■tv ir^ 1','^1 
 
On Hawthorne 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2020 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 https://archive.org/details/onhawthorne01unse 
 
On Hawthorne 
 
 The Best from American Literature 
 
 Edited by Edwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd 
 
 Duke University Press Durham and London 1990 
 
© 1990 Duke University Press 
 All rights reserved 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 on acid-free paper 00 
 
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data 
 appear on the last page of this book. 
 
Contents 
 
 Series Introduction vii 
 
 Hawthorne and Literary Nationalism (1941) 
 
 Neal F. Doubleday / 
 
 Suggestions for Interpreting The Marble Faun (1941) 
 
 Dorothy Waples 8 
 
 The “Case” of Tobias Pearson: Hawthorne and the Ambiguities (1950) 
 Louise Dauner 24 
 
 The Double Symbol (1951) 
 
 Harold Orel 
 
 Hawthorne’s Revision of “The Gentle Boy” (1954) 
 
 Seymour L. Gross 59 
 
 Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter: “The Dark Problem of This Life” (1955) 
 Hugh N. Maclean 52 
 
 The Character of Flame: The Function of Pearl 
 \nThe Scarlet Letter (1956) 
 
 Anne Marie McNamara 65 
 
 •^A New Reading of The Blithedale Romance (1957) 
 
 Frederick C. Crews 82 
 
 Hawthorne’s Allegory of Science: “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (i960) 
 Edward H. Rosenberry 106 
 
 Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne’s “Young 
 Goodman Brown” (1962) 
 
 David Levin 7/4 
 
 Hester Prynne’s Little Pearl: Sacred and Profane Love (1968) ^ 
 Robert E. Whelan /2j 
 
 Hawthorne and Nineteenth-Century Perfectionism (1973) 
 
 Claudia D. Johnson 74/ 
 
 Hawthorne’s Public Decade and the Values of Home (1974) 
 
 Terence Martin 752 
 
 —Hawthorne’s Coverdale: Character and Art 
 in The Blithedale Romance (1975) 
 
 James H. Justus 764 
 
/ 
 
 Beyond Convention: The Dynamics of Imagery and Response in 
 Hawthorne’s Early Sense of Evil (1980) 
 
 David Downing 180 
 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Mother: A Biographical Speculation (1982) 
 Nina Baym 1^4 
 
 The Scarlet Letter and Revolutions Abroad (1985) 
 
 Larry J. Reynolds 221 
 
 Nature and Frontier in “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (1988) 
 James McIntosh 24^ 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Intention in “Chiefly About War Matters” (1989) 
 James Bense 262 
 
 Index 277 
 
Series Introduction 
 
 From Vol. i, no. i, in March 1929 to the latest issue, the front cover 
 of American Literature has proclaimed that it is published “with the 
 Cooperation of the American Literature Section [earlier Group] of 
 the Modern Language Association.” Though not easy to explain 
 simply, the facts behind that statement have deeply influenced the 
 conduct and contents of the journal for five decades and more. The 
 journal has never been the “official” or “authorized” organ of any 
 professional organization. Neither, however, has it been an indepen¬ 
 dent expression of the tastes or ideas of Jay B. Hubbell, Clarence 
 Gohdes, or Arlin Turner, for example. Historically, it was first in 
 its field, designedly so. But its character has been unique, too. 
 
 Part of the tradition of the journal says that Hubbell in founding 
 it intended a journal that should “hold the mirror up to the profes¬ 
 sion”—reflecting steadily its current interests and (ideally) at least 
 sampling the best work being done by historians, critics, and bibliog¬ 
 raphers of American literature during any given year. Such remains 
 the intent of the editors based at Duke University; such also through 
 the decades has been the intent of the Board of Editors elected by the 
 vote of members of the professional association—“Group” or “Sec¬ 
 tion.” 
 
 The operative point lies in the provisions of the constitutional 
 “Agreements” between the now “Section” and the journal. One of 
 these provides that the journal shall publish no article not approved 
 by two readers from the elected Board. Another provides that the 
 Chairman of the Board or, if one has been appointed and is acting in 
 the editorial capacity at Duke, the Managing Editor need publish no 
 article not judged worthy of the journal. Historically, again, the 
 members of the successive Boards and the Duke editor have seen 
 eye-to-eye. The Board has tended to approve fewer than one out of 
 every ten submissions. The tradition of the journal dictates that it 
 keep a slim back-log. With however much revision, therefore, the 
 journal publishes practically everything the Board approves. 
 
 Founder Hubbell set an example from the start by achieving the 
 
Series Introduction 
 
 viii 
 
 almost total participation of the profession in the first five numbers 
 of American Literature. Cairns, Murdock, Pattee, and Rusk were 
 involved in Vol. i, no. i, along with Boynton, Killis Campbell, 
 Foerster, George Philip Krapp, Leisy, Mabbott, Parrington, Bliss 
 Perry, Louise Pound, Quinn, Spiller, Frederick Jackson Turner, and 
 Stanley Williams on the editorial side. Spiller, Tremaine McDowell, 
 Gohdes, and George B. Stewart contributed essays. Canby, George 
 McLean Harper, Gregory Paine, and Howard Mumford Jones ap¬ 
 peared as reviewers. Harry Hayden Clark and Allan Gilbert entered 
 in Vol. I, no. 2. Frederic I. Carpenter, Napier Wilt, Merle Curti, 
 and Grant C. Knight in Vol. i, no. 3; Clarence Faust, Granville 
 Hicks, and Robert Morss Lovett in Vol. i, no. 4; Walter Fuller Tay¬ 
 lor, Orians, and Paul Shorey in Vol. 2, no. i. 
 
 Who, among the founders of the profession, was missing? On 
 the other hand, if the reader belongs to the profession and does not 
 know those present, she or he probably does not know enough. 
 With very few notable exceptions, the movers and shakers of the 
 profession have since the beginning joined in cooperating to create 
 and sustain the journal. 
 
 The foregoing facts lend a special distinction to the best articles 
 in American Literature. They represent the many, often tumultuous 
 winds of doctrine which have blown from the beginnings through 
 the years of the decade next to last in this century. Those articles 
 often became the firm footings upon which present structures of un¬ 
 derstanding rest. Looking backward, one finds that the argonauts 
 were doughty. Though we know a great deal more than they, they 
 are a great deal of what we know. Typically, the old best authors 
 wrote well—better than most of us. Conceptually, even ideologi¬ 
 cally, we still wrestle with ideas they created. And every now and 
 again one finds of course that certain of the latest work has rein¬ 
 vented the wheel one time more. Every now and again one finds 
 a sunburst idea which present scholarship has forgotten. Then it ap¬ 
 pears that we have receded into mist or darkness by comparison. 
 
 Historical change, not always for the better, also shows itself in 
 methods (and their implied theories) of how to present evidence, 
 structure an argument, craft a scholarly article. The old masters 
 were far from agreed—much to the contrary—about these matters. 
 
Scries Introduction 
 
 IX 
 
 But they are worth knowing in their own variety as well as in their 
 instructive differences from us. 
 
 On the other hand, the majority of American Literature'% authors 
 of the best remain among us, working, teaching, writing. One testi¬ 
 mony to the quality of their masterliness is the frequency with which 
 the journal gets requests from the makers of textbooks or collections 
 of commentary to reprint from its pages. Now the opportunity pre¬ 
 sents itself to select without concern for permissions fees w'hat seems 
 the best about a number of authors and topics from the whole sweep 
 of American Literature. 
 
 The fundamental reason for this series, in other words, lies in the 
 intrinsic, enduring value of articles that have appeared in American 
 Literature since 1929. The compilers, with humility, have accepted 
 the challenge of choosing the best from well over a thousand articles 
 and notes. By “best” is meant original yet sound, interesting, and 
 useful for the study and teaching of an author, intellectual move¬ 
 ment, motif, or genre. 
 
 The articles chosen for each volume of this series are given simply 
 in the order of their first publication, thus speaking for themselves 
 and entirely making their own points rather than serving the com¬ 
 pilers’ view of literary or philosophical or historical patterns. Hap¬ 
 pily, a chronological order has the virtues of displaying both the de¬ 
 velopment of insight into a particular author, text, or motif and the 
 shifts of scholarly and critical emphasis since 1929. But comparisons 
 or trend-watching or a genetic approach should not blur the individ¬ 
 ual excellence of the articles reprinted. Each has opened a fresh line 
 of inquiry, established a major perspective on a familiar problem, or 
 settled a question that had bedeviled the experts. The compilers aim 
 neither to demonstrate nor undermine any orthodoxy, still less to 
 justify a preference for research over explication, for instance. In 
 the original and still current subtitle, American Literature honors 
 literary history and criticism equally—along with bibliography. To 
 the compilers this series does demonstrate that any worthwhile au¬ 
 thor or text or problem can generate a variety of challenging perspec¬ 
 tives. Collectively, the articles in its volumes have helped to raise 
 contemporary standards of scholarship and criticism. 
 
 This series is planned to serve as a live resource, not as a homage 
 
X 
 
 Series Introduction 
 
 to once vibrant but petrifying achievements in the past. For several 
 sound reasons, its volumes prove to be v^^eighted toward the more re¬ 
 cent articles, but none of those reasons includes a presumed superior¬ 
 ity of insight or of guiding doctrine among the most recent genera¬ 
 tions. Some of the older articles could benefit now from a minor 
 revision, but the compilers have decided to reprint all of them ex¬ 
 actly as they first appeared. In their time they met fully the stan¬ 
 dards of first-class research and judgment. Today’s scholar and 
 critic, their fortunate heir, should hope that rising generations will 
 esteem his or her work so highly. 
 
 Many of the articles published in American Literature have ac¬ 
 tually come (and continue to come) from younger, even new mem¬ 
 bers of the profession. Because many of those authors climb on to 
 prominence in the field, the fact is worth emphasizing. Brief notes 
 on the contributors in the volumes of their series may help readers to 
 discover other biographical or cultural patterns. 
 
 Edwin H. Cady 
 Louis J. Budd 
 
Hawthorne and Literary Nationalism 
 Neal F. Doubleday 
 
 T he most obvious literary influence on Hawthorne is the 
 work of Sir Walter Scott. Scott’s influence on Hawthorne, in 
 all its main aspects, has been recognized since G. E. Woodberry’s 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne} We now realize, too, that Hawthorne’s 
 early practice conforms to a critical demand that American materials 
 be treated in the manner of Scott. Scott’s work had a great influence 
 on American literary theory in general, because it combined signif¬ 
 icantly with the patriotic nationalism of American writers and, as 
 G. Harrison Orians has said, “converted the demand for nationalism 
 into a quest for Scott-like ingredients in American life.”^ By 1825 
 the success of this quest was apparent.® 
 
 Hawthorne started out in his treatment of historical materials 
 very much as current literary theory prescribed, but he developed 
 away from and modified the theory which had directed his early 
 work. To overlook the influence of current literary theory and 
 fashion upon Hawthorne is to attribute to him an unwarranted 
 isolation; to overlook the individuality of the treatment he gave 
 quite ordinary materials is to miss something of his greatness as 
 an artist. It is the purpose of this note to review the connections 
 between Hawthorne’s work and the contemporary desire for na- 
 
 ^ See G. E. Woodberry, Nathaniel Hawthorne (Boston, 1902), pp. 125-126; G. H. 
 Orians, “Scott and Hawthorne’s Fanshawe,” New England Quarterly, XI, 388-394 (June, 
 1938). There is ample evidence of Hawthorne’s intimate acquaintance with Scott’s work. 
 See Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Wife (Boston, 1885), I, 105, II, 269; G. P. 
 Lathrop, A Study of Hawthorne (Boston, 1876), p. 108, Appendix, pp. 341, 343; James 
 T. Fields, Yesterdays with Authors (Boston, 1879), pp. 101-102; Hawthorne’s Worlds, 
 Riverside ed., VII, passim, VIII, 263-274, 504-508, and passim. 
 
 ° “The Romance Ferment after Waverley," American Literature, III, 409 (Jan., 1932). 
 ’Jared Sparks, in an 1825 review of ten American novels published within a year, 
 says that he finds “it expedient first to settle ... the peculiarities” of the Waverley pattern, 
 of which most of the ten novels are “acknowledged copies.” He makes an excellent 
 statement of the appeal the imitation of Scott had for his time: “...the actors in these 
 works have not only a human, but a national, and often a provincial character. . . . The 
 subject of manners and customs is, moreover, one of general interest, and as an adherence 
 to these serves to give individuality to the characters in these narratives, it is so far an 
 improvement on the practice of the older novels, and advantageous to the writer.” See 
 North American Review, XXI, 78-104 (July, 1825). 
 
2 
 
 Neal F. Doubleday 
 
 tionalistic fiction patterned after the work of Scott, and to discuss 
 Hawthorne’s final attitude toward the critical demand in which 
 his work had its inception. 
 
 Hawthorne had been in college but one year when W. H. 
 Gardiner, in some prefatory paragraphs to a review of Cooper’s 
 The Spy, stated the three great historical resources of the American 
 fiction writer: the Colonial period, the Indian wars, and the Revo¬ 
 lution. “What would not the author of Waverley,” Gardiner asked, 
 “make of such materials.?”^ Ten years later, when Hawthorne was 
 beginning to write for The Token, his first publication outside of 
 Fanshawe and a few pieces for the Salem Gazette, the young Whit¬ 
 tier was calling for the use of the same materials.® Hawthorne 
 makes important use of only one of these “three matters of American 
 Romance,”® the Puritan material.^ W. C. Brownell has remarked, 
 rather unaccountably, that Hawthorne’s works “are thoroughly 
 original, quite without literary derivation upon which much of our 
 literature leans with such deferential complacence. Even the theme 
 of many of them—the romance of Puritan New England—was 
 Hawthorne’s discovery.”® Actually, parallels in literary theory to 
 Hawthorne’s practice in his first period may be found as early as 
 a Phi Beta Kappa address by William Tudor, which was printed 
 in the second volume of the North American Review and which 
 helps to mark the beginnings of a distinct New England literary 
 consciousness. Writing almost prophetically at the beginning of 
 Scott’s career as a novelist, Tudor stated those characteristics of 
 Scott’s work which were to influence American literary theory and 
 
 'North American Review, XV, 255-257 (July, 1822). 
 
 ^The Literary Remains of John G. C. Brainard, ed. J. G. Whittier (Hartford, 1832), 
 P- 35 - 
 
 * Carl Van Doren, The American Novel (New York, 1933), p. 15. 
 
 ’’ Hawthorne regrets that he “was shut out from the most peculiar field of American 
 fiction by an inability to see any romance, or poetry, or grandeur, or beauty in the Indian 
 character, at least till such traits were pointed out by others.” And he adds, “I do abhor 
 an Indian story” {Worlds, II, 483). He remarks in “Roger Malvin’s Burial” that “Lxjvell’s 
 Fight” is “one of the few incidents of Indian warfare naturally susceptible of the moon¬ 
 light of romance” (II, 381). Even in “The Great Carbuncle,” an allegory made from an 
 Indian legend, Hawthorne keeps the tale well away from Indians. Likewise, his use of 
 material from the time of the Revolution is carefully limited, in tales like “Howe’s 
 Masquerade” or “Old Esther Dudley,” to the use of incidents which have an implicit 
 unity and a symbolic quality. At the end of his career, in Septimius Felton, he disclaims 
 interest as an artist in the surrounding action, and seems to feel that there might be 
 danger of its intrusion upon his real theme (XI, 242-243). 
 
 ^American Prose Masters (New York, 1923), p. 51. 
 
Literary Nationalism 
 
 3 
 
 practice so deeply. Tudor says, speaking of the resources of Ameri¬ 
 can history for the fiction writer, that “Perilous and romantick 
 adventures, figurative and eloquent harangues, strong contrasts and 
 important interests, are as frequent in this portion of history, as the 
 theatre on which these actions were performed is abundant in 
 grand and impressive scenery.” In this single sentence we see some¬ 
 thing of Hawthorne’s early practice in the use of history: the perilous 
 and romantic adventure of “The Grey Champion,” the eloquent 
 harangue of “Endicott and the Red Cross,” the strong contrast of 
 “The Maypole of Merry Mount,” the important interest of “Howe’s 
 Masquerade.” But it is perhaps more important that two of Tudor’s 
 four suggestions of specific historical incidents available for the 
 writer are used by Hawthorne—the career of Ann Hutchinson, in 
 “Mrs. Hutchinson” (1830), and the striking “incident mentioned by 
 President Stiles ... of Dixwell, one of the regicides, suddenly 
 emerging from his concealment, and by his presence animating an 
 infant settlement . . .,” in “The Grey Champion” (1835), though 
 changed to fit Hawthorne’s purpose.® John Neal, writing in Black¬ 
 wood’s in 1825, also suggests the life of Mrs. Hutchinson and the 
 accounts of the regicide judges as story material, as well as “the 
 female Quakers ... or the witches,” the materials of “The Gentle 
 Boy” and “Young Goodman Brown.” Neal complains, indeed, of 
 the pre-emption of the story of the regicide judge by Scott in Feveril 
 of the Fea\ (1822).^® “The Grey Champion” particularly well 
 illustrates the connection between Hawthorne’s work and the literary 
 climate about him, for in it Hawthorne is not only fulfilling 
 Tudor’s prescription, as three Americans had done before him, 
 and almost certainly deriving (at least his title) from Peveril of the 
 Fea\^^ but also changing the traditional story—in which the “infant 
 settlement” was imperiled by Indians—in order to combine it with 
 the history of the resistance in Massachusetts to the government of 
 Sir Edmund Andros. Just the year before the publication of “The 
 Grey Champion,” Rufus Choate, in an address called “The Colonial 
 Age of New England,” had made the resistance to Andros the 
 
 *'North American Review, II, 28-29 (Nov., 1815). Stiles identifies the regicide judge 
 concerned in the incident cited as Goffe, not Dixwell. 
 
 John Neal, American Writers: A Series of Papers Contributed to Blacl{wood's Maga¬ 
 zine (1824-1825), ed. F. L. Pattee (Durham, N. C., 1937), pp. 191-192. 
 
 G. H. Orians, “The Angel of Hadley in Fiction," American Literature, IV, 257- 
 269 (Nov., 1932). 
 
4 
 
 Neal F. Doubleday 
 
 prime example of the Colonial spirit of liberty, an example to be 
 remembered and taught to succeeding generations.^^ 
 
 The literary addresses of Rufus Choate are particularly interesting 
 in reference to Hawthorne because Choate is so eloquently representa¬ 
 tive of the dominant trend in the critical theory of his time. An 
 address delivered at Salem in 1833, called “The Importance of 
 Illustrating New-England History by a Series of Romances like The 
 Waverley Novels,sums up impressively the combination of a 
 literary nationalism, natural enough to a new nation, with the in¬ 
 fluence of Scott. Orians has well called it “the finest expression” 
 of the demand for a Scott-like national literature.It is Choate’s 
 contention that the writer of historical fiction vivifies and fills in 
 for the imagination the story of the past, and that every lover of 
 American literature would like, not one, but a thousand American 
 Scotts. Moreover, the American fiction writer ought not only to pre¬ 
 serve, but to make intelligible and to universalize history: he must 
 accommodate “the show of things to the desires and needs of the im¬ 
 mortal moral nature.” Particularly is the Puritan past available for 
 this purpose, and it should be exalted and made to represent an ideal 
 spirit of liberty and nobility.^® Hawthorne’s “The Grey Champion” 
 is as perfect an exemplification of Choate’s theory as could be de¬ 
 sired; “Endicott and the Red Cross” (1838), is, but for one ironic 
 paragraph, as much so.^® Hawthorne says the Grey Champion him¬ 
 self is “the type of New England’s hereditary spirit,” his march “the 
 pledge that New England’s sons will vindicate their ancestry”; he 
 makes Endicott’s “rending of the Red Cross from New England’s 
 banner the first omen of that deliverance which our fathers consum- 
 
 ^^The Worlds of Rufus Choate, ed. S. G. Brown (Boston, 1862), I, 356-359. 
 
 Ibid., I, 319-346. Something of the representative quality of Choate’s address may 
 be seen in a comparison of a passage from it with a stanza from Whittier’s “The Garrison of 
 Cape Ann.” Choate wishes the American writer to be “like Old Mortality among the 
 graves of the unforgotten faithful, wiping the dust from the urns of our fathers,—^gathering 
 up whatever of illustrious achievement. .. their history commemorates, and weaving it 
 all into an immortal and noble national literature. . . .” Whittier writes: 
 
 So, with something of the feeling which the Covenanter knew. 
 
 When with pious chisel wandering Scotland’s moorland graveyards through. 
 
 From the graves of old traditions I part the blackberry-vines. 
 
 Wipe the moss from off the headstones, and retouch the faded lines. 
 
 “The Romance Ferment after Waverley," p. 428. 
 
 See Choate’s “The Colonial Age of New England” and “The Age of the Pilgrims 
 the Heroic Period of Our History,” Worlds, I, 347-393. 
 
 It is not, of course, contended that Hawthorne had Choate’s address consciously in 
 mind in the composition of these tales, though it is likely enough that he heard it. For 
 the resemblance of these tales to the work of Scott, see Woodberry, op. cit., pp. 134-136. 
 
Literary Nationalism 
 
 5 
 
 mated after the bones of the stern Puritan had lain more than a 
 century in the dust.” 
 
 But there is an emphasis in Choate’s theory from which Haw¬ 
 thorne makes a significant departure. He will not use the past only 
 to glorify and idealize it. Choate’s motives are worthy enough; he 
 believes that historical fiction would foster a corporate imaginative 
 life and reassemble “the people of America in one vast congre¬ 
 gation”: “Reminded of our fathers, we should remember that we 
 are brethren.” He urges a selection from the varied materials of 
 history to achieve artistic unity; but he urges, too, a selection in 
 which all that is regrettable in Puritan society be suppressed. The 
 writer of historical fiction will neglect that large portion of history 
 which “chills, shames and disgusts us.” Choate makes explicit what 
 he thinks unavailable in New England history: “The persecutions 
 of the Quakers, the controversies with Roger Williams and Mrs. 
 Hutchinson, the perpetual synods and ecclesiastical surveillance of 
 the old times; a great deal of this is too tedious to be read, or it 
 offends and alienates you. It is truth, fact; but it is just what you 
 do not want to know, and are none the wiser for knowing.” Choate 
 would hardly have wished Hawthorne to include, in “Endicott 
 and the Red Cross,” the Wanton Gospeller’s question, “Call you 
 this liberty of conscience.?” or the suggestion of an answer in the 
 “sad and quiet smile” which “flitted across the mild visage of Roger 
 Williams.” Much less would Choate have had Hawthorne write 
 “The Gentle Boy” or “Mrs. Hutchinson”—perhaps not even “The 
 Maypole of Merry Mount,” almost certainly not “Young Goodman 
 Brown.” While Hawthorne’s work has the ethical emphasis in 
 which Choate’s theory is representative of the best in New England 
 literary theory, Hawthorne comes, early in his career, to relegate 
 history to background, and to be less interested in the picturesqueness 
 of individual incident than in history as background for the develop¬ 
 ment of a general, not specifically national, moral theme. 
 
 Hawthorne himself makes it plain that, in his maturity, his 
 acceptance of the conventional doctrine for the use of American mate¬ 
 rials was limited. In 1846 Hawthorne reviewed W. G. S im ms’s 
 Views and Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction 
 (New York, 1845),” which has for its main theme a belated repe- 
 
 Part I of Simms’s book, with which Hawthorne is mostly concerned, begins with 
 a review of an address by Alexander B. Meek on “Americanism in Literature,” and then 
 
6 
 
 Neal F. Doubleday 
 
 tition of the familiar plea for an American literature that will 
 use the materials of American history. Hawthorne’s review repre¬ 
 sents his dislike for the bombastic generalization in which Simms 
 is fairly typical of middle nineteenth-century literary theory in 
 America. But Hawthorne’s most important stricture on Simms’s 
 book suggests his own position concerning the use of historical 
 material. For Hawthorne, historical background relieves, and at the 
 same time gives perspective to, an ethical or spiritual theme. He 
 says of Simms’s book: 
 
 ... we cannot help feeling that the real treasures of his subject have 
 escaped the author’s notice. The themes suggested by him, viewed as he 
 views them, would produce nothing but historical novels, cast in the 
 same worn out mould that has been in use these thirty years, and which 
 it is time to break up and fling away. To be a prophet of Art requires 
 almost as high a gift as to be a fulfiller of the prophecy. Mr. Simms 
 has not this gift; he possesses nothing of the magic touch that should 
 cause new intellectual and moral shapes to spring up in the reader’s 
 mind, peopling with varied life what had hitherto been a barren waste.^* 
 
 But it may very well be that Hawthorne’s feeling that the mould 
 of American historical fiction was outworn influenced his own 
 departure, after The Scarlet Letter, from the field of historical 
 fiction.^® 
 
 proceeds to a discussion of historical subjects in general, with illustrative suggestions such 
 as “Benedict Arnold as a subject for Fictitious Story” and “Pocahontas; A Subject for the 
 Historical Painter.” 
 
 Randall Stewart, “Hawthorne’s Contributions to the Salem Advertiser,” American 
 Literature, V, 331-332 (Jan., 1934). 
 
 Hawthorne has his share, too, in the negative aspect of the literary nationalism 
 discussion. Passages in the prefaces to both The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun 
 repeat, and rather belatedly, the complaint of many -American writers in the first quarter 
 of the century that the American scene, particularly the contemporary scene, did not 
 furnish the proper background and materials for the fiction writer. Hawthorne, in turning 
 from materials in which he had had distinguished success, recurs to the frayed phrases of 
 this complaint as a ready-to-hand explanation for his way of treating a scene in the present. 
 These two prefaces should not be cited (as they have been) exclusively as evidence of a 
 special temperamental quality in Hawthorne or of a special romanticism, for they resemble 
 closely, indeed repeat, what literally .scores of his predecessors had said before him. See, 
 for example, a passage in Cooper’s Notions of the Americans and his preface to Home as 
 Found in Robert Spiller, James Fenimore Cooper (New York, 1936), pp. 15-16 and 
 303-304. Bryant in the third of his Lectures on Poetry (1825) offers a concise and fair 
 statement of the position of those who find American materials unavailable for literature, 
 a position which he opposes. For a good discussion of the whole problem see William 
 Ellery Sedgwick, “The Materials for an American Literature,” Harvard Studies and Notes 
 in Philology and Literature, XVII, 141-162 (1935). Henry James seems to have attributed to 
 Hawthorne his own (James’s) feeling about the availability of the American scene, in an 
 often quoted passage. See his Hawthorne (London, 1887), p. 43. 
 
Literary Nationalism 
 
 7 
 
 The mature Hawthorne found that his early admiration for 
 Scott had become limited with the passing years and his changing 
 concept of the function of literature. He was aware of a certain 
 lack of depth in Scott which perhaps he consciously contrasts with 
 his own seriousness. In “P’s Correspondence” (1845), Hawthorne 
 makes “P” say of Scott: “Were he still a writer, and as brilliant a 
 one as ever, he could no longer maintain anything like the same 
 position in literature. The world, nowadays, requires a more earnest 
 purpose, a deeper moral, and a closer and homelier truth than he 
 was qualified to supply it with.” In the same sketch is included a 
 characterization of Abbotsford (long before Hawthorne had seen 
 it) and a judgment of Scott: “. . . that splendid fantasy . . . which 
 grew out of his brain and became a symbol of the great romancer’s 
 tastes, feelings, studies, prejudices, and modes of intellect. Whether 
 in verse, prose, or architecture, he could achieve but one thing, al¬ 
 though that one in infinite variety.”^® Some years later in his ac¬ 
 count of a visit to Abbotsford in the English Noteboot{s, Hawthorne, 
 after a description of Scott’s collection of curios, is led to reflect on 
 the lack in Scott’s character that Abbotsford typifies. What he 
 writes seems to be partly an unconscious reminiscence of the passage 
 just quoted: 
 
 On the whole, there is no simple and great impression left by Abbotsford; 
 and I felt angry and dissatisfied with myself for not feeling something 
 which I did not and could not feel. But it is just like going to a museum, 
 if you look into particulars; and one learns from it, too, that Scott 
 could not have been really a wise man, nor an earnest one, nor one that 
 grasped the truth of life; he did but play, and the play grew very sad 
 toward its close. In a certain way, however, I understand his romances 
 the better for having seen his house; and his house the better for having 
 read his romances. They throw light on one another. 
 
 Yet Hawthorne confesses “a sentiment of remorse” for having visited 
 the home of Scott “with so cold a heart and in so critical a mcxxl,— 
 his dwelling-place . . . whom I had so admired and loved, and 
 who had done so much for my happiness when I was young.” He 
 still cherishes Scott in “a warm place” and he anticipates rereading 
 all his novels.^^ Hawthorne may indeed have cherished Scott, for 
 much of his work is to be regarded as a development in an American 
 tradition which nourished itself on Scott. 
 
 ““Works, II, 415-416. 
 
 ivories. VIII, 273-274. 
 
Suggestions for Interpreting The Marble Faun 
 
 Dorothy Waples 
 
 P erhaps The Marble Faun is a novel which needs to be seen 
 in a certain light to be fully revealed. Although Hawthorne 
 has always had his admirers and defenders among literary critics, 
 this novel has sometimes been selected for unfavorable comparison. 
 Henry James, who so frequently penetrated to the core of Haw¬ 
 thorne’s thought, set The Marble Faun at comparatively slight value 
 among its author’s novels. The faun he granted to be charming, 
 but he said: “I think it a pity that the author should not have made 
 him more definitely modern, without reverting so much to his 
 mythological properties and antecedents, which are very gracefully 
 touched upon, but which belong to the region of picturesque con¬ 
 ceits, much more than to that of real psychology.”^ James was re¬ 
 garding the romance in the light of cosmopolitan realistic novels, 
 and under that light it did not show well. Granville Hicks has com¬ 
 plained in. The Great Tradition that Hawthorne wrote as if unaware 
 of the stream of thought in his own day. But Hicks was regarding 
 Hawthorne from a point of view which sees only that great liter¬ 
 ature cannot be written within our social framework; and examined 
 for traces of socialism, the novel does not shine. Ludwig Lewisohn 
 has called The Marble Faun a book “quite without bone or muscle, 
 that is, acceptable intellectual or moral content.” He was viewing 
 it as the expression of a private, personal, unnaturally exaggerated 
 sense of guilt in Hawthorne. So viewed, of course the novel is 
 devoid of acceptable content—even of sense. 
 
 Now, Mr. Lewisohn tells us that Hawthorne’s treatment of sin 
 is different from a normal artist’s treatment; and to define the 
 difference, he uses a statement by Thomas Mann. “The difference 
 between Hawthorne and the more normal artist is this,” Mr. Lew¬ 
 isohn says, “that the latter dwells upon the process of creative justifi¬ 
 cation of himself and, as Thomas Mann has pointed out, hence of 
 
 ^Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York, n.d.), pp. 163-164. 
 
The Marble Faun 
 
 9 
 
 mankind. Out of his need to justify himself he becomes servant 
 and savior of his race and seeks constantly to ‘justify the ways of 
 God to man.’ Hawthorne, on the contrary, was imprisoned with 
 his feeling of guilt and impelled to state and restate it in tale after 
 tale and romance after romance.”” 
 
 The best part of this passage is its statement that the normal 
 artist conducts a creative justification of mankind. If we test Haw¬ 
 thorne’s novel by this demand upon the artist, we may by this very 
 definition find in The Marble Faun some bone or muscle, after all, 
 some intellectual or moral content. In the process, we may even 
 discover a connection between the faun and “real psychology” which 
 escaped Henry James. We may find a content acceptable enough 
 to warrant our saying that instead of being merely provincial, out 
 of the stream of contemporary thought, or indicative of abnormality. 
 The Marble Faun now shows itself “more definitely modern” than 
 it seemed to James. 
 
 It has been asked before this whether “nature caught in the snare 
 of guilt” is indeed the subject of The Marble Faun. Is not the sub¬ 
 ject, rather, nature improved by a share of guilt This is a theme 
 so daring that though it is reiterated, Hawthorne tempers it to the 
 shorn lambs who may read it; Hilda is allowed to say, perhaps on 
 behalf of the timid reader, that the idea is shocking. 
 
 Hawthorne is investigating for himself the nature of good and 
 evil. He puts into Miriam’s mouth the question whether the murder 
 had not been a blessing in disguise, a means of education whereby 
 the “simple and imperfect nature” of Donatello had been brought 
 to “a point of feeling and intelligence which it could have reached 
 under no other discipline.” Kenyon warns her that she is tending 
 towards “unfathomable abysses.” But Miriam professes that “there 
 is a pleasure” in such thoughts. 
 
 But these thoughts are on the fall of man: “I delight to brood 
 on the verge of this great mystery.. . . The story of the fall of man! 
 Is it not repeated in our romance of Monte Beni.?” As the romance 
 of Monte Beni repeats Adam’s story, so does the life of Donatello 
 repeat the romance of his ancestor of Monte Beni. It is evident, 
 
 ^Expression in America (New York, 1932), pp. 184, 172-173. 
 
 ° Cf. Lloyd Morris, The Rebellious Puritan: Portrait of Mr. Hawthorne (New York, 
 1927). PP- 79 > 142 -I 43 > 332: D. H. Lawrence, passages on Hawthorne in Studies in Classic 
 American Literature (New York, 1923). 
 
10 
 
 Dorothy Waples 
 
 then, that in this novel Ha\vthorne is attempting to define the Fall; 
 and presently we are obliged to admit that he is also attempting to 
 “justify the ways of God to man,” for Miriam proceeds to ask: “Was 
 that very sin into which Adam precipitated himself ... the destined 
 means by which ... we are to attain a higher, brighter, and pro¬ 
 founder happiness, than our lost birthright gave.^ Will not this 
 . . . account for the permitted existence of sin, as no other theory 
 can?”'* When the sculptor cries out that he cannot follow Miriam 
 in these thoughts, it is not because he thinks they are untrue, but 
 because he feels that they are dangerous. “Ask Hilda,” advises 
 Miriam. Kenyon, after some solitary thinking, does ask Hilda the 
 same questions. She shrinks from Kenyon and his dangerous prob¬ 
 ings; but we have already perceived that Hilda’s own soul has been 
 made more capacious and her heart has been opened merely by her 
 bystander’s knowledge of the crime. Her well-brought-up conscience 
 simply will not let her admit what Hawthorne has told us about her. 
 
 Despite Hilda’s shrinkings, Hawthorne, tested by Lewisohn’s 
 citation of Mann, seems to qualify as a normal artist, so far as his 
 intentions are concerned. The question would be whether his 
 method is interesting and his conclusion acceptable. 
 
 I 
 
 Now, there is an indication of deeper than superficial insight in 
 the fact that when they consider the educative power of sin, Miriam 
 feels pleasure; Kenyon, attraction and fear; and Hilda, revulsion. 
 Yet this insight is interesting principally if we consider it from a 
 twentieth-century point of view. Compare Hawthorne with Henry 
 James as a writer of psychological novels, and The Marble Faun is 
 nonsense; but compare him with an author who has the ideas of 
 this century, such as Thomas Mann, whom Lewisohn cited against 
 him, and T he Marble Faun shows both profundity and charm. 
 
 One reason for this difference is that since The Marble Faun was 
 written Sigmund Freud has given statement and currency to some 
 theories of mental behavior which Hawthorne seems to have ob¬ 
 jectified in the novel. How clearly Hawthorne defined the psycho¬ 
 logical manifestations in question and how well he embodied them 
 in fiction, will be variously estimated; but even though these matters 
 are disputed, if reading The Marble Faun in the light of some 
 
 * The Marble Faun (Boston, i860), II, 250-251. 
 
The Marble Faun 
 
 II 
 
 contemporary ideas brings out any new values in a novel which has 
 been depreciated, it will not be a valueless activity. 
 
 To list some topics which interested both Freud and Hawthorne 
 is distinctly not to attempt psychoanalysis of Hawthorne, in any 
 degree whatever;® the purpose here is to use a psychologist’s state¬ 
 ment of some ideas which are discernible in The Marble Faun as 
 ideas, treated by a conscious artist, not as unconscious symptoms.® 
 
 Five such ideas which are stated by Freud are; timelessness as a 
 characteristic of the unconscious; the connection between myth or 
 symbol and the unconscious; repetition-compulsion; the existence 
 of a death instinct; the contest for the soul between life and death. 
 
 Mention of these concepts perhaps will suggest to various readers 
 various contemporaries who have made use of them in fiction. It 
 may be advantageous in this essay not only to demonstrate the 
 similarity of ideas in Hawthorne’s novel to these five concepts but 
 also to illustrate his modern use of them by comparison with a con¬ 
 temporary novelist who shares them. Since Thomas Mann has 
 already been mentioned as defining the artist’s aim, it is fitting that 
 his work be that chosen for these comparisons. 
 
 II 
 
 First, then, to be considered, is Hawthorne’s use of timelessness. 
 As Thomas Mann’s Hans Castorp learned in a sanatorium that 
 months were of different lengths under different circumstances, 
 Hawthorne learned in Rome what comparative antiquity is. After 
 seeing the “Egyptian obelisks . . . put even the Augustan or Repub¬ 
 lican antiquities to shame,” he set down in his notebook that he 
 remembered “reading in a New York newspaper, an account of one 
 of the public buildings of that city—a relic of ‘the olden time,’ the 
 writer called it; for it was erected in 1825!”^ And so when Haw- 
 
 ° Lewisohn’s remarks, professedly Freudian, on the probability of Hawthorne’s having 
 had a sense of guilt with an erotic origin, exhibits the kind of errors laymen make in 
 attempts to psychoanalyze; Freud himself says that a sense of guilt is not erotic in origin 
 but arises from aggressiveness mrned inward by self-restraint, and that moral anxiety arises 
 from a conflict of the ego with the super-ego, not with the id. See New Introductory Lectures 
 on Psycho-Analysis (London, 1933), pp. 103, 104, 141-143. 
 
 ® Regis Michaud, The American Novel To-day (Boston, 1928), p. 32, writes that 
 Hawthorne “is, in many respects, very Freudian,” but applies this interpretation chiefly to 
 T he Scarlet Letter, dealing in rather general terms with repressions. L.-E. Chretien, La Pensee 
 morale de Nathaniel Hawthorne (Paris, 1932), appears to have a Freudian interpretation of 
 The Marble Faun in mind, but if so, it comes to little more than emphasizing the importance 
 of love as being a recurrent theme in the novel. 
 
 ^Passages from the French and Italian Note-Bool{s (Boston, 1892), p. 60. 
 
12 
 
 Dorothy Waples 
 
 thorne wished to have his reader in “that state of feeling which is 
 experienced oftenest at Rome,” this feeling turns out to be “a vague 
 sense of ponderous remembrances; a perception of such weight and 
 density in a bygone life, of which this spot was the centre, that the 
 present moment is pressed down or crowded out, and our individual 
 affairs and interests are but half as real here as elsewhere.” For 
 “Side by side with the massiveness of the Roman Past, all matters 
 that we handle or dream of now-a-days look evanescent and vision¬ 
 ary alike.”* Other passages preserve as the enveloping atmosphere 
 of Rome this dream of confused time and even of place, lest we 
 awake from it.® 
 
 Now, this sense of timeless dream serves a purpose in the novel. 
 It is not mere texture for its own sake. Timelessness is, we are told, 
 a trait of the unconscious mind.^® As an element in the atmosphere 
 of this novel, it is of strong effectiveness in bringing out the sig¬ 
 nificance of such a mythological creature as a faun. The connection 
 between the unconscious mind and myth is, of course, now well 
 known.^^ There are interesting indications that Hawthorne saw a 
 connection between certain symbols which appear frequently in 
 myth and the operations of the unconscious mind. 
 
 He not only wrote of a spiritualistic seance that it seemed to be 
 “a sort of dreaming awake” because “the whole material is, from 
 the first, in the dreamer’s mind,” but said this material was “con¬ 
 cealed at various depths below the surface.” He thought the ex¬ 
 ploration of these levels of the mind was important, for he said he 
 could not “sufficiently wonder at the pig-headedness both of meta¬ 
 physicians and physiologists, in not accepting the phenomena so far 
 as to make them the subject of investigation.” He makes an in¬ 
 genious suggestion in interpretation, himself, in the theory by which 
 he accounts for the mischievous spirit, Mary Runnel, who was the 
 only spirit in the seances which did not come “evidently from 
 Dreamland.” She, he suspects, “represents that lurking scepticism, 
 that sense of unreality, of which we are often conscious amid the 
 most vivid phantasmagoria of a dream.”^® These statements are 
 
 ® The Marble Faun, I, 16-17. 
 
 ^Ibid., I, 131, 137, 149, 152, 190, 192, 197, 201; II, 93, 223. 
 
 Freud, op. cit., p. 99. 
 
 Compare, for instance, the dream symbol of the bridge with the bridge in mythology. 
 Freud, op. cit., pp. 37-38, writes of the existence of such parallels. 
 
 ^‘Italian Note-Books, Sept, i, 1858, MS (Morgan Library). Illustrations from Haw- 
 
The Marble Faun 
 
 13 
 
 indications that Hawthorne had a general interest in the uncon¬ 
 scious. 
 
 But Hawthorne shows in The Marble Faun an interest in specific 
 symbols. The first page of this novel introduces us to a statue 
 which is the “symbol ... of the Human Soul, with its choice of 
 Innocence or Evil close at hand,” and which is equally a personifica¬ 
 tion of the action of the book which is thus opened. The statue is 
 “the pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom, but 
 assaulted by a snake,” and Hawthorne recognizes that the symbols 
 here used have been apt ones for two thousand years. Echoes of the 
 symbolism of dove and snake are repeated at intervals as if to keep 
 a pattern.^^ A legend is true, he once wrote, “if it is a genuine 
 one that has been adopted into the popular belief, . . . and incrusted 
 over with humanity, by passing from one homely mind to another. 
 Then, such stories get to be true, in a certain sense, and indeed in 
 that sense may be called true throughout, for the very nucleus, the 
 fiction in them, seems to have come out of the heart of man in a 
 way that cannot be imitated by malice aforethought. . . Though 
 this was said of the growth of legend, it would serve as a good 
 description of the development of the symbols of mythology, and 
 may be taken as an indication that Hawthorne was aware of the 
 process by which these emerge. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The faun concept is the principal element of mythology which 
 connects the timeless Roman atmosphere with the unconscious. The 
 novel is not named for Donatello, but for a marble statue which 
 had set the novelist wondering what the faun’s relationship was to 
 man. The novel is his answer to the questions which thus arose. 
 Hawthorne’s conclusion was that Praxiteles’ sculpture was an ex¬ 
 pression or symbol of man’s delightful escape from his own moral 
 censor: “Perhaps it is the very lack of moral severity, of any high 
 
 thorne’s fiction other than The Marble Faun of his knowledge of the unconscious, such as 
 the presence of both invited and uninvited shapes from the past at “A Select Party,” would 
 form too long a list here. But Hawthorne’s own half-waking dreams and composition in a 
 trancclike state have been mentioned by Arlin Turner (“Autobiographical Elements in 
 Hawthorne’s ‘The Blithedale Romance,’” University of Texas Studies in English, No. 15, 
 pp. 39-62) and E. L. Chandler (Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, VII, 31, July, 
 1926) and perhaps have some bearing. 
 
 ^^The Marble Faun, I, 75, 120, 218; II, 123, 175, 199. 
 
 Septimius Felton (Cambridge, 1883), p. 326. 
 
Dorothy Waples 
 
 14 
 
 and heroic ingredient in the character of the Faun, that makes it so 
 delightful an object to the human eye and to the frailty of the human 
 heart.” Furthermore, the inception of the statue in the sculptor’s 
 mind seemed to Hawthorne to be derived, possibly, from a racial 
 memory: “after all, the idea may have been no dream, but rather a 
 poet’s reminiscence of a period when man’s affinity with nature was 
 more strict, and his fellowship with every living thing more inti¬ 
 mate and dear.” The faun was “Neither man nor animal, and yet 
 no monster; but a being in whom both races meet on friendly 
 ground! The idea grows coarse as we handle it, and hardens in our 
 grasp. But, if the spectator broods long over the statue, he will be 
 conscious of its spell.” 
 
 Donatello at first possessed just this charm. Besides this, he had 
 an origin in “the same happy and poetic kindred who dwelt in 
 Arcadia, and . . . enriched the world with dreams, at least, and 
 fables, lovely if unsubstantial, of the Golden Age.” He is a per¬ 
 sonification in fiction as the faun was in marble of one aspect of the 
 mind. Even Kenyon and Hilda seem half aware of a connection 
 between the faun concept and the unconscious. Kenyon is amused 
 and charmed to discover that under Hilda’s “little straw hat” “Great 
 Pan is not dead . . . after all!” and “The whole tribe of mythical 
 creatures yet live in the moonlit seclusion of a young girl’s fancy....” 
 But on an earlier occasion Hilda has confessed, not without “shrink¬ 
 ing a little,” that she does not quite like to consider what the source 
 might be of the “nameless charm” which Kenyon felt in a creature 
 “not supernatural, but just on the verge of nature.” Hilda, with all 
 her purity, never quite liked to face her own thoughts, and this 
 shrinking may have been shrinking from herself. Hawthorne may 
 have intended Kenyon to be speaking more truly than the sculptor 
 realizes about the habitat of mythical creatures under straw hats.^® 
 
 Since the faun represents only one side of human nature, Haw¬ 
 thorne works out his fable with the help of a second symbolic figure, 
 the spectre of the catacombs. The spectre is not, like the faun, a 
 figure already established in mythology “by passing from one 
 homely mind to another”; but there are indications that he, like 
 the faun, symbolizes in this novel a part of the unconscious mind. 
 The spectre’s demon face, which resembles one painted by Guido, 
 
 ^^The Marble Faun, I, 133-135, 24. 
 
The Marble Faun 
 
 15 
 
 brings up queries about its inception similar to those inspired by the 
 marble faun; had Guido “hit ideally upon just this face” by imagin¬ 
 ing “the utmost of sin and misery,” or was it a portrait of a face 
 that had actually haunted the master “into the gloom” of his last 
 years and after the painter’s death had lurked in the ancient sep¬ 
 ulchres for centuries until “it was Miriam’s ill-hap to encounter 
 him”? Is the spectre’s archetype, in other words, a product of an 
 individual’s imagination, or a summary of racial experience 
 
 In this double symbolism of faun and spectre, The Marble Faun 
 is highly comparable to “Death in Venice,” where the figures of 
 life, death, and love seem to be projections from the mind of the 
 moribund artist in the story and yet to have objective life as well. 
 Donatello and the spectre similarly seem to move about Rome like 
 visible characters and mortal men, but to be at the same time eternal 
 symbols of two sides of the human soul. These two sides of the soul 
 engage in a struggle for supremacy; and, as in “Death in Venice,” 
 they represent the life instinct and the death instinct at war. For 
 an explanation of this contest between life and death, we must turn 
 to Freud’s theory of repetition-compulsion. 
 
 rv 
 
 Briefly, this theory of repetition-compulsion runs thus; Man feels 
 a compulsion to repeat past events which is a stronger principle in 
 him than is the pleasure principle, since it can drive him to repeat 
 painful experiences by recall. This behavior, and also the tendency 
 to torture others or as a substitute to torture himself, gave rise to 
 the hypothesis that there is in man a positive desire for dissolution, 
 a death instinct. Freud connects this death instinct with the repeti¬ 
 tion-compulsion by the theory that if “life arose out of inanimate 
 matter,” since that moment the repetition-compulsion has sought to 
 “re-establish the inorganic state of things.” Thus the instinct for 
 death v/ould be the result of life and inseparable from life, even an 
 indication of life. The impulse to self-destruction may be regarded 
 
 There are hints (hardly to be called proofs) that the spectre, like the faun, had his 
 dwelling in the human mind. The chapter tide “Subterranean Reminiscences” suggests a 
 mental underworld as well as a physical one. “She has called me forth," says the spectre, as 
 if he might have been kept submerged. The spectre, having been admitted to Miriam’s studio, 
 “left his features ... in many of her sketches.” Of certain gloomy paintings repellent to 
 Donatello and evidently done under the spectre’s influence, Miriam said: “They are ugly 
 phantoms that stole out of my mind; not things that I created, but things that haunt me” 
 (1, 45-46, 61). 
 
i6 
 
 Dorothy Waples 
 
 as “the manifestation of a death instinct, which can never be absent 
 in any vital process. And now the instincts in which we believe 
 separate themselves into two groups: the erotic instincts, which are 
 always trying to collect living substance into even larger unities, 
 and the death instincts which act against that tendency, and try to 
 bring living matter back into an inorganic condition. The co-oper¬ 
 ation and opposition of these two forces produce the phenomena of 
 life to which death puts an end.” This sounds, Freud says himself, 
 like Schopenhauer, but Freud claims a difference: “We do not 
 assert that death is the only aim of life; we do not overlook the 
 presence of life by the side of death. We recognize two fundamental 
 instincts, and ascribe to each of them its own aim.”^^ 
 
 The use of repetition in connection with timelessness is well 
 illustrated from Thomas Mann’s fiction in those passages in which 
 characters, such as Hans Castorp and Joseph, identify themselves 
 with their ancestors. Frequently Mann connects both repetition and 
 loss of the time sense with myth, as in the repetitions of the essential 
 features of the Adonis myth in various guises over and over in 
 Joseph and His Brothers, until the throwing into the pit and the 
 descent into monkeyland seem themselves variations of the myth. 
 
 So Donatello is connected with repetition and with myth by 
 more than his resemblance to his Dionysian relatives. He repeats not 
 only the appearance and character of those members of his line who 
 bear the marks of the faun; he repeats also the experience of the 
 knight who wooed and lost the fountain nymph, him who stained 
 the spring with blood. And his story repeats (so Miriam says) 
 Adam’s Fall. 
 
 Repetition occurs also in the career of the faun’s antithesis, the 
 spectre of the catacombs: in the rumors of his agelong existence, 
 during which he is said to have prevailed on “any unwary visitor to 
 take him by the hand” and in the gratification of “his fiendish 
 malignity” by perpetrating some mischief, bringing back some old 
 pestilence or “long-buried evil” or “teaching the modern world some 
 decayed and dusty kind of crime.”^® 
 
 Freud, op. cit., pp. 137-140. The idea is more fully developed in Beyond the Pleasure 
 Principle (London and Vienna, 1922). 
 
 ^^The Marble Faun, I, 200, 178, 47. 
 
The Marble Faun 
 
 17 
 
 V 
 
 The breath of pestilential death and crime, rising repeatedly 
 from the underground haunts of decay by the willingness of some 
 unwary mortal—this is the spectre’s cycle. The animal vitality of 
 Donatello, on the other hand, offers an opposing force. It becomes 
 more and more distinct in the pattern of The Marble Faun that the 
 fable of this novel is the struggle between the death instinct repre¬ 
 sented by the spectre and the life instinct represented by Donatello. 
 
 The Borghese Gardens are a world where time works no revenges 
 and where Miriam and Donatello are merged in nymph and faun. 
 Here the venerable ilex trees dream, forgetful that “only a few years 
 ago they were ... imperilled by the Gaul’s last assault.” The tender 
 mingling here of art and wildness is a kind of landscape allegory of 
 the constant tendency of nature to redeem her domain from man’s 
 control. Time here is confused, and even age itself may be illusion, 
 for “veritable relics of antiquity” or figures touched by “artful ruin” 
 may close a vista. So the Gardens seem “to have been projected out 
 of the poet’s mind.” Here is the proper setting for myth: “If the 
 ancient Faun were other than the mere creation of old poetry, and 
 could have appeared anywhere, it must have been in such a scene 
 as this.” And here we see the life instinct in Donatello contesting 
 for possession of Miriam against the death instinct in the spectre. 
 
 When the faunlike youth entered the Gardens, his spirit took on 
 “new elasticity.” For Donatello languished in the “stony-hearted 
 streets.” He had disliked the excursion into the underworld of 
 catacombs, though the rest of the party, more normal persons, 
 “went joyously down into that vast tomb, and wandered by torch¬ 
 light through a sort of dream.” He could not bear “all that ghastli¬ 
 ness which the Gothic mind loves to associate with the idea of 
 death.” His ancestors of Monte Beni had “hated the very thought 
 of death” for generations. They had been a “cheerful race of men 
 in their natural disposition”; so much so that a sinful ancestor had 
 found it needful to order an alabaster copy of his own skull to be 
 handed down to his posterity to correct their indulgence in life’s 
 enjoyments. Donatello in time has need of that same skull, but in 
 the Gardens he is purely careless animal vitality.^® 
 
 When Miriam steps into the dreamworld of the Borghese Gar- 
 
 ** Ibid., I, 51, 26, 37, 38; II, 38. 
 
i8 
 
 Dorothy Waples 
 
 dens, and Donatello drops into the path before her from the tree he 
 has climbed to view the fairyland, she is uncertain whether he 
 comes from the upper or the lower world. More than ever, she is 
 impressed by his likeness to the marble faun, and feels a new affec¬ 
 tion for him. Fearing the emotion for its very sweetness, she cries 
 out, “Donatello, how long will this happiness last?” Donatello, 
 who knows no more of time than of death and can remember his 
 own boyhood only by his “best effort,” answers, “Forever! Forever!” 
 
 Yielding to the gaiety of Donatello and the “sweet wilderness,” 
 Miriam herself for a while seemed “born to be sportive forever.” 
 The scene then was “a glimpse far backward into Arcadian life.” 
 
 But it was only Donatello’s charm that created the timeless 
 Arcadia. The spell presently was broken, and then the Gardens be¬ 
 came “only that old tract of pleasure-ground, close by the people’s 
 gate of Rome,—a tract where the crimes and calamities of ages, the 
 many battles, blood recklessly poured out, and deaths of myriads, 
 have corrupted all the soil, creating an influence that makes the air 
 deadly to human beings.” For Miriam’s model, he of the catacombs, 
 has brought, as he always does in the novel, the touch of ruin and 
 of death. No sooner had the “mysterious, dusky, death-scented ap¬ 
 parition” thrown his shadow across the Arcadian sunshine of the 
 Gardens, than all joy died there. Miriam exchanged her dream of 
 eternal gaiety for a hope of suicide.^® 
 
 When the spectre first appeared in the novel, his shaggy dress 
 gave him a resemblance to a satyr; but Donatello’s instant repug¬ 
 nance disclaims all brotherhood. If he is intended to have any 
 attributes of the satyr, and the shaggy dress is meant to indicate any¬ 
 thing beyond mere realism, it must be the violence without the 
 sunny carelessness of the wild part-man. In later appearances, the 
 spectre wears a costume (a monk’s habit) more in keeping with his 
 Gothic connection with the catacombs. As Hilda is compared to a 
 dove, so is he to a serpent. When he first emerges to our view m the 
 heart of underground darkness, the actors in the event seem to be 
 surrounded not merely by a place of death but by death itself; the 
 “great darkness spread all round” a little chapel where the party 
 stood shuddering, and seemed “like that immenser mystery which 
 envelopes our little life, and into which friends vanish, one by one.” 
 At such a moment one of the friends, Miriam, does vanish from 
 
 Ibid., I, ii6, 51, 121-122. 
 
The Marble Faun 
 
 19 
 
 their circle, and is discovered with the spectre. The spectre is always 
 obsessed by a sense of guilt, and seems to carry “the time-stains and 
 earthly soil of a thousand years.” If, as one tale has it, he ever served 
 as Guido’s model, it was for a demon’s face.^^ 
 
 Perhaps the particular demon face which Hawthorne in his own 
 mind set upon the spectre’s shoulders was not drawn by Guido, but 
 by Michelangelo, for in looking through a collection of drawings, 
 much as the artists were doing in the novel when they came upon 
 the sketch of Guido’s demon, Hawthorne found that of Michel¬ 
 angelo’s drawings in the collection, the “most striking was a very 
 ugly demon.” Guido’s triumphant Michael, however, had deeply 
 impressed Hawthorne in spite of his not being much attracted to 
 Guido in general. Perhaps when Hawthorne introduced Guido’s 
 painting into the novel instead of a drawing by Michelangelo of a 
 single demon, he did so because the theme of the novel, the struggle 
 between two powers, was more adequately echoed by this picture 
 of the “immortal youth” of the angel triumphant over sin and 
 death.‘“ 
 
 The play of chiaroscuro is so prominent in Hawthorne’s work 
 that it has attracted attention everywhere, not merely as a technique 
 of description, but as a pattern of joy and sorrow which Hawthorne 
 saw in life. In “The Maypole of Merry Mount,” light and gaiety 
 are associated with classical paganism, gloom with northern Chris¬ 
 tianity; a connection which resembles The Marble Faun, in which 
 the faun derives from Arcadia and the spectre is twice connected 
 with the word “Gothic,”"® to say nothing of his monastic associa¬ 
 tions. For normal life, Hawthorne insisted upon the need for both 
 sun and shade, and he went so far as to continue this requirement 
 when sun and shade were life and death themselves. 
 
 While Hawthorne was still in Italy and working on The Marble 
 Faun, he knew what it was to be attracted to death.®^ This tendency 
 in him has, indeed, been often remarked.®® Septimius Felton decides 
 in favor of the usefulness of death; and the characters in that tale 
 
 Ibid., I, 75, 120, 40, 186, 197, 51, 178. The order of page references here, as in 
 other footnotes, corresponds to the order in which the respective passages are cited or quoted 
 in the text. 
 
 ^‘French and Italian Note-Boo^s, pp. 398, 163, 310, 505-506; MS, Feb. 21, 1858 
 (Morgan Library). The Marble Faun, I, 38, 197. 
 
 See the MS of the Italian Note-Books in the Morgan Library for passages deleted in 
 the published version: Sept. 29, 1858; June ii, 1859; June 12, 1859; May 16, i860. 
 
 Lloyd Morris alone refers to it several times: op. at., pp. 70, 78, 99, 217. 
 
20 
 
 Dorothy Waples 
 
 who appear to have the strongest vitality are the ones who are 
 not seeking to prolong life. 
 
 So Hawthorne treats Donatello’s extreme fear of death as well 
 as the spectre’s constant dwelling in the halls of death as unsuitable 
 for a whole and normal person. Miriam was quite aware that death 
 could be regarded as an “unspeakable boon,” that darkness of mood 
 was “just as natural as daylight to us people of ordinary mould.” 
 She had a curiosity about death which increased even while Don¬ 
 atello’s horror of it, after the murder, was growing. Though it was 
 horror which first called upon Miriam to summon her courage and 
 face death by looking at the monk’s corpse, she was able, after this, 
 to see majesty in death, even when it was represented in this man 
 than whom there had been “nothing, in his lifetime, viler.” (Com¬ 
 pare Hans Castorp’s interest in death.) Hawthorne says that Miriam 
 was two women in one. She was able to embrace life and yet to 
 face death as the incomplete faun-man could not. Her wisdom lay 
 in this complete embracing of experience, and in this also lay her 
 power to assist Donatello, to draw him from unthinking animal 
 existence, into thoughtful human life.^® 
 
 For Donatello needed a shadow in his sunshine,^^ but he also 
 needed love. Shut away from Miriam in his tower, with the alabas¬ 
 ter skull, Donatello learned to think of death, but the thoughts did 
 not return him to life. At the mere anticipation of meeting Miriam 
 in Perugia, some of his old brightness came back to him. When 
 Kenyon sees him in the Campagna rejoined to Miriam, much of his 
 old charm and vitality glow about him without loss of his new man¬ 
 liness. “It is the surest sign of genuine love, that it brings back our 
 early simplicity to the worldliest of us,” Kenyon had once said about 
 this love of Miriam and Donatello. Love brings us out from shadow 
 and unreality into life and eternity, Hawthorne wrote of his own 
 love.^® 
 
 It takes both love and death to form the Garden of Eden. Don¬ 
 atello and Miriam in the Borghese Gardens seemed to be a glimpse 
 into “the Golden Age, before mankind was burdened with sin and 
 sorrow, and before pleasure had been darkened with those shadows 
 
 ““ The Marble Faun, I, 67, 190, 237-242, 107-108. 
 
 "''Ibid., I, 64, 102-103. 
 
 Ibid., I, 136. Randall Stewart (ed.), The American Notebooks by Nathaniel Haw¬ 
 thorne (New Haven, 1932), p. Ixx. 
 
The Marble Faun 
 
 21 
 
 that bring it into high relief, and make it happiness.” Death is 
 needed to make Eden of those gardens; and this “final charm is 
 bestowed by the malaria.” So Kenyon wanders in the sorrow- 
 haunted vineyards at Monte Beni like an “adventurer who should 
 find his way to the sight of ancient Eden, and behold its loveliness 
 through the transparency of that gloom which has been brooding 
 over those haunts of innocence ever since the fall. Adam saw it in 
 a brighter sunshine, but never knew the shade of pensive beauty 
 which Eden won from his expulsion.” 
 
 Now, it is a part of Donatello’s insufficiency as a man that he 
 felt nothing of the “dreamlike melancholy” of the Gardens. He not 
 only lacked Miriam’s premonition that their hour of joy must die, 
 but when the spectre had already killed it, he cried, “Why should 
 this happy hour end so soon?” And yet, in Hawthorne’s descrip¬ 
 tion, there had been something in the scene all along that had 
 hinted at mortality. The dance in the Gardens resembled “the 
 sculptured scene on the front and sides of a sarcophagus, where . . . 
 a festive procession mocks the ashes and white bones that are 
 treasured up within. You might take it for a marriage-pageant; but 
 after a while” you see some sad break in the gay movement. 
 “Always some tragic incident is shadowed forth or thrust sidelong 
 into the spectacle; and when once it has caught your eye you can 
 look no more at the festal portions of the scene except with reference 
 to this one slightly suggested doom and sorrow.”^® 
 
 Thomas Mann’s Settembrini, like Hawthorne, was interested in 
 ancient sarcophagi, and for the same reason; the adornment of the 
 tomb with emblems of life revealed, he said, that “These men knew 
 how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage, as the 
 cradle of life. . . . Severed from life, it becomes a spectre. . . .” When 
 death at length comes perilously near to Hans Castorp in the snow, 
 Hans in a dream solves the riddle by recognizing that it is love that 
 overcomes death’s attraction; but he discovers, also, that death is 
 close to the shrine of love and life.®® The debate in The Magic 
 Mountain as to whether life is not “only an infection, a sickening 
 of matter,” brings up the question whether the creation of life did 
 not constitute the Fall. This idea is developed more fully in the 
 opening of Joseph and His Brothers, where Mann weaves together 
 
 ~^The Marble Faun, I, 114. 
 
 ^’’The Magic Mountain (New York, n.d.), pp. 256, 362, 626. 
 
22 
 
 Dorothy Waples 
 
 myths of the origin of life and death. Perhaps the soul was, “like 
 matter, one of the principles laid down from the beginning, and .. , 
 it possessed life but no knowledge.” Having no knowledge, it in¬ 
 clined “towards still formless matter, avid to mingle with this and 
 evoke forms upon it.” Matter, however, “sluggishly and obstinately 
 preferred to remain in its original formless state.” But God, coming 
 to the aid of the soul, created the world, that the soul might en¬ 
 gender man; and he also sent “spirit to man in this world,” to serve 
 as a reminder to “the human soul imprisoned in matter” that “the 
 creation of the world came about only by reason of its folly in 
 mingling with matter.” The spirit’s “hoping and striving are di¬ 
 rected to the end that the passionate soul.. . will at length ... strike 
 out of its consciousness the lower world and strive to regain once 
 more that lofty sphere of peace and happiness.” Hence, the attrac¬ 
 tion man feels for death: but “its role as . . . grave-digger of the 
 world begins to trouble the spirit in the long run . . . ; while being, 
 in its own mind, sent to dismiss death out of the world, it finds 
 itself regarded . . . as . . . that which brings death into the world.” 
 So, Mann says, “It remains controversial which is life and which 
 death.”^^ 
 
 VI 
 
 Now, the transformation of Donatello from the charming but 
 soulless animal into a man by the knowledge of death and love is 
 the fable of The Marble Faun; but whereas in the beginning of the 
 book the struggle takes place between the two abstractions of life 
 and of death, the faun and the spectre, with the murder of the 
 spectre this situation undergoes a basic alteration, which is that the 
 struggle between life and death now goes on within Donatello’s 
 dawning soul. 
 
 This internal struggle of the wretched Donatello is evidently 
 representative of the struggle of the human race. Donatello in his 
 pained retirement at Monte Beni seemed to Kenyon to represent 
 natural man upset by modern civilization.®^ But Hawthorne wrote 
 of the marble faun in terms which would be effective if applied not 
 to one creature but to a certain level of the nature of mankind: the 
 faun had “no principle of virtue” and was “incapable of understand¬ 
 ing such”; only his capacity for warm attachment offered a possibil- 
 
 Joseph and His Brothers (New York, I0?4), pp. 38-48. 
 
 The Marble Faun. II, 17. 
 
The Marble Faun 
 
 23 
 
 ity for his education; through the operation of this capacity, how¬ 
 ever, “the coarser animal part of his nature might eventually be 
 thrown into the background, though never utterly expelled.”^^ If 
 the faun and the early Donatello stand for one level of man’s mind, 
 Donatello’s struggle to become a man has universal meaning; if they 
 do not stand for this, they would seem to have little meaning what¬ 
 ever. Assuming that they do have this meaning, Hawthorne’s edu¬ 
 cation of Donatello into “truer and sadder views of life” by his 
 “glimpses of strange and subtle matters in those dark caverns, into 
 which all men must descend,” is a universal experience. When 
 Donatello can strike a balance between his new knowledge of death 
 and his natural vivacity, he will be ready for reconciliation with 
 Miriam and will be a man. 
 
 When the transformation is completed and the reconciliation 
 takes place, the action of the story is over. There is added in the 
 book, however, a feeble conclusion which betrays by its very sketch¬ 
 iness how little interest its author took in it. This conclusion, indeed, 
 was so far from a conclusion, left for the literal-minded so many 
 questions unanswered, that Hawthorne was obliged to add (com¬ 
 plaining) a further set of explanations. By placing his fable in a 
 realistic setting, Hawthorne brought upon himself the difficulty of 
 having to dispose of his Miriam and Donatello in a practical modern 
 external society. He sent them to a prison and a nunnery to avoid 
 crushing them under lives of hidden guilt. From the calf in the 
 Campagna to the unlikely detail of the bleeding of the corpse, de¬ 
 tails are drawn from Hawthorne’s observations, and the surface of 
 the novel is amazingly realistic. Yet the fable itself is “a fanciful 
 story, evolving a thoughtful moral,” and the novel is at its best 
 while the fable is progressing. 
 
 It is at its best, that is to say, most acceptable as to its moral 
 content, where it is most modern; where faun and spectre are clear 
 in their symbolic opposition, and where in a mysterious timeless 
 realm the instinct for life and the instinct for death repeat the 
 ancient story of the Fall. 
 
 It was to have been expected that Donatello would, if left to his natural development, 
 eventually betray the sensuality and surly selfishness characteristic of his family as the 
 members of it advanced in age. See The Marble Faun, II, 12; I, 20-21, 25, loi, 117, 187. 
 
The "Case” of Tobias Pearson: Hawthorne 
 and the Ambiguities 
 Louise Dauner 
 
 I T IS PROBABLY a textbook platitude that Hawthorne presents 
 a constant awareness of, and, one almost suspects, a perverse de¬ 
 light in, the element of paradox. It is for him, as it is for Mel¬ 
 ville, and Henry James, and Edwin Arlington Robinson, and T. S. 
 Eliot, a “core” realization. Thus, with regard to affirmations or to 
 “taking sides,” Hawthorne characteristically refuses to commit 
 himself, often indulging in a perhaps typical New England circum¬ 
 locution.^ 
 
 At least once, however, in “The Gentle Boy,” Hawthorne 
 erects a structure of avowal as unflinching as Melville’s basic pro¬ 
 nouncement in Pierre. It is not as impressive in magnitude, not as 
 eloquently, even melodramatically explored or asserted; but it exists 
 with such clarity of outline that for once we may say of it, and of 
 Hawthorne, “This is the case.” 
 
 The present juxtaposition of Hawthorne with Melville is not a 
 casual one. Their mutual preoccupations with the great indefinables 
 of human experience—Sin, Free Will, Truth, the very nature of 
 man and his universe—postulate them, uniquely in American 
 literature, as tragic artists. For both, existence objectifies itself as 
 Good-and-Evil, as inevitably hyphenated. Both voice the minor 
 tonalities of disenchantment, although there is an obvious difference 
 in dynamics and instrumentation: the difference between the quiet 
 skepticisms of the observer, remote enough from the anguish of 
 the battlefield to be poised and restrained to the point of ambiguity, 
 and the impassioned avowals of the survivor who needs no other 
 words than his raw wounds to communicate the desperateness of 
 the conflict. Yet one can, and does, illuminate the other. 
 
 Ethically speaking, Hawthorne most frequently projects in¬ 
 triguing but finally elusive moral hypotheses. And artistically, with 
 
 ^ Miss Esther Bates, the long-time friend of Robinson, who is himself often remarkably 
 Hawthornian, once aptly defined this quality of the noncommittal as “the mind in 
 solution.” 
 
Tobias Pearson 
 
 25 
 
 regard to symbolic reference, he likes to leave us to the sometimes 
 dubious delight of a “multiple choice.”^ Did Donatello have furry 
 ears? Did Dimmesdale bear upon his tortured breast a scarlet A? 
 Did Young Goodman Brown merely dream the witches’ rendezvous 
 in the forest? We may accept with a willing suspension of disbelief; 
 or we may reject with literal rationality—except for the modest but 
 significant fact that in each case the character acts as though he did, 
 and that in such instances this “fact” is basic to the structure of the 
 narrative, hence fundamental also to the “statement” of the theme. 
 We are, however, confronted with a slippery blending of fact with 
 fancy, of the symbol with the concrete. Thus a tantalizing uncer¬ 
 tainty still persists, rising to affront and check us whenever, in 
 moments of overconfidence, we would presume to formulate for 
 Hawthorne some comfortable “system” of ethical thought. We 
 know not exactly where to have him, for there appears a countering 
 black for every white. In such a quest it is illuminating to turn 
 from Hawthorne’s delicate sets of balances to the massive and 
 overburdened scale of Pierre, where similar ambiguities find some 
 resolution, sad and sardonic though it may be. (It must of course 
 be interpolated that we need not thus imply either an acceptance of 
 Melville’s black iron bed as the only and right psychic bed in which 
 to rest, or an expectation that our literary artists provide us with 
 a menu of neat absolutes.) 
 
 Once, however, Hawthorne did, in the figure of Tobias Pearson, 
 venture—or slip—into a dark commitment. True, Pearson is a minor 
 figure and must be made to bear no more than his share of weight. 
 But for whatever it may be worth, the Melvillian ambiguity of his 
 case is firmly drawn and firmly resolved: there is no final lightening 
 of the dark colors, no adjustment for the possibility of alternate 
 choices. 
 
 The crucial situation for Tobias develops after the tolerant 
 Puritan has adopted the little Quaker outcast, Ilbrahim, particularly 
 after the brutal attack upon the delicate boy by his contemporaries, 
 and especially by the diabolical boy whom Ilbrahim had befriended 
 after the accident to the former. Tobias has lavished upon Ilbrahim 
 a parental love which had been frustrated by the deaths of his own 
 children. In so doing, he has found his attitude toward the Quakers 
 
 ’ F. O. Matthiesscn, American Renaissance (New York, 1941), p. 276. 
 
26 
 
 Louise Dauner 
 
 imperceptibly changing, though he still retains a contempt for the 
 “tenets and practical extravagances” of the sect. For a time his in¬ 
 cipient sympathy for the Quakers struggles with doubt; then the 
 doubt comes to “hold the place of a truth.” It is a subtle delineation 
 of the process of a conversion. But it is one step forwards and two 
 steps backwards, for Tobias recognizes in his alloy of feelings and 
 attitudes a contempt for himself which undermines his sense of 
 social security until he imagines a sneer upon every face, a gibe upon 
 every tongue. 
 
 In a matter of months, Tobias’s internal conflict has realized 
 itself both actually and symbolically in “ignominy and misfortune” 
 for himself and in the “endurance of a thousand sorrows” for his 
 wife, Dorothy. The increasing daily drooping of Ilbrahim and his 
 persecuted mother’s far fanatic wanderings and neglect of her ma¬ 
 ternal obligation are a kind of antiphony to the material and spirit¬ 
 ual darkness of the Pearsons. 
 
 The final episode, that of Ilbrahim’s death, discovers Tobias and 
 an old Quaker sitting in sad company together in the Pearson home. 
 All is gloom—a gloom echoed and intensified by the inclemency of 
 the winter night. The Pearson home itself reveals the present shape 
 of Tobias’s world: “.. . the apartment was saddened in its aspect by 
 the absence of much of the homely wealth which had once adorned 
 it; for the exaction of repeated fines, and his own neglect of 
 temporal affairs, had greatly impoverished the owner. And with 
 the furniture of peace, the implements of war had likewise disap¬ 
 peared; the sword was broken, the helm and cuirass were cast away 
 forever; the soldier was done with battles, and might not lift so 
 much as his naked hand to guard his head.”® 
 
 There is more here than the literal acceptance of the Quaker 
 principle of nonaggression. Tobias is a broken man—impoverished, 
 emaciated in body, unhealthy of countenance, diminished in spirit 
 and in will. As the old Quaker seeks to comfort him by reading 
 to him from the Bible, Tobias seems to be in physical pain. Worse, 
 there is for him no comfort in the holy words; the sound of the 
 reader’s voice is remote to him, as the words read are cold and life¬ 
 less. For Ilbrahim is dying. Now even Tobias’s one source of joy 
 is to be taken from him. 
 
 ® Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Gentle Boy,” The Complete Writings of Nathaniel 
 Hawthorne (Old Manse ed., Boston and New York, 1900), I, 123. 
 
Tobias Pearson 
 
 27 
 
 He has fallen into a sullen resentment. To the Quaker’s reproof 
 that his burden is yet light, Tobias returns, impatiently: 
 
 “It is heavy! It is heavier than I can bear! .. . From my youth upward 
 I have been a man marked out for wrath; and year by year, yea, day 
 after day, I have endured sorrows such as others know not in their 
 lifetime. And now I speak not of the love that has been turned to hatred, 
 the honor to ignominy, the ease and plentifulness of all things to danger, 
 want, and nakedness. All this I could have borne, and counted myself 
 blessed. But when my heart was desolate with many losses, I fixed it 
 upon the child of a stranger, and he became dearer to me than all my 
 buried ones; and now he too must die as if my love were poison. Verily, 
 I am an accursed man, and I will lay me down in the dust and lift up 
 my head no more.’’^ 
 
 The case, and the irony, are complete. Here then would appear 
 to be an unmitigated presentation of the Melvillian ambiguity—that 
 misfortune, pain, sorrow, and death (his own, or a loved one’s) may 
 and indeed often do accrue to the man whose motive and action, 
 so far as he honestly knows, and so far as we can see, have sought 
 only good. It is true that for neither Tobias nor Pierre was the 
 initial act—the championing of Ilbrahim, and Pierre’s assumption 
 of responsibility for Isabel—an “expedient” one, calculated to bear 
 fruit of a practically advantageous nature. But the noble or un¬ 
 selfish deed is more often than not at odds with expediency. So, 
 like Pierre, Tobias has become enmeshed in a close-linked chain of 
 causes and effects, until now he is a disillusioned, embittered, and 
 defeated man. It is, partially, at least, the problem of Job, the 
 Good Man, over again. But unlike Job, and again like Pierre, Tobias 
 has not even the martyr’s consolation of faith; and certainly there 
 is no joy in him either. So that, in effect, even his conversion be¬ 
 comes ambiguous in quality. 
 
 This raises the question as to whether Tobias’s misfortunes may 
 not in part be rooted in his own impatient disposition: he does not 
 endure suffering with resignation. Yet the facts remain: he has 
 taken in the outcast; he has adopted and suffered for his new 
 religious beliefs; he has, through overt acts, asserted a “real relation¬ 
 ship” between himself and his world; and he has done these things 
 voluntarily, in so far as we do anything voluntarily when we act 
 according to an inner compulsion. 
 
 * Ibid., pp. 125-126. 
 
28 
 
 Louise Dauner 
 
 There is also the question of the practical possibility of our ever 
 being able to combine and manage equally well both our mortal 
 and immortal “business affairs.” In his exploration of “Chrono- 
 metricals and Horologicals,” Melville flatly asserts the contradiction 
 between heavenly wisdom and earthly wisdom: . . though the 
 
 earthly wisdom of man be heavenly folly to God, so also, conversely, 
 is the heavenly wisdom of God an earthly folly to man. Literally 
 speaking, this is so.”® And again, Melville argues that if the 
 “chronometrical soul” seek “to regulate his own daily conduct” by 
 heavenly time, “he will but array all men’s earthly time-keepers 
 against him, and thereby work himself woe and death.”® 
 
 Now Hawthorne, like the good mystery writer that he is (for 
 what deeper mysteries exist than those which he chooses to ex¬ 
 plore?), usually gives us enough “facts” to assert a kind of practical 
 logic for those who must have it. There are reasons enough then 
 of a purely rational nature to provide acceptable grounds for Tobias’s 
 poverty and suffering. But, however we may analyze his fall 
 from prosperity and the mental comfort of an uncomplicated exist¬ 
 ence, the fact of the fall remains. And the basic fact in the fall 
 remains: Had he not encountered, adopted, and loved Ilbrahim, 
 and had he not extended his love to include those who, in effect, 
 produce the Ilbrahims, he would, we must assume, have continued 
 as a happy and successful member of the Puritan community. In 
 their acceptance of the basic irony and ambiguity posed by such 
 instances, Melville and Hawthorne seem to stand agreed. 
 
 Since, as suggested, there is for Tobias no joyousness in his 
 brave new world, none of the self-securing overtones of a vivid and 
 vital faith, we must ask: “What does Tobias get out of it?” And 
 we must admit that there seems to be for him little or no compensa¬ 
 tion on any level. He stands then not as a symbol of the happy mar¬ 
 tyr, who takes on such weight and momentum of nobility as accrues 
 to his kind, but merely as another example of the vicious irony of 
 life; or as another instance of that flaw, that negative principle in 
 existence which, aesthetically, we know as Tragedy. Like Pierre, 
 Tobias acts according to a simplest Christian ethic, in an impulse of 
 pure generosity and loving-kindness. And like Pierre, the very pil- 
 
 ' Herman Melville, Pierre or The Ambiguities (New York, 1929), p. 295. 
 
 ® Ibid., p. 296. 
 
Tobias Pearson 
 
 29 
 
 lars of the Christian temple, ironically symbolized here by the perse¬ 
 cuting Puritans, shatter about him and crush him in the ruins. 
 
 But it may be objected that this interpretation of and bearing 
 down upon the case of Tobias Pearson and the linking of his 
 physical and psychic history with that of Pierre are disproportionate; 
 that it would oppose a highly specific situation, that of the Puritan 
 age and ideology, to a situation which carries no such unique 
 period or cultural implications and which is, therefore, more uni¬ 
 versal. In this regard, I should like to suggest that Hawthorne’s 
 very use of the Puritan scheme is ambivalent; certainly it does 
 erect for us a special world; and certainly Tobias’s diminuendo oc¬ 
 curs because his “virtue,” his tolerance and conversion to Quakerism, 
 obviously opposes the conventional attitudes and behavior which 
 distinguish his time and place. Yet for fallible Mortality, virtue 
 characteristically and timelessly defines itself by its very opposition 
 to the practical conventionalities, which constitute a special “ap¬ 
 paratus” for any given period or “world.” 
 
 Furthermore, it is also true that this very Puritan milieu, this 
 very Puritan strenuosity with regard to the “urgent conscience” are 
 the particular elements and themes which appeal most strongly to 
 Hawthorne as a creative artist. If Puritanism is not for him an 
 individual creed, it is an artistic spark which repeatedly fires his 
 creative imagination. His greatest novel. The Scarlet Letter, and 
 his perhaps most profoundly searching and intense short story, 
 “Young Goodman Brown,” reveal how deeply he “felt” the prob¬ 
 lems, implicit and explicit, which issue from the rigorous Puritan 
 orthodoxy. Certainly one key to an artist’s temperament and 
 psychology lies in the themes and materials to which he recurs and 
 which he thus obviously finds provocative and rewarding. And 
 this, in turn, may suggest the moral depth or value of his character¬ 
 istic work. With regard to the morality of a work of art and the 
 form in which it appears, we recall that Henry James notes “the 
 perfect dependence of the moral sense of a work of art on the 
 amount of felt life concerned in producing it.” James continues; 
 “. . . the question comes back, thus, obviously, to the kind and de¬ 
 gree of the artist’s prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which 
 his subject springs. The quality and capacity of that soil, its 
 
30 
 
 Louise Dauner 
 
 capacity to ‘grow’ with due freshness and straightness any vision of 
 life, represents, strongly or weakly, the projected morality.”^ 
 
 Thus we may further suggest that Hawthorne’s appropriation of 
 Puritan material is instinct with his deepest moral intuitions and 
 that quite possibly the very fact that here again the Puritan lines 
 frame a specific circumstance tends to assert that circumstance, 
 symbolically, at least, as a kind of Hawthornian “universal.” If 
 this be accepted, we are saying that Hawthorne’s truest, most funda¬ 
 mental world, his sharpest intuitions of truth in human experience, 
 are costumed in the trappings and the suits of Puritanism. For 
 Hawthorne, we may even venture, all the world is essentially a 
 Puritan stage. If we need still further evidence of the universality 
 implicit in Tobias’s case, it lies in the fact that the crushing climax 
 of his travail of love is the death of Ilbrahim, a “universal” in any 
 time or language. 
 
 But Tobias is, again, a minor figure. Both Ilbrahim and his 
 mother Catherine command our major interest. Yet, in addition 
 to Tobias’s value as a Puritan symbol, his significance for Haw¬ 
 thorne personally may not be minor. Did Hawthorne, one 
 wonders, deliberately, for once, allow his Puritan skepticism or 
 “realism” an obliquely sharp expression, constraining it merely in 
 that he refers it to a minor character in an obscure position.^ Did 
 he not here write not only his truest world, but his truest self, more 
 overtly than even he knew? 
 
 There is little question about the autobiographical overtones in 
 the moral doubts, the despairs of Pierre; but usually, though Haw¬ 
 thorne’s constant striving for “realism” led him to incorporate 
 strangely alien (if often symbolic) items into his fanciful morality- 
 plays—black dogs, perambulating calves, Roman carnivals—Haw¬ 
 thorne himself remains a dimly adumbrated figure behind the 
 scenes. The “real” Hawthorne, like the “real” Shakespeare, can¬ 
 not yet be comfortably caught and detained. In the case of Tobias 
 Pearson, however, Hawthorne follows to the end of bitter actualities 
 what he usually leaves merely as subtle and tantalizing implications. 
 Characteristically, we feel in Hawthorne a sleight-of-mind adept¬ 
 ness so delicate and swift that the movements of the “trick” are a 
 blur. Often his imaginative and daring speculation, his “cat-like 
 
 ''Henry James, The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York, 1947), Intro¬ 
 duction, p. xxxi. 
 
Tobias Pearson 
 
 31 
 
 faculty of seeing in the dark,” as James puts it, lead us to the pre¬ 
 carious brink of crucial intuitions and judgments. But then, like 
 Kenyon, he retreats, or hurries down a convenient bypath; or like 
 a kind of literary squid, he conceals himself within the inky cloud 
 of the (deliberately.'^) vague and fanciful emanations of his genius. 
 Or he simply leaves the resolution to the reader. But in the figure 
 of Pearson, Hawthorne appears, staunchly and for once, to com¬ 
 mit himself. 
 
 It is perhaps inevitable that, having suggested an analogy be¬ 
 tween Tobias and Pierre, we should recall the relationship between 
 their creators, so far as to speculate upon a possible cross-fertiliza¬ 
 tion. But then we remember the sad divergence in their artistic 
 and spiritual paths—Melville, it has been suggested,® with the reali¬ 
 zation that Hawthorne was for him a “mistaken identity,” and 
 Hawthorne, one suspects, with a temperamental incapacity to absorb 
 or really to understand Melville’s violences of rebellion and resent¬ 
 ment, and his growing bitter denunciations of the universal scheme. 
 So Melville’s skepticism sinks, except for the dawn-struck coda of 
 Billy Budd, a step lower than Hawthorne’s, until he rejects utterly 
 Hawthorne’s too frequent kid-glove shadow-boxing and himself 
 pounds away at the raw stuff of human experience with bare and 
 bloody fists. 
 
 There is not much likelihood then of such a cross-fertilization 
 with regard to the ambiguities basic to both Pierre and “The 
 Gentle Boy.” (In point of fact, there are almost twenty years be¬ 
 tween them, “The Gentle Boy” dating from 1835.) And we can 
 merely speculate too about the amount of nourishment provided by 
 Hawthorne for Melville’s innate and tragic cynicism. Hawthorne 
 was too inherently aloof from the bloody soil out of which grew 
 his beautiful and poisonous purple flowers, except as that dark and 
 sinful earth was sustenance for his creative imagination. Melville, 
 on the other hand, was sinking ever deeper, threshing ever more 
 violently to keep from being buried alive. Yet—and this is the im¬ 
 portant point—both are conspicuous and subtle anatomizers of our 
 moral nature; hence bound, finally, to reach the quicksand area of 
 the moral ambiguities where each must proceed at his own strength 
 and pace and at his own peril. Melville defined that darksome 
 
 * Raymond Weaver, Introduction to The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville (New 
 York, 1942), p. xxvi. 
 
32 
 
 Louise Dauner 
 
 country as he saw it, and in no uncertain terms. Hawthorne was 
 there and saw it, too, but preferred largely to by-pass the specific 
 verbal and philosophical definition, merely drawing for us a series 
 of intricate shadow-maps. Each writer, however, comprehended 
 the ruggedness of the spiritual terrain; and each detected there 
 many of the same quagmires and volcanic craters. Melville’s 
 condor-pen will not do for vignettes; nor will Hawthorne’s delicate 
 brushes sweep for us a mural. But Melville brings us high wind 
 and outrageous seas and the ubiquitous and immortal white whale. 
 And Hawthorne points up Chinese prints of unsurpassed subtlety 
 and suggestiveness. 
 
 When, rarely, as in the figure of Tobias Pearson, the specific 
 pattern emerges with the clarity of a firm and powerful stroke, for 
 the nonce we are off the tightrope of ambiguity, even though the 
 texture of the rope itself remains ambiguous. The resultant firmness 
 is kinesthetically reassuring. It is also enlightening when we 
 resume the high shadowed vistas of the usual exquisite and airy 
 balance. 
 
The Double Symbol 
 
 Harold Orel 
 
 HAPTER XVIII of Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven 
 
 Gables deals ostensibly with Judge Pyncheon, a man who sits 
 in a chair. His two relatives, Hepzibah and Clifford, are wildly flee¬ 
 ing from the house, and are indeed at the moment quite a distance 
 away; they have alighted at a solitary way station, and the reader 
 does not know whether they will return at all. Nor, on first read¬ 
 ing, can he be sure that the Judge is dead. The author’s focus is 
 a motionless figure in a deserted house, and for many readers the 
 chapter has a time-marking inevitability about it. “The melodrama 
 in Judge Pyncheon’s demise is like the sensational deaths in the 
 other novels,” Stanley Williams has written, “typical of a weaker 
 phase of his art”; and Austin Warren, making an acute stylistic 
 judgment, has pointed out the rhetorical questions are more in keep¬ 
 ing with a novel of Dickens than with one of Hawthorne. Never¬ 
 theless, it is my contention that this chapter does far more than 
 
 allow Hepzibah and Clifford sufficient time to return to the House 
 of the Seven Gables; it presents the very essence of an author’s 
 method. 
 
 The double symbol of the chapter involves light and time. The 
 day changes to night, and the night finally gives way to morning. 
 We consider this light always in relation to Pyncheon, for it casts 
 shadows upon his face, or it illuminates his face, or its absence hides 
 his face. Light or darkness by itself is not enough; it must have 
 
 relevance to the figure sitting in the old parlor. Also, the Judge 
 
 clutches in his left hand a watch. The timepiece ticks, the light 
 changes, and finally the watch, neglected by its owner for the first 
 time in five years, runs down. But the clock, symbol of time, has 
 no significance save as it relates to the engagements the Judge is 
 supposed to be keeping at the very moment he is sitting motionless; 
 its significance becomes personal. 
 
 The two worlds in which the double symbol has meaning are 
 the outer world and the inner world. The outer world, in which 
 Judge Pyncheon has work to do, places to go, and people to see, is 
 
34 
 
 Harold Orel 
 
 related to the inner world, the room within the house, the body 
 within the room, the soul within the body. The score of drawing¬ 
 rooms which will welcome the Judge form external appearance. 
 The real estate which the Judge enjoys in town and country, “his 
 railroad, bank, and insurance shares, his United States stock—his 
 wealth, in short, however invested, now in possession, or soon to be 
 acquired; together with the public honors that have fallen upon 
 him, and the weightier ones that are yet to fall,” all these are part 
 of the outer world. They measure what seems, not what is. The 
 benevolent actions of the Judge include kindliness to a destimte 
 widow, the renewal of a tombstone, a contribution to the fall cam¬ 
 paign, attendance at a charitable society; but the actions exist in a 
 universe of accidents. The universe of essence, as the author makes 
 clear increasingly in veiled insinuations that become finally bald 
 accusations, is something entirely different. The reality of this sec¬ 
 ond world informs us that the Judge will not be kind to the desti¬ 
 tute widow unless he receives a bribe; that the tombstone will be 
 renewed only because the person buried beneath it took what the 
 Judge considers to be a seasonable departure; that the Judge has 
 a direct stake in the fall campaign inasmuch as he is a candidate 
 for the gubernatorial candidacy (the chapter itself has the title, 
 “Governor Pyncheon”); that the Judge will not attend the meeting 
 of the charitable society unless he remembers the society’s name, and 
 the sheer “multiplicity of his benevolence” renders that unlikely. 
 Two Judge Pyncheons exist, the one people think he is (outer-world 
 Pyncheon), and the one we as readers finally discover him to be 
 (inner-world Pyncheon). 
 
 The relationship between the two Pyncheons is ubiquitous. For 
 example, politicians gather to honor the Judge at a banquet. The 
 dinner will include rare treats: turtle, salmon, tautog, woodcock, 
 boiled turkey, Southdown mutton, pig, roast beef, all flavored by 
 a brand of old Madeira. The politicians decide their trip has been 
 in vain when the Judge does not show up, that the Free-Soilers have 
 persuaded the Judge to run on their side; so they eat the dinner. 
 So thoroughly do they devour it that only fragments remain, luke¬ 
 warm potatoes, and gravies crusted over with cold fat. The cycle 
 of nature (one form of life preys upon another form to exist in its 
 own right) illuminates the Judge who is. The dinner-hour has 
 
The Double Symbol 
 
 35 
 
 made him a great beast; he is a person of “large sensual endow¬ 
 ments.” He would have enjoyed the meal, had he been present. 
 
 Far more than food has involvement here, though the emphasis 
 on the Judge’s love of peaches, wines, and broiled fowl (mentioned 
 time and again in the chapter) should warn us no accident deter¬ 
 mines its presence. Animals also form a running motif. The 
 Judge’s horse, a big, healthy animal, has stumbled, and “must be 
 at once discarded.” A mouse sits on its hind legs, debating whether 
 or not to undertake a journey of exploration over the Judge’s body. 
 A cat appears at the window; is it the devil watching for “a human 
 soul.?” A common housefly smells out the Judge (at this point 
 ironically named “Governor Pyncheon”), and “alights now on his 
 forehead, now on his chin, and now. Heaven help us! is creeping 
 over the bridge of his nose, towards the would-be chief-magistrate’s 
 wide-open eyes!” The imagery of decay, of transition from health 
 to death, brings us to the naked evil of the Judge. The metaphor 
 of the chapter’s first paragraph, which claims the story will now 
 betake itself, “like an owl, bewildered in the daylight, and hasten¬ 
 ing back to his hollow tree,” to the House of the Seven Gables, for 
 the first time becomes symbolic. 
 
 This technique circles inward, moves from the goodness of day 
 to the sin of night. During the morning the Judge lies abed, “in 
 an agreeable half-drowse,” refusing to consider seriously any medical 
 advice his family physician might give on a visit he is destined never 
 to make. But the Judge does not like to look inward. He laughs 
 heartily about the region of the thorax, which is where he ails. 
 Day continues. Lost opportunities and the failure to exploit time 
 lead to a seriousness of diction: 
 
 Up, therefore, Judge Pyncheon, up! You have lost a day. But to¬ 
 morrow will be here anon. Will you rise, betimes, and make the most 
 of it.? To-morrow! To-morrow! To-morrow! We, that are alive, may 
 rise betimes to-morrow. As for him that has died today, his morrow will 
 be the resurrection morn. 
 
 The Judge will never rise in this world. Twilight comes into 
 the house, shadows grow deeper on the old furniture, and finally 
 blackness crawls over the Judge’s face with its “swarthy whiteness.” 
 
36 
 
 Harold Orel 
 
 Light finally vanishes from the room, and the “infinite, inscrutable 
 blackness has annihilated sight.” The universe (outer world) dis¬ 
 appears. Everything crumbles away from us, and we, “adrift in 
 chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing 
 and murmuring about, in quest of what was once a world!” 
 
 Light symbolizes the garment of the spirit. When the garment 
 tears to nothingness, when the light goes, we are left without our 
 illusions; chaos is come again. Hawthorne’s symbol, unlike Car¬ 
 lyle’s, brings us to a terror of night rather than to a greater glory 
 of day. Epiphany follows: a storm begins to howl. The wind veers 
 in from the northwest, takes hold of the aged framework of the 
 Seven Gables, and “gives it a shake, like a wrestler that would try 
 strength with his antagonist.” The crescendo rises. 
 
 A rumbling kind of a bluster roars behind the fireboard. A door has 
 slammed above stairs. A window, perhaps, has been left open, or else is 
 driven in by an unruly gust. It is not to be conceived, beforehand, what 
 wonderful wind-instruments are these old timber mansions, and how 
 haunted with the strangest noises, which immediately begin to sing, and 
 sigh, and sob, and shriek,—and to smite with sledge-hammers, airy but 
 ponderous, in some distant chamber,—and to tread along the entries as 
 with stately footsteps, and rustle up and down the staircase, as with silks 
 miraculously stiff,—whenever the gale catches the house with a window 
 open, and gets fairly into it. 
 
 Outer world crowds upon the inner world. The awful clamor 
 of the wind embodies the relationship itself. We pass from without 
 to within, and we are not again to leave the House of the Seven 
 Gables, even in our fancy, during this chapter. The room in which 
 the Judge is sitting now coffins us. Whatever light we see hence¬ 
 forward comes in from a fabulous beyond, as it must to prisoners in a 
 cell: “a peep of starlight, now here, now there”; moonlight “upon 
 the upper branches of the pear-tree”; the half-illumination indicates 
 the changed nature of things. A fantastic scene recapitulates the 
 history of Maule’s curse, but Hawthorne concludes, “we were be¬ 
 trayed into this brief extravagance by the quiver of the moonbeams; 
 they dance hand-in-hand with shadows, and are reflected in the 
 looking-glass, which, you are aware, is always a kind of a window 
 or door-way into the spiritual world.” 
 
The Double Symbol 
 
 37 
 
 Spirit or essence lies beneath the light. The grin of benignity 
 with which the Judge has fooled the world is feigned, “insolent in 
 its pretence, and loathsome in its falsehood.” At the base of 
 Pyncheon’s being rests heavy sin. Subtle, selfish, iron-hearted, hypo¬ 
 critical, the Judge may not tear the sins out of his nature. A higher 
 judge has taken him into custody. “The Avenger” is upon him. 
 
 Judge Pyncheon’s clock, “undeviatingly accurate chronometer,” 
 is of moment only to the living, eventually runs down. But while 
 the faithful timekeeper marks the seconds and the years, eventually 
 to circumscribe the life, it acts as dimension for the two worlds of 
 appearance and reality; within it, accidents and essence co-exist. So 
 long as “the great world-clock of Time still keeps its beat,” so long 
 will all things seem possible; so long will it be conceivable that the 
 Judge can rise up from his chair and, through a universal benedic¬ 
 tion, escape the just penalty for his sins. The ticking of the clock 
 provides an effect of terror, however, which the author does not 
 find in any other accompaniment of the scene, precisely because it 
 suggests the transcendent nature of evil. But when the clock, “this 
 little, quiet, never-ceasing throb of Time’s pulse, repeating its small 
 strokes with such busy regularity, in Judge Pyncheon’s motionless 
 hand,” finally dies into nothingness, the outer world of goodness 
 dissolves; only the inner world of evil remains. No longer must 
 the light have relevance to the Judge’s actions; the Judge is incapable 
 of actions; the Judge is dead. Thus, though the morning sunshine 
 glimmers through the foliage, though it be beautiful and holy, light 
 as such will refuse to kindle up the Judge’s face. 
 
 The double symbol may well provide a clue to Hawthorne’s art, 
 in so far as it indicates the general direction pursued by the art. 
 Hawthorne’s concern with the return of individuals to their inner 
 beings is really the very thing which so fascinates him with the 
 framework of a crime story, and which finally matures into The 
 Marble Faun, with all its strength and weakness. Mistaken identity, 
 where the reader mistakes a person for something or someone he is 
 not, has value as a narrative device only when true identity is estab¬ 
 lished. We may flee from ourselves, as Hepzibah and Clifford do 
 even while the Judge keeps his grotesque vigil in the House of the 
 Seven Gables; eventually we must return, as Hepzibah and Clifford 
 
38 
 
 Harold Orel 
 
 do. We may not flee at all (the Judge sits motionless in a chair), 
 but the true self will emerge. Darkness and light co-exist in the 
 medium of time, measurable by mechanical clocks. We may pre¬ 
 sent to others an aspect of light, but if our souls be dark, eventually 
 we are driven in upon ourselves; if not in this world, then in the 
 next; whatever world it may be, measurable by The Avenger, or 
 God Himself. 
 
Hawthorne’s Revision of "The Gentle Boy” 
 
 Seymour L. Gross 
 
 W HEN Hawthorne selected “The Gentle Boy” for inclusion in 
 his 1837 edition of Twice-Told Tales, he deemed it necessary 
 to revise that tale from the form in which it had first appeared in 
 Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s Tokfn of 1832. That this was a con¬ 
 sciously artistic revision, rather than a mere “worrying” of material, 
 can be seen in part from the fact that the three other tales^ which 
 appeared in the same annual were unrevised when subsequently in¬ 
 corporated into his collections. The tale, however, continued to dis¬ 
 turb Hawthorne artistically even after his revision. In his preface 
 to a separate reprint of the tale in 1839, he wrote, “. .. there are sev¬ 
 eral among his twice told tales which on re-perusal, affect him 
 less painfully with a sense of imperfect and ill-wrought conception, 
 than THE GENTLE BOY.”^ He took refuge, however, in the cliche of 
 nature-over-art, by concluding “that Nature here led him deeper 
 into the Universal heart than Art has been able to follow.”® 
 
 Some consideration of his changes in the tale should prove 
 profitable, inasmuch as “The Gentle Boy” is the only tale of Haw¬ 
 thorne’s in which we have abundant evidence of artistic revision.'* 
 These revisions are for the most part deletions. And when these de¬ 
 letions are viewed in their totality, they exhibit how Hawthorne 
 has managed to give his piece a firmer point of view through the 
 solidifying of a remarkably perilous balance between Puritan and 
 Quaker. In short, he has clarified the terms of his tragedy. 
 
 Hawthorne introduces his tale with an expository sketch of the 
 
 * “Roger Malvin’s Burial” {Mosses, 1846); “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and “The 
 Wives of the Dead” {Snow Image, 1852). 
 
 ’Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Gentle Boy: A Thrice Told Tale (Boston, 1839), p. 4. 
 
 ’ Ibid. 
 
 * Hawthorne’s revisions in other short pieces were, for the most part, matters of eradi¬ 
 cating tasteless references to contemporaries, or simple word changes. For an analysis of 
 the changes in “The Hall of Fantasy,” see Harold P. Miller, “Hawthorne Surveys His 
 Contemporaries,” American Literature, XII, 228-235 (May, 1940). 
 
40 
 
 Seymour L. Gross 
 
 historical position of the Quakers in seventeenth-century Massachu¬ 
 setts Bay.® With a calm objectivity Hawthorne points up the self- 
 castigating nature of the Quakers, their maniacal courting of “the 
 cross,” and their deliberate choice of Massachusetts Bay as a most 
 eligible place to invite martyrdom. As a consequence of these aber¬ 
 rations, an intrinsically holy feeling has been converted into a mad 
 enthusiasm that has driven the Quakers beyond “rational religion.” 
 But there is a deliberate counterbalance. The Puritans’ vicious re¬ 
 action in the form of torture, even though terribly provoked, is not 
 absolved of moral culpability. Irony lashes out at them in such a 
 phrase as “The fines, imprisonments, and stripes liberally distrib¬ 
 uted by our pious forefathers.”® Further, no matter what theoretical 
 argument Hawthorne could summon up to justify the Puritans 
 (and, indeed, the first deletion is just such a justification), he could 
 not bring himself to accept emotionally the cruelty of torture. 
 Whenever he speaks of the Puritan devices for physical and mental 
 torture, as for example in “Endicott and the Red Cross” and “Main 
 Street,” it is with fascinated horror. In fact, one of Hawthorne’s 
 most personal remarks is on this subject. In “Main Street,” after dis¬ 
 cussing his own ancestor’s guilty responsibility for the whipping of 
 the Quaker Ann Coleman, he prayerfully hopes, with a touch of 
 the inherited guilt he was always to feel, that “as the rain of so many 
 years has wept upon it [the bloody trail of the whip], time after 
 time, and washed it all away, so there may have been a dew of 
 mercy to cleanse this cruel blood-stain out of the record of the 
 persecutor’s life!”^ 
 
 The most Hawthorne could concede was that the Quakers’ “in¬ 
 decorous exhibitions . . . abstractly considered, well deserved the 
 moderate chastisement of the rod.”® For Hawthorne, then, there 
 was only an abstract justification in moderate punishment—no more. 
 But the Puritans’ justice was not abstract, and its concrete manifesta¬ 
 tions were hardly moderate. 
 
 “ For a very thorough discussion of the historical sources of this tale, see G. Harrison 
 Orians, “The Sources and Themes of Hawthorne’s ‘The Gentle Boy,’ ’’ 'New England Quar¬ 
 terly, XIV, 664-678 (Dec., 1941). 
 
 “George Parsons Lathrop, ed.. The Wor\s of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Boston, 1883), I 
 85. (Hereinafter cited as Worths.) 
 
 ’’ Worlds, III, 463. 
 
 ® Ibid., I, 86. I am using abstractly of The To{en rather than abstractedly of the River¬ 
 side edition, since the latter is obviously a misprint. 
 
“The Gentle Boy” Revised 
 
 41 
 
 Once having recognized that Hawthorne has, at the very outset, 
 set up a balance of two evils, abstract guilt and unreasonable retribu¬ 
 tion, which, as will be seen, is a necessary condition for the subse¬ 
 quent tragedy, the reason for the following deletion becomes evident. 
 
 That those who were active in, or consenting to, this measure [the killing 
 of two Quakers in 1659], made themselves responsible for innocent blood, 
 is not to be denied: yet the extenuating circumstances of their conduct 
 are more numerous than can generally be pleaded by persecutors. The 
 inhabitants of New England were a people, whose original bond of 
 union was their peculiar religious principles. For the peaceful exercise 
 of their own mode of worship, an object, the very reverse of universal 
 liberty of conscience, they had hewn themselves a home in the wilder¬ 
 ness: they had exposed themselves to the peril of death, and to a life 
 which rendered the accomplishment of that peril almost a blessing. They 
 had found no city of refuge prepared for them, but, with Heaven’s assist¬ 
 ance, they had created one; and it would be hard to say whether justice 
 did not authorize their determination, to guard its gate against all who 
 were destitute of the prescribed tide to admittance. The principle of their 
 foundation was such, that to destroy the unity of religion, might have 
 been to subvert the government, and break up the colony, especially at 
 a period when the state of affairs in England had stopped the tide of 
 emigration, and drawn back many of the pilgrims to their native homes. 
 The magistrates of Massachusetts Bay were, moreover, most imperfectly 
 informed respecting the real tenets and character of the Quaker sect. 
 They had heard of them, from various parts of the earth, as opposers of 
 every known opinion, and enemies of all established governments; they 
 had beheld extravagances which seemed to justify these accusations; and 
 the idea suggested by their own wisdom may be gathered from the fact, 
 that the persons of many individuals were searched, in the expectation of 
 discovering witch-marks. But after all allowances, it is to be feared that 
 the death of the Quakers was principally owing to the polemic fierceness, 
 that distinct passion of human nature, which has so often produced 
 frightful guilt in the most sincere and zealous advocates of virtue and 
 religion.^ 
 
 This is a very curious passage. That this is a rather convincing 
 plea for historical necessity (motivated perhaps by Hawthorne’s 
 unconscious need to rationalize his ancestral guilt) seems fairly 
 obvious. But Hawthorne the artist could see in its general tenor a 
 threat to the balanced backdrop of the tale. Even the final sentence, 
 
 ’Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Gentle Boy,” The To\en (Boston, 1832), pp. 194-195. 
 
42 
 
 Seymour L. Gross 
 
 in which Hawthorne with characteristic sanity cuts down his seem¬ 
 ingly logical argument, was best left unsaid. For after all, the right¬ 
 ness or wrongness of the situation makes little difference here. 
 Caught between forces beyond their control, Ilbrahim and Tobias, 
 like Romeo and Juliet, are tragically destroyed. What ultimately 
 arrests us in both Shakespeare’s and Hawthorne’s tragedies is not the 
 force itself, the existence of evil, but the tragic waste of decent hu¬ 
 man beings trapped by life itself. 
 
 The next deletion of real importance^” is somewhat more difiE- 
 cult to explain. After Tobias’s good heart has finally conquered his 
 inherited misgivings about the Quaker child whom he has found 
 standing forlornly on his executed father’s grave, he takes the boy 
 home to his wife Dorothy, having decided to accept him as their 
 own. After Tobias tells Dorothy to be kind to the child even as she 
 would have been to their own children now dead, the following 
 passage is deleted. 
 
 The wife’s eyes filled with tears; she inquired neither who little Ilbra¬ 
 him was, nor whence he came, but kissed his cheek and led the way into 
 the dwelling. The sitting-room, which was also the kitchen, was lighted 
 by a cheerful fire upon the large stone-laid hearth, and a confused variety 
 of objects shone out and disappeared in the unsteady blaze. There were 
 the household articles, the many wooden trenchers, the one large pewter 
 dish, and the copper kettle whose inner surface was glittering like gold. 
 There were the lighter implements of husbandry, the spade, the sickle, 
 and the scythe, all hanging by the door, and the axe before which a thou¬ 
 sand trees had bowed themselves. On another part of the wall were the 
 steel cap and iron breast plate, the sword and the matchlock gun. There, 
 in a corner, was a little chair, the memorial of a brood of children whose 
 place by the fire-side was vacant forever. And there, on a table near the 
 window, among all those tokens of labor, war, and mourning, was the 
 Holy Bible, the book of life, an emblem of the blessed comforts which 
 
 An unimportant but interesting change occurs soon after the story proper begins. 
 As Tobias enters the scene, Hawthorne comments that “a gloomy extent of nearly four 
 miles lay between him and his home." In the Token edition the final word is house. 
 Ordinarily, such a minor change would be attributed to the kind of misprintings one finds 
 in many of Hawthorne’s stories, and about which he complained fairly often. But here, 
 where there is ample evidence of close revision, it seems reasonable to attribute the change 
 to artistic scrupulousness. The word home has richer, warmer connotations than does 
 house, and is therefore substituted. When Tobias asks Ilbrahim where he belongs, the 
 child, pointing to his father’s grave, says, "Here is my home.” And when Tobias later 
 points to his own “home,” “a thrill passed through the child’s frame.” And finally, 
 Ilbrahim’s acceptance of his new parents is complete when he considers "their house as 
 home.” Hawthorne’s change, then, gives consistency to the distinction. 
 
“The Gentle Boy” Revised 
 
 43 
 
 it offers, to those who can receive them, amidst the toil, the strife, and 
 sorrow of this world. Dorothy hastened to bring the little chair from its 
 corner; she placed it on the hearth, and, seating the poor orphan there, 
 addressed him in words of tenderness, such as only a mother’s experience 
 could have taught her. At length, when he had timidly begun to taste 
 his warm bread and milk, she drew her husband apart.^^ 
 
 There is nothing in this passage which would contradict Doro¬ 
 thy’s character as we come to know her: a warm, considerate, in¬ 
 stinctively loving mother. In fact, the inclusion of the passage would 
 have lent something to Hawthorne’s portrayal of her as the ideal of 
 “rational piety” and sensitive motherhood. Further, the description 
 of the Puritans’ household is effective. The rather casual cataloguing 
 of the items, deftly accentuating the austerity of the entire setting, 
 summons up for the reader the experiental gamut of Puritan life; 
 husbandry, war, domesticity, piety, and death. Perhaps it might be 
 suggested that the over-all effect of the scene with its emphasis on 
 purity and cheerful utility would have run counter to the barbarity 
 that the Puritans are later to exhibit. But the Pearsons are in no way 
 representative of the Puritans in the tale; in fact, they are to be the 
 victims, not the perpetrators, of the “cold sect’s” persecutions. The 
 omission of the passage also weakens a later passage in the tale,^^ 
 in which the Pearson home is pictured now destitute of its “homely 
 wealth.” Without the previous passage the Pearsons’ loss is not dra¬ 
 matically visualized, somewhat vitiating the pathos of their situa¬ 
 tion. However, Hawthorne must have felt that the warmth of the 
 scene in the home of Puritans, even ones who are later to prove 
 highly unrepresentative, might, unwittingly, upset the precarious 
 balance he felt he needed. 
 
 The first foreshadowing of Tobias’s ultimate rejection of Puritan¬ 
 ism comes when Dorothy asks her husband if the Indians had or¬ 
 phaned the child. “No,” he answers, “the heathen savage would 
 have given him to eat of his scanty morsel, and to drink of his 
 birchen cup; but Christian men, alas! had cast him out to die.”“ 
 After Dorothy with an even quicker tenderness than her husband 
 accepts the child as her own, the following description of Ilbrahim 
 is deleted: “She drew near to Ilbrahim, who, having finished his re- 
 
 ** Tol{en, pp. 202-203. 
 
 ” Wor\s, I, 115. 
 
 I. 92. 
 
44 
 
 Seymour L. Gross 
 
 past, sat with the tears hanging upon his long eye-lashes, but with 
 a singular and unchildlike composure on his little £ace.”^^ The key 
 to the deletion is in the words “singular and unchildlike.” Although 
 Hawthorne could just as well have kept the rest of the passage, the 
 final words contradict the quiet and lovely childishness of the boy. 
 The two paragraphs which follow the deletion emphasize the pained 
 helplessness of the child: tears that gush forth at the word “mother,” 
 the simple and affecting Quaker prayer he insists upon, his pale and 
 spiritual countenance. The “singular and unchildlike composure” 
 would have indicated, not the wretched bewilderment of a child 
 buffeted by circumstances it could but imperfectly understand, but 
 rather an almost premature recognition and acceptance of suffering 
 as a part of the human condition. 
 
 The following pages of the tale deal with the Puritans’ reaction 
 to the Pearsons’ act of Christian charity. They are adamant in their 
 hatred of the child, whose very beauty and winning manners are 
 ascribed to Satanic influences. Their antipathy is increased by their 
 inability to convert the gentle Quaker to the tenets of Calvinism— 
 to them a certain sign of invincible depravity. But more important, 
 Tobias, once a respected member of the community, is now hooted 
 and threatened as a “backslider.” 
 
 On the second Sabbath after Ilbrahim has become a member of 
 the family, the three Pearsons go to the meetinghouse. Hawthorne’s 
 treatment of the scene is stingingly ironic. The signal for com¬ 
 mencement is a thundering drum—“a martial call to the place of 
 holy and quiet thoughts.”^^ The parishioners on the way to the 
 holy place are full of hate, avoiding the “two parents linked to¬ 
 gether by the infant of their love.”^® They form a “formidable pha¬ 
 lanx,” so as to wither the Pearsons with gazes of disapproval. But 
 even in this passage of the scathing contrast between theoretical 
 piety and actual impiety, Hawthorne deleted a passage, which, on 
 the face of it, would have served the vehicle of his critical comment, 
 the military metaphor, very well: “. . . in connexion with which 
 peculiarity [the use of a military drum as the commencement sig¬ 
 nal], it may be mentioned, that an apartment of the meetinghouse 
 served the purposes of a powder magazine and armory.”^^ 
 
 “ Tol{en, p. 203. “ Wor{s. 1 , 96. 
 
 p. 207. 
 
“The Gentle Boy” Revised 
 
 45 
 
 Although this deletion would have served Hawthorne’s purpose 
 beautifully, he probably could not bring himself to be so unfair 
 as to insinuate, even for artistic purposes, that the whole of the 
 Puritans’ religion was one monstrous distortion. He knew that the 
 arsenal was for defense, not aggression, and that the meetinghouse 
 was the most logical place to store arms. Whereas the use of a 
 military drum is explained as being due to the absence of a bell, 
 and carries only a subtle implication, the deleted passage is both 
 too obvious and too baldly unextenuated. 
 
 Hawthorne’s next deletion is motivated by a desire for unity of 
 effect. Immediately following his description of the rude, unplas¬ 
 tered, naked, and drab meetinghouse, there appears in the original 
 version of the tale this obviously inappropriate passage. 
 
 On one side of the house sat the women, generally in sad-colored and 
 most unfanciful apparel, although there were a few high head-dresses, 
 on which the “Cobbler of Agawam” would have lavished his empty wit 
 of words. There was no veil to be seen among them all, and it must 
 be allowed that the November sun, shining brightly through the win¬ 
 dows, fell upon many a demure but pretty set of features, which no 
 barbarity of art could spoil. The masculine department of the house pre¬ 
 sented somewhat more variety than that of the women. Most of the 
 men, it is true, were clad in black or dark-grey broadcloth, and all co¬ 
 incided in the short, ungraceful, and ear-displaying cut of their hair. 
 But those who were in martial authority, having arrayed themselves in 
 their embroidered buff-coats, contrasted strikingly with the remainder of 
 the congregation, and attracted many youthful thoughts which should 
 have been otherwise employed.^® 
 
 This passage individualizes and humanizes the otherwise ab¬ 
 stract and faceless force which is ultimately to crush Tobias and II- 
 brahim. The figures depicted here seem hardly the same ones who 
 with barbarous self-righteousness had put Ilbrahim’s father to death, 
 or shouted after Tobias, “What shall be done to the backslider.? 
 Lo! the scourge is knotted for him, even the whip of nine cords, and 
 every cord three knots Nor is it possible to imagine these rather 
 attractive people, a moment later, turning their “repulsive and un- 
 heavenly countenance[s] upon the gentle boy,” and drawing back 
 
 ^^Ibid., p. 208. 
 
 Works. I. 95. 
 
46 
 
 Seymour L. Gross 
 
 their “earth-soiled garments from his touch,” as if to say, “We are 
 holier than thou.”^° 
 
 The description of the Puritan minister is also tempered in the 
 final version. Although Hawthorne stresses the minister’s having 
 forgotten the lesson of persecution taught by the grim Archbishop 
 Laud, by having the old divine condemn heretics even though but 
 “little children” or “sucking babes,” he deletes the aspersions he had 
 originally cast upon the minister’s intellectual capabilities. After 
 describing the old man’s countenance as “pale and thin,”^^ Haw¬ 
 thorne deletes “yet not intellectual.”^^ And following his resume of 
 the minister’s sermon, Hawthorne strikes out the following passage 
 as well: 
 
 Into this discourse was worked much learning, both sacred and profane, 
 which, however, came forth not digested into its original elements, but in 
 short quotations, as if the preacher were unable to amalgamate his own 
 mind with that of the author. His own language was generally plain, 
 even to affectation, but there were frequent specimens of a dull man’s 
 efforts to be witty—little ripples fretting the surface of a stagnant pool.^^ 
 
 The deletion here is extremely significant. Hawthorne in delet¬ 
 ing this satiric passage is underlining the fact that the invidious 
 mantle of evil that is settling down upon the shoulders of the three 
 central characters stems not from a stupid man’s pietistic aberra¬ 
 tions, but rather is the outgrowth, necessary and indomitable, of 
 the sect’s metaphysic, whose self-sufficient righteousness must in¬ 
 evitably doom the tangential believer, be he ever so innocent and 
 intrinsically good. Hawthorne’s treatment of the minister’s stu¬ 
 pidity is amusing; but the Puritans are not a laughing matter. The 
 minister, as a grim symbol of the Puritan force, cannot be, at the 
 same time, an object for Popean satire. 
 
 The balance of evils is next affected by the return of Ilbrahim’s 
 mother, Catherine, to the meetinghouse. Garbed in the sackcloth 
 and ashes of the conspicuous martyr, she delivers a countersermon. 
 Hawthorne’s sharp comment on her impassioned rantings is, “Hav¬ 
 ing thus given vent to the flood of malignity which she mistook 
 for inspiration, the speaker was silent.”^'* The only deletion is that 
 of the irrevelant remark, “Having thus usurped a station to which 
 
 Ibid., I, 97 - “ Jbid.. I, 98. 
 
 Tok.cn, p. 209. Jbid., p. 210. 
 
 Works, I> loi. 
 
“The Gentle Boy” Revised 
 
 47 
 
 her sex can plead no title. .. This deletion is somewhat allied to 
 the previous one in that the particularity of the criticism detracts 
 from the general evil which Hawthorne felt to be inherent in seven¬ 
 teenth-century Quakerism. For a woman to preach, as Hawthorne 
 could see, was at most a violation of a convention; but for Haw¬ 
 thorne the deepest and most fundamental evil in Quakerism was 
 the “unbridled fanaticism” that destroyed “the duties of the present 
 life” and broke the bonds of natural affection—for Hawthorne the 
 unpardonable sin. Finally, after a tortured struggle, Catherine 
 leaves her son with the Pearsons, and wanders off again to carry out 
 what she believes is her mission. In cataloguing her self-imposed 
 suffering at the hands of other bigots, Hawthorne changes one 
 phrase so as to emphasize the Puritans’ cruelty: “For her voice had 
 been already heard in many lands of Christendom; and she had 
 pined in the cells of a Catholic Inquisition before she felt the 
 lash and lay in the dungeons [“ate the bread” in the To\en^ of the 
 Puritans.”"® 
 
 So Ilbrahim becomes a part of the “immovable furniture” of the 
 Pearson household. The child under the consciousness of being 
 loved blossoms into a delighted and delightful boy, although, as 
 Hawthorne observes, “the disordered imaginations of both his father 
 and mother had perhaps propagated a certain unhealthiness in the 
 mind of the boy.”^^ Ilbrahim is acutely sensitive both to pleasure 
 and pain, and although his is a prevailingly sweet temperament, the 
 slightest rebuke steeps him in an almost unnatural depression. The 
 Puritans are unrelenting. It is with scorn and bitterness that they 
 view the child, whose innocent spirits constantly offend their sense 
 of propriety. But it is the children of the settlement who most hate 
 Ilbrahim—the very children whom he needs for the exercise of his 
 yet “unappropriated love.”^® When chance has it that one of these 
 children is injured and has to be confined to the Pearson home for 
 medical reasons, Ilbrahim’s tragedy rises to its climax. Ilbrahim 
 WOOS the injured boy, who is significantly misshapen, with the con¬ 
 sideration, patience, and gentleness of an unworthy lover. When 
 the boy is well enough to leave, Ilbrahim imagines that his natural 
 
 Totfen, p. 211. 
 
 Worlds, I, 107. 
 
 ” Ibid., I, 108. 
 
 ** “Unappropriatc love” in Tol{en. 
 
48 
 
 Seymour L. Gross 
 
 affection has overcome the inherited malice of the community. One 
 day, completely trusting, Ilbrahim approaches a group of Puritan 
 boys. But with the “devil of their fathers” in their hearts the chil¬ 
 dren attack him mercilessly. The boy whom Ilbrahim had be¬ 
 friended stands apart on crutches. He calls coaxingly to the besieged 
 boy and Ilbrahim drags his bruised body towards the friend to “take 
 his hand.” When the Quaker child is close enough, the boy strikes 
 him across the mouth with his crutch. It is all over with the child. 
 Where before he had struggled against the battering of his body, he 
 now, more deeply damaged, turns over to die. The Puritan force 
 in its most elemental state—the children—has done its work. Ilbra¬ 
 him is saved from actual death by some older people. 
 
 Back at the Pearsons’ the child, his soul withered, awaits death. 
 But Hawthorne forces us to remember that although the Puritan 
 force has beat its unrelenting hate against the child’s fragile being, 
 the soul was crushed against the rock of the Quaker woman’s un¬ 
 holy neglect of a mother’s duty. Ilbrahim in his agony cries out 
 “Mother, Mother,” which “admitted of no substitute in his extreme 
 affliction.”^ 
 
 The tragedy of Ilbrahim is complete. Caught between two ab¬ 
 stract forces, which the gentle boy could only feel but never under¬ 
 stand, he is ironically mangled between a pious love masquerading 
 as hate, and pious hate masquerading as love. His physical death in 
 the arms of his agonized mother later is an anticlimax. When the 
 soul is dead the body will not long endure. 
 
 But before Ilbrahim’s death Hawthorne had shifted his focus of 
 interest to Tobias. Tobias had always yearned for a more fervid 
 faith than Calvinism, although he had little doubt of its doctrinarian 
 validity. His love for Ilbrahim had softened his attitude towards 
 Quakers, but his contempt for the sect’s tenets and outrageous prac¬ 
 tices remained firm. His struggle for metaphysical values is tor¬ 
 tured by the paradox of the head and the heart. Whereas his in¬ 
 tellect rejected the spiritual extravagances of the Quakers, his emo¬ 
 tional nature was revolted by the Calvinists’ torture and castigation, 
 even in the name of a Truth whose theoretical basis he accepted. 
 Even as he becomes assimilated to the “enthusiasts,” his contempt 
 for them is not lessened, and he resolves the problem by turning the 
 Workj, I, 113. 
 
“The Gentle Boy” Revised 
 
 49 
 
 scorn upon himself. At this point in Tobias’s religious predicament 
 Hawthorne deletes this passage. 
 
 At length, when the change in his belief was fully accomplished, the 
 contest grew very terrible between the love of the world, in its thousand 
 shapes, and the power which moved him to sacrifice all for the one pure 
 faith; to quote his own words, subsequently uttered at a meeting of 
 Friends, it was as if “Earth and Hell had garrisoned the fortress of his 
 miserable soul, and Heaven came battering against it to storm the 
 walls.’’^® 
 
 The reason for this deletion is obvious. First, Hawthorne realized 
 that by projecting Tobias’s ultimate spiritual peace into the future 
 he was vitiating, even nullifying, the tragedy which was still to be 
 dramatized. “It is heavy! It is heavier than I can bear!” exclaims 
 the tortured Tobias somewhat later, as he awaits the death of his 
 new-found son.^^ Second, and more important, the passage seems to 
 insinuate that Tobias’s choice was the “correct” one: that his con¬ 
 version enabled him finally to grasp The Truth (“the one pure 
 faith”). But this is not what the form of the tale indicates. The 
 quest for The Truth is not here Hawthorne’s concern; on the con¬ 
 trary, it is the ruthless conviction that the truth is The Truth which 
 activates the forces of the tragedy. Tobias is not the happy martyr 
 whose anguished pain eventually gains for him the gift of certainty; 
 he “acts according to the simplest Christian ethic, in an impulse of 
 pure generosity and loving-kindness. And . . . the very pillars of the 
 Christian temple . . . shatter about him and crush him.”^^ Ulti¬ 
 mately, Tobias’s conversion was not toward the dogma of the 
 Quakers, but away from the cruel inhumanity of the Puritans—a 
 desperate and despairing escape, without sweetness or light. It is 
 the tragedy of Ilbrahim that incites the tragedy of Tobias. 
 
 The revision of the following passage achieves the same effect as 
 the previous deletion. 
 
 Such was his state of warfare at the period of Ilbrahim’s misfortune; and 
 the emotions consequent upon that event enlisted with the beseiging 
 army, and decided the victory. There was a triumphant shout within 
 him, and from that moment all was peace. Dorothy had not been the 
 
 Tokj:n, p. 227. 
 
 Worlds, I, 117. 
 
 Louise Dauner, “The ‘Case’ of Tobias Pearson: Hawthorne and the Ambiguities,” 
 American Literature, XXI, 468-469 (Jan., 1950). 
 
50 
 
 Seymour L. Gross 
 
 subject of a similar process, for her reason was as clear as her heart was 
 tender. (Tof^en, pp. 227-228) 
 
 Such was his state of mind at the period of Ilbrahim’s misfortune; and 
 the emotions consequent upon that event completed the change, of which 
 the child had been the original instrument. (Wor^s, I, 114) 
 
 The original version indicates a spiritual peace, which is wholly 
 absent from the final one. In revising his original passage, Haw¬ 
 thorne escaped the predicament of the Miracle Plays: the audience’s 
 knowledge that the “tragic” happenings of this world would be, 
 at the end, recompensed with Infinite Bliss. The Miracle Plays, 
 therefore, are never tragedies; but Hawthorne’s tale is a tragedy. 
 
 The final scene of the tale introduces a new character: an old 
 Quaker whose suffering, unlike Tobias’s, has gained him the happy 
 acceptance of the convinced martyr. The old man, as Catherine 
 had, deserted a child to follow the compelling inner light. Although 
 the old Quaker is an affecting figure, and his sincere suffering 
 arouses the reader’s sympathy, there runs through this section an 
 unmistakable undertone of criticism. For Hawthorne, the inner 
 light which causes an unnatural neglect of duties is, in reality, an 
 inner darkness, and, so as not to mitigate the basic fanaticism which 
 lay beneath the old man’s actions, Hawthorne deleted this piece of 
 description: “His features were strong and well connected, and 
 seemed to express firmness of purpose and sober understanding, al¬ 
 though his actions had frequently been at variance with this last 
 attribute.”^® 
 
 Catherine returns to her final agony: Ilbrahim dies in her arms. 
 And after still more years of even more “unbridled fanaticism,” 
 heightened by the absence of any earthly ties, she finally returns to 
 the Pearson household, “her fierce and vindictive nature ... softened 
 by the same griefs which had once irritated it.”^^ In time, her trans¬ 
 formation wins over the Puritans, and when she dies many mourners 
 follow her to her grave beside her son’s. Both forces have spent 
 themselves. 
 
 There remains but one final deletion to consider. Originally 
 Hawthorne had closed his tale with these words: “My heart is glad 
 of this triumph of our better nature; it gives me a kindlier feeling 
 
 To/(en, p. 229. 
 
 Worlds, I, 125. 
 
“The Gentle Boy” Revised 
 
 51 
 
 for the fathers of my native land; and with it I will close the tale.”*® 
 Perhaps Hawthorne omitted this extraneous “story-teller’s” com¬ 
 ment so as better to preserve the effect of imaginative reality; how¬ 
 ever, he closed so many another tale in a similar manner that such 
 a conclusion would be extremely tenuous. But it does seem reason¬ 
 able to assume that he deleted the passage because it would have 
 tended to cast the greatest burden of guilt upon the Puritans; how¬ 
 ever, as I have attempted to demonstrate, Hawthorne manipulated 
 his material, especially through his revisions, so as to point up the 
 mutuality of guilt. Therefore, it seems to me, the theme of this tale 
 is more than just a dramatized social tract—“a mature study of 
 bigotry and persecution”^®—although it is that too. Hawthorne’s 
 revisions in this tale so generalize and equalize the terms of the guilt, 
 that, in its final effect, the thematic implication of the story trans¬ 
 cends any particular manifestation of evil. For Hawthorne, more 
 than for any of his contemporaries except Melville, the existence of 
 an Evil Principle was a reality;®^ and this tale, ultimately, contem¬ 
 plates the tragedy of an innocent child and a Christian adult caught 
 up by this elemental condition of existence, of which the historical 
 act of persecution is but a grim reflection. 
 
 To}(en, p. 240. 
 
 Mark Van Doren, Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York, 1949), p. 77. 
 
 '’"There is evil in every human heart,” he wrote in his notebook for 1836 (Worlds, 
 IX, 43 ). 
 
Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter: "The Dark Problem 
 of This Life” 
 
 Hugh N. Maclean 
 
 I 
 
 L ike all great books, The Scarlet Letter continuously stimulates 
 criticism. Hawthorne’s genius has not called forth such tre¬ 
 mendous surges of critical interest as those which have swept over 
 Blake, James, or Melville; but a steadier and perhaps more progres¬ 
 sively constructive stream of studies has added considerably to Haw¬ 
 thorne’s stature. An early tendency to consider Hester the “hero¬ 
 ine,” saved, or at least somehow “improved” by her experiences, has 
 been replaced by a tougher but more accurate interpretation.^ The 
 placing of Hawthorne in Melville’s shadow, as a “conscious allegor- 
 ist,” properly somewhat behind and beneath the “symbolist drawing 
 on the unconscious,” has been corrected. Matthiessen’s insights, 
 meanwhile, have become critical touchstones, whether they relate to 
 Hawthorne’s concern with his own day (as distinct from Brooks’s 
 wraith-like aesthete in the ghost town of Salem), his deliberately 
 imposed framework of allegory, or his choice of “romance” for its 
 multilateral nature.^ 
 
 As to the relation of structure and theme in Hawthorne’s novel. 
 Professor Gerber has done much.® But the text of the novel justifies 
 an extension of his approach. The purpose of the present study is to 
 show that the structure of The Scarlet Letter is more deliberately pat¬ 
 terned than Gerber suggests, and to show that, by making the fullest 
 use of allegory and of “levels of meaning,” its artful balance con¬ 
 sciously illuminates the “dark necessity” of Hawthorne’s theme. 
 Critics of the book have often evaded unequivocal statement of 
 
 ^ See especially R. H. Fogle, Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Light and the Dar\ (Norman, 
 Okla., 1952), pp. 104-107, 117-118; and Darrel Abel, “Hawthorne’s Hester,” College 
 English, XIII, 303-309 (March, 1952). 
 
 ’F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1949), PP. 192, 250, 267. See 
 also The Portable Hawthorne, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York, 1948), pp. 1-21; 
 Fogle, op. cit., pp. 106-109. 
 
 •J. C. Gerber, “Form and Content \n The Scarlet Letter," New England Quarterly, 
 XVII, 25-55 (March, 1944)- 
 
The Scarlet Letter 
 
 53 
 
 this theme; this is reasonable, since Hawthorne himself does not 
 absolutely define the fate of Hester and Dimmesdale. Matthiessen 
 finds Hawthorne’s “device of multiple choice” peculiarly applicable 
 to The Scarlet letter; Cowley, who recognizes his subject’s Calvinist 
 convictions, implies that “a faith in the value of confession and 
 absolution” somewhat mitigates the rigor of Hawthorne’s position; 
 Fogle remarks that “The true conclusion of The Scarlet Letter is an 
 unresolved contradiction—unresolved not from indecision or lack of 
 thought but from honesty of imagination.”^ Hawthorne, of course, 
 could not give a final answer to “the dark problem of this life.” But 
 he resolves the contrast between man’s complete weakness (con¬ 
 sequent on his sin) and God’s complete power (revealed by His 
 grace) in an unmistakably voluntarist manner. That contrast is 
 the theme of The Scarlet Letter. There is no evidence that Haw¬ 
 thorne questions the absolute nature of God’s predestinate decree. 
 All Hester’s strength, intelligence, devotion avail neither her lover 
 nor herself. God alone saves the sinner, and Dimmesdale acknowl¬ 
 edges this with his dying breath: “Praised be his name! His Will 
 be done!”^ He reserves for Hester the accents of fear and doubt. 
 No wonder Sophia, who thought Emerson “the greatest man that 
 ever lived,” “took to her bed,” when Hawthorne read the last chap¬ 
 ters aloud to her, “with one of her old headaches.”® Her bowdler¬ 
 izing instincts must have been dumfounded by the stark and un¬ 
 compromising revelation of her husband’s beliefs. 
 
 Hawthorne knew very well that he was dealing with a theme 
 “not less but more heroic” than anything which had yet appeared in 
 American fiction. Consciously or not, he clothed his fable in epic 
 machinery. The tale begins in medias res; it develops in twenty-four 
 books, of which the first twelve lead outward and “downward”; 
 the concluding twelve home to the heart and to salvation—for Dim¬ 
 mesdale, at least. At the halfway mark Chillingworth seems to be 
 triumphant; Pearl has been described in terms almost exclusively 
 of uncontrolled, chaotic passion. A number of “solutions,” political, 
 theological, even necromantic, have been tried (or suggested) and 
 found wanting. Dimmesdale allows himself to be led away by the 
 
 ‘Matthiessen, op. cit., pp. 276-277; Cowley, op. cit., p. 13; Fogle, op. cit., pp. 104-105. 
 
 ' TAf Best of Hawthorne, ed. Mark Van Doren (New York, 1951), p. 387. Page 
 references to The Scarlet Letter in the text of this article are to this edition. 
 
 ‘Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 230; The Best of Hawthorne, p. 19. 
 
54 
 
 Hugh N. Maclean 
 
 leech. But in the concluding twelve chapters all is reversed. Chill- 
 ingworth steadily declines in power. Pearl’s character, though rud¬ 
 derless for a time, is now considered in terms of its potential intel¬ 
 ligence and active fiber. The one true solution to “the dark prob¬ 
 lem” resolves the bewildered despair of the protagonists on a 
 supernatural plane, to which they can be raised only by supernatural 
 aid. This is “epic machinery” without a self-starter. Only God can 
 provide the vital spark. 
 
 There are three epic “quests” in the novel. Dimmesdale’s search 
 for salvation is a conscious, if largely involuntary quest, which is one 
 long agon, pierced (in Chapter XII), by the pathos or apparent 
 “death” of his soul, but concluded by the final triumph (really God’s 
 triumph) of the struggling “hero.” Two other quests turn on the 
 outcome of this central struggle. Chillingworth, the agent of evil, 
 undertakes a conscious and voluntary quest, with the soul of Dim- 
 mesdale as object; this mission, appropriately, is perverted in pattern, 
 and ends (after an apparent victory in Chapter XII) in the destruc¬ 
 tion of the physician. Pearl, who represents man’s hopeful future as 
 Chillingworth recalls his bitter and diseased past, has her quest too. 
 It is first announced by Hester: “My child must seek a heavenly 
 Father; she shall never know an earthly one” (p. 241). This quest, 
 which is unconscious and involuntary, appears doomed for a time. 
 As Dimmesdale falls under Chillingworth’s spell. Pearl seeks knowl¬ 
 edge, not of any “heavenly Father,” but of “the Black Man.” At 
 length, of course, she finds her “heavenly Father.” After the kiss on 
 the scaffold. Pearl, reconciled to the conditions of life, will not “for¬ 
 ever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it” (p. 386). 
 
 These quests, however, take place on different levels. Although 
 they are closely interdependent, they differ in kind. The quest and 
 career of Dimmesdale (as of Hester) is carried on in society and in 
 nature. Granting all their passion and determination, it remains a 
 fact that both these figures are ineffectual. Dimmesdale accomplishes 
 nothing positive until the eve preceding the “Election Sermon.” 
 Hester’s frenetic activity is thoroughly futile. To be sure, this is the 
 level of humanity, on which the story of the novel unfolds. But al¬ 
 though we call the events on this level “real” and its characters 
 “central,” events and characters both are signs and symbols of the 
 eternal battle being waged by forces altogether outside its limits. 
 
T/ie Scarlet Letter 
 
 55 
 
 Chillingworth, cold and determined, and Pearl, whose heavenly 
 Father waits in the wings, remind us of this struggle. Throughout 
 the action Hester and Dimmesdale, first separately, then together, 
 come under the influence of Chillingworth; and their reactions af¬ 
 fect Pearl. Indeed, the actions of Hester and the minister are a 
 kind of “mirror” through which Chillingworth, once he is actively 
 launched on his way of revenge, moves freely into the Pearl-world. 
 Only at the close of the novel does this mirror become opaque, clos¬ 
 ing Chillingworth out from the New Jerusalem and reflecting mere¬ 
 ly his own self-destructive image. 
 
 The quests of Pearl and the leech, therefore, are in a sense more 
 “real” than those of the two “central” characters. But Hawthorne 
 was careful not to assign a scene to Pearl and Chillingworth alone, 
 as he assigned at least one to every other pair of characters. The 
 child and the physician meet only in the presence of others, and they 
 exchange no word. Hawthorne knew that the past and the future 
 meet only in the present, and that the effect of the one and the hope 
 of the other have meaning for man only in consequence of the 
 thought and action of present time. In The Scarlet Letter the level 
 of actuality on which Hester, Dimmesdale, and society move is re¬ 
 lated both to a threatening symbolic level, acting as it were from 
 below, and also to a hopeful symbolic level, promising more than 
 this world offers. As God knows the necessary outcome, the fate 
 of Chillingworth and Pearl does not literally depend on the actions 
 of Hester and Dimmesdale; rather, the manner in which the lives of 
 these four figures turn on each other demonstrates the nature of the 
 divine plan. 
 
 The structure of The Scarlet Letter, accordingly, is complex; but 
 its complexity is unified by the central theme of God’s saving power 
 and man’s futility, to which each part of the book directs its readers’ 
 attention. The structure is thoroughly balanced and ordered. Pro¬ 
 fessor Gerber finds a four-part progressive division to be the dis¬ 
 tinguishing principle of the novel’s pattern; and it seems to be true 
 that first society at large, then, successively, Chillingworth, Hester, 
 and Dimmesdale take the center of Hawthorne’s stage. Yet the 
 parts of the novel interact more closely than this interpretation 
 would allow. Chillingworth’s quest is the subject of Chapters IV 
 and XIV; Pearl’s quest (or “fate”) is central first in VI through 
 
56 
 
 Hugh N. Maclean 
 
 VIII, later again in XV and XVI; Dimmesdale’s quest (that of all 
 men) is considered especially in IX through XI and again in XVII 
 through XX. The reactions and attitudes of society are discussed, 
 especially as they affect Hester, in Chapters V, XIII, and XXI-XXII. 
 At regular intervals, finally, those “key” chapters centered on the 
 scaffold sum up and comment on the action. In each of them the 
 fearful symbol appears in a different form. The scarlet letter on 
 Hester’s breast in Chapter II reminds us of sin in woman; Dimmes¬ 
 dale’s revelation in Chapter XXIII confirms the presence of sin in 
 man; the cloudy yet fiery “A” in the heavens, described in Chapter 
 XII, points to the importance of sin in the universal plan. These 
 groupings are enclosed by Chapters I and XXIV, which symbolical¬ 
 ly anticipate and confirm the theme of the novel. 
 
 II 
 
 Death and life, darkness and light, ugliness and beauty: these are 
 suggested by the prison-door and the rosebush of Chapter I. But 
 both are natural symbols; and although the rosebush is a sign that 
 “the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to” the sinner, that 
 is not enough for salvation, as Hawthorne emphasizes in his later 
 account of the forest meeting between Hester and Dimmesdale. 
 There he reminds us that “the sympathy of Nature” stems from 
 “that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by 
 human law, nor illumined by higher truth” (p. 345). Life is not 
 totally dark; but it must always be “a tale of human frailty and sor¬ 
 row,” since the ancient crime at its root effectively prevents the 
 establishment by men of any “Utopia of human virtue and happi¬ 
 ness.” They are condemned instead to an existence symbolized by 
 “the black flower of civilized society, a prison.” The opening chap¬ 
 ter of the novel, therefore, promises a description of prisoners and 
 criminals, under sentence of doom, whose hearts may be relieved, 
 but not truly lifted up, by moral virtue or natural beauty. The novel 
 ends at a gravestone, confirming the dominance of sin over death 
 as well as life. When the characters have been disposed of in the 
 customary nineteenth-century manner, we are left with the “simple 
 slab of slate . . . relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light 
 gloomier than the shadow.” No earthly shadow can be as somber 
 as man’s lot; yet within the rigoristic framework of God’s plan lies 
 the promise of salvation gained after suffering. 
 
The Scarlet Letter 
 
 57 
 
 Chapters V, XIII, and XXI-XXII deal with society—and with 
 Hester. Society, which at first condemns Hester, later respects her, 
 and finally takes her for granted, is evidently deluded. Its confi¬ 
 dence in the righteousness of social judgments and its assumption 
 that Hester is properly cowed (and presumably “improved”) by the 
 punishment are unfounded. “The scarlet letter had not done its 
 office.” But Hester also is at fault. Although her suffering is the 
 subject of Chapter V, and her strength of will that of Chapter XIII, 
 both heart and will are pressed into the service of a foolish and fat¬ 
 uous arrogance. That she sets herself, from the first, against man’s 
 law is understandable, even part of Hawthorne’s theme; but she 
 also challenges the law of God. Hester “deemed herself connected 
 with Dimmesdale in a union that, unrecognized on earth, would 
 bring them together before the bar of final judgment, and make that 
 their marriage-altar” (p. 250). This is altogether unwarranted; and 
 Hawthorne confirms our impression by his reference to Hester’s 
 “sick and morbid heart,” which sheltered “no genuine and steadfast 
 penitence, but something that might be deeply wrong, beneath” 
 (p. 252). Society may be partly accountable for this condition, but 
 that is less important than the fact that Hester presumes to judge 
 her own case. As Hawthorne points out in Chapter XIII, Hester 
 was “little accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure 
 her ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself” 
 (P- 311)- 
 
 Even more significant is Hester’s “marble coldness,” the result 
 of her turn “in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to 
 thought” (p. 315). Just as Hester’s spiritual pain led her, not to 
 true penitence, but to presumption, so she dedicates her strength to 
 a task beyond her, the “saving” of Dimmesdale. Hester is still 
 making her own laws. “She determined to redeem her error, so 
 far as it might yet be possible” (p. 317). Of course, this is not pos¬ 
 sible. We may sympathize with her courage, and even applaud the 
 moral effect of her conduct upon society; but we cannot miss the 
 futility of her attempt. Chapters XXI and XXII describe Hester as 
 “startled more than she permitted to appear,” “. . . in the utmost 
 consternation,” and “harassed by . . . terrible perplexity.” Her 
 desperate effort on the scaffold to bring off the conjuring trick re¬ 
 sults only in her lover’s admonition to be silent, to recall their mutual 
 
58 
 
 Hugh N. Maclean 
 
 error, and to praise the Lord for having saved Dimmesdale. This 
 is cruel; but it is Hawthorne’s view of life. 
 
 Chillingworth comments openly on his “quest” in only two chap¬ 
 ters, IV and XIV. But these chapters reveal a significant develop¬ 
 ment in his nature and his search. The scholar who has “sought 
 truth in books” and “gold in alchemy,” and who has “learned many 
 new secrets in the wilderness,” is at first confident and then self- 
 reliant. His smile betrays “dark and self-relying intelligence.” 
 Chillingworth is quite sure that by his own intellectual powers he 
 can dominate Hester and expose Dimmesdale. He even regards his 
 sojourn among savages as a period of intellectual preparation for his 
 avenging task in the community—almost as a parodied version of 
 Christ’s forty days in the wilderness. Pearl is implicitly in his power 
 by force of the mysterious drug; the others he claims more directly. 
 “Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me.” As for the other, 
 “Let him hide himself in outward honor, if he may! Not the less 
 he shall be mine” (p. 247). But his almost casual admission, “Mine 
 was the first wrong,” foreshadows his defeat. The reader senses 
 that while Chillingworth means to “ruin” the soul of Dimmesdale, 
 God’s purpose has already substituted the soul of the leech. This is 
 made certain by the balancing Chapter XIV, in which Chilling¬ 
 worth, though bound to play out the game, fully recognizes that he 
 is merely a pawn on the board. Hester, with her usual complacency, 
 imagines that she alone can perceive the physician’s inner trans¬ 
 formation. Chillingworth knows far more than Hester; living with 
 a devil has brought him a special and bitter insight. Man is power¬ 
 less ; the way of the world is governed by a “dark necessity”; and sin 
 itself, which men fondly imagine to be their own, belongs to God 
 too. “Ye that have wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of 
 typical illusion. . . .” All men are agents, destined to “plant the 
 germ of evil” or of good, not by their own wills, but as instruments 
 in the hand of God. In such an existence, as Chillingworth comes 
 to know, talk of “pardon” between man and man is meaningless 
 and wholly without effect. 
 
 In this same Chapter XIV, Hester, glimpsing her own futility, 
 insists passionately that an identical fate awaits all men. “There is 
 no good for him,—no good for me,—no good for thee! There is no 
 good for little Pearl! There is no path to guide us out of this dismal 
 
The Scarlet Letter 
 
 59 
 
 maze!” She is wrong, and especially wrong about Pearl. It is true 
 that in Chapter VI, where Pearl is presented almost entirely through 
 her mother’s eyes, the child’s chaotic nature receives chiefest em¬ 
 phasis; her wilfulness, her enmity to others, and especially “the war¬ 
 fare of Hester’s spirit” which she perpetuates, are at this stage 
 dominant. Further, “the small black mirror of Pearl’s eyes” reveals 
 to a horrified Hester the “little, laughing image of a fiend”; Pearl’s 
 rejection of her quest (“He did not send me! ... I have no Heavenly 
 Father”) seems to spring from the promptings of an evil spirit. This 
 is only one view of Pearl, and the least reliable; yet the two chapters 
 which follow, and which deal with society’s comment on the child, 
 are broadly parallel. Pearl is variously described as one of the 
 “children of the Lord of Misrule,” “one of those naughty elfs or 
 fairies,” and (by Chillingworth) as a “little baggage” with “witch¬ 
 craft in her.” But even the rigid Puritans conclude their examina¬ 
 tion of Pearl on an unaccustomed note of humility. At this moment, 
 too, Hester is reminded that “there was love in the child’s heart, al¬ 
 though it mostly revealed itself in passion”; and Hawthorne ends the 
 chapter on a new note, remarking, as Hester rebuffs Mistress Hib- 
 bins, “Even thus early had the child saved her from Satan’s snare.” 
 
 Chapters XV and XVI do not positively assert that there is 
 “good” for Pearl; that must wait for Dimmesdale’s public admission 
 of guilt. Hester, typically, tells the child that although the scarlet 
 letter has meaning. Pearl’s green symbol has none. Yet there now 
 begins to emerge from “the little chaos of Pearl’s character” courage, 
 “sturdy pride,” scorn of falsehood, and a ripening capacity for love. 
 Even Hester is allowed a glimpse of Pearl’s destiny. 
 
 Hester had often fancied that Providence had a design of justice and 
 retribution, in endowing the child with this marked propensity; but 
 never, until now, had she bethought herself to ask, whether, linked with 
 that design, there might not likewise be a purpose of mercy and 
 benevolence. 
 
 Hawthorne, in fact, has in the second group of chapters centered on 
 Pearl prepared his audience for that moment on the scaffold when 
 her kiss announces the breaking of “a spell,” and it becomes sure 
 that “she will grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor forever do 
 battle with the world, but be a woman in it” (p. 386). This does not 
 mean that Pearl will find life completely happy; but that Pearl 
 
6o 
 
 Hugh N. Maclean 
 
 (in the future) can become “the richest heiress of her day, in the 
 New World.” She has been freed into a new spiritual life. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The quests of Chillingworth and Pearl, and the wanderings of 
 Hester, are in the novel properly subsidiary to that of Dimmesdale. 
 Chapters IX, X, and XI describe the gradual decay of his will and 
 spirit under Chillingworth’s grinding inexorability. In these chapters 
 the full weight of the physician’s malice, knowledge, and ferocious 
 craving for revenge is thrown into the scales against Dimmesdale, 
 who, for his part, understands very well “the perchance mortal agony 
 through which he must struggle towards his triumph” (p. 287). 
 But the very weakening of Dimmesdale’s fiber is a subtle part of 
 God’s plan, for only in this way can man receive grace. Chilling- 
 worth blindly counts on “all the powers of nature,” which, he be¬ 
 lieves, “call so earnestly for the confession of sin” (p. 289). Dim¬ 
 mesdale recognizes his own corruption: “. .. above all things else ... 
 he loathed his miserable self!” But he knows that “nature” is ir¬ 
 relevant. “There can be, if I forebode aright, no power, short of the 
 Divine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or 
 emblem, the secrets that may be buried with a human heart.” Ir¬ 
 resistible grace follows the recognition of total depravity. Penance, 
 however, is not penitence; the bloody scourge in Dimmesdale’s closet 
 does not compensate for his secretiveness; his life at this stage is 
 “so false . . . that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever 
 realities there are around him.” The minister, overcome by “chill” 
 despondency, is led away by the leech. 
 
 The Calvinist knows, of course, that only from such absolute deg¬ 
 radation and apparent defeat can regeneration spring. We should 
 not expect a gradual recovery, balancing Dimmesdale’s gradual de¬ 
 cline; for if man works slowly, God’s will is done in an instant. 
 That is why Hawthorne, in Chapters XVII through XX, allows only 
 hints of the approaching climax to appear. Earlier anticipations of 
 the direction and meaning of Dimmesdale’s quest are given new em¬ 
 phasis. “As concerns the good which I may appear to do, I have 
 no faith in it. It must needs be a delusion. What can a ruined soul 
 like mine effect towards the redemption of other souls.?—or a pol¬ 
 luted soul towards their purification?” “Of penance, I have had 
 enough! Of penitence, there has been none!” The mutual forgive- 
 
The Scarlet Letter 
 
 6i 
 
 ness of the lovers, and the recognition that their sin is not “the 
 vi^orst ... in the world” (p. 339), appropriately accompany Dim- 
 mesdale’s bitter self-recrimination. But human power can achieve 
 no more than mutual sympathy and understanding in “things in¬ 
 different.” Further effort is unavailing. Hester’s continual harping 
 on the “happiness” that she can win for both would be almost comic, 
 were it not such a pathetic effort to escape the will of God. Haw¬ 
 thorne points up the irony of Hester’s determination by treating her 
 as he had treated Chillingworth, when the physician (in Chapter 
 IV) announced his intention of ruining the soul of her lover. His 
 own soul was in question, although he meant another’s. Here too, 
 when Hester whispers dramatically, “Thou shalt not go alone!” it is 
 God who smilingly prepares to “accompany” the minister. 
 
 The crucial Chapter XX has two functions. It emphasizes the 
 weakness of the most determined and wily human efforts to gain 
 salvation. But it also shows the immediate results (on Dimmesdale) 
 of irresistible grace. The minister is not buoyed up or strengthened 
 by his interview with Hester; after it, in fact, his mind most com¬ 
 pletely yields to the insidious persuasions of evil, as his encounters 
 with age, beauty, and innocence show. He is in that “maze” which 
 terrified Hester. But the path out of the maze is at hand: God 
 speaks to Dimmesdale and confirms his election. This is clearly 
 indicated in the closing paragraphs of the chapter. Chillingworth, 
 at the outset of his acquaintance with the minister, had spoken of 
 “saintly men, who walk with God on earth,” and of their desire “to 
 walk with him on the golden pavements of the New Jerusalem” 
 (p. 282). The bitter (and apparently Godless) “walk” on earth is 
 over now; Chillingworth, on the threshold of triumph, sardonically 
 compares “a good man’s prayers” to “the current gold coin of the 
 New Jerusalem, with the King’s own mint-mark on them!” It is 
 God who answers him. Chillingworth, after all, has the unhappy 
 knack of saying precisely the wrong thing (from God’s point of 
 view) at such crucial moments as this, and it is artistically right that 
 he should blunder once more. This is how Hawthorne continues 
 speaking of Dimmesdale: 
 
 . . . flinging the already written pages of the Election Sermon into the 
 fire, he forthwith began another, which he wrote with such impulsive 
 flow of thought and emotion, that he fancied himself inspired; and only 
 
62 
 
 Hugh N. Maclean 
 
 wondered that Heaven should see fit to transmit the grand and solemn 
 music of its oracles through so foul an organ-pipe as he. However, 
 leaving that mystery to solve itself, or go unsolved forever, he drove his 
 task onward, with earnest haste and ecstasy. Thus the night fled away, 
 as if it were a winged steed, and he careering on it; morning came, and 
 peeped, blushing, through the curtains; and at last sunrise threw a golden 
 beam into the study and laid it right across the minister’s bedazzled eyes. 
 
 An old life is cast into the fire; the foul sinner becomes the recipient 
 of a divine favor totally beyond the grasp of reason. Inspired and 
 ecstatic, the newly elected rises in spirit beyond his dark night of 
 the soul, dazzled but irresistibly drawn into the protective blaze of 
 salvation. There remains only the acknowledgment (on the scaf¬ 
 fold) of God’s power and the confirmation of God’s mercy—which 
 Hester has dimly glimpsed, but which she cannot hope to compre¬ 
 hend. 
 
 IV 
 
 Most critics have noticed Hawthorne’s preoccupation with mir¬ 
 rors. In The Scarlet Letter, he uses them as signposts in the struc¬ 
 ture and to illustrate his theme. There are eight mirrors in the 
 novel, reflecting scenes and images appropriate to the persons who 
 look into each mirror. Hester sees a demon in the mirror of Pearl’s 
 eyes (p. 262). Fear, hatred, and self-assertive determination, de¬ 
 veloped in her by the severity of society, make possible only the view 
 of life which finds “no good for little Pearl.” Since the image in 
 this mirror is in a sense of Hester’s own making, it is false and un¬ 
 real. Chillingworth, on the other hand, sees real evil—his own doom 
 according to the divine fiat—in the mirror of his imagination. The 
 “frightful shape, which he could not recognize, usurping the place 
 of his own image in a glass” (p. 321), foreshadows the final scenes 
 of the novel, when the physican’s carefully developed plans explode 
 and destroy him. 
 
 Dimmesdale, the only character to view himself in an actual 
 mirror, sees all—but doubtfully, not with discernment. Devils, 
 angels, dead friends and parents, Hester and Pearl pass over the sur¬ 
 face of his mirror, and these shadows bring no certainty either of 
 damnation or salvation. They reflect Dimmesdale’s own degenera¬ 
 tion of character. “To the untrue man, the whole universe is false, 
 —it is impalpable,—it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he 
 
The Scarlet Letter 
 
 63 
 
 himself, in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a 
 shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist” (p. 301). This mirror signifies 
 that Dimmesdale may yet follow angel or beckoning devil; and it 
 betrays his utter inability to make the right decision for himself, 
 lacking that divine aid which alone can make him a “true” man. 
 
 For Pearl there are two mirrors. In Governor Bellingham’s 
 armor she sees Hester, and a “gigantic” scarlet letter, symbolizing 
 both her heritage and the fate which may be hers. But in the pool 
 at the water’s edge (in Chapter XIV), she sees a “visionary little 
 maid,” who beckons her to “a better place.” Pearl (in the future) 
 may look on to election as well as to damnation. Her destiny, un¬ 
 like that of the others, hangs in the balance (for readers of the novel) 
 until the final scene on the scaffold. 
 
 The remaining three “mirrors” have to do, not with the char¬ 
 acters, but with past, present, and future time, the framework within 
 which their trials develop. In Chapter XVI, “the giant trees and 
 bowlders of granite seemed intent on making a mystery of the course 
 of this small brook; fearing, perhaps, that with its never-ceasing 
 loquacity, it should whisper tales out of the heart of the old forest 
 whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of 
 a pool.” This suggests that the “wild, heathen Nature of the forest, 
 never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth,” 
 wishes to conceal the past, with its deadly yet dazzling secrets, which 
 deny to Nature the full solace of God’s saving promise to the elect. 
 The present, in which God continually works out the consequences 
 of Adam’s fault, is made up of hurrying moments; it is man’s na¬ 
 ture to catch at these. But time is only the stage of the eternal 
 drama; life is short and evanescent. The ephemeral nature of human 
 life and the fleeting opportunities it offers to all men’s vision are 
 caught in Hawthorne’s second mirror of time; when Hester and 
 Dimmesdale meet in the forest, “The soul beheld its features in the 
 mirror of the passing moment” (p. 335). As for the future, that 
 mirror must be Pearl’s; and in fact the final mirror-image in the 
 novel is the brook’s reflection of Pearl, “a perfect image of her little 
 figure . .. more refined and spiritualized than the reality” (p. 349). 
 This final mirror denies Hester’s assumption of Pearl’s doom, and 
 confirms the second possibility offered to Pearl by her reflection in 
 the pool. Thus the three mirrors reflect the terrible but inescapable 
 
64 
 
 Hugh N. Maclean 
 
 facts of man’s past, the challenge of a fleeting but invaluable present, 
 and the divine promise to be realized in the future. 
 
 Is not the novel itself, or at least the line of plot which describes 
 the development of Hester and Dimmesdale, a mirror for the reader ? 
 As external observer, the reader becomes imaginatively aware of Chil- 
 lingworth’s sidling approach to the mirror’s surface, beyond which 
 plays the innocent (yet wise, and even potentially vicious) Pearl. 
 Only with Dimmesdale’s revelation does the mirror become opaque, 
 casting Chillingworth’s dreadful image destructively back upon him¬ 
 self. But the novel is not by any means merely “a novel,” to be read, 
 criticized, “appreciated” by the objective and disinterested reader. 
 We are also internal actors, identifying ourselves with Dimmesdale 
 or Hester, and applying the significance of their actions (and the 
 consequences of those actions) to our lives. In fact, we become the 
 mirror through which evil Chillingworth may strike at us and our 
 posterity. We cannot (Hawthorne would say) alter the course of 
 events; but we may more clearly understand the significance of 
 these events. 
 
 F. O. Matthiessen remarks that “what stirred Melville” in The 
 House of the Seven Gables “was not any merely abstract speculation 
 about the nature of man,” but rather, in Melville’s words, “the 
 apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as they 
 strike the eye of the man who fears them not.” Matthiessen con¬ 
 tinues : 
 
 Such steady inspection of life, which does not flinch from probing sinister 
 recesses and is determined to make articulate the whole range of what it 
 finds, is indispensable for the great artist. Only thus can he cut through 
 conventional appearances, and come into possession of what Eliot has 
 called “a sense of his own age.”^ 
 
 In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne was determined to set forth, not 
 only his “sense of his own age,” but his interpretation of the ageless 
 “dark problem of this life.” The interlocking structural detail which 
 he chose as suitable vehicle for the epic theme of The Scarlet Letter 
 is the most convincing evidence we possess of Hawthorne’s artistic 
 genius, as a writer of novels; but it is even more important to see that 
 Hawthorne deliberately chose his complex method as the most ef¬ 
 fective way in which he could communicate to others his vision of 
 life. 
 
 ’’ Matthiessen, American Renaissance, pp. 192-193. 
 
The Character of Flame: The Function of Pearl in 
 The Scarlet Letter 
 Anne Marie McNamara 
 
 I N DISCUSSIONS of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, little 
 attention has been given to the significance of Pearl, the illegiti¬ 
 mate daughter of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. In¬ 
 difference' to her role in the plot is surprising in view of the general 
 assumption that lack of motivation for the confession of Dimmes¬ 
 dale is a radical weakness in the plot. Since it is obvious that 
 neither Hester nor Chillingworth constitutes an external cause for 
 Dimmesdale’s volte face, it seems reasonable to consider the possi¬ 
 bility that Pearl may be the agent who effects his unexpected public 
 confession of paternity. If Pearl is a part of the “electric chaln^ 
 formed as she, Dimmesdale, and Hester join hands in the darkness 
 and stand on the pillory as a family for the first time (p. 174),^ it 
 may not be illogical to assume that she is as dynamic a force in the 
 plot as are the other two members of the chain. 
 
 The narrator’s extensive treatment of the child, his careful de¬ 
 lineation of her physical and spiritual qualities, his presentation of 
 her in juxtaposition to both Hester and Dimmesdale, and his use of 
 her in every decisive scene seem to justify an assumption that she is 
 more than a passive link between her father and mother and more 
 than aTfati^^^Bob of their sin. Above all, his insistence upon the 
 peculiar preternatural quality of the child and his manipulation of 
 this phenomenon in the crucial scenes (the forest scene and the three 
 pillory scenes) must certainly indicate that she is not merely a 
 fantastically decorative “relief” in the somber story but a functional 
 element in the structural design.^ It is my purpose to present evi¬ 
 dence that Pearl is more than a link, more than a symbol—that she 
 is the efficient cause of the denouement and thus provides the motiva¬ 
 tion for Dimmesdale’s final act. 
 
 ' References by page or chapter of The Scarlet Letter are to the Random House edition, 
 New York, 1927. 
 
 ' Pearl is presented in action, mentioned, or discussed in all but four of the twenty- 
 three chapters of the novel proper (i.e., chaps, i, ix, xi, xvii) and in the Conclusion. 
 
 Cj n C 
 
66 
 
 Anne Marie McNamara 
 
 Henry James asserted that The Scarlet Letter is pr im arily 
 Dimmesdale’s story, not Hester’s. 
 
 The story, indeed, is in a secondary degree that of Hester Prynne; she 
 becomes, really, after the first scene, an accessory figure; it is not upon 
 her the denouement depends. It is upon her guilty lover that the 
 author projects most frequently the cold, thin rays of his fitfully-moving 
 lantern. . . 
 
 Agreement with James (and I agree with him) necessitates rejection 
 of Mr. Leland Schubert’s statement that the three pillory scenes are 
 “in every sense the high points of the novel.”^ Dimmesdale’s story 
 centers in the forest scene. I suggest that the “missing” motivation 
 for Dimmesdale’s confession may be found in this great scene. 
 Without it, the first two pillory scenes would be structurally mean¬ 
 ingless and the third would never occur. 
 
 If The Scarlet Letter is Dimmesdale’s story, it must trace the 
 change within him from the condition of a sinner, a hypocrite, and 
 a weak capitulator to Hester’s plea for flight and resumption of sin, 
 to that of a penitent, sincere and strong enough (and just barely 
 strong enough) to make public confession.® But there must be a 
 cause for the change. I suggest that it is Pea^in her “otherworldly” 
 aspect. Since the change in Dimmesdale is in the spiritual order, 
 the'cause may be assumed to be in the same order. Pearl is-^ spirit- 
 child. As such she operates plausibly as an efficient cause within 
 the ambiance of ambiguity which pervades the novel. She causes a 
 transformation in the realm of the spirit; the effect is translatable in 
 the terms of the spirit. Above and beyond the literal reality of her 
 action as Hester’s and Dimmesdale’s child, she moves authoritatively 
 as a regenerative influence on the level of operative symbol. On 
 this level. The Scarlet Letter is the story of an extraordinary man re¬ 
 deemed by the extraordinary action of an extraordinary child. The 
 progress of such a redemption in such a realm seems to me to take 
 place in four stages: Preparation (Chapters I-XVI); Communication 
 
 ® Henry James, Hawthorne (English Men of Letters Series, New York, 1887), p. 109. 
 
 ‘Leland Schubert, Hawthorne the Artist (Chapel Hill, 1944), pp. 137-140. 
 
 ® Hester does not actually change interiorly during the course of the novel. Outwardly 
 she seems to change: she adjusts to her social ostracism and she appears to be repentant. 
 Inwardly, however, she is not repentant, as we see in her bold instigation of Dimmesdale 
 to flee and to undertake a life of deliberate sin with her. She determines to make their 
 “sin of passion” a “sin of principle.” Cf. chaps, v (p. 89), xiii (pp. 187-189), and xvii 
 fpp. 126-128). 
 
The Function of Pearl 
 
 67 
 
 (Chapters XVII-XIX); Transformation (Chapters XX-XXII); and 
 Revelation (Chapter XXIII). 
 
 The first of these stages consists of a meticulous preparation for 
 the cause-effect relationship between Pearl and Dimmesdale, a re¬ 
 lationship which depends upon the capability of the one to initiate 
 and of the other to receive the impetus to regenerative action. For 
 such capability in Pearl and for such susceptibility in Dimmesdale 
 the narrator through sixteen chapters most carefully and elaborately 
 provides. By detailing and dissecting the relationship of each of the 
 two with one of the other major characters, he reveals in both 
 certain peculiar spiritual and psychological qualities which he will 
 juxtapose as he brings them face to face in the crucial forest scene 
 for their first major meeting. Before this central scene, he presents 
 Pearl in relation to Hester, Dimmesdale in relation to Chilling- 
 worth.® Gradually and cumulatively, he draws first one, then the 
 other, carefully keeping them apart except for four brief but preg¬ 
 nant meetings.^ 
 
 In this preparation for their decisive encounter, in which the 
 intercourse between them will be effected on a preternatural plane, 
 he presents each of them on two distinct levels: the ordinary and 
 the extraordinary, or the literal and the figurative, or the natural 
 and the preternatural. Neither the child nor the man, he shows, is 
 merely an ordinary being. Pearl is not merely an ordinary, playful 
 seven-year-old child: she is also precociously intelligent, bewildering- 
 ly subtle, frighteningly independent, and penetratingly wise. A 
 double-natured anomaly, torturing her mother with misgivings of 
 her natural origin, she exhibits even in babyhood an uncanny 
 curiosity concerning Hester’s scarlet letter. From early childhood, 
 she displays unearthly inquisitiveness about the minister’s habit of 
 placing his hand over his heart. Most significantly, by curious ques¬ 
 tioning and implication and with a prescience that can only be de¬ 
 scribed as preternatural, she insistently associates these two ostensibly 
 disparate phenomena. Similarly, Dimmesdale is not only a well¬ 
 loved and devoted minister: fie is a godlike figure in the community, 
 admired for his delicate understanding and sympathy and superbly 
 
 “ This is not to say that the narrator docs nothing else in these chapters. He does 
 much: he delineates Hester’s superficial and real natures (v and xiii); he draws Chilling- 
 worth’s character (ix); he establishes the Hester-Chillingworth relationship (i-iv). 
 
 '^On the pillory (ii); at the Governor’s house (vii and viii); from Dimmesdale’s window 
 (x); on the pillory at midnight (xii). 
 
68 
 
 Anne Marie McNamara 
 
 endowed with intellectual acumen and spiritual perspicuity. Above 
 all, he is blessed almost beyond human capacity with the gift of com¬ 
 munication (p. i6o). It is of the utmost importance to observe that 
 in spite of the physical and moral deterioration resulting from his 
 own conscience and from Chillingworth’s vindictive ministrations, 
 his profound insight, his acute perception, and his delicate spiritual 
 sensitivity remain unimpaired (pp. 160-162). 
 
 With such preparation, the preternaturally endowed child and 
 man are brought together by the narrator in a cause-effect relation¬ 
 ship in the great forest scene. I suggest that the second stage in the 
 process of Dimmesdale’s redemption takes place in the three chap¬ 
 ters which constitute this scene (Chaps. XVII, XVIII, XIX). It is 
 the critical stage of Communication. Everything in the arrange¬ 
 ment of details is powerfully suggestive of duality: in the setting, 
 light and darkness, land and water; in the mood, love and disdain, 
 desire and fear, acceptance and rejection, reconciliation and estrange¬ 
 ment; in the atmosphere, the real and the preternatural. Against 
 this background, the duality that has already been elaborately 
 established in Pearl and in Dimmesdale begins to operate in a 
 remarkably subtle context of ambiguity. 
 
 The double nature of little Pearl functions in this environment 
 on two distinct levels (the natural and the preternatural), in two 
 directions (towards a known and an unknown parent), through two 
 sets of actions (the explicit and the implicit) translatable upon two 
 planes of meaning (the literal and the figurative). She approaches 
 and affects Hester and Dimmesdale in appropriately different ways 
 suited to the capacity of each to receive and understand her meaning. 
 On the natural level she acts on Hester as a real child; on the pre¬ 
 ternatural level she acts on Dimmesdale as a “more-than-child,” an 
 elf-dryad-nymph, a spirit child. In each case, her method of ap¬ 
 proach is determined by the nature of the desired effect. In 
 Hester the need is for the restoration of the discarded public ac¬ 
 knowledgment of adultery, the embroidered scarlet letter. In 
 Dimmesdale the desideratum is the revelation of the private, hidden 
 stigma of the same sin. As a real child. Pearl causes a visible change 
 in Hester by audibly, imperiously, and petulantly demanding that 
 her mother pin the discarded A in its customary place on her 
 breast. Hester understands and obeys, and the estrangement be- 
 
The Function of Pearl 
 
 69 
 
 tween the mother and child is immediately mended: Pearl leaps the 
 brook and embraces her mother. 
 
 But the estrangement between Pearl and Dimmesdale is not a 
 temporary condition, induced by one overt act and dissipated by 
 another. The offense of her father against her is the deliberate and 
 guilty concealment of parenthood during her whole lifetime. The 
 healing of this serious breach (divined by the elf-nature but not by 
 the child-nature in Pearl) cannot be effected as was the other, im¬ 
 mediately, visibly, audibly, objectively. The spirit child^ communi- 
 cates her disapproval in another way, one exquisitely appropriate to 
 Dimmesdale’s sensibility—through a silent, indirect, subjective 
 language. In fhe*Tntire scene at the brookside she does not speak 
 to him with her human voice at all. She addre sses him indirectly 
 through her persistent rejection of his advances and through actions 
 ostensibly directed towards her mother. When Hester, restored to 
 Pearl’s favor, entreats the child to greet the minister and assures her 
 that he loves her. Pearl phrases in two succinct questions the only 
 terms on which the alienation may be terminated: “Doth he love us ? 
 Will he go back with us, hand in hand, we three together, into the 
 town?” (p. 244). Public revelation of the real relationship among 
 the three is to Pearl the only means of reconciliation. She ignores 
 her mother’s request that she love the minister. She is not cajoled 
 by~the promise of a future home in which the three will be together 
 and in which Dimmesdale will love her dearly. Her only reply 
 is again a question: “And will he always keep his hand over his 
 heart?” (p. 244). She clearly implies that guilt will plague Dimmes¬ 
 dale even if he succeeds in the plans for escape which he and Hester 
 are now formulating. Her mother, not sensing the profound im¬ 
 plications of her questions, lightly evades them. Consequently, 
 stubbornly refusing to show any friendliness towards the minister 
 and grimacing with disapproval. Pearl receives his embrace only 
 at her mother’s insistence and immediately bathes her forehead in the 
 brook to wash away all vestiges of his “unwelcome kiss” (p. 245). 
 
 Pearl’s actions at the brookside nettle her mother and produce 
 immediate and tangible results. They work differently on Dimmes¬ 
 dale. For him they have more than their superficial meaning. 
 His fancy that the brook flowing between Pearl and her parents is 
 a boundary between two worlds may suggest his awareness of the 
 d ouble level of Pearl’s action. His comment is eloquent: he says 
 
70 
 
 Anne Marie McNamara 
 
 that the brook separates Pearl from Hester; he does not say that it 
 separates Pearl from him (p. 240). On the other hand, when 
 Hester is about to call to Pearl to join her and the minister, the 
 child’s distance from them is judged differently by the two. To 
 Hester, Pearl is “not far off,” but to Dimmesdale she is “a good 
 way off” (p. 234). Does he mean that she seems to be in another 
 world from which she is reaching out to him ? Do fus observation 
 and insight suggest TnowTcHge^oiTthe commencement of the “other¬ 
 worldly” infl uence of his child upon his spirit ? Does his incipient 
 realisation prepare him for an extraordinary meeting of their ex¬ 
 traordinary minds ? He is nervous and anxious as she mistrustingly 
 delays her approach. He is afraid as the child’s penetrating glances 
 apparently at once seek and divine the relationship between Hester 
 and himself: his hand involunfanly’’steals over his heart—and over 
 the markrdf that relationship. He is deeply disturbed as Pearl bursts 
 into passionate cries and gesticulations of protest and demand. Her 
 insiffermdesTgnation of the cause of her displeasure—the absence of 
 the scarlet letter from her mother’s breast—unnerves him. He 
 seems aware that her agitation is more than a childish tantrum, for 
 he uses the word preternatural to describe it (p. 242). 
 
 Although Pearl’s outburst at the brookside is directed towards her 
 mother, it affects Dimmesdale traumatically. This hypersensitive 
 man experiences almost simultaneously the extremes of exaltation 
 and depression—Hester’s plan for the resumption of their love affair 
 and Pearl’s adamant rejection of his affection. His unacknowledged 
 daughter tells him in her wordless language that his acquiescence 
 to Hester’s will to escape is a false answer to his problem and is 
 distasteful to her. She will not enter into arrangements which in¬ 
 volve a continuance of his conceal me ditTf~sin 7 ~~flNo wonder that tbe 
 minister who leaves the elf at the brookside is a minister in a maze.® 
 
 The narrator’s final comment on| the forest meeting characterizes 
 
 it as “fateful” (p. 245). This statement is valid and acceptable on 
 both the natural and-th^ supranatural levels: the interview isjfateful 
 as the time ofinesterj^ and Dimmesdale’s decision to enter de^ 
 liberately u pon aTifirm sin; it is fateful as the silent impetus to the 
 agitated minister’s subsequent action on the day of the Governor’s 
 inauguration. 
 
 * Cf. the title of chap. xx. 
 
The Function of Pearl 
 
 71 
 
 Three passages in a previous chapter entitled “The Interior of a 
 Heart” (Chap. XI) lend credibility to the perspicuity which I 
 have imputed to the minister at this forest meeting. The first pre¬ 
 figures the major action of Pearl at the brookside, her insistent 
 pointing at her mother’s breast; the second illustrates Dimmesdale’s 
 poweF^T^erception—however dim at first—of a subtle influence 
 unperceived by others; the third foreshadows the peculiar ability of 
 Dimmesdale to interpret Pearl’s meaning. 
 
 The first of these significant foreshadowings occurs in the de¬ 
 tailing of Dimmesdale’s relationship with Chillingworth after the 
 latter’s discovery of the secret stigma. Diabolically playing upon his 
 victim, Chillingworth seeks to overpower him through the agony 
 of fear. In the figure of speech chosen by the narrator to describe 
 the physician’s evil plan, the elements of unearthly power a nd of 
 finger-pointing are adumbrations of the incriminating knowledge 
 and the accusing gesture of Pearl at the brookside. The importance 
 —Xff this associatioti grows as one recalls the triple pattern in which 
 these two elements are found in the forest scene. Three times the 
 narrator repeats the pattern: the child stands on the farther side of 
 the brook, authoritatively pointing her finger at her mother’s breast, 
 while beneath, mirrored in the brook, is her image, imperious and 
 beautiful, pointing in the same accusing way. If Dimmesdale had 
 been startled with sudden fear by a “grisly phantom. . . , a thousand 
 phantoms ... all flocking round [him] and pointing with their 
 fingers at his breast” (p. 159), may he not react similarly to see “the 
 bright-apparelled vision” (p. 234), of Pearl, “now like a child, now 
 like a child’s spirit” (p. 234), using the same condemnatory gesture 
 True, the gesture is not made directly at him by Pearl—since her 
 method of approach to him is indirect—but its repetitive pattern 
 commences immediately after a passage which shows Pearl’s un¬ 
 canny divination of the lovers’ relationship and the minister’s in¬ 
 voluntary, guilty reaction to the suspicious knowledge in her “wild, 
 brigTireyes”~(pr24o):”“his hF^nd . . . stole over iris heart” (p. 240). 
 May liorThe thrice-repeated pattern bf^fier dfrect communication 
 with Hester and her indirect comnmnication with Dimmesdale 
 suggest a reaL^diild-Hester relationship; but a s pirit child-Dimme s- 
 ^le'felatiorrehip^^FThe imagersf llTF child in the pool, the narrator 
 says, is “more"refined and spiritualized than the reality” (p. 239). 
 Moreover, the finger-pointing of Pearl may recall to Dimmesdale 
 
72 
 
 Anne Marie McNamara 
 
 his agonizing vigil on the pillory at midnight when, his eyes fixed on 
 the blazing A in the night sky, “he was, nevertheless, perfectly 
 aware that little Pearl was pointing her finger towards old Roger 
 Chillingworth, who stood at no great distance from the scaffold. The 
 minister appeared to see him, with the same glance that discerned 
 the miraculous letter” (p. 177). As the real child on the edge of the 
 pool points accusingly at her mother’s breast, silently reproaching 
 her for discarding her A, Dimmesdale is aware of the image-child. 
 in the pooTTT^Wfirtg reproachfully in the same way (pp. 240-241). 
 If the meteor which Dimmesdale saw in the first instance “kindled 
 up the sky . . . with an awfulness that admonished Hester Prynne 
 and the clergyman of the day of judgment,” as the narrator points 
 out (p. 177), may not the same fear of doom be generated in Dim- 
 mesdale’s sensitive mind by his association of the A and the finger¬ 
 pointing of the one instance with the same phenomena in the other ? 
 
 The second of these foreshadowing references not only offers 
 ground for Dimmesdale’s receptivity to subtle influences but also 
 obviates the objection that the lack of immediate perceptible evi¬ 
 dence of Dimmesdale’s understanding of Pearl’s meaning at the 
 brookside renders suspect the assumption that s he is the 
 ultimate con^ssion. In the narrator’s explanation of Chillingworth’s 
 method in his plot to break the resistance of his patient, he says 
 that the evil work “was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect that 
 the minister, though he had constantly a dim perception of some evil 
 influence watching over him, coulcTnevergain a knowledge of its 
 actual nature” (p. 159)^ May not Dimmesdale, then, be said to have 
 at the brookside the first “dim perception” of the redemptive in¬ 
 fluence of Pearl? 
 
 The final foreshadowing concerns the metaphor of the Tongue 
 of Flame. Ascribing Dimmesdale’s prestige among the townspeople 
 to his heavenly gift of sympathy for human nature, the narrator uses 
 the Pentecostal Tongues of Flame to symbolize the supernatural 
 penetration and love which distinguished the clergyman in his un¬ 
 derstanding and expressing the feelings of the human heart (pp. 161- 
 162). The juxtaposition of this passage with that which describes 
 Pearl as the enigmatic symbol of the lovers’ secret—the “living hiero¬ 
 glyphic”—shows that the same figure has been used again. “She had 
 been offered to the world ... as the living hieroglyphic, in which 
 was revealed the secret they so darkly sought to hide,—all written in 
 
The Function of Pearl 
 
 73 
 
 this symbol,—all plainly manifest,—had there been a prophet or 
 a magician skilled to read the character of flame!” (p. 238). In the 
 Bible narrative, tongues of flame were_th e symbols of the power of 
 eloquence given by Heaven to men who were chosen to'Tmderstahd 
 anchreveal truth nTorder to effect the salvation of others. In the 
 imaginative narrative with which we are concerned, the narrator 
 interprets them as symbols “not of the power of speech in foreign 
 and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human 
 brotherhood in the heart’s native language” (p. 161). The scarlet- 
 garbed child—“The character of flame”—addresses an unspoken 
 truth to a man capable in mind and heart of comprehending it. 
 DirnmeHafe is the only one of the clergymen of the town marked 
 with “Heaven’s last and rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue 
 of Flame.” His burden of hidden sorrow gave him sympathetic 
 understanding anffithe gift of expressing “highest truths through the 
 humblest medium of familiar words and images” (p. 161). The 
 first use of the figure, therefore, is a foreshadowing of and a prepara¬ 
 tion for the socond, and the second recalls the context of the first and 
 lends credibility to the silent communication at the brookside.® 
 
 In other references in Chapter XI, the narrator emphasizes the 
 “preternatural activity” of Dimmesdale’s intellectual and moral per¬ 
 ceptions, his power of experiencing and communicating emotion, 
 and his predilection for the autonomy of truth (pp. 160-162). It is 
 obvious that the narrator has taken great care to establish Dimmes- 
 dale as a fit recipient for Pearl’s cryptic message of truth. 
 
 The three chapters which follow the communication in the forest 
 constitute what may be called the phase or stage of Transformation 
 in the process of Dimmesdale’s redemption. In the context of 
 ambiguity, the title of the first of these chapters, “The Minister in a 
 Maze,” may imply a double effect in the minister as he leaves Hester 
 and Pearl. On a literal level, he is reeling with the physical excite¬ 
 ment of plans for escape from Chillingworth and for resumption of 
 his love affair with Hester. On the figurative level, however, he may 
 be stunned and reeling from the spiritual blow dealt him by the elf- 
 child, the meaning of which he as yet only imperfectly realizes. 
 Through her act of rejection she has communicated to him the ne- 
 
 “ Appropriate to the whole artistically ambiguous patterning of the novel, the frame 
 for both uses of this eloquent trope is a conditional clause. By this device of indirection 
 the narrator achieves suggestiveness consonant with the general tone of the novel. 
 
74 
 
 Anne Marie McNamara 
 
 cessity for public declaration of sin as a prerequisite of forgiveness. 
 “So great a vicissitude in his life could not at once be received as 
 real” (p. 246). Now a vicissitude is a change. The term is capable 
 of''d6uble translationrthFbbvious one, the projected change of his 
 status and environment by escape to Europe; and the subtle one, the 
 incipient interior change of his attitude towards his concealment of 
 guilt. So strange has the experience been that it seems to him to 
 have been a dream. Yet he knows that it was not: he sees Pearl 
 happily dancing along at Hester’s side, now that he (the intruder 
 on one level, the hypocritical sinner on the other) has left them. 
 The “indistinctness and duplicity of impression” which the narrator 
 says “vexed him with a strange disquietude” (p. 246) may well be 
 the conflict in his sensitive mind between the two effects of his forest 
 interview: the possibility of freedom (evil seen as good) and the 
 necessity of bondage (good seen as evil). The_contention between 
 the two forces for mastery over the soul of the minister is set in 
 motion in this tremendously meaningful chapter, all of which (with 
 the exception of the first three paragraphs) has to do with the ele¬ 
 ment of change. 
 
 This chapter develops the motivation generated in the forest 
 scene for the minister’s confession in the final chapter. It is in 
 perfect harmony with the ambiguous pattern of the whole. Internal 
 change manifested only in the final chapter is suggested here in an 
 account of the minister’s strange sense of external change in familiar 
 objects on his homeward walk. In a long passage of eight pages, 
 “this importunately obtrusive sense of change” is developed (pp. 
 249 ff.). The woods seem wilder; in the town, familiar landmarks 
 seem namelessly but noticeably changed; people are unaccountably 
 but certainly different; his own church seems unreal and dreamlike. 
 The narrator’s interpretation of this passage adumbrates the ultimate 
 use to which he will put this provocative material: “This phenom¬ 
 enon in the various shapes which it assumed, indicated no external 
 change, but so sudden and important a change in the spectator of 
 the familiar scene, that the intervening space of a single day had 
 operated on his consciousness like the lapse of years” (p. 249).^” The 
 significance of this comment cannot be overestimated. It states 
 and emphasizes the sudden and radical character of the alteration 
 of perspective induced in the minister and strongly looks forward 
 
 Italics mine. 
 
The Function of Pearl 
 
 75 
 
 to the sudden and radical volte face which results in his confession. 
 The narrator’s explanation of the transformations as the result of 
 “the minister’s own will, and Hester’s will, and the fate that grew 
 between them” fits into the ambiguity of the pattern first by sug¬ 
 gesting the conflict between Hester’s strong will to perpetuate his 
 falsehood and his own weak will to tell the truth, and second, by 
 implying concreteness in the vagueness of its third element, “the fate 
 that grew between them.” There is nothing to preclude the con¬ 
 ception of this “fate” as Pearl. The explanation may be so con¬ 
 strued as to suggest a double meaning in the term transformation 
 and to include a double set of agents operative in effecting the 
 change: Dimmesdale’s and Hester’s plans transforming Dimmesdale 
 into a new and spuriously free man; Pearl’s rejection transforming 
 Dimmesdale into a really free man. In this second sense, there is"^ 
 nothing to preclude the operation of Pearl as an efficient cause of '*' 
 the change effected in Dimmesdale between the moment of his 
 meeting Hester and the child in the forest and the moment of his 
 voluntary mounting of the pillory to declare his guilt to the world— 
 “the same minister returned not from the forest” (p. 249). Ostensi¬ 
 bly, a morally worse minister returned. Actually, as the final pillory 
 scene shows, a morally better minister returned. 
 
 The course which the narrator takes in the development of the 
 important “transformation” or “change” scene in this chapter pro¬ 
 vides for the objection that if Pearl were the efficient cause of the 
 minister’s inner change, the manifestation of the effect in him would 
 have come either at the moment of rejection at the brookside or im¬ 
 mediately on his arrival in the town among the people whom he had 
 so long deceived. By a series of carefully plotted incidents on his 
 homeward walk, we are made acutely aware that as yet this sensi¬ 
 tive and intelligent but weakened and confused man does not know 
 exactly what is happening within him. The evidence for this lies in 
 his behavior during the six chance encounters occurring between 
 the edge of the town and his own abode (pp. 250-253). His-actions, 
 described by the narrator as “impulses,” carefully identifiecrar^‘at 
 once involuntary and intentional,” and presented as happening “in 
 spite of himself, yet growing out of a profounder self than that which 
 opposed the impulse” (p. 250), indicate a man in whom opposing 
 strengths are striving for mastery as he looks on, bewildered by the 
 fight and uncertain as to the outcome. In the first encounter his 
 
76 
 
 Anne Marie McNamara 
 
 impulse to speak blasphemously to a deacon causes him to fear that 
 the strength of the bad impulse will prevail without his consent 
 (p. 251). In the second encounter he is impelled to utter an argu¬ 
 ment against the immortality of the soul. Later he cannot account 
 for overcoming that evil inclination. In the third his impulse to per¬ 
 vert innocence is thwarted only by mighty effort. In the fourth 
 only his sense of good taste and decorum—not his devotion to princi¬ 
 ple—prevents his corrupting the young and swearing with the disso¬ 
 lute. 
 
 In a passage which concludes the homeward walk, the narrator 
 emphasizes the lack of self-understanding which marks this stage of 
 the transformation in Dimmesdale. In passionate self-address, the 
 tormented man questions himself as to the possibility of his being 
 mad. Or leagued with the devil, who now demands evil deeds of his 
 victim (p, 254). 
 
 At this point ostensible corroboration of these fears seems to 
 be presented in the unexpected scene between the tortured man and 
 Mistress Hibbins, “the reputed witch lady.” The significance of this 
 scene, however, must be evaluated within the context of ambiguity. 
 By twice discounting the authenticity of the meeting,^^ the narrator 
 carefully provides for antithetical interpretations: simultaneous af¬ 
 firmation and denial of the fear that he has succumbed to the bond¬ 
 age of the devil. In the frame of ambiguity his seemingly hypocriti¬ 
 cal replies to the old woman’s malicious insinuations may signify 
 that he is not the lost soul that he seems to be, that he is indeed 
 sincerely interested in salvation. 
 
 If these scenes with the deacon, the widow, the maiden, the 
 children, the seaman, and the witch show anything, they show the 
 moral ambivalence of a sensitive, suffering soul startled by the war in 
 his “interior kingdom”—that between attractive evil proposed 
 by Hester and repulsive good proposed by Pearl—and by the exterior 
 manifestations of the conflict in his “profounder^self.” In every 
 case the evil impulse had been thwarted by an unaccountable power 
 within him. If these scenes look forward to anything, they look 
 forward to the moment after the Election Sermon when, with every 
 human motive urging him on to flight and love, this same man will 
 
 '' “Old Mistress Hibbins . . . is said to have been passing by” (p. 254), and “his en¬ 
 counter with old Mistress Hibbins, if it were a real incident, did but show his sympathy 
 with wicked mortals and the world of perverted spirits” (p. 255). Italics mine. 
 
The Function of Pearl 
 
 77 
 
 yield to the good impulse to turn aside from the procession, to mount 
 the pillory—again “in spite of himself, yet growing out of a pro¬ 
 founder self than that which opposed the impulse” (p. 250). 
 
 The final section of this chapter which, in overtly tracing the 
 minister’s physical journey homeward from the forest, subtly sug¬ 
 gests his spiritual journey to peace from a moral wilderness, presents 
 him in his own dwelling, his “refuge” and his “shelter” from the 
 world. Even here there is now the strangeness of change. Yet, it is 
 still the place that it was, the place of his study, his writing, his 
 penance, his prayer, his agony. It is still familiar: he sees his Bible, 
 his unfinished Election Sermon on the table. May not his gazing 
 at his Bible, in its “rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the Prophets 
 speaking to him, and God’s voice through all” (p. 256),^^ figure 
 the dawning of his full comprehension of the cryptic action-language 
 of Pearl, the preternatural child, at the brookside } She vvas telling 
 him to abandon sin, to confess, and to repent. May not his “un¬ 
 finished” Election Sermon, with “a sentence broken in the midst” 
 be a figure of an imminent break with the past.? The very word 
 Election may operate above its conventional meaning and take on 
 the significance of the Calvinistic connotation of divine predestina¬ 
 tion. 
 
 On the literal, factual, narrative level, this account of manifesta¬ 
 tions of change in Dimmesdale is pejorative. But on the figurative 
 level, the opposite interpretation is possible and valid in the light of 
 both antecedent and subsequent action. “Another man had returned 
 from the forest. . . .” It may be a man enlightened by subtly com¬ 
 municated knowledge of “hidden mysteries which the simplicity of 
 the former could never have reached” (p. 256). This knowledge¬ 
 able man may well “stand apart from that former self [i.e., the pious 
 hypocrite] eyeing it with scornful, pitying, but half-envious curiosi¬ 
 ty” (p. 256). 
 
 The final scene in this remarkably suggestive chapter crystallizes 
 the change in Dimmesdale. He confronts Chillingworth with one 
 hand on the Hebrew Scriptures (the voice of God in a cryptic 
 tongue) and the other spread upon his breast (over the hidden sign 
 of his hidden sin) and engages in a conversation which suggests the 
 choice that he will make. To Chillingworth’s observation that his 
 paleness indicates that his “journey through the wilderness” had 
 
 Italics mine. 
 
78 
 
 Anne Marie McNamara 
 
 been “too sore,” he replies that the sight of the Apostle Eliot, whom 
 he had gone to visit, has done him good. He says that he does not 
 now need any more drugs from Chillingworth for “heart and 
 strength” to preach the Election Sermon (pp. 257-258): he does not 
 need the physician’s ministrations to maintain him in his deception 
 and to try to keep alive his broken body and his scarred soul. Has 
 he determined upon his own cure, his own way of salvation ? Has 
 he determined to be worthy of “election” ? Affirmative answers to 
 both these questions may be read in Chillingworth’s reply to the 
 minister’s offer to requite the physician’s “good deeds” with prayers: 
 “A good man’s prayers are golden recompense! Yea, they are the 
 current gold coin of the New Jerusalem, with the King’s own mint- 
 mark on them!” Intended sarcastically, these words of the evil 
 leech may suggest the minister’s real state, unknown to Chilling- 
 worth and probably until this moment not completely known to 
 Dimmesdale himself; he is a worthy minister by reason of his strong 
 interior desire to do the deed that will restore him to the favor of 
 the King whom he serves and that will open to him the way to the 
 New Jerusalem, salvation.^® But to this final remark of the old 
 physician, Dimmesdale makes no verbal reply. Instead, as the old 
 man leaves, he acts with unaccustomed alacrity. Calling for food, 
 he eats “with ravenous appetite,” and “flinging the already written 
 pages of the Election Sermon into the fire,” he forthwith begins 
 another, which he writes with “such an impulsive flow of thought 
 and emotion” that he fancies himself inspired (pp. 258-259). The 
 complete destruction of the first Election Sermon, conceived and 
 written in deceit and hypocrisy, may be significant of a complete 
 break with the past that produced it The fluent composition of a 
 new one may figure the tremendous vitality of the soul freed from 
 the shackles of sin and operating under the flow of divine grace. 
 As his physical appetite is satisfied by his ravenous eating, so the 
 appetite of his soul now seems to satiate itself in ecstatic composition 
 that continues unabated throughout the night and ceases only when 
 the morning sun throws a golden beam into the study and lays it 
 “right across the minister’s bedazzled eyes” (p. 259). The sun image 
 recalls the forest scene. Is it a figure of the new light that shone 
 
 Cf. Edward Taylor’s Sacramental Meditation VI, in Thomas H. Johnson, ed.. The 
 Poetical Worlds of Edward Taylor (Princeton, 1939), p. 127, in which the figure of the 
 golden coin as a symbol of a minister’s worthiness is similarly used. 
 
The Function of Pearl 
 
 79 
 
 upon the darkened soul of the sensitive minister as he saw h is littl e 
 daughter standing in a shaft of sunlight in the gloomy forest—the 
 only ray of light in that wilderness—and recognized in her, however 
 obscurely at first, the prophet of his transformation and redemption ? 
 
 The answer lies in the final scene at the pillory on Election 
 Sermon Day, the scene for which the narrator has provided through 
 the artistic device of ambiguity in three stages, those of Preparation, 
 Communication, and Transformation. They have led inexorably to 
 the fourth—Revelation. As the minister moves in the procession 
 towards the church, it is evident that he is a changed man. In his 
 gait and air he seems invigorated with physical and spiritual energy. 
 Hester Prynne, standing in the crowd of townspeople, feels de¬ 
 pressed as she sees him. She hardly knows him. He seems un¬ 
 sympathetic, unattainable, withdrawn from her world (p. 275). If 
 the visible change in Dimmesdale is the result of capitulation to sin 
 and anticipation of the spurious freedom it will bring, would there 
 not be at least a glance, a meeting of the eyes, between the two 
 lovers? There is none. The minister’s thoughts are not on Hester 
 and a new life with her and Pearl"iii sdin^T^uropean city.^ They 
 are oh tEe Election Serihoh ^^icE he is about to deliver, die theme 
 of which, as the narrator later reveals, is the Providence of God upon 
 this settlement in the wilderness and the glorious destiny that it will 
 achieve in His hands (p. 286). The application of this theme to the 
 personal problem of the minister is obvious. Through the Provi¬ 
 dence of God his moral wilderness will be transformed into glory: 
 the change in him is one of spiritual reformation, not one of sinful 
 capitulation. Equally obvious is the narrator’s placing of Hester out¬ 
 side the church, separated from the minister. She cannot hear the 
 words that he speaks, but she catches the spiritual sense of the sound 
 of his truly wonderful voice: “the complaint of the human heart. . . 
 tellingits secret ... to the great heart of mankind, beseeching its 
 symp atEy andfo rgiveness” (p. 281). The opening paragraphs of 
 the next chapt^(ChapTXXIII)—those in which the narrator de¬ 
 scribes the general effect of the sermon—suggest that the sound 
 conveyed to her the sense of an ending and a beginning: the ending 
 of their plans for escape (indeed, she already knows that Chilling- 
 worth has outwitted her, although Dimmesdale does not know it) 
 
8 o 
 
 Anne Marie McNamara 
 
 (p. 270)^^ and the beginning of a new phase in the minister’s life, not 
 that which her will has planned, but another over which she has no 
 control, for it involves his death. 
 
 Hester is well aware that she is seeing and hearing a Dimmesdale 
 who is radically different from the Dimmesdale of the forest. She 
 does not know the cause of the,xhaQge in him. But I suggest that 
 Dimmesdale now knows. x ^It is Pea xL’ From the moment of her 
 dramatic rejection of him in the forest, he has moved in bewilder- 
 ment and agony^S^ the conflict within him towards this moment 
 when he will identify her as his daughter to the world.- Refusing all 
 human aid except that of the woman who wears the sign of his sin, 
 he stands at the foot of the scaffold and, at the very moment of con¬ 
 fession, summons Pearl, his child. This time she does not refuse. 
 Her worried question of the morning, when she had asked Hester 
 why the minister had kissed her in the forest but would not recog¬ 
 nize her in the town, is about to be answered. She senses that 
 revelation is at hand. She runs to him. She clasps her arms about 
 his knees. Is it an accident that at this moment of imminent revela¬ 
 tion she accepts him with the same gesture which she had used in her 
 reconciliation with her mother in the forest, when Hester had 
 restored the sign of guilt (p. 243) As the minister mounts the 
 platform of disgrace, supported by Hester and clasping Pearl’s hand 
 in his, he thanks God for leading him through “grace” to this 
 moment (p. 291). In that word Pearl is at last identified: she is 
 grace, the instrument of his redemption, a powerful but hidden force 
 urging him to good. When the “dreadful witness” of his sin, his 
 scarlet letter, has been exposed, it is to Pearl that the dying man 
 speaks. He asks her for a kiss, the sign of reconciliation that she 
 had refused him in the forest. Her response is immediate and 
 wholehearted. She kisses his lips (p. 294), as she had kissed the 
 lips of her mother when she had restored the scarlet letter to her 
 bosom in the forest.^® Moreoyer, the effect of Pearl’s major gesture 
 in the direct communication with her mother and in the simul¬ 
 taneous indirect communication with her father in the forest scene 
 
 '‘It is interesting to observe that in a Theater Guild adaptation of The Scarlet Letter 
 for radio presentation, the text was distorted to give Dimmesdale knowledge of Chilling- 
 worth’s plan to sail for Europe on the same ship with him. This distortion provided motiva¬ 
 tion for Dimmesdale’s confession. It is significant to observe further that Pearl was omitted 
 entirely from the play. 
 
 Cf. supra. Cf. supra. 
 
The Function of Pearl 
 
 8i 
 
 is here fully elucidated in Dimmesdale’s passionate disclosure (made 
 almost against his will)^^ that both the angels and the Devil “were 
 forever pointing” at the “brand of sin and infamy” (p. 293)—the 
 hidden wound of the scarlet letter on his breast. Pearl and Chilling- 
 worth have probed that wound for seven years, the one for the 
 angelic purpose of redemption, the other for the satanic purpose of 
 damnation. Pearl has won. The subtle power which the minister 
 has called “grace” has moved him to confession and salvation. 
 
 From the very beginning the narrator has made clear the nature 
 of Pearl’s mission to her mother: she had been sent as a blessing and 
 as a retribution to remind Hester of her fall from grace and to teach 
 her the way to heaven (p. 128). Her mission to her father, however, 
 has been a hidden one. The narrator has chosen to suggest rather 
 than to present it. It has been my purpose to try to elucidate it as 
 another mission of redemption, to show that Pearl, the elf-child, as 
 a figure of gr ace and through appropriately subde means, is the 
 cause of Dimmesdale’s volte jcu:€. It is unthinkable that an artist 
 of the stature of Nathaniel Hawthorne should fail to motivate the 
 central action of his most distinguished and most admired work. 
 There must be a cause for Dimmesdale’s confession. It is Pearl in 
 her preternatural aspect. 
 
 *^Cf. supra. 
 
A New Reading of The Blithedale Romance 
 
 Frederick C. Crews 
 
 M ost critics are agreed that The Blithedale Romance is among 
 the least satisfactory of Hawthorne’s works. It is felt that the 
 book suffers from a confusion of genres—that, as Yvor Winters put 
 it, the author “began as a novelist, but lost himself toward the close 
 in an unsuccessful effort to achieve allegory.”^ Allegory is indeed a 
 problem in Blithedale, and none of the book’s admirers—including 
 Howells, James, and Browning^—has come to terms with this crucial 
 fact. Recent critics have read the book more carefully. Hyatt Wag¬ 
 goner, Frank Davidson, and W. V. O’Connor have emphasized 
 hitherto unnoticed aspects.^ Useful as these new insights are, how¬ 
 ever, I feel that no critic has yet understood the essential movement 
 of the plot. If the present judgment on Blithedale differs radically 
 from any previous one, the reason is that my basic reading is 
 different. 
 
 If this reading is valid, it would seem remarkable that the novel 
 has been so consistently misunderstood. But a dispassionate look at 
 Blithedale will show how this can easily have happened. Several 
 incidental difficulties have been unduly emphasized. Hawthorne’s 
 Preface, for example, apologizes for the insubstantiality of the ro¬ 
 mance, and prepares the reader for an uncomfortable marriage of 
 fabulous and prosaic elements.^ One is left with the impression that 
 
 'Yvor Winters, Mattie’s Curse (Norfolk, Conn., 1938), p. 17. 
 
 “See William Dean Howells, My Literary Passions (New York, 1895), p. 186; 
 Henry James, Hawthorne (New York, 1880), pp. 132-138; and Hawthorne’s English 
 Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart (London, 1941), pp. 362-383. In fairness to Browning it 
 should be said that he made no attempt to “explain” Blithedale, but simply told Haw¬ 
 thorne that he preferred it to his other works. 
 
 “Hyatt H. Waggoner, Hawthorne, a Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1955); Frank 
 Davidson, “Toward a Re-evaluation of The Blithedale Romance,” New England Quarterly, 
 XXV, 374-383 (Sept., 1952); W. V. O’Connor, “Conscious Naivete in ‘The Blithedale 
 Romance,’ ” Revue des langues vivantes, XX, 37-45 (Feb., 1954). 
 
 * The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York, 
 1937 )> PP- 439 f- Further references to The Blithedale Romance are made to this edition, 
 and will be incorporated into the text. In two minor cases of doubtful punctuation I 
 have accepted the more probably correct readings of the first edition (Boston, 1852). 
 
The Blithedale Romance 
 
 83 
 
 Blithedale will be little more than an improvisation upon the auth¬ 
 or’s recollections of Brook Farm, despite Hawthorne’s mild protest 
 to the contrary. Nor does an examination of Hawthorne’s notebooks 
 reassure us on this point. The large number of passages lifted di¬ 
 rectly from journal entries of 1841 and after suggests a rehashing 
 of miscellaneous sketches.® Hawthorne is not known to have ever 
 expressed admiration for his book. He seems not to have been 
 annoyed that contemporary readers saw it as a roman a clef, and 
 concerned themselves only with trying to identify the prototypes of 
 Hollingsworth and Zenobia.® Still another incentive for a prejudicial 
 reading is Julian Hawthorne’s statement that his father changed the 
 title when it was “more than half written as ‘Hollingsworth.’ 
 This seems to imply an aimlessness of conception. Above all, the 
 tone of the book itself is unsteady. In perceiving that the language 
 of Miles Coverdale, the narrator, vacillates between poetic enthusiasm 
 and scornful bitterness, some critics have inferred that Hawthorne 
 could not make up his mind about the value of his characters or 
 describe them accurately. For this reason F. O. Matthiessen, Mark 
 Van Doren, and Rudolph von Abele are satisfied to dismiss Blithe¬ 
 dale as an artistic failure.® 
 
 Although all of these considerations have influenced critical 
 opinion, the influence seems unfair. Hawthorne’s Preface is heavily 
 ironical. His apparent silence about Blithedale and the fact of his 
 having incorporated many passages from his journals have nothing 
 strictly to do with the book’s final merit. Again, assuming that 
 Julian Hawthorne’s statement about the title is true, nothing would 
 have prevented Hawthorne from rewriting the first, imperfect half 
 in the light of his new idea. As for the extension of Coverdale’s 
 indecisiveness to a hypothetical indecisiveness in his creator, this 
 strikes me as a serious confusion of perspective. Use of the first 
 
 ^The American Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart (New Haven, 1932). Most of these 
 correspondences are noted by Arlin Turner, “Autobiographical Elements in Hawthorne’s 
 The Blithedale Romance,” University of Texas Studies in English, XV, 39-62 (July, 1935). 
 
 ’ This knotty but essentially irrelevant question cannot be entirely solved, because 
 Blithedale is not a roman a clef at all. Its characters were derived from people Hawthorne 
 knew or had studied, but this is little more than we can say of any novel. We ought not 
 to mistake the author’s material for his intent, which is in this case something very 
 different from a representation of his friends. 
 
 ’’The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne, ed. Edith G. Hawthorne (New York, 1938), p. 34. 
 
 ® F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1941), p. 297; Mark Van Doren, 
 Hawthorne (New York, 1949), pp. 188-189; Rudolph von Abele, The Death of the Artist: a 
 Study of Hawthorne's Disintegration (The Hague, 1955), p. 82. 
 
84 
 
 Frederick C. Crews 
 
 person singular need not blind us to the fact that a narrator can also 
 be a character. It is possible that Coverdale’s shortcomings may be 
 centrally important to the plot, and that Hawthorne stands outside of 
 everything that happens in BUthedale. Most critics have briefly en¬ 
 tertained this possibility and then rejected it. The real reason they 
 have done so, beyond those listed above, is that BUthedale seems to 
 supply no good alternative to the identification of author and nar¬ 
 rator. Without a key to the thematic purpose of Coverdale’s self- 
 inflicted irony, we must assume that Hawthorne is simply laughing 
 at himself. But I believe that this key can be found. In the in¬ 
 terpretation that follows, virtually every sentence in the book can be 
 seen as contributing to a deliberate, clearly definable thematic whole. 
 The point of departure from previous criticism is that whereas Cover¬ 
 dale’s limitations as a storyteller have hitherto been ascribed to 
 Hawthorne, I ascribe them only to Coverdale. The “story” that he 
 tells is not in itself the center of attention; it is the act of telling that 
 is important. Once we have grasped Coverdale’s function as a char¬ 
 acter, we can go on to consider the unfolding of BUthedale’s true plot. 
 
 I 
 
 Literally and by temperament. Miles Coverdale is a minor poet. 
 In him are joined the vague aspirations of a Transcendentalist, the 
 tastes of an artist, and an acute sense of his own limitations. He 
 yearns to create some permanent and spiritual work of art, divorced 
 from the prosaic aspects of his daily life; but he also has “a decided 
 tendency towards the actual” (p. 522). In one sense these two lean¬ 
 ings are complementary, as in this statement of his aim: “to live in 
 other lives, and to endeavor—by generous sympathies, by delicate 
 intuitions, by taking note of things too slight for record, and by 
 bringing my human spirit into manifold accordance with the com¬ 
 panions whom God assigned me—to learn the secret which was hid¬ 
 den even from themselves” (p. 533). Here is the artist as novelist, 
 combining “negative capability” with keen observation. But in 
 another sense Coverdale’s tendency towards the actual is an impedi¬ 
 ment to his art. Any work of art is more concise, more vivid, and 
 more purposeful than the mass of experience from which it is de¬ 
 rived ; an interest in the petty details of life is useful to the artist only 
 insofar as he is willing to select and juxtapose them in a new, more 
 significant order. But this is precisely what Coverdale’s tendency 
 
The Blithedale Romance 
 
 85 
 
 towards the actual prevents him from doing. Stated differently, 
 Coverdale has two distinct senses of truth, and he tries to be loyal 
 to both. He is obsessed with the undeniable reality of humdrum life, 
 and equally with the aesthetic conviction that some details in that Hfe 
 are more important than others—more “true” because more uni¬ 
 versal. The two senses will not let each other alone. When Cover- 
 dale tries to think prosaically, his poetic imagination tempts him 
 away. When he thinks poetically, his sense of literal reality calls 
 him back to earth again. Coverdale’s dilemma is that he cannot help 
 feeling that “art” and “life” represent incompatible modes of truth. 
 He is swung like a pendulum from one extreme to the other. 
 
 This polar view of Coverdale’s psychology is more than a meta¬ 
 phor. It is an account of the basic rhythm of his narrative. Torn 
 between poetry and prose, he never achieves a middle style—or 
 rather, he achieves it only once, at the climax of his career. Until 
 then, and afterwards, his language is characterized by alternating 
 passages of rapture and cynicism. Whenever he rejoices in the 
 ambitious spirit of Blithedale, he immediately adds a note of satire. 
 Whenever he begins to praise a friend, he finishes by criticizing him. 
 His own enthusiasm, inspired by a wish for imaginative truth, re¬ 
 minds him of his excess and starts him on the swing back to the 
 other extreme. The two basic concerns of the plot, which give the 
 novel a strict but subtle unity, are subjected to the same rhythm of 
 zeal and disgust, on a larger scale. One of these concerns is the 
 question of social and moral reform, epitomized in the Blithedale 
 colony. The other has never been noticed, and must be introduced 
 more carefully. 
 
 In order to interpret the “romance” that Coverdale recounts be¬ 
 tween Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla as the subject of Blithe¬ 
 dale, or even as an accurate version of the facts, the reader must over¬ 
 look a great deal of evidence to the contrary. In the first place, 
 Coverdale never supplies answers to some of the principal questions 
 of fact involved in the romance: “Zenobia’s whole character and 
 history; the true nature of her mysterious connection with Wester- 
 velt; her later purposes towards Hollingsworth, and, reciprocally, 
 his in reference to her; and, finally, the degree in which Zenobia had 
 been cognizant of the plot against Priscilla, and what . . . had been 
 the real object of that scheme” (p. 566). Without this information, 
 which Hawthorne hints at but deliberately withholds, we are not 
 
86 
 
 Frederick C. Crews 
 
 equipped to use Coverdale’s impressions as a basis for judging the 
 other characters. More importantly, Coverdale’s unreliability as a 
 philosopher extends to his storytelling; and Coverdale is our only 
 source of information about the romance. Most of the important 
 scenes he recounts are observed from an inconvenient distance, or 
 are not observed at all. Two of his most significant chapters are 
 imaginative reconstructions of someone else’s words,® and for the 
 most crucial meeting of Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla he 
 arrives “half an hour too late” (p. 564). These considerations in 
 themselves prove nothing, but they become significant when con¬ 
 nected with the language with which Coverdale surrounds many of 
 his “facts.” In order to describe the first day at Blithedale he must 
 “rake away the ashes from the embers in my memory, and blow them 
 up with a sigh, for lack of more inspiring breath” (p. 443). After 
 describing Hollingsworth’s self-centeredness he adds, “Of course I 
 am perfectly aware that the above statement is exaggerated, in the 
 attempt to make it adequate. . . . The paragraph may remain, how¬ 
 ever, both for its truth and its exaggeration . . . and as exemplifying 
 the kind of error into which my mode of observation was calculated 
 to lead me” (p. 480). He recalls an image of Hollingsworth and 
 Priscilla “with the evening twilight a little deepened by the dusk of 
 memory” (p. 484). His first view of Westervelt “had almost the 
 effect of an apparition” (p. 493). He admires Priscilla not for her¬ 
 self but “for the fancy-work with which I have idly decked her 
 out” (p. 498). She has “always seemed like a figure in a dream” 
 (p, 538). He concludes an important dialogue between Westervelt 
 and Zenobia with this reflection: “Other mysterious words, besides 
 what are above written, they spoke together; but I understood no 
 more, and even question whether I fairly understood so much as this. 
 By long brooding over our recollections, we subtilize them into some¬ 
 thing akin to imaginary stuff, and hardly capable of being dis¬ 
 tinguished from it” (p. 501). And his summary of Moodie’s con¬ 
 fession is characterized by “a trifle of romantic and legendary license, 
 worthier of a small poet than of a grave biographer” (p. 546). Such 
 language makes it difficult to see how Richard Fogle arrived at the 
 conclusion that “Coverdale’s interpretation is final,” and that he is 
 possessed of “infallibility.”^® On the contrary, Hawthorne has taken 
 
 “ These are Zenobia’s Legend of the Veiled Lady and Moodie’s autobiography. 
 
 '“Richard H. Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dar\ (Norman, Okla., 
 1952), p. 157. 
 
The Blithedale Romance 
 
 87 
 
 considerable pains to suggest that Coverdale’s story is not to be 
 trusted. 
 
 Another series of unusual statements raises this unreliability to 
 paramount importance. Not only does Coverdale take liberties with 
 the facts in relating them; he has had a suspiciously accurate fore¬ 
 knowledge of the whole course of events. He tells us that a record 
 of his dreams during the first night at Blithedale “would have antici¬ 
 pated several of the ^hief incidents of this narrative, including a dim 
 shadow of its catastrophe” (p. 460). A little later he has what 
 Zenobia calls “an idea worthy of a feverish poet”: that she is actu¬ 
 ally the Veiled Lady’s sister. Speaking of the Blithedale colony, the 
 narrator says, “I shall never feel as if this were a real, practical, as 
 well as poetical system of human life, until somebody has sanctified 
 it by death” (pp. 515-516). When he rediscovers Zenobia and 
 Priscilla in town, “it was with no positive surprise, but as if I had 
 all along expected the incident” (p. 530). On his way back to Blithe¬ 
 dale, “the thought stared me in the face that some evil thing had 
 befallen us, or was ready to befall” (p. 561). And just after Zenobia 
 —not having told Coverdale of her intention—has gone off to drown 
 herself, he “must have fallen asleep, and had a dream, all the cir¬ 
 cumstances of which utterly vanished at the moment when they 
 converged to some tragical catastrophe” (p. 574). Clearly, there is 
 a direct relationship between the workings of Coverdale’s imagina¬ 
 tion and the tale that he asks us to believe. 
 
 If this relationship is not already apparent, another look at Cover¬ 
 dale’s language will make it so. His interest in Hollingsworth, 
 Zenobia, and Priscilla is specifically literary. 
 
 My own part in these transactions was singularly subordinate. It re¬ 
 sembled that of the Chorus in a classic play, which seems to be set aloof 
 from the possibility of personal concernment, and bestows the whole 
 measure of its hope or fear, its exultation or sorrow, on the fortunes of 
 others, between whom and itself this sympathy is the only bond. Destiny, 
 it may be,—the most skilful of stage-managers,—seldom chooses to ar¬ 
 range its scenes, and carry forward its drama, without securing the 
 presence of at least one calm observer. It is his office to give applause 
 when due, and sometimes an inevitable tear, to detect the final fitness 
 of incident to character, and distil in his long-brooding thought the 
 whole morality of the performance, (p. 496) 
 
88 
 
 Frederick C. Crews 
 
 This self-image is recalled again and again. “After all was finished, 
 I would come, as if to gather up the white ashes of those who had 
 perished at the stake, and to tell the world . . . how much had 
 perished there which it had never yet known how to praise” (p. 534). 
 He refers to his three friends as “these three characters ... on my 
 private theatre” (p. 480), and speaks of their habits in terms of 
 suitability for “a sufficiently tragic catastrophe” (p. 486). “These 
 three had absorbed my life into themselves” (p. 553). In brief, 
 Coverdale is trying to make Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla 
 into a work of art. The narrative we read is not a description of his 
 friends, but a tale which attempts to idealize them dramatically—a 
 Blithedale romance. 
 
 This statement should be quickly amended. The romance that 
 Coverdale is imagining, like his enthusiasm for the moral ideals of 
 the colony, does not occupy the whole of his narrative. Together 
 they are subject to what I called the rhythm of his mind—his tenden¬ 
 cy to swing between the real and the ideal. The Blithedale colony 
 and Coverdale’s Blithedale romance are both representative of the 
 ideal. One embodies a vision of moral perfection; the other, aesthe¬ 
 tic perfection. Both demand a transcendence of the actual. Blithe¬ 
 dale is an effort to ignore and supersede all existing institutions, and 
 the Blithedale romance is an effort to create an aesthetically mean¬ 
 ingful world, above physical reality. For as Coverdale sadly ob¬ 
 serves, “real life never arranges itself exactly like a romance” (p. 500). 
 Since Coverdale’s respect for real life—both as an artist and as a 
 friend of reform—is no weaker than his desire to transcend it, the 
 action of the book consists largely in a running debate within 
 Coverdale’s mind over the suitability of his two ambitions. Every 
 other “action” in Blithedale is subordinate and contributory to this 
 debate. 
 
 The best evidence for this reading of the book will appear later— 
 namely, its usefulness in making sense out of the many chapters 
 which must otherwise be dismissed as incongruous. The awkward 
 contrast between the ethereal romance and its prosaic setting; the sud¬ 
 den shifts of tone and scenery; the thickly suggestive language with 
 no apparent referents; the seemingly frivolous episodes involving the 
 Veiled Lady, and especially Zenobia’s tale on this subject; the inter¬ 
 lude with the Blithedale masqueraders; the shockingly vivid descrip¬ 
 tion of Zenobia’s drowned body; and above all, Coverdale’s obsessive 
 
The Blithedale Romance 
 
 89 
 
 interest in his friends—all of these become pieces in a complete and 
 ingenious mosaic. Nor is this view of Blithedale’s plot so thorough 
 a contradiction of previous criticism as it may seem. In one form or 
 another, Davidson, Waggoner, Matthiessen, and von Abele all 
 recognized that Coverdale is distinct from Hawthorne. Von Abele 
 deals specifically with the fact that Coverdale’s attitude toward hii 
 friends is artistic; and although his analysis of the book is impaired 
 by a random Freudianism, there is no real contradiction between 
 saying that Coverdale has an artistic viewpoint and that he puts this 
 viewpoint to practical use. Furthermore, there is no reason for 
 thinking that this sophisticated relationship between the author, the 
 narrator, and the narrator’s experience is beyond Hawthorne’s 
 powers of refinement. The majority of the heroes in his fiction are 
 isolated, like Coverdale, by some intellectual passion, and two of his 
 tales are directly concerned with the clash between human and 
 aesthetic values: “The Artist of the Beautiful” and “The Prophetic 
 Pictures.” The Marble Faun deals with the same question. And 
 Hawthorne’s notebooks indicate a persistent awareness of such 
 problems. Indeed, it is possible that the genesis of Blithedale can be 
 traced to this journal entry of October 25, 1835: “A person to be 
 writing a tale, and to find that it shapes itself against his intentions; 
 that the characters act otherwise than he thought; that unforeseen 
 events occur; and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to 
 avert.... he having made himself one of the personages.”^ This is 
 slightly different from Blithedale’s plot as it actually developed, but 
 the same basic concern is present. 
 
 This plot will be traced in a moment, but first we must become 
 better acquainted with the questions upon which it is built. The 
 matter of social reform is relatively simple. On the one hand is the 
 appeal of an ideal society; on the other, a distrust of novelty, an 
 awareness of practical obstacles, and a skepticism about the wisdom 
 of devoting oneself single-mindedly to any kind of project. It is 
 true that the issue is complicated by Hollingsworth’s minority plan 
 for the reformation of criminals, for Hollingsworth’s scheme lacks 
 the poetic attractions of Blithedale; but Coverdale brings the same 
 values to bear upon both of them. The artistic question is of greater 
 complexity, and is debated on a level farther beneath the surface of 
 the narrative—the level of symbolic language. For convenience we 
 
 ’‘T-'/f Hear^ of Hawthorne'; Journals, ed. Newton Arvin (Boston, 1929), p. 8. 
 
90 
 
 Frederick C. Crews 
 
 may separate it into two components, which might be phrased as 
 “Should art be made to resemble life?” and “Should life be made to 
 resemble art?” The first of these is introduced covertly on the first 
 page of the book, where the narrator is recalling a demonstration of 
 clairvoyance by the Veiled Lady. 
 
 Nowadays, in the management of his “subject,” “clairvoyant,” or “medi¬ 
 um,” the exhibitor affects the simplicity and openness of scientific ex¬ 
 periment; and even if he profess to tread a step or two across the bounda¬ 
 ries of the spiritual world, yet carries with him the laws of our actual 
 life, and extends them over his preternatural conquests. Twelve or fifteen 
 years ago, on the contrary, all the arts of mysterious arrangement, of 
 picturesque disposition, and artistically contrasted light and shade, were 
 made available, in order to set the apparent miracle in the strongest at¬ 
 titude of opposition to ordinary facts, (p. 441) 
 
 Readers who are familiar with Hawthorne’s Prefaces—including 
 the Preface to Blithedale —^will not fail to recognize that this passage 
 states a fundamental artistic problem, the opposition of realism and 
 romance as techniques of fiction. Should a writer strive to give 
 the illusion of real life, however prosaic ? Or should he rather admit 
 that fiction must always be different from life, and strive to culti¬ 
 vate this difference through frankly artificial devices? These two 
 extremes correspond to the two poles of Coverdale’s temperament, 
 his tendency towards the actual and his love for the spiritual and 
 ideal. Neither extreme can therefore be expected to satisfy him. 
 Coverdale’s true conception of a proper art is presented later on, 
 when he is examining some paintings in a saloon. He expresses 
 distaste for a picture of a drunken man asleep on a bench; “The 
 death-in-life was too well portrayed” (p. 542). However, he is 
 charmed by certain still-lifes, equally realistic in detail, but with an 
 important difference. “All these things were so perfectly imitated, 
 that you seemed to have the genuine article before you, and yet with 
 an indescribable ideal charm; it took away the grossness from what 
 was fleshiest and fattest, and thus helped the life of man, even in its 
 earthliest relations, to appear rich and noble, as well as warm, cheer¬ 
 ful, and substantial” (p. 542). In short, Coverdale’s artistic ideal is 
 a marriage of actual life with an ennobled taste. Real people must 
 be the subject of his romance, but they must give forth “an inde¬ 
 scribable ideal charm.” 
 
The Blithedale Romance 
 
 91 
 
 Where, then, is the cause for debate? It lies in the fact that 
 Coverdale, for all his belief in this desired ideal, cannot put it into 
 practice. He can concentrate alternately on corporeal life and on 
 pure spirit, but he is emotionally incapable of fusing them. If he 
 were satisfied either to record only the meanest details of his ex¬ 
 perience or to create a wholly fictitious romance, he might well suc¬ 
 ceed. But his integrity betrays him. He is committed to base his 
 art on the real transactions among Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and 
 Priscilla, and at the same time to make these relationships “artistic.” 
 But the subjects of his attention resent his efforts to see them in an 
 unreal light. Hollingsworth and Zenobia, especially, deliberately 
 ridicule his conception of the affair, and thus they force Coverdale 
 into a moral corner. He cannot easily deceive himself into thinking 
 that his friends are involved in a ready-made romance, and yet he 
 wants very badly to compose his romance according to the observed 
 truth. Here is where the second part of the question comes in: 
 “Should life be made to resemble art?” Since life refuses to be 
 artistic in se, to what degree should an artist alter his notion of reality 
 to suit his purpose as artist ? It is only a small exaggeration to say 
 that Blithedale is a symbolic treatise on this subject. 
 
 II 
 
 Coverdale begins with the best intentions. Through the first four 
 chapters he shows no sign of contemplating a romance. These 
 chapters are principally concerned with developing the contrast 
 between Blithedale and the neighboring city, presumably Boston, and 
 with introducing the main characters of the book. But Priscilla, the 
 last of these to appear, stimulates Coverdale’s fancy. When he ex¬ 
 presses his interest to Zenobia, she says: “Since you see the young 
 woman in so poetical a light . . . you had better turn the affair into 
 a ballad” (p. 457). Here is the germ of Coverdale’s trouble. On the 
 same evening he is stricken with a fever, the significance of which is 
 made fairly plain. “During the greater part of it [the night], I was 
 in that vilest of states when a fixed idea remains in the mind, like 
 the nail in Sisera’s brain, while innumerable other ideas go and come, 
 and flutter to and fro, combining constant transition with intolerable 
 sameness” (p. 460). The sentence which immediately follows has 
 already been quoted. “Had I made a record of that night’s half¬ 
 waking dreams, it is my belief that it would have anticipated several 
 
92 
 
 Frederick C. Crews 
 
 of the chief incidents of this narrative, including a dim shadow of 
 its catastrophe.” Coverdale has begun to entertain his romance, and 
 his fever is that of an artist in the first stage of expanding an in¬ 
 spirational idea. 
 
 This fever lasts for two more chapters, during which time Cover- 
 dale is content to lie in bed and observe his three attendants, and to 
 formulate his poetic conception of them. For in sickness, “Vapors 
 then rise up to the brain, and take shapes that often image falsehood, 
 but sometimes truth. The spheres of our companions have, at such 
 periods, a vastly greater influence upon our own than when robust 
 health gives us a repellent and self-defensive energy” (p. 466). On 
 May Day he gets up and emerges into the “genial sunshine” of 
 Blithedale. He tells us that his illness has purged him of everything 
 pertaining to his old self. “In literal and physical truth, I was quite 
 another man. I had a lively sense of the exultation with which the 
 spirit will enter on the next stage of its eternal progress...” (p. 474). 
 Here Coverdale is expressing the poetic, unrealistic side of his 
 nature, nursed by his recent isolation from daily toil. But as soon 
 as he accepts his new duties as a farmer, this poetic attitude is chal¬ 
 lenged. “The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored 
 and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. 
 Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish” (p. 
 477). Thus begins one of the most prominent metaphorical tensions 
 in the book, between the real, prosaic earth and the clouds, vapors, 
 or breezes of poetic truth. Every reference to earth occurs in defiance 
 of one or both of Coverdale’s ambitions, and every escape from earth 
 is an escape to the ideal. 
 
 Chapter IX is entitled “Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla,” and 
 this is its opening paragraph: 
 
 It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation, to devote 
 ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women. 
 If the person under examination be one’s self, the result is pretty certain 
 to be diseased action of the heart, almost before we can snatch a second 
 glance. Or, if we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, 
 we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his 
 peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and, of course, patch him very 
 clumsily together again. What wonder, then, should we be frightened 
 by the aspect of a monster, which, after all,—though we can point to 
 every feature of his deformity in the real personage,—may be said to have 
 been created mainly by ourselves, (p. 479) 
 
The Blithedale Romance 
 
 93 
 
 At this stage in his thinking, having just tested his preliminary ideas 
 about Blithedale and its colonists against the intractable reality of 
 the soil, Coverdale is taken aback. Perhaps he has been at fault in 
 thinking of his comrades only in terms of his private scheme. He 
 is by no means convinced, but from this point onward he is plagued 
 by doubts. The rest of the chapter contains numerous expressions 
 of uncertainty, but Coverdale persists in his conjectures. It is at this 
 point, also, that he first confesses his awareness of a growing aliena¬ 
 tion from the others. “While these three characters figured so 
 largely on my private theatre, I . . . was at best but a secondary or 
 tertiary personage with either of them” (p. 480). A human problem 
 thus complicates the artistic one. In order to see his friends in a 
 sufficiently artistic light, Coverdale recognizes that he must detach 
 himself from a personal concern for them, and this detachment in¬ 
 spires scorn in return. 
 
 The next two chapters, which bring the mysterious figures of 
 Moodie and Westervelt briefly into the foreground, are devoted to 
 the further development of Coverdale’s ideas; but the second also 
 hints at an impending change in his attitude. The spot where 
 Westervelt is seen in the Blithedale woods is lent a peculiar signifi¬ 
 cance. “. . . I abated my pace, and looked about me for some side- 
 aisle, that should admit me into the innermost sanctuary of this 
 green cathedral, just as, in human acquaintanceship, a casual opening 
 sometimes lets us, all of a sudden, into the long-sought intimacy of 
 a mysterious heart” (pp. 491-492). Coverdale is seeking to crystallize 
 his romance. Westervelt’s arrival momentarily breaks his reverie, 
 for the mesmerist’s attitude towards Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and 
 Priscilla is exactly opposite to that which Coverdale is trying to 
 maintain. He speaks of them in the most cynical manner, without 
 poetic flavor. His very appearance “had an indecorum in it, a kind 
 of rudeness, a hard, coarse, forth-putting freedom of expression, 
 which no degree of external polish could have abated one single 
 jot” (p. 493). Although Westervelt displays a close familiarity with 
 Coverdale’s three “characters,” the poet’s instinctive rudeness to him 
 soon puts an end to their conversation, and Westervelt disappears 
 “among the windings of the wood-path.” The full import of this 
 encounter will be seen later, but for the moment this much can be 
 said: Coverdale is not yet so dedicated to a deliberate manipulation 
 of his characters that he will recognize a kinship between himself 
 
94 
 
 Frederick C. Crews 
 
 and a charlatan like Westervelt. However, the evil seed has been 
 sown. “But after a little reflection, I could not help regretting that 
 I had so peremptorily broken off the interview while the stranger 
 seemed inclined to continue it. His evident knowledge of matters 
 affecting my three friends might have led to disclosures or inferences 
 that would perhaps have been serviceable” (p. 496). It should be 
 added that Westervelt, in this chapter and in every subsequent ap¬ 
 pearance, is conspicuously linked with references to the Devil. In 
 the romance, he tempts Zenobia into marriage and later tempts 
 Hollingsworth, through Zenobia, to betray Priscilla into his power. 
 But outside the romance he is a symbolic tempter of a deeper sort. 
 He represents Coverdale’s impulse to complete his romance at the 
 expense of literal truth, and when Coverdale has been tempted, 
 Westervelt reminds us of his fall. 
 
 Every backdrop in Blithedale is significantly associated with the 
 type of action occurring there. The city from which Coverdale first 
 departs comes to stand for the restrictions and also the comforts of 
 conventional life, in contrast with the more adventurous but more 
 uneasy country.^^ At Blithedale itself, as Coverdale becomes in¬ 
 creasingly aware of his isolation from the others, he connects certain 
 localities with certain aspects of his experience. It is obvious that the 
 farmhouse is the scene of community life, and that the farmland itself 
 is the scene of physical labor, the enemy of intellect and art. But 
 Coverdale’s romance also has a special locality—the woods. Not only 
 do many of the significant developments in his tale occur on wood- 
 paths, but he himself has a private retreat for artistic contemplation. 
 This, as the title to Chapter XII informs us, is “Coverdale’s Hermit¬ 
 age,” “an admirable place to make verses” (p. 497). This little nook, 
 shielded from the sun of literal truth, is formed by the intertwining 
 of a wild grape vine “of unusual size and luxuriance” with three or 
 four trees—that is, by the intertwining of poetic fancy with the ma¬ 
 terial of romance. The richness of symbolic suggestion in these para¬ 
 graphs can scarcely be overstated. These two sentences, for example, 
 prefigure both the maturing of the romance and its grim climax: “I 
 counted the innumerable clusters of my vine, and fore-reckoned the 
 abundance of my vintage. It gladdened me to anticipate the sur¬ 
 prise of the Community, when, like an allegorical figure of rich 
 
 See, for example, Coverdale’s first voyage from city to farm (pp. 444-445) and his 
 partial readjustment to the city (pp. 525-526). 
 
The Blithedale Romance 
 
 95 
 
 October, I should make my appearance, with shoulders bent be¬ 
 neath the burden of ripe grapes, and some of the crushed ones 
 crimsoning my brow as with a blood-stain” (p. 497). Henceforth, 
 every mention of overhanging trees heralds a new complication in 
 the romance, and every mention of grapes or wine implies the joy 
 of artistic creation. 
 
 Perched in his tree-hermitage, Coverdale now surveys the farm. 
 Hollingsworth at toil appears ludicrous, and so does his philanthro¬ 
 py. Priscilla evokes sympathy, but only for the “fancy-work” with 
 which Coverdale has adorned her. Under the influence of “the 
 pleasant scent of the wood,” Coverdale confesses to “a mood of 
 disbelief in moral beauty or heroism” (p. 498). He laughs aloud, 
 and his laughter is echoed—by Westervelt’s.^^ Westervelt has al¬ 
 ready affected his thinking. “I recognized as chiefly due to this 
 man’s influence the sceptical and sneering view which, just now, 
 had filled my mental vision, in regard to all life’s better purposes.... 
 I detested this kind of man; and all the more because a part of my 
 own nature showed itself responsive to him” (p. 499). This renewed 
 connection with the materialistic show-master, coming as it does 
 when Coverdale is reappraising his friends from a purely artistic 
 point of view, can only signify that his conception of the romance 
 is being cheapened. The episode that now ensues between Wester¬ 
 velt and Zenobia contributes appreciably to the progress and “at¬ 
 mosphere” of the romance; but it is also bombarded on all sides by 
 images of falsehood, error, and fancy. 
 
 Appropriately enough, the next scene is one of fancy almost 
 wholly divorced from fact. “Zenobia’s Legend,” as retold by Cover- 
 dale, is completely out of character in its motivation. There is no 
 conceivable reason why Zenobia should want at this point to suggest 
 to the assembled colonists that Priscilla is the Veiled Lady; and 
 equally strangely, no one seems to draw this unmistakable inference. 
 Nor does Zenobia’s apparent maliciousness here seem to effect the 
 slightest change in the relations among the three characters. It is 
 not even mentioned again. These facts, plus the poetic license that 
 Coverdale stresses, can only mean that the legend is not a literal part 
 of the romance, but is partly or entirely a fabrication of Coverdale’s. 
 
 In their earlier meeting it was Westervelt who laughed first, and was joined in¬ 
 voluntarily by Coverdale. The reversal of this order here is suggestive of Coverdalc’s 
 increasing “possession” by Westervelt. 
 
96 
 
 Frederick C. Crews 
 
 Its theme of the skeptic who refuses to have faith in the beauty be¬ 
 neath the veil is intended as a symbolic gloss to his romance. But it 
 is also a condemnation of that romance—Coverdale being now ex¬ 
 clusively concerned with “veils”—and in addition a judgment on 
 all of the real characters in Blithedde, as we shall see in retrospect. 
 The legend marks the end of a progression of chapters that are in¬ 
 creasingly “romantic,” beginning with Zenobia’s first mocking sug¬ 
 gestion that Coverdale “turn the affair into a ballad.” The next 
 chapter brings us back to earth. Its locale, “Eliot’s Pulpit,” is a 
 place of moral judgment, and as such it belongs to the self-righteous 
 Hollingsworth (as his name implies) rather than to Coverdale. 
 The issue debated is the status of women, and the question as Cover- 
 dale phrases it—“Will it be possible ever to redeem them?”—bears on 
 the real fortunes of Zenobia and Priscilla as well as on Coverdale’s 
 rather different plan for immortalizing them. The influence of 
 Eliot’s Pulpit is a sobering one. When a brief “wood-path” episode 
 near the end of the chapter brings Coverdale’s favorite subject back 
 into focus, these are some of the questions he asks himself: “But was 
 it a vision that I had witnessed in the wood? Was Westervelt a 
 goblin ? Were those words of passion and agony, which Zenobia had 
 uttered in my hearing, a mere stage declamation ? Were they formed 
 of a material lighter than common air?” (p. 514). These questions 
 are disingenuous. Hawthorne is informing us, through Coverdale’s 
 imagery, that his narrator is engaged in distorting the truth. And 
 Coverdale himself is displaying a vague consciousness of this fact. 
 
 Chapter XV, “A Crisis,” comes at the literal and thematic mid¬ 
 point of Blithedale}^ Hollingsworth, in his growing distrust of 
 the colony’s usefulness, is prepared to break off on a private tangent. 
 His ideas of reform divorce practical utility from the Utopian af¬ 
 fectations of Blithedale. When Coverdale is asked to join him, the 
 contrast is sharpened between Hollingsworth’s fanatical but down-to- 
 earth philanthropy and Coverdale’s loyalty to the Utopian affecta¬ 
 tions. As Hollingsworth justly observes, the real reason for Cover¬ 
 dale’s interest in Blithedale is that “It has given you a theme for 
 poetry” (p. 516). The two men part in anger, and in the next 
 
 That is to say, every previous chapter has drawn Coverdale farther away from the 
 truth, although an undercurrent of misgivings has been accumulating. Hereafter, the 
 misgivings will be of superior weight; Coverdale will be drawn closer and closer to a 
 despair of completing the romance on false terms, until he must finally submit to the 
 factual truth. 
 
The Blithedale Romance 
 
 97 
 
 chapter Coverdale has decided to leave the farm, “and take an ex¬ 
 terior view of what we had all been about” (p. 522). Hollings¬ 
 worth’s accusations have shaken his faith in Blithedale’s reality—and 
 also, of course, in the reality of his Blithedale romance. “I was be¬ 
 ginning to lose the sense of what kind of a world it was, among 
 innumerable schemes of what it might or ought to be.” His purpose 
 in returning to town is at once philosophical and artistic: “to correct 
 himself by a new observation from that old stand-point.” The side 
 of Coverdale’s nature that responds to corporeal reality—as symbol¬ 
 ized in this chapter by his leave-taking of the pigs—will now be 
 temporarily served. 
 
 Situated comfortably in a hotel, Coverdale now savors the con¬ 
 trast between Blithedale and the town. The contrast is essentially 
 between artistic techniques, as a close reading of the chapter will 
 show. Coverdale’s detailed and random observations of his neigh¬ 
 bors—between whom and himself a symbolic grapevine grows—are 
 apparently collected to furnish a more solid basis for the romance. 
 But here again, Coverdale senses his inability to connect the mun¬ 
 dane with the romantic. The last paragraph of the chapter is a 
 metaphorical statement of this fact. 
 
 There was nothing else worth noticing about the house, unless it be that 
 on the peak of one of the dormer-windows which opened out of the roof 
 sat a dove, looking very dreary and forlorn; insomuch that I wondered 
 why she chose to sit there, in the chilly rain, while her kindred were 
 doubtless nestling in a warm and comfortable dove-cote. All at once, 
 this dove spread her wings, and, launching herself in the air, came flying 
 so straight across the intervening space that I fully expected her to alight 
 directly on my window-sill. In the latter part of her course, however, she 
 swerved aside, flew upward, and vanished, as did, likewise, the slight, 
 fantastic pathos with which I had invested her. (p. 529) 
 
 This dove reappears in the next chapter, but now in her proper 
 context: Zenobia, Priscilla, and Westervelt are seen in this same 
 house. Their reappearance is a sign of Coverdale’s slavery to his 
 romance as it has been previously established. “After the effort 
 which it cost me to fling them off,—after consummating my escape, 
 as I thought, from these goblins of flesh and blood, and pausing to 
 revive myself with a breath or two of an atmosphere in which they 
 should have no share,—it was a positive despair, to find the same 
 
98 
 
 Frederick C. Crews 
 
 figures arraying themselves before me, and presenting their old 
 problem in a shape that made it more insoluble than ever” (pp. 531- 
 532). From this point onwards Coverdale makes no pretense of 
 human sympathy for his friends, but devotes himself only to work¬ 
 ing out their tragedy. “I began to long for a catastrophe. If the 
 noble temper of Hollingsworth’s soul were doomed to be utterly 
 corrupted by the too powerful purpose which had grown out of 
 what was noblest in him; if the rich and generous qualities of 
 Zenobia’s womanhood might not save her; if Priscilla must perish 
 by her tenderness and faith, so simple and so devout,—then be it so! 
 Let it all come!” (p. 532). Coverdale is positively looking forward 
 to these events. Although Zenobia sees him from across the street 
 and angrily lets down a curtain, “like the drop-curtain of a theatre, 
 in the interval between the acts” (p. 533), Coverdale pays a call, 
 trying to extort “some nature, some passion, no matter whether right 
 or wrong, provided it were real” (p. 536). His heartless interest in 
 drama has obliterated his sense of moral values; and remembering 
 his moralistic ideal of art, we may say that it is destroying his art 
 as well. When Zenobia refuses to answer all his questions, Coverdale 
 goes to a less reliable source—Old Moodie. Moodie, like Westervelt, 
 is central to the romance but only incidentally a subject of Cover- 
 dale’s attention. His story, related at second-hand by the narrator, 
 comes close to answering the questions I listed earlier as withheld 
 by Hawthorne. But it does not answer them, for Moodie’s biogra¬ 
 phy is not only sketchy, it is lent the same legendary quality as 
 Zenobia’s tale of the Veiled Lady. As Coverdale’s readers, we 
 shall never know what Moodie really said; but we can be sure that 
 Coverdale has adapted his words to the purpose of his romance. 
 
 m 
 
 Now we are ready for two of the richest chapters in Blithedde. 
 In “A Village Hall” we have a literal scene, an episode in Cover- 
 dale’s romance, a symbolic judgment on that romance and on 
 Blithedale itself, and a hint of their ultimate failure, all embodied 
 in a single concrete event. Coverdale is by now fully aware that his 
 obsession is unhealthy. “Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla! These 
 three had absorbed my life into themselves. Together with an 
 inexpressible longing to know their fortunes, there was likewise a 
 morbid resentment of my own pain, and a stubborn reluctance to 
 
The Blithedale Romance 
 
 99 
 
 come again within their sphere” (p. 553). Now they reappear in a 
 setting such as to suggest an utterly fraudulent and prostituted art— 
 a country lyceum-hall, fit for ventriloquism, thaumaturgy, panto¬ 
 mimes, wax museums, and the like. Before a vulgar and super¬ 
 stitious audience, Westervelt is to present the hypnotized Veiled 
 Lady. The analogies between Westervelt’s debased art and Cover- 
 dale’s, which have been accumulating throughout Blithedale, are 
 pointed devastatingly. “Human character was but soft wax in his 
 hands; and guilt, or virtue, only the forms into which he should see 
 fit to mould it” (p. 556). Coverdale denounces this blasphemy, but 
 to no avail; Westervelt’s introductory remarks are a parody both of 
 Coverdale’s art and of the Blithedale experiment. “He spoke of a 
 new era that was dawning upon the world; an era that would link 
 soul to soul, and the present life to what we call futurity, with a 
 closeness that should finally convert both worlds into one great, 
 mutually conscious brotherhood” (p. 557). The supreme blow is 
 dealt to Coverdale’s art-worship when Westervelt borrows some of 
 his most reverent vocabulary and twists it into this: “Slight and 
 ethereal as it [the veil] seems, the limitations of time and space have 
 no existence within its folds. This hall—these hundreds of faces, 
 encompassing her within so narrow an amphitheatre—are of thinner 
 substance, in her view, than the airiest vapor that the clouds are made 
 of. She beholds the Absolute!” (p. 558). When this final analogy 
 between Westervelt’s Priscilla and Coverdale’s has been drawn, the 
 ensuing action is a symbolic defeat for Coverdale as well as a tangible 
 defeat for the mesmerist. Hollingsworth, the anti-poet, climbs onto 
 the stage, breaks Westervelt’s spell over Priscilla, and bears her off 
 to safety. Reality has conquered fiction. 
 
 Chapter XXIV, “The Masqueraders,” has been ignored or con¬ 
 demned as irrelevant in previous interpretations of Blithedale. Al¬ 
 though its symbolism is a trifle more strained than that of the pre¬ 
 ceding chapter, it is a masterpiece of relevancy. Surrounded on all 
 sides by impediments to his romance, Coverdale makes the only 
 choice that may possibly extricate him. He decides to return to 
 Bhthedale and check his version against the truth. The closer he 
 gets to the colony, the more certain he becomes that the truth will 
 mock him. He even doubts the very existence of the place as he has 
 remembered it, and when the thick earth of the farm partly reassures 
 him, he gratefully renounces all of his spiritual aspirations. “The 
 
100 
 
 Frederick C. Crews 
 
 red clay of which my frame was moulded seemed nearer akin to 
 tdiose crumbling furrows than to any other portion of the world’s 
 dust. There was my home, and there might be my grave” (p. 560). 
 But it is too late to get off so easily. Fearful of “some evil thing,” 
 he turns off into the woods and seeks out his hermitage. Although 
 he passes the very spot where Zenobia is to die, he refuses to dwell 
 on his vague presentiment; his summer grapes are completely 
 ripened, and ready to be pressed into the wine of art. “And I 
 longed to quaff a great goblet of it that moment!” (p. 562). Thus 
 committed to pursue his work, but afraid to base it on the truth, he 
 plunges into the woods again—in search of a method. First he sees 
 some cows, who make him “foolishly angry” by their indifference 
 to him; thus the method of prosaic realism is quickly rejected. Next, 
 he meets a band of masqueraders who represent allegorical figures. 
 Some of these are dancing to the music of a Devil. Coverdale knows 
 they are only Blithedale residents on a picnic, and the absurdity of 
 their disguises makes him laugh; allegory is shallow. Recognizing 
 his laughter, the dancers threaten him with tortures appropriate to 
 their various roles. “ ‘The voice was Miles Coverdale’s,’ said the 
 fiendish fiddler . . . ‘My music has brought him hither. He is al¬ 
 ways ready to dance to the Devil’s tune!”’ “The whole fantastic 
 rabble. . . . streamed off in pursuit of me, so that I was like a mad 
 poet hunted by chimeras” (p. 563). Glad to escape from such a spe¬ 
 cious and unmanageable technique, Coverdale entertains one final 
 possibility. He finds a pile of cut logs, moss-covered with age—or 
 symbolically, a historical situation that is real but “dated.” “I found 
 something strangely affecting in this simple circumstance. I 
 imagined the long-dead woodman, and his long-dead wife and chil¬ 
 dren, coming out of their chill graves, and essaying to make a fire 
 with this heap of mossy fuel!” (p. 564). Thus Coverdale has re¬ 
 jected the use of indiscriminate realism, of allegory, and of historical 
 romance. He has exhausted his alternatives to the real adventures 
 of his friends. It is thus with full symbolic import that he next hears 
 the voices of these very people, calling to him from the seat of moral 
 judgment, Eliot’s Pulpit. “But you come half an hour too late,” says 
 Zenobia, “and have missed a scene which you would have enjoyed!” 
 (p. 564). While Coverdale has been searching for a less honest 
 
The Blithedale Romance 
 
 lOI 
 
 technique, the central action of his romance has transpired un¬ 
 observed. 
 
 In the next two chapters any lingering hope of resuming his 
 fiction is erased. Finally in the presence of a real crisis between real 
 people, he feels ashamed. “The intenseness of their feelings gave 
 them the exclusive property of the soil and atmosphere, and left me 
 no right to be or breathe there” (p. 565). The human tragedy whose 
 next-to-final scene he is witnessing is more dramatic than anything 
 he might fabricate, and it has been quietly developing all the while 
 that he was busy trying to romanticize it. Now a sudden flood of 
 genuine sympathy nullifies his artistic detachment. When Hollings¬ 
 worth departs with Priscilla, the center of controversy, at his side, 
 Coverdale’s grief is scarcely less than Zenobia’s. For as he confesses 
 in the last line of the book, he has loved Priscilla all along. That is 
 to say, he has loved her as a romantic heroine. When Coverdale is 
 left alone with Zenobia, “the analogy that I saw, or imagined, be¬ 
 tween Zenobia’s situation and mine” (p. 570) becomes clear; they 
 have each been deprived of an ill-founded and consuming hope. At 
 first Zenobia refuses to recognize the change in Coverdale’s attitude. 
 “Ah, I perceive what you are about! You are turning this whole af¬ 
 fair into a ballad. Pray let me hear as many stanzas as you happen 
 to have ready” (pp. 570-571). But she sees her mistake, and eventu¬ 
 ally takes him into her confidence. Ironically enough, Zenobia 
 speaks like a tragic heroine only when she is sure that she is no longer 
 in the presence of a writer of tragedies. 
 
 Coverdale’s romance has been partly truth, partly fiction, but its 
 catastrophe is entirely true—so true that it invalidates the rest. This 
 is the meaning of his dream, “all the circumstances of which utterly 
 vanished at the moment when they converged to some tragical 
 catastrophe, and thus grew too powerful for the thin sphere of slum¬ 
 ber that enveloped them.” During this dream Zenobia has drowned 
 herself. When Coverdale, at the start of Chapter XXVII, throws “a 
 tuft of grass with earth at the roots” into Hollingsworth’s room, we 
 are symbolically informed that brute reality is to be confronted at 
 last. In the middle of the night Hollingsworth, Coverdale, and a 
 prosaically minded farmer named Silas Foster dredge the river for 
 Zenobia’s body. This scene has justly been acclaimed as the most 
 vivid in Blithedale. It is the most vivid because it is the only one 
 
102 
 
 Frederick C. Crews 
 
 that Coverdale makes no attempt to touch up. And yet it is also the 
 symbolic climax of the whole book. The most prominent metaphor 
 throughout Blithedale has been one of disguise, and particularly of 
 white or silvery veils.^“ Now every veil has been lifted except one, 
 the black veil of the river. Underneath it is pure, stark reality. 
 
 Her wet garments swathed limbs of terrible inflexibility. She was the 
 marble image of a death-agony. Her arms had grown rigid in the act of 
 struggling, and were bent before her with clenched hands ... it seemed 
 as if her body must keep the same position in the coffin, and that her 
 skeleton would keep it in the grave. . . . (p. 578) 
 
 This rigidity denies every vain delusion in Blithedale. It even chal¬ 
 lenges the spirit of tragedy: “could Zenobia have foreseen all these 
 ugly circumstances of death . . . she would no more have committed 
 the dreadful act than have exhibited herself to a public assembly in 
 a badly fitting garment!” (p. 579). Zenobia’s funeral in the next 
 chapter is devoid of affectation, despite the very different plans that 
 the Blithedale residents had projected earlier. “She was buried very 
 much as other people have been for hundreds of years gone by” 
 (p. 580). And when Coverdale meets the cynical Westervelt by her 
 grave, he is justified in denouncing Westervelt’s expressions of regret 
 that Zenobia did not live to achieve worldly success. He can secretly 
 agree that her suicide was unnecessary, but he has been made aware 
 that worldly success—be it in the form of personal influence, useful 
 philanthropy, or literary fame—is less real than death, and less im¬ 
 portant than something else—love. Zenobia learned this at die cost 
 of her life. Coverdale did so at the cost of his romance. And Hol¬ 
 lingsworth, as we presently learn, did so at the cost of his self-respect. 
 
 Blithedale's theme is the most common one in Hawthorne’s 
 work. It is what he called the Unpardonable Sin: “the separation of 
 the intellect from the heart.”^® Each of the book’s characters is 
 guilty of denying the heart—except Priscilla, who is not a character 
 at all but an abstract symbol of the heart. Zenobia pursued an image 
 of herself as grandly independent. Hollingsworth embodied his ego 
 in a project of reform. Westervelt scorned the very existence of the 
 heart, and Moodie betrayed it for the sake of external display. And 
 
 Waggoner’s treatment of this symbol is adequate, although his conclusions about 
 structure seem to me over-simple {Hawthorne, pp. 179-181). 
 
 American notebooks, p. 106. 
 
The Blithedale Romance 
 
 103 
 
 Coverdale drained himself of human sympathy to make room for 
 his romance. 
 
 However, it must not be thought that Blithedale is a condemna¬ 
 tion of all art. Insofar as it deals with Coverdale, it is a condemna¬ 
 tion of divorcing the moral consciousness from the aesthetic. A 
 better artist than Coverdale could base his work on a proper relation¬ 
 ship to his material—a relationship involving a respect for truth and 
 at the same time a respect for the human beings under scrutiny. 
 Coverdale’s romance was justified in aspiring to present an exalted 
 view of humanity. But the “indescribable ideal charm” should have 
 arisen from a perception of ideal virtues within the subject itself, 
 not in the detached fancy of the artist.^^ And an exactly parallel 
 judgment is passed on the Blithedale colony. The desire for an 
 ideal society was good, but it became worthless when detached from 
 a concern for actual society. In each case the fundamental error was 
 the same: a lack of faith that spiritual qualities are inherent in real 
 life. Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Coverdale, Westervelt, and Moodie 
 each failed to see that the symbolic Priscilla was neither real nor ideal, 
 but both. Hollingsworth made partial amends, but everyone suf¬ 
 fered for his mistake.^* The unifying moral of this complicated 
 book is simply that the highest truth is intrinsic in the lowest. If Miles 
 Coverdale can see only one of them at a time, the fault is not in 
 nature; it is in a consciousness that unjustly divorces intellect from 
 heart. In this sense—remembering the evident pun in “Westervelt” 
 —it is not unfair to read Blithedale on its highest level as a parable 
 of the modern mind. 
 
 IV 
 
 However, the ambition of this paper is only to show that Blithe¬ 
 dale has been misread on the very lowest level, that of plot. If my 
 reading is correct, it is only fair to Hawthorne that we discount as 
 irrelevant all previous value-judgments about this book. For in 
 
 ” In warning his fiancee against the dangers of mesmerism, Hawthorne wrote: “And 
 thou wilt know that the view which I take of this matter is caused by no want of faith 
 in mysteries, but from a deep reverence of the soul. . . . Keep thy imagination sane—that is 
 one of the truest conditions of communion with Heaven” {Love Letters of Nathaniel 
 Hawthorne, 1 vols. Chicago, 1907, II, 64-65) 
 
 Strictly speaking, however, it is wrong to say that Westervelt suffered. Like Priscilla, 
 he is only a symbol—the symbol of everything that Priscilla is not. He tempts the others 
 into a cheap materialism and personifies it, but, like Priscilla, he remains morally un¬ 
 affected by the events around him. 
 
Frederick C. Crews 
 
 104 
 
 order to speak of a book’s faults and virtues, we must at least have 
 some idea about what is transpiring in its plot. The surface diffi¬ 
 culties of Blithedcde have goaded its various critics into generaliza¬ 
 tions which bear little or no reference to Hawthorne’s achievement. 
 And those who have admired Blithe dale have on the whole been less 
 acute than its detractors, for if this book is not principally concerned 
 with Coverdale’s mind, surely it is one of the most absurd and self- 
 defeating romances ever written. But if we take the trouble to read 
 it in the terms that Hawthorne established—not in the title or the 
 Preface, which are ironical, but in the language of Coverdale’s nar¬ 
 rative—we may emerge with a very different estimate of its value. 
 
 The Blithedale Romance is a symbolic commentary on several 
 types of activity. It is not a romance, nor is it a novel in any usual 
 sense of the term. To judge it on the traditional grounds of char¬ 
 acter and action is to miss the point—despite the fact that Miles 
 Coverdale is one of the most subtly conceived characters in American 
 fiction. The real achievement of Blithedale lies in the complexity 
 and consistency of its structure. Hawthorne is attempting what few 
 writers have dared: a surface plot, an imaginative reconstruction of 
 that plot by a narrator, and a symbolic commentary on both. In¬ 
 deed, Blithedale has claims to uniqueness, for in no other book that 
 I know does the narrator’s changing attitude toward his narrative 
 constitute a rival plot which overtakes and is eventually matched 
 against the other. The nearest approach is Henry James’s The Sacred 
 Fount, and James’s failure is the measure of Hawthorne’s success. 
 James was forced to eliminate everything from his book except the 
 tedious, falsifying mind of his narrator, but Hawthorne can give 
 us glimpses of the truth within the false narrative—and a symbolic 
 means of distinguishing between them—so that we can see the two 
 plots separating and then converging.^® Some parts of the book are 
 less successful than others in maintaining this complex purpose, but 
 there is not a single chapter that can be called unfunctional or in¬ 
 consistent. Blithedale belongs to a tradition that includes Gulliver’s 
 Travels and Ulysses —books whose greatness lies in the author’s abili¬ 
 ty to express his deepest judgments through a narrator who is himself 
 a subject of judgment. Historically, as a precursor of the modern 
 
 James’s The Turn 0/ the Screw may provide a more exact parallel, if Edmund Wilson’s 
 well-known interpretation is correct. 
 
The Blithedale Romance 
 
 105 
 
 novel, and biographically, as the most complex expression of Haw¬ 
 thorne’s mind, Blithedale deserves considerable respect; but for its 
 own sake it demands attention as an extraordinary work of art. If 
 it lacks the warmth and surface drama of The Scarlet Letter, it 
 eliminates the half-visible puppet-master who asks us to suspend dis¬ 
 belief. Or rather, it sublimates him into Miles Coverdale. Haw¬ 
 thorne’s discomfort with the too obvious devices of romance led him 
 into something far deeper and more challenging to his powers of 
 expression. His success must be judged in terms of his purpose. 
 
Hawthorne’s Allegory of Science: 
 "Rappaccini’s Daughter” 
 
 Edward H. Rosenberry 
 
 R appaccini’s Daughter” is one of the major unsolved enigmas 
 in Havv^thorne’s work. The problem, difficult as it has been to 
 solve, is easy to define. The knowledgeable reader looks for a clear 
 pattern of second meanings in a Hawthorne story. In this one, as 
 if to ensure the expectation, Hawthorne made prefatory remarks 
 about his “inveterate love of allegory” and the fact that if his tales 
 are not taken “in precisely the proper point of view . . . they can 
 hardly fail to look excessively like nonsense.” Few readers would 
 reject “Rappaccini’s Daughter” as nonsense; on the other hand, 
 none has seemed to find “precisely the proper point of view” to un¬ 
 ravel its mysteries. Many of the best analyses of the tale hang fire 
 on uncertainties or discrepancies in hkely allegorical patterns, and as 
 a result critics have disagreed whether it is “below its author’s high¬ 
 est art” or “one of Hawthorne’s greatest tales.”^ The purpose of 
 this essay is to contribute to a clearer reading and more setded esti¬ 
 mate of the story by proposing a consistent allegory underlying its 
 admittedly complex narrative. 
 
 The interpretation to be developed here is grounded on two as¬ 
 sumptions about Hawthorne’s donnee. First, the title establishes 
 the center of meaning in Beatrice Rappaccini, and specifically in her 
 capacity as her father’s child. Second, the opening sentence estab¬ 
 lishes the narrative point of view in Giovanni Guasconti, and spe¬ 
 cifically in his capacity as a student.^ The focal point and the frame 
 
 ' The judgments belong respectively to Austin Warren, ed., Nathaniel Hawthorne: Repre¬ 
 sentative Selections (New York, 1934), p. 367, and Mark Van Doren, Nathaniel Haw¬ 
 thorne (New York, 1957), p. 131. Some of the frustrations in good recent studies may 
 be seen in Richard Harter Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction: the Light and the Darl{_ (Norman, 
 Okla., 1952), p. 92; Hyatt H. Waggoner, Hawthorne, a Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 
 I 955 )> PP- 115-116; Roy R. Male, Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision (Austin, Texas, 1957), p. 55. 
 
 “ Critical differences about the story are generally reducible to divergence on these 
 fundamental points. Traditional interpretation has placed central emphasis on Rappaccini 
 (e.g., Warren, loc. cit.). More recent critics favor Beatrice (e.g., Fogle, Waggoner, and 
 Male), or sometimes Giovanni (F. L. Gwynn, "Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’’’ 
 
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” 
 
 107 
 
 of the picture thus defined, the vital elements of the setting and their 
 figurative suggestions take shape with reasonable clarity of outline. 
 
 The opening tableau of Giovanni at his window, gazing with 
 kindled interest upon the exotic garden of Dr. Rappaccini, is plainly 
 enough the picture of an impressionable young student discovering 
 in his traditional and somewhat boring educational world an excit¬ 
 ing laboratory of experimental science. The waters that nourish this 
 garden and the ruined fountain from which they flow are identified 
 for us as “immortal spirit” and “perishable garniture” respectively; 
 or, in terms of a strictly academic symbolism, intellectual energy, 
 the spirit of learning, as opposed to its transitory uses, forms, and 
 disciplines. The meaning of the great central shrub with gem-like 
 purple blossoms follows from context. In its position wdth respect 
 to the garden as a whole and the symbolic fountain, this plant repre¬ 
 sents the crowning product of a potent but lawless force of mind. In 
 its physical character, it suggests a marvelous new source of energy, 
 expressed to the visual observer in terms of light: “a show so resplen¬ 
 dent that it seemed enough to illuminate the garden even had there 
 been no sunshine.” In the midst of the symbolic laboratory appears 
 Rappaccini, the standard Hawthorne man of science, conveying, as 
 he moves among his flowers, a sinister impression of not loving his 
 plants but fearing them, as “one walking among malignant in¬ 
 fluences . . . which, should he allow them one moment of license, 
 would wreak upon him some terrible fatality.” He works with 
 gloves and a mask and a wary “perception of harm in what his own 
 hands caused to grow.” This is Hawthorne’s “Adam” in his “Eden 
 of the present world.” It is an ironical but not otherwise distorted 
 picture of science seen from the gloomiest point of view—a picture 
 which has been rushing rapidly enough toward reality in the inter¬ 
 vening century to justify the author’s irony and gloom. 
 
 When Rappaccini finds his work at last too perilous and calls his 
 daughter to help, the action of the allegory may properly be said to 
 begin. Three things are at once stressed about the new and all-im¬ 
 portant figure of Beatrice: she is young, she is attractive, and she is 
 almost horribly at ease with plants her father is in mortal fear of. 
 As he gives the great purple shrub into her care, she welcomes the 
 
 Nineteenth Century Fiction, VII, 217-219, Dec., 1952; Bernard McCabe, “Narrative Tech¬ 
 nique in ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’” Modern Language Notes, LXXIV, 213-217, March, 
 1959). but do uot define and relate their roles in the way that is suggested here. 
 
io8 
 
 Edward H. Rosenberry 
 
 charge with a mystical fervor in striking contrast to her father’s 
 dread. What is the meaning of this crucial symbolic act ? Evident¬ 
 ly the old scientist is passing the torch to the next generation. Both 
 narrative and allegorical contexts seem to say this. But they say it 
 in different ways; Hawthorne here requires the native ambivalence 
 of symbolism, which no one has seen fit to grant him on this point. 
 Beatrice is an old man’s child so long as he remains an old man. 
 But in his allegorical incarnation as Scientist, Rappaccini has no 
 physical offspring, only spiritual or intellectual. To the man of learn¬ 
 ing, “the next generation” can only be those he teaches, the children 
 of his intellect, the inheritors and habitual possessors of objects and 
 ideas which he has, often fearfully, brought into being. It is an old 
 but vital story that Hawthorne is telling here: how the adventure of 
 one age is the custom of the next, and how long familiarity can make 
 a safe and stable haven of the very brink of disaster. 
 
 In addition to being young and unafraid, Beatrice is extremely at¬ 
 tractive. Hawthorne has given this fact all the emphasis in his 
 power by making her the first of a famous gallery of his heroines 
 remarkable for a darkly voluptuous sexual magnetism. So suc¬ 
 cessful is he that the reader brings himself with some difficulty to 
 translate her literal charms into the necessary symbolic causes of 
 Giovanni’s intellectual infatuation. The young man is about to be 
 captivated by the glamor of Science. Of course, he will be entranced, 
 too, by a ravishing young woman, because this is a story and that is 
 what happens in it; but to read Beatrice as woman on the allegorical 
 level of the tale is to deny her essential duahty as a symbol. Having 
 established, then, the figurative sex appeal which Science exerts on 
 Giovanni, Hawthorne provides a hedge against quick disillusionment 
 by having the student check his dreamy twilight experience “in the 
 light of morning,” which “brought everything within the limits of 
 ordinary experience, so that he was inclined to take a most rational 
 view of the whole matter.” Both head and heart are now enthralled, 
 and our freshman is ripe for his fateful academic heresy. 
 
 At this point Hawthorne introduces the fourth and last major 
 element into his human equation, the professor to whom Giovanni’s 
 father (orthodox intellectual tradition.?) has sent the young man. 
 Professor Baglioni has given readers of the tale more trouble, if 
 possible, than Beatrice has. In the excitement of measuring him for 
 
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” 
 
 109 
 
 some strictly ethical equivalence, it is easy to forget that Baglioni is 
 a professor, as Giovanni is a student, and that his entire role in the 
 story is devoted to representing an academic philosophy diametri¬ 
 cally opposed to that of his rival, Rappaccini. If he does so ineffec¬ 
 tually, at times pettily, the manner will of course qualify the role, 
 but it will in no sense define or alter it. What are the facts as Haw¬ 
 thorne gives them? 
 
 Baglioni is, first, “of genial nature.” Unlike Rappaccini, he is a 
 sociable man, a drinker, and a talker. His opinion of his dehuman¬ 
 ized colleague is colored by enough prejudice and professional jeal¬ 
 ousy to make his character humorously human; but it fairly reflects 
 the basic irreconcilability of their positions. To an uninfected mind 
 Baglioni’s indictment of the pure scientist, for all its asperity, must 
 be decisive. But Giovanni, like the rest of us, wonders whether “so 
 spiritual a love of science” may not be rather a “noble” thing. Here 
 speaks the Romance of the Laboratory, an epidemic and durable 
 mode of hero-worship. What is the humanitarian to say to this? 
 Indignant, and frustrated by his loss of ground in this “warfare of 
 long continuance,” Baglioni grows sarcastic. With a conservative’s 
 disdain, he dismisses the radical methods of his rival, deprecates his 
 professional successes, and hints waspishly at dark designs to place 
 his learned daughter in Baglioni’s own chair. These are not heroic 
 sentiments. They are most appropriately human ones. And they are 
 significantly in tune with the views of his creator. One of the 
 plainest attitudes in Hawthorne’s writings is a contemptuous dis¬ 
 trust of science, which he personified in villain after villain of Rappa¬ 
 ccini’s stamp: Cacaphodel, Aylmer, Brand, Chillingworth—even the 
 mild and sagacious Dr. Heidegger, whose fiancee “had swallowed 
 one of her lover’s prescriptions, and died on the bridal evening.” 
 If Baglioni seems at times contemptible himself, perhaps it is be¬ 
 cause he, too, was a Hawthorne physician. In any event, his antag¬ 
 onism toward two scientists of another camp, and his somewhat 
 officious unwillingness to surrender Giovanni into their hands, are 
 hardly symptomatic of any real or symbolic depravity. The pro¬ 
 fessor’s tribute of jealousy and resentment is, after all, only another 
 form of the student’s tribute of adoration. 
 
 The plot now thickens. Giovanni, observing Beatrice a second 
 time in her garden, is struck with a new aspect of her beauty, most 
 
no 
 
 Edward H. Rosenberry 
 
 important to the total tale in view. This is an “expression of sim¬ 
 plicity and sweetness,—qualities that had not entered into his idea 
 of her character, and which made him ask anew what manner of 
 mortal she might be.” Her moral innocence becomes at once a part 
 of her fatal attraction for Giovanni; but neither he nor the reader 
 for him can anticipate at this point that it will become in time the 
 principal irony of the drama and a key to Beatrice’s meaning in the 
 allegory. To add to his perplexity, Giovanni notices (or fancies) 
 that the girl and the flower she so mysteriously resembles have a 
 lethal effect on small, normal plants and animals. But here Haw¬ 
 thorne takes immediate pains to ensure that the reader will not share 
 Giovanni’s mystification. “Beatrice,” he tells us, “observed this re¬ 
 markable phenomenon, and crossed herself, sadly, but without sur¬ 
 prise; nor did she therefore hesitate to arrange the fatal flower in 
 her bosom.” The episode may, characteristically, speak too softly of 
 Hawthorne’s symbolic thinking in the story; but its imagery surely 
 does all that imagery can do to portray both the awful power of 
 modern science and the moral insulation of the youthful manipu¬ 
 lator of its deadly marvels, to whom attendant death and desolation 
 are sincerely regrettable but for whom there is no other way of life 
 than that which assumes for its own high purposes the tragic risks 
 of technological progress. Perhaps no fact about the allegorical 
 Beatrice is more significant than that “her experience of life had been 
 confined within the limits of that garden.” How could she know 
 what her father had not taught her ? How should she, the “sister” 
 of his dreadful inventions, see them with the eye of an homme 
 moyen sensuel? To the innocent Beatrice, her wizard parent is a 
 benevolent Prospero, as her admirer is a Ferdinand, and she herself 
 a Miranda, deriving “a pure delight from her communion with the 
 youth not unfike what the maiden of a lonely island might have felt 
 conversing with a voyager from the civilized world.” She is, of 
 course, a tragic Miranda, for, as she must discover to her destruc¬ 
 tion, her father lacks humanity and her lover lacks purpose and 
 understanding. 
 
 While the story must be told from Giovanni’s point of view, he 
 plays a part at least as villainous as Dr. Rappaccini’s. His demerits 
 are less spectacular but far more devastating to the simple soul whose 
 knowledge of the world is so fantastically circumscribed. From first 
 
Ill 
 
 “Rappaccini’s Daughter” 
 
 to last, his manner to Beatrice is selfish and disingenuous. Attracted 
 by curiosity and vanity rather than by any valid interest in science, 
 he bribes his way into her world through a back door, flatly disre¬ 
 garding an all but certain apprehension of its diabolical character, 
 and sweeps poor Beatrice off her feet with his Grecian beauty and 
 his Latin charm. His ultimate disillusionment and rejection of her 
 are inevitable. His love is mere fascination; and his intelligence, apt 
 enough to see the satanic meaning of Rappaccini’s botanical crea¬ 
 tions, is blind to the kindred nature of the daughter. It is the para¬ 
 dox of their relationship that Beatrice, the unwitting agent of death, 
 is a “heavenly angel” in her capacity for love, while Giovanni, 
 though grounded in humane tradition, proves a vain and shallow 
 adventurer. No wonder she asks with her final breath, “Was there 
 not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?” As 
 the only true murderer in the story, Giovanni changes, in effect, 
 from a moth at a flame to a bull in a china shop. Difficult as the 
 change must have been for Hawthorne to manage, it was the one 
 structural device that enabled him finally to establish Beatrice as the 
 tragic center between the opposing emotional forces of Giovanni and 
 her father without sacrificing the initial advantage of Giovanni’s 
 suspension between the contending intellectual forces of the Rappac- 
 cinis and Baglioni. 
 
 If Baglioni has fared badly at the hands of the story’s interpreters, 
 it is probably because his jarringly Chaucerian personality has over¬ 
 shadowed the moral importance of two acts which his author gave 
 him to perform. First, he tells Giovanni the old legend out of Sir 
 Thomas Browne on which the tale is based and which effectively 
 defines the danger of an intimacy with Beatrice Rappaccini. Sec¬ 
 ond, he provides Giovanni with the antidote intended to counteract 
 the poison in Beatrice’s system and thus bring her back, in Haw¬ 
 thorne’s oft-repeated phrase, “within the limits of ordinary nature.” 
 It is true that Baglioni lacks the fine conscience of a Hawthorne or a 
 Henry James hero. But Hawthorne could hardly have intended him 
 for either hero or villain, and it would seem a distortion of the 
 author’s aim to assess Baglioni’s irascibility and sentimentality as 
 “ignoble motives” which his creator held in significant contempt.^ 
 In the same way, the point of the tale is shifted or obscured if we 
 
 ® Chester E. Eisinger, "Hawthorne as Champion of the Middle Way,” New England 
 Quarterly, XXVII, 48-49 (March, 1954). 
 
II2 
 
 Edward H. Rosenberry 
 
 suppose that Baglioni’s antidote was placed in a Cellini vase in order 
 to suggest that to him Giovanni’s affair is “on the same level as 
 Cellini’s amorous adventures”; or if we read Baglioni’s concluding 
 taunt to his stunned rival as “the revenge of the mediocre over the 
 exceptional.”^ Such interpretations cannot fail to drive one to 
 Arvin’s conclusion that “Rappaccini’s Daughter” represents a “dis¬ 
 paragement of the intellect.”'’ 
 
 Both Baglioni and his mental superior, Rappaccini, demonstrate 
 a tragic intellectual fallibility as they stand aghast before a catastro¬ 
 phe which they could neither anticipate nor avert; and surely this 
 common failure of mind, whether pragmatic or empirical, speaks 
 critically enough of two major camps of modern intellectuahsm. 
 Yet the point of the story does not lie wholly in this weakness, nor 
 in the equal and opposite emotional weakness of Giovanni, nor in 
 the conflict of the two.® It does not even lie in the destructive im¬ 
 pact of these forces on Beatrice, though this is clearly a part of what 
 Hawthorne has to say—is, indeed, precisely what he means in re¬ 
 ferring to her, finally, as “the poor victim of man’s ingenuity and of 
 thwarted nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of 
 perverted wisdom.” Had Hawthorne ended the story there he 
 would have had a point, but no further point than the one he had 
 already made more cogently in “The Birthmark.” 
 
 In the earlier tale, as in this one, innocent humanity in the guise 
 of a beautiful girl is beguiled by the scientist-who-would-be-God 
 into a state of unquestioning and finally self-destructive discipleship. 
 In “The Birthmark” the idea behind this pattern was to dramatize 
 the tragedy of cabalistic hubris and public hero-worship in a civiliza¬ 
 tion in which science has become a religion.' Georgiana was Ayl¬ 
 mer’s wife, bound to him by romantic love and contractual fealty, 
 and her conscious sacrifice to his fanaticism takes its meaning from 
 analogy with martyrdom. Beatrice, on the other hand, is conceived 
 as the daughter of the god-scientist because only the filial relation¬ 
 ship could dramatize the split personality of science itself; the scien¬ 
 tist as villain and as victim, at once the sorcerer and the sorcerer’s 
 
 ‘Male, p. 66; Fogle, p. loo. 
 
 “Newton Arvin, Hawthorne (Boston, 1929), p. 139. 
 
 “ S. R. Price, “The Head, the Heart, and ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’ ’’ Hew England 
 Quarterly, XXVII, 399-403 (Sept., 1954). 
 
 ’Robert B. Heilman, “Hawthorne’s ‘The Birthmark’: Science as Religion,’’ South At¬ 
 lantic Quarterly, XLVIII, 575-583 (Oct., 1949). 
 
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” 
 
 ”3 
 
 apprentice. In “The Birthmark” these figures in the pattern were 
 totally discrete and somehow oversimplified—the arrogant Aylmer, 
 the ethereal Georgiana, the gross Aminadab. There, too, the tale 
 is wholly concerned with the scientist’s operations upon the girl to 
 change her nature, and when the change is complete the tale is done. 
 In this sense, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” takes up where “The Birth¬ 
 mark” leaves off. The crucial change in the girl’s nature is quite 
 complete before the story begins. For this reason, the ultimate 
 fatality of that change can hardly be considered the sole, or even the 
 chief, point of the story. 
 
 Hyatt Waggoner, in pointing out the subordinate role of Rappac- 
 cini, concludes that it is not the original poisoning, but “present 
 evil, a woman poisoned, that is the chief subject of the story.”® My 
 extension of his view might be defined, if not quite defended, by a 
 more literal translation of the French title Hawthorne gave the story 
 in his whimsical preface—“Beatrice; ou la Belle Empoisonneuse.” 
 To the extent to which Beatrice is merely a woman poisoned her 
 story has nothing to say, since she lives in her deadly garden, like 
 Housman’s Mithridates, “easy, smiling, seasoned sound.” It is only 
 when she becomes “the fair poisoner ”—when her father’s experi¬ 
 ment, that is, becomes political rather than simply botanical—that 
 there can be tragic meaning in her death and in the final cry of 
 Baglioni with which the tale concludes; “Rappaccini! Rappaccini! 
 And is this the upshot of your experiment!” 
 
 Beatrice is more than the innocent victim of Rappaccini’s experi¬ 
 ments; she is, without the least loss of personal innocence, the trans¬ 
 mitter of them to a foolish and unwary society to which her training 
 has made her effectively a stranger. Randall Stewart has correctly 
 placed this tale in the first rank of those embodying Hawthorne’s 
 obsessive theme of social estrangement.® By virtue of its unique 
 symbolic multiplication of the personality, it also stands high among 
 his studies of the scientist as an ethical being and of the ambiguous 
 warfare of guilt and innocence in the human soul. Perhaps in no 
 other tale did Hawthorne attempt so ambitious a program, and its 
 extraordinary complexity has made for interpretive difficulty pro¬ 
 portional to its richness of texture and variety of esthetic rewards. 
 
 ^Hawthorne, p. 107. 
 
 ‘The American Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne (New Haven, 1932), p. Ixxi. 
 
Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne’s 
 "Young Goodman Brown” 
 
 David Levin 
 
 I CHOOSE FOR MY TEXT two Statements written in the autumn of 
 1692, after twenty Massachusetts men and women accused of 
 witchcraft had been executed. The first is by Increase Mather, the 
 second by Thomas Brattle. 
 
 . . . the Father of Lies [Mather declared] is never to be believed: He 
 will utter twenty great truths to make way for one lie: He will accuse 
 twenty Witches, if he can thereby bring one honest Person into trouble: 
 He mixeth Truths with Lies, that so those truths giving credit unto lies. 
 Men may believe both, and so be deceived.’ 
 
 Brattle was astonished by the ease with which witnesses avoided 
 a crucial distinction: 
 
 And here I think it observable [he wrote], that often, when the afflicted 
 [witnesses] do mean and intend only the appearance and shape of such 
 an one, (say G[oodman]. Proctor) yet they positively swear that G. 
 Proctor did afflict them; and they have been allowed so to do; as tho’ 
 there was no real difference between G. Proctor and the shape of G. 
 Proctor." 
 
 Nathaniel Hawdiorne’s protagonist Goodman Brown commits 
 the very mistakes that Brattle and Mather belatedly deplored in 
 1692. He lets the Devil’s true statements about the mistreatment of 
 Indians and Quakers prepare him to accept counterfeit evidence, 
 and he fails to insist on the difference between a person and the 
 person’s “shape,” or specter. Most modern critics who have dis¬ 
 cussed the story have repeated both these errors, even though 
 Hawthorne clearly identifies the chief witness as the Devil and the 
 setting as the Salem Village of witchcraft days. In the last decade, 
 
 ' Increase Mather, Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men (Boston, 
 1693), reprinted in What Happened in Salem?, David Levin, ed. (New York, i960), p. 122. 
 
 "Letter of Thomas Brattle, dated October 8, 1692, and reprinted in ibid., p. 130. The 
 letter was probably circulated in manuscript; the name of the addressee is unknown. 
 
“Young Goodman Brown” 
 
 ”5 
 
 several articles have rightly contended that HaNvthorne meant to 
 reveal the faultiness of Goodman Brown’s judgment;^ but the first 
 and most cogent of these did not prevent so distinguished a critic 
 as Harry Levin from alluding to “the pharisaical elders” whom 
 Goodman Brown sees “doing the devil’s work while professing 
 righteousness.”^ And the cogent article itself insists that “^is_not 
 necess ary to choose between interpreting the story literally and 
 taking it as a dream”; that Brown neither goes into a forest nor 
 dreams that he goes into a forest. What Brown does, says D. M. 
 McKeithan, is “to indulge in sin (represented by the journey ...).”® 
 I believe that one must first of all interpret the story literally. 
 The forest cannot effectively represent sin, or the unconscious mind 
 of Goodman Brown, or the heart of the dark moral wilderness, until 
 one has understood the literal statements about the forest in regard to 
 the literal actions that occur therein. Instead of agreeing with one 
 recent critic that “the only solution to the problem” of what hap¬ 
 pens in the forest “lies in the tale’s complex symbolic pattern,”® 
 let us try to accept Hawthorne’s explicit statements of fact. Instead 
 of inventing a new definition of the word “witch,” as another critic 
 has done,’ let us try to read the story in the terms that were available 
 to Hawthorne. A proper reading of the literal action removes some 
 of the ambiguity that it is now so fashionable to admire, but it 
 should leave open a sufficient variety of interpretations to satisfy 
 those who insist on multiple meanings, and it will clarify the fine 
 skill with which Hawthorne made the historical materials drama¬ 
 tize his psychological insights and his allegory. 
 
 Hawthorne knew the facts and lore of the Salem witchcrafi 
 “delusion,” and he used them liberally in this story as well as others. 
 He set the story specifically, as the opening line reveals, not in his 
 native Salem, but in Salem Village, the cantankerous hamlet (now 
 Danvers) in which the afflictions, the accusations, and the diabolical 
 
 ® D. M. McKeithan, “Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’: An Interpretation,’’ 
 Modern Language Notes, LXVII, 93-96 (Feb., 1952); Thomas F. Walsh, Jr., “The Be¬ 
 deviling of Young Goodman Brown,” Modern Language Quarterly, XIX, 331-336 (Dec 
 1958); Paul W. Miller, “Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’: Cynicism or Meliorism? 
 Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XIV, 255-264 (Dec., 1959). 
 
 ‘Harry T. Levin, The Power of Blad^ness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (New Yoi 
 1958), p. 54 - 
 
 “ McKeithan, p. 96. 
 
 “ Walsh, p. 336. 
 
 ’’ Miller, p. 259 n. 10. 
 
ii6 
 
 David Levin 
 
 sabbaths centered in 1692. Among the supposedly guilty are the 
 minister of Salem Village and two women who were actually 
 hanged in that terrible summer. Hawthorne not only cites testi¬ 
 mony that Martha Carrier “had received the Devil’s promise to be 
 queen of hell”; he also quotes Cotton Mather’s description of her 
 as a “rampant hag,” and he even violates Goodman Brown’s point 
 of view in order to introduce another actual rumor of 1692: “Some 
 affirm that the lady of the governor was there [at the witches’ sab¬ 
 bath].” He takes great care to emphasize the seeming presence at 
 the witches’ sabbath of the best and the worst of the community— 
 noting with superbly appropriate vagueness, just before the climax, 
 that the “figure”® who prepares to baptize Goodman Brown “bore 
 no slight similitude, both in garb and manner, to some grave divine 
 of the New England churches.” 
 
 There can be no doubt that Hawthorne understood clearly the 
 importance of what was called “specter evidence” in the actual trials. 
 This was evidence that a specter, or shape, or apparition, represent¬ 
 ing Goodman Proctor, for instance, had tormented the witness or 
 had been present at a witches’ meeting. Hawthorne knew that 
 there had been a debate about whether the Devil could, as the 
 saying went, “take the shape of an angel of light,” and in both 
 “Alice Doane’s Appeal” and “Main Street” he explicitly mentioned 
 the Devil’s ability to impersonate innocent people.® He was well 
 aware that Cotton Mather had warned against putting too much 
 confidence in this sort of evidence; he also knew that after the 
 Mathers and Thomas Brattle had opposed even the admission of 
 
 ® The first published versions of the story used the word “apparition” here. See The 
 'Neu’-England Magazine, VIII, 257 (April, 1835); and Mosses from an Old Manse 
 (New York, 1846), p. 80. The word was changed to “figure” in Hawthorne’s last 
 revision of Mosses from an Old Manse (Boston, 1857). 
 
 The text of this story has often been erroneously printed. One important change seems 
 to have been made by George P. Lathrop in the edition he published nineteen years after 
 Hawthorne’s death. Every earlier version that I have seen, including Hawthorne’s last 
 revision, says that “the chorus of the desert” at the spectral meeting in the forest seemed 
 to include “the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the howling beasts, and every other 
 voice of the unconverted wilderness. . . .” Lathrop and almost every editor after him 
 changed the word “unconverted” to “unconcerted.” I have been following Hawthorne’s 
 last revision. 
 
 “ Hawthorne even joked casually about this kind of imposture. Of his participation 
 in the experiment at Brook Farm he wrote: “The real me was never an associate of the 
 community; there has been a spectral Appearance there, sounding the horn at day-break, 
 and milking the cows . . . and doing me the honor to assume my name.” Quoted in 
 Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne, A Biography (New Haven, 1949), p. 60. 
 
“Young Goodman Brown” 
 
 117 
 
 specter evidence (the Mathers on the ground that it was the Devil’s 
 testimony), the court had convicted almost no one and not a single 
 convict had been executed. It seems certain, moreover, that 
 Hawthorne had read Cotton Mather’s biography of Sir William 
 Phips, in which Mather the historian not only echoes his father’s 
 language about truths and lies, but clearly suggests that one of the 
 Devil’s purposes had been the traducing of Faith. 
 
 On the other Part [Mather wrote in 1697], there were many persons 
 of great Judgment, Piety and Experience, who from the beginning were 
 very much dissatisfied at these Proceedings; they feared lest the Devil 
 would get so far into the Faith of the People, that for the sake of many 
 Truths, which they might find him telling of them, they would come 
 at length to believe all his Lies, whereupon what a Desolation of Names, 
 yea, and of Lives also, would ensue, a Man might without much 
 Witchcraft be able to Prognosdcate; and they feared, lest in such an 
 extraordinary Descent of Wicked Spirits from their High Places upon us, 
 there might such Principles be taken up, as, when put into Practice, 
 would unavoidably cause the Righteous to perish with the Wicked, and 
 procure the Blood-shed of Persons like the Gibeonites, whom some 
 learned Men suppose to be under a false Pretence of Witchcraft, by 
 Saul exterminated.^® 
 
 If we set aside the alternative possibilities for a while and 
 examine the story from the seventeenth-century point of view—the 
 perception of Goodman Brown through which Hawthorne asks 
 us to see almost all the action—we will find a perfectly clear, con¬ 
 sistent portrayal of a spectral adventure into evil. Goodman Brown 
 goes into the forest on an “evil” errand, promising himself that 
 after this night he will “cling” to the skirts of his wife. Faith, “and 
 follow her to heaven.” Once in the wilderness, he himself con¬ 
 jures the Devil by exclaiming, “What if the Devil himself should 
 be at my very elbow!” Immediately, he beholds “the figure of a 
 man,” and this figure quite unambiguously tells him that it has 
 made the trip from Boston to the woods near Salem Village—at 
 least fifteen or twenty miles—in fifteen minutes. Brown refuses the 
 Devil’s staff and announces that he is going back to Faith, but the 
 Devil, “smiling apart,” suggests that they “walk on, nevertheless, 
 reasoning as we go.” 
 
 Cotton Mather, Magnolia Christi Americana: or. The Ecclesiastical History of New- 
 England (London, 1702), Book II, p. 62. 
 
ii8 
 
 David Levin 
 
 The reasoning proceeds from this point, as the Devil tries to 
 convince Bro^vn that the best men are vv^holly evil. Most of the 
 argument that follows corresponds to the traditional sophistry of 
 the Devil—the kind of accusation with which Satan nearly dis¬ 
 courages Edward Taylor’s saint from joining the church in God’s 
 Determinations Touching His Elect. It is here that the Devil 
 mentions true sins (the mistreatment of Indians and Quakers) in 
 order to induce despair: men are so wicked that nothing can save 
 
 them. ^^ Against this first argument Goodman Brown resists longer 
 than some modern critics have resisted, for he sees that the alleged 
 hypocrisy of elders and statesmen is “no rule for a simple husband¬ 
 man like me.” Foolishly, however, he believes the Devil’s testimony 
 (as his neighbors did in 1692), and he frankly tells him that “my 
 wife. Faith,” is the foundation of his reluctance to become a witch. 
 
 This admission invites the Devil to proceed, and it determines 
 the organization of the rest of his argument. With typical subtlety 
 he pretends to give up at once, because 
 
 “. . . I would not for twenty old women like the one hobbling before 
 us that Faith should come to any harm.” 
 
 As he spoke he pointed his staff at a female figure on the path, in 
 whom Goodman Brown recognized a very pious and exemplary old 
 dame. . . 
 
 The Devil has of course conjured this “figure,” which moves “with 
 singular speed for so aged a woman,” and he appears to it in “the 
 very image”—soon afterward, “the shape”—“of old Goodman 
 Brown, the grandfather of the silly fellow that now is.” When the 
 woman’s figure has served his purpose, the Devil throws his staff 
 “down at her feet,” and she immediately disappears. Brown accepts 
 this evidence without question, for by this time the Devil is “dis¬ 
 coursing so aptly that his arguments [seem] rather to spring up in 
 the bosom of his auditor than to be suggested by himself.” 
 
 Here again we should notice that Cotton Mather had used language very close to 
 Hawthorne’s. In a sermon called “The Door of Hope,” Mather cautioned against “A 
 sinful and woful Despair.” Some men, he said, “rashly conclude” that “because they see 
 no help to their Souls in themselves, . . . there is no hope for their Souls any where 
 else.” And among several "Reasons of Despair” to which he offered answers at the end 
 of the sermon, the fifth reads: “I doubt I have committed the unpardonable Sin; and 
 
 then, all my hope is lost forevermore.” Batteries Upon the Kingdom oj the Devil 
 (London, 1695), pp. 100 ff. 
 
 The italics are mine. 
 
“Young Goodman Brown” 
 
 119 
 
 But Goodman Brown holds back once again, and the Devil, 
 assuring him that “You will think better of this by and by,” vanishes. 
 Just as Brown is “applauding himself greatly,” he is assaulted by 
 another kind of airy evidence; disembodied voices. The “mingled 
 sounds” appear to pass “within a few yards,” and although the 
 “figures” of the minister and deacon “brushed the small boughs by 
 the wayside, it could not be seen that they intercepted, even for a 
 moment, the faint gleam from the strip of bright sky athwart 
 which they must have passed.” Brown cannot see “so much as a 
 shadow,” but “he could have sworn”—as witnesses in 1692 did 
 indeed swear—that he recognized the deacon and the minister in 
 “the voices, talking so strangely in the empty air.” 
 
 Now, as Brown doubts that “there really [is] a heaven above 
 him,” the Devil has only to produce evidence that Faith, too, is 
 guilty. Hearing the voice of Faith from a “black mass” of cloud 
 that “hurried” across the sky although no wind is stirring. Brown 
 calls out to her in agony, and the “echoes of the forest”—always 
 under the Devil’s control—mock him. Then the Devil sends his 
 final argument. Faith’s pink ribbon, as her voice fades into the far- 
 off laughter of fiends. At the end of the story we learn that this 
 evidence, too, was spectral, for Faith wears her ribbons when her 
 husband returns home in the morning; but now, in the forest, 
 Brown is convinced that his “Faith is gone,” that the world belongs 
 to the Devil. He takes up the Devil’s staff and “seems to fly along 
 the forest path rather than to walk or run,. . . rushing onward with 
 the instinct that guides mortal man to evil.” 
 
 With beautiful care Hawthorne makes his descriptive language 
 reinforce these meanings through the rest of the horrible experience. 
 “Flying” among the black pines. Brown finally sees the “lurid 
 blaze” of the witch-meeting and pauses “in a lull of the tempest 
 that had driven him onward.” The verse that he hears is sung “by 
 a chorus, not of human voices, but of all the sounds of the be¬ 
 nighted wilderness, pealing in awful harmony together,” and 
 his own cry sounds in “unison with the cry of the desert.” At the 
 sabbath itself he sees, “quivering between gloom and splendor,” 
 faces belonging to the best people of the colony. A congregation 
 shines forth, then disappears in shadow, and again grows, “as it 
 were, out of the darkness, peopling the heart of the solitary woods 
 
120 
 
 David Levin 
 
 at onceT^^ Brown believes that he recognizes “a score” of Salem 
 Village church members before he is “well nigh ready to swear” 
 that he sees “the figure” of the minister, “the shape of his own dead 
 father,” “the dim features” of his mother, and “the slender form” 
 of his wife. When he stands with the form of Faith, they are “the 
 only [human] pair, as it seemed,” who hesitate “on the verge of 
 wickedness in this dark world.” It is “the shape of evil” that pre¬ 
 pares to baptize them, and the figure that stands beside Brown is 
 that of his “pale” wife.^^ When he implores her to “look up to 
 heaven and resist the wicked one,” the whole communion dis¬ 
 appears, and he cannot learn “whether Faith obeyed.” 
 
 The clarification that this reading achieves for the story should 
 remove some of the objections that have been raised against it even 
 by its admirers. When we recognize that the Devil is consistently 
 presenting evidence to a prospective convert who is only too willing 
 to be convinced, we do not need to complain with F. O. Matthiessen 
 against Hawthorne’s “literal insistence on that damaging pink 
 ribbon”; nor need we try, with R. H. Fogle, to explain the ribbon 
 away.^® One might insist that even here Hawthorne restricts his 
 language admirably to Brown’s perception, for he says that some¬ 
 thing fluttered lightly down through the air and that Brown, after 
 seizing it, beheld a pink ribbon. Brown’s sensory perception of the 
 ribbon is no more literal or material than his perception of the Devil, 
 his clutching of the staff, or his hearing of the Devil’s statement 
 about the fifteen-minute trip from Boston to the woods near Salem 
 Village. But such an argument is really unnecessary. The seven¬ 
 teenth-century Devil could produce specters, with or without the 
 consent of the people they resembled, and he could make cats, birds. 
 
 The italics are mine. 
 
 ^‘Here it might be argued that Hawthorne says Faith was actually present, for he 
 writes that “the wretched man beheld his Faith, and the wife her husband,” and just 
 before Brown cries out Hawthorne writes, “The husband cast one look at his pale wife, 
 and Faith at him. What polluted wretches would the next glance show them to each 
 other... !” It is more consistent with Hawthorne’s practice throughout the story to read 
 these references to Faith’s observation as Goodman Brown’s view of her reaction. All the 
 action has been seen from Brown’s point of view, and Hawthorne has never entered 
 Faith’s mind. Surely the exclamation is in Brown’s mind only, for it prompts him to act, 
 and his plea that she look up to heaven leaves him standing alone. Her specter vanishes 
 with the others. 
 
 F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of 
 Emerson and Whitman (New York, 1941), p. 284; and R. H. Fogle, “Ambiguity and 
 Clarity in Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown,’ ” 'New England Quarterly, XVIII, 451 
 (Dec., 1945)- 
 
“Young Goodman Brown” 
 
 I 2 I 
 
 and other familiars seem to materialize before terrified witnesses/® 
 For such a being, and with a witness overcome by “grief, rage, and 
 terror,” a ribbon posed no great difficulty. 
 
 Hawthorne’s technique thus gives a clear view of his meaning. 
 When we stop looking for what we may wish to believe about 
 Puritans who whipped Quakers and burned Indian villages, we can 
 recognize just what it is that Goodman Brown sees. Hawthorne 
 does not tell us that none of the people whom Brown comes to 
 suspect is indeed a diabolical agent, but he makes it clear that 
 Brown has no justification for condemning any of them—and no 
 justification for suspecting them, except for the shadowy vista that 
 this experience has opened into his own capacity for evil. Asking 
 whether these people were “really” evil is impertinent, for it leads 
 us beyond the limits of fiction. The story is not about the evil of 
 other people but about Brown’s doubt, his discovery of the possibility 
 of universal evil. Before reading the Devil’s statements here in the 
 light of ideas that Hawthorne suggested elsewhere, we must read 
 them in their immediate context. At the witch-meeting, the “shape 
 of evil” invites Goodman Brown to “the communion” of the human 
 “race,” the communion of evil, but we have no more right than 
 Brown himself to believe the Father of Lies. Indeed, Hawthorne’s 
 brilliant success depends on this distinction. He gives us an irre¬ 
 sistible picture of a “crisis of faith and an agony of doubt” we 
 must notice that Brown finally does exorcise the spectral meeting, 
 but that he can never forget his view of the specters or the abandon 
 in which he himself became “the chief horror” in the dark wilder¬ 
 ness. He lives the rest of his life in doubt, and the literal doubt 
 depends on his uncertainty about whether his wife and others are 
 really evil. If he were certain that they had been present in the 
 forest, he would not treat them even so civilly as he does during 
 the rest of his life. It is the spectral quality of the experience—both 
 its uncertainty and its unforgettable impression—that makes the 
 doubt permanent. 
 
 Cf. Cotton Mather, Magnolia Christi Americana, Book II, p. 6o; and Cotton 
 Mather, in Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions (Boston, 1689), 
 reprinted in Levin, What Happened in Salem?, pp. 96-97: “Other strange things are done 
 by them in a way of Crafty Illusion. They do craftily make of the Air, the Figures and 
 Colors of things that never can be truly created by them. All men might see, but, I 
 believe, no man could feel some of the Things which the Magicians of Egypt, exhibited 
 of old.” 
 
 The phrase is Harry Levin’s. See The Power of Black.ness, p. 54. 
 
122 
 
 David Levin 
 
 The question, then, is not whether Faith and the others were 
 really there, in their own persons, at the witch meeting. When 
 Hawthorne asks whether Goodman Brown had “fallen asleep in the 
 forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch meeting,” and 
 replies, “Be it so if you will,” he offers an alternative possibility to 
 the nineteenth-century reader who refuses to take devils seriously 
 even in historical fiction. The choice lies between dream and a reality 
 that is unquestionably spectral. Neither Hawthorne nor (at the 
 end) even Goodman Brown suggests that the church members were 
 present in their own persons. Brown’s question is whether the 
 Devil, when he took on their shapes, had their permission to repre¬ 
 sent them. That is why Hawthorne can say, “Be it so if you will.” 
 For the meaning remains the same even if Brown, having for some 
 odd reason fallen asleep in the woods before the story begins, has 
 dreamed the entire experience. 
 
 By recognizing that Hawthorne built “Young Goodman Brown” 
 firmly on his historical knowledge, we perceive that the tale has 
 a social as well as an allegorical and a psychological dimension. 
 Hawthorne condemns that graceless perversion of true Calvinism 
 which, in universal suspicion, actually led a community to the 
 unjust destruction of twenty men and women. But we ought also 
 to be reminded of some general truths about proper ways to read 
 this wonderfully shrewd writer. We must not underestimate his 
 use of historical materials, even when he is writing allegory; nor 
 should we let an interest in patterns of image and symbol or an 
 awareness that he repeatedly uses the same types of character ob¬ 
 scure the clear literal significance of individual stories. Working 
 over an amazingly—some critics have said, an obsessively—narrow 
 range of types and subjects, he nevertheless achieves a remarkable 
 variety of insights into human experience. 
 
Hester Prynne’s Little Pearl: Sacred and Profane Love 
 
 Robert E. Whelan 
 
 I N HIS INTRODUCTION TO “Rappaccwi s Daughter” Hawthorne 
 confesses to “an inveterate love of allegory,” telling us that “he 
 generally contents himself with a very slight embroidery of out¬ 
 ward manners,—the faintest possible counterfeit of real life,—and 
 endeavors to create an interest by some less obvious peculiarity of 
 the subject.” He at the same time warns us that his works “can 
 hardly fail to look excessively like nonsense” unless “the reader 
 chance to take them in precisely the proper point of view” (II, 107- 
 108).^ In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne seems to further warn us 
 that we shall with difficulty make sense of the history of Arthur 
 Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne unless we take Pearl in precisely 
 the proper point of view: 
 
 In [Pearl] was visible t he tiejhat united them. She had been offered to 
 the world, these seven years past, as the living hieroglyphic, in which was 
 revealed the secret they so darkly sought to hide,—all written in this 
 symbol,—all plainly manifest,—had there been a prophet or magician 
 skilled to read the character of flame! (V, 247-248) 
 
 iw—i— I I n-r-nri'W i 
 
 Certainly Hawthorne’s reference to Pearl as a hieroglyphic suggests 
 that this character of flame will be somewhat difficult to decipher 
 unless the reader, like Champollion, also becomes possessed of the 
 Rosetta Stone. That the Rosetta Stone has not been found accounts, 
 
 I should say, for the uncertain answers still given by so many critics 
 to the poignant ^noslinn,.U££tfij:_ add resses tO Dimme sdal f in his 
 dying moments :\ “Shall we not spend our immortal life together.? j 
 Surely, surely, we h^e ransomed one another, with all this woer 
 
 (V, 303).^ 
 
 ’ Volume and page references to Hawthorne’s works are to T he Complete Wor\s of 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. George Parsons Lathrop (Riverside ed.; Boston, 1882-1883). 
 
 “Both Marius Bewley, The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Novel 
 (New York, 1959), pp. 173-174, and Richard Harter Fogle, Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Light 
 and the Dar\ (Revised ed.; Norman, Okla., 1964), pp. 132-135, feel that Hawthorne has 
 left the ultimate destiny of Hester and Dimmesdale darkly ambiguous. Hyatt H. Waggoner, 
 
124 
 
 Robert E. Whelan 
 
 Both Hester and Dimmesdale can, however, be placed irrevoca¬ 
 bly in heaven once the reader recognizes that Pearl’s sole reality^js 
 that of an allegorical mirror which multitudinously reflects the in¬ 
 tricate tangle of love and passion uniting Hester and Dimmesdale.^* 
 Sick as they both are “with the plague'df'sm’^U, zSTJTheitEeFTIes- 
 ter nor Dimmesdale carTB^rel^’M' ft6m"“that saddest of all prisons, 
 his own heart” (I, 67), .except 5 ^^ what Hawthorne considers the 
 sole remedy for sin—•Lov^“the flower that grew in heaven and was 
 sovereign for all the miseries of earth” (II, 287-288). Pearl is sov¬ 
 ereign for all Hester’s and Dimmesdale’s miserig^' because she is 
 just such a flower: she is the “sweet moral blossom” (V, 68) which 
 Hester plucks off “the bush of wild roses that grew by the prison- 
 door” (V, 138), and which Hawthorne presents to the reader in 
 order to “relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and 
 sorrow” (V, 68). In short, it is because the love between Hester and 
 Dimmesdale is the oneness of, their-beipg^ that Hawthorne can 
 prophesy their salvation through his comments on Pearl, the alle¬ 
 gorical embedment of that love: “And Pearl was the oneness of 
 their being. Be the foregone evil what it might, how could they 
 doubt that their earthly lives and future destinies were conjoined, 
 when they beheld at once the material union, and the spiritual idea, 
 in whom they met, and were to dwell immortally together?” (V, 
 248). 
 
 Since Pearl is “the scarlet letter in another form3.the starlet letter 
 
 Hawthorne: A Critical Study (Revised ed.; Cambridge, Mass., 1963), also thinks it pos¬ 
 sible to doubt that either Hester or Dimmesdale truly repented; and he further asserts that 
 “the redemptive love and knowledge that worked the cure of Roderick Elliston in ‘Ego¬ 
 tism’ do not enter the picture here” (p. 154). 
 
 ® We should agree, then, with Marius Bewley both when he tells us that “Hawthorne 
 explicidy presents Pearl as a symbol of [Hester’s and Dimmesdale’s] love in its full play 
 of complex contradictions”; and when he suggests, though very tentatively, that “the 
 emotional transformation of little Pearl as she kneels by her dying father on the scaffold 
 may be read to symbolize a kind of spiritual resurrection for both her parents” {The Ec¬ 
 centric Design, p. 173). Mr. Bewley speaks far more truthfully here than he realizes 
 since he himself does not perceive how accurately Pearl dramatizes the vicissitudes of 
 Hester’s and Dimmesdale’s misbegotten love. In other words, he recognizes, along with 
 other critics, that Pearl is an allegorical figure; but the language of allegory—Pearl’s antics 
 and words, and the comments which the other characters and Hawthorne himself make 
 about her—this he leaves for the most part untranslated. 
 
 Anne Marie McNamara, “The Character of Flame: The Function of Pearl in The 
 Scarlet Letter,” American Literature, XXVII, 537-553 (Jan., 1956), limits the value of her 
 interpretation by identifying Pearl merely with divine grace (pp. 552-553). Roy R. Male, 
 Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision (Austin, Texas, 1957), also wrongly restricts Pearl’s symbolic 
 function when he identifies her merely with truth and grace (p. 95). 
 
Pearl: Sacred and Profane Love 
 
 125 
 
 endowed with life” (V, 127), she is an obvious heart-symbol—a 
 diamond “that sparkles and flashes with the varied throbbings of the 
 breast on which it is displayed” (V, 272). It is Pearl, the gem on 
 her mother’s unquiet bosom, who throughout the tale betrays to the 
 reader, “by the very dance of her spirits, the emotions which none 
 could detect in the marble passiveness of Hester’s brow” (V, 272)— 
 especially the passionate love for the minister which Hester, of fear¬ 
 ful necessity, takes such great care to hide. Indeed, the most im¬ 
 portant question Hawthorne asks in this tale is whether there is 
 “anything in Hester’s face for Love to dwell upon”—anything in 
 her “bosom, to make it ever again the pillow of Affection” (V, 198). 
 That that something is there we are certain, for in all seasons of 
 calamity “Hester’s nature showed itself warm and rich; a well- 
 spring of human tenderness, unfailing to every real demand, and 
 inexhaustible by the largest. Her breast, with its badge of shame, 
 was but the softer pillow for the head that needed one” (V, 195). 
 Both this badge of shame and Pearl, its living counterpart—allegori¬ 
 cal emblems as they are of Hester’s heart—are intended by Haw¬ 
 thorne to travel through the same range of meanings: “Adultery,” 
 “Able,” “Affection,” and “Angel.” Once, therefore, that Pearl and 
 the scarlet letter can legitimately mean holy Affection, they can 
 also mean Angel; for both Hester and Dimmesdale will have be¬ 
 come angelic in the sense that a profane love has become sacred 
 and, in so doing, has led them to Heaven. 
 
 The history of little Pearl is, however, predominantly the alle¬ 
 gorical history of Hester’s love for the minister. Providence, as we 
 know, “had assigned to Hester’s charge the germ and blossom of 
 womanhood, to be cherished and developed amid a host of diffi¬ 
 culties” (V, 200). Indeed Hester’s very salvation is made dependent 
 upon her guiding her child to Heaven—a point that is emphasized 
 by Dimmesdale in his defense of Hesters right to little Pearl: 
 
 “This boon was meant, above all things else, to keep the mother’s soul 
 alive, and to preserve her from blacker depths of sin into which Satan 
 might else have sought to plunge her! Therefore it is good for this poor, 
 sinful woman that she hath an infant immortality, a being capable of 
 eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care,—to be trained up by her to 
 righteousness,—to remind her, at every moment of her fall,—but yet to 
 teach her, as it were by the Creator’s sacred pledge, that, if she bring the 
 
126 
 
 Robert E. Whelan 
 
 child to heaven, the child will also bring its parent thither!” (V, 141- 
 142) 
 
 (■Since Hawthorne intends the relationship between Hester and her 
 /misbegotten child to be the allegorical embodiment of Hester’s mis¬ 
 begotten love for Dimmesdale, Hester’s loving her child “with the "in¬ 
 tensity of a sole affection” (V, 216) aptly mirrors her all-absorbing 
 love^r the minister; and consequently the beneficent influence that 
 \ Pearl has ohT her mother’s heart properly mirrors the beneficent in- 
 \fluence~tlrat Hester’s love for Dimmesdale has on her soul. Loyalty 
 ^o the logic of Hawthorne’s allegory also reveals to the reader that 
 Hester must bring her love for the minister into accord with God’s 
 ^^ill if she is to be saved. Moreover, since, according to the literal 
 stWy, Pearl is intended by God “to connect her parent forever with 
 th\ race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in 
 heaVen” (V, 113), the child serves the most jmportant function of 
 keeping her mother within the magnetic chain of hurhamty; and, 
 of course, on the allegorical level this Tery same function is served 
 by Hester’s attachment to Dimmesdale. At this point, however, we 
 must not forget that Pearl is also Dimmesdale’s child. As his child, 
 she can—and occasionally does—mirror his love for Hester. Indeed, 
 Hawthorne intends any return of affection that Pearl shows either 
 Dimmesdale or Hester to be emblematic of love beneficendy at 
 work within their hearts. 
 
 Of course, the love that exists between Hester and Dimmesdale 
 cannot lead them to Heaven until they and their love escape the cow¬ 
 ardice that is the deepest cause of their impenitence—that coward¬ 
 ice which induces Dimmesdale to lead a life of hypocrisy; and which 
 also persuades Hester to consent, out of concern for the minister’s 
 life and reputation, to that life of destructive secrecy. In other words. 
 The Scarlet Letter essentially presents a battle of the virtues and the 
 vices within the hearts of Hester and Dimmesdale: it is a war that 
 Love and Truth under the guise of little Pearl wage with Cowardice 
 and Falsehood under the guise of old Roger Chillingworth. Indeed 
 the illegitimate child and the vengeful husband, inasmuch as they 
 are the not unnatural consequences of adultery, are ideally situated 
 to assume unobtrusively their roles as the allegorical reflectors of 
 the inner lives of Hester and Dimmesdale. 
 
 Because love in some way or other dominates Hester’s heart 
 
Pearl: Sacred and Profane Love 
 
 127 
 
 throughout the story, the allegory demands that little Pearl be al¬ 
 most always at her side. In truth, Pearl’s birth, her troubled child¬ 
 hood, her deep grief at Dimmesdale’s death, her attainment of 
 womanhood, her marriage, and her subsequent motherhood—all 
 mark allegorically the different stages of Hester’s love for Dimmes- 
 dale. Since love, “whether newly born, or aroused from a death-like 
 sluifiber, must always create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of 
 radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world” (V, 243), it 
 is not at all surprising that Hawthorne chooses the birth of Pearl, 
 the child who has “an absolute circle of radiance around her” (V, 
 
 114) and is “all glorified with a ray of sunshine” (V, 249), to alle¬ 
 gorize the birth of love within Hester’s heart. It is to this birth 
 that Hawthorne refers when he tells us that “it was as if a new birth, 
 with stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forest¬ 
 land, still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into 
 Hester Prynne’s wild and dreary, but life-long home” (V, 103); 
 for it is Hester’s passionate love that keeps her “within the pathway 
 that had been so fatal”; “There dwelt, there trode the feet of one 
 with whom she deemed herself connected in a union, that, unrec¬ 
 ognized on earth, would bring them together before the bar of final 
 judgment, and make that their marriage-altar, for a joint futurity 
 of endless retribution” (V, 103). Under the guise of little Pearl, 
 therefore, a lawless and passionate love has been born into the 
 world—a love that is able to face hardships and suffering, but that j 
 has no home and apparently no way to build one. Indeed the only 
 marriage and home that the moral pattern of The Scarlet Letter 
 can allow our erring lovers is the Eternal Home of Heaven and the 
 spiritual union that this implies for all who enter there. 
 
 As Hester’s love for the minister develops both in courage and in 
 truth, so there can be seen emerging in the little chaos of Pearl’s ‘ 
 character “the steadfast principles of an unflinching courage,—an 
 uncontrollable will,—a sturdy pride, which might be disciplined 
 into self-respect,—and a bitter scorn of many things, which, when 
 examined, might be found to have the taint of falsehood in them” 
 (V, 216). But until Hester’s love for the minister has been disci¬ 
 plined to recognize and obey the will of God—until “the taint of 
 deepest sin” is removed from “the most sacred quality of human 
 life” (V, 77)—Pearl’s affections must remain “acrid and disagree¬ 
 able, as are the richest flavors of unripe fruit” (V, 216). It is only 
 
128 
 
 Robert E. Whelan 
 
 after Hester’s repentance that little Pearl’s love for her mother, 
 which up to then had “mostly revealed itself in passion, and'hardly 
 twice in her lifetime . . . been softened by” tenderness (V, 143), 
 becomes “a continual remembrance” (V, 310) flowing from a fond 
 heart. It is then that the alert reader of Hawthorne’s allegory knows 
 that Hester’s love for the minister has been redeemed. In other 
 words. Pearl, “an imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, . . . [has] 
 no right among christened infants” (V, 118) until Hester’s and 
 Dimmesdale’s love for one another—the love that Pearl symbolizes— 
 is christened. It is when Pearl grows to noble womanhood, marries, 
 and bears a child that we learn through allegory that Hester’s love 
 for Dimmesdale has borne the fruit of salvation. Then it is that 
 Hester’s words to Dimmesdale in the forest—“But the child hath 
 strong affections! She loves me, and will love thee!” (V, 248)— 
 are fulfilled in their deepest sense; for it can then be truly said that 
 little Pearl—the personification of the love that Hester and Dimmes¬ 
 dale have for one another—has loved each of them so wisely that 
 she has led both of them to heaven. 
 
 What we are saying, then, is that Pearl, although her aspect has 
 “nothing of the calm, white, unimpassioned lustre that would be 
 indicated by” her name (V, 113), will actually become for Hester 
 the Pearl of Great Price once the impure love within Hester’s heart 
 has been converted into the love of God and man. This is why 
 Hawthorne has the Reverend Mr. Wilson say, “Pearl,. .. thou must 
 take heed to instruction, that so, in due season, thou mayest wear in 
 thy bosom the pearl of great price” (V, 138). We must not assume, 
 however, that this love of Hester’s is mere earthly passion; and we 
 must remember that Hawthorne distinguishes sharply between pure 
 and immortal love in which “there is no falsehood or forgetfulness” 
 and “an earthly passion” that is “mingled with little that is spiritual, 
 and must therefore perish with the perishing clay” (XII, 73). Al¬ 
 though Hawthorne’s description of the conception and birth of little 
 Pearl makes clear that Hester’s adulterous relationship found its 
 beginnings in merely guilty and lustful passion, it is also this same 
 description that allegorically marks the sudden and unexpected 
 flowering within Hester’s heart of something really resembling true 
 love for Dimmesdale; for Hawthorne refers to Pearl both as “the 
 unpremeditated offshoot of a passionate moment” (V, 127) and as 
 “that little creature, whose innocent life had sprung, by the inscru- 
 
Pearl: Sacred and Profane Love 
 
 129 
 
 table decree of Providence, a lovely and immortal flower, out of the 
 rank luxuriance of a guilty passion” (V, 113).^ Since Hester’s in¬ 
 tense love of her child is the living emblem of her love for the min¬ 
 ister, Hawthorne can emphasize once again, through the distinction 
 Dimmesdale draws between Hester’s former sin of lust and her 
 present devotion to her child, the difference between Hester’s once 
 mere unhallowed lust and her present passionate and self-sacrificing 
 love for the minister. Dimmesdale, in his defense of Hester’s right 
 to little Pearl, attempts to persuade the other magistrates that there 
 is “a quality of avidul sacredness in the relation between this mother 
 and this child” (V, 141); and in so doing he urges that if they were 
 to judge the relation otherwise, they would have to conclude that 
 “the Heavenly Father, the Creator of all flesh, hath lightly recog¬ 
 nized a deed of sin, and made of no account the distinction between 
 imhallowed lust and holy love” (V, 141). Those aspects of Hester’s 
 love that might properly be termed “holy” are spelled out allegori¬ 
 cally for the reader by the reasons Hester gives in defense of her 
 continued custody of her child: “ ‘She is my happiness!—she is my 
 torture, none the less! Pearl keeps me here in life! Pearl punishes 
 me too! See ye not, she is the scarlet letter, only capable of being 
 loved, and so endowed with a million-fold the power of retribution 
 for my sin?’ ” (V, 139). To be sure, Hester’s love for the minister is 
 her only happiness. In fact, it keeps her in life, for without it she 
 would long before this have committed suicide. Moreover, Hester’s 
 love for Dimmesdale is endowed with a million-fold the power of 
 retribution for her sin of unhallowed lust because it is only this 
 love that gives her the courage to stay within the limits of the Puri¬ 
 tan settlement and bear the public ignominy which has become her 
 daily loL_ Indeed, as Hawthorne suggests later through allegory, 
 one~orProvidence’s merciful and beneficent purposes in sending 
 Hester this love is ultimately “to help her to overcome the passion, 
 once so wild, and even yet neither dead nor asleep, but only im¬ 
 prisoned within the same tomb-like heart” (V, 217). Since, how¬ 
 ever, such problems as Hester’s vanish only if the woman’s “heart 
 chance to come uppermost” (V, 201), it is important to recall again 
 
 ‘ Some light can be thrown on the redemptive role that Pearl is to play as the incarna¬ 
 tion of the love that exists between Hester and Dimmesdale if we compare this quotation 
 with what Hawthorne says of the young couple in “The Ambitious Guest”: “Perhaps a 
 germ of love was springing in their hearts, so pure that it might blossom in Paradbe, since 
 it could not be matured on earth” (I, 371). 
 
Robert E. Whelan 
 
 130 
 
 that Hester’s love for Dimmesdale—her little Pearl—is the “sole 
 treasure” that keeps “her heart alive” (V, 139); for it prevents her 
 complete isolation from mankind and thereby interferes ^vith her 
 intellect gaining—as it almost succeeds in doing—an absolute as¬ 
 cendancy within her soul (V, 198-200). Beyond question, then, Hes¬ 
 ter’s love for Dimmesdale, despite its guilty origin and despite the 
 impurities imbuing it, is the best and most beautiful part of her be¬ 
 ing. It can therefore be truly said that this love which is Hester’s 
 better self can no more remain in being without God’s concurring 
 power than Hester herself can. This is a truth that Hester herself 
 insists on by way of allegory just after little Pearl denies that God 
 is her Heavenly Father: “Hush, Pearl, hush! Thou must not talk 
 sol .... He sent us all into this world. He sent even me, thy 
 mother. Then, much more, thee! Or, if not, thou strange and elfish 
 child, whence didst thou come?” (V, 124). It is in this fashion that 
 Hawthorne has chosen, here and elsewhere, to dramatize the inter¬ 
 play of light and shadow within the love that was born amiss within 
 Hester’s heart. 
 
 Since Hester, by falling in love with Dimmesdale, “has evoked 
 a spirit [Pearl], but, by some irregularity in the process of conjura¬ 
 tion, has failed to win the master-word that should control this new 
 and incomprehensible intelligence” (V, 117-118); and since she 
 therefore wanders “without a clew in the dark labyrinth of mind” 
 (V, 201), she and the love within her heart will ultimately have to 
 turn to Dimmesdale for wiser and better guardianship than she her¬ 
 self can provide. Indeed, one of the arguments given by the leading 
 inhabitants of Boston for depriving Hester of her child underlines 
 allegorically the need Hester’s misbegotten love has for just such 
 spiritual direction; for these good people felt that “if the child . . . 
 were really capable of moral and religious growth, and possessed 
 the elements of ultimate salvation, then, surely, it would enjoy all 
 the fairer prospect of these advantages by being transferred to wiser 
 and better guardianship than Hester Prynne’s” (V, 125). That this 
 is the kind of control Dimmesdale will exercise over the love he has 
 begotten in Hester’s heart, we cannot doubt; for Hawthorne has 
 Governor Bellingham say to Mr. Wilson, “Care must be had ... to 
 put the child to due and stated examination in the catechism, at thy 
 hands or Master Dimmesdale’s” (V, 142). Hester herself, with un¬ 
 conscious irony, indicates Dimmesdale’s future role as a catechist to 
 
Pearl: Sacred and Profane Love 
 
 131 
 
 the unruly love within her heart when, during her forest meeting 
 with the minister, she says of Pearl, “She is a strange child! I hardly 
 comprehend herl^But thou wilt love her dearly, as I do, and wilt 
 advise me how to deal with her” (V, 244). In this way, then, does 
 little Pearl, the allegorical child, enable Hawthorne to prophesy 
 that Hester will find salvation for her soul if she allows her love 
 for Dirhmesdale to be instructed by the lessons he will teach through 
 his heroic confession on the scaffold. 
 
 A good and golden year can therefore “pass over the poor old 
 world” of Hester’s heart only when Dimmesdale, having cast off the 
 “old man,” begins, as a “new man,” to rule over Hester’s heart, and 
 thereby fulfils his pastoral responsibility to her soul; all of which 
 Hawthorne predicts allegorically when Hester, on the day of Dim- 
 mesdale’s return to God, explains to Pearl the reason for the holiday 
 (or holy day) in language that is reminiscent of the parable of the 
 prodigal son: “ ‘The children have come from their schools, and the 
 grown people from their workshops and their fields, on purpose to 
 be happy. For, to-day, a new man is beginning to rule over them; 
 and so . . . they make merry and rejoice; as if a good and golden 
 year were at length to pass over the poor old world!’” (V, 274). 
 Dimmesdale does truly become for Hester the “mouth-piece of 
 Heaven’s messages of wisdom, and rebuke, and love” (V, 174): 
 obedience to God’s will, hatred of sin, and trust in God’s mercy are 
 the truths he bequeaths her with his dying breath. His last words 
 are without doubt the prayers of a truly penitent man; and since a 
 good man’s prayers, as Chillingworth tells us, are “golden recom¬ 
 pense” or “the current gold coin of the New Jerusalem, with the 
 King’s own mint-mark on them” (V, 268), it is most probable that 
 these words of the minister’s will enrich the heart of the grief- 
 stricken woman who listens so attentively to them. Moreover, since 
 the minister’s dying words are indeed his Election Sermon in that 
 he elects as the inmate of his heart the God of truth, love, and cour¬ 
 age rather than the demon of cowardice and hypocrisy,® we can 
 say that his last words affect Hester just as his Election Sermon af- 
 
 ' Anne Marie McNamara interprets the Election Sermon in almost the same way: “The 
 complete destruction of the first Election Sermon, conceived and written in deceit and 
 hypocrisy, may be significant of a complete break with the past that produced it. The 
 fluent composition of a new one may figure the tremendous vitality of the soul freed from 
 the shackles of sin and operating under the flow of divine grace” (“The Character of 
 Flame,” p. 550). 
 
132 
 
 Robert E. Whelan 
 
 fects the people of Boston: “It was as if an angel, in his passage to 
 the skies, had shaken his bright wings over the people for an in¬ 
 stant,—at once a shadow and a splendor,—and had shed down a 
 shower of golden truths upon them” (V, 295). Indeed, another 
 flight to heaven—that of Governor Winthrop at the time of the mid¬ 
 night scaffold scene—looks forward to the kind of inheritance Dim- 
 mesdale is to leave Hester. For when the Reverend Mr. Wilson re¬ 
 turns home by lantern light from the death chamber of the Gov¬ 
 ernor, Dimmesdale observes him and imagines that he is “sur¬ 
 rounded, like the saint-like personages of olden times, with a radiant 
 halo, that glorified him amid this gloomy night of sin,—as if the 
 departed Governor had left him an inheritance of his glory, or as if 
 he had caught upon himself the distant shine of the celestial city, 
 while looking thitherward to see the triumphal pilgrim pass within 
 its gates” (V, 182-183). 
 
 Triumphal pilgrim Dimmesdale certainly becomes, for through 
 his heroic confession the weed of falsehood—the black weed that 
 typifies the hideous secret buried within his heart (V, 160)—is up¬ 
 rooted, to wilt and die beneath the meridian sunshine of truth; all 
 of which Hawthorne tells us allegorically when he informs us that 
 very soon after Dimmesdale’s death all Chillingworth’s “strength 
 and energy—all his vital and intellectual force—seemed at once to 
 desert him; insomuch that he positively withered up, shrivelled 
 away, and almost vanished from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed 
 that lies wilting in the sun” (V, 307). Thus, after the death of old 
 Roger Chillingworth—after, in other words, the death of Dimmes¬ 
 dale’s falsehood and cowardice—Roger’s last will and testament 
 aptly allegorizes those dying words of the minister that are for Hes¬ 
 ter “a shower of golden truths”; for old Roger bequeaths “a very 
 considerable amount of property, both here and in England, to little 
 Pearl, the daughter of Hester Prynne” (V, 308). And since to know 
 and do the will of God is to come into one’s richest spiritual in¬ 
 heritance, then how appropriate it is that Pearl, the living mirror of 
 her mother’s inner life, should become “the richest heiress of her 
 day, in the New World” (V, 308). In having Chillingworth thus 
 bequeath his wealth to Pearl—in having Dimmesdale, in other 
 words, teach Hester practically a Golden Rule—Hawthorne is 
 merely reworking an idea that appears in one of his notebooks: “An 
 old man to promise a youth a treasure of gold;—and to keep his 
 
Pearl: Sacred and Profane Love 
 
 133 
 
 promise by teaching him practically a Golden Rule.”® Furthermore, 
 “in the spiritual world, the old physician and the minister—mutual 
 victims as they have been—may, unawares, have found their 
 earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transmuted into golden love” 
 (V, 308); for the detestation that the minister feels for his cowardly 
 and hypocritical self in the guise of old Roger Chillingworth disap¬ 
 pears of necessity when he kisses little Pearl and allows holy and 
 golden love to reign in his heart. 
 
 It is also at the moment of this kiss that Hester’s love for Dim- 
 mesdale—her little Pearl—experiences the grief it so much needs: “a 
 grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make 
 her capable of sympathy” (V, 221). In other words, it is at this 
 moment that Hester, from whom “some attribute had departed .. ., 
 the permanence of which had been necessary to keep her a woman” 
 (V, 198), receives that magic touch to which Hawthorne refers 
 when he says of her: “She who has once been a woman, and ceased 
 to be so, might at any moment become a woman again if there were 
 only the magic touch to effect the transfiguration” (V, 198). And 
 although formerly there had seemed “to be no longer anything in 
 Hester’s face for Love to dwell upon;... nothing in Hester’s bosom, 
 to make it ever again the pillow of Affection” (V, 198), that very 
 bosom now becomes “the pillow of Affection”; for after Dimmes- 
 dale collapsed on the scaffold, “Hester partly raised him, and sup¬ 
 ported his head against her bosom” (V, 303). Thus, through the 
 instrumentality of Dimmesdale’s heroic confession and his ensuing 
 death, is broken the “bewildering and baffling spell, that so often 
 came between [Hester] and her sole treasure” (V, 117)—that is, be¬ 
 tween Hester and her love for the minister: “Towards her mother 
 . . . Pearl’s errand as a messenger of anguish was all fulfilled” (V, 
 303). Like one of her literary ancestors, the diamond with the evil 
 spirit in “The Antique Ring,” Pearl is purified only “by becoming 
 the medium of some good and holy act, and again the pledge of 
 faithful love” (XII, 55). In truth, Hester, as a consequence of the 
 
 * The American Notebook.s by Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Randall Stewart (New Haven, 
 1932), p. 102. My interpretation of Chillingworth’s last will and testament is not alto¬ 
 gether original. It is partly anticipated by Roy R. Male, Hawthorne's Tragic Vision, p. 97; 
 and Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York, i960), pp. 
 512-513. Both Male and Fiedler, however, wrongly claim that Pearl’s allegorical role 
 ceases after she becomes a wealthy heiress; Male can be permitted to speak for both Fiedler 
 and himself when he asserts that, “as Dimmesdale ascends, [Pearl] moves down from her 
 allegorical function and into fully temporal existence’’ (p. 97). 
 
134 
 
 Robert E. Whelan 
 
 last scaffold scene, could have legitimately addressed to Dimmes- 
 dale those words that Hawthorne wrote to Sophia Peabody on Oc¬ 
 tober 4, 1840; 
 
 Thou only hast taught me that I have a heart—thou only hast thrown a 
 light deep downward, and upward, into my soul. . . . 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—^till the heart is 
 touched. That touch creates us—then we begin to be—thereby we are 
 beings of reality, and inheritors of eternity.' 
 
 It is well to note here that Dimmesdale’s Election Sermon, alle¬ 
 gorical embodiment as it is of Dimmesdale’s dying words, is an ex¬ 
 pression of love as well as a catechetical lesson; for it breathes “pas¬ 
 sion and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to 
 the human heart, wherever educated” (V, 289). Through his re¬ 
 sponse both to repentance and to Hester’s love the minister converts 
 the “atmosphere ... into words of flame” (V, 294): the fire not only 
 of truth but also of love—God’s as well as man’s. He thereby gains 
 in its fullest measure the power “of addressing the whole human 
 brotherhood [and Hester Prynne in particular] in the heart’s native 
 language”; not lacking, like his fellow ministers, “Heaven’s last and 
 rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue of Flame”—the gift 
 “that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost” (V, 173). 
 Indeed it is in harmony with this New England hoHday (or holy 
 day) that during Dimmesdale’s Election Sermon the influence of 
 the Holy Spirit, who is the infinite love that exists benveen God the 
 Father and God the Son, “could be seen, as it were, descending 
 upon him , and possessing him” (V, 294-295); which is why inspira¬ 
 tion had never “breathed through mortal lips more evidently than 
 it did through his” (V, 294) on this day. Hester’s attimde toward 
 the Election Sermon is that of Dimmesdale’s flock toward his other 
 sermons in that she listens to his dying “ ‘words as if a tongue of 
 Pentecost were speaking’” (V, 229). In truth, she is affected by 
 Dimmesdale’s heroic confession—by his Election Sermon—in the 
 same way as some of his parishioners were affected by the sermon 
 he preached the day after his midnight meeting with Hester upon 
 the scaffold—a sermon, therefore, that was also delivered under the 
 
 'TAf 0/ Hsu-thomc's Journals, ed. Newton .^rvin (Boston, 1929), p. 66. 
 
Pearl: Sacred and Profane Love 
 
 135 
 
 influence of the “vital warmth” (V, 186) of Hester’s love.® This 
 discourse “was held to be the richest and most powerful, and the 
 most replete with heavenly influences, that had ever proceeded from 
 his lips. Souls . . . were brought to the truth by the efficacy of that 
 sermon, and vowed within themselves to cherish a holy gratitude 
 towards Mr. Dimmesdale throughout the long hereafter” (V, 191). 
 
 And just as one of these souls, a young girl, was won by this 
 sermon “to barter the transitory pleasures of the world for the 
 heavenly hope, that was to assume brighter substance as life grew 
 dark around her, and which would gild the utter gloom with final 
 glory” (V, 262), so too is Hester won by the minister’s Election 
 Sermon and comes to cherish “a holy gratitude towards Mr. Dim¬ 
 mesdale throughout the long hereafter.” And just as this same 
 young girl enshrined Dimmesdale “within the stainless sanctity of 
 her heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image, impart¬ 
 ing to religion the warmth of love, and to love a religious purity” 
 (V, 262), so too will Hester’s remembrance of the holy death of Mr. 
 Dimmesdale, enshrined as he already was within the not-so-stainless 
 sanctity of her heart, impart to her love a religious purity, and to her 
 future religious devotion the warmth of love. It is in this way that 
 Dimmesdale’s last “ ‘footsteps . . . leave a gleam along [his] earthly 
 track, whereby the pilgrims that shall come after [him] may be 
 guided to the regions of the blest’ ” (V,'i75). 
 
 Hester will, therefore, eventually bring the love within her 
 bosom to God as her most precious offering; and in so doing she 
 will very much resemble those virgins of Dimmesdale’s church who 
 were so influenced by his sermons as to become “victims of a passion 
 so imbued with religious sentiment that they imagined it to be all 
 religion, and brought it openly, in their white bosoms, as their most 
 acceptable sacrifice before the altar” (V, 174). Mutatis mutandis, the 
 closing lines of Hawthorne’s “Graves and Goblins,” spoken as they 
 
 ® Hawthorne’s description of Hester and Dimmesdale during the midnight scaffold 
 scene, with little Pearl between them and the light of the meteoric A surrounding them, is 
 prophetic of that “noon of . . . solemn splendor” when they will be redeemed through 
 iove: “And there stood the minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with 
 the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and 
 the connecting link between those two. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn 
 splendor, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall 
 unite all who belong to one another” (V, 187). Here Pearl and the scarlet letter in the 
 sky are very obviously both symbols of the love that exists between Hester and Dimmes¬ 
 dale; and this love of theirs is the light that is to reveal their secret, and the daybreak 
 that shall unite them in heaven. 
 
136 
 
 Robert E. Whelan 
 
 are by a young man’s ghost, aptly describe the influence Dimmes- 
 dale’s dying words will have on Hester’s heart: 
 
 But where is the maiden, holy and pure, though wearing a form of clay, 
 that would have me bend over her pillow at midnight, and leave a bless¬ 
 ing there? With a silent invocation, let her summon me. Shrink not, 
 maiden, when I come! ... in death, I bring no loathsome smell of the 
 grave, nor ghostly terrors,—but gende, and soothing, and sweetly pensive 
 influences. Perhaps, just fluttering for the skies, my visit may hallow 
 the wellsprings of thy thought, and make thee heavenly here on earth. 
 Then shall pure dreams and holy meditations bless thy life; nor thy 
 sainted spirit linger round the grave, but seek the upper stars, and meet 
 me there! (XII, 77) 
 
 Indeed the spiritual fatherhood that Dimmesdale assumes in regard 
 to Hester just before his flight to Heaven is foreshadow^ in the^rst 
 scaffold scene when Hester declares that Pearl must seek a heavenly 
 Father because she will never know an earthly one. It is, of course, 
 no less true that only when Dimmesdale becomes a loving father 
 and religious guide to the love he has begotten in Hester’s breast can 
 Pearl, the personification of that love, find a Father in God. 
 
 Hawthorne, however, is too acute an observer of the human 
 heart to allow Hester to achieve religious purity immediately after 
 Dimmesdale’s death. Only after she meditates for many years on 
 Dimmesdale’s last catechetical lesson is the wild, rich nature of her 
 love for him—the wild, rich nature of her child—“softened and sub¬ 
 dued, and made capable of a woman’s gentle happiness” (V, 309). 
 Only then is Hester able to return to New England, the place of 
 her sin and sorrow, and where is “yet to be her penitence” (V, 310). 
 In thus resuming the scarlet letter, she obeys Dimmesdale’s loving 
 injunction: “The law we broke!—the sin here so awfully revealedl^ 
 let these alone be in thy thoughts!” (V, 304). It irthrough Haw¬ 
 thorne’s final remarks on Pearl, however, that we learn with cer¬ 
 tainty that Dimmesdale’s heroic example has made Hester heavenly 
 on earth by hallowing the wellsprings of her thought and blessing 
 her life with holy meditations. Indeed, some of the benefits which 
 in this life, according to the Westminster Catechism, either accom¬ 
 pany or flow from justification, adoption, and sanctification—“as¬ 
 surances of God’s love, peace of conscience, joy in the Holy Ghost, 
 increase of grace, and perseverance therein to the end”®—find their 
 
 ^ The New-England Primer, Improved-, The Assembly of Divines' Catechism (Norwich, 
 Conn.: Russell Hubbard, 1812; reprinted by Henry Ford, 1926), p. 43. 
 
Pearl; Sacred and Profane Love 
 
 137 
 
 allegorical embodiment in the gifts and letters that Pearl sends her 
 mother during Hester’s last years in Boston; which is, in truth, the 
 kind of allegorical finish that is almost necessitated by the ripening 
 to maturity of the allegorical child who, at the age of three, “could 
 have borne a fair examination in ... the first column of the West¬ 
 minster Catechisms” (V, 138). The letters with strange armorial 
 seals that come to Hester from “some inhabitant of another land” 
 (V, 309) are therefore no other than Hester’s assurances of God’s 
 love—her “spiritual communications with the better world” in which 
 her redeemed love for the minister now dwells. For Hester, in “the 
 toilsome, thoughtful, and self-devoted years” (V, 310) that make up 
 the end of her life, is very like those “true saintly fathers, whose 
 faculties had been . . . etherealized ... by spiritual communications 
 with the better world, into which their purity of life had almost in¬ 
 troduced these holy personages, with their garments of mortality 
 still clinging to them” (V, 173). Moreover, the articles of comfort 
 and luxury in Hester’s cottage, “which only wealth could have pur¬ 
 chased, and affection have imagined for her” (V, 310), can be con¬ 
 strued as the religious consolations that Hester’s love—the richest 
 heiress in the New World—purchases for her. Just as the loss of 
 loved ones by the oldest of Dimmesdale’s parishioners, “which would 
 else have been such heavy sorrow, was made almost a solemn joy 
 to her devout old soul, by religious consolations and the truths of 
 Scripture, wherewith she had fed herself continually for more than 
 thirty years” (V, 261), so too is Hester’s heavy sorrow after Dim¬ 
 mesdale’s death converted into a solemn and religious joy by her 
 never-ending meditation on the truths of Scripture that he so ef¬ 
 fectively taught her. 
 
 Not even yet, however, has the allegory come to an end: the baby 
 garment that Hester, with “a lavish richness of golden fancy” (V, 
 310), embroiders for Pearl’s child indicates, as we have suggested 
 earlier, that Hester’s love for Dimmesdale has become religiously 
 fruitful—has borne the fruit of salvation. Consequently when Hes¬ 
 ter tells the women who bring her all their sorrows that she rec¬ 
 ognizes “the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious 
 truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down 
 with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow” (V, 311), 
 her words have for us an irony to which Hester in her holiness and 
 humility is oblivious; for we know that “the divine and mysterious 
 
138 
 
 Robert E. Whelan 
 
 truth” of the redemptive power of love has become the very sub¬ 
 stance of Hester’s life. The irony becomes more marked when Hes¬ 
 ter tells these women that “th$ angel and apostle of the coming 
 revelation must be a woman indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; 
 and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal me¬ 
 dium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, 
 by the truest test of a life successful to such an end!” (V, 311). In¬ 
 deed, sacred love has made Hester an angel and an aposde to those 
 in sorrow and trouble; and it has made her wise by converting her 
 dusky grief into a solemn joy through her religious consolations 
 and her meditations on the truths of Scripture. In short, Hester 
 has shown how sacred love can “make us happy, by the truest test 
 of a life successful to such an end.” Moreover, it is well in accord 
 with the indirectness of Hawthorne’s style that Hester should speak 
 these words about sacred love in the last line of the story’s next-to- 
 last paragraph, and that she should thereby unwittingly summarize 
 her life and Dimmesdale’s by correctly interpreting the living hiero¬ 
 glyphic—the Tongue of Flame—that we have known as little Pearl. 
 
 Hester had therefore been right in thinking that “perchance, the 
 torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work 
 out another purity than that which she had lost; more saint-like, 
 because the result of martyrdom” (V, 104). In the eyes of the reader 
 as well as in the eyes of the townspeople, the scarlet letter should 
 now have “the effect of the cross on a nun’s bosom,” imparting to 
 Hester “a kind of sacredness” (V, 197). There is now something in 
 Hester’s relationship to her child to remind us—and no longer mere¬ 
 ly by contrast—“of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose 
 infant was to redeem the world” (V, 77); for it is no other than 
 Pearl, the incarnation of Hester’s love, who has redeemed the world 
 of her mother’s heart. 
 
 Since Hester’s love for the minister has survived his death and 
 followed him to heaven, we must agree with the gossips who be¬ 
 lieved “that Pearl was not only alive, but married, and happy, and 
 mindful of her mother, and that she would most joyfully have en¬ 
 tertained that sad and lonely mother at her fireside” (V, 310). Thus 
 we may legitimately say of little Pearl—the infant who “was worthy 
 to have been brought forth in Eden; worthy to have been left there, 
 to be the plaything of angels, after the world’s first parents were 
 driven out” (V, 114)—what Hawthorne says of her literary ances- 
 
Pearl: Sacred and Profane Love 
 
 139 
 
 tor Lilias Fay: “The chill winds of the earth had long since breathed 
 a blight into this beautiful flower, so that a loving hand had now 
 transplanted it, to blossom brightly in the garden of Paradise” (I, 
 502). Truly, Hester, now that her love for Dimmesdale is purified, 
 has achieved a spiritual union with him that blesses only the rare 
 marriage. Earlier in the story, she had deemed herself connected in 
 a union with him, “that, unrecognized on earth, would bring them 
 together before the bar of final judgment, and make that their mar¬ 
 riage-altar, for a joint futurity of endless retribution” (V, 103). Her 
 last words to him, “Shall we not spend our immortal life together ? 
 Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe!” 
 (V, 303), show that she is finally able to hope that the bar of final 
 judgment will become their marriage altar for a joint futurity, not 
 of endless retribution, but of eternal happiness. Our reading of 
 Pearl’s allegorical role ratifies Hester’s hope and rejects the possi¬ 
 bility that Dimmesdale suggests with his dying words: “It may be 
 that, when we forgot our God,—when we violated our reverence 
 each for the other’s soul,—it was thenceforth vain to hope that we 
 could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion. God 
 knows; and He is merciful!” (V, 304). God has been merciful: we 
 have seen that throughout Hester’s long years of penitence the light 
 of faith has been guiding her to where her love for Dimmesdale 
 already dwells—to what is to be her Eternal Home and Fireside. 
 Hester and Dimmesdale could well have made their own the words 
 that the elderly Mr. Smith in “The Wedding Knell” speaks to his 
 bride, the widow Mrs. Dabney: 
 
 “Yes; it is evening with us now; and we have realized none of our morn¬ 
 ing dreams of happiness. But let us join our hands before the altar, as 
 lovers whom adverse circumstances have separated through life, yet who 
 meet again as they are leaving it, and find their earthly affection changed 
 into something holy as religion. And what is Time, to the married of 
 Eternity.?” (I, 51) 
 
 There is no doubt, then, that Hester and Dimmesdale are among 
 the few who, “we are glad to say, made earnest efforts to exchange 
 vice for virtue, and, hard as the bargain was, succeeded in effecting 
 it” (II, 374). Love, finding its personification in little Pearl and its 
 symbols in the scarlet letter, the red rose, and the Tongue of Flame, 
 has ultimately defeated Chillingworth, the “black flower” (V, 68) 
 
140 
 
 Robert E. Whelan 
 
 of Fate and the incarnation of Cowardice, Shame, Egotism, False¬ 
 hood, and inejffectual Remorse (V, 180). Because the love of Hes¬ 
 ter and Dimmesdale for one another—“their infant commonwealth” 
 —^has been “under a celestial guardianship of peculiar intimacy and 
 stricmess” (V, iSS), they have made their own the “high and glori¬ 
 ous destiny” that Dimmesdale, in his Election Sermon, prophesies 
 for “the newly gathered people of the Lord” (V, 295). 
 
Hawthorne and Nineteenth-Century Perfectionism 
 
 Claudia D. Johnson 
 
 O NE OF THE MOST prominent members of the Bowdoin College 
 faculty at the time of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s attendance was a 
 young philosopher-psychologist named Thomas C. Upham. Horatio 
 Bridge, Hawthorne’s college classmate and friend, remembered 
 Upham, who was Professor of Moral and Mental Philosophy during 
 their senior year, as “young, scholarly, gentle, and kind to the 
 students, by all of whom he was much beloved.”^ A few critics have 
 speculated about the influence of Upham’s theory of trifaculty 
 psychology on Hawthorne,* but another of Upham’s convictions, 
 on which he wrote a number of books, has received almost no at¬ 
 tention. This was the doctrine of Christian perfection for which 
 Upham, in his day, was as well known as for his psychological 
 theories. The very word, “perfection,” however, connotes a belief so 
 far removed from the dark vision of Nathaniel Hawthorne as to 
 render absurd any consideration of the writer’s relationship to the 
 doctrine.^ The word leads one to think that the advocates of per- 
 
 ' Horatio Bridge, Personal Recollections of Kathaniel Hawthorne (New York, 1893), 
 
 ’ Marvin Laser, “ ‘Head,’ ‘Heart,’ and ‘Will’ in Hawthorne’s Psychology,” Nineteenth- 
 Century Fiction, X (Sept., 1955), 130-136; Leon Howard, Literature and the American 
 Tradition (New York, i960), p. 122; Joseph Schwartz, “A Note on Hawthorne’s Fatalism,” 
 Modem Language Notes, LXX (Jan., 1955), 33-36. Laser and Howard cite the influence 
 of Upham’s trifaculty psychology on Hawthorne’s work. Schwartz makes the point that 
 the insistence of Hawthorne’s educators, including Upham, on freedom of the will con¬ 
 tributed to his rejection of orthodox fatalism. 
 
 ’ Merle Curti, ‘‘Human Nature in American Thought,” Political Science Quarterly, 
 LXVIII (Sept., 1953), 354-375: Joseph Schwartz, “Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1S64: God 
 and Man in New England,” American Classics Reconsidered, edited by Harold C. Gardiner, 
 S.J. (New York, 1958), p. 141. These two critics reflect the tendency to ignore or to 
 misrepresent perfectionism. Although Schwartz is aware of Upham’s influence, he fails to 
 take perfectionism into account, saying only that Hawthorne had no sympathy with the 
 Unitarian idea of ‘‘human perfectability.” Curti concludes, presumably because Upham was a 
 perfectionist, that he had no sense, as did Hawthorne, of the profound depths of evil 
 in the heart. 
 
 The summary of perfectionist doctrine in this paper is made on the basis of primary 
 readings in the following nineteenth-century perfectionist literature: William Arthur, 
 
142 
 
 Claudia D. Johnson 
 
 fectionism thought that, after having been made “perfect,” the heart 
 was free from evil. Nothing, however, could be further from the 
 truth. Thomas Upham, Charles G. Finney, John Humphrey Noyes, 
 and other perfectionists were as thoroughly convinced of the evil of 
 the heart as were their Puritan forebears. The journals and the 
 memoirs of perfectionists disclose that their knowledge of the heart’s 
 evil came from painful personal experiences. Like John Humphrey 
 Noyes, they were very much aware of “the labyrinth of iniquity” 
 at the bottom of the heart.^ 
 
 Like the Puritans, perfectionists believed that man is, by nature, 
 sinful and requires regeneration. Unlike those early Calvinists, 
 however, the perfectionists taught that after conversion man could 
 experience a second stage of religious growth when he would, for 
 a second time, be the recipient of God’s grace. At this time he was 
 “perfected” by partaking of God’s love which “purified” his inclina¬ 
 tions. Even after purification, however, evil was a powerful force in 
 the perfect man’s heart. Noyes, who had an immense impact on 
 nineteenth-century Protestantism through the circulation of The 
 Perfectionist, was convinced that being purified in heart did not 
 exempt one from inner experiences with evil. Evil was a part of the 
 carnal self which would not be lost until the body died, and forces 
 of good and evil would war within even a perfect man until he died. 
 One needed only to look at the tempted Christ to understand this 
 warfare: 
 
 Our theory of Christian life, while it equips the spiritual soldier with a 
 pure heart and a good conscience at the outset, nevertheless does not dis¬ 
 charge him from service. To \eep his heart pure and his conscience good, 
 in the midst of a world of pollution and accusation . . . will cost him 
 
 The Tongue of Fire (Torontcs 1857); Jeremy Boyton, Sanctificaiion Practical (New York, 
 1867); J. T. Crane, Holiness (New York, 1875); Charles G. Finney, Attributes of Love: 
 A Section From Lectures on Systematic Theology (Miimeapolis, 1963) and Memoirs (New 
 York, 1876); R. S. Foster, Christian Purity (New York, 1869); Asa Mahan, Out of 
 Darkness Into Light (New York, 1876); John Humphrey Noyes, Religious Experiences 
 of fohn Humphrey Noyes (New York, 1923) and Salvation From Sin (Wallingford, 
 Conn., 1866); Phoebe Palmer, Present to My Christian Friend (New York, 1853); Thomas 
 C. Upham, Treatise on Divine Union (Boston, 1857); Principles of the Interior or Hidden 
 Life (New York, 1843), and Life of Faith (New York, 1845). 
 
 * Noyes, “Journal Entry, July 25,” The Religious Experiences of John Humphrey Noyes, 
 pp. 47-48. 
 
Nineteenth-Century Perfectionism 
 
 M 3 
 
 many and sore conflicts with his own corrupted propensities, and with 
 “principalities and powers, and spiritual wickedness in high places.”® 
 
 Thomas Upham m The Interior Life also warned that evil would 
 be an even greater force within the soul of the perfected man than 
 it was in other men: 
 
 Thou hast contended with Satan, and hast been successful. Thou hast 
 fought with him, and he has fled from thee. But, O, remember his 
 artifices. Do not indulge the belief that his nature is changed. True, 
 indeed, he is now very complacent and is, perhaps, singing thee some 
 syren song; but he was never more a devil than he is now.® 
 
 Even though evil would continue to fight within his soul, as long 
 as love sustained the perfected man, he had reason to hope that his 
 victories over evil would be assured. In short, the doctrine of per¬ 
 fectionism was in no sense the conviction that the soul could reach 
 a stage in which it was free from the experience of evil. 
 
 This clarification of the perfectionists’ beliefs about the evil of 
 the heart, which, contrary to what the term may suggest, is not so 
 radically different from Hawthorne’s view, may serve to open for 
 consideration the relationship of Hawthorne to this vital and far- 
 reaching nineteenth-century Protestant movement. 
 
 Upham and his fellow perfectionists insisted on three essential 
 characteristics of the perfected man which are relevant to Haw¬ 
 thorne’s themes: man had to be guided by love, the transforming 
 principle in the life of the perfected man; he had to live in this life 
 rather than for the hereafter; and he had to be active rather than 
 passive. The perfectionist taught that love was the transforming 
 power of the soul, the indwelling principle which caused the old man 
 locked in inwardness to emerge reborn. Love displaced selfish pride 
 and united men. It propelled a perfected man into the world: per¬ 
 fectionism, by definition, meant the state of man in this life, not in 
 the hereafter. One of the Methodist perfectionists, William Arthur, 
 goes so far as to label a man’s concern for his salvation as a selfish 
 perversion of the gospel.^ 
 
 Just as love drew the good man into this world, it necessarily 
 
 “ Noyes, SdvMion From Sin, p. 394. 
 
 ‘Upham, The Interior Life, p. 394. 
 
 ’Arthur, p. 129. 
 
144 
 
 Claudia D. Johnson 
 
 drew him into fellowship with other men. It made a life of solitude 
 impossible. Introspection was a stage in Christian development, 
 but to prolong seclusion was to be caught in the dead end of selfish¬ 
 ness. Asa Mahan, the perfectionist president of Oberlin College, 
 called such inwardness “spirimal paralysis.”® In Thomas Upham’s 
 comments on isolating inwardness one sees the expression of a dieme 
 which would be persistently repeated in the works of Natlianiel 
 Hawthorne: 
 
 A being who is supremely selfish is necessarily miserable. . . . Instead 
 of the principle of unity, which tends to oneness of purpose with other 
 beings, and naturally leads to happiness, he has within him the principle 
 of exclusion and of eternal separation. In its ultimate operation, if it is 
 permitted permanently to exist, it necessarily drives him from everything 
 else, and wedges him closer and closer in the compressed circumference 
 of his own personality. . . . This is the true hell and everlasting fire.® 
 
 The perfect man, therefore, had to ascend from inwardness to 
 union with tlie world. The man of God who failed in this union 
 abdicated a profound Christian duty, according to Upham: 
 
 The mind, separated from the bonds which link it to others, and falling 
 back upon itself, as both centre and circumference, becomes contracted 
 in the range of its action, and selfish in its tendencies.’^® 
 
 Perfectionist doctrine not only insisted upon fellowship in die 
 world; it demanded action in the world. Passivity was a characteristic 
 of die initial religious experience of introspection, but a Chrisdan 
 must move from die passive to an active state. Love, again, was die 
 compelling force. Charles G. Finney, the most prominent evangelist 
 of die second great awakening and an Oberlin perfectionist, wrote 
 of the perfect man: 
 
 . . . the intellectual perceptions never sink so low as to leave benevolence 
 to become a stagnant pool. It is never sluggish, never inactive. ... It 
 is essential activity itself.” 
 
 Thus, the good man, according to the perfectionist doctrine, 
 followed a definite mythic development. In order to be converted, 
 
 ® Mahan, p. 117. 
 
 “Upham, The Interior Life, p. iiS. 
 
 *®Ibid., p. 193. 
 
 "Finney, Attributes of Love, pp. no—iii. 
 
Nineteenth-Century Perfectionism 
 
 145 
 
 he descended into the depths of his heart as the Puritans had taught 
 that he must. After having received a clear view of his sins, he was 
 converted. But a man could become entrapped and poisoned in this 
 pious, passive introspection if he were not moved by love. If he were 
 guided by love, he would ascend from inwardness to an active 
 existence on the earth among his fellow human beings. Thomas 
 Upham’s student, Nathaniel Hawthorne, saw the perils and pos¬ 
 sibilities of man in just such terms. 
 
 “The Haunted Mind,” Hawthorne’s sketch of the progress of 
 the mind which descends into inwardness and emerges renewed, 
 mirrors the perfectionists’ values as well as their concept of man’s 
 spiritual development In this early sketch, a dreamer in repose 
 isolates himself from the realities of the world in order to descend 
 into his heart, which he subsequently comes to know as an infernal 
 region outside of time, outside of nature, and outside of society, 
 “where the business of life does not intrude” (p. 343).^^ The bed 
 into which the dreamer sinks in “conscious sleep,” is no less than a 
 cozy womb until the thought of death breaks in to remind him that 
 the components of this inward world— timelessness, lifelessness, 
 inaction, and isolation—are also the components of death. As he 
 sinks deeper into the tomb of the heart, he is accosted by fiends of 
 his own making and comes to know that to remain forever in this 
 inward inferno is to live forever with fiends. The everyday materials 
 of the real world—book, table, letter—and the influence of love 
 bring the dreamer back to the living world which is now presented 
 in pictures of “gladsomeness and beauty” (p. 348), the last of which 
 is “a brilliant circle of a crowded theatre. . .” (p. 348). Thus the 
 moral history of man’s descent and rebirth, as it is portrayed in 
 “The Haunted Mind,” is almost identical to that outlined by nine¬ 
 teenth-century perfectionists. 
 
 Furthermore, the vision of Hawthorne’s major tales and ro¬ 
 mances is basically perfectionistic in that his characters are measured 
 against the perfectionist possibility. In a few instances his characters 
 reach a greater humanity than they have known before as love dis¬ 
 places self, action displaces inaction, and social concern displaces 
 
 Quotations from Hawthorne’s short stories are taken from The Complete Wor\s of 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York, Sully and Kleinteich, 1882, 1883). Quotations from the 
 novels are taken from The Centenary Edition of the Wor^s of Nathaniel Hawthorne. 
 
146 
 
 Claudia D. Johnson 
 
 egoistic isolation. More often, however, his characters fail to ascend 
 from that inwardness which Upham called “a true hell.” 
 
 Although Hawthorne was strongly convinced that the man who 
 would be regenerated must make a descent into the tomb of the 
 heart, he, like the perfectionists, was just as strongly convinced of 
 the dangers of sustained inwardness. It is not surprising that his 
 characteristic protagonist in the tales is a man who remains in an 
 inner hell, unable to pronounce his brotherhood with other men or 
 to join them in a common struggle. Goodman Brown, the Reverend 
 Hooper, Wakefield, Richard Digby, Adam Coburn, and Roderick 
 Elliston are the protagonists who best exemplify the perfectionist 
 pattern, albeit in Hawthorne’s largely negative fashion. 
 
 These protagonists are caught in a stage of development which 
 the perfectionists called the descent into the heart. Because each 
 of them meditates within the circle of his own ego, he is removed 
 from the larger world of human society and human passions. The 
 man of adamant physically leaves his village and, shutting himself 
 away in a cave, an image of his own heart, contemplates his right¬ 
 eousness in an evil society. Adam Coburn deserts the village to find 
 shelter in a sect which turns its back on the world and human nature; 
 Wakefield steps aside “from the main business of his life” (p. 163) 
 to seclude himself in disguise; and Goodman Brown leaves his wife 
 and his village not just for a night, but for a lifetime. The Reverend 
 Hooper’s veil and Roderick Elliston’s bosom serpent are symbolic 
 of the dark obsessive visions which separate them from other men. 
 Neither love nor sympathy touches the Reverend Hooper in his 
 “true hell”: “With self-shudderings and outward terrors, he walked 
 continually in its shadow, groping darkly within his own soul. . .” 
 (p. 65). Roderick, too, lives without the love of friends, wife, or 
 God: “Not merely the eye of man was a horror to him; not merely 
 the light of a friend’s countenance; but even the blessed sunshine, 
 likewise, which in its universal beneficence typifies the radiance of 
 the Creator’s face, expressing his love for all the creamres of his 
 hand” (p. 307). Wakefield, in deserting his wife, loses his place in 
 the universe. 
 
 The alternative to gloomy inwardness in each of these tales is 
 the love of a woman who is capable of drawing the self-directed 
 soul back into human society. The Reverend Hooper, however, re- 
 
Nineteenth-Century Perfectionism 
 
 147 
 
 fuses to lift his veil in order to love Elizabeth. It must always separate 
 him from the world and from love. Richard Digby disregards all 
 of Mary Goffe’s pleas that he return with her to the village. Adam 
 Coburn withdraws his hand from Martha’s in “satisfied ambition” 
 (p. 476) as he chooses to be a Shaker leader and a brother instead 
 of a lover and father. Although Goodman Brown returns to Faith, 
 he “looked sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on without 
 a greeting” (p. 105). Of these men, only Roderick Elliston is happily 
 reunited with his wife and the society from which he had separated 
 himself. 
 
 Like the nineteenth-century perfectionists, Hawthorne often 
 compares the achievement of a higher humanity to growing up, a 
 metaphor which is central to his first two major novels. The Scarlet 
 Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. The unregenerate man 
 who lingers in inwardness is like a child whose only world is him¬ 
 self, whose primary interest is attending to his own wants, who feels 
 little responsibility for those other than himself, and who, as a 
 stranger in the larger world, sacrifices almost nothing of himself 
 to it. 
 
 Indeed, in both of these novels the principal settings suggest the 
 childlike dependency of the characters. The society created by the 
 Puritan elders 'm The Scarlet Letter and the ancestral home place 
 of The House of the Seven Gables are both paternalistic shelters 
 from the larger world and reflections of the decay and gloom of the 
 characters who live in them. The most prominent landmarks of 
 the Puritan community are the scaffold, the prison, and the cemetery. 
 The community’s most prominent members are stern and somber 
 old men who are incapable of “sitting in judgment on an erring 
 woman’s heart and disentangling its mesh of good and evil. . .” 
 (p. 64). The ordinary citizens remain children in this oligarchy. 
 
 Dimmesdale is a child not only in his dependence upon the 
 Puritan elders and in his rejection of fatherhood, but in his failure 
 to emerge from the closed circle of his own heart. He is a striking 
 example of the self-centered, unperfected man as he is described on 
 the scaffold under cover of darkness: 
 
 In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered 
 mental state when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, 
 intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse 
 
148 
 
 Claudia D. Johnson 
 
 of nature until the firmament itself should appear no more than a 
 fitting page for his soul’s history and fate. (p. 155) 
 
 Hester also knows years of despairing self-contemplation, pride, 
 and self-deception but, in contrast to Dimmesdale, the love which 
 she feels for him and for Pearl turns her affections outward and 
 enables her not only to endure, but eventually to mature into a 
 stronger and more productive member of human society. After she 
 returns to the place of her ignominy to take up the letter humbly 
 and of her own free will, her acts of charity grow from love rather 
 than from concern for her own salvation; 
 
 And, as Hester Prynne had no selfish ends, nor lived in any measure 
 for her own profit and enjoyment, people brought all their sorrows and 
 perplexides, and besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone 
 through a mighty trouble, (p. 263) 
 
 In short, despite her inescapable gloom, she comes to possess those 
 traits by which the perfected human being was identified. 
 
 A similar pattern discloses the values of perfectionism m The 
 House of the Seven Gables, where the inhabitants of the patriarchal 
 shelter remain children, each largely wrapped up in his own world, 
 unacquainted with anything outside that world, and unable to act 
 in it. For all of her life Hepzibah has hidden away in her father’s 
 house like a child. Because she has never before “put forth her hand 
 to help herself’ (p. 52), she is as clumsy as an infant in setting up 
 her shop, in keeping her house, and in trying to establish a relation¬ 
 ship with the everyday world of the street beside her house. Clifford, 
 too, is a child devoid of judgment, overwhelmed by his immature 
 emotions, and absorbed almost entirely in himself. Holgrave, al¬ 
 though he does not fit the metaphor of immature child as clearly 
 as Clifford and Hepzibah do, is, nonetheless, unregenerate in that 
 he is largely loveless, egoistic, and ill at ease in the world. He has 
 wandered, homeless, from place to place, from profession to profes¬ 
 sion, unwilling to become sufficiently involved with his fellow 
 creatures “to help or hinder” (p. 216), but only to observe and 
 analyze them. 
 
 Phoebe, on the other hand, lives harmoniously with a world in 
 which she is productive and orderly. Shop-keeping and house-keep¬ 
 ing are not mysteries to her, and she is capable of giving her love 
 
Nineteenth-Century Perfectionism 
 
 149 
 
 to the unlovely Hepzibah and Clifford. She represents the agency 
 of love which embodies active commerce with the greater world be¬ 
 yond the self. 
 
 The issues which occupied perfectionists continued to be apparent 
 in Hawthorne’s last major novels. Miles Coverdale is the chief 
 illustration of the unregenerate or unperfected man m The Blithe- 
 dale Romance. His inaction, his preference for the spiritual, and his 
 obsession with the lives of his friends betray a failure to ascend to 
 the living world. The leafy cave to which he retreats during his 
 Blithesdale stay is symbolic of the state of his soul. He is persistently 
 guided by cold curiosity and self-interest rather than by love, and 
 he fittingly ends his life as an improductive writer and lonely 
 batchelor. Hollingsworth, by contrast, is able to break the circle of 
 his egoistic obsession and to begin reforming himself with the help 
 of Priscilla, his link with the world. 
 
 The perfectionistic values which had been the basis for Haw¬ 
 thorne’s tales and novels are, in The Marble Faun, formulated ex¬ 
 plicitly as myth in the history of the Monte Benis. The characters 
 in this last major novel are measured against the perfectionist 
 possibility of gaining greater humanity. As the novel opens, each of 
 the four characters is in a state of withdrawal from the active, time- 
 affected world, out of touch with society, and out of sympathy with 
 other people: Donatello in his Arcadia is too animalistic to be called 
 fully human; Hilda lives in an angel’s untouchable world; Miriam 
 broods in the dark cave of bitterness; and Kenyon lives in the cold 
 marble world of art. Each must, if he is to reach a higher form of 
 being, first enter a period of self-scrutiny, become fully aware of his 
 own ignominy, and, as Donatello finally does, emerge from inward¬ 
 ness to commit himself in love to other mortals. 
 
 After he has committed murder, Donatello begins to brood about 
 the ugliness and mortality of his soul. It is Kenyon who warns him 
 of the dangers of sustained inwardness: 
 
 “Believe me,” said he, turning his eyes upon his friend, full of grave 
 and tender sympathy, “you know not what is requisite for your 
 spiritual growth, seeking, as you do, to keep your soul perpetually 
 in the unwholesome region of remorse. It was needful for you to pass 
 through that dark valley, but it is infinitely dangerous to linger there 
 
150 
 
 Claudia D. Johnson 
 
 too long; there is poison in the atmosphere, when we sit down and 
 brood in it, instead of girding up our loins to press onward.” (p. 273) 
 
 In order to grow, the soul must take a new direction. The per¬ 
 fectionist hope of a greater life for a man who dedicates h im self 
 in love to humankind is reflected by Kenyon and then by the nar¬ 
 rator as they anticipate Donatello’s emergence from remorse. Kenyon 
 advises him to avoid the life of seclusion and to make his new life 
 among men: 
 
 “But, for my own part, if I had an insupportable burthen—if, for any 
 cause, I were bent upon sacrificing every earthly hope as a peace-offering 
 towards Heaven—I would make the wide world my cell, and good 
 deeds to mankind my prayer.” (p. 267) 
 
 Donatello seems to respond to Kenyon’s humanism: 
 
 . . . when first the idea was suggested of living for the welfare of his 
 fellow-creatures, the original beauty, which sorrow had partly effaced, 
 came back elevated and spiritualized. In the black depths, the Faun 
 had found a soul, and was struggling with it towards the fight of 
 heaven, (p. 268) 
 
 That Donatello does eventually achieve what the perfectionists would 
 call a higher humanity is supported by the growth of a mature love 
 for Miriam and by the awakening of a moral sense which leads him 
 to deliver himself up to the world for judgment. 
 
 Thus from the earliest published tales to the last major novel, 
 Hawthorne demonstrated that he shared with nineteenth-century 
 perfectionists a timeless moral concern, which had caught the atten¬ 
 tion of his Puritan ancestors, of how man rises above his natural 
 state to a finer humanity, a greater manhood. Like both Puritan 
 and perfectionist, Hawthorne believed that it was necessary for man 
 to begin by making a journey into his own foul heart. Only when he 
 faced the awful truth that he was the worst of sinners could he begin 
 to grow in love. Man’s ultimate concern, however, could not con¬ 
 tinue to be his own soul nor his own salvation in the hereafter, but 
 the well-being of his brothers on this earth. The arrow of his soul’s 
 compass had to be moved outward by love rather than inward, for 
 although contemplation and seclusion were necessary stages in 
 man’s development, the complete man had to emerge from seclusion 
 
Nineteenth-Century Perfectionism 
 
 151 
 
 to become an active participant in society. The Hawthornian charac¬ 
 ter who fails to emerge continues to be obsessed and bedeviled. The 
 possibility of regeneration is usually represented by the love of a 
 woman who is invariably a link with society. 
 
 Hawthorne found these concerns interesting and useful to the 
 end of his life because he was both Puritan and democrat, convinced 
 of the dangerous inner hell of the soul at the same time that he was 
 caught up in the high possibilities of nineteenth-century society, 
 and because he could not dismiss either the past or the present, 
 either the light or the dark of human nature. 
 
 The combination of seventeenth-century Puritanism and nine¬ 
 teenth-century progressivism, which has confused or intrigued 
 Hawthorne’s critics, is no other than the religious mind of the age 
 as it was mirrored in the perfectionism of Hawthorne’s Bowdoin 
 professor, Thomas C. Upham, and others. Both recognized the dark, 
 forbidden mystery of the soul below, which had to be experienced 
 and transcended in love, and the active, growing world of human 
 relationships above, in which salvation had to be achieved. 
 
Hawthorne’s Public Decade and the Values of Home 
 
 Terence Martin 
 
 B etween 1850 and i860 Nathaniel Hawthorne lived the most 
 public years of his life. The early part of the decade evidenced 
 what was for him a virtual burst of creative energy. To recall; within 
 four years he produced three of his major romances and demon¬ 
 strated his versatility with children’s books and a campaign biog¬ 
 raphy of Franklin Pierce. Additionally, following the advice of 
 James T. Fields, he endeavored to gain maximum financial advan¬ 
 tage from the widening importance of his name and appeared 
 before the public with new editions of previously published tales. 
 In all, nine separate books—new, reissued, or repackaged—appeared 
 under Hawthorne’s name between 1850 and 1853. h was, indeed, 
 in the words of Roy Harvey Pearce, a time of “flourishing self- 
 confidence.”^ 
 
 If, in these years, Hawthorne presented himself to the public, the 
 middle years of the decade saw the public presenting itself to him. 
 From the time he assumed his post as United States Consul at Liver¬ 
 pool, he received a steady stream of callers—merchant seamen with 
 grievances, American citizens seeking legal, financial, or perhaps 
 emotional help, exiles in search of assistance. Overwhelmed at first 
 by the “rascally set of sailors” who crowded “pirate-like” into the 
 entry of his office, he responded with a greater involvement in the 
 affairs of others than he had formerly had occasion to show.^ The 
 years 1853 ^^57 brought Hawthorne into direct contact with dis¬ 
 
 tress and inhumanity. They also introduced him to England and to 
 an idea of homecoming that he would later seek in vain to articulate 
 in fiction. 
 
 In Italy during the last years of the decade, Hawthorne met 
 artists and poets as a peer, visited cathedrals and museums as an 
 
 1 “Historical Introduction," in True Stories from History and Biography, Centenary 
 Edition (Columbus, Ohio, 1972), p. 287. 
 
 2 Randall Stewart, ed.. The English Notebook.s by Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York. 
 1941), p. 3. 
 
The Values o£ Home 
 
 153 
 
 amateur critic, and perceived the mighty dimensions of the past as an 
 American. He was now the man of letters, of established reputation, 
 gathering force for a romance which would embody some significant 
 aspect of his European experience. The Marble Faun (i860) marks 
 the conclusion of Hawthorne’s public decade; in his Preface he 
 adopts a characteristic stance of trepidation but has the casual au¬ 
 thority of a man who has seen something of the world. There is an 
 eventful difference between the author who would offer “The 
 Gentle Boy” or “The Gray Champion” to the public as the fruits 
 of an uneasy solitude and the author who can say that his “Romance 
 was sketched out during a residence of considerable length in Italy, 
 and has been rewritten and prepared for the press in England.”^ As 
 much as anything could, the decade had made Hawthorne a cos¬ 
 mopolite. 
 
 As The Marble Faun reveals, however, Hawthorne had been chal¬ 
 lenged and unsettled by Italy. Rome, especially, held an attraction 
 with revolutionary implications for him. For he had carried abroad 
 an idea of home that served the specific requirements of his imagina¬ 
 tion. In England he acquired a second (related) idea of home that 
 extended his sense of history without transforming the capacities of 
 his imagination. Finally, in Italy, a third idea of home took hold of 
 his consciousness, one that he had perforce to repudiate even as he 
 wrenched fiction out of his experience. 
 
 I 
 
 Recorded in his English Notebook's and fashioned later into the 
 sketches of Our Old Home (1863), Hawthorne’s descriptions of 
 England demonstrate the manner in which he assimilated what he 
 saw. Although the attitudes of individual Englishmen occasionally 
 annoyed him, an American, Hawthorne felt, “has a singular tender¬ 
 ness for the stone-encrusted institutions of the mother-country.”^ 
 English scenes give him the persistent feeling of “having been there 
 before” (p. 63), so that he walks the streets of old Boston like some¬ 
 one “who has a right to be there” (p. 156). At ease in history, he is 
 
 The Marble Faun: or. The Romance of Monte Beni, Centenary Edition (Columbus, 
 Ohio, 1968), p. 2. 
 
 ■* Our Old Home: A Series of English Stretches, Centenary Edition (Columbus, Ohio. 
 1970), p. 60. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text. 
 
154 
 
 Terence Martin 
 
 able to pass judgment on aspects of the present because the past of 
 England is also his. The results of Puritan iconoclasm, for example, 
 evoke a bemused tolerance which softens the violence of a previous 
 century. The manner in which nature has domesticated stone fences 
 calls forth approval. And the “homelike atmosphere” (p. 213) of his 
 residence in the suburbs of London gives him a feeling of personal 
 comfort not unlike that of the Old Manse years before. 
 
 Hawthorne’s years in England thus extended his sense of home 
 into an idea of homecoming. But they did more than that: when 
 Hawthorne appraises London, “the dream-city of my youth” (p. 
 215), the idea of homecoming gives way to the experience of being 
 at the center of human activity. London, he writes, contains “the 
 central spot of all the world (which ... we may allow to be some¬ 
 where in the vicinity ... of St. Paul’s Cathedral)” (p. 214). Green¬ 
 wich Observatory accentuates this feeling of centrality; as he sets 
 his watch by the dial-plate on the wall of the Observatory, Haw¬ 
 thorne feels “it pleasant to be standing at the very centre of Time 
 and Space” (p, 223). London draws him from the periphery to the 
 center—of place, time, and space—establishing thereby a uniqueness 
 to which he must, and can, defer. He found the real London, he 
 says, better than the city of his youthful dreams, and he “acquired a 
 home-feeling there, as no where else in the world” (p. 215). 
 
 It is worth noting, however, that Hawthorne’s most complete 
 acceptance of London is to be found in Our Old Home and not in 
 his earlier notebook entries. Only after he had been to Italy did he 
 emphasize the magnetic centrality of London. Only after he had 
 lived in Rome did he describe London as incomparable. From the 
 vantage point of the Thames he bids us look back upon roofs, 
 steeples, towers, columns, “and the great crowning Dome—look 
 back, in short, upon that mystery of the world’s proudest city, amid 
 which a man so longs and loves to be; not, perhaps, because it con¬ 
 tains much that is positively admirable and enjoyable, but because 
 at all events the world has nothing better” (p. 255). 
 
 The troubled opening sentence of chapter thirty-six of The Marble 
 Faun provides a striking contrast to this reconciled praise of London. 
 It is a monumental sentence, by far the longest Hawthorne ever 
 wrote; in waves of detail he struggles to express the assault of Rome 
 on a temperament nourished in and by New England. He enumer¬ 
 ates the ugliness and hypocrisy of Rome so enervating both to body 
 
The Values of Home 
 
 155 
 
 and spirit—the “alley-like” streets, the “cheerless” firesides, the bug- 
 ridden beds, the “rancid butter,” the “pretense of Holiness and the 
 reality of Nastiness.” But Hawthorne’s aggregation of details, con¬ 
 crete, startling, with the bite of experience behind them, turns out 
 over three hundred words later to be a massive concession. For when 
 we have known at first hand the languor and trickery of Rome, and 
 departed, “hating her with all our might,” we are astonished to dis¬ 
 cover, “by-and-by, that our heart-strings have mysteriously attached 
 themselves to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again, 
 as if it were more familiar, more intimately our home, than even 
 the spot where we were born!” 
 
 Hawthorne expressed his divided and swirling feelings about 
 Rome before he extolled London as the best of the world’s cities, 
 before he said that London gave him a “home-feeling” as did no 
 place “else in the world.” In the later years of his public decade, 
 Rome had engaged Hawthorne as London never did. It was the 
 “imperial” city, the “City of all time, and of all the world.”® Yet, in 
 his French and Italian notebooks, Hawthorne repeatedly bemoans 
 “the dreariness, the ugliness, shabbiness, un-home-likeness of a 
 Roman street.”® Another notebook entry at the time of his leaving 
 Italy catches the ambivalence of his feelings: he wishes never to see 
 
 any of those objects again, though no place ever took so strong a hold of 
 my being as Rome, nor ever seemed so close to me and so strangely 
 familiar. I seem to know it better than my birthplace, and to have known 
 it longer; and though I have been very miserable there . . . , and dis¬ 
 gusted with a thousand things in its daily life, still I cannot say I hate it, 
 perhaps might fairly own a love for it. But life being too short for such 
 questionable and troublesome enjoyments, I desire never to set eyes on 
 it again.^ 
 
 The illness of his daughter Una in Rome caused Hawthorne con¬ 
 siderable personal anguish. Beyond that, however, Rome came to 
 represent to him the antithesis of his New England sense of home, 
 all the more forcibly to be resisted because submitting to it would 
 require a radical shift in vision, in faith, in personality. He seems 
 later to have stressed the homelikeness of London as a way of tem¬ 
 pering the claims of Rome. 
 
 ^ The Marble Faun, p. 111. 
 
 ^Passages From the French and Italian Note-Book,s, Riverside Edition (Boston, 1883), 
 P- 59 - 
 
 Ibid., pp. 506-507. 
 
156 
 
 Terence Martin 
 
 Hawthorne had gone abroad in 1853 with a sense of home so 
 developed, so ingrained, that he could grumble about it and sport 
 with it, even as he relied on it. Out of his felt assumptions about 
 New England and his investigations into New England history had 
 come fiction that bore a particular imaginative signature. His years 
 in England and those in Italy gave him as a man two additional 
 senses of home, one congenial, one fraught with a feeling of attrac¬ 
 tion and repulsion. But Hawthorne the man remained Hawthorne 
 the artist. And the importance of such biographical considerations 
 is that we might come to see more clearly how and why his Euro¬ 
 pean homes failed to satisfy his artistic needs. Framing Hawthorne’s 
 public decade are The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun, his 
 classic romance and his most ambitious but least satisfactory one. To 
 consider certain qualities of each of these romances (along with 
 aspects of representative tales) in the context of his European experi¬ 
 ence is to understand something of the meaning of home for Haw¬ 
 thorne’s imagination. 
 
 II 
 
 When Henry James catalogs the items of high civilization that 
 were missing in the United States of Hawthorne’s time, he lists social 
 phenomena which supported the texture of his own fiction. But 
 Hawthorne, as James concedes, was part of the culture in which he 
 worked: accustomed to a lack of density in his world, he could 
 breathe, and draw sustenance from, a rarefied social atmosphere. 
 
 There is a good deal of truth in James’s observations. To press the 
 matter further, however, is to see that Hawthorne, plagued by what 
 he calls the American insistence on actualities, deliberately courts in 
 his work a thinness and sparseness far greater than that of his own 
 day. Tales such as “The Hollow of the Three Hills” and “The 
 Birthmark,” for example, are set in vague, a-social worlds. The mode 
 of reality is that of the fairy tale converted to the purposes of the 
 moral fable; consequently, such tales lack social furnishing even as 
 they defy history. But Hawthorne's historical tales likewise thrive on 
 sparseness: he consistently moves his most characteristic fiction back 
 toward the beginnings of the colonial experience in America and lets 
 his imagination take advantage of what he finds—and does not find 
 —there. 
 
 Hawthorne’s descriptions of a Puritan meetinghouse and of a 
 
The Values of Home 
 
 157 
 
 cathedral may serve to illustrate the importance of a demeuble his¬ 
 torical artifact to him. Plain on the outside, the meetinghouse in 
 “The Gentle Boy” is “rude” in its interior, with a “low ceiling,” 
 “unplastered walls,” “naked wood work,” an “undraperied pulpit,” 
 and, in place of pews, “rows of long, cushionless benches.”*^ Beyond 
 the fact of historical accuracy, which leads Hawthorne to seat the 
 adult men and women on opposite sides of the single aisle, the very 
 lack of churchly furnishings, inviting the rhetorical negatives, makes 
 the meetinghouse functionally accessible to Hawthorne’s Active imag¬ 
 ination—which is to say that in such an “unadorned” setting (as he 
 terms it) the actions of his characters can command full attention. 
 In Our Old Home, he uses the “one set of phrases” which, he be¬ 
 lieves, adequately describe “all the Cathedrals in England, and else¬ 
 where”: “an acre or two of stone-flags for a pavement; rows of vast 
 columns supporting a vaulted roof at a dusky height”; “stained 
 glass’’ windows, a “massive organ,” the “Bishop’s throne, the pulpit, 
 the altar” (p. 147). The consequence, as Hawthorne goes on to say, 
 is that in cathedrals “the sermon is an exceedingly diminutive and 
 unimportant part of the religious services.” The “magnificence of 
 the setting quite dazzles out what we Puritans look upon as the jewel 
 of the whole affair” (pp. 226-227). 
 
 The difference—iconic density and iconoclastic sparseness—be¬ 
 tween cathedral and meetinghouse is obvious. And the meaning of 
 that difference is equally clear: in a cathedral setting, amid splendor 
 that expresses the significance of the past, the importance of human 
 action, specifically the human word, is lessened, even minimized. 
 Hawthorne’s ideal seems to be the Puritans’ first “house of worship,” 
 described in “Main Street” as “naked, simple, and severe,” infused, 
 however, with an “enriching” faith that makes “of these new walls, 
 and this narrow compass, its own cathedral.”® The best cathedrals 
 take their metaphorical structure from the human spirit. Only in 
 such a house of worship could Arthur Dimmesdale’s sermons possess 
 their compelling power. In a European cathedral, the Reverend Mr. 
 Hooper might pass unnoticed behind a veil of incense. 
 
 For Hawthorne, sparseness, in virtually every form, was prefer¬ 
 able to denseness. In his fiction it allowed him to emphasize the 
 
 ® Twice-Told Tales, Riverside Edition (Boston, 1882), pp. 96-97. 
 
 ^ The House of the Seven Gables and The Snow Image, Riverside Edition (Boston, 1883), 
 p. 449. 
 
158 
 
 Terence Martin 
 
 importance of the human character. In his life it allowed him to 
 respond to human situations more fully than he could otherwise. His 
 experience with beggars is a case in point. When an elderly widow 
 from a foreign land came begging at the Old Manse in 1842, Haw¬ 
 thorne took occasion to write in his notebook that he had never 
 knowingly refused his “mite to a wandering beggar.” With so much 
 “want and wretchedness in the world,” one may “safely take the 
 word of any mortal” who asks assistance. “It is desirable,” he con¬ 
 tinues, “that such persons should be permitted to roam through our 
 land of plenty, scattering the seeds of tenderness and charity—as 
 birds of passage bear the seeds of precious plants . . . without ever 
 dreaming of the office which they perform.”^® 
 
 Hawthorne had doubtless seen very few beggars at this contented 
 point in his life; faced with one, he can indulge himself with a rush 
 of sentiment. He heightens the importance, the human-ness, of the 
 widow and proceeds to consider her life as if she were to be a char¬ 
 acter in a romance. When, in England, he came into contact with 
 numerous beggars, he learned to distrust them and to withhold his 
 “mite,” at times with a guilty conscience. In Italy, inundated with 
 beggars, he reacted with a drastic change in attitude. “This kind of 
 vermin,” Hawthorne writes of paupers in The Marble Faun, “in¬ 
 fested the house of Monte Beni worse than any other spot in beggar- 
 haunted Italy”; beggars become “pests”—“human ones.”^^ Such 
 remarks cannot be attributed exclusively to that fashionable abstrac¬ 
 tion we call a narrator, thereby exempting Hawthorne from com¬ 
 plicity. These are Hawthorne’s feelings, as clear in The Marble 
 Faun as they are in his notebooks when he reports that the “multi¬ 
 tude of beggars in Italy makes the heart as obdurate as stone.”^^ 
 Understandable as this language may be for anyone who has found 
 his capacity to give bankrupted by overwhelming and insistent 
 poverty, it is a far cry from what Hawthorne wrote about the foreign 
 widow in 1842. Confronted by one beggar, he could not only respond 
 but could emphasize her importance to others. Confronted by dele¬ 
 gations of beggars, he not only turns hard-hearted but relegates them 
 to the status of “vermin.” Once again, the human element, so crucial 
 
 Claude M. Simpson, ed., The American Notehook.s, Centenary Edition (Columbus, 
 Ohio. 1972), p. 353. 
 
 '1 The Marble Faun, pp. 241, 306. 
 
 12 French and Italian Note-Book,s, p. 240. 
 
The Values of Home 
 
 159 
 
 to his life and art, is made possible only by scarceness or sparseness. 
 
 Even sportively, in comparing English and American women, 
 Hawthorne finds a way to award the prize to sparseness. After 
 several years’ residence in England, he confesses in Our Old Home, 
 the beauty of English women has come to appeal to his “deteriorated” 
 taste. American women, in contrast to their English sisters, seem to 
 possess a “certain meagreness, (Heaven forbid that I should call it 
 scrawniness!) a deficiency of physical development, a scantiness, so 
 to speak, in the pattern of their material make, a paleness of com¬ 
 plexion, a thinness of voice.” Because he must half-acknowledge that 
 English women are the “finer animals,” he resolves, “much the 
 more sturdily,” to praise American women as “angels”: “It would be 
 a pitiful bargain to give up the ethereal charm of American beauty 
 in exchange for half a hundred-weight of human clay!” (p. 334). 
 
 To say that Hawthorne’s American fiction is bereft of cathedrals, 
 multitudes of beggars, and fat women is only to make the serious 
 point that Hawthorne, needing a context of sparseness or thinness in 
 order to appreciate the importance of the human character, deliber¬ 
 ately courts “thin” settings which accentuate the human drama to be 
 played out. Concomitant with this tendency, as I have suggested, 
 is his need to feel that although his tale might be drenched with 
 what history there is, not much history exists behind it. Only with a 
 sense of being imaginatively near the beginning can Hawthorne tell 
 us, in the second paragraph of The Scarlet Letter, that the founders 
 of any new colony “have invariably recognized it among their 
 earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a 
 cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.” He has the 
 authority to record the fact that the Puritans laid out the “first burial- 
 ground” around the grave of Isaac Johnson and that it “became the 
 nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old church-yard of 
 King’s Chapel.” Imaginatively at the beginning, present in a history 
 that has broken with the past, he can refer to the first burial ground 
 and even to the first death as he leads us into the new, thin, atmo¬ 
 sphere of The Scarlet Letter. In Scotland, he looked into a church¬ 
 yard and “saw that the ground was absolutely stuffed with dead 
 people” {Our Old Home, p. 205). That kind of perception—of den¬ 
 sity and of age impossible to circumvent—would forever stultify 
 Hawthorne’s creative impulse. 
 
 In Rome, as one might expect, the “massiveness” of the past 
 precludes any attempt to get to a beginning. Indeed, in The Marble 
 
i6o 
 
 Terence Martin 
 
 Faun the dimensions of the past outreach description: Rome invites 
 one to look not at but through successive stages of history, “through 
 a vista of century beyond century," through alternating phases of 
 barbarism and civilization, “through a broad pathway of progressive 
 generations," until, finally, “you behold the obelisks . . . , hinting 
 at a Past infinitely more remote than history can define." In com¬ 
 parison with that “immeasurable distance." concludes Hawthorne, 
 “your own life is as nothing." What a cathedral does to a sermon, 
 the Roman past does to all individual activity. As a consequence of 
 its “weight and density," our concerns become “but half as real, here, 
 as elsewhere."^® 
 
 With no chance to sift back through history and get to a begin¬ 
 ning in The Marble Faun, Hawthorne operates under a severe handi¬ 
 cap. He tries to give a sense of beginning-ness by reenacting more 
 explicidy than is his wont the story of man’s fall from innocence, but 
 the past of Rome stands between him and the fulfilled meaning of 
 his subject. Only in The Marble Faun does a past loom thick behind 
 the setting of a Hawthorne story. Representative of the historical 
 tales, “Young Goodman Brown” has barely enough past to give 
 meaning to the action taking place. Replete with Hawiihorne's per¬ 
 sistent concerns, the sketch “Main Street" traces the growth of a 
 community “from infancy upward" and follows that growth only 
 through the life span of John Massey, the “first-born of Naum- 
 keag."^‘ The Blithedale Romance, very much the story of a begin¬ 
 ning. requires the absence of all but a few biographical threads. In 
 The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne’s most time-bound 
 American romance, the chin line of a family past informs the devel¬ 
 oping contours of a story that reaches toward a new start at the end. 
 And in The Scarlet Letter there is virtually nothing behind the 
 Puritans with whom Hawthorne deals; he is so close to a beginning 
 that the death of Governor Winthrop can be converted to the pur¬ 
 poses of the romance. At its characteristic best, we may say, Haw¬ 
 thorne’s imagination seeks out and creates a beginning (hence sparse, 
 thin) moment in history—out of which much comes tumbling for¬ 
 ward but behind which, quite logically, there is very little. In The 
 Marble Faun, Hawthorne cannot employ this basic strategy. 
 
 Set against the world of The Marble Faun, the world of The 
 
 The Marble Faun, quotations drawn from pp. 410 and 6. 
 
 The House of the Seren Gables and The Snow Image, pp. 430, 4=50. Hawthorne also 
 focuses on Roger Conant, “the first settler of Naumkeag," in this sketch (p. 443). 
 
The Values o£ Home 
 
 i6i 
 
 Scarlet Letter seems wondrously empty. At bottom, what is missing 
 in Hawthorne’s Boston is iconography—with all that icons can imply 
 about the expressive nature of the past. Because of the Puritan in¬ 
 sistence on directness of worship, because of their fl«//-iconic bias, 
 Hawthorne is able to appropriate a point in time prior to icons. Thus, 
 in the marketplace of Boston is the scaffold, the formal and public 
 place for the revelation of sin. In the marketplace of Perugia, by 
 way of contrast, is the statue of Pope Julius III with his hand out¬ 
 stretched in benediction. At noon, Hester Prynne stands on her 
 “pedestal of shame,” the absolute center of attention. At noon, too, 
 Miriam and Donatello meet penitentially at the foot of the Pope’s 
 statue, while the people in the bustling square pay no more attention 
 to them than to cast admiring glances at Miriam’s beauty. Haw¬ 
 thorne’s scene in The Marble Faun is effective; he makes good use 
 of his “bronze pontiff.” But in The Scarlet Letter he has been able 
 to put' a human character rather than a statue on a pedestal and 
 thereby set a hidden human action directly at the center of his 
 romance. That Hester and Pearl may remind one flickeringly of 
 Madonna and Child enforces the human priority inherent in Haw'- 
 thorne’s setting, as does his statement (toward the end of the ro¬ 
 mance) that Hester “stood, statue-like, at the foot of the scaffold.”'® 
 At a time “when the professional character was of itself a lofty 
 pedestal,” Arthur Dimmesdale is in effect w'orshipped by his parish¬ 
 ioners, who revere him as Romans might venerate the statue of a 
 saint—and thus make his self-serving penance all the more possible. 
 Dimmesdale’s final sermon evokes a shout of apotheosis from all 
 assembled in the marketplace: “Never, on New England soil,” 
 writes Hawthorne, “had stood the man so honored by his mortal 
 brethren as the preacher.”'** Prior to icons at this fictive moment, the 
 human character in The Scarlet Letter compels a total focus of 
 attention from the community and from the reader. 
 
 Hawthorne goes one masterful step farther in The Scarlet Letter. 
 Possessed of a pre-iconic w’orld, he creates an icon out of the Puritans’ 
 punishment for adultery. And in the way his heart can respond to a 
 single beggar, his imagination can respond to a single icon. Rome, 
 Hawthorne might say, is “absolutely stuffed” with iconography, ancf 
 although his description of Hilda in St. Peter’s Cathedral has the 
 
 ^^The Scarlet Letter, Centenary Edition (Columbus. Ohio, 11)62). p. 244. 
 
 ^®Ibid., pp. 249-250. 
 
i 62 
 
 Terence Martin 
 
 charm of a temptation resisted, he balks at the sheer number of 
 statues, crosses, shrines, and grottoes in Italy. His frequent recourse 
 to the techniques of the sketch in The Marble Faun suggests a prob¬ 
 lem of assimilation. In The Scarlet Letter, however, with no such 
 problem besetting him, Hawthorne presides over the creation of an 
 icon—which, as he claims in “The Custom-House,” has survived the 
 world that brought it into being. 
 
 By means of that scarlet A, a literal object, so he would have us 
 believe, Hawthorne leads us back into a world barren of icons. The 
 letter, as we know, dominates the romance. When Hester stands on 
 the scaffold, all eyes are “concentered” on the A. Arthur Dimmesdale 
 finds it fixed at the center of his meditative life. Roger Chillingworth 
 pursues it obsessively. Even the suit of armor in Governor Belling¬ 
 ham’s mansion, one of the few things brought into the romance 
 from the past, mirrors it back for all to see. But this icon—standing 
 alone, grounded in a historical moment which Hawthorne can 
 visualize as a beginning—enhances rather than diminishes the im¬ 
 portance of the human individual. Moral in nature and meaning, it 
 becomes protean and omnipresent, heuristic and elusive, yet dramat¬ 
 ically sacrificial in that each character can embody it, and by so 
 doing, humanize it. 
 
 Ill 
 
 When Hawthorne went abroad in the 1850’s he wrote extensively 
 in his notebooks, first in England, then in Italy. With great insight 
 he portrayed persons, manners, institutions. Along with The Marble 
 Faun and Our Old Home, these notebooks demonstrate that he 
 acquired a sense of home in England and that later, in Italy, Rome 
 appealed to him as a place more familiar than the spot where he was 
 born. Such sentiments signified much to a man who put a consum¬ 
 mate value on home, whose work dramatized the importance of 
 heart and hearth, whose original sense of New England as home 
 had engendered fiction of high order. Retrospectively, Hawthorne 
 saw London as the central city of the world and developed a perilous 
 love-hate feeling with regard to Rome. New England, London, 
 Rome: with full awareness of his different attitudes toward each, we 
 may say that these were the three homes of Nathaniel Hawthorne. 
 
 But Hawthorne abroad was faced with a world to which he could 
 
The Values of Home 
 
 163 
 
 not bring a strategy for writing fiction that had been more than 
 twenty years in the making. For the first time in his career, a sense 
 of home was not easily in the service of his imagination. In London 
 he may have experienced a feeling of centrality, but in New England 
 he could acquire a sense of being near a beginning. In Rome he 
 could find many icons, but in New England he could respond to 
 one forged out of his imagination. His inability to complete The 
 Ancestral Footstep —and, later. Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret —stems, I 
 should think, not only from his failing powers as an artist during 
 the years of the Civil War but also from his attempt to impose 
 life-long creative habits on a history he could not “thin out,” to work 
 toward a beginning he could not possess imaginatively. His difficul¬ 
 ties with The Marble Faun are compounded by his feeling that 
 present day Rome “seems like nothing but a heap of broken rub¬ 
 bish.”'‘ The density of the Roman past evokes Hawthorne’s most 
 archetypal plot. But Hawthorne the artist does not live by plot alone, 
 and when Kenyon asks Hilda to guide him home at the end of the 
 romance one senses that there is no alternative, and one is told that 
 home is New England. 
 
 Capable of so much after a long, quiet struggle into life, Haw¬ 
 thorne’s imagination could not experience another parturition during 
 his years abroad. After beginning his public decade with a flurry of 
 achievement, he came to confront a world that—no matter how 
 broadening, how enticing, how challenging—did not fulfill the con¬ 
 ditions for his special kind of fiction. With all its limitations. New 
 England remained Hawthorne’s imaginative home. The Scarlet 
 Letter testifies to its sustaining quality. 
 
 The Marble Faun, p. no. 
 
Hawthorne’s Coverdale: Character and Art in 
 The Blithedale Romance 
 James H. Justus 
 
 I 
 
 W HEN HE DECIDED to draw hcavily upon his experiences at Brook 
 Farm for The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne aggressively 
 confronted for the first time in his fiction the abundant materials of 
 the present. Although his letters and notebooks reveal an urgency to 
 define, work within, and preserve a synecdochic present—“that nar¬ 
 row strip of sunlight which we call Now”—his third extended fiction 
 was the closest Hawthorne was ever to come to the beef-and-beer sub¬ 
 stantiality which he saw and admired in novelists like Trollope.^ A 
 work that traditionally has been, with the exception of James’s and 
 Howells’s high regard, the least admired of his major productions, 
 Blithedale has always seemed something of an anomaly in the canon 
 of American Romances. 
 
 Its characters, sketchily developed like those in most of Haw¬ 
 thorne’s works, seem less dependent than usual upon figural types 
 and tend to function independently of their vaguely assigned alle¬ 
 gorical roles. It is Hawthorne’s only major fiction whose dialogue 
 consistently reproduces the authentic ring of actual speech. Because 
 of its time and place, though they are no more “removed” than those 
 of The House of the Seven Gables, this work exploits contemporary 
 events rather than historical legends. Finally, with a first-person point 
 of view, used otherwise for only a few undistinguished sketches, 
 Hawthorne succeeds in making Miles Coverdale one of the most 
 
 ^ In their different ways Arlin Turner and Frederick C. Crews have confirmed the deep 
 autobiographical nature of this book; and from the time of its publication there has been no 
 dearth of readers who, taking lightly the author’s ambiguous disavowals in the preface, prefer 
 to see Blithedale as a roman a clej. See .'\rlin Turner, “Autobiographical Elements in Haw¬ 
 thorne’s The Blithedale Romance," University of Texas Studies in English, XV (July, 1935). 
 39-62, and Nathaniel Hawthorne: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York, 1961). 
 pp. 79-81; Frederick C. Crews, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes 
 (New York, 1966), pp. 198-205, passim. I stress not the origins of Coverdale but the mani¬ 
 festations of his character and talent in his own narrative. 
 
Coverdale 
 
 165 
 
 interesting and complex I-narrators in our nineteenth-century 
 literature. 
 
 11 
 
 It is curious that Blithedale is such a dispassionate document. 
 Despite its subject, it lacks the fire and thunder appropriate to the 
 widespread hyperbolism of reformist New England. Hollingsworth’s 
 moral enthusiasm before his break with Coverdale is low-keyed for 
 a man who is described as “forever fiddling on a single string,” and 
 the early Zenobia is as much a chattering dilettante as Coverdale. It 
 is almost as if Hawthorne had taken the fervent reformers of his 
 time, who from most accounts turn out to be impassioned creatures 
 of both mind and tongue—almost their own caricatures of reformers 
 —and scaled them down into characters less sensational, less melo¬ 
 dramatic, less visceral than their general counterparts in real life. 
 
 One critic believes that Hollingsworth is “an unimpressive mono¬ 
 maniac” and Zenobia is “an unconvincing feminist” because of Haw¬ 
 thorne’s inept characterization.^ More to the point is Hawthorne’s 
 necessity for giving over the duties of characterization to his artist- 
 narrator, whose skill at painting such portraits is not equal to the bias 
 which nourishes them. Hawthorne’s subject of course is not reform, 
 and Miles Coverdale is not the spokesman for a specific reform move¬ 
 ment. Yet Coverdale is convincing in his revealed ambivalences to¬ 
 ward reform and reformers; his earlier faint praise of Hollingsworth 
 and his admiration for the New Woman cannot conceal Coverdale’s 
 perverse psychic thrill in seeing both finally get their comeuppance. 
 In this complex work, the nature of reform and the nature of the 
 narrator are mutually reinforcing aspects of Hawthorne’s vision. 
 
 As a document. The Blithedale Romance directly confronts the 
 question, livelier perhaps in antebellum Massachusetts than else¬ 
 where, of “How shall a man live?” It exploits the competing claims 
 for saying how, from such pseudo-sciences as mesmerism and spiritu¬ 
 alism to such serious concerns as social theory and humanitarianism. 
 Indeed, it touches upon choices demanded by a reformist culture: 
 material grubbing or spiritual transformation ? labor or leisure ? com¬ 
 merce or art? urban or rural values? patchwork revision or radical 
 
 ^Rudolph Von Abele, The Death of the Artist: A Study of Hawthorne’s Disintegration 
 (The Hague, 1955), p. 83. 
 
James H. Justus 
 
 166 
 
 reform? dilettantism or ideology? The generating energies in this 
 narrative emerge from what Hawthorne’s Concord neighbor Emer¬ 
 son referred to variously as “The Present Age,” “The Times,” or “The 
 Mind and Manners of the XIX Century.” Here, the truths of the 
 human heart are tested by the explicitly social and cultural ferment 
 of reform, the most characteristic signature of American life in the 
 1840’s and 1850’s. In no other of his fictions does Hawthorne en¬ 
 compass such a remarkable spectrum of life-styles of his time; Blithe- 
 dale is his “Mind and Manners of the XIX Century,” his one romance 
 that at least aspires to the form of the novel. 
 
 The pivot in this romance-novel is Coverdale. The bits and pieces 
 of the story of the Blithedale brotherhood form the substance of 
 Coverdale’s story; these same bits and pieces, augmented by the 
 ramifying implications of the urban past and the conflict of influ¬ 
 ences both personal and ideological in Coverdale,^ form the substance 
 of Hawthorne’s story. If Coverdale is an embarrassingly peripheral 
 actor in the romance of Blithedale, Hawthorne makes him the lead¬ 
 ing performer in The Blithedale Romance. That Coverdale, as narra¬ 
 tor, is not entirely to be trusted in the tale he tells is by now generally 
 accepted, but Coverdale’s limitations follow from the contextual fact 
 that the elusive and disjointed events which Coverdale relates are 
 totemistic events whose importance lies in the valuations he puts on 
 them.^ The character of this narrator finally cannot be abstracted 
 from the form which he encloses (the story he tells), but, more 
 crucially, he cannot be abstracted from the form which encloses him 
 (the story which Hawthorne tells). 
 
 Whereas this minor New England poet writes of a failed com¬ 
 munal enterprise, Hawthorne writes of a failed human being—and 
 
 3 Leo B. Levy is the only critic to stress societal change as an important context for the 
 fate of Hawthorne’s characters. Coverdale, he observes, stands midway between the forces of 
 a newly mechanized society and an older rural America. See "The Blithedale Romance: 
 Hawthorne’s ‘Voyage Through Chaos,’ ” Studies in Romantiasm, VIII (Autumn, 1968), 
 1 - 15 - 
 
 ^ In "A New Reading of The Blithedale Romance," American Literature, XXIX (May, 
 1957), 147-170, Frederick C. Crews finds Coverdale a morally deficient narrator; in Sins of 
 the Fathers, he finds crippling Oedipal compulsions as well. William Hedges argues for a 
 Coverdale who learns from his experiences in "Hawthorne’s Blithedale: The Function of the 
 Narrator,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XIV (March, i960), 303-316. Kelley Griffith, Jr.’s 
 "Form in The Blithdale Romance,” American Literature, XL (March, 1968), 15-26, and 
 Nina Baym’s “The Blithedale Romance: A Radical Reading/' JEGP, LXVIII (Oct.. 1968), 
 545-569, are the two most peninent studies which concentrate on the narrator as Haw¬ 
 thorne’s subject. See also Louis Auchincloss, "The Blithedale Romance: A Study in Form and 
 Point of View,” Nathaniel Hau/thorne Journal, II (1972), 53-58. 
 
Coverdale 
 
 167 
 
 does so both as romancer and novelist. Coverdale explores the weak¬ 
 nesses of egotists, faithless lovers, proud businessmen brought low, 
 females both liberated and parasitic, grubby Yankee farmers, and 
 spiritualist charlatans, all of whom undercut the high purposes of 
 Blithedale; Hawthorne explores the process by which a man who 
 shrinks from the taint of human imperfection dooms himself 
 irrevocably to a life of sterile complacency. 
 
 The mannerisms which so annoy Coverdale’s friends are not only 
 the traits of a self-indulgent Boston gentleman; they are also symp¬ 
 toms of an unfulfilled poet whose life in the city has been as com¬ 
 fortably conventional as his verse. Psychologically, Coverdale is never 
 far away from his urban quarters, which he alludes to several times, 
 and the society which shapes his tastes and values. If his good life 
 suggests dilettantism, the tenacity with which he mentally clings to 
 it suggests the need for emotional anchoring. His bout of chills and 
 fever at Blithedale, following his exposure to the unseasonable 
 weather, is a physical equivalent of the emotional strain involved in 
 the transition. In a new and untried society, he recalls the stable 
 charm of what he has left behind: 
 
 My pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, 
 with the bed-chamber adjoining; my centre-table, strewn with books and 
 periodicals; my writing-desk, with a half-finished poem in a stanza of my 
 own contrivance; my morning lounge at the reading-room or picture 
 gallery; my noontide walk along the cheery pavement, with the sug¬ 
 gestive succession of human faces, and the brisk throb of human life, in 
 which I shared; my dinner at the Albion, where I had a hundred 
 dishes at command . . . ; my evening at the billiard-club, the concert, the 
 theatre, or at somebody’s party, if I pleased:—what could be better than 
 all this ? ® 
 
 The man whose comfort is made secure by “a good fire burning in 
 the grate” and a closet stocked with champagne and claret must 
 adjust to plain tea from “earthen cups” before a more unrestrained 
 fire of peat, pine, and oak in a country fireplace. 
 
 ^The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe, Centenary Edition (Columbus, 1964), p. 40. 
 All other extensive quotations from Blithedale are from this edition and are incorporated in 
 the text. 
 
i68 
 
 James H. Justus 
 
 III 
 
 Miles Coverdale begins his last chapter with a conventional tack: 
 “It remains only to say a few words about myself.” What follows, 
 however, is gratuitous, since the entire story has been more a self¬ 
 dramatization than an account of a failed communal experiment. 
 What the reader learns of the founding and disbanding of Blithedale 
 is thin, curiously inert, generalized; any sense of a thickly textured 
 life comes primarily from the minutely recorded stages of the 
 narrator’s personal relationships. 
 
 Amiable as he is, Coverdale displays revealing deficiencies both as 
 a man and as an artist, and those deficiencies matter. While Haw¬ 
 thorne was always too ambivalent about the artist ever to equate the 
 good man and good artist, both kinds of flaws in Coverdale coincide 
 in such a way that they not merely round out the portrait of one 
 character but also signal Hawthorne’s abiding interest in both the 
 implications of the cold heart in human affairs and in the possibilities 
 and limitations of art. From his own account, two aspects of Cover- 
 dale can be isolated for analysis without damaging the overall tex¬ 
 ture of his narrative: his attitude toward Hollingsworth (which sug¬ 
 gests his frailty as a man) and his use of Zenobia as symbol (which 
 establishes the aesthetic boundaries of his art). Coverdale’s judgment 
 that he has made “but a poor and dim figure in [his] own narra¬ 
 tive,” like so many evaluations which he makes earlier, is untrue. 
 Though the springs of action for most of the principals in the story 
 remain hidden, those of Coverdale do not. For all his flaws he is the 
 most familiar, the most knowable character in the book. 
 
 Coverdale’s declaration of love for Priscilla at the end of his narra¬ 
 tive may not be as jejune as earlier readers took it to be, but it indi¬ 
 cates a spiritual impoverishment more profound than some readers 
 now are willing to grant.® Prior to his “Confession,” Coverdale gives 
 no indications that he looks upon the seamstress as anything more 
 than a vacuous encumbrance, a patronizing attitude betraying a 
 social and intellectual snobbery. Throughout the narrative, however, 
 he has been attracted to both Zenobia—for her sexuality, her intelli- 
 
 ® Ellen E. Morgan, for example, argues convincingly that Coverdale's passion for Zenobia 
 is psychologically displaced by Priscilla in the “confession,” but concludes curiously that 
 Coverdale is “finally not a failure, but ... a man capable of a profoundly moving lover’s 
 obsession.” See “The Veiled Lady: The Secret Love of Miles Coverdale,” Nathaniel Haw¬ 
 thorne Journal,! (1971),169-181. 
 
Coverdale 
 
 169 
 
 gence and passion, and her “mystery”—and Hollingsworth—for his 
 masculine authoritativeness and his magnetism; he has even been 
 drawn briefly, Coverdale admits, to the despicable Westervelt. But all 
 are finally irrelevant in the matter. “Miles Coverdale’s Confession” 
 covertly acknowledges an inability to love, a radically disabling flaw 
 which cripples him both as man and artist. His unimpressive sub¬ 
 stitutes for love, on which he expends considerable energy, are a 
 peevish antipathy for masculine power and an exaggerated emphasis 
 on feminine passion. Those substitutes are a direct outgrowth of his 
 disappointing relationships with Hollingsworth and Zenobia. 
 
 Critics usually take Hollingsworth’s scheme to rehabilitate crimi¬ 
 nals at face value (which is to say at Coverdale’s valuation)—at best 
 a single-minded, abstract, “partial” reform of the kind which both 
 Emerson and Hawthorne distrusted, and at worst one that is gran¬ 
 diose, self-serving, dishonest, and possibly illegal. Although Hollings¬ 
 worth’s language in Chapter 15 is egocentric and absolutist, as be¬ 
 fitting the radical reformer, much of the extremist tone is a result of 
 Coverdale’s mediating consciousness. After Hollingsworth rejects 
 Coverdale’s proposal to put some of Fourier’s principles to work at 
 Blithedale, Coverdale uses the incident to charge his friend with a 
 lack of “real sympathy with our feelings and our hopes”; and he 
 characterizes Hollingsworth’s philanthropic reform with such terms 
 as “one channel,” “prolonged fiddling upon one string,” and “his 
 lonely and exclusive object in life.” But Hollingsworth rejects the 
 Fourieristic system because he believes it to be based on “the selfish 
 principle—the principle of all human wrong, the very blackness of 
 man’s heart, the portion of ourselves which we shudder at, and which 
 it is the whole aim of spiritual discipline to eradicate” (p. 53). 
 
 And though his own scheme may be overly sanguine, its principle 
 is unselfishness.' It concerned, Coverdale reports, “the reformation 
 of the wicked by methods moral, intellectual, and industrial, by the 
 sympathy of pure, humble, and yet exalted minds, and by opening to 
 his pupils the possibility of a worthier life than that which had be¬ 
 come their fate” (p. 131). Since even in the narrator’s paraphrase the 
 project sounds more admirable than heinous, to discredit it Cover- 
 dale falls back on what “most people thought”: that it was “imprac- 
 
 " Zenobia’s evaluation of Hollingsworth ("It is all self!"), though understandable, is not 
 necessarily the complete story; moreover, the rage is directed toward Hollingsworth the man 
 and would-be husband rather than Hollingsworth the philanthropist. 
 
170 
 
 James H. Justus 
 
 ticable.” But Hollingsworth rightly assesses the impracticableness of 
 Blithedale, which is, he says, “a wretched, unsubstantial scheme . . . 
 on which we have wasted a precious summer of our lives” (p. 130). 
 As reforms go, Hollingsworth’s is considerably more tangible and 
 less self-serving than the Blithedale experiment, which Coverdale 
 defends in language that betrays an unsupportable position even as 
 it reveals the abstraction of his commitment. 
 
 The man who in April calls Blithedale a “counterfeit Arcadia” and 
 who with his “customary levity” admits that he has little purpose in 
 life other than to “make pretty verses, and play a part, with . . . the 
 rest of the amateurs, in our pastoral,” is the same man who in August 
 exclaims that the community is now “beginning to flourish.” Hol¬ 
 lingsworth disagrees: “It is full of defects—irremediable and damn¬ 
 ing ones!—from first to last, there is nothing else! I grasp it in my 
 hand, and find no substance whatever. There is not human nature 
 in it!” (p. 132). Coverdale’s adherence to the idealism of Blithedale 
 is escapist, and Hollingsworth’s invitation to “strike hands” with him 
 promises this minor poet no more “languor and vague wretchedness” 
 but “strength, courage, immitigable will—everything that a manly 
 and generous nature should desire!” (p. 133). From Coverdale’s per¬ 
 spective, the temptation is evil, but from the reader’s it has all the 
 marks of a healthy alternative for “an indolent or half-occupied 
 man.” 
 
 What Hollingsworth offers to Coverdale is what Coverdale, given 
 his coldness and abstraction, cannot accept: a tangible brotherhood, 
 disinterested devotion, generous cooperation, purpose, and above all, 
 love. Coverdale admits, “I stood aloof.” It is the stance that damns.* 
 Blithedale is a sham, but as long as it is detached from what Hol¬ 
 lingsworth calls “human nature,” as long, that is, as it is safely 
 idealized, Coverdale can pretend to a new life of courage and pur¬ 
 pose. A few days after the “crisis” in the potato patch, Coverdale, 
 with “intolerable discontent and irksomeness,” lays down his hoe, 
 says farewell to the pigs, and takes his first leave of Blithedale. 
 
 If Coverdale’s failure as a man is crystallized in his “tragic passage- 
 at-arms” with Hollingsworth, his failure as an artist is confirmed by 
 
 ® For a contrary view, see ‘‘The Politics of Blithedale; The Dilemma of the Self,” Studies 
 in Romanticism, XI (Spring, 1972), 138-146, by John C. Hirsch, who believes Coverdale’s 
 rejection proper because to accept Hollingsworth’s offer would mean the ‘‘veritable extinction 
 of self”—the philanthropist's plans involve the ‘‘reassertion of a society ruled by precept 
 from without where individual members are less important than social order.” 
 
Coverdale 
 
 171 
 
 his last meeting with Zenobia, a scene marked by his inability to 
 redeem his superficial and derivative art with insight and charity. 
 After Hollingsworth’s rejection of Zenobia, only Coverdale witnesses 
 her convulsive weeping. Regaining her composure, she adopts what 
 is by this time her usual brittle and deflating attitude toward him: 
 “Ah, I perceive what you are about! You are turning this whole affair 
 into a ballad. Pray let me hear as many stanzas as you happen 
 to have ready!” (p. 223). The words are an echo of her remark to 
 Coverdale on their first evening, when he surmises that Priscilla has 
 come to join the community to pay homage to the well-known 
 feminist. “Since you see the young woman in so poetical a light,” 
 Zenobia says, “you had better turn the affair into a ballad” (p. 33). 
 After projecting a romantic literary ballad, which becomes a fanciful 
 condensation of the narrative of Blithedale, Zenobia turns from fanci¬ 
 ful chatter to a more down-to-earth explanation. By “tokens that 
 escape the obtuseness of masculine perceptions,” she declares Priscilla 
 not a death-dealing snow-maiden but a poor seamstress from the city 
 come for “no more transcendental purpose” than to do Zenobia’s 
 miscellaneous sewing. The “affair” which might be turned into a 
 ballad is not one of thwarted sexual love between an exotic woman 
 and a rugged philanthropist, but a sisterly love that carries with it 
 moral responsibility. If it is a kind of love which lies beyond Cover- 
 dale’s “obtuse” perceptions, its violation of course lies even further. 
 By her betrayal of Priscilla, Zenobia sins against the human heart in 
 ways far more serious than her frustrated passion for Hollingsworth 
 could ever do. That remorse over her betrayal of Priscilla for her own 
 gain (love, money, or both) might have impelled her to take her 
 own life never occurs to Coverdale. 
 
 The repartee between Zenobia and Coverdale on her final evening 
 is a grim replay of this earlier scene, and her manner is an intensified 
 version of her earlier bantering and edged wit. She utters a “sharp, 
 light laugh.” She ranges from mild irony to scornful sarcasm to 
 haughty solemnity to calm security; but throughout the exchange, 
 Coverdale notes that she is also “laughing” or “smiling” and remarks 
 on the strange way in which her mind seemed “to vibrate from the 
 deepest earnest to mere levity.” It is clearly the portrait of a woman 
 only partly in control of her emotions; but it is also a glimpse of a 
 woman sufficiently alert to her confidant’s limitations to allow him 
 (indeed, to encourage him) to interpret her grief as simplistically as 
 
172 
 
 James H. Justus 
 
 he, with his “obtuseness,” is inclined to do. Thus, Zenobia collabo¬ 
 rates with Coverdale on a little ballad about herself, the point of 
 which is the way the world conspires against the woman “who 
 swerves one hair’s breadth out of the beaten track.” Coverdale inter¬ 
 prets this specifically as Zenobia’s love for Hollingsworth and gen¬ 
 erally as the dangers of the passions which overcome the intellectual, 
 liberated woman. Though he protests that her interpretation has “too 
 stern a moral,” it is nevertheless the one he adopts. 
 
 If the moral is “too stern,” it is also irrelevant. The Blithedale 
 Romance is remarkably free of evidence that the world punishes this 
 feminist for her activities. As in other works of Hawthorne, the 
 source and means of punishment here are more profoundly spiritual 
 than those at the service of the world. (The same is true for Hollings¬ 
 worth, whose public scheme for the reformation of criminals must be 
 painfully internalized to cope “with a single murderer.”) Though 
 we hear much of Zenobia’s activism in the cause of women’s rights— 
 which would presumably distort her humanity just as Hollings¬ 
 worth’s philanthropy is said to distort his—what Hawthorne drama¬ 
 tizes is feminine spirit, not ideological advocacy. And in the most 
 explicitly “feminist” chapter in the book, “Eliot’s Pulpit,” Zenobia’s 
 statements on women’s rights pale into vagueness when set beside 
 Coverdale’s own conciliating, extravagant vision of a matriarchy in 
 which the submissive male “would kneel before a woman-ruler!” 
 
 Coverdale’s limited understanding of both friends is betrayed by 
 his language. Hollingsworth’s challenge provokes Coverdale to self¬ 
 torturing envy. Whereas in the earlier chapters the narrator speaks 
 merely patronizingly of his friend, after “A Crisis” he drops even the 
 pretense of good will. The diction grows excessive, even virulent: 
 odious, loathsomeness; great, blacky ugliness of sin; trample on con¬ 
 siderations; squalid. After Zenobia’s death, his conduct toward Hol¬ 
 lingsworth is dictated by what Coverdale believes to be “all the evil” 
 of which the philanthropist is guilty; his taunts are those of a harpy. 
 Coverdale’s “ballad” about Zenobia, the kind which might have 
 reclaimed a genteel, minor Romantic, turns out to be simply another 
 work about the passionate heroine who, “defeated on the broad 
 battlefield of life,” falls on “her own sword, merely because Love had 
 gone against her.” Even Westervelt, at her grave, knows better than 
 this. The world, concludes Coverdale, should throw open “all its 
 avenues to the passport of a woman’s bleeding heart” (p. 241). The 
 
Coverdale 
 
 173 
 
 vision is derivative just as the language which describes it is shabby. 
 But Coverdale’s failure of perception here, antecedent to his failure 
 as artist, should come as no surprise. Much earlier, with his nar¬ 
 rator’s arrival at Blithedale, Hawthorne has prepared the reader for 
 this moment. His new friends, particularly Zenobia, understand that 
 Coverdale will be poet in residence, which means a continuation of 
 his role as romantic poet now put to the service of the brotherhood; 
 Coverdale, however, apparently expects that his new life will be the 
 source for an art that will be qualitatively different from his previous 
 work.® Perhaps now, he says to Zenobia, he will write something 
 deserving the name of poetry—“true, strong, natural, and sweet, as 
 is the life which we are going to lead—something that shall have the 
 notes of wild-birds twittering through it, or a strain like the wind- 
 anthems in the woods” (p. 14). If this remark does nothing else, it 
 establishes Coverdale as a thoroughly undistinguished talent of Main¬ 
 stream Romantic. Although Hawthorne protects his readers from 
 knowing at first hand any of his protagonist’s productions, the impli¬ 
 cations are clear. The new experience should result in work more 
 ambitious and more significant than the mechanical competence 
 which finally attracts the attention of Rufus W. Griswold. Now to 
 be tested are the depth and breadth of Coverdale’s artistic powers, 
 and the crucial question has implications both personal and aesthetic. 
 Can this creator of trivial art show himself to be more than trivial ? 
 Can he in fact create something better than trivial art.? The results 
 are not promising. If there is tragedy attendant upon Zenobia’s fate, 
 it takes shape, outside and beyond the range of Coverdale’s percep¬ 
 tions. If there is tragedy attendant upon Hollingsworth’s abortive 
 scheme for the reformation of criminals, its resonances are heard 
 despite Coverdale’s assessment of the man. 
 
 Coverdale’s “romance,” then, is one of the thinner kinds. It is com¬ 
 pounded of soaring passions—most of them misdirected and coming 
 to grim fruition. Two linked ironies emerge—that a self-confessed 
 idler whose lack of purpose has rendered his life “all an emptiness” 
 should denounce and hound someone else whose errors have dried 
 up his “rich juices,” and that the rich potentialities of artistic re- 
 
 ^ Terence Martin stresses the narrator's search for a role, a search seen largely in 
 theatrical imagery that reinforces the position of Coverdale as spectator. See Nathaniel Haw¬ 
 thorne (New York, 1965), pp. 151-157. 
 
174 
 
 James H. Justus 
 
 newal should wither to the point where Coverdale can divert the 
 tragedy of Zenobia into conventional nineteenth-century melodrama. 
 
 IV 
 
 The Blithedale Romance stands as its own critique of Coverdale. 
 As a memoir, it contains the testing of himself as a man; the memoir 
 itself is the test of Coverdale the artist. He fails the first test, and only 
 ironically does he pass the second. A bittersweet narrative, not wind- 
 anthems or onomatopoetic songs about twittering birds, is Coverdale’s 
 ultimate response. 
 
 If Coverdale’s focus in his narrative is blurred by a multiplicity of 
 subjects (Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Old Moodie, his own routine 
 urban life as well as his one ambivalent adventure in communal 
 living), Hawthorne’s focus on Coverdale is as sharp, intense, and 
 composed a bit of portraiture as that provided by other first-person 
 narratives of the nineteenth century. One of the remarkable accom¬ 
 plishments of Blithedale is Hawthorne’s novelistic exploration of a 
 theme most commonly seen in those tales written as romances, 
 allegories, or exempla. Coverdale, a man whose emotional deficiency 
 isolates him from the human mainstream, joins the ranks of Wake¬ 
 field, Ethan Brand, Roger Chillingworth, Aylmer (“The Birth¬ 
 mark”), and Giovanni (“Rappaccini’s Daughter”); but unlike them, 
 he seems to exist in an actual and multidimensional society which 
 asserts its own claims beyond the rather rigid ones he chooses to 
 acknowledge. Hawthorne allows his protagonist entry into a wide 
 area of contemporary life, the pleasing urbanities of society in the 
 city, the not-so-pleasing physical demands of life in the country, the 
 low-powered lyceum entertainments in the villages. Though in writ¬ 
 ing his memoir Coverdale thinks and acts as the romancer, Haw¬ 
 thorne renders the context in which Coverdale moves with the kind 
 of circumstantial detail, the observations of commonplace reality, 
 which occur more often in Hawthorne’s notebooks than in his fiction. 
 
 Readers find Coverdale as unsatisfactory as do most of his fellow 
 participants in the Blithedale brotherhood, and for much the same 
 reasons: his reticence to commit himself humanly to others and his 
 dilettantish curiosity. Both his reticence and his curiosity are expres¬ 
 sions of a man whose frustrated search for meaning leads him to the 
 
Coverdale 
 
 175 
 
 dubious comfort of “conjectured” reconstructions of events and their 
 significance. 
 
 Coverdale’s insufficiency as man or artist cannot be justified or 
 wished away, but lurking about this narrator is something more than 
 mere obtuseness or inexcusable behavior. Many of Hawthorne’s pro¬ 
 tagonists—saints and sinners alike—suffer from spiritual rigidity, ob¬ 
 sessiveness, isolation, and the cold heart which threatens their moral 
 survival; but unlike most of them, Coverdale displays a sense of 
 humor, a tonic irony directed toward himself as well as others, a 
 distancing perspective which permits disclosure of those ambiva¬ 
 lences pulling him from one inadequate footing to another. With 
 these characteristics Hawthorne extends the complexities only sug¬ 
 gested by his customary quasi-allegorical figures into a narrator more 
 fictively realistic. The gain is substantial. For this character whose 
 dilemma is neither so domestic as Wakefield’s nor so apocalyptic as 
 Ethan Brand’s, Hawthorne succeeds in projecting a situation that is 
 understated, bland, and modern in its horror onto a consciousness 
 singularly unequipped to perceive the horror. That very disparity 
 allows Hawthorne to lavish his full creative attention on a character 
 who, despite an irritating and acerbic ineffectuality, stands revealed 
 as pathetic. 
 
 For all the annoying complacency in which he cloaks himself, 
 Coverdale still possesses a certain frail honesty which makes his 
 failures humanly, even poignantly, understandable. The reader is not 
 surprised, for example, when he asserts, on practically the last page 
 of his narrative, that he would still be willing to die for a just cause 
 provided “the effort did not involve an unreasonable amount of 
 trouble,” because this is precisely the attitude he reveals in Chapter i, 
 when he expresses a willingness to do Old Moodie a favor if it 
 involves “no special trouble” to himself. Early or late, Coverdale 
 never disguises his arid emotions. What gives this account both its 
 chill and its pathos is the realization that at its end nothing has 
 changed. Even more pathetic, however, is the realization that Cover- 
 dale fails to understand his limited nature; his experiences, though 
 traumatic, contribute nothing to his potential self-knowledge. It is a 
 horrifying self-portrait of a man whose divided sensibilities are never 
 harmonized, whose purposelessness is never replaced by purpose, and 
 whose inability to love continues to be trivialized by fantasy. 
 
 Except for the final chapter, Coverdale seems not to see his narra- 
 
176 
 
 James H. Justus 
 
 tive as a confession. But in its larger perspective, Hawthorne surely 
 means for his readers to see it as such. This protagonist is not an 
 Underground or Superfluous Man. Those Russian figures, alive as 
 they are to every suggestion of suffering, grope messily and blatantly 
 for some meaning to their separated lives. Coverdale, however, covers 
 his tracks, throwing off pursuit by the civility of his personality, and 
 presumes that sickness is to be found in souls other than his own. His 
 document, for all its veneer of control and self-sufficiency, is con¬ 
 fessional, and its complexity comes not from Coverdale’s bland expo¬ 
 sition but from Hawthorne’s manipulation of his narrator’s character. 
 
 The key to that character is Coverdale’s idealism. Behind the aloof¬ 
 ness, behind the witty and abrasive language, stands the man of good 
 will who insists that the ideal represented by the Blithedale experi¬ 
 ment is one to which he once genuinely subscribed. Moreover, at the 
 end of the narrative he strongly suggests that of that little band of 
 reformers, only he has remained faithful to its high undertaking. 
 The adventure is a crucial one for Coverdale; and both the substance 
 and the style of his account bespeak the poignant efforts of a man 
 struggling to redeem himself morally and aesthetically. Alone of 
 the major characters, including even the frail and ill-used Priscilla, 
 Coverdale engages in no real deceptions, has no past worthy of con¬ 
 cealing, offers no covert reformist schemes as alternatives to the com¬ 
 munity; but despite those admirable, if negative, virtues, he is con¬ 
 cerned exclusively with ideal relationships. He is unprepared to 
 accept, or at first even to acknowledge, the imperfect human context 
 in which the ideal must realize itself if it is to realize itself at all. The 
 idea of brotherhood, like a high and certainly cloudy romance, con¬ 
 tinues to attract him more than a decade after the collapse of Blithe¬ 
 dale. As Hawthorne makes clear, however, the idea of brotherhood 
 is not sufficient for redemption. Hollingsworth and Zenobia come to 
 experience the full human implications when idealism and factuality 
 clash, which is another way of saying that they attain a tragic self- 
 awareness denied Coverdale. 
 
 Coverdale’s very inability to do full justice to his Blithedale fellows 
 ironically allows a self-concentration—the disclosure of character 
 broader and richer than is possible in the portrayal of Hollingsworth, 
 Zenobia, and Priscilla. Hawthorne’s choice of a first-person narrator 
 provides an obvious but functional hiatus of information at several 
 crucial moments throughout the narrative. Zenobia, for example, tells 
 
Coverdale 
 
 177 
 
 Coverdale that he has returned to Blithedale “half an hour too late” 
 to witness a climactic scene between her and Hollingsworth, and 
 Coverdale with some chagrin admits the missed opportunity: 
 
 And what subjects had been discussed here? All, no doubt, that, for so 
 many months past, had kept my heart and my imagination idly feverish. 
 Zenobia’s whole character and history; the true nature of her mysterious 
 connection with Westervelt; her later purposes towards Hollingsworth, 
 and, reciprocally, his in reference to her; and, finally, the degree in 
 which Zenobia had been cognizant of the plot against Priscilla, and 
 what, at last, had been the real object of that scheme. On these points, as 
 before, I was left to my own conjectures, (pp. 215-216) 
 
 Considering the consummate effectiveness of the final scaffold 
 scene in T he Scarlet Letter, it is somewhat surprising that Hawthorne 
 should pass up an opportunity to dramatize what would normally 
 have been its counterpart in this work. Technically, of course, Haw¬ 
 thorne limits himself: to supply information unavailable to Cover- 
 dale would violate point of view, even with the latitude generally 
 enjoyed by the romancer. He as well as his narrator must remain 
 content with Coverdale’s “conjectures.” But why should Hawthorne 
 deliberately delay his narrator’s arrival for the key scene thirty min¬ 
 utes too late ? Dramatized or not, this is the climactic moment in the 
 action, the moment from which Zenobia’s death and funeral and 
 Hollingsworth’s remorse inevitably follow. A simple adjustment, 
 coming so late in the narrative, would have necessitated no radical 
 changes in plot progression or character development. The answer 
 lies in consistency of characterization. If Hawthorne had finally 
 given his narrator full access to those subjects about which he had 
 been “feverish” for several months, a vital aspect of Coverdale’s 
 character—mischievous curiosity—would have been mitigated. By 
 keeping Coverdale in ignorance Hawthorne maintains the careful 
 ambivalence with which he imbues his narrator from the beginning. 
 Disallowing him the final and most important revelations is a deft 
 tactic. It not only sustains the too-little-too-late aspect of Coverdale 
 with which the reader has come to be so familiar; it also marks an 
 innovative imagination at work—in its tidy culmination, the romance 
 form is in this case skewed just enough to deprive both narrator and 
 reader of full gratification. Both must be content with the “conjec¬ 
 tures” of one limited man whose partial view is not only self-evident 
 but also self-admitted. 
 
178 
 
 James H. Justus 
 
 It is tempting to sympathize with Hollingsworth’s impatience with 
 Coverdale’s fashionable airs or with Zenobia’s exasperation when she 
 accuses him of “Bigotry; self-conceit; an insolent curiosity; a meddle¬ 
 some temper; a cold-blooded criticism . . .; a monstrous scepticism 
 . . (p. 170). But the reader knows Coverdale better than his 
 
 friends know him, and for all his flaws, he is not quite a monster.^® 
 He is, to be sure, a “frosty bachelor’’ who takes too keen an interest 
 in indulging his curiosity; and coupled to his ineffectual and rigid 
 idealism is a mannered style which paradoxically establishes him as 
 a frivolous dabbler among solemn socialists. When he is not being 
 the abrasive wit, he is the moralistic meddler. His customary moral 
 posture is a little silly, but, more important, it is also sad. It dooms 
 him from any further emotional growth, either in or out of Blithe- 
 dale. The personal renewal promised by the new life is aborted, and 
 with it goes the chance for artistic renewal. Thus, Coverdale will 
 recast his Blithedale experiences according to both what he knows 
 (which is limited enough) and what he feels—pity and exasperation 
 in dangerous proportions. 
 
 What Hawthorne achieves in this work is a sense of the human 
 costs of failure, the pathos of weakness, without any diminishment 
 of his own tough-minded standards for the conduct of life. In no 
 other work does he succeed so well in dramatizing emptiness and 
 purposelessness; in no other work does he sacrifice so many of the 
 comfortable conventions of allegory or moral apologue or legend for 
 the more difficult challenges of the realistic memoir, exchanging (in 
 currently fashionable terms) telling for showing. Coverdale looks 
 forward to James’s emotional cripples (Marcher of “The Beast in the 
 Jungle,” Winterbourne of Daisy Miller, or Acton of The Europeans) 
 and beyond them—to the desperate expatriates of Fitzgerald’s and 
 Hemingway’s fiction and to the hollow men of Eliot’s earlier poems.” 
 
 It is surely a misplaced emphasis to suggest, as readers occasionally do, that Coverdale's 
 speculative detachment destroys Blithedale and that his spoiler instincts aggravate and hasten 
 the personal tragedies of Zenobia and Hollingsworth. The latter two characters pursue 
 destruction out of the strength of their own wills. And common sense, as well as the logic 
 of the narrative, says that Blithedale must fail with or without Coverdale. Its presumptuous 
 example of the higher possibilities for living, directed at crass society at large, is artioulated 
 by physical withdrawal from that society (though, significantly, not to the point of disdain¬ 
 ing agricultural competition). 
 
 Roy R. Male sees Coverdale as the fictivc ancestor of such modern intellectuals as 
 Prufrock and Robert Penn Warren’s Jack Burden. See Hawthorne's Tragic Vision (Austin, 
 1957)1 PP- I 5 i“i 55 - John C. Stubb remarks that to achieve a fusion of the comic and the 
 tragic, “Hawthorne had to invent the Jamesian narrator before James” {The Pursuit of Form: 
 
Coverdale 
 
 179 
 
 In permitting Coverdale virtually to construct his self, his voice, his 
 configuring nuances, Hawthorne releases the ironic possibilities of a 
 narrating intelligence who unconsciously steps beyond the limits 
 which, as a romancer, he consciously observes. 
 
 A Study of Hawthorne and the Romance, Urbana, 111 ., 1970, p. 136). See also Nicholas 
 Canaday, Jr., “Community and Identity at Blithedale,” South Atlantic Quarterly, LXXI 
 (Winter, 1972), 30-39. 
 
Beyond Convention: The Dynamics of Imagery and 
 Response in Hawthorne’s Early Sense of Evil 
 
 David Downing 
 
 E arly in his career Hawthorne modeled his tales according to con¬ 
 ventional literary structures. He combined the popular gothic 
 and romantic conventions of his day with the more rigid doctrines 
 of his cultural and familial ancestry, rooted in the Calvinist belief in 
 the natural depravity of man. Puritan typology even offered itself as 
 a kind of literary model: the minister’s duty (like the writer’s.?) was 
 to read and decode the sensible world as a system of signs revelatory 
 of God’s works and intent. Despite the pressure of these conventions, 
 however, Hawthorne created his own unique vision. In this essay I 
 shall examine two stories which serve for Hawthorne as tentative 
 explorations that will later propel him beyond the limits of traditional 
 forms.^ 
 
 In “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” Hawthorne uses conventional 
 symbolic representations such as darkness, desolation, and witchcraft. 
 Within this external framework, he creates an experience of evil that 
 includes a series of perceptual impressions lacking in formal or objec¬ 
 tive detail, but which nevertheless have more far-reaching conse¬ 
 quences than the predominant gothic terror. Narrative action and 
 plot have been reduced to a bare minimum. A beautiful young 
 woman afflicted with a strange “untimely blight” seeks the aid of 
 
 ^ Among studies of Hawthorne’s tales I have found the following particularly helpful in 
 this essay: Nina Baym, The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976), pp. 15-83; 
 Stanley Brodkin, “Hawthorne and the Function of History: A Reading of 'Alice Doane’s 
 .\ppeal,’" The Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal 1^74, ed. C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr. (Englewood, 
 Col., 1975), pp. 116-128; Clinton S. Burhans, Jr.. “Hawthorne’s Mind and Art in ‘The 
 Hollow of the Three Hills,’ ’’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LX (April, 1961), 
 286—295; Frederick Crews, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes 
 (New York, 1966), pp. 3-60; Kenneth Dauber, Rediscovering Hawthorne (Princeton, N.J., 
 1977), pp. 47—86; Prabhat K. Pandeya, “The Drama of Evil in ‘The Hollow of the Three 
 Hills,’’’ The Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal ig 7 S, ed. C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr. (Englewood, 
 Col., 1975), pp. 177-181; Ely Stock, “Witchcraft in ‘Hollow,’’’ American Transcendental 
 Quarterly, XIV (Spring, 1972), 31-33. 
 
 American Literature, Volume LI, Number 4, January, 1980. Copyright © 1980 by Duke 
 University Press. 
 
The Early Sense of Evil 
 
 i 8 i 
 
 a decrepit old woman steeped in the lore of witchcraft. The noctur¬ 
 nal meeting begins at sunset in the “mathematically” symmetrical 
 hollow between three hills. The ritual incantations of the aged crone 
 precipitate three hypnotic or hallucinatory visions of the life of the 
 young woman. The whole story consists of little more than the meta¬ 
 phorical filling up of the stagnant hollow with the successive visions 
 of the woman’s loneliness and separation beginning with a domestic 
 image of the bereaved parents and ending with the funeral march of 
 the abandoned child she has apparently left to die. 
 
 Beyond the initial suggestion of adultery, Hawthorne supplies us 
 with no specific reasons for the woman’s strange losses. His fictional 
 world, however, actively engages the reader in the poetics of distance 
 and immediacy. By approaching his subject through the distance of 
 conventional tropes—an “untimely blight” has stricken the “natural 
 bloom” of the young woman—Hawthorne skirts the subconscious 
 depths of his material and leaves us with a genuine interpretive prob¬ 
 lem. But he also employs rhythm and imagery in new and signifi¬ 
 cant ways that enable him to fuse a coherent experience out of non¬ 
 specific materials. The images of decay and infestation, with their 
 necessarily bodily meanings, function as metaphors for bodily and 
 psychical processes, and the narrative rhythm intensifies the imagery 
 by a gradual buildup and fusion of the energies conveyed by the vari¬ 
 ous images in the three visions. The rhythm depends not just on the 
 symmetrical geometry of the scenes, but on the emotional intensifica¬ 
 tion carried over from scene to scene: from decay and sorrow to 
 madness to isolation and death. 
 
 The narrative rhythm itself has a double function which illustrates 
 the aesthetic dilemma. The rhythm defends against a prolonged 
 probing of individual lives, but it also energizes one’s reading ex¬ 
 perience so as to prevent what Hawthorne could see as the dangerous 
 urge to systematically dissect meanings merely to find a single source 
 for the woman’s “untimely blight.” Given the symbolic framework 
 of “Hollow,” Hawthorne teases us to employ the theological con¬ 
 struct of natural depravity as an interpretive tool. But the text resists 
 this closure—it represents a form of disengagement from the text 
 which, if extreme, amounts to an unnatural separation of the individ¬ 
 ual from the larger culmral history in which we are all involved. 
 Within this story we cannot even draw clear boundaries between 
 
David Downing 
 
 182 
 
 individual characters—the separate voices of the mob join in unison; 
 we cannot be sure who is actually having or creating the visions: the 
 old woman’s magic, the young woman’s dreaming, a combination of 
 the two, or some power controlling both. The point is that all con¬ 
 tribute, and we need not make those separations. 
 
 Hawthorne’s only attempt to come to terms with such boundaries 
 within the world of the hollow occurs in a superficial way in his de¬ 
 scription of the setting. The “almost mathematically circular” shape 
 of the hollow provides for a separation or juxtaposition of natural and 
 unnatural. Like the concavity of a lens, the hollow vale focuses on the 
 “putrid waters” of a stagnant pool so contaminated with the “powers 
 of evil” as to push the beauty of the natural world far to the periph¬ 
 ery: the rich colors of the sunset gild the three hill-tops, but only “a 
 paler tint stole down their sides” into this vortex of human depravity. 
 Within the hollow, however, boundaries dissolve. The decayed body 
 of the old crone fuses with the decayed waters of the pool. Traditional 
 images of darkness and moonlight reinforce the sense of the hollow 
 as the heart; the shape of the hollow suggests a woman’s sexual or¬ 
 gans. The source of emotional and sexual power is dead and decay¬ 
 ing, its blood turned to the bile-green waters of the infested pool. As 
 conventional boundaries dissolve, the vision of evil becomes general¬ 
 ized to include the young woman, the entire village, and, in turn, the 
 entire human race. The strange “untimely blight” of the young 
 woman may then suggest a youthful foreshadowing of the “withered, 
 shrunken, and decrepit” aspects of the old crone. 
 
 Hawthorne fuels the story with the underlying fantasy of yielding 
 to the old crone: the mother figure, whose body, heart, and sexual 
 organs have decayed, engulfs the guilt-ridden daughter. All taboos 
 against evil have been broken, and fear of drowning in the deadly 
 pool propels the hallucinatory vision. Hawthorne recognizes the 
 solipsistic dangers of the internalized fantasy (it leads to meaning¬ 
 less idiosyncrasy), and he seeks to relate it to more external, cultural 
 conditions. He links the terrifying vision of isolation with a socially 
 acceptable vision of home life. 
 
 In the first vision, we are given a glimpse of the young woman’s 
 parents, now old and broken by sorrow. The home and hearth appear 
 as a distinct space, totally separated from the poisonous world of the 
 hollow: “Those strangers appeared not to stand in the hollow depth 
 
The Early Sense of Evil 
 
 183 
 
 . . (p. 5)^ But the “appearance” is little more than just that. Al¬ 
 
 though the young woman is surely an outcast and may not return 
 home, the similarities between home and hollow may be more im¬ 
 portant than the literal separation. The old couple is described in 
 words similar to those used to describe the old crone: they are “aged,” 
 “broken and decayed.” They are broken not only by the dishonorable 
 daughter, but by “other and more recent woe.” If they are bound to 
 a moral code as Hawthorne knew most Puritans to be, then the rigid 
 code may make it difficult for the parents to ever forgive the errant 
 daughter. In this way they may contribute directly to the daughter’s 
 forced isolation. While “their voices were encompassed and re-echoed 
 by the walls of a chamber,” those walls surrounding the world of the 
 hearth can hardly be experienced as secure boundaries. The echoing 
 walls may be the echoing hollow which actually houses the vision, 
 and the voices easily blend with the lonely breeze between the hills. 
 The woeful separation of the old couple appears of a piece with the 
 woeful separation of the young woman. 
 
 We have no way of establishing more definite connections, but the 
 presence of decay provides enough energy to carry us into the second 
 vision—the gothic heart of the story. Following (as if beneath the 
 surface) the sorrowful mourning of the parents, the narrator plunges 
 into this chaotic menage of primal explosions, a passage which would 
 become entirely chaotic and undeveloped except for several key im¬ 
 ages and phrases within the paragraph. Evil for Hawthorne will 
 repeatedly be associated with bizarre passions and frenzied laughter. 
 Consider the following passage: 
 
 Shrieks pierced through the obscurity of sound, and were succeeded by the 
 singing of sweet female voices, which, in their turn, gave way to a wild 
 roar of laughter, broken suddenly by groanings and sobs, forming al¬ 
 together a ghastly confusion of terror and mourning and mirth. Chains 
 were rattling, fierce and stern voices uttered threats, and the scourge re¬ 
 sounded at their command, (p. 6) 
 
 The diabolical nature of this “wild scene” is associated with the 
 release of unbound passions, but under specific conditions. Although 
 the women hear a mob whose passion is unbounded and limitless, 
 they are literally bound with rattling chains, threats, and commands. 
 
 ^ Nathaniel Hawthorne, Selected Tales and Sketches, ed. Hyatt Waggoner (New York, 
 1970), P- 6 . All subsequent citations of Hawthorne’s work are from this edition. 
 
184 
 
 David Downing 
 
 Indeed, as a literal account, the scene embodies an image of an ex¬ 
 ternal authority exercising its power by controlling the mob with 
 such brutal means. Hawthorne will later enlarge and intensify such 
 physical images of repression. Hollingsworth’s “barrel-chested,” “iron 
 countenance” has its precursor in the iron chains. As an image, the 
 rattling chains function in a way similar to the “mind-forged man- 
 nacles” in William Blake’s poem, “London”: external authorities ex¬ 
 ercise their control over both mind and body, and such culturally 
 reinforced repressions of bodily experience produce disease and terror 
 in London as well as in America.® The sporadic mixture of frenzied 
 merriment and raging terror in Hawthorne’s vision may reflect the 
 disorganization of the rebellion and revenge against the controlling 
 powers. Possibly it is disorganized because of the psychological im¬ 
 balance produced by just those repressive powers represented in the 
 story and thus in the culture. 
 
 When we examine this second vision more closely, we find that it 
 also contains a rather simplistic division in the gothic imagery. The 
 shrieks, wrath, sobs, and hysteria are juxtaposed against the “singing 
 of sweet female voices,” the “soft and dreamy accent of the love 
 songs,” and the “manly and melodious voice” of her bereaved hus¬ 
 band. We have a sense of transition in which “the love songs . . . 
 died causelessly into funeral hymns.” Hawthorne is trying to create 
 a fictional experience which clarifies his own intuitive knowledge of 
 the senseless loss of natural love consequent upon the perversion of 
 these passions into death and terror. 
 
 Just as the voices of the aged parents blended with the wind in the 
 hollow, so too the voices of this mob join in unison with the “fitful, 
 and uneven sound of the wind.” The third vision thus concludes with 
 the inevitable sense of doom and death in the funeral march of the 
 abandoned child. Here the two worlds blend even more fully: the 
 social convention of the funeral cannot be clearly separated from the 
 asocial perpetration of evil and death as experienced in the hollow 
 where the body has likewise decayed. The young woman does not 
 even raise her head to differentiate the two worlds. Perhaps she too 
 has died and the funeral is her own. The wind in the hollow now 
 seems to physically shake the very coffin in the vision. Incorporated 
 
 ® Just like Hawthorne's stor>-, Blake's poem begins by obsers’ing “marks of weakness, 
 marks of woe" and concludes with blood, disease, and death. See; The Poetry and Prose of 
 William Blahje, ed. David V. Erdman (New York, 1970), pp. 26-27. 
 
The Early Sense of Evil 
 
 185 
 
 in this final image is the wife, daughter, and mother who has 
 wronged the parents, betrayed the husband, and abandoned the 
 child. Hawthorne supplies us with no details as to how or why the 
 woman committed such abominable acts. The specifics are lost. But 
 we do not lose the generalized sense of brutality. Indeed, it appears 
 to be not just the woman who has “sinned against natural affection,” 
 but the whole culture itself. Howxver undeveloped, this story shows 
 Hawthorne working to describe a culture which he intuitively senses 
 has produced a great deal more pain than pleasure. 
 
 Haw’thorne concludes “The Hollow of the Three Hills” with the 
 “withered crone, chuckling to herself . . . ‘Here has been a sweet 
 hour’s sport!’ ” (p. 7) The gothic sarcasm seems consistent with the 
 story’s more conventional representations of evil delight in the suffer¬ 
 ing of others. But a significant aspect of Hawthorne’s sense of evil 
 involves just such a sadistic inversion of pain for pleasure. The old 
 woman’s total lack of sympathy for the plight of the suffering w'oman 
 characterizes her inability to feel the natural flow of emotions in her 
 “decayed” body and in her “diseased” imagination. The young 
 woman’s pain may serve as an unconscious mirror image of the 
 crone’s own youthful pain which she has now blocked from feeling 
 by rigidly suppressing and converting it into sadistic delight. Disease 
 and decay of the body are the inevitable consequences of such 
 emotional twisting. 
 
 In “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” Hawthorne associates Leonard Doane’s 
 “diseased imagination” wtth the evils of incestuous jealousy and fra¬ 
 ternal murder. And just as the witch in “Hollow” seemed to have 
 control of the young w'oman, we find that a wizard in “Alice Doane’s 
 Appeal” has control of Leonard. Can we take Hawthorne seriously.^ 
 He describes the wizard in “Appeal” as “a small, gray, withered 
 man . . . senseless as an idiot and feebler than a child to all better 
 purposes.” (p. 130) The caustic humor of a w’orld controlled by the 
 reckless buffoonery of this wizard serves on one level as a reactionary 
 antidote to the transcendentalists’ humorless spiritualism. But the 
 story itself reveals Hawthorne’s awareness that such manipulating of 
 the plot to make the wizard appear as the evil scapegoat solely ac¬ 
 countable for psychological perversion of all sorts will hardly pro 
 duce a satisfying response in his nongothic readers. Indeed, the shifts 
 
i86 
 
 David Downing 
 
 and breaks in this story reveal significant aspects of Hawthorne’s 
 ironic portrayal of himself struggling to create a more fully resonant 
 fiction, 
 
 Hawthorne’s understanding of the biopsychological nature of evil 
 resists purely symbolic representation. He begins to reject the conven¬ 
 tional notion of evil as merely a metaphysical given and represents it 
 more as a cultural creation, at least insofar as it relates to the un¬ 
 natural control of emotions conditioned by a culturally based fear of 
 the body. In “Appeal” Hawthorne tries to account for the sources 
 of the wizard’s power in an otherwise unnecessary descriptive passage 
 of the “town glittering in icy garments.” (p. 134) “The creation of 
 wizard power” Hawthorne attributes to a freezing of the emotions 
 and heart. This image functions as an isomorphic metaphor—the 
 qualities of “icy garments” correspond to an armoring of the physi¬ 
 cal body so as to prevent sensual relief in natural sexual forms. Night¬ 
 mare and a barrage of destructive forces result, as in the hysterical 
 mob in “Hollow” and in the march of the dead and accursed souls in 
 the paragraph following the “fantastic piece of description” of the 
 frozen city in “Appeal.” While Hawthorne undoubtedly uses the 
 wizard to defuse the threatening and unmanageable incestuous plot 
 between Alice and her two brothers, he also suggests that the wizard’s 
 source of power derives from the “frigid glory” of the whole village— 
 a village in which any one of the inhabitants might, at a given his¬ 
 torical moment such as the witch hangings, be capable of becoming 
 a witch or wizard. Thus: “One looked to behold inhabitants suited 
 to such a town glittering in icy garments, with motionless features, 
 cold sparkling eyes, and just sensation enough in their frozen hearts 
 to shiver at each other’s presence.” (p. 134) 
 
 Hawthorne’s self-conscious awareness of the limitations of such an 
 image in an undeveloped fictional context can be seen in his hedging, 
 in his calling it fantastic, as if he would even prefer to shake off the 
 more serious implications while confessing that it’s all a bit silly and 
 extravagant. Such descriptive exuberance might succumb to being 
 just another in the list of gothic extremes of the original story “Alice 
 Doane,” which lacked both depth and originality. But Hawthorne 
 does not really prefer the silly gothicism, and even his sarcastic hedg¬ 
 ing takes a serious turn when Hawthorne portrays himself as a nar¬ 
 rator struggling from out of the gothic and into the psychological 
 
The Early Sense of Evil 
 
 187 
 
 and historical; on the premise that “our history had been very im¬ 
 perfectly written,” the stated intention of “Appeal” is to explore the 
 “universal madness” of “guilt and frenzy . . . which . . . consum¬ 
 mated the most execrable scene that our history blushes to record.” 
 (p. 127) 
 
 The major advance of “Appeal” over “Hollow” is that while the 
 latter remains tied to “those strange old times, when fantastic dreams 
 and madmen’s reveries were realized among the actual circumstances 
 of life” (p. 3), the former story joins the gothic horrors of incest and 
 murder with the historical horror of the actual hangings on Gallows 
 Hill in the 1692 witch hunt. Indeed, the importance of this story lies 
 in Hawthorne’s understanding of a key psychological parity at the 
 heart of both gothic and historic extremes of cruelty. 
 
 Hawthorne incorporates within this story the self-reflexive quest 
 for a fiction capable of deeply moving, even changing, his actual 
 readers. A narrator portrayed as a young writer leads two young 
 ladies to Gallows Hill where he reads them a gothic tale he has writ¬ 
 ten about incest and murder. Ironically, the search for fictional in¬ 
 tensity thrives on the repressed wish for power and control over his 
 audience, and Hawthorne comes close to a manipulative, wizardly 
 control of emotions and events. He parodies this effect by having his 
 narrator attempt to control and heighten the response of the ladies by 
 not only fictionally but also literally moving them about, directing 
 them first to Gallows Hill, then to a grave, then to the woodwax on 
 the hill. For example, as the fictionalized narrator reads the account 
 of Alice and her brother approaching the graveyard of “the mur¬ 
 dered man who was buried three days before” (p. 134), the narrator 
 simultaneously leads the two ladies “to a new made grave.” Haw¬ 
 thorne and his fictionalized narrator seem to merge when it becomes 
 unclear who voices the final sentence: “suddenly there was a multi¬ 
 tude of people among the graves.” Hawthorne would like to fuse the 
 gothic graves with the literal graves around which the narrator is 
 standing. And he partially succeeds with this control: his audience 
 of two remains silently captive, and the narrator proceeds into the 
 gothic vision arising from the grave. 
 
 This vision corresponds to the gothic vision in “Hollow,” and again 
 we find the sadistic inversion of pleasure for pain when the accursed 
 souls look at each other “with glances of hatred and smiles of bitter 
 
i88 
 
 David Downing 
 
 scorn, passions that are to devils what love is to the blest.” (p. 136) 
 The narrator ends this “apparition” with the confession that it was 
 “too shadowy for language to portray.” The specifics of the gothic 
 plot would become unmanageable for him to explore further, and we 
 are left with the quick summary of the plot ending with Alice’s ap¬ 
 peal to her brother Walter. As the narrator admits: he “dare not give 
 the remainder of the scene except in very brief epitome.” (p. 136) 
 
 Hawthorne toys with the narrator’s limitations (his need to avoid 
 something) through the melodramatic irony of these admissions. We 
 are left with the suggestion that language need not be so “shadowy,” 
 that it could do a better job than the obscure visions the narrator has 
 thus far offered us. But here is an instance when it becomes difficult 
 to determine just where Hawthorne stands in relation to his text. The 
 aesthetic distance verges on collapse as the author may be identifying 
 a little too closely with his narrator. The irony threatens to break 
 down into literal confession, and the narrator quickly drops the 
 gothic plot. The only achievement of the “brief epitome” has been 
 silence and perhaps momentary awe on the part of the ladies. In 
 frustration, the narrator steps outside his narrative to point out that 
 the nearby woodwax “had sprouted originally from . . . Walter’s 
 . . . unhallowed bones.” The ladies suddenly break into laughter. 
 
 The narrator recognizes these failures of the gothic contrivance, but 
 he also understands the underlying connections embedded in both 
 the gothic and the historic plots, whereas the ladies’ conventional 
 expectations defend against the threatening perceptions. By acquies¬ 
 cence to social conventions and to such “acceptable” and “proper” 
 literary taste, their “gentility” so limits their own responsiveness that 
 they rigidly avoid or deny close contact with unpleasant experiences. 
 As a result, the narrator feels “a little piqued that a narrative which 
 had good authority in our ancient superstitions, and would have 
 brought even a church deacon to Gallows Hill, in old witch times, 
 should now be considered too grotesque and extravagant for timid 
 maids to tremble at.” (p. 137) But recovering from his justifiable 
 frustration and now inspired by the literal “indistinctness” of twi¬ 
 light, the narrator gives up the “icy splendor” of the gothic tale and 
 entrances his two listeners with an imaginative description of the ac¬ 
 tual hangings themselves as they might have taken place on Gallows 
 Hill. And sure enough, this fictionalized account “reaches the seldom 
 
The Early Sense of Evil 
 
 189 
 
 trodden places of their hearts.” Even though it here attains to a some¬ 
 what gothic sentimentality, Hawthorne has been searching for a 
 natural power in the “well-spring of tears,” a power diametrically 
 opposed to the wizardlike denial of emotional warmth and vulner¬ 
 ability. 
 
 The historical actuality provides clear and resonating connections 
 with the culture of the young ladies. Their response no longer ends 
 in gothic mystery—for this can be laughed away. Nor can they glibly 
 deny the psychological underpinnings of both Leonard’s individual 
 hysteria and Salem’s mass hysteria. They can feel the common crimi¬ 
 nality of these hysterias: both Alice and those who were hanged dur¬ 
 ing the witch hunt were victimized by a disturbed people. And the 
 experience of death, the senseless killing of innocent bodies, becomes 
 the final undoer of the genteel defenses of the narrator’s two lady 
 companions. Now they too have a sense of the guilt which they may 
 share as the present-day upholders of the society which once com¬ 
 mitted such atrocities. 
 
 The failures of the gothic tale have provided the grounds for the 
 success of the historic tale. “Appeal” hangs not only on a structural 
 parallel between the tales, but also on an emotional fusion in the tone 
 and content of the two plots. The gothic terror carries over from one 
 to the other, although the moment of mirth between the two tales 
 breaks the gothic extravagance down into a kind of muted glow or 
 emotional residue which blends into the subjectivity represented by 
 the twilight: natural phenomenon such as “the crimson west” and 
 the breeze become personified “as if responsive to” the mood of the 
 ladies. The story has been working towards this responsiveness where 
 artificial boundaries between past and present dissolve: “Twilight 
 over the landscape was congenial to the obscurity of time.” (p. 137) 
 As contexts change from gothic to present/historical, the image of 
 twilight functions with aesthetic precision. It accurately reflects a phe¬ 
 nomenological quality of the natural world: at dusk, boundaries do 
 become hazy. But also, the insight and response which emerge from 
 the ensuing historic plot are both sharp and powerful. 
 
 We may account for this apparent contradiction between sharply 
 felt insights and hazy boundaries by reconsidering the case of the 
 young women. As twilight descends, the boundaries between their 
 inner experience and the outside world become more permeable. 
 Hawthorne uses the words “blend” and “intermingled” to describe 
 
190 
 
 David Downing 
 
 this condition: “An indistinctness had begun to creep over the mass 
 of buildings and blend them with the intermingled tree-tops . . 
 
 (p. 137). The human artifacts (buildings) blend with the natural 
 world (tree-tops). The blending applies equally well to individual 
 psychologies. Conventional boundaries no longer hinder the flow of 
 energies represented by the glow of twilight. The women’s need to 
 maintain the artificial defenses of sociability decreases proportionally 
 because these defenses are useful only when the external social world 
 is clearly visible and defined. We find evidence for the connection 
 between twilight and subjectivity in the overall changes the women 
 will undergo at this time of day: their personal identities simply have 
 more room to expand (or grow) when defensive borders become 
 hazy rather than rigid. Concomitantly, their vulnerability to the 
 forces in the outside world increases. The twilight represents not only 
 a haziness but a readiness to take in experience, especially affective, 
 emotional experience which cannot be easily intellectualized and de¬ 
 fined. The narrator proceeds to call upon his own “share of feeling 
 and fancy” to relate the historical “facts.” 
 
 Hawthorne thus suggests that genuine historical vision occurs only 
 when one becomes vulnerable to the entire emotional and psycho¬ 
 logical context involving the intermingling of boundaries between 
 the experience of one’s present and the historical past. Theoretically 
 stated, the fullness of subjective responsiveness (unarmored experi¬ 
 ence) provides the preconditions for objective knowledge and criti¬ 
 cal insight. The quality of fullness or receptivity may be as natural 
 as the twilight, yet, paradoxically, we rarely find it in Hawthorne’s 
 characters or in his fictional world. In this story, however, Haw¬ 
 thorne begins to imagine a kind of responsiveness, beyond conven¬ 
 tion, in which one can dialectically move between inside and outside, 
 subjective and objective, without severely interfering with or short- 
 circuiting the perceptions via one’s idiosyncratic defenses, wishes, or 
 fantasies. Given these conditions, the tone of Leonard’s declamatory 
 rant as he tells his story to the wizard corresponds to the frenzied 
 intensity of the mob leading the condemned to the gallows. Haw¬ 
 thorne’s portrayal of the Puritan superstitious intolerance revives the 
 original intensity of the harmless nineteenth-century genteel intoler¬ 
 ance of literary extremes reflected in the two women’s defensive 
 superficiality. 
 
 The violence in both plots derives from a noticeable impairment 
 
The Early Sense of Evil 
 
 191 
 
 of judgment: the natural reasoning and perceptive powers of human 
 beings have been severely maligned by the world in which they live. 
 Leonard’s judgment becomes impaired when Walter Brome’s hints 
 of a vile seduction drive Leonard’s incestuous jealousy to a demonic 
 intensity. Walter serves as the catalyst which ignites Leonard’s un¬ 
 conscious upheaval, but the original impairment of Leonard’s judg¬ 
 ment occurs long before, in a childhood trauma: Leonard recalls the 
 dim memory of his father murdered during an Indian raiding party. 
 Historical forces thus play a part in controlling and violating 
 Leonard’s life before he can ever defend himself or understand what 
 has happened. 
 
 The apparition of his father’s murder emerges during Leonard’s 
 confession to the wizard of his murder of Walter Brome. As the dead 
 Walter lay at his feet, the childhood vision of his dead father over¬ 
 whelms Leonard “. . . with the sensation of one who struggles 
 through a dream. . . . Me thought I stood a weeping infant by my 
 father’s hearth; by the cold and blood-stained hearth where he lay 
 dead.” (p. 132) The struggle with the dream is a struggle with the 
 dark powers of the unconscious which threaten to overwhelm him. 
 Leonard tries ineffectually to control the upsurge of violent and de¬ 
 structive impulses. He turns to the wizard: the one person least likely 
 to help him. His hysterical frenzy increases until he becomes vulner¬ 
 able to deception. As Stanley Brodkin suggests: “he is . . . unable to 
 distinguish between a gust of wind and the wizard’s laugh which 
 mocks the ‘indubitable proofs’ (p. 132) of Alice’s guilt, proofs which 
 the wizard knows are unreal.”' 
 
 The “indubitable proofs” parody the “spectral evidence” of the 
 witchcraft trials where the hallucinatory visions of young children 
 who claimed to be afflicted by witches acquired the legal status of 
 “spectral evidence.” Merely on the basis of their unprovable claims, 
 nineteen people were condemned by the law to be hung on Gallows 
 Hill. That the demonic deceptions of these children could be accepted 
 as adequate proofs of an individual’s guilt parallels Leonard’s de¬ 
 monic deception at the hands of the wizard. But whereas Leonard— 
 neither as a fatherless child nor as a disturbed adult—-has no one to 
 trust, no supporting culture or folklore to fall back on, the disturbed 
 children of Salem found their visionary powers idolized by the “dis- 
 
 * Brodkin, pp. 120-121. 
 
192 
 
 David Downing 
 
 eased imagination” of the entire culture. The sexual and Oedipal con¬ 
 fusions Hawthorne outlines at the core of even such an imperfectly 
 rendered character as Leonard provide insight into similar sexual and 
 Oedipal confusions in the members of any culture afflicted by a dis¬ 
 turbance comparable in nature to that of the witchcraft craze.® 
 Leonard’s sexual hallucinations become fixated on individual mem¬ 
 bers within the family, whereas the sexual hallucinations of the 
 young children of the witchcraft craze, supported by a folklore, 
 could reach outside the family and fixate on any member of the 
 culture. 
 
 Either way, fixation is a measure of unresponsiveness. The wizard, 
 Leonard, and both children and adults in the Puritan society have all 
 become immune to the natural flow of sympathy for the suffering of 
 others. The cost of this immunity reverberates throughout the story. 
 The extremes of death and pain magnify a disturbance more intrinsic 
 to their epistemology than a momentary breach in the cultural values 
 which are supposed to eliminate these forces. The normal Puritan 
 dependence on the visible signs of the natural world as evidence of 
 God’s presence opposed the replacement in 1692 with immediate, 
 invisible, “spectral evidence” without recourse to provable natural 
 signs. In Hawthorne’s story, however, we may experience the more 
 fundamental connection between these two modes (verbal typology 
 vs. sudden intuition), in any culture which places as much, if not 
 more, credibility on another world besides (or beyond) our bodily 
 existence. In this sense the visible evidence supporting the “words” of 
 the ministers is not all that different in kind than the invisible evi¬ 
 dence of the “words” of the afflicted children. They both point to¬ 
 wards a world we can neither see nor feel nor touch with our senses. 
 
 Responsiveness to the potential qualities in Hawthorne’s text may 
 depend on an openness to the physical world as experienced through 
 our bodies. From the symbolic presence of the “vile and ineradicable 
 weed” which “blasted the spot” on Gallows Hill with “a physical 
 curse,” the story moves quickly to the murdered corpse of Walter 
 Brome and the hysteria of Leonard Doane. These initial sensations 
 of bodies being menaced (Leonard’s, at least emotionally, beginning 
 
 5 Among studies of witchcraft I have found the following two sources particularly help¬ 
 ful in this essay: H. R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze oj the i 6 th and lyth 
 Centuries (Harmonsworth, Eng., 1969); Larzer Ziff, Puritanism in America (New York, 
 1973). PP- 229-250. 
 
The Early Sense of Evil 
 
 193 
 
 with his father’s murder) provide the affective grounds for our read¬ 
 ing experience. Through the activity of critical insight, we are led to 
 a critique of the underlying values of the patriarchal society which 
 establishes the conditions for both Indian raids and witch hunts. 
 
 From the reverse direction, we find that as Hawthorne plunges 
 deeper into the seemingly invisible world of words and language, he 
 finds himself carried deeper into his own body and his own culture. 
 He does not always like what he finds, but he employs various ways 
 to communicate those dark insights without letting them destroy 
 either himself or his art. As we have seen in these two early stories, 
 and throughout his writing during the 1830’s, Hawthorne draws 
 heavily on the material of his native history so as to redirect his lit¬ 
 erary plunge away from his solipsistic self-consciousness. “Hollow” 
 and “Appeal” focus on Puritan America, but it is only natural that 
 he would also turn to the most significant series of events in Ameri¬ 
 can history culminating in the Revolution of 1776. The nature of the 
 psychological insights embedded in the early stories help to illumi¬ 
 nate the more complex and successful stories such as “My Kinsman, 
 Major Molineux.” Wc can more easily understand why the familiar 
 Oedipal and sexual dimensions are not just Hawthorne’s limiting ob¬ 
 sessions but reflect actual dimensions of the psycho-historical moment. 
 
Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Mother: 
 A Biographical Speculation 
 
 Nina Baym 
 
 E very student of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work and life knows that 
 he wrote The Scarlet Letter because he lost his job at the Salem 
 Custom House. He told the world so in his autobiographical preface 
 to the story, “The Custom-House,” and all later biographers have 
 followed his lead while filling out the details.^ But the sequence of 
 events Hawthorne chronicles in the preface explains no more than 
 how he came to be free to write, and offers no factual basis for 
 understanding what he wrote. To be sure, his angry and defiant 
 heroine might express some of his own humiliation and rage. To 
 write a story which favored the outcast so heavily against the estab¬ 
 lishment might have been an act of sweet revenge on the author’s 
 powerful enemies. 
 
 I 
 
 But such connections are remote. The essence of Hester’s character 
 and story (not to mention Dimmesdale’s) is untouched. Why did 
 Hawthorne pick a woman protagonist.^ Why a lone woman.? Why 
 a mother.? To the extent that we seek biographical explanations for 
 such choices we are probably always limited to surmise rather than 
 certain knowledge. But it seems fair to say that the biographical 
 accounts we now have do not offer hypotheses which engage with 
 these questions. 
 
 Another event occurred in Hawthorne’s life at the same time, 
 exactly, that he was dismissed from the Custom House. On 30 July 
 1849, only six days after the new surveyor was appointed, his mother 
 died. Her health had long been fragile, but she had lived to be sixty- 
 
 See Hubert H. Hoeltje, “The Writing of The Scarlet Letter,” New England Quarterly, 
 27 (1954)) 326-46, and Stephen Nissenbaum, “The Firing of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” 
 Essex Institute Historical Collections, 114 (1978), 57-86. 
 
 American Literature, Volume 54, Number i, March 1982. Copyright © 1982 by Duke 
 University Press. 
 
Hawthorne and His Mother 
 
 195 
 
 nine years old. She was residing in Hawthorne’s house (as were his 
 two sisters, both unmarried) when she succumbed to a sudden, 
 relatively brief illness which took the author by surprise. He was 
 greatly affected by her death, coming near to a “brain fever” after 
 her burial on 2 August. Six days later he was writing for the first time 
 of leaving Salem, “this abominable city,” forever, as indeed he was 
 to do after finishing The Scarlet Letter. By early September he had 
 recovered from his illness and begun The Scarlet Letter, working 
 with an intensity that almost frightened his wife, and with a speed 
 that brought the book to completion before the year ended. He was 
 insoired as he had never been before, or was to be again." 
 
 Common sense suggests that a work following so immediately on 
 the aeatn of a motner, featuring a heroine who is a mother (and 
 whose status as a mother is absolutely central to her situation), might 
 very likely be inspired by that death and consist, in its autobiographi¬ 
 cal substance, of a complex memorial to that mother. But one looks 
 virtually in vain for a biographical analysis of The Scarlet Letter 
 which pursues such a suggestion.® One looks in vain for a reliable, 
 comprehensive account of Hawthorne’s mother and his relationship 
 with her. Instead, we have a longstanding and unreliable tradition 
 about her which persists despite a quantity of countervailing evi¬ 
 dence. This tradition permits critics to accuse her of a grotesque, 
 pernicious role in his life or, alternatively, to deny her any role 
 at all. 
 
 Mark Van Doren, one of the few skeptics, described the situation 
 well: “His mother has long been the subject of a .sentimental legend 
 which no evidence supports. She is supposed, soon after her husband’s 
 death, to have shut herself away not only from the world but from 
 the Mannings [her natal family] and her own children. There are 
 hints of a darkened room where she takes her meals alone, says 
 nothing, and mourns ‘in a Hindoo seclusion’ the irreparable sadness 
 
 ^ Arlin Turner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, A Biography (New York: Oxford, 1980), p. 
 208; Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 
 1884), I, 353-54 (henceforth cited parenthetically). 
 
 ® Jean Normand, Nathaniel Hawthorne: An Approach to an Analysis of Artistic Crea¬ 
 tion, tr. Derek Coltman (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Univ. Press, 1970), and John 
 Franzosa, " ‘The Custom-House,’ The Scarlet Letter, and Hawthorne’s Separation from 
 Salem,” ESQ, 24 (1978), 5-21, find the biographical significance of the romance to reside 
 in the maternal figure of Hester, as I do. But both subsume this figure into larger, 
 abstract schemes, Jungian and quasi-Freudian respectively, and ignore biographical detail. 
 
196 
 
 Nina Baym 
 
 of her lot. It appears on the contrary that she was an excellent cook, 
 an attentive mother, and an interesting talker about things past and 
 present. Her son’s childhood letters to her, a number of which sur¬ 
 vive, are addressed to no such awful stranger as the legend sug¬ 
 gests.”^ Van Doren could have added that some of her letters also 
 survive, showing an active, outward-looking disposition and betray¬ 
 ing no hint of reclusiveness. But despite evidence accumulated and 
 publicized by such scholars as Norman Holmes Pearson, Randall 
 Stewart, Manning Hawthorne, and (recently) Gloria Ehrlich, the 
 legend persists in newer biographies.® Thus when we look for Haw¬ 
 thorne’s mother we have to make our way past a legend constructed, 
 it seems, to deny access. 
 
 It is not hard to understand why the legend has persisted. It has 
 Hawthorne’s own authority behind it, as well as the endorsement 
 of his wife, his sister-in-law, and his son. For those seeking a reason 
 for Hawthorne’s supposed lifelong feelings of gloom and alienation, 
 both the maternal rejection and her example of seclusion seem to 
 provide clues. Such early biographers as George Woodberry, Lloyd 
 Morris, Herbert Gorman, Robert Cantwell, and Newton Arvin 
 depended heavily on the legend to explain the oddities of Haw¬ 
 thorne’s imagination and his fiction. To other biographers seeking 
 (for various reasons) to connect Hawthorne to the father he never 
 knew and the father’s family he had nothing to do with, her alleged 
 absence allowed them to follow their preferences by writing her 
 out of his life altogether. Among such biographers one must include 
 Randall Stewart, Hubert Hoeltje, Arlin Turner, and James R. 
 Mellow. 
 
 It is not especially difficult to understand the motives of Haw¬ 
 thorne’s surviving family in transmitting to the public a misrepre- 
 
 ■* Mark Van Doren, ’Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Sloane, 1949), p. 9. 
 
 ® Norman Holmes Pearson, “Elizabeth Peabody on Hawthorne," Essex Institute His¬ 
 torical Collections, 94 (1958), 256-76; Randall Stewart, “Recollections of Hawthorne by 
 His Sister Elizabeth,” American Literature, 16 (1945), 316—31; Manning Hawthorne, “Haw¬ 
 thorne’s Early Years,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 74 (1938), 1-21; "Parental 
 and Family Influences on Hawthorne,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, "jfi (1940), 
 1-13; “Nathaniel Hawthorne Prepares for College,” New England Quarterly, ii (1938), 
 66-68; “Maria Louise Hawthorne,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 75 (1939), 103-34; 
 “Nathaniel Hawthorne at Bowdoin,” New England Quarterly, 13 (1940), 246-79; “A 
 Glimpse of Hawthorne’s Boyhood,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 83 (1947), 178- 
 84; Gloria Ehrlich, “Hawthorne and the Mannings,” Studies in the American Renaissance 
 igSo (Boston: Twayne, 1980), pp. 97-117. 
 
Hawthorne and His Mother 
 
 197 
 
 sentation of his mother. The misrepresentation operated to their 
 advantage, as we shall see; and in any case they would not have been 
 likely to go against a story originating with Hawthorne himself. 
 It is very puzzling, however, to make out Hawthorne’s own motives 
 in this case. But it is important to try to do so, for every conscious 
 misrepresentation points to something hidden. Hawthorne seems 
 to have been trying to hide not merely the actual role that his 
 mother had played in his life, but the fact that she had a role at all. 
 Such a denial—completely unnecessary in those innocent pre- 
 Freudian days—only suggests that her role must have been very large 
 indeed. 
 
 The legend made its first appearance of record in his early love 
 letters to Sophia Peabody, where he writes of his mother’s and sisters’ 
 eccentric reclusiveness, and the morbid atmosphere in their house, 
 which he calls “Castle Dismal.” (The phrase later became a favorite 
 of Sophia’s.) Later he resisted Sophia’s urgings that he make their 
 engagement known by citing “the strange reserve, in regard to 
 matters of feeling, that has always existed among us. We are con¬ 
 scious 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.”® 
 
 These sentences have carried a good deal of weight with biog¬ 
 raphers who have taken them at face value instead of observing 
 their highly literary character. They need to be examined for the 
 equivocations of their rhetoric—the unallowable equation of an 
 engagement with deepest, private heart-concernments, for example. 
 And, while asserting the existence of “a strange reserve” these lines 
 imply a group of people deeply attuned to one another’s moods and 
 hence, possibly, an understanding beyond the need for speech. In 
 any event, people who are always conscious of one another’s feelings 
 must be in more or less constant contact. A particular irony of this 
 letter is the way Hawthorne offers up its obfuscation to Sophia as 
 exemplary of how he can gush out freely to her and to her only. 
 
 In fine, what we seem to have here is an instance of a lover’s 
 strategy, to claim that nobody understands him and thereby appear 
 both more needy and more interesting in the beloved’s eyes, all the 
 
 ^ Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Chicago: Society of the dofobs, 1907), II, 78 
 (henceforth cited parenthetically). 
 
198 
 
 Nina Baym 
 
 while giving her the pleasure of enacting the heroine’s role in his 
 romantic drama. “Mine ownest,” he wrote her on 4 October 1840, 
 addressing her as though they were already married, “Here sits 
 thy husband in his old accustomed chamber, where he used to sit 
 in years gone by. . . . Sometimes (for I had no wife then to keep 
 my heart warm) it seemed as if I were already in the grave, with 
 only life enough to be chilled and benumbed . . . till at length a 
 certain Dove was revealed to me, in the shadow of a seclusion as 
 deep as my own had been. ... So now I begin to understand why 
 I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I 
 could never break through the viewless bolts and bars” (Love Letters, 
 1,223-24). 
 
 Sophia’s limpid, unsophisticated imagination accepted the lover’s 
 hyperbole as literal truth, as Hawthorne expected—for he was aware 
 of, and attracted to, the transparent sensibility which seemed the 
 very opposite of his own. “I tell thee these things,” he wrote, “in 
 order that my Dove, into whose infinite depths the sunshine falls 
 continually, may perceive what a cloudy veil stretches over the abyss 
 of my nature” (Love Letters, II, 79). Her simple sincerity guaranteed 
 that she would mistake the veil for the abyss. And, as a result of her 
 mistake, she transmitted the legend through conversations and 
 letters until it became an article of family faith. 
 
 Sophia was apparently not the only one to whom Hawthorne 
 talked in this vein in the years before his marriage. When Julian 
 Hawthorne was preparing a biography of his parents in the early 
 1880s he asked Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia’s sister, to write up her 
 recollection of Hawthorne during the period of his courtship. (Pea¬ 
 body had sought Hawthorne out after the publication of Twice- 
 Told Tales and had introduced him to her sister Sophia.) Her 
 memories can be questioned, since they pertain to a period almost 
 fifty years behind her; but the statements she attributed to Haw¬ 
 thorne resemble those he wrote to Sophia. He is represented as say¬ 
 ing, “We do not live at our house, we only vegetate. Elizabeth 
 [Hawthorne’s older sister] never leaves her den; I have mine in 
 the upper story, to which they always bring my meals, setting them 
 down in a waiter at my door, which is always locked.’ ‘Don’t you 
 even see your mother?’ said I. ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘in our little parlour. 
 She comes and sits down with me and Louisa [Hawthorne’s younger 
 
Hawthorne and His Mother 
 
 199 
 
 sister] after tea—and sometimes Louisa and I drink tea together. 
 My mother and Elizabeth each take their meals in their rooms. My 
 mother has never sat down to table with anybody, since my father’s 
 death.’ I said, ‘Do you think it is healthy to live so separated?’ ‘Cer¬ 
 tainly not—it is no life at all—it is the misfortune of my life. It has 
 produced a morbid consciousness that paralyzes my powers.’ ” 
 
 Peabody then goes on to describe the reclusive widow Hawthorne 
 who, through Julian Hawthorne’s biography, found her way into 
 the common understanding of Hawthorne’s life. But in the very 
 same description she comments on the widow in a manner that 
 undercuts her own account. “Widow Hawthorne always looked as 
 if she had walked out of an old picture, with her ancient costume, 
 and a face of lovely sensibility, and great brightness—for she did 
 not seem at all a victim of morbid sensibility, notwithstanding her 
 all but Hindoo self-devotion to the manes of her husband. She was 
 a person of fine understanding and a very cultivated mind.”' It takes 
 no great acumen to observe that Elizabeth Peabody could not have 
 known how the widow “always” looked, or characterize her fine and 
 cultivated sensibility if she had seldom left her bedroom. Indeed, 
 the revealing phrase “she did not seem at all a victim of morbid 
 sensibility” shows that Peabody’s theories of Elizabeth Hathorne did 
 not mesh with her memories. 
 
 Julian Hawthorne was a shrewd and tactful man who doubtless 
 perceived discrepancies in the material he had before him. However, 
 given the filial respect which was his announced motive in writing 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, he could not contradict views 
 of events maintained by his parents. He transmitted much of Eliza¬ 
 beth Peabody’s account, and building from its description of the 
 widow’s reclusiveness, he attributed Hawthorne’s alienated tempera¬ 
 ment to the mother’s unnatural behavior. Hawthorne “was brought 
 up,” Julian wrote, “under what might be considered special dis¬ 
 advantages. His mother, a woman of fine gifts but of extreme sensi¬ 
 bility, lost her husband in her twenty-eighth year; and, from an 
 exaggerated, almost Hindoo-like construction of the law of seclusion 
 which the public taste of that day imposed upon widows, she with¬ 
 drew entirely from society, and permitted the habit of solitude to 
 grow upon her to such a degree that she actually remained a strict 
 
 ” Pearson, “Elizabeth Peabody on Hawthorne,” pp. 266-68. 
 
200 
 
 Nina Baym 
 
 hermit to the end of her long life, or for more than forty years after 
 Captain Hawthorne’s death. ... It is saying much for the sanity 
 and healthfulness of the minds of these three children, that their 
 loneliness distorted their judgment, their perception of the relation 
 of things, so little as it did” {Hawthorne and His Wife, I, 4-5). 
 
 Only a few pages further on, Julian approves Widow Hawthorne’s 
 views on education, and credits her with shaping her son’s literary 
 sensibilities by encouraging him to read poetry, romance, and alle¬ 
 gory. And he prints recollections by other informants which contra¬ 
 dict the legend implicitly. But ultimately he fails to engage with the 
 inconsistencies in his narrative. He needs the widow’s morbidity for 
 his thesis, which is that Hawthorne was saved as man and artist 
 through his marriage to Sophia. The story that Julian’s father had 
 invented as an ardent lover is respectfully promulgated by a duti¬ 
 ful son. 
 
 Perhaps the damage done to Elizabeth Hathorne’s reputation re¬ 
 sulted inadvertently from Hawthorne’s campaign to win Sophia. 
 But, unquestionably, there is malice and hostility expressed toward 
 her in the particular legend Hawthorne devised. In some obscure 
 manner she is held accountable for Hawthorne’s incarceration in 
 the Castle Dismal. In the fairy-tale structure of the legend (a variant 
 of “Beauty and the Beast,” perhaps) she is allocated the role of the 
 enchanter whose evil spell must be undone by the greater power of 
 Sophia’s beneficence. While the structure is demonstrably out of 
 keeping with known facts, it might well be an accurate, though 
 necessarily figural, dramatization of Hawthorne’s inner reality. If 
 so, then its representation of the mother as absent actually masks an 
 oppressive sense of her presence in his psychic world. But, known 
 facts do not permit us to characterize Elizabeth Hathorne as domi¬ 
 neering and possessive. The presence that is symbolized, then, is the 
 presence of Hawthorne’s own deep attachment to his mother. 
 
 II 
 
 Elizabeth Clarke Manning was born in 1780, the third of nine 
 children of Miriam Lord (b. 1748) and Richard Manning (b. 1755). 
 The other children were Mary, b. 1777; William, b. 1778; Richard, 
 b. 1782; Robert, b. 1784; Maria, b. 1786; John, b. 1788 Priscilla, 
 b. 1790; and Samuel, b. 1791: a total of five boy^ and four girls, all 
 
Hawthorne and His Mother 
 
 201 
 
 surviving to adulthood. The Mannings were a close-knit and late 
 marrying family who lived together in a large plain wooden house 
 on Herbert Street in Salem. The head of the family, Richard 
 Manning, began his working life as a blacksmith and progressed to 
 owning a stagecoach line. Through this and other enterprises, 
 including land investments, he built a comfortable estate. 
 
 Although none of the Manning children attended college— 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne would be the first of the line to do so—there 
 was considerable interest in education among them, and all (in¬ 
 cluding Elizabeth) received some schooling. As adults, they were 
 avid readers. Their religious views inclined toward the liberal, as 
 they belonged to the Unitarian church. (Elizabeth and her sister 
 Mary joined the Congregational Church in 1806, however.) Eliza¬ 
 beth was the first to leave the Manning household, marrying 
 Nathaniel Hathorne—as the name was then spelled—on 2 August 
 1801, when she was twenty-one years old. Hathorne, a sea captain, 
 was five years older than she, and had probably known her for 
 some time because he lived across the back fence in a house on 
 Union Street, where she moved upon marriage. There is evidence 
 of a courtship of some duration: on a voyage two years earlier 
 Nathaniel had written couplets to his “dear Betsey.” The notebook 
 in which these verses were inscribed became in time the property 
 of his son, who copied over one of his father’s amatory couplets: 
 “In the Midest of all these dire allarms/I’ll think dear Betsey on thy 
 Charms.”® 
 
 The household to which Elizabeth moved was presided over by 
 Nathaniel’s mother, a widow; and his two unmarried sisters also 
 lived there. He and his brother Daniel, also a seafaring man, lived at 
 home when they were on shore, which was seldom. He left for sea 
 very shortly after his marriage and was away when Elizabeth bore 
 her first child on 7 March 1802, a daughter also named Elizabeth 
 though commonly called Ebe. 
 
 The date of Ebe’s birth was barely seven months after that of her 
 parents’ marriage. The significance of this seven-month’s child has 
 escaped notice, or at least mention, by virtually all of Hawthorne’s 
 biographers. But it could hardly have escaped the notice of the 
 
 ® James R. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 
 1980), p. 13. 
 
202 
 
 Nina Baym 
 
 three women with whom Elizabeth was now domiciled, nor could 
 it have been insignificant to them. Perhaps they were models for the 
 hostile chorus of women at the beginning of The Scarlet better. 
 For, as the historian Carl N. Degler reminds us, “bridal pregnancies” 
 in nineteenth-century America appear to have been quite rare—well 
 under ten percent—^nd, as evidence of sexual relations outside mar¬ 
 riage, led to social stigma which “fell like a hammer” on the 
 errant.® Certainly among conservative segments of Salem society, 
 including quite probably the old-fashioned and pious Hathornes, 
 Elizabeth would have been harshly judged. The daughter Ebe grew 
 up into a strikingly independent, only partially socialized woman, 
 much as though she had been exempted from normal social expecta¬ 
 tions by those entrusted with rearing her. It is not improbable that 
 Hawthorne’s depiction of the wild Pearl had as much to do with 
 his memory of Ebe as a child, as it did with his observations of his 
 own daughter Una. 
 
 Nathaniel Hathorne Jr. was born on 4 July 1804; his father was 
 again away at sea. A third child, Maria Louisa (called Louisa) 
 arrived on 9 January 1808, barely two weeks after the father had 
 again set sail, this time on what proved to be his last voyage. Early 
 in the spring of that year he died of a fever in Surinam. He left 
 Elizabeth a widow at the age of twenty-eight, with children aged 
 six and four and an infant of a few months. In seven years of married 
 life he had spent little more than seven months in Salem, and had 
 been absent from home at the births of all his children. We need 
 hardly look further for sources of the image of a socially stigmatized 
 woman abandoned to bear and rear her child alone. 
 
 However, Elizabeth did not have to deal with her harsh lot alone, 
 although support did not come from the Hathornes. Only a few 
 months after receiving word of her husband’s death she returned 
 permanently to the Mannings. It was only prudent for her to do so, 
 since the Hathornes were not well off and she had inherited nothing 
 from Nathaniel. The Mannings were lower on the social scale than 
 the Hathornes but they were prospering, and the family included 
 several vigorous men to look after its interest and conduct its 
 business. 
 
 ^ At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present 
 (New York: Oxford, 1980), p. 20. 
 
Hawthorne and His Mother 
 
 203 
 
 In addition, there is evidence of bad feeling between Elizabeth 
 and her husband’s family. Aunt Peabody in her recollection to 
 Julian Hawthorne wrote that Elizabeth “was not happily affected by 
 her husband’s family—the Hawthornes being of a very sharp and 
 stern individuality—and when not cultivated, this appeared in oddity 
 of temper.”'® Peabody’s syntax is defective here but her intent is to 
 characterize the Hathornes as people who had, through want of 
 cultivation, let a naturally stern individualism turn to oddness and 
 eccentricity. It may well be that they, rather than Hawthorne’s 
 mother, went in for solitude. In any event, after she left them 
 Elizabeth Hathorne made little effort to keep up contacts, notwith¬ 
 standing their continued proximity. Nor is any effort at relationship 
 recorded from their side. On an occasional Sunday young Nathaniel 
 went over and read the Bible in his grandmother’s parlour, and the 
 difference between that household of sharp and stern eccentrics, and 
 the cooperative Mannings, must have been imaginatively striking. 
 
 The failure of the Hathornes to pursue a relationship with Eliza¬ 
 beth seems stranger than her defection from them, because in losing 
 her they lost grandchildren who bore their name. But perhaps 
 Elizabeth’s misstep had disqualified her children as Hathornes in 
 their eyes. Perhaps they viewed her as a social interloper, a female 
 conniver using a woman’s age-old trick to entrap a husband. Perhaps 
 their old-fashioned piety led them to perceive her as sinful and 
 fallen. Perhaps the causes of the falling-out were banal. But however 
 it came about, it is impossible that Nathaniel Hawthorne could 
 have absorbed any other perspective on this rift than that of his 
 mother. Through his later readings in New England history he 
 came to associate the early Puritans with the Hathornes, and this 
 association may go far to explain the severity with which he turns 
 their judging natures back on themselves. The Puritans versus a 
 defenseless woman equalled the Hathornes versus his mother. If 
 his mother herself suffered some sense of guilt or shame under 
 the judgment, then her psychological turmoil filtering into her son’s 
 consciousness might linger to provide a model for Hester’s complex 
 ambivalences. In any event, I should suppose that some heightened 
 response to her situation underlies the poignant depiction of Hester’s 
 duress in The Scarlet Letter. 
 
 Pearson, “Elizabeth Peabody on Hawthorne,” p. 268. 
 
204 
 
 Nina Baym 
 
 Of course much would have been beyond his childish understand¬ 
 ing. He would have to be old enough to mesh a knowledge of 
 wedding and birth dates with a knowledge of biological processes 
 before he could relate his mother’s guilt, her children, and her 
 separation from the Hathornes in one logical structure. But the aura 
 of mystery—of the uncanny—that accompanies so many “adult 
 doings” in his fiction from “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” to 
 The Marble Faun may be an expression of just that deeply-impressed 
 early sense of bewilderment. 
 
 As he became more knowing, Hawthorne may have come to feel 
 some guilt himself—guilt over siding with his mother, if she was 
 indeed in the wrong; and guilt over carrying the name of people 
 (perhaps sharing their traits) who had repudiated his mother for the 
 sin of bearing children. He was one of those children, and when later 
 in his life he was reading New England history and found a variant 
 spelling of the paternal name—Hawthorne instead of Hathorne— 
 his adoption of that orthography may have been a gesture of 
 counter-repudiation. 
 
 Elizabeth’s return to the Mannings has been seen as the first step 
 in an intensifying withdrawal, but in fact the Mannings were much 
 more in the world than the Hathornes, and there were enough of 
 them to be a world in themselves. In 1808 the entire clan was intact 
 at Herbert Street. This means that ten people were living there, rang¬ 
 ing from Mrs. Manning who was then sixty years old to Samuel who, 
 at age seventeen, was only eleven years older than Hawthorne’s 
 sister Ebe. These numbers alone explain Hawthorne’s subsequent 
 appetite for solitude; he must have had almost none of it in his 
 boyhood. The addition of Elizabeth and her three children to the 
 Herbert Street group brought the total living in that house to an 
 incredible (by our modern middle-class standards) fourteen. 
 
 The three children were apparently regarded as a joint family 
 charge, and their futures were discussed and determined upon by all. 
 After the senior Manning died in 1813, and Richard settled in 
 Raymond, Maine, to manage family property there, the business 
 head of the Mannings became Robert, while Mary ran the household. 
 Given the limited biological understanding of the child, young 
 Hawthorne probably never missed his dead father consciously, and 
 since there were male heads of the Manning household in abundance 
 
Hawthorne and His Mother 
 
 205 
 
 he probably never grasped, at any level, the fact that he was lacking 
 a father until he was beyond childhood. At the best, this lack could 
 only have been grasped intellectually, for in his emotional world 
 he had several. The evidence is that he missed not one more father, 
 but a home which might be presided over by his mother without the 
 intervention of any other adult. For a while this seemed likely: 
 Elizabeth considered settling near Richard in Maine and running 
 her own farm. She actually tried this way of life, on and off, for 
 six years, and though Hawthorne often had to stay behind in Salem 
 for his schooling, he was anxious for her to make Raymond her 
 permanent residence. 
 
 “I hope. Dear Mother,” he wrote from Salem on 19 June 1821, 
 “that you will not be tempted by any entreaties to return to Salem to 
 live. You can never have so much comfort here as you now enjoy. 
 You are now undisputed mistress of your own House. Here you 
 would have to submit to the authority of Miss Manning. If you 
 remove to Salem, I shall have no Mother to return to during the 
 College vacations. ... If you remain where you are, think how 
 delightfully the time will pass with all your children around you, 
 shut out from the world with nothing to disturb us. It will be a 
 second garden of Eden.”“ Two elements of Hawthorne’s imagery 
 are noteworthy. First, Raymond was at that time not a garden but a 
 forest setting (although, perhaps not insignificantly, a rose bush 
 grew before Elizabeth Hathorne’s door).^^ Ever after, Hawthorne 
 visualized Eden not as a garden but a forest, albeit that vision was 
 often obscured by subsequent grief and loss in his fiction. Too, the 
 “first” Garden of Eden had no children in it, while Hawthorne’s 
 second Eden conspicuously lacks an Adam. If Hawthorne secretly 
 casts himself in Adam’s role, then he is his mother’s son and lover 
 both. For him, Eden is a benign matriarchy. 
 
 A year earlier he had written his mother expressing reluctance to 
 go to college and, more generally, to grow up. “Oh how I wish I 
 was again with you, with nothing to do but 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.Given the 
 
 Manning Hawthorne, “Nathaniel Hawthorne at Bowdoin,” p. 87. 
 
 Manning Hawthorne, “Nathaniel Hawthorne Prepares for College,” p. 77. 
 
 “Nathaniel Hawthorne Prepares for College,” pp. 69-70. 
 
2o6 
 
 Nina Baym 
 
 conspicuous gun image, Hawthorne is not complaining about his 
 gender, but about social rules that force a boy out of the Garden of 
 Eden into the cold patriarchal world while permitting a girl to 
 remain enclosed in the maternal paradise. The search for the lost 
 mother, rather than the lost father, underlies much of the story 
 patterning in his mature fiction, as does the scheme of flight from 
 the patriarchy. The idea of the matriarchy retained a powerful hold 
 on his imagination throughout life, and he could only view patriar¬ 
 chal social organizations—the only kind he knew, though others 
 could be imagined—with enmity. 
 
 The enmity may owe its origins precisely to Elizabeth’s return to 
 Salem. Hawthorne may have been hurt and angry that his mother 
 disregarded his wishes in favor of her siblings’ entreaties. He may 
 have resented her failure to conform her life to his plans; a residue 
 of bitterness may have indeed affected his relation to her after he 
 graduated from Bowdoin and had to come back to Herbert Street 
 instead of Raymond. But he could fault the Mannings too. Haw¬ 
 thorne was glad enough to leave Herbert Street when he was 
 married, but in fact he never felt at home again.^^ Home was mother. 
 
 By 1825 the Manning family had suffered from time and circum¬ 
 stance. Only six were still living at Herbert Street when Hawthorne 
 came back from Bowdoin, although some of the others were 
 domiciled close by. Briefly, the senior Richard Manning had died 
 in 1813, his son Richard had gone to live in Maine, and John had 
 disappeared the same year (presumably lost at sea). Maria died in 
 1814. Priscilla married in 1817 and Robert in 1824; both moved out 
 but remained in Salem. When Hawthorne was married in 1842 the 
 household had been so far depleted as to consist only of his mother 
 and two sisters. Mrs. Manning died in 1826, William went into 
 bachelor quarters, and Samuel died in 1833. At the time that Haw¬ 
 thorne was stressing his solitude to the Peabody sisters, Mary was 
 still living at Herbert Street, but she died in 1841. Robert died in 1842. 
 
 For some reason, the probable cumulative effect of all these deaths 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne, English Notebook's, ed. Randall Stewart (New York; Modern 
 Language Association of America, 1941), p. 23; French and Italian Notebooks, ed. Thomas 
 Woodson (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1980), p. 570. Subsequent references to 
 Hawthorne's works citing the Centenary Edition published by the Ohio State Univ. Press 
 will be parenthetically included in the text, noting volume and page number of the 
 edition. 
 
Hawthorne and His Mother 
 
 207 
 
 on Hawthorne has never been appreciated, possibly because he said 
 and wrote little about them. Whatever effect they had on him, how¬ 
 ever, they must have been disastrous for Elizabeth, who had made 
 her whole life within the family circle. It is useful to remember that 
 when Hawthorne was married she was mourning for the sister to 
 whom she had been closest, and was soon to lose a brother. If she 
 seemed somewhat reclusive in the years when the Peabody sisters 
 came to know her, it may have been merely because she was sad. 
 Or because she did not change with her changing world—she was 
 approaching the age of sixty, and may have seen no way to fill the 
 void that her departing siblings created. She did remain close to her 
 surviving sister Priscilla (Mrs. Dike) and to Robert’s widow, 
 Rebecca. 
 
 In the years that Hawthorne w-as living at Herbert Street after 
 graduation, he may well have been the obscurest man of letters in 
 America (as he poetically characterised himself) but he certainly 
 could not have been the most solitary. He may indeed have had to 
 resort to such devices as taking meals in his room and locking his 
 door in order to get some writing done in that busy house. Still, he 
 walked and visited, w'ent on trips with his uncle Samuel, worked 
 on a magazine in Boston (with help from Ebe). He shared his 
 literary plans and agonized over his failures with his mother and 
 sisters. Ebe selected books for him from the Salem Athenaeum. 
 The three knew about his anonymous first novel Fanshawe, although 
 Sophia never learned of it. Ebe was able partly to reconstruct, many 
 years later, the early aborted projects for framed collections of short 
 stories. All three women helped him to collect copies of the pieces 
 printed in Twice-Told Tales and to prepare the manuscript for 
 publication.^® Louisa made him a shirt when he went to Brook 
 Farm, while Elizabeth sewed buttons on his trousers and rejoiced 
 in Osgood’s flattering portrait of her son that he had made for her. 
 Louisa, who carried on most of the correspondence with him while 
 he was at the farm, bemoaned the infrequency of his letters and 
 visits in a manner that suggests ordinary family intimacy.^® That 
 Hawthorne was much petted and greatly adored he implicitly 
 admits (Castle Dismal notwithstanding) in a letter to Sophia gently 
 
 Hawthorne and his Wife, I, 123-25; Stewart, “Recollections of Hawthorne by His 
 Sister Elizabeth,” pp. 323, 327-28. 
 
 Mellow, pp. 185-86. 
 
208 
 
 Nina Baym 
 
 chiding her for having taken offense at something he had written 
 earlier: “Dearest, I beseech you grant me freedom to be careless and 
 wayward—for I have had such freedom all my life” {Love Letters, 
 1 , 43 )- 
 
 When Hawthorne fell in love with Sophia Peabody late in 1838 
 he was thirty-five years old. No evidence survives as to whether his 
 mother and sisters had hoped that he would marry, or wished him 
 to remain single, or simply hoped for his happiness whatever he did. 
 Given their general fondness, the last is the most likely possibility. 
 Certainly, however, they never expected him to conceal an attach¬ 
 ment, and when he finally announced his engagement a scant month 
 before his wedding, Ebe at least was angered beyond the ability 
 to forgive or to rejoice in his happiness. She wrote to Sophia as 
 follows: 
 
 Your approaching union with my brother makes it incumbent upon me 
 to offer you the assurances of my sincere desire for your mutual happi¬ 
 ness. With regard to my sister and myself, I hope nothing will ever 
 occur to render your future intercourse with us other than agreeable, 
 particularly as it need not be so frequent or so close as to require more 
 than reciprocal good will, if we do not happen to suit each other in our 
 new relationship. I write thus plainly, because my brother has desired 
 me to say only what was true; though I do not recognize his right so 
 to speak of truth, after keeping us so long in ignorance of this affair. 
 But I do believe him when he says that this was not in accordance with 
 your wishes, for such concealment must naturally be unpleasant, and 
 besides, what I know of your amiable disposition convinces me that you 
 would not give us unnecessary pain. It was especially due to my mother 
 that she should long ago have been made acquainted with the engage¬ 
 ment of her only son.^’ 
 
 To some degree, Ebe never forgave her brother for his devious¬ 
 ness. “We were in those [early] days almost absolutely obedient 
 to him,” she wrote to Julian. “I do not quite approve of either 
 obedience or concealment” {Hawthorne and His Wife, I, 124-25). 
 And, despite her comment about Sophia’s amiable disposition, she 
 never warmed to her brother’s wife. “I might as well tell you that 
 [Sophia] is the only human being whom I really dislike,” a late 
 letter to relatives said. “Though she is dead, that makes no difference. 
 
 Turner, p. 141. 
 
Hawthorne and His Mother 
 
 209 
 
 I could have lived with her in apparent peace, but I could not have 
 lived long; the constraint would have killed me.”^® Perhaps Haw¬ 
 thorne’s having chosen so timid and conventional a woman caused 
 Ebe to reassess his character. 
 
 But Elizabeth responded in a different way, as Hawthorne wrote 
 to Sophia: 
 
 Sweetest, scarcely had I arrived here, when our mother came out of her 
 chamber, looking better and more cheerful than I have seen her this 
 some time, and enquired about the health and well-being of my Dove! 
 Very kindly too. Then was thy husband’s heart much lightened; for I 
 knew that almost every agitating circumstance of her life had hitherto 
 cost her a fit of sickness; and I knew not but it might be so now. Foolish 
 me, to doubt that my mother’s love would be wise, like all other genuine 
 love! . . . Now I am very happy—happier than my naughtiness deserves. 
 It seems that her heart was troubled, because she knew that much of 
 outward as well as inward fitness was requisite to secure thy foolish 
 husband’s peace; but, gradually and quietly, God has taught her that 
 all is good, and so, thou dearest wife, we shall have her fullest blessing 
 and concurrence. {Love Letters, II, 93-4) 
 
 Despite his mother’s loving acceptance, Hawthorne’s concealment 
 had done her a great wrong, and he knew it. His little boy’s con¬ 
 fession of naughtiness refers to more than that concealment, how¬ 
 ever. He was also confessing the naughtiness of his involvement with 
 Sophia to his mother. And, too (what he did not confess), there was 
 the naughtiness of the way in which he had misrepresented her and 
 his relation with her, to the Peabody sisters (and perhaps to others 
 as well). In fact, I surmise that it was his complex sense of acting in 
 bad faith toward Elizabeth that led him to desire concealment; 
 and then that this concealment became another act of bad faith, 
 in a chain of the sort that Hawthorne’s fiction sets out so knowingly. 
 Indeed, for the rest of his life Hawthorne was caught by that act of 
 bad faith since he was never able to rectify it except in the oblique 
 language of his fiction. 
 
 And I suspect that there was yet more than the lies about Castle 
 Dismal and solitary meals that burdened Hawthorne’s conscience. 
 The constellation of images in which he represented his case to 
 Sophia suggested, as I have said above, that Sophia was to save him 
 
 Turner, p. 142. 
 
210 
 
 Nina Baym 
 
 from and substitute for his mother. The image of the one woman 
 annihilates the image of the other; on the inner stage, where the 
 image is the person, to let Sophia rescue him is to kill his mother. 
 No evidence exists to suggest that Sophia or Elizabeth regarded each 
 other as rivals; the narrative Hawthorne projected derives (to the 
 extent that it is sincere) from his own emotions and not fact. The 
 narrative suggests—what the belated adolescent quality of his 
 romance with Sophia tends to confirm—that his attachment to 
 Elizabeth was so deep and pervasive that he experienced his love 
 for another woman as doing some kind of violence to her, as a 
 killing infidelity. At the same time, if Hawthorne blamed her for 
 his long years of “enchantment” in the Herbert Street house while 
 the world of adult sexual relationships passed him by, then he must 
 also assuredly have wanted to kill her to gain his freedom. And so on, 
 through the complex layers of the heart that Hawthorne knew so 
 well. 
 
 Doubtless, Sophia caught no glimmer of these depths in his talk of 
 naughtiness, but we can see that she was not entirely satisfied with 
 his explanations because she later worked out a tale which made Ebe 
 (conveniently) the culprit in the concealment. Obligingly, though in 
 revealing language, Julian transmitted her explanation: Ebe, wishing 
 to come between the two lovers, let Hawthorne know that “news of 
 his relation with Miss Sophia would give [Elizabeth] a shock that 
 might endanger her life.” As a loving son, Hawthorne was naturally 
 “not prepared to face the idea of defying and perhaps ‘killing’ his 
 mother” {Hawthorne and His Wife, I, 196-97). This story does not 
 withstand a moment’s scrutiny. Ebe could not have forestalled the 
 announcement of an engagement which she didn’t know about; her 
 blunt nature was incompatible with concealment; and, of course, 
 Hawthorne knew how his mother was likely to react as well as Ebe 
 did. But, if Ebe had not persuaded Hawthorne that his engagement 
 would kill his mother, he had probably persuaded himself. 
 
 However, Elizabeth declined to be killed, and hence not even a 
 temporary break in her relations with Hawthorne actually took place. 
 Granted, she did not attend his wedding; but there are other explana¬ 
 tions for this than hostility. During his sojourn at the Old Manse 
 he had more than one occasion to return to Salem, and inevitably he 
 stayed at Herbert Street, dining and chatting with his mother and 
 
Hawthorne and His Mother 
 
 2II 
 
 sisters. {Ste Love Letters, II, 107, 114, 120-21, 126-27, ^ 55 ~ 5 ^-) When 
 he returned with Sophia and his child Una to Salem upon being 
 appointed to the Custom House, he took up residence in Herbert 
 Street while looking for his own home. He did this as a matter of 
 course. The stay lasted several months—longer than anticipated— 
 and seems to have produced tension. But we must remember that 
 Sophia never became a favorite with the three women, nor did she 
 greatly care for them. For example, we find her writing to her 
 mother in January of 1846 that “on many accounts it would be 
 inconvenient to remain in this house. Madame Hawthorne and 
 Louisa are too much out of health to take care of a child, and I do 
 not like to have Una in the constant presence of unhealthy persons. 
 I have never let her go into Madame Hawthorne’s mysterious 
 chamber since November, partly on this account, and partly because 
 it is so much colder than the nursery, and has no carpet on it” 
 {Hawthorne and His Wife, I, 307-08). A woman who regarded 
 her husband’s closest female relatives only as babysitters, described 
 them as “unhealthy persons,” and kept her child out of grand¬ 
 mamma’s room for many weeks because it lacked a carpet, cannot be 
 imagined to have encouraged family intimacy. It seems clear that a 
 major goal on Sophia’s part was to preserve the autonomy of her 
 own new family. 
 
 Nevertheless, when a house (on Mall Street) that finally suited 
 them was found, it was determined that Elizabeth, Ebe, and Louisa 
 should join them permanently. The house, Sophia wrote to her 
 mother, fortunately had a suite of rooms “wholly distant from ours 
 so that we shall only meet when we choose to do so. Madame 
 Hawthorne is so uninterfering, of so much delicacy, that I shall 
 never know she is near excepting when I wish it; and she has so 
 much kindness and sense and spirit she will be a great resource in 
 emergencies. ... It is no small satisfaction to know that Mrs. 
 Hawthorne’s remainder of life will be glorified by the presence of 
 these children [Julian had been born] and of her own son. I am so 
 glad to win her out of that Castle Dismal, and from the mysterious 
 chamber, into which no mortal ever peeped till Una was born and 
 Julian—for they alone entered the penetralia. Jnto that chamber the 
 sun never shines. Into these rooms in Mall Street it blazes without 
 stint” (Hawthorne and His Wife, I, 314). One wonders how Sophia 
 
212 
 
 Nina Baym 
 
 knew so much about Elizabeth’s room if none but the little children 
 had ever entered it, or what opportunties the widow would have had 
 to show her kindness, sense, and spirit if she herself never left it. 
 Indeed, Sophia’s obtuseness is equalled only by her complacency (or 
 is some complex defensiveness working itself out here?). What sort 
 of rescue would it be for “Madame Hawthorne” if her lot was to 
 wait in her chamber until called on for help in an emergency ? 
 
 However, Elizabeth Hathorne had her own kind of spunk, it 
 seems. She made her presence known after all. She began to cook 
 items of food for Hawthorne that he had loved as a boy, and even to 
 carry bowls of coffee to him in his study as he sat writing. Though 
 Sophia was appalled, Hawthorne made no objection. Sophia unbent 
 so far, finally, as to obtain from Elizabeth a recipe for an Indian 
 pudding of which her husband was especially fond.^® 
 
 Hawthorne’s feelings about his mother in the years after his mar¬ 
 riage are not recoverable, for he spoke of these personal matters only 
 to Sophia and then necessarily in a highly oblique language designed 
 as much to veil as reveal. Sophia regularly read his journal and 
 therefore he had to compose his entries with her expectations in 
 mind. Nevertheless, we can be sure that the threatened loss of his 
 position at the Custom House after the election of 1848 must have 
 been particularly horrifying because he had assumed responsibility 
 for his mother’s welfare and undertaken to make a home for her 
 “remainder of life.” While he could be sure that the surviving 
 Mannings would provide for her (as they did for Ebe and Louisa 
 after Elizabeth’s death), the question was not her physical or even 
 psychological welfare but his own. 
 
 Certainly, then, her sudden serious illness and death at just the 
 moment when he became unable to provide for her must have seemed 
 profoundly significant to a man who felt so strongly the force that 
 the inner life exerted on the outer world. It is in the context of a 
 host of like thoughts, which he could not articulate plainly, that we 
 must read his extraordinary journal entry penned the day before his 
 mother died: 
 
 I love my mother; but there has been, ever since my boyhood, a sort of 
 coldness of intercourse between us, such as is apt to come between 
 
 Louise Hall Tharp, The Peabody Sisters of Salem (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950), 
 p. 185. 
 
Hawthorne and His Mother 
 
 
 persons of strong feelings, if they are not managed rightly. I did not 
 expect to be much moved at the time—that is to say, not to feel any 
 overpowering emotion struggling, just then—though I knew that I 
 should deeply remember and regret her. Mrs. Dike was in the chamber. 
 Louisa pointed to a chair near the bed, but I was moved to kneel down 
 close by my mother, and take her hand. She knew me, but could only 
 murmur a few indistinct words—among which I understood an injunc¬ 
 tion to take care of my sisters. Mrs. Dike left the chamber, and then I 
 found the tears slowly gathering in my eyes. I tried to keep them down; 
 but it would not be—I kept filling up, till, for a few moments, I shook 
 with sobs. For a long time, 1 knelt there, holding her hand; and surely 
 it is the darkest hour I ever lived. Afterwards, I stood by the open window, 
 and looked through the crevice of the curtain. ... I saw my little Una 
 of the golden locks, looking very beautiful; and so full of spirit and 
 life, that she was life itself. And then I looked at my poor dying mother; 
 and seemed to see the whole of human existence at once, standing in the 
 dusty midst of it. {Centenary, VIII, 429) 
 
 Though constrained to repeat the legend of coldness since boyhood 
 (which his boyhood letters so decisively refute), and to finish this 
 entry with an expression of hope in the afterlife suitable for Sophia’s 
 eyes, Hawthorne nevertheless permits the depths of his grief to come 
 to light. Connecting Una to his mother through himself, and making 
 this linked chain of three comprise the whole of human existence, 
 he effectively expunges Sophia from the record, makes Una his 
 mother’s child, and hence makes his mother both wife and mother to 
 him. But these were not his last words on the subject. His real tribute 
 to her, and to her influence, was to come in The Scarlet Letter. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The Scarlet Letter obviously cannot be called a work of auto¬ 
 biography or even biography as we use these terms to refer to 
 recognizable literary genres.^® But this discussion is meant to demon¬ 
 strate the way in which it, along with “The Custom-House,” contains 
 autobiographical and biographical material (his mother’s biography) 
 and is engendered specifically by Hawthorne’s experience of his 
 
 20 william C. Spengemann, in The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History 
 of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980), makes The Scarlet Letter 
 a sort of ultimate “self-reflexive” autobiographical statement, but in his definition auto¬ 
 biography need not refer to any real-life happenings. 
 
214 
 
 Nina Baym 
 
 mother’s death. It is not inaccurate to describe The Scarlet Tetter 
 as Hawthorne’s response to his mother’s death. This response is 
 composed of a number of elements difficult to extricate separately 
 from the one dense texture of the romance. The fact that the 
 woman it writes about is dead is paramount, for her death provides 
 the motive for writing and also the freedom to write. The con¬ 
 sciously articulated intentions of The Scarlet Tetter, one might say, 
 are to rescue its heroine from the oblivion of death and to rectify the 
 injustices that were done to her in life, and both of these intentions 
 take death as their starting point. 
 
 It is possible, within the elegiac frame of the work, to point to 
 several autobiographical and biographical strands, some pertaining 
 to the mother herself, some to the mother and son, and some to the 
 son alone. First, The Scarlet Tetter makes a noble attempt to realize 
 the mother as a separate person with an independent existence in 
 her own right; such an attempt represents the son’s very belated 
 recognition that his mother was a human being with her own life 
 and consciousness, something more than a figure in his own carpet. 
 As a youth of seventeen begging his mother to live in Maine, 
 Hawthorne had his own Garden of Eden in mind, but he never 
 doubted that his ideal would be hers also, and that a life shut off from 
 the world with her children would content her. Perhaps as a mature 
 man he began to know better. 
 
 Yet, in realizing the separate individuality, he must make Hester 
 a mother, for that is what Elizabeth inescapably was not only as part 
 of his reality but as part of hers also. So he tries to understand what 
 motherhood might mean for a person who does have, as all human 
 beings do, a sense of independent existence. The way in which 
 Pearl both impinges on and defines her mother’s selfhood vividly 
 dramatizes the claims that children make on their mothers. 
 
 Yet even as he strives to provide Hester with an independent 
 existence as the center of her own world, Hawthorne maintains a 
 double focus. Events in The Scarlet Tetter never work themselves 
 free of the constant voice of the narrator. We are always aware that 
 the character Hester depends for her reality on the act of narrative 
 generosity which is creating her. Here, Hawthorne reverses the 
 biological relation of mother and child and becomes the creator of 
 his mother. It seems to me that such a reversal not only underlies all 
 
Hawthorne and His Mother 
 
 215 
 
 representational art, but also responds to a specific set of wishes in 
 the particular author writing at this particular time—the wish to be 
 free of lifelong dependency on maternal power, the wish to have 
 one’s mother all to oneself (even if that possession can be attained 
 only after death). 
 
 But—another twist in the cable—Hester’s instant-by-instant de¬ 
 pendence on the narrator-author is reversed again in the testimony of 
 “The Custom-House” where “Hester” is defined as a creative force 
 outside the romance which is responsible for his inspiration and his 
 ability to write about her. Thus there is a transcending symbiosis of 
 symbol and artist, mother and son—each created by the other and 
 each dependent on the other for artistic life: the artist dependent 
 on the image which inspires him, and the image dependent on the 
 artist for representation. 
 
 There is, finally, an inevitable gap between the image and the 
 being who has inspired it and whom it represents; the image is the 
 refraction of the mother’s influence in the son’s psychic world. And 
 so the work becomes an ambitious attempt to give his mother her 
 own reality and bring to life her image in his mind as well and 
 somehow to keep these distinct. Mediating between the two inten¬ 
 tions of biography and autobiography, Hawthorne as narrator 
 creates a structure in which the identities of the two subjects alter¬ 
 nately assert themselves independently and then merge into a larger 
 unity. The unity is best symbolized in the icon of mother and child— 
 Divine Maternity—which is thrust on our attention in the first 
 scaffold scene of T he Scarlet Letter. 
 
 Beyond this complex personal intention, Hawthorne is also con¬ 
 cerned to make his romance a public document, and hence much of 
 the work of his text goes into generalizing, extending, and deper¬ 
 sonalizing the meaning of his core images. The maternal symbol at 
 the heart of The Scarlet Letter is contained within a sophisticated 
 narrative structure, and this structure is distanced from the reader by 
 the prefatory “Custom-House” essay. The personal meanings of the 
 romance are processed though a sequence of narrators (the narrator 
 of “The Custom-House” is not identical to the narrator of The 
 Scarlet Letter) who are deeply aware of what, in “The Custom- 
 House,” Hawthorne refers to as the reader’s right—the reader’s 
 right not to have unwanted confidences forced upon him. 
 
216 
 
 Nina Baym 
 
 Some of the resemblances between Hester’s and Elizabeth’s stories 
 will, I hope, already be evident from the account provided of her life: 
 the questionable circumstances of their children’s births, their 
 repudiation by those assigned society’s judging function, the absence 
 of spouse and abandonment of the child entirely to the mother. 
 Facing down Hester’s critics and overcoming presumed reader 
 resistance to her, Hawthorne goes beyond forgiveness to complete 
 acquittal. The chief agency of Hester’s exoneration is Pearl. Although 
 the narrative perspective is resolutely adult, it silently privileges 
 Pearl’s point of view toward her mother over all the others. Her 
 very existence is the narrative’s first and last fact, and it legitimizes 
 the act of her mother which engendered her. We cannot doubt that 
 Pearl has a right to be, and hence cannot fault the mother for 
 bringing her into existence. 
 
 Essentially, too. Pearl is her mother’s child only. Though society 
 and Hester are aware that a man participated in the act. Pearl has no 
 sense of this necessity and hers is the view that the reader is forced 
 to adopt. That is, we know that Hester has had a lover but we never 
 really “know” that Pearl has a father. Through Pearl and because 
 of her, then, Hester takes precedence over Dimmesdale and over the 
 society which tries to put him and his cohorts at the organizing 
 center of the fictional world. The world of the romance is organized 
 around her. Matriarchy prevails. Autobiographically speaking, Haw¬ 
 thorne identifies himself once and for all as his mother s child. 
 
 To be sure, Hester pays a high price for her legitimation, the price 
 of confinement within her motherhood for most of her life. Through¬ 
 out the romance she is virtually never separated from Pearl; the 
 image she represents, we remember, is inextricably linked to mater¬ 
 nity rather than selfhood or even womanhood. The brookside scene 
 in the forest, for all its multiple possibilities of interpretation, 
 dramatizes at some basic level the need of the child to possess the 
 mother all to herself. Pearl recognizes at once through the mother’s 
 changed appearance, as Hester blossoms out into relation with 
 Dimmesdale, that the mother is no longer merely and entirely her 
 mother. She cannot abide this. Imperiously she requires that Hester 
 reassume motherhood as her sole reality before she will return to 
 her. The “A” at this point means only maternity: the complex, 
 bewildering, and ambiguous set of events which have set Hester’s 
 
Hawthorne and His Mother 
 
 217 
 
 course for life are ultimately reduced to the “sin” of having given 
 birth to a child. 
 
 The tensions between Hester’s motherhood and personhood, be¬ 
 tween the needs of her own life and the needs of her child, between 
 the person herself and the figure in the son’s tale, are resolved at a 
 higher level of the story than Pearl’s perceptions. The narrator, 
 taking the roles of her prophet, son, and lover simultaneously, creates 
 an image now responsive to its own rhythms and now to the rhythms 
 of the two beings who impinge on her—Pearl, her figured child, and 
 the author-narrator who in many respects is her child grown up. The 
 image to which both subscribe, and within which they enclose 
 Hester, is the Garden of Eden, the benign matriarchy. 
 
 One is reminded not only of Hawthorne’s adolescent letters but of 
 a lengthy passage from “Main Street,” which is the only tale we are 
 sure that Hawthorne meant to include along with The Scarlet Letter 
 in the larger collection he was originally planning. “Main Street” 
 is a rapid survey of New England history and it begins before the 
 patriarchy comes to impose its civilization on western soil, with the 
 timeless land existing under the rule of a woman: 
 
 You perceive, at a glance, that this is the ancient and primitive wood,— 
 the ever-youthful and venerably old,—verdant with new twigs, yet hoary, 
 as it were, with the snowfall of innumerable years, that have accumulated 
 upon its intermingled branches. The white man’s axe has never smitten 
 a single tree; his footstep has never crumpled a single one of the 
 withered leaves, which all the autumns since the flood have been har¬ 
 vesting beneath. Yet, see! along through the vista of impending boughs, 
 there is already a faintly-traced path. . . . What footsteps can have worn 
 this half-seen path? Hark! Do we not hear them now rustling softly 
 over the leaves? We discern an Indian woman —a majestic and queenly 
 woman, or else her spectral image does not represent her truly—for this 
 is the great Squaw Sachem, whose rule, with that of her sons, extends 
 from Mystic to Agawam. That red chief, who stalks by her side, is 
 Wappacowet, her second husband, the priest and magician. {Centenary, 
 XI, 50-51) 
 
 The white man—adulthood for the race—has arrived, and the 
 happy days of mother-rule retreat to legend and imagination. But 
 within imagination their existence is powerful and pervasive. The 
 Scarlet Letter is Hawthorne’s testimony to the existence of that inner 
 
2 i8 
 
 Nina Baym 
 
 world ruled over by a woman. The woman in that inner world 
 could never die. 
 
 The Scarlet Letter is the only one of Hawthorne’s long romances 
 whose origin can be attributed to a specific autobiographical impulse. 
 Alerted by the kinds of concerns it manifests, one can perceive certain 
 biographical implications in the others, however. Although there is 
 not a trace of the Squaw Sachem in The House of the Seven Gables, 
 this is a quintessential family story whose deepest meaning resides, 
 ultimately, precisely in her absence. For it tells a tale of the sub¬ 
 mersion of individual identity and the total loss of happiness and 
 freedom in a male-ruled household. The reason why the alternatives 
 of Pyncheon and Maule can provide no resolution to the excesses 
 of the other is that each remains in essence a patriarchy. Eliminating 
 Pyncheon, the hero Holgrave has nothing to substitute but—him¬ 
 self. One can interpret the families of Pyncheon and Maule as 
 Hathorne and Manning respectively, the run-down aristocrats and 
 the rising laborers, and recall that neither permitted Elizabeth to be 
 mistress in her own house. From another vantage point, the Pyn¬ 
 cheon house can be seen as an amalgamation of both Hathorne and 
 Manning into a composite figure of hated family oppression, an 
 overwhelming symbol of patriarchal usurpation. In sum, the repudia¬ 
 tion of father and fathers imaged forth as a minor point in The 
 Scarlet Letter as it defended Hester’s priority here becomes the 
 central autobiographical statement. 
 
 In this context Phoebe can be only Sophia, as indeed we are asked 
 to understand by other indications (Hawthorne frequently called 
 Sophia Phoebe). Her role in the rescue, or failed rescue, plot is only 
 superficial, however. She is fundamentally unequal to the other 
 powers in the story and at crucial points in the narrative is shown to 
 be susceptible to victimization by them. Hawthorne, I think, is here 
 beginning to realize, or at least to signify, that Sophia was having 
 far less efficacy in his life than he had originally imagined. 
 
 That the simplicity of Sophia’s imagination was more and more 
 seeming like shallowness rather than infinite depths is more overtly 
 suggested in The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun. In 
 both romances the hated male rulers are abetted, albeit without much 
 awareness, by female figures whose task is to supplant or discredit a 
 more matriarchal or maternal type. (It must be granted that in The 
 
Hawthorne and His Mother 
 
 219 
 
 Blithedale Romance the matriarchal type is badly flawed, and is so 
 to a lesser degree in The Marble Faun, so to speak truly no possibility 
 for any restoration of the matriarchy is seriously entertained in either 
 romance.) In The Blithedale Romance this dovelike supplanter 
 appears at the beginning as part of the degraded urban complex 
 which the narrator-protagonist wishes to reject for a pastoral ideal. 
 The proper Arcadian values are established at once when the nar¬ 
 rator finds Zenobia ruling over Blithedale, but her initial matronly 
 and queenlike authority is systematically undercut and discredited 
 by the collusion of all the other characters until she is driven to 
 suicide. The dove is left in command of the field. But the survivors 
 of the battle are merely the walking wounded, and her lifelong task 
 is to nurse and guard them—a parody of matriarchy, making 
 Blithedale in some sense the dark inverse of The Scarlet Tetter. 
 
 Something similar happens in the tortured symbolism and obscure 
 narrative line of The Marble Faun, where Kenyon’s election of 
 Hilda, the dove transmuted into a steely virgin, is equivalent to 
 retreat from the complexities of an adult world. Hilda’s cutting 
 simplifications and platitudes masquerade as a world view which the 
 sculptor, finding himself unable to deal with the implications of 
 adult relations between the sexes, gladly espouses. The babyland to 
 which Kenyon and Hilda are returning at the end of the romance 
 is nothing like the ageless forest presided over by the Indian Queen 
 who, disguised in this romance as Venus, has been rejected by 
 Kenyon on the campagna in favor of Hilda. But Hawthorne does 
 not blame Sophia. 
 
 Toward the close of his literary career Hawthorne, working up 
 his English essays for publication, inserted a passage into “Outside 
 Glimpses of English Poverty” for which there is no notebook source: 
 
 Nothing, as I remember, smote me with more grief and pity . . . than to 
 hear a gaunt and ragged mother priding herself on the pretty ways of her 
 ragged and skinny infant, just as a young matron might, when she invites 
 her lady-friends to admire her plump, white-robed darling in the nursery. 
 Indeed, no womanly characteristic seemed to have altogether perished out 
 of these poor souls. It was the very same creature whose tender torments 
 make the rapture of our young days, whom we love, cherish, and protect, 
 and rely upon in life and death, and whom we delight to see beautify her 
 beauty with rich robes and set it off with jewels. {Centenary, X, 283) 
 
220 
 
 Nina Baym 
 
 The image goes beyond the gaunt and ragged mother, beyond the 
 young matron, and even beyond Elizabeth Hathorne to the arche¬ 
 type, the Magna Mater enthroned in a blaze of jewels in her son’s 
 imagination. Even at this late date the imagination remains cen¬ 
 trally possessed of and by her image. Elizabeth had been dead for 
 fourteen years. Hawthorne would be dead within a year himself. 
 In this ardent image, he indicates that her presence will survive with 
 him to the end. 
 
The Scarlet Letter and Revolutions Abroad 
 
 Larry J. Reynolds 
 
 W HEN Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter in the fall of 
 1849, the fact and Idea of revolution were much on his 
 mind. In “The Custom-House” sketch, while forewarning the 
 reader of the darkness in the story to follow, he explains that “this 
 uncaptivating effect is perhaps due to the period of hardly accom¬ 
 plished revolution and still seething turmoil, in which the story 
 shaped itself.”' His explicit reference is to his recent ouster from 
 the Salem Custom House, his “beheading” as he calls it, but we 
 know that the death of his mother and anxiety about where and 
 how he would support his family added to his sense of upheaval. 
 Lying behind all these referents, however, are additional ones that 
 have gone unnoticed: actual revolutions, past and present, which 
 Hawthorne had been reading about and pondering for almost 
 twenty consecutive months. These provided the political context 
 for The Scarlet Letter and shaped the structure, characterizations, 
 and themes of the work. 
 
 I 
 
 ROME YET UNCONQUERED! FRANCE TRANQUIL. 
 LEDRU-ROLLIN NOT TAKEN. THE HUNGARIANS 
 TRIUMPH! GREAT BATTLE NEAR RAAB! THE AUS¬ 
 TRIANS AND RUSSIANS BEATEN. CONFLICTS AT 
 PETERWARDEIN AND JORDANOW. SOUTHERN GER¬ 
 MANY REPUBLICAN. BATTLE WITH THE PRUSSIANS 
 AT MANHEIM. RESULT UNDECIDED. These are the 
 headlines of the Nevo York Tribune for 5 July i 8495 and because 
 they are typical, they suggest the excitement and Interest gener- 
 
 ' The Scarlet Letter, ed. William Charvat, Roy Harvey Pearce, and Claude Simpson 
 (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1962), p. 43. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the 
 text. 
 
 American Literature, Volume 57, Number i, March 1985. Copyright © 1985 by the 
 Duke University Press. CCC 0002-9831/85/$!.50 
 
222 
 
 Larry }. Reynolds 
 
 ated in America by the wave upon wave of revolution that swept 
 across Europe during the years 1848 and 1849. In Naples, Sicily, 
 Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Venice, Munich, Rome, and nearly 
 all the other cities and states of continental Europe, rulers and 
 their unpopular ministers were overthrown, most notably Louis 
 Philippe and Guizot in Erance, Ferdinand I and Metternich in 
 Austria, and Pope Pius IX and Rossi in the Papal States.^ Mean¬ 
 while revolutionary leaders such as Lamartine, Kossuth, and Maz- 
 zini became heroes in American eyes as they tried to institute 
 representative governments and alleviate the poverty and oppres¬ 
 sion that precipitated the revolutions. 
 
 By the fall of 1849, all of the fledgling republics had been 
 crushed by conservative and reactionary forces, and this fact ex¬ 
 plains in part why the influence of the revolutions upon The Scar¬ 
 let Letter in particular and the American literary renaissance in 
 general has been overlooked. Unlike the American Revolution 
 (whose influence has received thorough study), the revolutions of 
 1848—49 came to naught, making them appear inconsequential in 
 retrospect. In addition, the excitement generated in America, 
 while intense, was short lived and soon forgotten5 national atten¬ 
 tion soon turned to the turmoil generated by the slavery issue, 
 which obscured Europe’s role as the previous focus of this atten¬ 
 tion. A third explanation for the neglect is that studies of the lit¬ 
 erature of this period have tended to focus on native themes and 
 materials. Concomitantly, reference works such as James D. 
 Hart’s Oxford Companion to American Literature and John C. 
 Gerber’s Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘^The Scarlet Let¬ 
 ter’’ have provided chronological indexes that correlate only 
 American history with the lives and works of American authors, 
 despite the fact that the major newspapers of the day devoted 
 three-fourths of their front-page coverage to European events. 
 
 Although the European revolutions all failed, from the spring 
 of 1848 to the fall of 1849, the American public displayed its 
 interest and sympathy by mass gatherings, parades, fireworks, 
 proclamations, speeches, and constant newspaper coverage, which 
 
 ^ Useful overviews of the revolutions of 1848-49 are provided by The Opening oj 
 An Era: 1848 An Historical Symposium, ed. Frangois Fejto (1948; rpt. New York: 
 Howard Fertig, 1966) and The Revolutions oJ 1848—4g, ed. Frank Eyck (New York: 
 Barnes & Noble, 1972). 
 
European Revolutions 
 
 223 
 
 swelled with the arrival of each steamer/ Members of the Amer¬ 
 ican literati^ Hawthorne’s friends among them, also responded 
 with ardor. To celebrate the French Revolution, Lowell wrote two 
 poems, “Ode to France, 1848,” in which he linked American 
 Freedom with the fires burning in the streets of Paris, and “To 
 Lamartine, 1848,” in which he sang the praises of the poet-states¬ 
 man who headed the new provisional government. Evert Duyck- 
 inck, Hawthorne’s editor at Wiley & Putnam’s, declared himself 
 rap'port’’’ with the French Revolution;"* and S. G. Goodrich, 
 Hawthorne’s former publisher, who witnessed events in Paris, 
 wrote an enthusiastic account for the Boston Courier. Emerson, 
 who visited Paris in May 1848, expressed reservations about the 
 posturings of the mobs in the streets but was impressed by La¬ 
 martine and sympathized with the social activists. “The deep sin¬ 
 cerity of the speakers,” he wrote, “who are agitating social not 
 political questions, and who are studying how to secure a fair share 
 of bread to every man, and to get the God’s justice done through 
 the land, is very good to hear.”^ 
 
 Margaret Fuller, who served as one model for Hester, became, 
 as is well known, more intently engaged in the European revo¬ 
 lutions than any of her countrymen. As a witness to the rise and 
 fall of the Roman Republic, she wrote impassioned letters to the 
 New York Tribune praising the efforts of her friend Mazzini, 
 describing the defense of Rome, and pleading for American sup¬ 
 port. “The struggle is now fairly, thoroughly commenced between 
 the principle of democracy and the old powers, no longer legiti¬ 
 mate,” she wrote in the spring of 1849. “Every struggle made by 
 the old tyrannies, all their Jesuitical deceptions, their rapacity, 
 
 ^ A comprehensive study of the American response to the revolutions has yet to be 
 published; however, the specialized studies of Elizabeth B. White, American Opinion 
 oj France, jrom Fajayette to Poincare (New York: Knopf, 1927), .Arthur James May, 
 Contemporary American Opinion oj the Mid-Century Revolutions in Central Europe 
 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1927), and Howard R. Marraro, American 
 Opinion oj the Unijication oj Italy, 1846—1861 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 
 1932), when placed side by side, cover most of the salient features of this response, as 
 it revealed itself publicly. 
 
 Letter to George Duyckinck, 18 March 1848. All of the letters from the brothers 
 Duyckinck are quoted with the kind permission of the Duyckinck Family Papers, Rare 
 Books and Manuscript Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Til- 
 den Foundations. 
 
 ^ The Letters oj Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, IV (New York: Co¬ 
 lumbia Univ. Press, 1939), 73-74. 
 
224 
 
 Larry J. Reynolds 
 
 their imprisonments and executions of the most generous men, 
 only sow more dragon’s teeth; the crop shoots up daily more and 
 more plenteous.” When the battle of Rome was fought, Fuller 
 served tirelessly as a nurse and watched the warfare surrounding 
 her. “Men are daily slain,” she wrote on June 21, “and this state 
 of suspense is agonizing. In the evening ’t is pretty, though ter¬ 
 rible, to see the bombs, fiery meteors, springing from the horizon 
 line upon their bright path, to do their wicked message.” After 
 the French had invaded the city, she wrote, “I see you have meet¬ 
 ings, where you speak of the Italians, the Hungarians. I pray you 
 do something. . . . Send money, send cheer,—acknowledge as the 
 legitimate leaders and rulers those men who represent the peo¬ 
 ple. . . 
 
 As Hawthorne was defending himself from the attacks of the 
 Salem Whigs and battling to be reinstated as surveyor, the devel¬ 
 opments in Italy received a predominant amount of American at¬ 
 tention. On June 20, the Boston Daily Advertiser reported that 
 the French, in order to restore the power of the Pope, were march¬ 
 ing on Rome with 80,000 men, and it quoted Mazzini’s decla¬ 
 ration that “We shall fight to the last against all projects of a 
 restoration.” The following day, alongside of Hawthorne’s public 
 letter to Hillard, this same newspaper reported Garibaldi’s arrival 
 upon Neapolitan territory and printed Louis Napoleon’s lengthy 
 speech explaining his government’s support of the Pope. During 
 the next two months, as Hawthorne ceased careering through the 
 public prints in his decapitated state, accounts of the defeat of the 
 Roman revolutionaries made their way to the United States, where 
 they were greeted by most with sadness or outrage. 
 
 Although Margaret Fuller’s former devotee Sophia Hawthorne 
 (in her dutifully childlike manner) expressed approval of the re¬ 
 publican successes in Europe as they were occurring in 1848,’ her 
 husband most likely shared neither her optimism nor the enthu- 
 
 ® At Home and Abroad, or Things and Thoughts in America and Europe, ed. 
 Arthur B. Fuller (1856; rpt. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1971), pp. 380, 381, 
 409, 421. 
 
 ^ In a December 1848 letter to her mother, Sophia declared, “What good news from 
 France! . . . There seems to be a fine fresh air in France just now. ... it is ver\' pretty 
 when the people do not hurt the kings, but merely make them run. Since Prince Met- 
 ternich has resigned, I conceive that monarchy is in its decline,” quoted in Julian Haw¬ 
 thorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wije, I (1884; rpt. n.p.: Archon Books, 1968), 
 
 331- 
 
European Revolutions 
 
 225 
 
 siasm of their literary friends, particularly Fuller. In fact, the book 
 that he wrote in the wake of the revolutions in 1849 indicates that 
 they reaffirmed his scepticism about revolution and reform and 
 inspired a strong reactionary spirit which underlies the work. 
 
 Revolution had been a fearful thing in Hawthorne’s mind for 
 some time, even though he found the ends it wrought at times 
 admirable.® Violent reform and the behavior of mobs particularly 
 disturbed him,^ as the final scene of “My Kinsman, Major Mol- 
 Ineux” makes clear. This story may celebrate the beginnings of a 
 new democratic era, as some have suggested, but it cannot be de¬ 
 nied that Molineux is presented as a noble victim of a hellish 
 mob. “On they went,” Hawthorne wrote, “like fiends that throng 
 in mockery round some dead potentate, mighty no more, but 
 majestic still in his agony.”Similarly, in “The Custom-House” 
 sketch, Hawthorne presents himself as the victim of another 
 “bloodthirsty” mob, the Whigs, who, acting out of a “fierce and 
 bitter spirit of malice and revenge,” have struck off his head with 
 the political guillotine and ignomlniously kicked it about. This 
 presentation, humorous in tone but serious in intent, gives The 
 Scarlet Tetter its alternate title of “THE POSTHUMOUS PA¬ 
 PERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR” and foreshadows 
 the use and treatment of revolutionary Imagery in the novel 
 proper. 
 
 This imagery, of course, is drawn from the French Revolution 
 of 1789, which was at the forefront of Hawthorne’s mind for sev¬ 
 eral reasons. First of all, the spectacular excesses of that revolution 
 provided the language and metaphors used by conservatives to de- 
 
 * See Celeste Loughman, “Hawthorne’s Patriarchs and the American Revolution,” 
 American Transcendental Quarterly^ 40 (1979), 340—41, and John P. McWilliams, 
 Jr., “ ‘Thorough-Going Democrat’ and ‘Modern Tory’: Haw'thorne and the Puritan 
 Revolution of 1776,” Studies in Romanticism, 15 (1976), 551. 
 
 ^ Hawthorne’s reservations about the behavior of revolutionary mobs can also be seen 
 in his sketches “The Old Tory” (1835) and “Liberty Tree” (1840). His manuscript 
 “Septimius Felton” contains some of his final thoughts on the subject. “In times of 
 Revolution and public disturbance,” he writes, “all absurdities are more unrestrained; 
 the measure of calm sense, the habits, the orderly decency, are in a measure lost. More 
 people become insane, I should suppose; offenses against public morality, female license, 
 are more numerous; suicides, murders, all ungovernable outbreaks of men’s thoughts, 
 embodying themselves in wild acts, take place more frequently, and with less horror to 
 the lookers-on.” See The Elixir oj Lije Manuscripts, ed. Edward H. Davidson, Claude 
 M. Simpson, and L. Neal Smith (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1977), p. 67. 
 
 10 «\iy Kinsman, Major Molineux,” in The Snow-Image and Uncollected Tales, 
 ed. J. Donald Crowley (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974), p. 230. 
 
226 
 
 Larry J. Reynolds 
 
 scribe events in 1848-49. In a letter to the Ne^ York Courier 
 and Enquirer^ Bishop Hughes, a supporter of Pope Pius IX, de¬ 
 nounced the revolutionaries of Rome and claimed, “They have 
 established, according to what I regard as the truest accounts, a 
 reign of terror over the Roman people, which they call a govern¬ 
 ment.” Alluding to Margaret Fuller, Hughes added that “no am¬ 
 bassador from foreign countries has recognized such a republic, 
 except it be the female plenipotentiary who furnishes the Tribune 
 with diplomatic correspondence.”'' Evert Duyckinck, keeping his 
 brother George (who was in Paris) abreast of American attitudes 
 in the spring of 1848, reported that “People look at this Revolu¬ 
 tion with recollections of the Era of Robespierre and suspect every 
 revival of the old political phraseology of that period. An article 
 attributed to Alison is going the rounds from Blackwoods in which 
 he sets Satan grinning over the shoulders of Lamartine.”'^ The 
 Black’voood^s article referred to had echoed the theme of “Earth’s 
 Holocaust” as it declared, “Experience will prove whether, by dis¬ 
 carding all former institutions, we have cast off at the same time 
 the slough of corruption which has descended to all from our first 
 parents. We shall see whether the effects of the fall can be shaken 
 off by changing the institutions of society; whether the devil can¬ 
 not find as many agents among the Socialists as the Jacobins; 
 whether he cannot mount on the shoulders of Lamartine and Ar- 
 ago as well as he did on those of Robespierre and Marat.” 
 
 The bloody June Days of i 848 seemed to confirm such scep¬ 
 ticism, and even George Duyckinck, an ardent supporter of the 
 French people, was reminded of the Reign of Terror and the role 
 women played in it as he reflected upon recent events. “Human 
 nature,” he wrote his brother, “seems to be the same it was sixty 
 years ago. Heads were stuck on pikes or swords and women 
 danced about them as they did then and who can doubt but that 
 if the insurgents had succeeded the guillotine would have been as 
 busily at work today as it was then.”''' Although use of the guil¬ 
 lotine had been discontinued (General Cavaignac used the firing 
 
 " Rpt. Boston Post, 29 June 1849, p. i, col. 6. 
 
 '^Letter to George Duyckinck, 18 April 1848; Duyckinck Family Papers, New 
 York Public Library. 
 
 “Fall of the Throne of the Barricades,” Blackwood’s, 63 (1848), 399. 
 
 Letter to Evert Duyckinck, 30 June 1848; Duyckinck Family Papers, New York 
 Public Library. 
 
European Revolutions 
 
 227 
 
 squad during the June Days, when an estimated 10,000 died), the 
 shadow of that instrument loomed over all, and after Louis Na¬ 
 poleon came to power, it became unwise even to mention this 
 symbol of revolution. Under Napoleon’s administration in 1849, 
 the owner of a Paris newspaper called Peuple, for an article 
 entitled “The Restoration of the Guillotine,” was fined and sen¬ 
 tenced to five years imprisonment, while the proprietor of La 
 Revolution Lemocratique et Sociale, for an article entitled “The 
 Political Scaffold,” was fined and sentenced to three years impris¬ 
 onment.'^ In America, the guillotine and the scaffold carried not 
 quite so much Import, except, of course, in the mind of one de¬ 
 capitated surveyor. 
 
 Predictably, the American press drew careless comparisons be¬ 
 tween the European revolutions and the American political scene. 
 When Zachary Taylor began his series of political appointments 
 in the spring and summer of 1849, they were reported in the 
 Democratic papers as revolutionary acts, as symbolic beheadings 
 of Democratic party members. Some seven times in May and 
 June, for example, the Boston Post printed, in conjunction with 
 the announcement of a political appointment and removal, a small 
 drawing presumably of General Taylor standing beside a guillo¬ 
 tine, puffing a cigar, surrounded by heads (presumably of Demo¬ 
 crats) at his feet. One of these drawings appeared on 11 June and 
 on the following day, a letter to the editor appeared objecting to 
 Hawthorne’s removal from the Salem Custom House. “This is 
 one of the most heartless acts of this heartless administration,” the 
 anonymous writer declared. “The head of the poet and the scholar 
 is stricken off to gratify and reward some greedy partizan! . . . 
 There stands, at the guillotine, beside the headless trunk of a pure 
 minded, faithful and well deserving officer, sacrificed to the worth 
 of party proscription, Gen. Zachary Taylor, now President.” As 
 Arlin Turner has pointed out, this letter was probably a source of 
 Hawthorne’s “beheading” metaphor^'® however, behind the ref¬ 
 erence were two years of revolutionary events in Europe, two 
 years of revolutionary rhetoric and imagery. 
 
 See the review “Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins,” Southern Quarterly Re¬ 
 view, 16(1 849), 58. 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), p. 
 
228 
 
 Larry J. Reynolds 
 
 II 
 
 Such rhetoric and imagery appeared not only in the newspapers, 
 of course, but also in contemporary books, some of which dealt 
 with revolution in a serious historical manner. Although The Scar¬ 
 let Letter has often been praised for its fidelity to New England 
 history, the central setting of the novel, the scaffold, is, I believe, 
 an historical inaccuracy intentionally used by Hawthorne to de¬ 
 velop the theme of revolution. The Puritans occasionally sen¬ 
 tenced a malefactor to stand upon a shoulder-high block or upon 
 the ladder of the gallows (at times with a halter about the neck),’^ 
 but in none of the New England histories Hawthorne used as 
 sources (viz.. Felt, Snow, Mather, Hutchinson, and Winthrop) 
 are these structures called scaffolds. In fact, I have been unable 
 to find the word “scaffold” in them. The common instruments of 
 punishment in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were, as Hawthorne 
 shows in “Endlcott and the Red Cross,” the whipping post, the 
 stocks, and the pillory. (The gallows, located in Boston at the end 
 of town,’* was used for hangings and serious public humiliations.) 
 Although Hawthorne in his romance Identifies the scaffold as part 
 of the pillory, his narrator and his characters refer to it by the 
 former term alone some twenty-six times, calling it the scaffold of 
 the pillory only four times and the pillory only once.'^ 
 
 As early as 1557 and then later with increasing frequency dur¬ 
 ing the first French Revolution, the word “scaffold” served as a 
 synecdoche for a public beheading—by the executioner’s axe or 
 the guillotine. And, because of its role in the regicides of over¬ 
 thrown kings, the word acquired powerful political associations, 
 which it still retains.^® When King Charles I was beheaded with 
 
 See Joseph B. Felt, The Annals of Salem, from Its First Settlement (Salem: W. 
 & S. B. Ives, 1827), pp. 176, 317. 
 
 See Caleb H. Snow, A History of Boston, the Metropolis of Massachusetts (Bos¬ 
 ton: A. Bowen, 1825), p. 169. 
 
 See John R. Byers, Jr., and James J. Owen, A Concordance to the Five Novels 
 of Nathaniel Hawthorne, II (New York: Garland, 1979), 667, 579. 
 
 Oxford English Dictionary, IX (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), 159. Behead¬ 
 ing was not a common form of punishment in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The only 
 mention I have found of it involved the punishment of an Indian found gudty of theft 
 and of striking a settler’s wife in the head with a hammer, causing her to lose her senses. 
 Neither a block nor a scaffold was used in his execution, however. “The executioner 
 would strike off his head with a falchion,” John Winthrop reported, “but he had eight 
 blows at it before he could effect it, and the Indian sat upright and stirred not all the 
 
European Revolutions 
 
 229 
 
 an axe following the successful rebellion led by Cromwell, An¬ 
 drew Marvell in his “An Horation Ode” used the word in the 
 following tribute to his king: 
 
 . . . thence the royal actor born 
 The tragic scaffold might adorn: 
 
 While round the armed bands 
 Did clap their bloody hands. 
 
 He nothing common did or mean 
 Upon that memorable scene: 
 
 But bowed his comely head 
 Down, as upon a bed.^' 
 
 One hundred and forty-four years later, when Louis XV'^I became 
 a liability to the new French republic, he too, of course, mounted 
 what was termed the “scaffold” and there became one of the vic¬ 
 tims of the new device being advocated by Dr. Guillotin. The 
 association of a scaffold with revolution and beheading, particu¬ 
 larly the beheading of Charles I and Louis XVI, explains, I think, 
 why Hawthorne uses it as his central and dominant setting. It 
 links the narrator of “The Custom-House” sketch with the two 
 main characters in the romance proper, and it raises their common 
 predicaments above the plane of the personal into the helix of 
 history’. 
 
 Hawthorne’s desire to connect his narrative with historic revo¬ 
 lutions abroad is further shown by the time frame he uses. The 
 opening scenes of the novel take place in May 1642 and the clos¬ 
 ing ones in May 1649.^^ These dates coincide almost exactly with 
 those of the English Civil War fought between King Charles I 
 and his Puritan Parliament. Hawthorne was familiar with histories 
 of this subject and had recently (June 1848) checked out of the 
 Salem Atheneum Francois Guizot’s History oj the English Res¬ 
 olution oj 1640, Commonly Called the Great Rebellion}^ Gui¬ 
 zot, Professor of Modern History' of the Sorbonne when he wrote 
 
 time,” The History oj New England jrom 16^0 to i64g, ed. James Savage, 2 vols. 
 (1825—1826; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1972), II, i8q. 
 
 The Complete English Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (New York; St. Mar¬ 
 tin’s Press, 1972), p. 56. 
 
 See Edward Dawson, Hawthorne^s Knowledge and Use oj New England His¬ 
 tory: A Study oj Sources (Nashville; Joint Univ. Libraries, 1939), p. 17. 
 
 Marion L. Kesselring, Hawthorne’s Reading, 1828—1850 (1949; rpt. New 
 York: Norwood, 1976), p. 52. 
 
230 
 
 Larry J. Reynolds 
 
 this work, became, of course, Louis Philippe’s Prime Minister 
 whose policies provoked the French Revolution of 1848. During 
 the spring of 1848 Guizot’s name became familiar to Americans, 
 and probably the man’s recent notoriety led Hawthorne to a read¬ 
 ing of his work in the summer of 1848. 
 
 Examination of the simultaneity between fictional events in 
 The Scarlet Tetter and historical events in America and England 
 verifies that the 1642 — 1649 time frame for events in the romance 
 was carefully chosen to enhance the treatment of revolutionary 
 themes. When Hester Prynne is led from the prison by the beadle 
 who cries, “Make way, good people, make way, in the King’s 
 name,” less than a month has passed since Charles’s Puritan Par¬ 
 liament had sent him what amounted to a declaration of war. Five 
 months later, in October, 1642, the first battle between Round- 
 heads and Cavaliers was fought at Edgehill, and word of the open 
 hostilities reached America in December.^'^ Then and in the years 
 that followed, the Bay Colony fasted and prayed for victory by 
 Parliament, but these became times of political anxiety and stress 
 in America as well as England. According to one of Hawthorne’s 
 sources. Felt’s Annals of Salem, in November 1646 the General 
 Court (presided over by Messrs. Bartholomew and Hathorne) or¬ 
 dered “a fast on Dec. 24th, for the hazardous state of England 
 . . . and difficulties of Church and State among themselves, both 
 of which, say they, some strive to undermine.By the final 
 scenes of the novel, when Arthur is deciding to die as a martyr, 
 Charles I has just been beheaded (on 30 January 1649); thus, 
 when Chilllngworth sarcastically thanks Arthur for his prayers, 
 calling them “golden recompense” and “the current gold coin of 
 the New Jerusalem, with the King’s own mint-mark on them” (p. 
 224), Hawthorne adds to Chilllngworth’s irony with his own. Fur¬ 
 thermore, given the novel’s time frame, the tableau of Arthur 
 bowing “his head forward on the cushions of the pulpit, at the 
 close of his Election Sermon” (p. 250), while Hester stands wait¬ 
 ing beside the scaffold, radiates with ominous import, particularly 
 when one recalls that Arthur is not a graduate of Cambridge, as 
 most of the Puritan ministers of New England were,^* but rather 
 
 See Winthrop, II, 85. 
 
 Felt, p. 175. 
 
 See Frederick Newberry, “Tradition and Disinheritance in T/ie Scarlet Letter'' 
 ESQ, 23, No. I (1977), 13. 
 
European Revolutions 
 
 231 
 
 of Oxford, the center of Laudian and Royalist sympathies and the 
 place of refuge for King Charles during the Revolution. 
 
 By thus setting events in an age when “men of the sword had 
 overthrown nobles and kings” (p. 164), Hawthorne provides a 
 potent historical backdrop for the revolutionary and counter-rev¬ 
 olutionary battles fought, with shifting allegiances, among the four 
 main characters and the Puritan leadership. Furthermore, his bat¬ 
 tle imagery, such as Governor Bellingham’s armor and Pearl’s 
 simulated slaying of the Puritan children, draws upon and reflects 
 the actual warfare abroad and thus illuminates the struggles being 
 fought on social, moral, and metaphysical grounds in Boston. 
 
 Bearing upon the novel perhaps even more than its connections 
 with the English “Rebellion” and its attendant regicide are its 
 connections with the first French Revolution and the execution of 
 Louis XVI. In the romance itself, Hawthorne first alludes to one 
 tie when he describes the scaffold in the opening scenes; “it con¬ 
 stituted,” he writes, “a portion of a penal machine, which . . . was 
 held, in the old time, to be as effectual an agent in the promotion 
 of good citizenship, as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists 
 of France” (p. 55). This allusion may be derived from the im¬ 
 agery appearing, as discussed above, in the contemporary press; 
 but it is also shaped, in a more profound way, by an overlooked 
 source of The Scarlet Tetter^ Alphonse de Lamartine’s History oj 
 the Girondists^ a history of the first French Revolution published 
 in France in 1847, translated into English by H. T. Ryde and 
 published in the United States in three volumes in 1847-48.^^ 
 
 Lamartine, the poet-statesman who had risen to the head of the 
 Provisional Government in Paris following the Eebruary 1848 
 Revolution, became a well-known figure in America during i 848— 
 49 and was widely admired for his idealism, courage, and elo¬ 
 quence. Numerous Americans expressed high regard for him;^* 
 
 The relationship between the French and English revolutions is one point em¬ 
 phasized in Lamartine’s work; he points out that “Louis XVI had read much history, 
 especially the history of England. . . . The portrait of Charles L, by Van Dyck, was 
 constantly before his eyes in the closet in the Tuileries; his history continually open on 
 his table. He had been struck by two circumstances; that James 11 . had lost his throne 
 because he had left his kingdom, and that Charles 1 . had been beheaded for having 
 made war against his parliament and his people,” (New York: Harper, 1847-48) I, 52. 
 (This edition of Lamartine will hereafter be cited parenthetically in the text.) 
 
 Evert Duyckinck in a letter to his brother George, reported that from the point 
 of view of Americans “Lamartine stands out nobly” and speculated that if the new 
 
232 
 
 Larry J. Reynolds 
 
 the New York Herald, deviating from its usual format, ran an 
 engraving of him on its front page;^^ and one New York City 
 speculator, trying to dignify a venture, even named a street of 
 sixpenny shanties “Lamartine’s Row.”^° After he had fallen from 
 power due to his unwillingness to align himself with the radical 
 republicans or the right-wing Bonapartists, Lamartine was treated 
 as a noble martyr in the American press. The New York Evening 
 Post on 23 June 1849, the day after Bryant’s editorial on Haw¬ 
 thorne’s behalf appeared there, devoted two and a half front-page 
 columns to a glowing summary of Lamartine’s literary and polit¬ 
 ical career. “[His] brief administration,” the article concluded, 
 “born of the barricades of February, expired amidst the roar of 
 the cannon of June,” proved “that Lamartine is too righteous a 
 man to be a politician.” “He was no demagogue; he appreciated 
 the crisis, approved the revolution, but dreaded its excess. To save 
 his country from terrorism and communism, he cheerfully laid 
 down his popularity, as he would have laid down his life.” 
 
 Before this political martyrdom, which would have engaged 
 Hawthorne’s sympathy, Lamartine’s career had been advanced by 
 his writings; his Histoire des Girondins established his credentials 
 as a republican leader, helped inspire the Revolution of 1848 that 
 he struggled to lead and moderate, and acquired much interna¬ 
 tional renown. “We doubt whether this is not already the most 
 popular book, as its author is the most popular man of the day,” 
 a reviewer for the New York Courier and Enquirer proclaimed,^' 
 when the English translation appeared. Unlike Guizot, Lamartine 
 was not a scholarly historian, and his account of the first French 
 Revolution is an imaginative and dramatic construct that gains 
 much of its power from its sympathetic treatment of Louis XVI 
 and its suspenseful narrative structure, which includes a tableau 
 
 republic progressed well then Lamartine “will be the Washington of France” (3 April 
 1848, Duyckinck Family Papers, New York Public Library). Emerson, while in Paris, 
 attended a session of the National Assembly and heard Lamartine’s speech on Poland. 
 “He did not speak . . . with much energy,” Emerson wrote his wife, “but is a manly 
 handsome greyhaired gentleman with nothing of the rust of the man of letters, and 
 delivers himself with great ease & superiority {Letters, IV, 77). 
 
 On 29 March 1848. 
 
 See The Diary oj George Templeton Strong, eds. Allan Nevins and Milton Hal¬ 
 sey Thomas, I (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 344. 
 
 17 May 1848, p. 2, c. 3. 
 
European Revolutions 
 
 233 
 
 at the scaffold as its climactic scene. Throughout the first volume 
 and a half of his history, Lamartine, while detailing the political 
 infighting of the National Assembly and their struggle with the 
 king for power, generates sympathy for Louis. He and his family 
 are seldom free from danger, and the two high points of Volume 
 I are their unsuccessful attempt to flee the country and their con¬ 
 frontation with a mob of thousands at the Chateau of the Tull- 
 eries. In Volume II, Lamartine shows the situation of the royal 
 family becoming more desperate and the king acquiring strength 
 and character as his fate unfolds. In terms a decapitated surveyor 
 could appreciate, Lamartine observes that “all the faults of pre¬ 
 ceding administrations, all the vices of kings, all the shame of 
 courts, all the griefs of the people, were accumulated on his head 
 and marked his Innocent brow for the expiation of many ages” 
 (I, 27). “He was the scape-goat of olden time, that bore the sins 
 of all” (II, 323). 
 
 Lamartine shifts from third-person omniscient narration to 
 third-person limited after the National Assembly renders its ver¬ 
 dict of guilty and its judgment of death. Thus, unlike Carlvle’s 
 clipped, brusque, and almost sarcastic account of the regicide, La¬ 
 martine’s treatment generates sympathy^ the reader is beside the 
 king for some thirty intensely moving pages—as he parts with his 
 family, as he rides in the carriage with his priest, who hears his 
 confession, and as he sees and enters the Place de la Revolution 
 to be beheaded. “There,” Lamartine writes, “a ray of the winter’s 
 sun . . . showed the place filled by 100,000 heads, the regiments 
 of the garrison of Paris drawn up round all sides of the scaffold, 
 the executioners, awaiting the victim, and the instrument of death 
 prominent above the mob, with its beams and posts painted blood- 
 color. It was the guillotine!” (II, 370). Stationed around the scaf¬ 
 fold are “unscrupulous and pitiless ruffians,” who desire “the pun¬ 
 ishment should be consummated and applauded” (II, 371). In 
 contrast, the king steps forward composed and aloof. Humiliated 
 by being bound, he regains his composure, mounts the scaffold, 
 faces the multitude, casts a farewell glance on his priest, and 
 meets his death. “The plank sunk, the blade glided, tbe head fell” 
 (II, 373), Lamartine writes, as this chilling and memorable scene 
 comes to an end. Appearing in almost the exact center of the nar¬ 
 rative, on the 867th page of 1578, the scene dominates the his¬ 
 tory; all that goes before anticipates it; all that follows refers back 
 
234 
 
 Larry J. Reynolds 
 
 to it. The rest of Volume II and all of III detail the excesses of 
 the Revolution: the assassination of Marat, the Reign of Terror, 
 the wave upon wave of bloodletting, and so on, all of which be¬ 
 come horrifyingly repetitive. 
 
 Lamartine’s stirring treatment of revolutionary events and po¬ 
 litical martyrdom and especially his unprecedented use of the scaf¬ 
 fold as both a dramatic setting and a unifying structural device 
 lead one to speculate that Hawthorne may have read this work 
 before he wrote The Scarlet Letter-^ however, speculation is un¬ 
 necessary. He did. The records of the Salem Atheneum reveal 
 that on 13 September 1849, he checked out the first two volumes 
 of Lamartine’s HistoryJ'^ Moreover, Sophia Hawthorne’s letters 
 to her sister and mother, combined with Hawthorne’s notebook 
 entries, reveal, as no biographer has yet pointed out, that it was 
 about ten days later, most likely between 21 September and 25 
 September, that Hawthorne began work in earnest on The Scarlet 
 Tetter?^ On 27 September he checked out the third volume of 
 Lamartine’s History., and on that date Sophia, in an often-quoted 
 letter, informed her mother, “Mr. Hawthorne is writing morning 
 & afternoon. . . . He writes immensely—I am almost frightened 
 about it—But he is well now & looks very shining.” (He re¬ 
 turned the first two volumes of the History 6 November and the 
 third volume 12 November.) This correlation in dates plus Haw¬ 
 thorne’s allusions to the terrorists of France suggests that what has 
 become one of the most celebrated settings in American literature, 
 the scaffold of The Scarlet Tetter, was taken from the Place de 
 la Revolution of eighteenth-century Paris, as described by Lamar- 
 
 Kesselring, p. 42. 
 
 Hawthorne and his wife spent much of the last half of August and the first part 
 of September househunting, first on the Atlantic shore near Kittery Point, and then in 
 the Berkshires near Lenox. Hawthorne may have worked on The Scarlet Letter during 
 the second week in September after Sophia returned from Lenox, but if he did, it was 
 not with the commitment he later displayed, for on 17 September he set out with his 
 friend Ephraim Miller on a leisurely three-day journey to Temple, New Hampshire. 
 Assuming he rested on the 20th, the day after his return, and knowing it was the 27th 
 when Sophia first said he was writing “immensely” mornings and afternoons, it seems 
 likely that between 21 September and 25 September he became absorbed in tbe writing 
 of his romance. All of the letters from Sophia Hawthorne to her mother Elizabeth P. 
 Peabody and her sister Mary Mann are quoted with the kind permission of the Henrt' 
 W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and 
 Tilden Foundation. 
 
 Letter to Elizabeth P. Peabody (mother); Berg Collection, New York Public Li¬ 
 brary. 
 
European Revolutions 
 
 235 
 
 tine, and transported to the Marketplace of seventeenth-century 
 Boston, where it became the focal point of Hawthorne’s narrative. 
 Along with it came, most likely, a reinforced scepticism about vi¬ 
 olent reform. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Recognition that revolutionary struggle stirred at the front of 
 Hawthorne’s consciousness as he wrote The Scarlet Tetter not 
 only accounts for many structural and thematic details in the 
 novel but also explains some of the apparent inconsistencies in his 
 treatment of his characters, especially Hester and Arthur. The is¬ 
 sue of the degree and nature of Hawthorne’s sympathies in the 
 novel has been debated for years, at times heatedly, and I have 
 no hope of resolving the debate here; however, I think the revo¬ 
 lutionary context of events provides a key for sorting out Haw¬ 
 thorne’s sympathies, or more accurately those of his narrator 
 (whose biases closely resemble Hawthorne’s). The narrator, as a 
 member of a toppled established order, an ancien regime so to 
 speak, possesses instincts that are conservative and antirevolution¬ 
 ary, consistently so, but the individuals he regards undergo con¬ 
 siderable change, thus evoking inconsistent attitudes on his part. 
 Specifically, when Hester or Arthur battle to maintain or regain 
 their rightful place in the social or spiritual order, the narrator 
 sympathizes with them; when they become revolutionary Instead 
 and attempt to overthrow an established order, he becomes un¬ 
 sympathetic.^^ The scaffold serves to clarify the political and spir¬ 
 itual issues raised by events in the novel, and the decapitated 
 surveyor of the Custom House, not surprisingly, identifies with 
 whoever becomes a martyr upon it. 
 
 Hawthorne’s use of the scaffold as a structural device has long 
 been recognized; in 1944 Leland Schubert pointed out that the 
 novel “is built around the scaffold. At the beginning, in the mid¬ 
 dle and at the end of the story the scaffold is the dominating 
 
 Nina Baym in her discussion of “The Custom-House” sketch posits that “like 
 Hester, [Hawthorne] becomes a rebel because he is thrown out of society, by soci¬ 
 ety. . . . The direct attack of ‘The Custom-House’ on some of the citizens of Salem adds 
 a fillip of personal revenge to the theoretical rebellion that it dramatizes,” The Shape 
 oj Hawthorne's Career (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 148—49. Hawthorne’s 
 attack, I think, can be more accurately termed a counterattack and seen as dramatizing 
 not a rebellion but his reaction to a rebellion. 
 
236 
 
 Larry }. Reynolds 
 
 point.The way in which the scaffold serves as a touchstone for 
 the narrator’s sympathies, however, has not been fully explored, 
 particularly with reference to the matter of revolution. 
 
 As every reader notices, at the beginning of the story, Hester 
 is accorded much sympathy. Her beauty, her courage, her pride, 
 all receive emphasis; and the scaffold, meant to degrade her, el¬ 
 evates her, figuratively as well as literally. The narrator presents 
 her as an image of Divine Maternity, and more importantly, as a 
 member of the old order of nobility suffering at the hands of a 
 vulgar mob. Her recollection of her paternal home, “poverty- 
 stricken,” but “retaining a half-obliterated shield of arms over the 
 portal” (pp. 53, 58) establishes her link to aristocracy. Further¬ 
 more, although she has been sentenced by the Puritan magistrates, 
 her worst enemies are the coarse, beefy, pitiless “gossips” who sur¬ 
 round the scaffold and argue that she should be hanged or at least 
 branded on the forehead. The magistrates, whom Hawthorne 
 characterizes as “good men, just, and sage” have shown clemency 
 in their sentence, and that clemency is unpopular with the chorus 
 of matrons who apparently speak for the people. 
 
 Through the first twelve chapters, half of the book, the narra¬ 
 tor’s sympathies remain with Hester, for she continues to repre¬ 
 sent, like Charles I, Louis XVI, and Surveyor Hawthorne, a fallen 
 aristocratic order struggling in defense of her rights against an an¬ 
 tagonistic populace. The poor, the well-to-do, adults, children, lay¬ 
 men, clergy, all torment her in various ways; but she, the narrator 
 tells us, “was patient,—a martyr, indeed” (p. 85). It is Pearl, of 
 course, who anticipates what Hester will become—a revolution¬ 
 ary— and reveals the combative streak her mother possesses. “The 
 warfare of Hester’s spirit,” Hawthorne writes, “was perpetuated 
 in Pearl” (p. 91), and this is shown by Pearl’s throwing stones at 
 the Puritan children (“the most intolerant brood that ever lived” 
 [p. 94]), her smiting and uprooting the weeds that represent these 
 children, and her splashing the Governor himself with water. 
 “She never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing 
 broadcast the dragon’s teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed 
 enemies, against whom she rushed to battle” (p. 95). (The echo 
 
 Haiuthorne the Artist (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1944), pp. 
 
 •37-38- 
 
European Revolutions 
 
 237 
 
 here of Margaret Fuller’s dispatch from Rome is probably not 
 coincidental.) 
 
 Hester’s own martial spirit comes to the fore in the confronta¬ 
 tion with Bellingham, but here she fights only to maintain the 
 status quo and thus keeps the narrator’s sympathies. She visits the 
 Governor not to attack him in any way but to defend her right to 
 raise Pearl. Undaunted by Bellingham’s shining armor, which 
 “was not meant for mere idle show,” Hester triumphs, because 
 she has the natural order upon her side and because Arthur comes 
 to her aid. Drawing Pearl forcibly into her arms, she confronts 
 “the old Puritan magistrate with almost a fierce expression”; and 
 Arthur, prompted into action by Hester’s veiled threats, responds 
 like a valiant Cavalier. His voice, as he speaks on her behalf, is 
 “sweet, tremulous, but powerful, insomuch that the hall reechoed, 
 and the hollow armour rang with it” (p. 114). 
 
 In the central chapters of the novel, when the narrator turns 
 his attention toward Arthur and evidences antipathy toward him, 
 it is not only because of the minister’s obvious hypocrisy but also 
 because of the intellectual change that he has undergone at Chil- 
 llngworth’s hands. Subtly, Arthur becomes radicalized and antic¬ 
 ipates Hester’s ventures into the realm of speculative and 
 revolutionary thought. “There was a fascination for the minister,” 
 Hawthorne writes, “in the company of the man of science, in 
 whom he recognized an intellectual cultivation of no moderate 
 depth or scope; together with a range and freedom of ideas, that 
 he would have vainly looked for among the members of his own 
 profession” (p. 123). And if Arthur is the victim of the leech’s 
 herbs and poisons, he is also a victim of more deadly Intellectual 
 brews as well. The central scene of the novel, Arthur’s “vigil” on 
 the scaffold, is Inspired, apparently, by the “liberal views” he has 
 begun to entertain. “On one of those ugly nights,” we are told, 
 “the minister started from his chair. A new thought had struck 
 him” (p. 146). This thought is to stand on the scaffold in the 
 middle of the night, but by so doing he joins the ranks of Satan’s 
 rebellious legions. As he indulges in “the mockery of penitence” 
 upon the scaffold, his guilt becomes “heaven-defying” and repre¬ 
 hensible, in the narrator’s eyes. Rather than seeking to reestablish 
 his moral force, which has been “abased into more than childish 
 weakness,” Arthur, in his imagination, mocks the Reverend Wil¬ 
 son, the people of Boston, and God himself. Furthermore, as 
 
238 
 
 Larry J. Reynolds 
 
 Henry Nash Smith has pointed out, the “lurid playfulness” Ar¬ 
 thur indulges in upon the scaffold, calls into question “the very 
 idea of a solid, orderly universe existing independently of con¬ 
 sciousness.”^^ The questioning remains Arthur’s, however, not the 
 narrator’s, and the scene itself, with the scaffold as its setting, 
 serves to reveal the cowardice and licentiousness Arthur has been 
 reduced to. The blazing A in the sky, which Arthur sees “ad¬ 
 dressed to himself alone,” marks Governor Winthrop’s death, ac¬ 
 cording to the townspeople, and thus further emphasizes (by its 
 reference to Winthrop’s famous leadership and integrity) the nadir 
 Arthur has reached by his indulgence in defiant thought and be¬ 
 havior. 
 
 The transformation Hester undergoes in the middle of the 
 novel (which only appears to be from sinner to saint) is a stronger 
 version of that which Arthur has undergone at her husband’s 
 hands; she too becomes, like the French revolutionaries of 1789 
 and the Italian revolutionaries of i 849, a radical thinker engaged 
 in a revolutionary struggle against an established political-religious 
 order. And as such, she loses the narrator’s sympathies (while 
 gaining those of most readers). The transformation begins with 
 her regaining, over the course of seven years, the goodwill of the 
 public, which “was inclined to show its former victim a more 
 benign countenance than she cared to be favored with, or, per¬ 
 chance, than she deserved” (p. 162). The rulers of the commu¬ 
 nity, who “were longer in acknowledging the influence of Hester’s 
 good qualities than the people,” become, as time passes, not her 
 antagonists but rather the objects of her antagonism. We first see 
 her impulse to challenge their authority when Chillingworth tells 
 her that the magistrates have discussed allowing her to remove the 
 scarlet letter from her bosom. “It lies not in the pleasure of the 
 magistrates to take off this badge” (p. 169), she tells him. Simi¬ 
 larly, when she meets Arthur in the forest several days later, she 
 subversively asks, “What hast thou to do with all these iron men 
 and their opinions? They have kept thy better part in bondage too 
 long already!” (p. 197). 
 
 The new direction Hester’s combativeness has taken is political 
 in nature and flows from her isolation and Indulgence in specu- 
 
 Democracy and the Novel: Popular Resistance to Classic American Writers 
 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), p. 25. 
 
European Revolutions 
 
 239 
 
 lation. In a passage often quoted, but seldom viewed as consistent 
 with the rest of the novel, because of its unsympathetic tone, the 
 narrator explains that Hester Prynne “had wandered, without rule 
 or guidance, in a moral wilderness. . . . Shame, Despair, Solitude! 
 These had been her teachers,—stern and wild ones,—and they 
 had made her strong, but taught her much amiss” (pp. iQQ-200). 
 Hester’s ventures into new areas of thought link her, significantly, 
 with the overthrow of governments and the overthrow of “ancient 
 prejudice, wherewith was linked much of ancient principle.” “She 
 assumed,” the narrator points out, “a freedom of speculation, then 
 common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our 
 forefathers, had they known of it, would have held to be a dead¬ 
 lier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter” (p. 164). 
 Referring for the second time to the antinomian Anne Hutchin¬ 
 son, whom Hawthorne in another work had treated with little 
 sympathy, the narrator speculates that if Pearl had not become the 
 object of her mother’s devotion, Hester “might, and not improb¬ 
 ably would, have suffered death from the stern tribunals of the 
 period, for attempting to undermine the foundations of the Puri¬ 
 tan establishment” (p. 165).^* 
 
 Although Hester does not lead a political-religious revolt 
 against the Puritan leadership, these speculations are quite rele¬ 
 vant to the action which follows, for Hawthorne shows her radi¬ 
 calism finding an outlet in her renewed relationship with Arthur, 
 which assumes revolutionary form. When they hold their colloquy 
 in the forest, during which she reenacts her role as Eve the sub¬ 
 versive temptress, we learn that “the whole seven years of outlaw 
 and ignominy had been little other than a preparation for this very 
 hour” (p. 200). What Hester accomplishes during this hour (other 
 than raising the reader’s hopes) is once again to overthrow Ar¬ 
 thur’s system and undermine his loyalty to the Puritan community 
 and the Puritan God. She establishes a temporary provisional gov¬ 
 ernment within him, so to speak, which fails to sustain itself. Al¬ 
 though Hester obviously loves Arthur and seeks only their 
 happiness together, her plan, which most readers heartily endorse. 
 
 For excellent discussions of Hawthorne’s attitudes toward women activists, see 
 Neal F. Doubleday, “Hawthorne’s Hester and Feminism,” PMLA, 54 (1939), 825- 
 28; Morton Cronin, “Hawthorne on Romantic Love and the Status of Women,” 
 PMLA, 69 (1954), 89-98; and Darrel Abel, “Hawthorne on the Strong Dividing 
 Lines of Nature,” American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 14 (1972), 23—31. 
 
240 
 
 Larry J. Reynolds 
 
 challenges, in the narrator’s eyes, the social order of the commu¬ 
 nity and the spiritual order of the universe, and thus earns his 
 explicit disapproval. 
 
 When Hester tells Arthur that the magistrates have kept his 
 better part in bondage, the narrator makes it clear that it is Ar¬ 
 thur’s better part that has actually kept his worse and lawless self 
 Imprisoned. For some time the prison has proved sound, but “the 
 breach which guilt has once made into the human soul is never, 
 in this mortal state, repaired,” the narrator declares. “It may be 
 watched and guarded^ so that the enemy shall not force his way 
 again into the citadel. . . . But there is still the ruined wall” (pp. 
 200—01). Thus, as Hawthorne draws upon the popular revolu¬ 
 tionary imagery of 1848—49 to present Hester as a goddess of 
 Liberty leading a military assault, she prevails^ however, her vic¬ 
 tory, like that of the first Bastille day, sets loose forces of anarchy 
 and wickedness. Arthur experiences “a glow of strange enjoy¬ 
 ment” after he agrees to flee with her, but to clarify the moral 
 dimensions of this freedom, Hawthorne adds, “It was the exhila¬ 
 rating effect—upon a prisoner just escaped from the dungeon of 
 his own heart—of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an un¬ 
 redeemed, unchristlanlzed, lawless region” (p. 201). 
 
 Unlike the earlier struggle that Hester and Arthur had fought 
 together to maintain the status quo —the traditional relationship 
 between mother and child—this struggle accomplishes something 
 far more pernicious: “a revolution in the sphere of thought and 
 feeling.” And because it does, it receives unsympathetic treatment. 
 “In truth,” Hawthorne writes, “nothing short of a total change of 
 dynasty and moral code, in that interior kingdom, was adequate 
 to account for the impulses now communicated to the unfortunate 
 and startled minister. At every step he was incited to do some 
 strange, wild, wicked thing or other, with a sense that it would be 
 at once Involuntary and intentional” (p. 217). 
 
 Donald A. Ringe among others has suggested that this abrupt 
 change in Arthur’s system is beneficent, a fortunate fall, in other 
 words, that gives him insight and powers of expression however, 
 the narrative emphasizes that it is unfortunate and unholy. Ar¬ 
 thur’s impulses to blaspheme, curse, and lead Innocence astray are 
 a stronger version of those seen during his vigil, and they confirm 
 
 “Hawthorne’s Psychology of the Head and Heart,” PMLA, 65 (1950), 129. 
 
European Revolutions 
 
 241 
 
 the narrator’s assertion that the minister has acquired “sympathy 
 and fellowship with wicked mortals and the world of perverted 
 spirits” (p. 222). It is important to notice also that the success of 
 Arthur’s sermon, which is so eloquent, so filled with compassion 
 and wisdom, depends ultimately not upon his new revolutionary’ 
 impulses but upon older counter-revolutionary’ sources that are 
 spiritually conservative. He draws upon the “energy—or say, 
 rather, the inspiration which had held him up, until he should 
 have delivered the sacred message that brought its own strength 
 along with it from heaven” (p. 251). 
 
 The final change of heart and spirit that Arthur undergoes and 
 that leads him to his death on the scaffold is foreshadowed by 
 events in the marketplace prior to his sermon. There the exhibi¬ 
 tion of broadswords upon the scaffold plus Pearl’s sense of “im¬ 
 pending revolution” suggests that while the minister’s better self 
 has been overthrown, it will reassert itself shortly. The procession 
 in which Arthur appears dramatizes the alternative to the lawless 
 freedom Hester has offered. Here, as Michael Davitt Bell has ob¬ 
 served, we have “the greatest tribute in all of Hawthorne’s writing 
 to the nobility of the founders.” The people, we are told, had 
 bestowed their reverence “on the white hair and venerable brow 
 of agej on long-tried integrity; on solid wisdom and sad-colored 
 experience; on endowments of that grave and weighty order, 
 which gives the idea of permanence, and comes under the general 
 definition of respectability” (pp. 237—38). These are the qualities 
 that distinguish Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and 
 their compeers. And, although we are not told who the new gov¬ 
 ernor is (it was Endicott), we know that his election represents 
 orderly change, in contrast to the rebellion and regicide that has 
 recently occurred in England. “Today,” Hester tells Pearl, “a 
 new man is beginning to rule over them,” and, in harmony with 
 this event, Arthur acts to reestablish his place within the order of 
 the community and within the order of the kingdom of God. 
 
 During the sermon Arthur seems to regain some of his spiritual 
 stature and is described as an angel, who, “in his passage to the 
 skies, had shaken his bright wings over the people for an in¬ 
 stant,—at once a shadow and a splendor.” Because Arthur is still 
 
 Hawthorne and the Historical Romance oj New England (Princeton: Princeton 
 Univ. Press, 1971), p. 140. 
 
242 
 
 Larry J. Reynolds 
 
 a hypocrite, considerable irony exists within this description; how¬ 
 ever, when the minister walks to and mounts the scaffold, the 
 narrator’s irony turns to sincerity. Arthur attempts, before he dies, 
 to regain God’s favor, and as he nears the scaffold, where Hester 
 and Chillingworth will both oppose his effort to confess, we are 
 told that “it was hardly a man with life in him, that tottered on 
 his path so nervelessly, yet tottered, and did not fall!” The ex¬ 
 clamation mark indicates the double sense of “fall” Hawthorne 
 wishes to suggest, and at the end Arthur seems to escape from the 
 provisional control over him that both Chillingworth and Hester 
 have had. 
 
 “Is not this better than what we dreamed of in the forest?” he 
 asks Hester, and although she replies “I know not! I know not!” 
 the revolutionary context of the novel, the bias toward restoration 
 and order, indicate we are supposed to agree that it is.'” Arthur’s 
 final scene upon the scaffold mirrors Hester’s first scene there, 
 even though he proceeds from the church whereas she had pro¬ 
 ceeded from the prison. But, unlike Hester, Arthur through hu¬ 
 mility and faith seems to achieve peace, whereas she, through “the 
 combative energy of her character,” had achieved only “a kind of 
 lurid triumph” (p. 78). In the final scaffold scene. Pearl acts as 
 an ethical agent once again and emphasizes Hawthorne’s themes 
 about peace and battle, order and revolt. At the moment of his 
 death, Arthur kisses Pearl, and the tears she then sheds are “the 
 pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor 
 for ever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it.” In what 
 seems to be a reward for her docility, she marries into European 
 nobility (thereby accomplishing a restoration of the ties with aris¬ 
 tocracy her maternal relatives once enjoyed); similarly, Hester at 
 last, we are told in a summary, forsakes her radicalism and rec¬ 
 ognizes that the woman who would lead the reform movements 
 of the future and establish women’s rights must be less “stained 
 with sin,” less “bowed down with shame” than she. This woman 
 must be “lofty, pure, and beautiful, and wise, moreover, not 
 through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy” (p. 263). 
 
 A number of critics have read this scene as ironic and seen Dimmesdale as deluded 
 or damned; however, the Pieta tableau, Arthur’s Christlike foregiveness of Chilling¬ 
 worth, and Hawthorne’s own emotional response to the scene (when he read it to So¬ 
 phia) make it difficult to agree with such a reading. 
 
European Revolutions 
 
 243 
 
 More than one reader has correctly surmised that this ending 
 to the novel constitutes a veiled compliment to Hawthorne’s little 
 Dove, Sophia, and a veiled criticism of Margaret Fuller, Ameri¬ 
 ca’s foremost advocate of women’s rights and, at the time, one 
 suffering from a sullied reputation due to gossip about her child 
 and questionable marriage. Hawthorne’s long and ambivalent re¬ 
 lationship with Fuller and his response to her activities as a radical 
 and revolutionary in i 849 had a decided effect upon the novel. 
 There are several parallels which indicate Fuller served as a model 
 for Hester: both had the problem of facing a Puritan society en¬ 
 cumbered by a child of questionable legitimacy; both were con¬ 
 cerned with social reform and the role of woman in society; both 
 functioned as counsellor and comforter to women; and both had 
 children entitled to use the armorial seals of a non-English noble 
 family. All of these Francis E. Kearns has pointed out;'^^ however, 
 a more important parallel Kearns fails to mention is that for Haw¬ 
 thorne both women were associated with the ideas of temptation 
 and revolution, with the figures of Eve and Liberty. Fuller was 
 not only the most intelligent, articulate, and passionate woman 
 Hawthorne had ever spent so many hours alone wlth,'*^^ she was 
 also, as he began The Scarlet Tetter., an ardent revolutionary sup¬ 
 porting the overthrow of the most prominent political-religious 
 leader in the world. 
 
 Certainly Hawthorne’s knowledge of and interest in the New 
 England past were considerable; however, as Thomas Woodson 
 has pointed out, his interest in his contemporary world was far 
 greater than the critical emphases of recent decades would indi¬ 
 cate.In his writing of The Scarlet Tetter he drew upon the is¬ 
 sues and rhetoric he was encountering in the present, especially 
 those relating to himself as a public figure. Moreover, he re¬ 
 sponded strongly and creatively to accounts of foreign revolutions 
 and revolutionaries that he found in the newspapers, the periodi¬ 
 cals, and books new to the libraries. Although to most of his coun- 
 
 ■*2 “Margaret Fuller as a Model for Hester ^rynnt," Jahrbuch jiir Amerikasttidien, 
 10 (1965), 191-97. 
 
 The most revealing information about the Hawthorne-Fuller relationship is con¬ 
 tained in Margaret Fuller’s 1844 Commonplace Book, which deserves to be edited and 
 published. The manuscript is on deposit by Mrs. Lewis F. Perry at the Massachusetts 
 Historical Society. 
 
 “Hawthorne’s Interest in the Contemporary,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Society 
 Newsletter, 7 (1981), 1. 
 
244 
 
 Larry J. Reynolds 
 
 trymen the overthrow of kings and the triumph of republicanism 
 were exhilarating events, to a man of Hawthorne’s temperament, 
 the violence, the bloodshed, the extended chaos that accompanied 
 the revolutions of i 848—49 were deeply disturbing. Associated in 
 his own mind with his personal plight, they, along with his read¬ 
 ing in Guizot and Lamartine, shaped The Scarlet Tetter in 
 Burkean ways the reader of today finds difficult to accept. We 
 value too highly Thomas Paine and the rights of woman. 
 
Nature and Frontier in "Roger Malvin’s Burial” 
 
 James McIntosh 
 
 I 
 
 Malvin’s Burial” has been much studied as a moral 
 rV and psychological table, a tale ot hidden motives uncon¬ 
 sciously acted out; and as a historical romance, a tale ot an 
 Indian-fighter who begins by defentling the trontier against the 
 savage but ends by carrying on a war within himselt. One key 
 feature ot the tale that has received remarkably little attention is 
 Hawthorne’s treatment ot the wilderness landscape, the natural 
 setting in which the main action of the story occurs. There are 
 reasons enough for this neglect. The action itself is so psycho¬ 
 logically suggestive that some critics in recent decades have been 
 drawn to it to the exclusion of other elements. Other critics have 
 been intrigued by the historical account of “Lovell’s Fight” that 
 begins the tale, and have explained the tale as the enactment 
 of a problem in New England’s moral history.' Hawthorne’s 
 treatment of landscape, by contrast, has rarely been a subject 
 of debate in this or any of his work.^ In general, it is assumed, 
 
 ' For readings of the psychological and moral action ot “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” 
 see especially Hyatt Waggoner, Hawthorne (Cambridge; Harvard Univ. Press, 1955), 
 pp. 78-86; Frederick C. Crews, “The Logic of Compulsion in ‘Roger Malvin’s Burial,’” 
 PM LA, 79 (1964), 457-65, and The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes 
 (New York; Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 80-95; and Sharon Cameron, The Corporeal 
 Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne (Baltimore; Johns Hopkins Univ. 
 Press, 1981), pp. 137-44. For historicist readings, see especially Robert S. Daly, “History 
 and Chivalric Myth in ‘Roger Malvin’s Burial,”’ Essex Institute Historical Collections, 
 109 (1973), 99-115; and Michael |. Colacurcio, The Province of Piety: Moral Histoiy in 
 Hawthorne's Early Tales (Cambridge; Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 107-30. 
 
 ^ William |. Scheick suggests the central importance of the unknowableness of nature 
 in the tale in “The Hieroglyphic Rock in Hawthorne’s ‘Roger Malvin’s Burial,’ ” Emerson 
 Society Quarterly, 24 (1978), 72-76. An excellent brief commentary on Hawthorne’s 
 
 American Literature, V^olume 60, Number 2, May 1988. Copyright © 1988 by the Duke 
 University Press. CCC 0002-9831/88/S1.50. 
 
246 
 
 James McIntosh 
 
 Hawthorne’s descriptions are either factual and journalistic, as in 
 “Sketches from Memory” and, more subtly. The Blithedale Ro¬ 
 mance, or allegorical, as in “The Man of Adamant” and, more 
 elaborately. The Scarlet Letter. Moreover, conventional opinion 
 has it that Hawthorne had little disposition toward Romanti¬ 
 cism, and hence little use for the idea of “Nature.” As a result 
 of this neglect, readers have tended to absorb the landscape in 
 “Roger Malvin’s Burial” without realizing what it has meant to 
 them. 
 
 “Roger Malvin’s Burial” is a very early work by Hawthorne. 
 As we know from his correspondence, he had ready a version 
 of it by late 1829 that he submitted to Samuel Goodrich; and 
 two years later it was published in Goodrich’s Token along with 
 those other early masterpieces, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” 
 and “The Gentle Boy.” As he launched himself as a writer of 
 historical romance, then, Hawthorne explored three strains of 
 New England history, the matter of the Puritans in “The Gen¬ 
 tle Boy,” the matter of the Revolution in “My Kinsman, Major 
 Molineux,” and the matter of the frontier in “Roger Malvin’s 
 Burial.” Yet while he was to return to the Puritans again and 
 again and to the Revolution in ample measure in the late 1830s, 
 “Roger Malvin’s Burial” is his only significant attempt to dra¬ 
 matize the frontier. It is unique also in the ways it presents a 
 frontier landscape. Hawthorne’s interest in frontier psychology 
 led him, it seems, to work out a special relation between his 
 frontiersmen and their wilderness environment. Granted, Haw¬ 
 thorne takes his characters into the wilderness elsewhere, in 
 “Young Goodman Brown” and The Scarlet Letter, for instance, 
 but in those fictions the landscape tends to be used as an arena 
 for the allegorical projection of character when it is not used 
 as scenic background. In “Roger Malvin’s Burial” the relation 
 between character and setting is more continuously central to 
 the effect of the story because the setting has an interest in itself 
 unusual for Hawthorne. “Nature” has its own unknowable char¬ 
 acter that develops in the course of the tale. At the same time, 
 those hunters and pilgrims Roger Malvin and Reuben, Dorcas, 
 and Cyrus Bourne project a variety of human attributes onto 
 
 treatment of the frontier in “Roger Malvin’s Burial” appears in Edwin Fussell, Frontier 
 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 75-77. 
 
“Roger Malvin’s Burial” 
 
 247 
 
 the forest as they make their way through it. Such a treatment 
 of landscape is unusually shifting and varied for Hawthorne. It 
 is one of those early experiments in imagination and technique 
 that he will not precisely repeat. 
 
 “Roger Malvin’s Burial” belongs to the first phase of Haw¬ 
 thorne’s career as a short-story writer. We can date this phase 
 approximately from 1829 to 1832, comprising his writings after 
 Fanshawe and before “The Story-Teller.” It should be conceived 
 as a distinct phase rather than only as a time of anticipa¬ 
 tions.^ One reason it has not usually been so conceived is that 
 Hawthorne’s efforts during these years are so experimental and 
 heterogeneous. He tries his hand at a host of new literary ven¬ 
 tures, not only “provincial tales” but ghost stories, personal es¬ 
 says like “Sights from a Steeple,” and the four “biographical 
 sketches” of figures from New England history. In the three 
 major historical tales, moreover, not only is his invention fer¬ 
 tile and diverse, but his designs are inordinately ambitious. He 
 has not yet chosen to limit the scope of his tales or learned to 
 give them ready generic boundaries. Never again will he write 
 such an overdetermined tale as “My Kinsman,” which is at once 
 Robin’s personal midsummer night’s nightmare and a condensed 
 political allegory, a ritual communal comedy and the poignant 
 tragedy of a persecuted old man. Nor, at least in his other short 
 fiction, will he present such a detailed picture of seventeenth- 
 century New England manners as he does in the 1831 “Gentle 
 Boy,” as if he were preparing himself for a career as a histori¬ 
 cal novelist rather than that of an elliptical romancer. Thus it 
 should not surprise us that “Roger Malvin’s Burial” also reflects 
 Hawthorne’s many-sided ambition and contains unrepeated ex¬ 
 periments, in its treatment of landscape and narrative as well as 
 in its celebrated treatment of Reuben Bourne’s “logic of com¬ 
 pulsion.”^ 
 
 As we shall see, Hawthorne’s experiment with the represen¬ 
 tation of landscape in the story is inextricably involved with his 
 experiment with narration. The variety of stances his characters 
 take toward the wilderness requires a flexible control of point 
 
 ^ A satisfactory account of this phase remains to be written. Nina Baym’s in The 
 Shape of Hawthorne's Career (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 29-39, is, as we might 
 expect, the best we have, but is more cursory than her treatment of other periods. 
 
 See Crews, “The Logic of Compulsion in ‘Roger Malvin’s Burial.’ ’’ 
 
248 
 
 James McIntosh 
 
 of view. Hawthorne dramatizes his narrator in a varying, yet 
 pointed manner, so as both to enter his characters’ minds and 
 to pass ironic judgment on them. Descriptive writing within 
 this drama offers him a suitable medium for his changeable 
 tentativeness, and also a means by which to exercise his moral 
 authority. 
 
 Another ambitious impulse that enlivens “Roger Malvin’s 
 Burial” as well as the other two major tales is Hawthorne’s pro¬ 
 clivity to rewrite New England history in his own new way. 
 He casts himself in these tales as a discreet revisionist historian. 
 The three tales take a subversive approach to New England 
 historical pieties and treat ironically the attempts of nineteenth- 
 century New Englanders to gloss over the cruelty of the Puritan 
 community at the time of Endicott, the violence of the Sons 
 of Liberty during the Stamp Act Crisis, and the aroused spirit 
 of vengeance of Captain Lovewell’s band of frontier warriors. 
 Hawthorne knew that Lovewell and his men ventured into the 
 wilderness not only to defend the settlements but also to murder 
 and scalp Indian warriors for large rewards. Hence in the histori¬ 
 cal account that begins “Roger Malvin’s Burial” he implies that 
 the 1825 commemorations of “Lovell’s Fight” in Maine, New 
 Hampshire, and Massachusetts amounted in part to a wishful 
 refusal to face disagreeable facts, which “imagination” had “cast 
 . . . judiciously into the shade.”I would not oversimplify. Here as 
 elsewhere Hawthorne is engaged in a moral balancing act; and he 
 backhandedly justifies the use Providence made of this frontier 
 violence, which brought peace to New England for a time. 
 Nevertheless, the reader misses one of the chief assumptions 
 underlying the tale if he or she fails to notice that in the opening 
 paragraph the frontiersmen are made morally equivalent to the 
 Indians.^ Both parties display the same “open bravery,” which. 
 
 ^Mosses from an Old Manse (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974), p- 337 (vol. 
 10 of The Centenary Edition of the Woifs of Nathaniel Hawthorne). Further references to 
 “Roger Malvin’s Burial” will be to this edition. 
 
 ^ I agree with Daly and Colacurcio, and differ respectfully with David Levin, in that 
 I think Hawthorne’s intent ironic in his account of Lovell’s Fight. See Levin, “Modern 
 Misjudgements of Racial Imperialism in Hawthorne and Parkman,” Yearbook of English 
 Studies, 13 (1983), 145-58. The vital barbarism of New England frontiersmen is treated 
 ironically also .in Hawthorne’s very early historical sketches, “Sir William Phips” and 
 “Sir William Pepperel.” See especially in “Sir William Phips” the description of the 
 “man clad in a hunting-shirt and Indian stockings” whose clothes are covered with leaves 
 from “the tangled wilderness” and who wears on his head “a wig made of the long and 
 
“Roger Malvin’s Burial” 
 
 249 
 
 the narrator remarks ironically, is “in accordance with civilized 
 ideas of valor.” (As Hawthorne knew, both parties slaughtered 
 their enemies with wanton cruelty in incidents before the battle. 
 Rather than following “civilized ideals,” whites and Indians alike 
 behaved like savages, first in their cruelty and then in their 
 bravery.) Likewise, the battle was “so fatal to those who fought” 
 on both sides. The dead of one hundred years ago do not share 
 in any self-congratulatory commemorations but are simply and 
 fatally dead. Indians and whites are joined in death, untouched 
 by the wishful “imagination” of later generations. 
 
 This subversive implication that frontiersmen and Indians 
 resemble each other persists in the ensuing tale of Roger Malvin 
 and Reuben Bourne. A historical question the tale asks is how 
 could these men maintain their inherited Puritan ways of think¬ 
 ing and at the same time share attitudes and habits of behavior 
 with their neighbors, the Indians, and what does this combi¬ 
 nation make them as representatives of their place and time.^ 
 For representative frontiersmen they surely are, responsive to 
 the long period of savage conflict with French and Indian on 
 the northern frontier that lasted from King Philip’s War till the 
 defeat of the French in 1763. One way Hawthorne manages this 
 question is by setting his tale in a wild, or as he calls it “savage,” 
 landscape. This is the home of the Indian, yet the frontiersman 
 has begun unconsciously to make it his home as well. He is 
 intermittently attracted to it, while at the same time as a Puritan 
 he finds it inscrutable and desolate and wishes to protect him¬ 
 self from it. His ambivalence toward the landscape mirrors the 
 division in his cultural and psychological make-up. He is at war 
 to the death with the Indian, yet has made himself akin to him 
 in order to survive. 
 
 Reuben and his family define themselves consciously as op¬ 
 posed to the Indians and different from them. Late in the tale, 
 when Dorcas prepares supper in the wilderness for her husband 
 and son, she sings an anonymous song “descriptive of a winter 
 evening in a frontier-cottage, when, secured from savage inroad 
 by the high-piled snow-drifts, the family rejoiced by their own 
 fireside.” The song calls up a picture of New England innocence; 
 
 straight black hair of his slain savage enemies”— Tales, Sketches, and Other Papers (Boston; 
 Houghton Mifflin, 1883), p. 231 (vol. 12 in the 1883 Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne). 
 
250 
 
 James McIntosh 
 
 in “simple words,” Hawthorne writes, “the poet had instilled 
 the very essence of domestic love and household happiness.” The 
 narrative commemorates this innocence, but also implies that 
 domestic bliss and household happiness can only be preserved 
 through fierce hostility to the native inhabitants. Similarly, when 
 Reuben leads Dorcas and Cyrus back toward Roger Malvin’s 
 rock, they are described as traveling “into a region, of which 
 savage beasts and savage men were as yet the sole possessors.” 
 Opposed to the Indian, they intrude in his accustomed home, 
 the undomesticated wilderness. 
 
 In this passage Hawthorne, I am sure, remembers William 
 Bradford’s (or as he knew it Nathaniel Morton’s) description 
 of the landscape that greeted the pilgrims of the Plymouth 
 colony in 1620: “What could they see but a hideous and desolate 
 Wilderness full of wilde Beasts and wilde Men?”’ Indeed, as 
 Michael J. Colacurcio has argued, the narrative implies through¬ 
 out that men and women on the frontier think of themselves 
 as pilgrims.* When Reuben, Dorcas, and Cyrus take their leave 
 of the settlements they become “pilgrims” venturing into “the 
 untrodden forest.” Earlier, both Roger’s life on the frontier and 
 Reuben’s journey through the woods to the settlements are called 
 “pilgrimages.” Thus the persons of the story are linked with 
 Bradford, and with New England’s conception of itself as a place 
 of Christian pilgrimage. Yet these eighteenth-century frontiers¬ 
 men differ from the Plymouth brethren in a way that brings 
 them closer to the Indians they oppose. They identify them¬ 
 selves not only as pilgrims but also and more often as hunters 
 —indeed it is as “a hunter and a warrior” that Roger wishes to 
 
 ’ Nathaniel Morton, New England’s Memorial (1669; rpt. Boston: Club of Odd Vol¬ 
 umes, J903), p. 13. Bradford’s Of Plimouth Plantation was as yet unpublished in 1829, 
 but Morton’s transcription of parts of it was readily available. Hawthorne had borrowed 
 a recently published new edition of New England’s Memorial (Boston, 1826) from the 
 Salem Athenaeum on 26 April 1828. (See Marion L. Kesselring, “Hawthorne’s Reading, 
 1828-1850,” Bulletin of the New Yorl{ Public Library, 53 [1949I, 71, 187.) In Grandfather’s 
 Chair, Hawthorne refers to this same passage explicitly when he has Grandfather describe 
 Lady Arbella Johnson’s unhappy exile in New England: “Poor Lady Arbella watches all 
 these sights, and feels that this new world is fit only for rough and hardy people. None 
 should be here, but those who can can struggle with wild beasts and wild men, and can 
 toil in the heat or cold, and can keep their hearts firm against all difficulties and dangers” 
 —True Stories from History and Biography (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 
 16-17 6 of The Centenary Edition of the Woifs of Nathaniel Hawthorne). 
 
 * The Province of Piety, p. 124. 
 
“Roger Malvin’s Burial” 
 
 251 
 
 be remembered on his tombstone. He implies unwittingly that 
 he has partly taken on the character of an Indian hunter and 
 warrior in order to give his life meaning. He has lived by this 
 Indian calling and now after Lovell’s Fight he will die by it. 
 As Hawthorne read the history of the Fight, then, he saw the 
 kinship between the hunters on both sides, and partly for that 
 reason he made the motif of frontiersmen-as-hunters crucial to 
 the drama of “Roger Malvin’s Burial.’’ 
 
 The likeness of frontiersmen and Indians is hinted at several 
 times in the course of the tale. The frontier inhabitants are 
 said to pay “an almost superstitious regard ... to the rites of 
 sepulture” “arising perhaps from the customs of the Indians.” 
 Elsewhere the narrative speaks of Reuben’s “superstitious fears, 
 of which none were more susceptible than the people of the 
 outward settlements.” The implication is that as a man living on 
 the edge of the wilderness Reuben partly thinks like an Indian. 
 A signal irony in the action is that Reuben leaves Roger sitting 
 upright in the posture of Freneau’s Indian hunter and warrior 
 dressed for burial;’ in effect he has buried him alive as if he were 
 an Indian. The intimation throughout the tale that “the people 
 of the outward settlements” are primitive as well as Christian 
 in feeling helps ground the ending, when Reuben trusts that 
 Heaven will afford him an opportunity of expiating his sin, 
 but then restores his heart only by killing his son. Tragically, 
 he deludes himself that regeneration comes through violence.'” 
 Reuben is impelled to his final act both by the trust of a pilgrim 
 and “the instinct of a hunter.” In his final misery he is a savage 
 as well as a Puritan. The tale shows that Hawthorne is well 
 aware of the moral confusion implicit in this combination. 
 
 II 
 
 “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” then, quietly dramatizes the proto- 
 
 ^ Freneau’s own note to his well known poem, “The Indian Burial Ground,” explains: 
 “The North American Indians bury their dead in a sitting posture; decorating the corpse 
 with wampum, the images of birds, quadrupeds, &: And (if that of a warrior) with bows, 
 arrows, tomhawks and other military weapons.” The Poems of Philip Freneau, ed. F. L. 
 Pattee (1903; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), II, 369. 
 
 I allude to Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of 
 the American Frontier (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973). Slotkin’s own 
 treatment of “Roger Malvin’s Burial” is brief, but he studies in great detail the tendencies 
 of white settlers to imagine themselves partly as Indians. 
 
252 
 
 James McIntosh 
 
 Melvillean point that, despite their Christian upbringing, fron¬ 
 tiersmen have the propensity to act like savages. It also questions 
 the New England chauvinism that helped justify the violence 
 accompanying the opening of the frontier. Yet in its tonal elabo¬ 
 ration the tale is Hawthorne’s, not Melville’s. Its ironies are 
 quiet, its subversiveness suffused with lyricism. Its author pur¬ 
 sues his research in the hearts of the frontiersmen “as well by 
 the tact of sympathy as by the light of [ironic] observation.”" 
 
 At the start of the tale proper, after the account of Lovell’s 
 Fight, Hawthorne moves sympathetically into the hearts and 
 minds of his characters. He manages this movement initially by 
 means of a description of the landscape surrounding the rock 
 where Roger Malvin sits dying. Intermittently throughout the 
 tale, this landscape, or a variation of it, is evoked to modify and 
 mediate our responses to the characters. The wilderness seems 
 to solicit different responses at different times, depending on the 
 occasion. Like other settings in Hawthorne, it reflects the minds 
 of the characters within it. Reuben especially is a complex and 
 conflict-ridden character. Since he is both a hunter and a pilgrim 
 he colors what he sees with the eyes of both these disparate types, 
 and this partly accounts for the wide variety of responses to the 
 wilderness the text expresses. Yet in this tale the wilderness is 
 more than just a means to characterization. The treatment of 
 landscape has another dimension, owing partly to the fact that 
 Lovell’s Fight took place in southwestern Maine near Raymond, 
 a region with which Hawthorne was deeply familiar. It is where 
 he “ran quite wild” " as a boy, and also heard tales of wilderness 
 strife between frontiersmen and Indians. It came naturally to 
 him to use this familiar landscape not only as a place to reenact 
 the past but also as an authentic emblem of wild Nature itself. 
 The landscape in the tale seems more closely and affectionately 
 observed than elsewhere in his work. This helps him give the 
 wilderness something of a fictional character of its own. It plays 
 a role not always fully controlled by the conscious or unconscious 
 imaginations of the merely human characters. 
 
 *' The Snow-Image and Uncollected Tales (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1974), 
 p. 4 (vol. 11 of The Centena-ry Edition of the Worlds of Nathaniel Hawthorne). 
 
 From Hawthorne’s 1853 account of his early life, quoted in Julian Hawthorne, 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), 1 , 95. For a valu¬ 
 able treatment of his early experience in Maine, see Melinda Ponder, “Hawthorne and 
 Raymond, Maine,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, 12, No. 2 (1986), 4-10. 
 
“Roger Malvin’s Burial” 
 
 253 
 
 This partly independent role is immediately apparent in the 
 opening description. 
 
 The early sunbeams hovered cheerfully upon the tree-tops, beneath 
 which two w'eary and wounded men had stretched their limbs the 
 night before. Their bed of withered oak-leaves was strewn upon the 
 small level space, at the foot of a rock, situated near the summit of 
 one of the gentle swells, by which the face of the country is there 
 diversified. The mass of granite, rearing its smooth, flat surface, fifteen 
 or twenty feet above their heads, was not unlike a gigantic grave¬ 
 stone, upon which the veins seemed to form a description in forgotten 
 characters. On a tract of several acres around this rock, oaks and other 
 hard-wood trees had supplied the place of the pines, which were the 
 usual grow'th of the land; and a young and vigorous sapling stood 
 close beside the travellers. 
 
 I would call attention to several features of this description. 
 To begin w'ith, it conveys an illusion of objectivity. It contains 
 facts about the contours of the land and the local species of trees, 
 even about what Thoreau w'ould call “the succession of forest 
 trees.”The narrator knows the country and is ready to inform 
 the reader about it. Yet at the same time there is something 
 unknowable about the scene. The inscription “in forgotten char¬ 
 acters” on the rock is a natural mystery that is never explained 
 in the course of the story. It points to an aspect of the wilderness 
 which the frontiersmen cannot understand and which they fear. 
 However much it may seem human at times, the wilderness is 
 also enigmatically itself. Finally, even with its mystery, this is 
 a congenial landscape, with cheerful sunbeams, gentle swells of 
 countryside, and a bed of leaves for Roger to rest on. In itself 
 such an image of Nature has no hostility to man—if anything it 
 seems his nurse and comforter. 
 
 This initial description engages us with its sensuous detail and 
 its tone of sympathy, and registers an impression against which 
 we measure other views of the wilderness proffered later by the 
 persons of the story as well as by other narrative voices within 
 it. Of course, our first impression has no fixed validity. The sig¬ 
 nificance of the landscape is fluid in the text and evolves with 
 our reading of it. For example, the narrator gives a different 
 
 13 “Xhe Succession of Forest Trees,” in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Boston; 
 Houghton Mifflin, 1906), V, 184-204, especially 189. 
 
James McIntosh 
 
 254 
 
 impression of the wilderness when he explains Roger’s change 
 of countenance as he thinks of dying in it: “after all, it was a 
 ghastly fate, to be left expiring in the wilderness.” The narrative 
 reflects Roger’s mind here, voicing his secret doubts about his 
 advice to Reuben, but it also implies that after all this is not 
 such a comforting place as it first appeared. Nevertheless, the 
 effect of the opening description is powerfully with us during 
 the whole first scene. It ought, for example, to influence our 
 reading of Roger’s comment on the landscape as he seeks to per¬ 
 suade Reuben to abandon him. “There is many and many a long 
 mile of howling wilderness before us yet.” Far from convinc¬ 
 ingly characterizing the wilderness itself, this assertion typecasts 
 Malvin. As we know, he is drawing on the remembered lan¬ 
 guage of his particular culture, the language of Bradford and 
 Endicott. “Howling wilderness” is the early settlers’ customary 
 label for undomesticated nature in New England. Roger be¬ 
 trays his conditioned anxiety as an embattled pilgrim, sharing 
 with Reuben his emotional bias as well as his knowledge of the 
 territory. 
 
 This changing perspective toward the wilderness is a feature 
 of the narrative throughout. By the juxtaposition of the con¬ 
 genial opening description with Malvin’s contrary assessment, 
 we should be trained to read everything that is voiced about 
 the wilderness as partial, whether it comes in the speech of the 
 characters or in the narrative. The “real” wilderness remains 
 untouched by all these partial assessments, beyond the scope of 
 language to articulate definitively. Yet it remains as a fictive pres¬ 
 ence in the tale. The opening description has made the presence 
 of the wilderness both trustworthy and mysterious, and we read 
 on partly to see the mystery deepened or varied or clarified. 
 
 The multitude of perspectives taken toward the wilderness is 
 nowhere more evident than at that point when Reuben and his 
 family quit the settlements to pursue their fortunes elsewhere. 
 Reuben, a ruined man, decides that only one course is open to 
 him. “He was to throw sunlight into some deep recess of the 
 forest, and seek subsistence from the virgin bosom of the wilder¬ 
 ness.” So the howling wilderness has a virgin bosom! Hawthorne 
 shows how well he understands the cognitive dissonance inher¬ 
 ent in the Puritan Errand and the particular confusion of one 
 poor hunter-pilgrim. When provoked by fear at the end of the 
 
“Roger Malvin’s Burial” 
 
 255 
 
 tale Reuben too will speak of “this howling wilderness.” As he 
 proposes to journey into the forest, however, he shows that he 
 also shares with his culture the image of a virgin wilderness, the 
 notion that one can encroach on wild Nature without her resist¬ 
 ing. Three paragraphs later the text dilates rhapsodically on this 
 partial perspective. “Oh! who, in the enthusiasm of a day-dream, 
 has not wished that he were a wanderer in a world of summer 
 wilderness, with one fair and gentle being hanging lightly on 
 his arm?” The voice Hawthorne ironically projects is that of a 
 wishfully innocent reader all too ready to imagine a Reuben or 
 Cyrus purified of conflict.'^ The narrator expatiates on the pros¬ 
 pects of this imagined early American as pilgrim-hunter. He is 
 to found a family, become a patriarch, be remembered in after¬ 
 life as a father of the frontier. But of course such a notion of an 
 effortless appropriation of Nature is drastically undercut. None 
 of the Bournes is to claim such an inheritance. More explicitly 
 than any image of the wilderness in the whole tale the image 
 of its virginal availability is a falsification, a dreamer’s “fantasy,” 
 as the chameleon narrator suggests less ironically in his next 
 picture: “The tangled and gloomy forest, through which the 
 personages of my tale were wandering, differed widely from the 
 dreamer’s Land of Fantasie; yet there was something in their 
 way of life that Nature asserted as her own; and the gnawing 
 cares, which went with them from the world, were all that now 
 obstructed their happiness.” 
 
 Hawthorne burrows deeply here, suggests hidden feelings in 
 the hearts of these frontier explorers of which they are scarcely 
 aware. “The tangled and gloomy forest” corresponds with the 
 family’s gnawing cares and thus expresses their mind more ac¬ 
 curately than the fantasy of summer wilderness. Yet at the same 
 time there is something else in “Nature” that stimulates and 
 empowers them. Nature is making them into more natural men. 
 They may be losing touch with the social “world,” but they 
 feel a primitive pleasure in the way of life the forest enjoins 
 and have intimations of a primitive, natural happiness. Though 
 Hawthorne does not spell out the idea except by association, the 
 Bournes have become more like savages, with savage advantages 
 
 I follow Fussell and Colacurcio in my reading of this passage. See Frontier, p. 76, 
 and The Province of Piety, pp. 121-23. 
 
256 
 
 James McIntosh 
 
 as well as limitations. The passage momentarily lends a heathen 
 hope to their errand while at the same time obliquely portend¬ 
 ing the disaster that will strike these hunters at the end of the 
 tale. They are now arriving in a region of savage beasts and 
 savage men and will be more disposed in the depths of their 
 hearts to act on savage instincts. 
 
 This evocation of “the tangled and gloomy forest” does more 
 than illustrate how perspectives on the wilderness change in 
 keeping with the changing moods of the characters and the 
 voice of the narrative. It also raises the question of the mean¬ 
 ing of “Nature.” If all perspectives on the landscape are partial, 
 are either culturally or psychologically determined, does Nature 
 have any meaning in itself, or is it only a stage set for human 
 responses and projections.^ Hawthorne certainly uses the word 
 diversely in the tale to fit the dramatic needs of his characters. 
 Earlier, when Reuben gloomily watches Roger praying in soli¬ 
 tude, Hawthorne writes, “there seemed a gloom on Nature’s 
 face, as if she sympathized with mortal pain and sorrow.” Later 
 Dorcas, left alone by her husband and son, lays out her snow- 
 white tablecloth “in the desolate heart of Nature.” In these three 
 contexts Nature is by turns a figure for secret natural energies, 
 a figure for maternal sympathy, and a figure for the howling 
 wilderness. 
 
 Yet as readers of the tale we never believe that Nature is inco¬ 
 herent—it impresses us as having one character, however diverse. 
 This is partly because Nature, dramatically considered, is sim¬ 
 ply a personification for the wilderness. The method of the tale 
 allows us to think of the wilderness, and hence of Nature, both 
 as persistently the same and as varying to suit the needs of the 
 fictive occasion. Conceptually, these diverse ideas of Nature are 
 conventional in 1829-31. They are part of the equipment with 
 which a young writer of the period would be likely to imagine 
 the wilderness. Moreover, as a writer emerging in the immedi¬ 
 ate aftermath of English Romanticism (and while American 
 Romanticism is gathering strength), Hawthorne treats all these 
 ideas of Nature as one idea. In this tale he deploys an American 
 Romantic conception, which he will later regard more skepti¬ 
 cally, of wild Nature as an all-encompassing other, connected 
 to human nature yet apart from it, sympathetic to the plight of 
 sufferers but also mysterious and potentially threatening. This 
 
“Roger Malvin’s Burial” 
 
 257 
 
 Other corresponds with the minds of the characters from time to 
 time but also asserts its own difference. Of course, Hawthorne 
 does not endorse such a Romantic conception of Nature. Now as 
 later his mind is too fine to be suited to didacticism. Rather, he 
 uses the conception to give the wilderness meaning, wholeness, 
 attractiveness, and power as a fictive presence. 
 
 No doubt Hawthorne plays with this conception and puts it 
 through as many variations as it will take. Yet one of the reasons 
 the tale works as an integrated fiction is that wilderness Nature 
 captivates the reader throughout. Even in the opening descrip¬ 
 tion several ideas of the wilderness—as a comforting mother, 
 as a vital source, and as a self-assertive stranger—are all more 
 or less implicit. This opening description imparts a poetic faith 
 in wilderness Nature as an independent entity, a faith nothing 
 else in the tale will shake. Through all the permutations of the 
 setting, the character of the wilderness keeps evolving in itself as 
 well as illustrating human fear and desire. This character is large 
 and flexible enough to include all the disparate significances that 
 human voices in the text attribute to the wilderness, because the 
 dramatic illusion is maintained that it remains itself. 
 
 Overall, Hawthorne carefully balances the impression of con¬ 
 geniality he creates in the opening with an impression of threat¬ 
 ening power he invokes on other occasions. The impression of 
 Nature’s power increases dramatically when Reuben and his 
 family arrive back in the vicinity of Roger Malvin’s rock. The 
 narrative echoes the opening description, but with a telling dif¬ 
 ference: “On the afternoon of the fifth day, they halted and 
 made their simple encampment, nearly an hour before sunset. 
 The face of the country, for the last few miles, had been diversi¬ 
 fied by swells of land, resembling huge waves of a petrified sea.’’ 
 We recall “the gentle swells, by which the face of the country 
 is there diversified.’’ These are now likened to “huge waves of 
 a petrified sea.’’ With this change in the image the same wild 
 place is no longer so congenial but has become sublime, its sub¬ 
 limity portending an unnamed crisis. Such a tone is displaced by 
 others as the tale moves to its climax. Yet this is a key moment, 
 suggesting that the landscape has a power of its own to be what 
 it will, that it can play a role in directing Reuben’s fate. 
 
 In the course of the tale, the landscape increasingly takes on 
 the role of a surrogate for fate. The wilderness throughout has 
 
258 
 
 James McIntosh 
 
 seemed a large and shadowy other to the frontiersmen. They 
 keep guessing its meaning but they fail to understand it. One 
 effect of all their misreadings is to build up its shadowy power. 
 At the end the wilderness exercises its power and draws Reuben 
 back to the scene of his imagined crime. The landscape in the 
 final episode is presented more allegorically than at the start of 
 the tale, when Hawthorne took pains to create an illusion of 
 factuality. The details of the final scene conspire to exert a quasi- 
 magical hold on Reuben and his family. When the branches of 
 the trees rustle and their trunks creak, it seems to the narrator 
 and to Reuben (we are in his mind) “as if the forest were waking 
 from slumber.” Even seemingly neutral details such as the “dense 
 and bushy undergrowth” take on an obscure imagined life and 
 support an emerging psychological allegory. More centrally to 
 the story, the rock becomes a palpable image of internal as 
 well as external fate, a metonym tor Reuben’s projected inner 
 necessities as well as a synechdoche for the wilderness’ magnetic 
 power. 
 
 Yet at the same time, the scene has a more complex effect be¬ 
 cause it remains more than merely allegorical.The wilderness 
 landscape continues to play another role, that ot a natural world 
 apart that frontier man will never know. From the start it has 
 had a mysterious objective presence that perforce eludes human 
 definitions; and even at the end the text makes clear that all 
 readings of the landscape are human and partial. The narrator’s 
 own readings are manifestly conjectural. Before he imagines the 
 forest waking from slumber, he interprets the sounds that it 
 makes and that humans hear quite differently. The Bournes have 
 lit their campfire, and the narrator comments: “The dark and 
 gloomy pines looked down upon them, and, as the wind swept 
 through their tops, a pitying sound was heard in the forest; or 
 did those old trees groan, in fear that men were come to lay the 
 axe to their roots at last?” The narrator’s question reminds us 
 that we do not know what the trees feel. Despite our illusory 
 
 However valuable Crews’s Freudian reading of the story’s plot and symbols con¬ 
 tinues to be, when he writes that the forest into which Reuben travels is simply "his own 
 mind,” and when he calls Hawthorne’s region of savage beasts and savage men only “the 
 mental region of Hawthorne’s best insight and highest art,” he oversimplifies the story’s 
 partially naturalistic treatment of the wilderness and neglects its historical dimension. 
 (Sms of the Fathers, pp. 94, 95.) 
 
“Roger Malvin’s Burial” 
 
 259 
 
 conjectures the forest keeps its own counsel and remains itself. 
 Similarly, the rock at the end may well stand for the internal 
 and external power that dictates Reuben’s destiny, but at the 
 same time it is still a rock somewhere in the uncharted territory 
 north of the settlements. Even the oak tree is imagined as a 
 natural tree as well as a metonym for Reuben as a ruined older 
 man. It sheds “real” leaves that physically cover the bones of the 
 dead as well as the metonymic tears of a natural double. As in 
 later Hawthorne, “Nature seems to love us,” but continues to 
 carry out its own operations. Yet Hawthorne uses the unknow¬ 
 ableness and the inhumanity of the landscape to good fictional 
 effect here. It helps keep the ending from seeming hermetically 
 psychological. After he kills his son, Reuben must go on with 
 his life in the actual and unfathomable forest. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Hawthorne has made the meaning of “Nature” elusive and 
 varied yet central in “Roger Malvin’s Burial.” He wishes to do 
 justice to the confused complexity of a representative frontiers¬ 
 man’s perspective on the wilderness in the era when the settle¬ 
 ments in northern New England were still the frontier. The 
 wilderness is not only the home of the hostile savage, a bound¬ 
 less region with a desolate heart, but is also a place where a 
 frontiersman can hunt and grow wild, a source of comfort and 
 delight. Both these views are in play in the depiction of the fron¬ 
 tier mind. Both also are comprehended in the idea that Nature 
 is a living whole which the frontiersmen do not understand, 
 which nourishes them but may overpower them and even enact 
 a judgment on them. Nature as a living whole is of course a 
 nineteenth-century idea. Yet, Hawthorne suggests, the Malvins 
 and the Bournes must have sensed the presence of such a Nature 
 when they found themselves surrounded by the wild unknown 
 and felt drawn to it as well as in awe of it. The frontiersmen 
 were not just invading the lands of the Indian but also dimly 
 discovering who they were in the mirror of the new world 
 wilderness. 
 
 The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1964), 
 p. 244 (vol. 3 of The Centenary Edition of the Woifs of Nathaniel Hawthorne). 
 
26 o 
 
 James McIntosh 
 
 The reader too is implicated in Reuben’s invasion and dis¬ 
 covery. Because landscape has a powerful subliminal effect on 
 reading, it helps the reader to integrate the tale and respond to 
 both its historical and its personal tragedy. An important esthe¬ 
 tic function of the landscape is to make it possible for one to 
 read the cultural-historical and the psychological-moral dimen¬ 
 sions of the tale as if they were aspects of a single whole. The 
 wilderness in “Roger Malvin’s Burial” is an obscure and com¬ 
 prehensive enough mirror to reflect disparate human desires as 
 if they belonged together in one undifferentiated mass of de¬ 
 sire. Reuben’s feelings as a pilgrim-hunter who would seek his 
 fortune on Indian lands are reflected in his responses to the 
 wilderness, but so also are his feelings as an errant foster-son 
 who has failed to heed his adopted father’s call to bury him in 
 his place of death. The landscape’s persistent presence mediates 
 in our reading between the tale as an historical representation 
 of a culture and the tale as a “timeless” psychological drama. 
 Through landscape, Hawthorne is able to take up his different 
 stories, including the story of Lovell’s Fight, and transform them 
 into one story. 
 
 In addition, the changing relation between man and the land¬ 
 scape in “Roger Malvin’s Burial” is its own submerged alterna¬ 
 tive story that runs slightly counter emotionally to the drama 
 of a ruined frontiersman and the murder of his son that is the 
 main subject of the tale. Because this alternative story is con¬ 
 veyed through description, the reader takes it in less directly 
 and continuously, more as a series of intermittent impressions. 
 The reader is sensitive to its being in a different generic mode, 
 as if “Roger Malvin’s Burial” in one of its dimensions were a 
 Romantic narrative of the conflicted relation between man and 
 Nature, not just a tale of guilt and expiation. The landscape in 
 this alternative story is a sort of wild card that from time to 
 time unpredictably alters the rules of the game Hawthorne plays 
 with us. On occasion, the reader feels a measure of identity with 
 the characters because he or she too faces Hawthorne’s imagined 
 wilderness with somewhat similar emotions, with excitement 
 and awe before an unknown. In other words, Hawthorne’s use 
 of landscape creates a hidden fraternity between characters and 
 readers. 
 
 It is not just that the lyrical early descriptions induce sym- 
 
“Roger Malvin’s Burial” 
 
 261 
 
 pathy with the wounded warriors. The reader is also brought 
 close to Reuben and his son when they feel by turns excited 
 and estranged in the forest toward the end. Such a connection 
 between reader and characters is of course kept tentative and 
 intermittent by the thematic and tonal ironies that mark the 
 tale throughout. In its course, Reuben is inescapably judged and 
 found wanting while the laws of his psychological and historical 
 being are anatomized and dramatized. It is essential to the tragic 
 effect of the whole that one recognizes and judges Reuben’s 
 archetypal failure from a moral and esthetic distance. Neverthe¬ 
 less, the landscape helps engender an equally essential sense of 
 identity with him. Such a use of landscape, in which a morally 
 equivocal character takes on a new dimension because he or 
 she is cast in a Romantic relation with Nature, is significant in 
 other fictional texts of the period, such as Brown’s Edgar Huntly, 
 or Goethe’s Elective Ajfinities, or Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. In 
 these texts too the landscape is a means for creating a bond of 
 identity between readers and characters as well as a device for 
 probing the impulses of the unconscious. Because landscape has 
 these unpredictable but central effects on the reading experience, 
 Hawthorne uses it from beginning to end of “Roger Malvin’s 
 Burial” to make his tale resonate with the voice of the reader’s 
 own feeling. 
 
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Intention in 
 "Chiefly About War Matters” 
 
 James Bense 
 
 D espite its notoriety among Hawthorne specialists, “Chiefly 
 About War Matters” remains one of the author’s least 
 known and appreciated writings published during his lifetime. 
 Hawthorne’s motive in what is alleged to have been an act of au¬ 
 thorial self-censorship has not been clearly understood. Neither 
 has evidence to the contrary been fully examined. Tradition¬ 
 ally, an imprecise account of disagreements that arose between 
 Hawthorne and his publishers has beclouded the genesis of the 
 text, confusing elements of Hawthorne’s intentional satire with 
 reported last-minute concessions to suppress and nullify parts of 
 the original version. 
 
 The following analysis of what happened brings the essay into 
 its proper light and takes a first step toward a critical appre¬ 
 ciation of its true character. Although expurgations did occur, 
 the facts derived from the evidence as a whole indicate that 
 Hawthorne had originally devised his essay in great part as a 
 censorship hoax. As a result of constraints he felt while trying 
 to write honestly about the war, he created a satirical dialectic 
 between his narrator and an imaginary editor. Through this ven¬ 
 triloquism, which has been misapprehended as self-censorship, 
 Hawthorne’s essay communicates the importance of maintaining 
 freedom of speech while it is most severely tested, when the 
 passions of a nation in turmoil threaten to suppress it. 
 
 I 
 
 After following the early events of the Civil War from a dis¬ 
 tance, Hawthorne resolved to approach the crisis more closely. 
 In March 1862, accordingly, he traveled from New England 
 to Washington, observed General George McClellan reviewing 
 
 American Literature, Volume 6i, Number 2, May 1989. Copyright © 1989 by the Duke 
 University Press. CCC 0002-9831/89/$!.50. 
 
“Chiefly About War Matters” 
 
 263 
 
 Union troops, met President Lincoln, and toured Union mili¬ 
 tary installations along the Virginia border. “Chiefly About War 
 Matters,” later published in the July 1862 Atlantic under the 
 pseudonymous appellation of “A Peaceable Man,” presents a 
 narrative of firsthand impressions gathered during the trip and 
 reflects Hawthorne’s dissent from the social idealism of the 
 Northern public. 
 
 Hawthorne intended his essay to be provocative. Its probing 
 observations sustain a sharp focus and immediacy; as a result, 
 the essay’s narrative consciousness is dynamic and complex. The 
 discursive movement of the text registers candid, humorous, and 
 heartfelt reflections, far-flung in their implications and unsettling 
 to the North’s moral vision of the war. This persona is countered 
 by the defensive reactions of a censorious editor, apparently of 
 the Atlantic^ whose objections to parts of the text represent the 
 prevailing mood and opinion of Northern readers. 
 
 Hawthorne’s contemporary readers were disturbed by the 
 essay’s broad range of disconcerting viewpoints about the war 
 crisis. Many were fooled by the pseudo-authenticity of the edi¬ 
 torial notes.' Subsequently, neither Hawthorne’s intention nor 
 achievement has been accurately recognized. To some extent, 
 the confusion surrounding the text has been symptomatic of 
 the fervid atmosphere of political crisis in which he wrote. 
 Even so, the later failure of eminently competent readers to 
 perceive the essay’s notes as the author’s own is surprising.^ 
 More importantly, an apocryphal tradition has grown up among 
 Hawthorne’s twentieth-century biographers and critics, who ac¬ 
 knowledge that the notes are Hawthorne’s but maintain that 
 they were his reluctant concession to self-censorship.^ 
 
 * For evidence of the contemporary response, see Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Haw¬ 
 thorne and His Wife (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884, 1893), II, 311-14; Moncure D. 
 Conway, Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1890; rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1968), pp. 
 203-06; and Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (New 
 York: Knopf, 1973), p. 51. 
 
 ^ Henry James and historian George M. Fredrickson have taken Hawthorne’s foot¬ 
 notes to be authentic reactions of the Atlantic management, thus exemplifying the extent 
 of the irony that has resulted historically from Hawthorne’s Swiftian intention. See, re¬ 
 spectively, ed. Tony Tanner (1879; rpt. New York: St. Martin’s, 1967), p. 159; 
 
 and The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: 
 Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 2-3. 
 
 ^ The misleading information in the Riverside Edition and Fields’s reminiscence of 
 Hawthorne (both cited below) evidently led Randall Stewart to infer that Fields had 
 
264 
 
 James Bense 
 
 Hawthorne’s plan to publish a satirical hoax was obscured 
 initially by unanticipated censoring on the part of his friend 
 and editor James T. Fields and, later, by subsequent historical 
 accounts of the matter. A manuscript written in Hawthorne’s 
 hand and bearing the signatures of typesetters (presumably those 
 who produced the proof sheets for the July 1862 Atlantic) still 
 survives; nonetheless, a complete text of the essay as originally 
 submitted has never appeared in print."* * In both the first pub¬ 
 lished version, edited for xhc Atlantic in 1862, and the partially- 
 restored version first printed in the 1883 Riverside Edition of 
 Hawthorne’s collected works, footnotes written by Hawthorne 
 but implicitly attributed to the Atlantic editor raise objections to 
 remarks in the text. When Hawthorne as narrator asserts, for 
 instance, that “Man’s accidents are God’s purposes. We miss the 
 good we sought, and do the good we little cared for,” Haw¬ 
 thorne as pseudo-editor replies in an anonymous footnote; “The 
 author seems to imagine that he has compressed a great deal of 
 meaning into these little, hard, dry pellets of aphoristic wisdom. 
 We disagree with him. The councils of wise and good men 
 are often coincident with the purposes of Providence; and the 
 present war promises to illustrate our remark.”^ 
 
 Moreover, as revealed by Hawthorne’s manuscript, he also 
 devised textual disjunctions creating the illusion of missing pas- 
 
 deleted the passages about Lincoln and “certain Cabinet-members and Congressmen.” 
 Not able “to locate the original manuscript,” Stewart concluded that this material “would 
 seem to be irrecoverable” (“Hawthorne and the Civil War,” Studies in Philology, 34 
 [1937], g6n). Apparently basing his remarks on the same sources as Stewart, Matthiessen 
 inferred that Hawthorne had written the notes at the insistence of the Atlantic (American 
 Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman [New York; Oxford 
 Univ, Press, 1941], p. 317)- Similarly, Nina Baym, The Shape of Hawthorne's Career (Ithaca: 
 Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), p. 267, speaks of the actual removal of “paragraphs pertaining 
 to Washington officials”; and Raymona E. Hull has Hawthorne promising Fields to 
 add the notes (Nathaniel Hawthorne: The English Experience, /S53-/S64 [Pittsburgh: 
 Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1980], pp. 209-10). Arlin Turner concludes correctly that the 
 essay “remained thoroughly Hawthornean.” But his reference to “deleted passages” later 
 published by Fields suggests that Turner was still not sure exactly what Fields had done 
 to Hawthorne’s text (Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 
 1980], p. 366). 
 
 * Nathaniel Hawthorne Collection 6249-g, the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Uni¬ 
 versity of Virginia. 
 
 ^ “Chiefly About War Matters,” The Complete Worlds of Nathaniel Hawthorne, River¬ 
 side Edition, ed. George Parsons Lathrop (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883, 1891), XII, 
 332. All subsequent references are cited as R. The essay was originally printed in Atlantic 
 Monthly, 10 (1862), 43-61. 
 
“Chiefly About War Matters” 
 
 265 
 
 sages regarding the Congress and President Lincoln’s Cabinet. 
 Each purported suppression, indicated by a sudden breaking- 
 off of the narrator’s discourse, is highlighted by an explanatory 
 note. The editor’s comment, however, has the humorous effect 
 of stimulating reader interest in the missing passage while char¬ 
 acterizing the freedom of description that has made its removal 
 necessary. This element of his hoax seems to have established 
 a precedent within the essay’s text, apparently unintended by 
 Hawthorne, for an unexpected excision of an interview with 
 Lincoln. Fields’s insistence that details of Lincoln’s appearance 
 would have to be modified brought about Hawthorne’s last- 
 minute decision to remove the interview passage altogether. 
 This modification of the manuscript text was certainly the most 
 notable, though other deletions and alterations were made as 
 well. 
 
 Much of the confusion that has grown up around the genesis 
 and publication of Hawthorne’s essay is traceable to the influ¬ 
 ence of Fields. His account of the matter, including the text of 
 the essay’s deleted Lincoln interview, first appeared in 1871 in 
 the Atlantic's “Our Whispering Gallery’’ and later in Yesterdays 
 with Authors (1872). Fields’s comments on the censor’s role he 
 had exercised nine years earlier have been the source of mis¬ 
 leading inferences: “If any one will turn to the paper in the 
 Atlantic Monthly (it is in the number for July, 1862), it will be 
 observed there are several notes; all of these were written by 
 Hawthorne himself. He complied with my request without a 
 murmur, but he always thought I was wrong in my decision.’’ 
 These remarks suggest that Hawthorne wrote the footnotes to 
 the essay at Fields’s request. Fields’s comments as a whole in¬ 
 vite the inference that other deleted passages, most likely those 
 others indicated in the essay by footnotes, along with the Lin¬ 
 coln interview, resulted from his insistence on “alterations.’’* In 
 fact, as will be shown further on, the textual changes brought 
 about by Fields, in the interest of propriety, stripped the essay’s 
 manuscript text of Hawthorne’s most revealing satirical humor. 
 
 ^ Yesterdays with Authors (Boston: Osgood, 1872), p. 98; these remarks appeared earlier 
 in epistolary form as part of a shorter version of Fields’s recollections of Hawthorne 
 in “Our Whispering Gallery,” Atlantic Monthly, 27 (1871), 510; and subsequently in 
 expository form as part of a revised and expanded chapter of Fields’s memoirs in 
 Yesterdays with Authors. 
 
266 
 
 James Bense 
 
 particularly unmistakable signals of mock-seriousness within the 
 footnotes. Fields did not, however, alter the fundamental nature 
 of Hawthorne’s intentional hoax. 
 
 The editorial gloss in the Riverside Edition was almost cer¬ 
 tainly derived from Fields’s account of the matter. George Par¬ 
 sons Lathrop, editor of the Riverside whose initials are appended 
 to the headnote to the text of “Chiefly About War Matters,” was 
 so unaware that the footnotes were a part of Hawthorne’s autho¬ 
 rial intention that he states, “It has seemed best to retain them 
 in the present reproduction” {R, XII, 299). Most likely, Lath¬ 
 rop did not know of Hawthorne’s manuscript and used Fields’s 
 article as the source of the Lincoln interview passage, which he 
 restored in the Riverside text. Lathrop’s apparent reliance on 
 Fields’s published account (probably after Fields’s death in 1881) 
 very likely explains why the Riverside text presents only a partial 
 restoration of Hawthorne’s original essay, rather than a faithful 
 representation of the manuscript. 
 
 Other comments in the Riverside gloss, evidently based upon 
 Fields’s account, have perpetuated further misunderstandings. 
 Lathrop’s headnote, which was retained with slight alterations in 
 later collected editions of Hawthorne’s works, states that when 
 the article first appeared, “the editor of the magazine objected to 
 sundry paragraphs in the manuscript, and these were cancelled 
 with the consent of the author, who himself supplied all the 
 foot-notes that accompanied the article when it was published” 
 {R, XII, 299). Moreover, in the Riverside and later editions, an 
 explanation appended to the Lincoln interview states that the 
 restored passage “was one of those omitted from the article 
 as originally published” {R, XII, 312), reiterating the implica¬ 
 tion that others had been omitted as well. Accordingly, current 
 readers are still presented with the erroneous impression that the 
 missing passages of the essay’s text, which were to have satirized 
 the Congress and Lincoln’s Cabinet, were deleted from the essay, 
 at Fields’s request, before its first publication. Scholars, as well, 
 have been continually misled into assuming that not only were 
 these apparent “cancellations” once included in the text, but that 
 the footnotes were part of an overall author-editor agreement to 
 make the article acceptable for the Atlantic in 1862. 
 
 For reasons of his own. Fields in 1871 obscured much that he 
 might have elucidated. In view of what seems to have occurred. 
 
“Chiefly About War Matters” 
 
 267 
 
 his circumspect account does not explicitly falsify the facts. On 
 the other hand, his confusing shift of focus between matters 
 regarding the article as a whole and the tenuous resolution of 
 the issue of the Lincoln interview does suggest that Hawthorne’s 
 manuscript text was unadulterated by editorial interventions and 
 was therefore fundamentally different from the Atlantic version. 
 
 The impact of this erroneous impression has been pernicious 
 and long-lived. If Hawthorne had violated his text only as a 
 concession to Fields’s conditions for publishing it, the surviving 
 version would seem to nullify Hawthorne’s original intention. 
 Questions relating to the restoration of Hawthorne’s text have 
 not been pursued, perhaps in part because the author has been 
 thought to be unsure of his purpose. What might be construed 
 as malice, however, seems entirely inconsistent with Fields’s gen¬ 
 erous nature. His motivation, as discussed further on, is not 
 easily determined. 
 
 Hawthorne’s own motivation in producing a satirical hoax 
 and the final form it was to have taken are clear, however, from 
 his correspondence with his publishers, the surviving manuscript 
 of “Chiefly About War Matters,’’ and the historical context in 
 which he wrote. Initially, he had written much more than he 
 could include in the space limit of the article. As he told Fields 
 in his letter of 7 May 1862 accompanying the manuscript, he 
 “had to leave out a great deal; else it would have grown into a 
 book.’’’ But the necessity of being selective by itself would not 
 have inspired him to invent the censored version of his essay that 
 his manuscript presents. More importantly, he anticipated that 
 much of his material would be objectionable to Northern readers 
 of the Atlantic. This fact and his response to it explain why he 
 was led to contrive the satirical form that his essay assumed. 
 
 The extent of Hawthorne’s sociopolitical estrangement from 
 his Northern world, though well-known in general, was more 
 extreme than can be readily imagined. In his biography. Mon¬ 
 cure D. Conway observed that in the early days of the war 
 
 ^ The Centenary Edition of the Worths of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat 
 et al. (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1962-). All subsequent references are cited 
 as C. Subsequent quotations from The Letters, 18^^-1864 (C, XVIII) are identified in 
 the text, e.g., Hawthorne to Fields, 7 May 1862. I am indebted to Centenary editors 
 Thomas Woodson and James A. Rubino for generously sending me computer file copies 
 of Hawthorne’s correspondence before this volume was published. 
 
268 
 
 James Bense 
 
 Hawthorne “had no party,—then nearly equivalent to having no 
 country. Probably,” Conway went on to speculate, “there was not 
 an individual in the United States who would have subscribed 
 his article Isic], ‘Chiefly About War Matters.’”* Conway’s abo¬ 
 litionist allegiance, which was a radical revolt against his own 
 Southern heritage, may have led him to exaggerate Hawthorne’s 
 estrangement. Nevertheless, Fields’s explanation of Hawthorne’s 
 notoriety during the same period corroborates the propriety of 
 Conway’s assessment: “Those were troublous days, full of war 
 gloom and general despondency. The North was naturally sus¬ 
 picious of all public men, who did not bear a conspicuous part 
 in helping to put down the Rebellion.”^ 
 
 Ironically, the politics of the war had flung Hawthorne back 
 into an earlier predicament, despite his lifelong attempt “to open 
 an intercourse with the world” (C, IX, 6). The problem of audi¬ 
 ence he encountered in 1862, though more intense and acutely 
 focused, produced an effect reminiscent of the authorial isolation 
 he had experienced for more than a decade, until the publication 
 of The Scarlet Letter (1850). Hawthorne had humored himself in 
 1851 by observing that prior to this recognition he could hardly 
 “regard himself as addressing the American Public, or, indeed, 
 any Public at all” (C, IX, 5). 
 
 The same could be said of Hawthorne’s situation as a com¬ 
 mentator on the Civil War, though for very different reasons. An 
 article on the subject uppermost in the national consciousness 
 would come to the attention of the Atlantic's 30,000 or more sub¬ 
 scribers. But Hawthorne certainly knew that a magazine with 
 Republican sympathies (whose semiannual title pages in the col¬ 
 lected volumes bear the Union flag in glorious sunlight above 
 somber clouds) would have few readers prone to appreciate the 
 narrator’s examination of the crisis from a Southerner’s point of 
 view. Few could be expected to reflect calmly on the implications 
 of a Swiftian proposal to allow only men of “fifty-five or sixty” 
 to be “eligible for most kinds of military duty and exposure.” 
 Most would probably be somewhat puzzled and annoyed at the 
 sardonic tone beneath the veil of lyricism, particularly as the 
 
 * Conway, p. 206. 
 ^ Fields, p. 107. 
 
“Chiefly About War Matters” 
 
 269 
 
 narrator’s argument proceeds from a lament over the tragic loss 
 of youthful lives to a poeticized reflection upon the prospect of 
 an elderly combatant’s death—the bullet wound “a pretty little 
 orifice, through which the weary spirit might seize the opportu¬ 
 nity to be exhaled!” {R, XII, 334). Readers holding to patriotic 
 illusions would not be predisposed to recognize the cool anger 
 with which the author seems here to have dwelt upon the evil 
 of language appropriated to glorify sentimental heroics and ob¬ 
 scure the brutal facts of the battlefield. Though the essay might 
 reach the hands of a multitude, the unsettling illuminations of 
 “A Peaceable Man” would have few understanding listeners. 
 
 Some realization of this irony must have occurred to Haw¬ 
 thorne. The derisive humor in his two letters to Fields, though 
 private, is very much in consonance with the essay itself. Taken 
 together, the public and private record serve as an index of the 
 unsparing satirical spirit in which Hawthorne devised his liter¬ 
 ary hoax. There were strong currents of public opinion that he 
 intended to play upon, and provocatively undercut, for which he 
 could expect little sympathy even from his friends. His attempt 
 to humor Fields in what seems to have been the first disclosure 
 of a plan to foist an editorial pose on Fields himself reveals the 
 extent to which Hawthorne’s problem of audience had compli¬ 
 cated his intention. After informing Fields that he had left out 
 “a great deal,” his letter of 7 May continued: “You will see that 
 I have affixed some editorial foot-notes, which I hope you will 
 have no hesitation in adopting, they being very loyal. For my 
 own part, I found it quite difficult not to lapse into treason con¬ 
 tinually; but I made manful resistance to the temptation. I am 
 afraid it will prove a stupid affair.” 
 
 Circumstances during the next week or so would cause Haw¬ 
 thorne to become increasingly troubled over the possibility of 
 creating “a stupid affair.” On 17 May, ten days after submitting 
 the article, he wrote to William D. Ticknor, senior partner of 
 Ticknor and Fields. He had learned that Fields had trustingly 
 “transmitted” his manuscript “to the printer unread” and had 
 departed for New York “without looking it over in the proof- 
 sheet.” Evidently, Hawthorne had been hoping Fields’s reaction 
 would allay his own apprehensions; now the article was on its 
 way to final production. Not wishing to cause a disaster for the 
 
270 
 
 James Bense 
 
 Atlantic^ circulation (as in fact, Harriet Beecher Stowe brought 
 about seven years later with her Byron article), he thought it 
 time to alert Ticknor. 
 
 Despite its genial tone, the letter reveals a sharply divided 
 impulse. After discussing the financial plight of his sister Eliza¬ 
 beth, Hawthorne shifts incidentally to Fields’s departure: “This 
 is somewhat to be regretted; because I wanted the benefit of 
 somebody’s opinion besides my own as to the expediency of 
 publishing two or three passages in the article. I have already 
 half-spoilt it by leaving out a great deal of spicy description and 
 remark, and whole pages of freely expressed opinion, which 
 seemed to me as good as anything I ever wrote, but which I 
 doubted whether the public would bear.” 
 
 The ambivalent effect of the assertions that follow belies the 
 casual approach in the letter as a whole: what remains of the 
 article “is tame enough in all conscience, and I don’t think it 
 will bear any more castration; but still, I don’t wish to foist an 
 article upon you that might anywise damage the Magazine.” On 
 this point, Hawthorne tries a reverse argument: “I think the 
 political complexion of the Magazine has been getting too deep 
 a black Republican tinge, and that there is a time pretty near 
 at hand when you will be sorry for it. . . . After all, I think I 
 left out almost everything that could possibly be objectionable 
 (that is to say, everything in the least worth retaining,) ... so 
 that I need not have mentioned it to you at all. Nevertheless, my 
 advice about the Magazine may be worth considering.” 
 
 These concerns for the magazine notwithstanding, his deter¬ 
 mination to publish his opposition to popular views, regardless 
 of the consequences to his reputation, shows the strength of his 
 convictions about the war. Although contributors to the 1862 
 Atlantic were not identified, except in the alphabetical listings 
 of the semiannual, library volumes, authorship was no secret 
 among the magazine’s readers around Boston where most of the 
 contributors resided. Hawthorne presented Ticknor with this 
 mitigating factor alongside his intention to upset reader expec¬ 
 tations: “On the other hand, I shall be known as the author, 
 and should be willing to take the responsibility of much worse 
 things than I have written here. . . .” 
 
 Ticknor did not reply to Hawthorne’s alert but was soon to 
 confer with Fields. On 21 May, four days after Hawthorne had 
 
“Chiefly About War Matters” 
 
 271 
 
 written, the putative censor replied: “I have just returned from 
 New York and at once went to the Printing Office of the A.M. 
 as a loyal Editor should do. I found yr. article all ready to send to 
 you in proof and sat down to read it.” Though he had expected 
 to “like it hugely” and said he did, he specified changes he and 
 Ticknor had agreed would have to be made. All references to 
 “Uncle Abe" should be changed to “the President,” and “the de¬ 
 scription of his awkwardness & general uncouth aspect” should 
 be left out.'° Fields referred to other troublesome passages, but 
 did so by indicating pages of the proof where he had made 
 markings." At one point, he explicitly touched upon a remark 
 regarding the Southerners that may have resulted in the notice¬ 
 able strengthening of the narrator’s Northern allegiance in the 
 penultimate paragraph of the essay." Moreover, Fields’s other 
 markings most likely brought about the deletion of a footnote (in 
 the manuscript text) that follows the portrait of General McClel¬ 
 lan." This passage and other alterations of the manuscript were 
 not restored after 1871." 
 
 On 23 May, two days after Fields had written his instruc¬ 
 tions, Hawthorne was ready to return the page proofs. His re¬ 
 sponse shows none of the earlier uncertainty he had expressed 
 to Ticknor. Though he thinks Fields is “wrong,” he is “going 
 to comply.” It was Hawthorne’s decision to omit “the whole 
 description of the interview with Uncle Abe, and his personal 
 appearance,” because he did “not find it possible to alter them.” 
 Fields had merely requested that he take out irreverent details 
 of Lincoln’s awkwardness. Hawthorne “likewise modified the 
 other passage” to which Fields had referred, most likely the 
 
 Fields to Hawthorne, 21 May 1862 (C, XVIII, 4580). 
 
 ' ’ These numbers do not match those pages the essay came to occupy in the final 
 printing of the issue. 
 
 The manuscript states that “Very excellent people, hereabouts, remember the many 
 dynasties in which the Southern character has been predominant, and contrast the genial 
 courtesy, the warm and graceful freedom of that region, with the awkward frigidity 
 of our Northern manners, and the uncouthness of Uncle Abe”; the printed essay was 
 amended to read, “with what they call (though I utterly disagree with them) the frigidity 
 of our Northern manners, and the Western plainness of the President” (/?, XII, 344). 
 
 “Apparently with the idea of balancing his gracious treatment of the Commander- 
 in-chief, the author had here inserted some idle sarcasms about other officers whom he 
 happened to see at the review; one of whom (a distinguished general,) he says, ‘sat his 
 horse like a meal-bag, and was the stupidest looking man he ever saw.’ Such license is not 
 creditable to the Peaceable Man, and we do him a kindness in crossing out the passage.” 
 
 Other alterations to the manuscript are noted in Letters (C, XVIII, 4620; 464n). 
 
272 
 
 James Bense 
 
 comparison of Northern and Southern manners near the end (as 
 noted above). 
 
 In connection with the removal of the Lincoln interview, 
 Hawthorne also states that he has “altered and transferred one 
 of the notes,” indicating that he performed what would have 
 been a quick operation, due to the pseudo-censorship already 
 established elsewhere in the text. Apart from the interview, the 
 discussion of Lincoln includes a paragraph in which the Peace¬ 
 able Man “deem[ed] it proper to say a word or two in regard 
 to him, of unfeigned respect and measurable confidence” {R, 
 XII, 313). These remarks remained in the Atlantic version. Fol¬ 
 lowing the longer passage on Lincoln in the manuscript text, 
 however, a footnote that survives in modified form originally 
 began: “We hesitated to admit the above sketch, and shall prob¬ 
 ably regret our decision in its favor.” This humorous signal of 
 satirical intent must have taken on a new semblance of dramatic 
 irony for Hawthorne as he deleted it, moved the rest of the note 
 to the juncture where the interview passage would be taken out, 
 and substituted a new beginning: “We are compelled to omit 
 two or three pages, in which the author describes the interview, 
 and gives his idea of the personal appearance and deportment 
 of the President” (/?, XII, 312). 
 
 While going along with his publishers, Hawthorne distanced 
 himself from their decision. His patronizing reply to Fields as 
 he claimed to be “the most good-natured man, and the most 
 amenable to good advice (or bad advice either, for that matter),” 
 followed by the complete withdrawal of the Lincoln interview, 
 must have struck Fields forcibly. After asserting that the pas¬ 
 sage “must be omitted,” Hawthorne immediately reversed the 
 responsibility, laying the action on Fields: “and in so doing, I 
 really think you omit the only part of the article really worth 
 publishing. Upon my honor, it seems to me to have a historical 
 value—but let it go.” 
 
 The close friendship between Hawthorne and Fields seems 
 to have been unaffected by their differences of opinion about 
 the article. Evidently, both could remove themselves as private 
 individuals from their public roles. Three months after the pub¬ 
 lication of “Chiefly About War Matters,” Hawthorne displayed 
 the depth of their trust in a letter which appeared as a headnote 
 with his next sketch in the October 1862 Atlantic. This letter 
 from the “Peaceable Man” opens with a mock-heroic threat of a 
 
“Chiefly About War Matters” 
 
 273 
 
 gentleman’s challenge to duel, including a near pun on Fields’s 
 name: 
 
 My Dear Editor,— 
 
 You can hardly have expected to hear from me again, 
 (unless by invitation to the field of honor,) after those 
 cruel and terrible notes upon my harmless article in the 
 luly Number.'^ 
 
 Hawthorne probably felt that the character of his intention 
 in “Chiefly About War Matters” had been somewhat obscured 
 by the last-minute changes. The note as a whole offers a public 
 clarification. The tone throughout, like that in the opening re¬ 
 marks above, is highhandedly playful. The grievances expressed 
 do contain an unescapable germ of private truth, though they are 
 exaggerated with fictitious license. To the public, on the other 
 hand, this “sendup” was sufficiently obvious to have cleared 
 Fields of any serious involvement as “the Editor” in the previous 
 article. Moreover, by explicitly connecting the pseudonymous 
 authorship of “Chiefly About War Matters” with the English 
 travel pieces to follow, Hawthorne leaves no doubt that he meant 
 to take full authorial responsibility for what was, after all, a 
 censorship hoax. 
 
 Fields’s apparent exaggeration of his influence in changing 
 the essay remains very curious. Evidently, his profound respect 
 for Hawthorne produced an unresolvable conflict between his 
 role as a guardian of the faith during the national upheaval 
 and his obeisance to Hawthorne’s artistic integrity. In his 1871 
 reminiscence, he summed up his earlier feelings by remarking 
 that “the office of an editor is a disagreeable one sometimes, 
 and the case of Hawthorne on Lincoln disturbed me not a 
 little.” Seven years after Hawthorne’s death, and six years after 
 the South’s surrender, the war’s outcome and the apotheosis of 
 Lincoln as savior of the Union no doubt seemed to vindicate 
 his earlier judgment. Thus, he prefaced his disclosure of the 
 suppressed passage on Lincoln with the assurance that “I will 
 copy here verbatim what I advised my friend, both on his own 
 account and the President’s, not to print nine years ago.” 
 
 “Leamington Spa,” Atlantic Monthly, lo (1862), 451. Fields carefully distinguished 
 between the personal and professional in reply to Hawthorne’s essay. Appended to “I 
 don’t like* the way you speak of the Southerners. . .” is a qualifying note: “*as an Editor 
 and Publisher” {C, XVIII, 458n). 
 
 Fields, p. 98. 
 
274 
 
 James Bense 
 
 But this forthrightness and his candor following the Lincoln 
 sketch are belied by the misleading impression of his other re¬ 
 marks, regarding the genesis of the footnotes. Despite his de¬ 
 fense of his earlier judgment, Fields’s distaste over his role as 
 censor may have led him to the false conclusion that he had 
 prevented Hawthorne from writing the work that the author 
 had originally intended. This hypothetical work was probably of 
 the same order as others, which Hawthorne said, belonged “on 
 a certain ideal shelf, where are reposited many other shadowy 
 volumes of mine, more in number, and very much superior in 
 quality, to those which I have succeeded in rendering actual” (C, 
 V, 4 )- 
 
 Hawthorne’s own clarification of the matter along similar lines 
 should have led Fields to quite a different conclusion. Here are 
 his final comments in the reply he made to Fields with the proof 
 sheets of his article: 
 
 What a terrible thing it is to try to let off a little bit of truth into this 
 miserable humbug of a world! If I had sent you the article as I first 
 conceived it, I should not so much have wondered. 
 
 I want you to send me a proof-sheet of the article in its present 
 state, before making any alterations; for, if ever I collect these sketches 
 into a volume, I shall insert it in all its original beauty. 
 
 (Hawthorne to Fields, 23 May 1862) 
 
 Explicit are two conclusive points: first, the public taste and 
 opinion of the Northern establishment for which Hawthorne 
 wrote had compelled him to abandon an original conception, 
 something closer to his own ideal; second, he fully endorsed 
 the text he had actually produced. His strategy of truncating 
 the text was prompted in part by anger at the vehement public 
 mood. As he told Fields, the last-minute alterations necessitated 
 by the omission of the Lincoln passage were “to indicate to the 
 unfortunate public that it here loses something very nice.” 
 
 II 
 
 It would be a mistake, however, to characterize Hawthorne’s 
 achievement in the essay as the product of a makeshift plan. His 
 own estrangement from contemporaries evidently heightened his 
 awareness of the danger of self-censorship during the crisis. This 
 concern informs his ironic framework as a whole. While he 
 was primarily determined to give full expression to his critical 
 
“Chiefly About War Matters” 
 
 275 
 
 detachment from the politics of the war, he accomplished this 
 purpose and more. By incorporating the voice of opposition into 
 his essay, Hawthorne enlarged its critical scope and necessarily 
 detached himself from his own skeptical attitudes. Thus, he not 
 only objectified his vision of the crisis, but also displayed the 
 passionate tensions of the historical moment. 
 
 The notes as a whole serve two radically different functions. 
 On the one hand, there is the conspicuous representation of cen¬ 
 sorship. The voice of the imaginary censor—alternately acute, 
 strident, or unwittingly humorous—sustains Hawthorne’s ironic 
 vision with powerful economy. As mentioned earlier, some of 
 the humor that arises from the editor in the manuscript text has 
 yet to be restored to the essay. A deleted footnote describing a 
 general on horseback concludes: “Such license is not creditable 
 to the Peaceable Man, and we do him a kindness in crossing out 
 the passage.” Not an unkindly figure, the editor here takes the 
 form of a dangerous oppressor, the benign authoritarian. With 
 good reason, perhaps. Fields may have thought the image of the 
 general who “sat his horse like a meal-bag, and was the stupid¬ 
 est looking man” the narrator had ever seen, too offensive. If 
 so, his reaction corroborates the narrator’s judgment elsewhere 
 in the text that Lincoln’s stories, which “smack of the frontier 
 freedom,” might not bear repeating “on the immaculate page 
 of the Atlantic” {R, XII, 312). Clearly, Hawthorne devised the 
 humor in this passage—with the editor’s disclosure of material 
 he means to suppress—as a signal that the editorial intrusions 
 should be understood as satire. 
 
 On the other hand, the footnotes raised in protest against the 
 text dramatically illustrate the dialectic of freedom of speech. 
 As Walter Lippmann once explained, freedom of speech is not 
 simply the expression of opinions, it is “the confrontation of 
 opinions in debate.” ” Although the full range of Hawthorne’s 
 intention in the essay as a whole cannot be reduced to one didac¬ 
 tic effect, the footnotes demonstrate this important lesson. Thus, 
 it is precisely because “the freedom of opinion which causes 
 opposing opinions to be debated” is, as Lippmann argues, “in¬ 
 dispensable” that some of the editorial remarks stand up forcibly 
 against the views expressed in Hawthorne’s text. His application 
 of this principle may have contributed to the impression that 
 
 “The Indispensable Opposition,” Atlantic Monthly, 164 (1939), 188. 
 
276 
 
 James Bense 
 
 he was confused during the war. But the opposition within the 
 essay is a corollary to the dialectical habit that probes for truth 
 in much of his writing. Unlike the Hegelian dialectic, his was 
 most penetrating when it remained unresolved.'® The value of 
 his analysis in the midst of crisis has little to do with the out¬ 
 come of events. It was the discrepancy between the ideological 
 faith necessary to win a war and the particular truths as he 
 observed them that engaged him as a critic of history itself. 
 
 Finding himself at odds with the American world, Haw¬ 
 thorne could not accept the solution of silence. As he wrote at 
 the beginning of the essay, “there is a kind of treason in in¬ 
 sulating one’s self from the universal fear and sorrow ... in 
 the dread time of civil war” {R, XII, 300). Self-isolation, a re¬ 
 current theme of his life and work, was here recast as a form 
 of “treason.” His daring appropriation of this term, denoting 
 the most heinous of crimes during the crisis of the war, raises 
 its significance beyond the causes of the moment, to the ulti¬ 
 mate level of forsaking involvement with the rest of humanity. 
 This quintessential “treason” had always been a capital offense 
 in Hawthorne’s moral universe. Hawthorne’s detachment from 
 the popular support of the Northern cause in the Civil War 
 has been criticized, but his engagement with the tragic drama 
 itself should be praised. As an artist and public figure, Haw¬ 
 thorne fulfilled a moral imperative by making his views of the 
 war a matter of public and historical record. To do so without 
 compromising his integrity, he incorporated the voice of oppo¬ 
 sition into his overall intention, both for the expediency of the 
 moment and with the full realization that what he wished to 
 convey could only be achieved through a unique demonstration 
 of his impersonality as an artist. 
 
 I am indebted to Professor Brom Weber for this description of Hawthorne’s 
 dialectic, and for other very helpful advice in the preparation of this article. 
 
Index 
 
 Aaron, Daniel, 263n. 
 
 Abel, Darrel, 52n., 239n. 
 allegory, 52-64, 100, 106-113, 124- 
 126, 129-131, 134, 137 
 ambiguity, 24-32 
 Andros, Sir Edmond, 3 
 Arthur, William, I4i-i42n., i43n. 
 Arvin, Newton, 89n., 112, i34n. 
 Auchincloss, Louis, i66n. 
 
 Baym, Nina, i66n., i8on., 194-220, 
 2350., 2470., 2640. 
 
 Bell, Michael D., 241 
 Bense, James, 262-276 
 Bewley, Marius, 1230., 1240. 
 
 Bible, the, 27, 77, 137 
 Blake, William, 52, 184 
 Bovvdoin College, 141 
 Boyton, Jeremy, 1420. 
 
 Bradford, William, 250 
 Brattle, Thomas, 114 
 Bridge, Horatio, 141 
 Brodkin, Stanley, i8on., 191 
 Bronte, Emily, 261 
 Brooks, Van Wyck, 52 
 Brown, Charles Brockden, 261 
 Brownell, W. C., 2 
 Browning, Robert, 82 
 Bryant, William Cullen, 6n., 232 
 Burhans, Clifton, i8on. 
 
 Byers, John B., 228n. 
 
 Byron, Lord, 270 
 
 Cameron, Sharon, 245n. 
 
 Canaday, Nicholas, 1790. 
 
 Cantwell, Robert, 196 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 36 
 Champollion, Jean-Fran^oise, 123 
 Chandler, E. L., i3n. 
 
 Charles I, 229, 23in., 236 
 Choate, Rufus, 3-5 
 Chretien, L. E., ii 
 
 Civil War (American), 262-276 
 Clark, C. E. Fraser, i8on. 
 
 Colacurcio, Michael J., 245n., 248n., 
 250, 255n. 
 
 Conway, Moncure D., 263n., 267-268 
 Cooper, James Fenimore, 2, 6n. 
 Cowley, Malcolm, 520., 53 
 Crane, J. T., i42n. 
 
 Crews, Frederick C., 82-105, 1640., 
 i66n., i8on., 2450., 247, 2580. 
 Cronin, Morton, 239n. 
 
 Curti, Merle, i4in. 
 
 Daly, Robert S., 245n., 248n. 
 
 Dauber, Kenneth, i8on. 
 
 Dauner, Louise, 24-32, 49n. 
 Davidson, Frank, 82, 89 
 Dawson, Edward, 229n. 
 
 Degler, Carl N., 202 
 Doubleday, Neal, 1-7, 239n. 
 Downing, David, 180-192 
 Duyckinck, Evert, 223, 2260., 231- 
 2320. 
 
 Duyckinck, George, 2230., 226, 231- 
 2320. 
 
 Ehrlich, Gloria, 196 
 Eisinger, Chester, iiin. 
 
 Eliot, T. S., 178 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 166, 223, 
 2320. 
 
 England, 152-163 
 epic, 54, 64 
 Eyck, Frank, 222n. 
 
 Fejto, Francois, 222n. 
 
 Felt, Joseph B., 228n., 230 
 feminism, 165, 171, 172 
 Fiedler, Leslie, 1330. 
 
 Fields, James T., in., 152, 262-276 
 Finney, Charles G., 142, 144 
 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 178 
 
278 
 
 Index 
 
 Fogle, Richard H., 520., 53, io6n., 
 ii2n., 120, 1230. 
 
 Foster, R. S., 1420. 
 
 Franzosa, John, i95n. 
 
 Frederickson, George M., 263n. 
 Freneau, Phillip, 251 
 Freud, Sigmund, lo-ii, i2n., 15-16, 
 89, 197, 258 
 
 Fuller, Margaret, 223-224, 237, 243 
 Fussell, Edwin, 246n., 255n. 
 
 Gardiner, W. H., 2 
 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 224 
 Gerber, John C., 52, 222 
 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 261 
 Goodrich, Samuel B., 39, 223, 246 
 Gorman, Herbert, 196 
 Griffith, Kelley, i66n. 
 
 Griswold, Rufus W., 173 
 Gross, Seymour, 39-51 
 Guizot, Francois, 222, 229-230, 232, 
 244 
 
 Gwynn, F. L., io6n. 
 
 Hart, James D., 222 
 Hathorne, Elizabeth (“Ebe”), 198, 
 201-202, 207, 208-212, 270 
 Hathorne, Elizabeth Manning, 194- 
 220 
 
 Hathorne, Louisa, 198-199, 202, 207 
 Hathorne, Nathaniel, 201 
 Hawthorne, Julian, in., 83, 1950., 
 198-200, 2070., 208, 210, 211, 224n., 
 2520., 2630. 
 
 Hawthorne, Manning, 196, 205n. 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: Writings by, 
 “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” 116, 185- 
 
 193 
 
 “Chiefly About War Matters,” 262- 
 276 
 
 Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret, 163 
 “Endicott and the Red Cross,” 3, 4, 
 5, 40, 228 
 
 Fanshawe, 2, 207, 247 
 
 French and Italian Notebool{s, 2o6n. 
 
 “Grandfather’s Chair,” 25on. 
 
 “Graves and Goblins,” 135-136 
 “Howe’s Masquerade,” 2n., 3 
 “Leamington Spa,” 273n. 
 
 “Liberty Tree,” 225n. 
 
 “Main Street,” 40, 157, 160, 217 
 Mosses from an Old Manse, ii6n. 
 “Mrs. Hutchinson,” 3, 5 
 “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” 
 39n., 193, 204, 225, 246, 247 
 “Old Esther Dudley,” 2n. 
 
 Our Old Home, 153-154, 157, 159, 
 162 
 
 “Outside Glimpses of English Pov¬ 
 erty,” 219 
 
 Passages from the French and 
 Italian Note-Bool^s, iin., I9n. 
 “P’s Correspondence,” 7 
 “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” 106-113, 
 
 “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” 2n., 39n., 
 245-261 
 
 Septimius Felton, 2n., 130., 19-20, 
 2250. 
 
 “Sights from a Steeple,” 247 
 “Sir William Pepperel,” 2480. 
 
 “Sir William Phips,” 248-2490. 
 “The Ambitious Guest,” 1290. 
 
 The American Notebooks, 2on., 
 830., i02n., 1130., 1330. 
 
 The Ancestral Footstep, 163 
 “The Artist of the Beautiful,” 89 
 “The Birthmark,” 156, 174 
 The Blithedale Romance, 6n., 82- 
 105, 149, 160, 164-179, 218-219, 
 246 
 
 The Elixir of Life Manuscripts, 
 2250. 
 
 T he English Notebool^s, 7, 1520., 
 153, 2o6n. 
 
 “The Gende Boy,” 3, 5, 24-32, 39- 
 5 L 153. i 57 > 246 
 “The Great Carbuncle,” 2n. 
 
 “The Grey Champion,” 3, 4, 153 
 “The Hall of Fantasy,” 390. 
 
 “The Haunted Mind,” 145 
 “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” 
 156,180-185 
 
Index 
 
 279 
 
 The House of the Seven Gables, 
 33-38, 64, 147, 160, 164, 218 
 “The Man of Adamant,” 246 
 The Marble Faun, 6n., 8-23, 25, 
 
 37, 89, 149-150, 153, 154-155, 
 156, 158, 159-160, 161-162, 204, 
 218-219 
 
 “The Maypole of Merry Mount,” 3, 
 
 5. 19 
 
 “The Old Tory,” 2250. 
 
 “The Prophetic Pictures,” 89 
 The Scarlet Letter, 6, 25, 29, 52-64, 
 65-81, 123-140, 147, 156, 159, 
 160-161, 163, 177, 194-220, 221- 
 244, 246, 268 
 “The Story-Teller,” 247 
 “The Wedding Knell,” 139 
 “The Wives of the Dead,” 390. 
 
 True Stories from History and Bi¬ 
 ography, 1520. 
 
 Twice-Told Tales, 207 
 “Young Goodman Brown,” 3, 5, 
 
 29, 114-122, 160, 246 
 Hawthorne, Sophia. See Peabody, 
 Sophia 
 
 Hawthorne, Una, 213 
 Hedges, William, i66n. 
 
 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 276 
 
 Heilman, Robert B., ii2n. 
 
 Hemingway, Ernest, 178 
 
 Hicks, Granville, 8 
 
 Hillard, 224 
 
 Hirsch, John C., i7on. 
 
 Hoeltje, Hubert, i94n., 196 
 Housman, A. E., 113 
 Howard, Leon, 14in. 
 
 Howells, W. D., 82, 164 
 Hull, Raymona, 2640. 
 
 Italy, 152-156, 162 
 
 James, Henry, 6n., 8, 9, 29, 3on., 31, 
 52, 66, 82, 104, III, 164, 178, 178- 
 i79n., 263 n. 
 
 James II, 23in. 
 
 Johnson, Claudia D., 141-151 
 
 Joyce, James, 104 
 Justus, James H., 164-179 
 
 Kearns, Francis E., 243 
 Kesselring, Marion L., 229n., 234n., 
 25 on. 
 
 King Philip’s War, 249 
 
 Lamartine, Alphonse-Marie-Louis de, 
 231-234, 244 
 Laser, Marvin, 14in. 
 
 Lathrop, George P., in., 4on., ii6n., 
 i23n., 266 
 Laud, William, 46 
 Lawrence, D. H., 9n. 
 
 Levin, David, 114-122, 248n. 
 
 Levin, Harry, ii5n., i2in. 
 
 Levy, Leo B., i66n. 
 
 Lewisohn, Ludwig, 8-9 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 263, 264, 265, 266, 
 267, 271, 272, 273, 275 
 Lippmann, Walter, 275 
 Liverpool, 152-159 
 London,154-155, 162-163 
 Loughman, Celeste, 225n. 
 
 Louis Napoleon, 224 
 Louis Philippe, 230 
 Louis XVI, 229, 232, 236 
 “Lovell’s Fight,” 2n., 245-261 
 Lowell, J. R., 223 
 
 McCabe, Bernard, io7n. 
 
 McClellan, George, 262-263, 271 
 McIntosh, James, 245-261 
 McKeithan, D. M., 115 
 Maclean, Hugh N., 52-64 
 McNamara, Anne Marie, 65-81, 
 i 24 n., i3in. 
 
 McWilliams, John P., 225n. 
 
 Mahan, Asa, i42n., 144 
 Male, Roy R., io6n., ii2n., 1240., 
 1330., 1780. 
 
 Mann, Thomas, 8-9, 15, 20, 21-22 
 Manning, Elizabeth Clarke, 200-201 
 Manning, Richard, 201, 204, 205 
 Manning, Robert, 204 
 Manning, Samuel, 207 
 
280 
 
 Index 
 
 Marraro, Howard, 2230. 
 
 Martin, Terence, 152-163, i73n. 
 Marvell, Andrew, 229 
 Mather, Cotton, 116-117, ii8n., 12in. 
 Mather, Increase, 114 
 Matthiessen, F. O., 52, 53, 64, 83, 120, 
 264n. 
 
 May, Arthur J., 223n. 
 
 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 223 
 Meek, Alexander, 5-6n. 
 
 Mellow, James, 196, 2070., 22in. 
 Melville, Herman, 28, 31, 32, 52, 64, 
 252 
 
 Michaud, Regis, iin. 
 
 Michelangelo, 19 
 Miller, Harold P., 39n. 
 
 Miller, Paul W., ii5n. 
 
 Morgan, Ellen E., i68n. 
 
 Morris, Lloyd, 90., 190., 196 
 Morton, Nathaniel, 250 
 
 nationalism, literary, 1-7 
 Neal, John, 3 
 
 Newberry, Frederick, 23on. 
 
 New England, 1-7, 155-156, 162-163, 
 165, 166, 246, 252 
 New-England Primer, The, 136 
 Nissenbaum, Stephen, i94n. 
 Normand, Jean, i95n. 
 
 Noyes, John Humphrey, 142, i43n. 
 
 O’Connor, W. V., 82 
 Orel, Harold, 33-38 
 Orians, G. H., i, 30., 4, 400. 
 
 Osgood, James R., 207 
 Owen, James J., 228n. 
 
 Paine, Thomas, 244 
 Palmer, Phoebe, 1420. 
 
 Pandeya, Prabhat, i8on. 
 
 Pattee, F. L., 30. 
 
 Peabody, Elizabeth, 198-199, 203 
 Peabody, Sophia [Hawthorne], 197- 
 199, 207-212, 218, 224, 234 
 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 152 
 Pearson, Norman Holmes, 196, 1990., 
 2030. 
 
 perfectionism, 141-151 
 Pierce, Franklin, 152 
 Ponder, Melinda, 252n. 
 
 Praxiteles, 13 
 Price, S. R., ii2n. 
 
 Puritanism, 2, 4, 5, 25-32, 39-51, 122, 
 142, 154, 156-157, 180-193, 229, 
 246, 248, 254 
 
 Quakers, 25-32, 39-51, 114 
 
 realism, 90, 100, 167 
 Republican Party, 268, 270 
 revolution, 221-244 
 Reynolds, Larry, 221-244 
 Ringe, Donald A., 240 
 Romance, the, 2, 52-64, 82, 85-86, 88, 
 90-96, 98-100, 102-103, 104, 153, 
 167. i73> i77> 256, 257, 260, 261 
 Rome, 154-156, 159-163, 224 
 Rosenberry, Edward H., 106-113 
 Rubino, James A., 2670. 
 
 Scheick, William J., 245n. 
 
 Schubert, Leland, 66, 235 
 science, 106-113 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 1-7 
 Sedgwick, W. E., 6n. 
 
 Shakespeare, William, 30, 42, no 
 Simms, William Gilmore, 5-6 
 Slotkin, Richard, 2510. 
 
 Smith, Henry Nash, 238 
 Snow, Caleb H., 228 
 Sparks, Jared, in. 
 
 Spengemann, William, 2i3n. 
 
 Spiller, Robert, 6n. 
 
 Stewart, Randall, 6n., 2on., 113, ii6n., 
 i52n., 196, 207n., 263-264n. 
 
 Stock, Ely, i8on. 
 
 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 270 
 Strong, George T., 2320. 
 
 Stubb, John C., i78n. 
 
 Swift, Jonathan, 104 
 
 Taylor, Edward, 780., 118 
 Taylor, Zachary, 227 
 Tharp, Louise Hall, 2i2n. 
 
Index 
 
 281 
 
 Thoreau, Henry David, 253 
 Ticknor, William D., 269, 270, 271 
 tragedy, 28, 31, 42, 113 
 Trevor-Roper, H. P., 1920. 
 
 Trollope, Anthony, 164 
 Tudor, William, 2-3 
 Turner, Arlin, i3n., 83n., 1640., 1950., 
 196, 2o8n., 2ogn., 227, 264 
 
 Upham, Thomas C., 141-151 
 
 \'an Doren, Carl, 2n. 
 
 Van Doren, Mark, 5in., 53n., 83, 
 io6n., 195-196 
 
 von Abele, Rudolph, 83, 89, 1650. 
 
 Waggoner, Hyatt, 82, 89, i02n., io6n., 
 113, i23-i24n., i83n., 245n. 
 
 Walsh, Thomas M., 1150. 
 
 Waples, Dorothy, 8-23 
 Ward, Nathaniel, 45 
 Warren, Austin, 33, io6n. 
 
 Warren, Robert Penn, i78n. 
 
 Weaver, Raymond, 3in. 
 
 Weber, Brom, 276n. 
 
 Westminster Catechism, 136, 137 
 Whelan, Robert E., 123-140 
 White, Elizabeth, 2230. 
 
 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 2n., 40. 
 Williams, Roger, 5 
 Williams, Stanley, 33 
 Winters, Yvor, 82 
 Woodberry, George, i, 40., 196 
 Woodson, Thomas, 2o6n., 243, 2670. 
 
 Ziff, Larzer, 1920. 
 
Notes on Contributors 
 
 Nina Baym (1936-). University of Illinois, 1963-. The Shape of Hawthorne's 
 Career (1976); Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in 
 America, iSio-iSyo (1978); Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to 
 Fiction in Antebellum America (1984); The Scarlet Letter: A Reading (1986). 
 
 James Bense (1948-). University of Maryland, 1978-1981; University of Cali¬ 
 fornia, Davis, 1982-. 
 
 Frederick C. Crews (1933-). University of California, Berkeley, 1959-. The 
 Tragedy of Manners: Moral Drama in the Later Novels of Henry James, 
 (1962); The Pooh Perplex (1963); The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psy¬ 
 chological Themes (1966); Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and 
 Critical Method ( 1975); Sceptical Engagements (1986). 
 
 Louise Dauner (1907-). University of Wisconsin, 1945-1946; Butler University, 
 1946-1947; Drake University, 1948-1963; Indiana University (lUPUI), 1963- 
 1977. 
 
 Neal F. Doubleday (1905-1976). University of Wisconsin, 1936-1939; Mon¬ 
 tana State University, 1939-1940; University of Connecticut, 1940-1945; Milikin 
 University, 1946-1970. Mark, Twain’s Picture of His America (i960); Haw¬ 
 thorne’s Tales of His Native Land ( 1962); Hawthorne’s Early Tales: A Critical 
 Study ( 1971). 
 
 David Downing (1947-). Eastern Illinois University, 1979-1988; Indiana Uni¬ 
 versity of Pennsylvania, 1988. 
 
 Seymour L. Gross (1926-). Indiana University, South Bend, 1955-1957; Uni¬ 
 versity of Notre Dame, 1957-1969; University of Detroit, 1969-1987. Images 
 of the Negro in American Literature ( 1966). 
 
 Claudia D. Johnson (1938-). University of Alabama, 1973-. An Annotated 
 Bibliography of Shakespearian Burlesques, Parodies, and Travesties (with 
 Henry Jacobs (1976); The Productive Tension of Hawthorne’s Art (1981); 
 Memoirs of the Nineteenth-Century Theatre (1982); American Actresses: Per¬ 
 spective on the Nineteenth Century (1984). 
 
 James H. Justus (1929-). University of Tennessee, 1956-1957; Indiana Uni¬ 
 versity, 1961-. The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren (1981); Editor, 
 Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1987). 
 
 David Levin (1924-). Stanford University, 1952-1971; University of Virginia, 
 1971-. What Happened in Salem? (1952, i960); History as Romantic Art: 
 Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman (1959); Cotton Mather: The Young 
 Life of the Lord’s Remembrancer, 166^-ijo^ ( 1978); Exemplary Elders ( 1990). 
 
Notes on Contributors 
 
 Hugh N. Maclean (1919-). University of Toronto, 1948-1950; Royal Military 
 College of Canada, 1950-1956; University of Cincinnati, 1956-1960; York 
 University (Canada), 1960-1963; SUNY-Albany, 1963-1986. The Argyll and 
 Sutherland Highlanders of Canada (Princess Louise’s) (1953)', Edmund 
 Spenser’s Poetry (1969, 1982); Ben Johnson and the Cavalier Poets (1974). 
 
 Terence Martin (1925-). Indiana University 1954-. Instructed Vision: 
 Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction 
 (1961); Nathaniel Hawthorne (1965, rev. ed., 1983). 
 
 James McIntosh (1934-). Tufts University, 1962-1967; Yale University, 1967- 
 1975; University of Michigan, 1975-. Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist: His 
 Shifting Stance Toward Nature (1974); Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales (1987). 
 
 Anne Marie McNamara (1909-1961.^). Catholic University, 1947-1957; Sacred 
 Heart College (Newton, Mass.), 1957-1961.?. 
 
 Harold Orel (1926-). University of Kansas, 1957-. Thomas Hardy’s Epic- 
 Drama: A Study of "The D\nasts’’ (1963); The Development of William 
 Butler Yeats, 188^-igoo (1968); English Romantic Poets and the Enlighten¬ 
 ment: Nine Essays on a Literary Relationship (1973); The Pinal Years of 
 Thomas Hardy, 1^12-1^28 (1976). 
 
 Larry J. Reynolds (1942-). Texas A&M University, 1974-. James Kirke 
 Paulding (1984); European Revolutions and the American Literary Renais¬ 
 sance (1988). 
 
 Edward H. Rosenberry (1916-). University of Delaware, 1952-1979. Melville 
 and the Comic Spirit (1955); Melville (1979). 
 
 Dorothy Waples (1896-1948). University of Illinois, 1923-1927; Lawrence 
 University, 1927-1948. The Whig Myth of James Fenimore Cooper (1938). 
 
 Robert E. Whelan (1924-). Saint John’s University (N.Y.), 1961-. 
 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
 
 On Hawthorne: the best from American literature/edited by Edwin H. 
 
 Cady and Louis J. Budd. 
 
 (The Best from American literature series) 
 
 ISBN 0-8223-1032-5 
 
 I. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864—Criticism and interpretation. 
 
 1 . Cady, Edwin Harrison. 11 . Budd, Louis J. III. American 
 literature. IV. Series: Best from American literature. 
 
 PS1888.05 1990 8i 3'.3 — dc20 89-25696 
 
DUKE UNIVERSITY 
 UBRARY 
 
 DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA 
 27706