EPILOGUE

When the Hawthornes arrived as newlyweds at the Old Manse, they were greeted by Sarah, the housekeeper. She was the first in a procession of laboring-class women over the years who cleaned house, cooked, and cared for the children at Sophia's direction. Sarah's last name is not known, nor is that of Margaret, who also helped out in the early months. The "Mary" who took their place was variously "O'Brien" and "Bryan"; the "Ellen" and "Mary" who worked at the Wayside and accompanied the family to Liverpool were "Herne," "Hearne," and "Ahern."^[1]

Sophia felt entitled to the social privilege that erases the last names of household help, but her dominance over these lower-class companions did not prevent a cherished intimacy from taking form. She developed a sisterly affection for Mary Bryan/O'Brien, teaching her to read and write during the long months of solitude at the Old Manse; and her hope that Mary's "little heart will not break in this lonliness," responds to a misery that Sophia shared.^[2] When she discovered that Mary—skilled in the stratagems of the oppressed—had sought a countervailing power through "cajolery" and "deceit," Sophia's ruling-class disdain blazed out. She would prefer a "blackey" to another "Irisher," she declared, and after obtaining the services of Mary Pray, she rejoiced in "the luxury of having an American and a Protestant maid," with "a conscience untouched by Jesuits and priests." Still, behind Sophia's rage at Bryan/O'Brien lay feelings of personal betrayal. "How much

I cared for the little siren," she protested, sounding very much like a jilted male lover.^[3]

The complicated mix of domination and affection in Sophia's relation to her maids seemed natural enough, since it echoed the politics of her marriage to Nathaniel; and there were times when Sophia and the household help suffered together under her husband's exercise of patriarchal control. Ellen Herne/Hearne/Ahern became "arrogant, hateful & bitter" in a quarrel that arose after the Hawthornes had taken her to England, whereupon Nathaniel intervened and fired the woman, much to Sophia's grief. She had always thought of Ellen as a sister, Sophia wrote home to her father, and had hoped the storm of painful emotions would blow over (Hull, English, 49). Sophia was haunted lifelong, as we have seen, by memories of a "little beggar girl" she had encountered in her early years, a figure of her own subjugation.

Among Sophia's dearest friends was Dora Golden, an Irish immigrant, who joined the household when Nathaniel was working at the Salem Custom House. Hawthorne's journals record that Dora cooperated fully in providing care for Una and Julian, a clear sign how deeply Sophia trusted her. Their shared household labors formed the basis of an intimate mutual reliance, which made them eager to stay in touch after the period of employment ended. Nathaniel too was very fond of Dora; he called her Golden Dora and portrayed her by name in "The Snow Image." As The Scarlet Letter achieved its immense early success, he declared that Dora had "brought good luck into the family." Dora Golden's descendants treasure today a table she was given by Sophia, at which Nathaniel's masterwork was written and which he cut with a jackknife while he labored over the manuscript.^[4]

A telling emblem of this friendship is a photograph of Sophia that she presented to Dora in 1861. Sophia generally avoided being photographed and once turned her face away when a group picture was being taken. Of the four photos that are known to survive, this one preserves the clearest image (Fig. 12).^[5] Sophia emphatically reasserted her dread of being photographed in writing to her friend Annie (Mrs. James T.) Fields about the picture and made it clear that Annie would not receive a copy. It seems likely Sophia felt secure giving Dora the picture because she knew it would remain private with her and would not be circulated in the genteel society of the Fieldses, to say nothing of being published. Sophia also gave Dora pictures of Nathaniel and the children on this occasion, and all taken together form the only "family photograph" of the Hawthornes known to exist (Figs. 13, 14).^[6]

Sophia pronounced the image of herself "frightful," and it indeed con-

trasts violently with the appurtenances of respectable feminine delicacy around her: the book on the marble-top table, the embroidered chair, and the locket clasped beneath her breast. Sophia's body surges up from the huge shapeless black skirt, filling the bodice with powerful shoulders and forearms. Her hands are heavy and thick, like the flat breadth of her jaw and brow. It is an image of resolute endurance, the punished face bluntly refusing submission even as her eyes are cast down and inward.

The images of Una, Julian, and Rose are suspended over the same patterned rug, Una with the absent expression that had begun to trouble her parents when she was five or six, when Dora was a member of the household. Julian is placed uncomfortably in the manly station at the center, his collar a bit too large. Rose stands slightly apart from the others, looking in a direction of her own. Nathaniel is as always the most beautiful, even here under the shadow of death, with hollow cheek and exhausted eyes, his fingers barely touching the broad-brimmed pudgy hat in his lap, which looks as though it had grown there like a pale fungus.

There is truth in the family legend that says Nathaniel came to his untimely death, in May 1864, because he could not overcome the torment aroused in him by Una's Roman illness. Soon after the Hawthorne's return to the Wayside, Una's physician declared she would have another attack of "brain fever" unless she could get away from her family. "Though I appear, & am, perfectly well while I do as I please," she wrote to her cousin Richard, "there is a certain little group of events & sights & minds that in a minute by a most wonderful magic make me faint & sick & all over shooting pains."^[7] Una became deranged and violent within the month and had to be tied down, whereupon the Hawthornes turned in desperation to a practicioner of electrotherapeutics, an early form of shock therapy. They were impressed by the results. "All the violent symptoms were allayed," Hawthorne wrote, "by the first application of electricity, and within two days she was in such a condition as to require no further restraint" (CE 18:327).^[8] Hoping that his own strange malady might likewise be cured, Nathaniel submitted to a course of electrical treatments himself.

The horrors of the Roman ordeal also reappeared in the spells of sick despondency that increasingly beset him. "I was quite alarmed when I returned that evening to find Mr. Hawthorne very ill," Sophia wrote to Annie Fields in 1862. "It was a Roman cold, with fever and utter restlessness, and it has hardly left him yet. . . . Alas the Roman days were melancholy days for him, and he thinks he shall never recover from them. Even when he looks at his Rose of Sharon so firm and strong now, I think he feels uncertain that

Fig. 12.
Sophia Hawthorne, 1861

she still lives and blooms, so deeply scored into his soul was the expectation of her death. It was his first acquaintance with suffering, and it seemed to rend him asunder."^[9]

In the slow progress of the disease that took his life, Nathaniel sought to cure his melancholy by taking trips away from Concord to refresh his spirits. He steadfastly refused to see a medical doctor, perhaps because he did not want to take up the role that Una had played as "patient" in Sophia's heroic drama of womanly self-sacrifice. "A chief difficulty about him," Julian later remarked, "was that he was extremely reluctant to be thought ill, and to receive the care which illness requires" (NHW 2:332).

In April 1864 William Ticknor accompanied Hawthorne on a journey south, which ended abruptly when Ticknor died in Philadelphia. Hawthorne was left to communicate the news to Ticknor's family, sat up with the body until the undertakers came for it, and then made his way back to Concord

Fig. 13.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1861

Fig. 14.
Una, Julian, and Rose Hawthorne, 1861

and the Wayside, where Sophia was startled by his condition: "so haggard, so white, so deeply scored with pain and fatigue was the face, so much more ill than I ever saw him before" (Fields, 118–119). Sophia was particularly horrified by the misfortune that had befallen Ticknor's wife. "What an inscrutable Providence that her husband should die away from her," she lamented to Annie Fields. "It is well that we have no right to question the Providence of God, but know that it must be best for all and each. Otherwise—what despair and madness!" Nathaniel himself was appalled, she was certain, by "his sense of the drear death in a hotel—away from his wife and children."^[10]

Yet Hawthorne preferred to avail himself of Franklin Pierce's company when it became evident his own death was near, and Sophia pronounced herself entirely satisfied. "General Pierce has been a most tender constant nurse for many years, and knows how to take care, and his love for Mr. Hawthorne is the strongest passion of his soul, now his wife is departed."^[11] Sophia expected that her husband would return from this journey refreshed and restored; yet behind the wall of denial lay her perception he would not. This was evident to Rose, now aged twelve, who was present at the scene. "I could hardly bear to let my eyes rest upon her shrunken, suffering form on this day of farewell. My father certainly knew, what she vaguely felt, that he would never return." He bore himself erect, Rose recalled, with "military self-command," as Sophia walked beside him sobbing to the carriage (R. H. Lathrop, 480).

As Sophia kept vigil over her husband's body, she wrote an incantatory prose poem declaring that her husband had been as remote from her as from the world at large. She saw that their marital union protected an inner sanctuary he himself could hardly enter.

In the most retired privacy it was the same as in the presence of men.

The sacred veil of his eyelids he scarcely lifted to himself. Such an unviolated sanctuary as was his nature, I his inmost wife never conceived nor knew. . . .

To me—himself—even to me that was himself in unity—He was to the last the holy of holies behind the cherubim. . . .

A tenderness so infinite—so embracing—that God's alone could surpass it.

It folded the loathsome leper in as soft a caress as the child of his home affections.^[12]

This song of grief again demonstrates Sophia's uncanny intuition of the inner life she claims never to have known: "the loathsome leper" was an image of her husband's abiding pain.

On a visit to an English almshouse Hawthorne, shown the section in which young children were kept, was appalled when one of these "very unlovely and unwholesome little imps" became attached to him. "This little sickly, humor-eaten fright prowled around me, taking hold of my skirts, following at my heels; and at last held up its hands, smiled in my face, and standing directly before me, insisted on my taking it up. . . . I held my undesirable burthen a little while; and after setting the child down, it still followed me, holding two of my fingers (luckily the glove was on) and playing with them, just as if (God save us!) it were a child of my own" (English, 275). Hawthorne makes no effort to conceal his fierce disgust toward the child, and toward all the filthy and diseased youngsters that are kept at the almshouse. "It would be a blessing to the world," he declares, "if every one of them could be drowned to-night, instead of being put to bed" (277).

When his tour returned to the children's ward, "there was this same child, waiting for me, with a sickly smile about its scabby mouth and in its dim, red eyes. If it were within the limits of possibility . . . I should certainly have set down its affection to the score of blood recognition; and I cannot conceive of any greater remorse than a parent must feel, if he could see such a result of his illegitimate embraces" (English, 276).

Sophia was right to identify this moment as central to her husband's spirituality and to celebrate the compassion he displayed. Within the holy of holies behind the cherubim was Nathaniel's sense of himself as contaminated at birth and abandoned. His own parents had married following the conception of their first child, and his father had left him and his sisters destitute. The Manning family then served as an almshouse, performing the traditional function being transferred increasingly from households to public institutions. Nathaniel's own existence was plausibly a consequence of the illegitimate embraces that had produced his older sister, and this whispered awareness was present amid the family charity that had enclosed and sustained him.

This experience haunted Nathaniel all his life and underlies an irrational obsession that seized him amid the mental disintegration at its end. He dreaded being consigned to the almshouse in Concord, and dying there.^[13] The merciless power of his insight was anchored here too, however. His "catlike faculty of seeing in the dark" was sharpened by knowing what a "blessing" it would have been if he and his sisters had been drowned like kittens rather than being put to bed in Castle Dismal. Seeing a figure of his primordial desperation in the English almshouse, Hawthorne is able momentarily to take it up in his arms.

This incident has resonances that reach forward into his children's lives. Despite the favor Julian enjoyed as the male child, he was haunted by the impression that he was a foundling, not really a member of the family. There recurs in his fiction the figure of a changeling child, who is burdened by a false identity he must escape to find his real existence. Known lifelong as "Hawthorne's son," Julian brought disgrace on himself in his early sixties by playing out a drama that exploited this role as well as repudiating it. Trading on his famous name, he wrote letters on yellow stationery soliciting investments in Canadian mines, which he misrepresented as rich in silver, gold, copper, and cobalt. When the fraud was exposed, a newspaper said it was a shame he had written so many yellow letters, instead of one Scarlet Letter, and he served a sentence at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. Julian spent the remaining twenty years of his life in California, in exile from his family and inherited traditions (Bassan, Hawthorne's Son, 213–220).

Rose Hawthorne also grew up feeling out of place in the family, like "a stranger who had come too late," and she eventually mastered the ambiguities of her own existence by creating a saintly vocation, modeled on her father's Christlike compassion. But this consummation was reached only after years of family discord.

Her marriage to George Parsons Lathrop infuriated Julian, and when Lathrop published A Study of Hawthorne in 1876, Julian responded as though the familial holy of holies had been despoiled. He claimed that Lathrop had illicitly obtained "peculiarly private and delicate" family papers through Rose, declaring in the New York Tribune that the book was "composed and published in violation of a trust." Such a work, he declared, "no member of Mr. Hawthorne's own family would have ventured to undertake" (Bassan, Hawthorne's Son, 116–117). Rose was pregnant when Julian launched this attack, and when her son, Francis, was born, she became "raving mad." Far from lifting the "curse" under which Rose was fated to live, Elizabeth Peabody observed, the birth renewed the "mental agonies" resulting from her brother's conduct, so they came "rushing back upon her" (Peabody, Letters, 378–79).

Rose, Julian, and George found themselves intractably at odds because none of them could secure a standpoint outside the complex of family tensions bequeathed by Nathaniel and Sophia, though each struggled to do so. Elizabeth Peabody stated that Rose and George had deliberately sought to "commence a new life entirely separate from the family blood of Hawthorne" (Peabody, Letters, 379). Yet in saying this she reveals her own entanglement in the struggle, repeating the Peabodys' self-serving theory that

there was "hereditary madness" in the Hawthorne "family blood." Hawthorne biography was a battleground even as the principals lived out their lives, and the warfare was intensified when it was carried over into print. There is no reason to suppose this will cease to be so, given the family's role in the fashioning of middle-class selfhood at large. We have all become, for better or worse, members of the family.

Rose made her way through this strife for the next two decades, in the course of which Julian published his two-volume Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife and George published a substantial "Biographical Sketch" for the Riverside edition of Hawthorne's works. Rose's saintly vocation took form slowly, following her treatment for insanity, the death of Francis, her conversion with George to Roman Catholicism, the termination of her married life with him, and his death.

When Rose published Memories of Hawthorne in 1897, she devoted the proceeds to her work among impoverished victims of cancer, who were shunned because of the social stigma they bore. It was not then possible to forestall or correct the shocking disfigurement cancer often produced, and the disease was superstitiously considered infectious, especially amid the filth of poverty. Rose singled out these pariahs for a ministry of compassion and founded a still vital Dominican order that offers bed care to persons who are destitute and fatally ill. Rose re-created the almshouse as a place of sacred motherhood and re-created herself as Mother Alphonsa without a husband to obey.

A founding metaphor of this extraordinary spiritual and institutional achievement was Nathaniel's compassion toward "the loathsome leper." Looking back on her life, Rose wrote that her patients "are of the class to which belonged the child whom my father found in an English hospital. . . . His words in regard to this little child, whose flesh reeked with parental desecration, made a deep impression upon me when I read them as a girl; and I was glad to have the latter years of my life devoted to the field of diseased poverty" (Valenti, To Myself, 134–135).

The firstborn of Nathaniel and Sophia lived a contained and quiet life that was interrupted by attacks of severe mental disorder. Yet far from appearing emotionally crippled, Una created an impression of extraordinary self-possession and personal force: "Tall beyond the average height of women, absolutely erect," wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "bearing her fine head upon the body of a gymnast, she herself kept no account of the eyes resting upon her, or of the heads that were turned to watch her as she swept by. It was this nobleness of carriage which first arrested attention, and her

superb Titianesque coloring which afterwards held it,—the abundant hair of reddish auburn and the large grey eyes" (Hull, "Una," 101). Una had periods of vigor and relative equilibrium in the ensuing years, yet she was never freed from the danger of mental collapse, especially when circumstances arose bespeaking her constitutional dilemma. When Rose married George Lathrop in September 1871, Una responded as though the event signaled her own failure to achieve this presumptive sine qua non of womanly fulfillment. Word soon reached Dora Golden that Una "became dangerously insane, spent great sums of money, nearly took the lives of three persons, and is confined in an asylum."^[14]

Una was twice engaged to be married, both times to notably unlikely prospects, as she both obeyed and disobeyed the imperative to take up the roles of wife and mother that Sophia had enacted so triumphantly. The first engagement was to Storrow Higginson (a nephew of Thomas Wentworth Higginson), who professed himself not to believe in marriage and in the event displayed the courage of this conviction; the second was to Albert Webster, a tubercular poet of modest means, who set off for the Sandwich Islands to regain his health and died on the voyage (Hull, "Una," 101–108).^[15] Julian describes Una's response to the news of Webster's death: "'Ah—yes!' she said, slowly, with a slight sigh. She made no complaint, nor gave way to any passion of grief, but she seemed to become spiritualized,—to relinquish the world, along with her hopes of happiness in it" (NHW 2:373).

Una was then engaged in Anglican volunteer service and had become associated with a sisterhood at Clewer, where she acted as a "district visitor." She had been confirmed in the Church of England in 1869, after a period of religious struggle, and in the early 1870s had devoted her energies to assisting in an orphans' home. She solicited public support by printing appeals in the newspapers that invoked her father's name, the method Rose was later to adopt in sustaining the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer (Hull, "Una," 117; Marks, 18). Unlike Rose, Una did not succeed in creating a coherent existence from her religious service, and within six months of learning Webster was dead, Una herself died at the Clewer convent, aged thirty-three.

Una never doubted that she was fully a member of the family, since she was aware that her parents' divine union was the substance of her own inner life. "I have more than ever realized what their love was since reading lately some of their exquisite letters to each other," she wrote to Rebecca Manning after Sophia's death. "I never could have known without the proof, that I

do indeed love them better than myself—and that being the case is a continual encouragement to bear the cost bravely. And I do feel as if they lived in my deepest heart and pervaded my life more fully than they ever did before."^[16] Una had cared for her mother with zealous solicitude during her lengthy terminal illness, held her hand as she died, assisted in preparing the body for burial, and then kept watch. "Her face looked more and more like an angel's," Una wrote. "A delicate color stayed upon the cheeks, a lovely smile upon the slightly parted lips; her beautiful white hair was brushed a little back from her face, under a pretty cap, and her waxen hands lay softly folded against each other upon her breast" (NHW 2:371). On the last day of this vigil Una removed the wedding ring from her mother's finger and placed it on her own.