcott's general assessment ofHawthorne the man is both romanticized and sympathetic. In one letter Alcott describes Hawthorne as "a beautiful soul in prison, trying to reach his fellow beings through bars, and sad because he cannot" (113). Within Hawthorne, she saw the idealized romantic combination of both beauty and loneliness.

A look at Annie Fields, Mary Russell Mitford and Katharine Lee Bates will finish this examination offemale support ofHawthorne. All three put an extraordinary effort into furthering Hawthorne's career. Though Fields, the wife ofHawthorne's editor James T. Fields, met Hawthorne only six years before his death, she became closely involved with promoting his career. Fields kept a journal in which she meticulously recorded personal meetings with Hawthorne as well as conversations about him, providing unique insights. She greatly admired his American journals, saying, "Nothing has ever made me comprehend more vividly the fullness ofthe world and the weight ofthe most trivial observation upon the mind ofman than Hawthorne's religiously kept journal," and after his death, she urged Sophia to publish them (qtd. in

Gollin, 134-5). In 1899 Fields published a biography, Hawthorne in which her characterizations ofHawthorne are couched in terms ofidolatry. One description states, "[Hawthorne] had seen the divine light and touched the divine hand; and to one who has known the source ofman's great hope the world is never quite the same as it 108 would appear to other men" (Fields 22). She once labeled him, "the greatest genius our country has produced." (qtd. in Gollin 138). Fields also read many of

Hawthorne's love letters to Sophia. While she reveled in their excessive idealization, she was astute enough to see a contradiction between the closeness to Sophia descnbed in these letters and the intense solitude that surrounded him, "his whole heart seems to have unveiled to no living soul" (141). Fields briefly notes her political disagreements with Hawthorne, but the short biography is more encomium than scholarly work

Mary Russell Mitford was also a staunch Hawthorne supporter who worked diligently to promote his career in Britain. Like Fuller, Mitford preferred Hawthorne ' s realism to his gothicism or allegory. She enthusiastically labeled Hawthorne "the best living writer of prose fiction." In a letter to Hawthorne's editor, Mitford described him as "one of the glories ofyour most glorious part ofgreat America" (qtd . in IdoL

"Mitford," 145, 146). Another enthusiastic promoter of Hawthorne's reputation was

Katharine Lee Bates. Bates, best known as author of"America the Beautiful," worked primarily in education. She wrote a widely-used textbook on American Literature in which she praised him extensively, and later, wrote the introduction for a complete edition ofhis fiction . Unlike Peabody and Fuller, Bates was attracted to the darkness in Hawthorne 's work, "Hawthorne's strange and shadowy tales linger among the mysteries ofman's moral nature, which he reveals half mockingly, half mournfully, and withal lovingly," (qtd. in Ponder 2 12). Yet Bates resisted Hawthorne as well as praised him. In an essay on Bates, M elinda Ponder suggests Bate's travel piece on 109

England, From Gretna Green to Land's End, is a feminist response to Hawthorne's

Our Old Home in which he descnbed England as the home of great male writers of literature. In contrast, Bates portrayed it as the home offemale writers like George

Eliot (213).

With the inclusion ofBates who died in 1929, we have moved well into the twentieth century, and as we've seen, nineteenth-century women from a wide range of backgrounds expressed their fervent support ofHawthorne and his work. But as the twentieth-century came into full-swing, the woman-friendly view ofHawthorne began to disappear. The field of literary criticism was primarily comprised ofmen, and most male critics read Hawthorne from a positive, but patriarchal viewpoint. No longer was

Hawthorne seen as a friend ofwomen. Though in no manner debunking Hawthorne, these critics did not read him in a female-friendly fashion. That is, until the advent of

Nina Baym in the 1960s, who decided it was, once again, time to read Hawthorne from a feminist standpoint. In a multitude of essays and books, Baym has engaged in a critical conversation with earlier male literary critics, and has assailed their patriarchal readings of Hawthorne.

When Nina Baym moved from graduate student into the ranks ofprofessional literary study, she brought with her the belief in vo gue at the time that literature "was a fixed set ofbeautifully written works expressing universal truths" (Intro. Feminism and

A merican L iterary History ix). She had been trained in what we still view as the

"traditional" canon, and tells us in the preface to her collection of essays, "Feminism 110 and American Literary History," that she believed "good criticism correctly ~alyzed the internal dynamics of literary works" (Preface xi). Her training was representative ofthe times-there were universal truths, there were correct (vs. incorrect) analyses, and literary value could be standardized. However, since her entrance into academe, she has spent her professional career addressing what she labels the ''yawning gaps" between her training and what she sees as the "actualities of professional literary study"

(ix). Baym came to see her role as engaging in dialectical conversations with those who would place narrow limits on American literary history.

In this pursuit, Dr. Baym has carved the interesting niche for herself ofre­ claiming American, nineteenth-century texts from the grip of the white, male literary critics who had dominated the discipline. After she entered the professional world of academia, she soon realized critics of American literature, seen as discerners of universal truths, "favored things male, (whaling ships over sewing circles)," preferred satires on stereotypical women over those on stereotypical men, and produced irresponsible readings oftexts because of their patriarchal world view. So Baym determined she would re-vision the nineteenth-century American literary canon by providing it with a feminist voice; she calls her work "revisionary efforts in American literary history" (x). Baym's contributions include new readings of white female writers previously ignored or undervalued, along with a re-visioned understanding of characters (both real and fictitious, male and female) previously only interpreted through the narrowly-focused lens ofthe white, male gaze. 111

Interestingly, throughout her career, Baym has also confronted various feminist critics. The few earlier second-wave feminists who bothered to address Hawthorne, read him almost exclusively as misogynist. During the 1980s, there emerged a feminist movement intent upon emphasizing the difference, rather than the equality, between men and women. Baym describes herself as "dismayed" at the intent ofthis movement to "ignore or undo everything that 1970s feminism was about" (x). Baym has also responded to third-wave feminist accusations that she groups all women together. She believes early second-wave feminists (of which she is a member) contended they needed to address the differences between women as well as their solidarity. She claims, "Early second-wave feminist activists assumed that one had to do both and pursued one or the other goal as circumstances seemed to call for" (xi).

In order to appreciate Baym's feminist stance, it is important to understand the traditions in which she was trained and to which she reacted. The advent of the women's rights movement in the 1960s challenged the male-dominated discipline of literary criticism. Until then, the dominant theories that influenced how people read had been primarily constructed by men. This was Baym' s training, and then became her point of departure from mainstream literary criticism. She investigates this patriarchal trend in her 1981 essay, "Melodramas ofBeset Manhood." "Melodramas"

focuses on American literary criticism rather than American literature in an attempt to

explain the dismissal ofwomen writers by critics during the first half of the twentieth­ century, or why women were left out of the canon. Baym states, "Ifone accepts 112 current theories of American literature, one accepts as a consequence-perhaps not dehberately but nevertheless inevitably-a literature that is essentially male." She believes gender restrictions in place in literature have nothing to do with any "cultural realities contemporary with the writing woman" but come instead from literary theories

(5). Women writers were kept out ofthe canon, not by anything they did or wrote, but simply by how they were perceived by critics. Baym resolved to direct her career toward addressing what she deemed the gender inequities fomented by early twentieth­ century critics.

One reason Baym sees for the exclusion ofwomen is the nationalist tendencies ofa young United States and its desire to outshine Europe. As a result, early American critics determined that the major criteria for excellence in literature was not its form but its "Americanness". Wishing to avoid all comparisons to Europe, critics began to look for that which was "most American" as a sign of excellence in literature, a trend that, according to Baym, continued well into the twentieth-century. But women writers were American and wrote about their lives in America, so why weren't they also considered an important aspect ofAmerican literature? Baym claims a major reason lay in how "Americanness" was defmed by the predominantly male critics.

One example is F. 0. Matthiesen's (1902-1950) whose well-known book,

American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age ofEmerson and Whitman, is devoted to reverencing five American authors- all male: Emerson, Thoreau, Melville,

Whitman and Hawthorne. Matthiesen says that these authors' "shared devotion to the 113 possibilities of democracy" proved the Americanness that made them worthy of canonization. He goes on to claim that his book "will be a history of the books of the great and near-great writers in a literature which is most revealing when studied as a by-product ofAmerican experience" (qtd. in. ''Melodramas" 126). This focus allowed

Matthiesen to present Hollingworth, who represented democracy in the form of the only real laborer at Blithedale, as the true protagonist of the The Blithedale Romance

(Matthiesen 246). This focus also allowed Matthiesen to exclude any books by women.

Baym sees another critic, Perry Miller, (1905-1963), an expert in American

Puritanism, as also guilty of demoting a female protagonist into second place. Miller's particular focus on Americanness saw The Scarlet Letter as a tale about Puritans from the viewpoint of the Puritans themselves24 (Baym ''Revisiting Hawthorne's Feminism"

108). Baym tells us the Miller influence was so strong, people began to read

Dimmesdale, who represented the Puritans and puritan theology, as the novel's protagonist. Hester's role, then, becomes secondary; she serves only as the seducer of

Dimmesdale who leads him astray from the path of righteousness. In this reading, not only is Hester removed as protagonist, she is also removed as a force for positive change within the community.

Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003) is another critic who moves Hester out of center place. Fiedler, a proponent of"outing" the homoerotic within American literature, had good intentions. This focus, however, led him to claim the relationship between 114

Dimmesda1e and Chillingworth as primary in The Scarlet Letter. He writes,

It is certainly true, in terms of plot, that Chillingworth drives the minister toward confession and penance, while Hester would have lured him to evasion and flight. But this means, for all of Hawthorne's equivocations, that the eternal feminine does not draw us on toward grace, rather that the woman promises only madness and damnation ... [Hester] is the female temptress of Puritan mythology, but also, though sullied, the secular madonna of sentimental Protestantism. ( qtd. in Baym, "Melodramas," 13)

To imagine the weak and cowardly Dimmesdale as protagonist seems so very unlikely.

Fiedler's seeming misogyny does not stop at literary characters. In his book Love and

Death in the American Novel, Fiedler blames women authors for writing "the flagrantly bad best-seller" against which great writers like Poe, Hawthorne and Melville have "felt it necessary to struggle for their integrity and their livelihoods" (93). Hawthorne's resentment toward that "damned mob of scribbling women" lived far into the twentieth century.

Baym's primary argument with these critics, is not that they only include male authors for membership in the canon, but that their reason for excluding women has nothing to do with "excellence" in literature, but with a focus that can somehow be deemed uniquely "American," and which coincidentally never seems to be the focus of women authors. She expresses amazement that the patriarchal attitudes of these critics allowed omission from the canon of women writers like Susannah Rowson, Hannah

Foster and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote the best selling American books of the nineteenth century (Baym 124). Baym dryly describes these white, male, American critics reviewing white, male, American authors, as "a consensus criticism of the 115 consensus" (129). The influence of these critics took hold, and for over half a century,

Hawthorne was not read as a supporter of women's rights.

Then, in her 1970 essay, "Passion and Authority in The Scarlet Letter," Baym reclaimed Hester as protagonist, and Hawthorne as feminist. Once again, Hawthorne is read and presented to the public as supportive of women's rights-just as he was by his

contemporary female readers. Baym continues this support throughout her career; thirty-four years after she wrote "Passion," Baym once again addresses Hawthorne's

attitude toward women in her essay "Revisiting Hawthorne's Feminism" (2004). She

sees a change in Hawthorne's writing around 1850 when he wrote The Scarlet Letter.

He then began, she says, to focus on "sympathetic women characters struggling against

a murderous male authority'' (1 08). This is also when he began to use the literary

convention of "dark lady'' vs. ''fair lady" where the dark lady represents the

unconventional and creative, and the fair lady represents the unquestioning status quo

constructed by the dominant group. When the dark lady is rejected by the male

character (and she always is), no one wins-not the man, not the fair lady, not the dark

lady. Women, their diminished status in society, and the danger ofthe conventional

choice for men and women, has become Hawthorne's primary subject.

As a result of this timing, Baym looks primarily to the female characters of his

novels for evidence of Hawthorne's feminism. "Smart, independent women like

Hester, Zenobia and Miriam are his heroines," she tells us (116). Hawthorne's female

protagonists have interests outside the "private sphere"-they are not limited, helpless 116 females. Through the discourses ofHester, Zenobia and Miriam, Hawthorne provides a feminist view of nineteenth-century America. Baym acknowledges there are no happily-ever-after endings for these women, but she believes these endings "offer limited, incremental change, although often at a great cost to the agent of such change"

( 116). She acknowledges Hawthorne's belief in essential differences between the genders, but stresses his beliefthat these differences should not be used to keep women down. Baym reads the male characters as filling supporting roles in order to serve as foils to the more admirable women. Hawthorne points the fmger ofblame for the problems within his tales at men who cannot see beyond their personal needs to the world outside them. The end results for the protagonistas may be punitive, but it is the men as representatives of society, who inflict the punishment, not the women who deserve it.

Hawthorne, then, has moved through the phases ofbeing viewed as idol, through patriarch, to feminist. It is an interesting history which reflects how we are all shaped by the era in which we live. Endnotes

1.Because the term feminism has so many defmitions, its use within a particular context must be explained. Feminism meant something entirely different in the nineteenth­ century than what it means today. The OED simply says that during that period it meant "the quality of females." It wasn't until the very late 1800s/early 1900s that the term came to be associated with advocacy ofthe rights of women. I use the latter defmition simply because it is enormously convenient to do so. Within this paper, the term will describe the philosophy of those in the nineteenth-century who believed women were capable ofmuch more than currently popular roles dictated. Those we now label frrst-wave feminists believed women were capable of increased involvement in the outside world and should be viewed as morally and socially equal to men. Essential differences between the sexes were generally accepted by supporters and detractors alike. Margaret Fuller, famous American feminist, believed each woman should be free to do anything she was capable of doing. In The Great Lawsuit, she explained that women did not necessarily just want power, ''What woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded to unfold such powers as were given her when we left our common home," (1629). Fuller believed woman should be allowed to go wherever her interests and abilities might lead her.

2.Two examples (out of many) of Hawthorne combining the characters of the Dove and Sophie Hawthorne: "And now if my Dove were here, she and that naughty Sophie Hawthorne ... how happy might we be!" (15:357), and ''Thou art my chastest, holiest, as well as intimatest little wife-a woman and an angel" (15:679). Hawthorne used whatever combination of characters ful:filled his need at the time.

3.For one interesting perspective regarding Sophia's internalization ofthese demands for perfection, see T. Walter Herbert's Dearest Beloved, especially chapters three and ten.

4.All of my quotations from the letters of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne were found in secondary texts. The complete collection has yet to be compiled for publication. Most of them can be found in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

5.Fields noted this as having been written "by Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne while her husband lay dead" (qtd. in Herbert 309).

6.For a more complete look at the interna~ relational dynamics of the marriage during their years in England, see Miller's Chapter 28, ''England: I Do Not Take Root Anywhere."

7.Nina Baym agrees House is problematic. She tells us, So far as its [House's] treatment of women is concerned, however, the book is unique in the Hawthorne 118 canon, for it makes the life-force inhere in a man-Maule-on whom all the other oppressed characters, Phoebe included, must depend for their ultimate vitality. ("Tyranny" 258). Interestingly, decades later, Baym re-investigated this issue in her article, ''The Heroine of The House ofthe Seven Gables; or, Who Killed Jaffrey Pyncheon?" and developed a unique solution.

8.There is no fair lady in The Scarlet Letter. Since Letter is set in a seventeenth­ century, Puritan society, Hester, the anti-heroine, stands in stark contrast to society's expectations of women. Instead of using one character to represent fair-lady attributes, Hawthorne disperses these characteristics among various women of the community.

9.This aspect of Zenobia's character is one of several reasons many of Hawthorne's contemporaries believed Margaret Fuller to be the inspiration for Zenobia. Fuller loved flowers and gardens, alluded to them often in her writing, and frequently wore a flower in her hair.

lO.The Marble Faun comprises two volumes with repeating page numbers. From here on in, references will be to volume:page-number (e.g., I:161-62).

11.This novel was originally published in England under the title The Transformation.

12.Jael, the Hebrew heroine, killed Sisera, a captain in the Razor army attacking Israel, frrst by welcoming him, then driving a nail through his head while he slept.

13.Judith, a beautiful Hebrew woman, decapitates the invading general Holofernes, while he slept. Hawthorne would have considered both Hebrew women to have "a certain rich Oriental character" in their face.

14.At the 2004 Bicentennial Nathaniel Hawthorne Conference, one presenter on The Marble Faun paused for moment, then exclaimed, "God! I just hate Hilda."

15.That Hester is Hawthorne's frrst dark lady is debatable. For example, I've considered Beatrice in "Rappaccini's Garden" (1844) as a potential "dark lady." After all, sweet natured as she may be, her breath is poisonous to those who live outside her garden. However, Beatrice does not struggle to declare her independence.

16.Written by Maria Cummins in1854, The Lamplighter was considered "domestic fiction."

17.For more on this topic, see Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition. Edited by John L. Idol Jr. and Melinda M. Ponder. 119

18.Quotes from the letters come from The Centenary Edition ofthe Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and further references will be noted only with volume number followed by page, e.g., 15:117.

19 .Peabody's actual letter to Hawthorne is no longer extant, but much can be gleaned from his written response which, along with pertinent endnotes, can be found in CE 18:589-594.

20.Ibid.

21.See Hawthorne's Fuller Mystery by Thomas R. Mitchell. U ofM Press, 1998

22.Exact dates unknown.

23.Davis, author ofLife in the Iron Mills, is considered a pioneer in American realist fiction.

24.This viewpoint is no longer commonly held. Most readers do not find much real Puritan culture in The Scarlet Letter. For Baym's own debunking of this assessment, read her essay, ''Passion and Authority in The Scarlet Letter" in The New England Quarterly (1970). Bibliography

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