Returning to Hawthorne after many years and remembering, particularly in The Scarlet Letter and “Young Goodman Brown,” a general atmosphere of Puritan rigor versus demonic hedonism, one expects to find a man torn between vice and virtue. It is not the case. Nothing in Hawthorne’s life, as described in lengthy biographies by Arlin Turner, James R. Mellow, and Brenda Wineapple,* or in the new, briefer account by Dale Salwak, suggests that he saw himself as particularly sinful or strove to be strictly virtuous. One need only consider biographies of his near contemporaries Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, for whom moral struggle was always to the fore, to appreciate how little Hawthorne was troubled by such matters. Even in The Scarlet Letter one finds two protagonists whose only sin is long behind them; neither Hester Prynne nor Arthur Dimmesdale seems tempted to further transgression. In many ways their lives are exemplary. Goodman Brown neither commits nor witnesses any crime; for reasons never explained he leaves his wife to spend just one night in the forest. If he is planning to sell his soul to the devil, we do not know what he hopes for in exchange. In any event, his nightmare vision of an entire community secretly dedicated to Satan proves fatal: he spends the rest of his life alienated from his fellow men in a state of misanthropic depression. It was a mood the author himself was often accused of.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804. His father, a ship’s captain, died of yellow fever in Suriname in 1808. Since the once-prominent Hawthorne family had fallen on hard times, his mother, a Manning, took her three children, Elizabeth, Nathaniel, and Louisa, back to her family home, where her eight brothers and sisters, none married, lived under the same roof. Castle Dismal, Hawthorne later called it. As the only male child among so many adults, he was “particularly petted.” At the same time his mother withdrew into a melancholic semi-seclusion. Hence, for the children, there were two distinct poles of belonging: the Hawthornes and the Mannings. The older Elizabeth gravitated toward her grieving mother, the younger Louisa toward her busy aunts and uncles; in the middle, Nathaniel was a Hawthorne depending for everything on the Mannings.
The boy loathed school and took advantage of poor health to avoid it. When, in his teens, his mother moved to the Mannings’ more remote property in Maine, Nathaniel followed her, but eventually his aunts and uncles insisted that he return to Salem for his schooling. “Why was I not a girl,” he complained, “that I might have been pinned all my life to my Mother’s apron?”
The Mannings’ extensive business interests had not been split up on their father’s death in 1813, and the family became “uncommonly close,” Turner tells us, administering the estate together. In 1821, at some expense, they sent Nathaniel to Bowdoin College. It was the first time a family member had pursued education to this level. Hawthorne became friends with the future poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the future president Franklin Pierce. Regularly fined for playing cards and drinking wine, he graduated in 1825 (eighteenth in a class of thirty-seven) and returned to the Manning household where, rather than entering a profession or devoting himself to business, as was no doubt expected, he shut himself up in a “chamber under the eaves” to write—for twelve years.
Salwak’s biography does not seek to compete with the richly detailed accounts of his predecessors but focuses on his enthusiasm for Hawthorne’s writing and his attempts to transmit that enthusiasm to his students over decades of teaching at Citrus College in Glendora, California. “Creation,” he tells his class, “is always the successful resolution of internal conflict or anxiety.” Certainly the conflict in Fanshawe, Hawthorne’s first novel, is clear enough and has nothing to do with sin or guilt. Published anonymously in 1828, it presents us with an introvert scholar and an extrovert poet both in love with a beautiful heiress who is kidnapped by villains. Fanshawe the scholar courageously saves her but renounces the chance of marriage to dedicate his life to study. When the poet marries the heiress, she lures him away from his writing, since it “would have interfered with domestic felicity.” Studying with “absorbing ardor,” Fanshawe wastes away and dies.
Salwak wonders why, having published the novel at his own expense and to some good reviews, Hawthorne quickly withdrew it, sought to destroy all existing copies, and enjoined his nearest and dearest to eternal silence on the matter. Was the story too “confessional”? Did it fall “short of his high standards”? The fear of seeming “unworthy” of family and friends would be a constant in Hawthorne’s life (he regularly burned his letters to avoid revealing himself), as was the opposite concern that society was unworthy of him (he avoided “rude encounters with the multitude”). But perhaps a deeper problem was that the conflict driving the novel—the competing demands of social convention and individual aspiration—had been neither convincingly defined nor successfully resolved: Why was this young man to expect nothing better than bland obscurity or lonely death?
Engaging in an intense reading of local history over many years, Hawthorne began to produce short stories in which his own concerns and dilemmas were reimagined in a remote Massachusetts past whose traditions and superstitions allowed him to conjure a gothic or fable-like atmosphere around events. Anonymous publication in local magazines “opened the way,” he later remembered, “to most agreeable associations, and to the formation of imperishable friendships.” Writing in isolation, he had discovered a community and accrued some prestige to satisfy supportive relatives.
If Salwak’s approach disappoints, it is when he passes from shrewd observations about the general drift of Hawthorne’s writing (“preoccupied with isolation and loneliness,” featuring protagonists “unable to identify [with] the General Will”) to simplistic, moralizing interpretations of individual stories. “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1835) was the first story that Hawthorne allowed to appear under his name. For Salwak, this tale of a young pastor who suddenly presents himself before his congregation wearing a black veil and, offering no explanation, never removes it for the rest of his life is “a crowning achievement about secret sin,” a parable “about the common practice of hiding behind appearances rather than facing the truth of ourselves.”
But the minister is hardly concealing himself as his parishioners might, nor, though he preaches about “secret sin,” does he ever confess to such a thing. Betrothed but as yet unmarried, a man who labored under “so painful a degree of self-distrust, that even the mildest censure would lead him to consider an indifferent action as a crime,” in choosing to wear the veil he draws enormous attention to himself and creates great insecurity in others. His wife-to-be abandons him. Like Goodman Brown he becomes “a bugbear,” “a man apart,” separated “from cheerful brotherhood.”
A wry comedy animates the story, as the need to give meaning to the clergyman’s “vagary” betrays the fevered workings of the collective imagination. The “one desirable effect,” the narrator tells us, was that the minister “became a man of awful power over souls that were in agony for sin.” Could he, the reader wonders, have chosen to wear the veil to gain that power, or, as Wineapple suggests, to avoid the intimacy of impending marriage, or because, inclined as he is to believe himself sinful, he takes his “indifferent” actions too seriously? Hawthorne delights in not telling us. At last presenting himself to the world as an author, he takes no position with regard to the disturbing story he offers and reveals nothing about himself except perhaps the determination to reveal nothing; in this he resembles the minister, who always had, we are told, a melancholy smile playing on his lips just beneath the veil.
Three other stories followed in quick succession. Marriage was a theme in all of them. In “The Wedding Knell” an elderly scholar marrying an elderly widow turns up to the wedding in his grave clothes and suggests the couple move directly from the altar to coffins. In “The Maypole of Merry Mount” Edith and Edgar are celebrating their wedding in the hedonistic community of Merry Mount when Puritans raid the settlement and chop down the Maypole, regretting that it couldn’t serve as a whipping post. “Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire,” the narrator observes. James Mellow remarks on an “unwritten prohibition against love and marriage that thwarts many of Hawthorne’s heroes.”
Salwak denies that Hawthorne was actually depressed in these twelve secluded years. From an exchange of letters with an old college friend in 1836, Turner deduces that he had been talking of suicide. A notebook kept the following summer during a trip to Maine includes frequent appraisals of young women, accounts of flirting, and feelings of “solemncholy” on parting. By all accounts Hawthorne was a handsome man. Eventually success made change possible. The publication of Twice-Told Tales in 1837 was met with enthusiastic reviews, including one from Longfellow. “I have made a captive of myself and put me into a dungeon,” Hawthorne wrote to his college friend. “I have not lived.” But he hinted that interest in a woman would now be a “sharp spur to exertion.” In fact he had already started maneuvering for the kind of job the Mannings no doubt always wished he had taken: a position in public administration. If he was to marry, he needed money.
From this point on, Hawthorne oscillated between periods of diligent public engagement and creative private withdrawal. Satisfaction with a successful book would allow him to put aside his writing and plunge into public life: working in the Boston customhouse, later in the Salem customhouse, and finally as American consul in Liverpool. Then either a change in political fortunes or anxiety that he was squandering his talent would have him retreating to an attic room to write. There were also repeated mood swings between melancholy and cheerfulness, something typical of the characters in his novels: the narrator of The Blithedale Romance alternates between “sickness of the spirits” and “flights of causeless buoyancy”; in The Marble Faun Miriam is “as unlike herself, in different moods, as if a melancholy maiden and a glad one were both bound within the girdle about her waist.”
Gloom might be induced by family demands, the weight of tradition, and an awareness of past evils, or conversely by a sense of one’s own inadequacies. Cheerfulness came with a positive engagement in the world or simply a sense of physical well-being. Hawthorne’s stories offer a constant back-and-forth between light and dark, town and wilderness, lonely individuals banished to the margins of society but also lavishly described crowd scenes (the bustling public holiday at the end of The Scarlet Letter, “the wild frolic of the carnival” in The Marble Faun). Looking down from his window on a political procession “with hundreds of flaunting banners, and drums, fifes, clarions, and cymbals,” the reclusive Clifford in The House of the Seven Gables (imprisoned for thirty years for a crime he didn’t commit) feels “a shivering repugnance at the idea of personal contact with the world” yet at the same time a mad impulse to throw himself down into “the surging stream of human sympathies.” Rather than offering cautionary tales or moral precepts of universal application, Hawthorne’s fiction invites us to enter his very particular world of feeling, where urgency and enigma come together around the conundrum initially posed by Goodman Brown: Is society good or evil? Do I get involved or do I withdraw?
Hawthorne’s choice of bride involved a typical swing from one extreme to another. Infatuated with the Salem socialite Mary Silsbee, he responded to her claim that a magazine editor had insulted her by challenging the man to a duel. On discovering that there had been no insult—he had been manipulated—he withdrew the challenge and shifted his attentions to Sophia Peabody, a woman almost as reclusive as himself, the sickly one of three sisters, apparently designated by her family to remain unmarried and at home, where she painted landscapes and kept a journal. When, after three years of intense correspondence, the two were to be married, Hawthorne couldn’t bring himself to tell his sisters and mother, as if the step were a betrayal. Eventually Sophia wrote to them; they responded coldly and did not attend the wedding. Hawthorne had found someone who got him away from his family and understood his need for long periods of seclusion. After they married, Sophia’s illnesses melted away; Elizabeth and Louisa stayed single.
Mellow regrets that Hawthorne draws so heavily on the gothic and always deploys allegory in stories where “the same characters appear and reappear,” bordering on “the stereotypical.” In particular The Scarlet Letter is “relentlessly allegorical.” Salwak enthuses about the “magic of allegory.” Turner takes at face value Hawthorne’s droll comment on his own work that “even in what purport to be pictures of actual life, we have allegory, not always so warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood, as to be taken into the reader’s mind without a shiver.” Wineapple notices how many of Hawthorne’s male characters are “repressed, insecure, cold, and self-deceived.”
Hawthorne began The Scarlet Letter in 1849. After marrying in 1842 he had moved to Concord and become a neighbor of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville, but soon ran out of money. In 1846, now a father of two, after much maneuvering with friends in the Democratic Party, he moved back to Salem to take up the direction of the customhouse from which, after further shenanigans, he was dismissed in 1849. His account of his three years in the job serves as preface to the novel, allowing him to claim that he had found the story of the scarlet letter there and to offer hints as to how it should be read. The piece is hilarious, a wonderfully funny description of a backwater bureaucracy peopled with ghosts and has-beens. Hawthorne acknowledges that he is very much a child of this now-antiquated Salem community and declares himself ashamed of the Puritan severity of his forefathers, though he is also keen to tell us that his family was never “disgraced by a single unworthy member.” In a delicate act of positioning, he goes on to say that while “invariably happiest elsewhere,” he nevertheless feels an “unjoyous attachment” to Salem, an attachment that is a “doom”; it is the word he repeatedly uses to describe the predicament of his protagonists.
At the beginning of the novel, Hester Prynne emerges from a prison gate. She has lived in Salem for two years while waiting for her husband to arrive from Europe but now has given birth to a child. Therefore she is an adulterer, and hence first imprisoned then condemned to wear the letter A, in red, on her breast. But though “fully revealed before the crowd,” she nevertheless refuses to reveal the name of the guilty father, and it is this, even more than her initial sin, that rankles the Puritans. Hester is loyal to a sinner. She keeps a secret. The community does not control her mind nor that of an adulterous man living among them.
We soon know that the culprit is none other than the minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, but Hawthorne discourages us from imagining any romance between the two. There is no talk of physical longing or sensual pleasure. The sin is simply a fact, whose fruit, the impulsive child Pearl, is presented for the most part positively. If the minister lives in torment, it is not because his mind returns to the awfulness of what he has done but because the sin has altered his relationship with his parishioners and with Hester. Ambitious as a pastor and hence dependent on the community’s approval of his ministry, Dimmesdale would be destroyed by a confession; by not confessing, he is disloyal both to Hester and his parishioners. Hawthorne’s characters do not wrestle with their Maker or worry about the metaphysics of sin; they agonize over what is due to the community and what can be kept for themselves, or again how they can be ambitious without becoming exposed. When the minister meets Pearl, what she demands of him is not that he confess or be morally upright but that he “stand . . . with mother and me”—loyalty.
Traditional allegory offered a stable pattern of correspondences; readers could be in no doubt as to what was meant. The opposite is true with Hawthorne. As with the black veil, he rejoices in multiplying the meanings of the scarlet letter. It initially signifies adultery, but for those who later benefit from Hester’s charitable works, it comes to mean “Angel” and is likened to “the cross on a nun’s bosom.” Thanks to the extravagant needlework Hester lavishes on the letter, it functions as an advertisement for the skills she lives by, while at other moments it is an emblem of “moral solitude” or a “passport into regions where other women dared not tread”; for Pearl it is an “enigma” that “seemed an innate quality of her being.” In short, a symbol means what people take it to mean, though the meaning it has for the community will weigh heavy on the individual even if he or she sees things differently. Hester knows she could easily leave Puritan Salem to live among “a people whose customs and life were alien from the law that had condemned her.” But she also senses that this community is her doom: sin and ignominy “were the roots which she had struck into the soil.” Like Hawthorne, she is unjoyously attached.
On numerous occasions Salwak seeks to pin down the “confidential relation” Hawthorne establishes with his readers. Turner notes the author’s remark that his fiction would fail “unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience,” one that nevertheless allows him to “keep the inmost Me behind its veil.” To achieve this balancing act, Hawthorne developed a distinctive style in which words of high, often archaic register are deployed in elaborate syntax teeming with relative clauses but delivered in a friendly, self-deprecating speaking voice, one always ready to report the outlandish imaginings of the superstitious community yet at the same time firmly grounded in modern skepticism. Ideas are introduced and dismissed in a phrase or two, yet they remain as indicators of what people are inclined to believe or are even granted a certain psychological perspicacity. So we hear that “the vulgar” with their penchant for “grotesque horror” claimed that the scarlet letter was “red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all alight, whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the night-time.” Absurd. Yet the letter “seared Hester’s bosom so deeply,” the narrator assures us, that there was perhaps more truth in this rumor than “our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit.” Readers are drawn into a reassuring complicity precisely as they are systematically disoriented. It is a style, as Wineapple puts it, of almost “voluptuous” insight and “exquisite ambiguity.”
Filled with references to the devil, Hawthorne’s fiction belies the adage that the devil has the best characters. Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s elderly physician husband, who arrives in Salem incognito and dedicates his life to tormenting the man who committed adultery with his wife, never convinces. What matters perhaps is his function of magnifying the pressure of the community on Dimmesdale. Negative figures in Hawthorne’s writing always align with public morality in hounding the individual who seeks to protect an inner self. Ruthless Judge Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables is “a man of eminent respectability” who engages Clifford’s neighbors “to have his deportment and habits constantly and carefully overlooked.” The philanthropist Hollingsworth in The Blithedale Romance deploys a rhetoric of piety to bludgeon others to his will. Both villains are at some point mistaken by their victims for the kind of grim Puritan who in times past held “inquest of life and death in a case of witchcraft.”
Following the success of The Scarlet Letter, in an extraordinary burst of creativity, Hawthorne wrote and published The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance in just two years. It is precisely their charm that they reimagine the same conflicts being played out in quite different settings. To read all three novels in quick succession is to be astonished by the intensity and generosity of reflection that Hawthorne brought to bear on his subjects in long hours of attic solitude. Of Melville’s novel Mardi he remarked that it was “so good…one scarcely pardons the writer for not having brooded long over it, so as to make it a great deal better.”
Then came the swing back to public life. Barely was Blithedale finished than, to the consternation of his admirers, Hawthorne was writing the presidential campaign biography of his old friend Franklin Pierce. It was an act of loyalty that involved overcoming not a few scruples. He was rewarded with the consulship in Liverpool, at the time one of the busiest ports in the world. As always he threw himself into the job, determined to be worthy of the honor and the salary. Exploring “our old home,” as he called England, he discovered his strong patriotism and attachment to the US. The feeling became even stronger during two years in Italy, after the consulship terminated with the Pierce administration. Hawthorne could not see his way to love Rome, and despite all the energy he poured into the novel that he set there, The Marble Faun, it is disappointing. One feels throughout that some unifying element is missing; the conflicted relationship between character and community that drives his best work could hardly be developed with American characters in an Italian world they are never really part of.
If the task of literary biography is to establish convincing relations between life and work, all four of these fine books succeed and fail in different ways. Mellow offers fascinating excursions into historical and cultural setting but seems deaf to aspects of Hawthorne’s style. Turner is meticulous in cross-referencing life and work but sometimes misses drawing what seem obvious conclusions. He notes the author’s “loyalty to friends” (his account of his time in England, Our Old Home, was dedicated to the anti-abolitionist Pierce, to the dismay of Hawthorne’s readership) but does not see how this value is systematically used in his fiction to undermine all forms of dogmatism. Wineapple wonderfully evokes the author’s domestic life but wearies the reader with savvy psychologizing of a kind, one imagines, that Hawthorne would have deplored.
Detecting a “decline in interest,” Salwak sets out to “convince [his] audience that Hawthorne still matters.” But his enthusiasm tends toward hagiography, omitting anything that might be negatively construed, in particular Hawthorne’s staunch opposition to both abolitionism and the women’s movement. Perhaps if he had asked his students—a constant presence in the book—“Do you think there are still figures today whom we might mistake for those old Puritans of the witch trials, people who seek to control our inmost thoughts?,” then Hawthorne’s continuing relevance could have been rapidly established.
Returning to the US in 1860, Hawthorne was dismayed by the Civil War and the polarized rhetoric about it. The long essay “Chiefly About War Matters” was an attempt to establish a more nuanced position and remind the righteous North that Southern soldiers were fighting more out of loyalty to community and territory than for any evil principle. When his editor worried that some of the material might seem anti-Union, he agreed to cuts but introduced in italics imaginary expostulations of the same editor. “Can it be a son of old Massachusetts who utters this abominable sentiment?” he has him object with Puritan fervor. “For shame!”
Withdrawing once again into seclusion, Hawthorne tried to write what he expected would be his last novel. A man who has discovered the secret of eternal life finds himself increasingly alienated in a community of mortals. Fragments that survive show no decline in Hawthorne’s powers. But his health was now failing him. Perhaps hoping to revive his spirits, in May 1864 he set off with ex-president Pierce on a journey through New Hampshire, dying in a hotel room in Plymouth. Salwak feels he must have “left home to die in the dignity of solitude and to spare his wife the grief and shock associated with the loss of her husband.” I doubt that was what she would have wished, but Sophia had always respected her husband’s obsession with privacy: “To the last,” she wrote, “he was in a measure to me a divine mystery”—and added, “for he was so to himself.”
English (US) · 