CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY SAN MARCOS THESIS SIGNATURE PAGE 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).