PART THREE—
MARITAL POLITICS

On a Sunday morning in June 1850 Sophia Hawthorne sat down to write her mother a letter; she continued well into the evening, because the writing was a joyful celebration of her fulfillment as wife and mother. The Hawthornes had at last moved away from Salem, where they had lived in close confinement with Nathaniel's mother and sisters, and now occupied the "little Red House," a snug home on a country road in Lenox, Massachusetts, commanding one of the finest prospects in the Berkshires. There were also two children for Sophia to be proud of: Una was six years old, and Julian had just reached his fourth birthday.

Sophia describes the interior of her household in loving, unhurried detail: "We seem to have such a large house! inside," she tells her mother, "though outside, the little reddest thing looks like the smallest of ten feet houses." Sophia writes as though she were leading her mother on a tour, which begins in the garden where a stately double rose columbine grows in honor of her sisters, Elizabeth and Mary. It is a letter of womanly achievement, from daughter to mother, rich with personal symbolism:

On the right hand side of the hail is a door. Will you enter the drawing-room? Between the front windows stands the beautiful antique ottoman, the monument of Elizabeth's loving kindness, covered with woven flowers. In the corner on that side stands crosswise the fairy tea-table,—a Hawthorne heir-loom, & upon an embroidered mat upon it lies my pretty white greyhound. In the other corner on the same side stands Apollo, whose head I have tied on! Diagonally opposite Apollo, stands the ancient carved chair, with its tapestry of roses. Opposite the ottoman is the card-table, with the alabaster vase, & over the vase hangs Correggio's Madonna. Over the ottoman, Raphael's Transfiguration. Opposite the door you have entered stands the centre-table. On that are books, the beautiful India box, and now the superb India bowl & pitcher, which Mr. Hawthorne's father had made in India for himself. . . . In the corner aslant from the fairy-table stands the ancient Manning chair, with its worked cover. The scarlet stuffed chair wanders about the room. The black haircloth rocking chair was much abused in moving, & one of the rockers is off. It has not yet been mended. . . . Over the centre-table hangs Endymion, & over the fireplace, Leonardo da Vinci's Madonna au Bas relief. You cannot think how prettily the room looks, though with such a low stud that I have to get acclimated to it, and still fear to be crushed.

Opposite the ottoman is another door. Entrez, entrez, Madame ma mère, s'il vous plait. This is the dining room. . . ."^[1]

So the description runs for several more paragraphs, a caressing inventory of treasures, each laden with meanings that connect the household with its sustaining contexts: the honored Hawthorne tradition with trophies of the merchant trade in exotic lands; Leonardo, Raphael, and Apollo the sun-god;

the more intimate contexts of family affection—the ottoman from Elizabeth, the Manning chair. Here also are emblems of household bustle and chores unaccomplished, the chair that rambles about and the rocker off its rocker. Her husband's genius is quietly mentioned by way of the carved chair with the roses, which Hawthorne had used as a device to tie together the children's stories in Grandfather's Chair . Sophia herself had painted the Endymion during the months at the Old Manse when she looked forward to Una's birth.

Writing this letter was a religious exercise, in which Sophia rehearsed her vision of a sacred space where art and the muses were present to cultivate the spirit of its human denizens. Hers was a divine household, and she was proud to claim that her husband made a spiritual contribution to its life. "He has perfect dominion over himself in every respect," she explained to her mother, "so that to do the highest, wisest, loveliest thing is not the least effort to him, any more than it is to Julian to be innocent. It is his spontaneous act & Julian is not more unconscious in his innocence than he in acting his best." Nathaniel's unerring childlike moral instinct was now receiving universal acclaim, Sophia believed, through the success of The Scarlet Letter; and she exulted at this vindication of her faith in his genius. "Such a person can never lose the prestige which commands & fascinates. I cannot possibly conceive of my happiness, but in a blissful kind of confusion, live on. . . . I am not deluded nor mistaken, as the angels know now, and as all my friends will know in open vision!"^[2]

Sophia portrays the divine power that was transmitted to the household through such a father by describing a quarrel between Julian and Una:

One day they asked me to read about Christ. Una got up out of her chair for something, & Julian took possession. Una complained very much. Her father said, "What did Christ say? If a man take your cloak, give him your coat also. Do you know what he meant?" Una responded with an inward voice, "Yes, I know." She soon rose & gave Julian the chair, which he received with a radiant smile, having caught light from the presence of the angel now descended—but immediately resigned again, feeling that he too must act well in such a presence. Do you think no glory was added to the sunshine by this scene, so trivial in appearance, but so universal in its influence?^[3]

Hawthorne did not command his daughter to give up the chair, but allowed her to obey the scriptural injunction freely. The voluntary character of Una's compliance brings down the angel in whose aura mutual altruism takes the place of self-seeking. Sophia credits her husband with the qualities of spirit required to bring about this divine alchemy; but she also believes that promoting such transactions is a mother's special province.

On her own mother's birthday several months later, Sophia recalls how this view of motherhood had been instilled. "Some portions of my life I remember only in moments when, at some crisis of excitement or trouble, you said to me softly, 'My love.' The tone, the words used to pour balm & comfort over my whole being. . . . & I remember it when my own child is in the same kind of mood, & I also say to her 'my love'—& find the same effect follow. Alas for those who counsel sternness & severity instead of love toward these young children!"^[4]

Sophia insists that "infinite patience" must be displayed in situations that might well provoke a mother to violence, because harsh measures invite reciprocal self-assertion in the child. If the mother's internal fury can be conquered, the child will learn to submit in a sweet and willing spirit. Instead of "the sharp rebuke" and "the cruel blow," Sophia recommends "a tender sorrow, a most sympathizing regret." "Naturally I have none of the pride of power toward my children," she explains. "When they disobey I am not personally aggrieved, & they see it, & find therefore that it is a disinterested desire that they should do right which induces me to insist."

The selflessness of mother and father in the Hawthorne household was sustained by the divine light that suffused their mutual love. Nathaniel alludes to this spiritual symbiosis in The House of the Seven Gables, which was written at the little Red House. "Phoebe" had long been a nickname for Sophia, invoking her kinship with Phoebus Apollo, and she likewise signaled their composite divine identity by referring to him as "Apollo." Yet the Hawthornes were in touch with an obverse domain, a torment of sexual politics lying beneath the joyful domestic surface and threatening continually to swallow it up. Sophia's strenuous tone betokens her engagement in this covert struggle, keeping the polluted darkness at bay.

Nathaniel's darker broodings are suggested by his remark—related by Sophia to her mother—that the little Red House "looks like the Scarlet Letter."^[5] He meant by this, Sophia promptly makes clear, only that the house viewed externally was small and bright red; but for our purposes the comment has a larger import. The "hell-fired" story of Hester, Arthur, Chillingworth, and Pearl—that disjointed double family—is a meditation on the paradise of domesticity that Nathaniel and Sophia lived out; but it is likewise a commentary on the new convention of family relations of which "divine motherhood" was the central feature. Hawthorne's narrative of adultery is set in Puritan Boston, but the conflicts and psychic torment it portrays are native to the matrimonial convention under construction in the Hawthornes' time.

The domestic ideal gave adultery an enlarged significance. The honor of

a dynastic family was menaced when the wife committed adultery, because she could introduce illegitimate heirs into the line; the husband's adultery, however offensive, was not a threat to the family's integrity. Within the domestic ideal, by contrast, adultery contaminated the relation from which the marriage itself took its meaning, poisoning the intimacy on which the sacredness of the home depended; and this was equally true for husband and wife.

The altered meaning of adultery was only one aspect of a new urgency given to intimacy in family life. It is easy to underestimate the sweeping power of the cultural change at stake here. The romantic movement in literature, like the accompanying movement in religious thought and practice during this period, is pervasively occupied with feeling, with gauging and evoking complex emotional states. Hawthorne's uncanny capacity to register and transcribe obscure psychological transactions—what Henry James called his "catlike faculty of seeing in the dark"—makes him one of the great romantic precursors of Freud, the psychoanalytic movement in our own time being an enlargement of the preoccupation with sexuality and private emotional experience that grew up in the early nineteenth century, with family life as its central focus. The zone of psychic experience identified as "interior" and "personal" was not invented in the nineteenth century; but it was mass-produced in volume sufficient to make it appear universally human.

Orthodox Freudian theory is individualist and ahistorical in a fashion unsuited to understanding the marital politics of the Hawthorne household. The psychological issues at stake in the Hawthornes' relationship are not merely the consequence of traits in Nathaniel and Sophia that arose separately in their personal development. Their relationship itself had an identity, of the sort that Jurg Willi describes as marital "collusion," in which an interactive correspondence between the two parties, partly conscious and partly unconscious, draws them together initially and informs the life they live together. The Hawthornes' marriage reveals such a metabolism of interior meanings, fashioned originally during their courtship and transformed under the pressures of married life and child rearing. The Scarlet Letter does not culminate this story of cultural creation so much as perpetuate it.

Chapter Seven—
Inward and Eternal Union

On the eve of her wedding in the summer of 1842, Sophia informed her friend Mary Foote that she and Nathaniel were already married. "We long have been bound by heavenly ties. The ceremony is nothing. Our true marriage was three years ago."^[1] The Hawthornes' extra-legal union was not merely a result of Nathaniel's incapacity to support a family or of Sophia's chronic nervous condition, practical problems that extended well beyond their wedding; on the contrary, the "true marriage" between Nathaniel and Sophia was a spiritual reality, of incomparably greater authority than the legal bond soon to be created. They both believed that their marriage consisted in their "heavenly" relation and that the public ceremony was a concession to "earthly" requirements.

Nathaniel celebrated the commencement of their marriage in a letter he had written just three years earlier, as Sophia accurately recalled. "Yes—we are married; and as God Himself has joined us, we may trust never to be separated, neither in Heaven nor on Earth. We will wait patiently and quietly, and He will lead us onward hand in hand . . . and will teach us when our union is to be revealed to the world. The world might, as yet, misjudge us; and therefore we will not speak to the world; but when I hold you in my arms, why should we not commune together about all our hopes of earthly and external, as well as our faith of inward and eternal union?" (CE 15:329–330). Nathaniel and Sophia were prompted by the inner logic of their

experience to place religious and legal institutions in "the world," excluded from the holy privacy of marriage.

The Hawthornes were not alone in feeling—in the late 1830s—that the public apparatus defining marriage was at odds with its spiritual essence. John Humphrey Noyes's Oneida community aimed at restructuring sexual relations so that the exclusive connection of one man to one woman would be replaced by a "complex marriage" better attuned to individual and communal needs. "I know that the immortal union of the heart," Noyes affirmed, "which alone is worthy to be called marriage, can never be made by a ceremony."^[2] Charles Fourier's argument that "isolated families" reinforce the evils of economic competition became available in translation in the early 1840s, including his advocacy of nonmarital sexual relations. Nathaniel and Sophia for a time considered setting up their household at Brook Farm, the communal experiment grounded on Fourierist ideas. The Brook Farmers did not adopt Fourier's recommendations concerning sexuality, but Sophia made a point of writing to her mother after she and Nathaniel were formally married, to say that she had at last read some of Fourier firsthand and was thoroughly disgusted and that Nathaniel had read more and was even more disgusted.^[3]

Radical reformers found an audience during this period because of the growing public awareness that the legal structure regulating matrimonial relations was out-of-date. The common law doctrine of marital unity, in which a woman ceased to have a legal existence when she married, was in conflict with the newly enhanced role of wife and mother and was assailed successfully on a number of points.^[4] Nathaniel and Sophia felt, accordingly, that their relationship did not discredit the institution of marriage but fulfilled its higher purposes: yet they considered this fulfillment altogether unique. "I could almost think," Nathaniel writes, "that the institution of marriage was ordained, first of all, for you and me, and for you and me alone; it seems so fresh and new—so unlike anything that the people around us enjoy or are acquainted with. Nobody ever had a wife but me—nobody a husband, save my Dove" (CE 15:334).

Nathaniel and Sophia were aware of moving onto tricky ground, where it might seem they were carrying on an illicit relationship or were in the grip of emotions whose true meaning and direction they did not understand. Since they claimed a marriage at odds with the law, and without analogue among their friends, it is not surprising they fended off doubts. "Let us make no question about our love, whether it be true and holy," Nathaniel wrote just a month after they pronounced themselves married. "Were it otherwise

. . . [angels] would have given you early and continued warning of the approach of Evil in my shape" (CE 15:338).

Their claim to an unexampled marriage rests on the "inward and eternal union" of their souls, a pre-existent joint identity that their acquaintance and deepening friendship had revealed. "We have met in Eternity," Hawthorne declared, "and there our intimacy was formed" (CE 15:299). The time they spend together does not fashion this bond, but only makes them aware of it, and provides evidences of its eternal presence.

Hawthorne confesses that he delayed speaking of this oneness for fear he might impair it. "I felt it long ago; and sometimes, when I was seeking for some fondest word, it has been on my lips to call you—'Wife'! I hardly know what restrained me from speaking it—unless a dread . . . of feeling you shrink back from my bosom, and thereby discovering that there was yet a deep place in your soul which did not know me" (CE 15:329). The notable fragility of this ostensibly eternal marriage follows in part from the definition of its essence that Hawthorne lays down here: there must not be any part of her soul that does not "know" him, in the sense of entering unrestrainedly into intimate communion.

Although Nathaniel and Sophia almost certainly did not consummate their relationship sexually before the wedding, their premarital marriage was not ascetic. On the contrary, Hawthorne's earliest love letters assert physical intimacy as a means of spiritual communion between them: their love is expressed in "holy kisses, which I do think have something supernatural in them." Amorous pleasure becomes a sacrament that makes the marriage between them real. "Any one of our innocent embraces—even when our lips did but touch for a moment, and then were withdrawn—dearest, was it not the symbol of a bond between our Souls, infinitely stronger than any external rite could twine around us?" (CE 15:295, 317, 329).

The Hawthornes' marital relation bears a striking analogy to the adultery portrayed in The Scarlet Letter . When Hester reminds Arthur that their sexual union "had a consecration of its own," she invokes a deep and self-validating love that sets at naught traditional religious and legal requirements and is livingly present in physical intimacy. The transcendental idiom of the Hawthornes' relationship contrasts sharply with the guilt-stricken urgency of the fictional lovers' declarations. But Nathaniel and Sophia invoked the ineffably otherworldly to convey earthy messages. Here, for example, Nathaniel looks forward to the consummation of their sexual relationship:

We have left expression—at least, such expression as can be achieved with pen and ink—far behind us. Even the spoken word has long been inadequate. Looks—pressures of the lips and hands, and the touch of bosom to bosom—these are a better language; but, bye-and-bye, our spirits will demand some more adequate expression even than these. And thus it will go on; until we shall be divested of these earthly forms, which are at once our medium of expression, and the impediments to full communion. Then we shall melt into another, and all be expressed, once and continually, without a word—without an effort.

(CE 15:606)

Thus "heavenly" melting invokes erotic bliss; yet the Neoplatonic rhetoric at work here puts the earthly and the divine at odds. Hawthorne is not alarmed, at least not yet, that their love might be contaminated through sexual intercourse; but he is anxiously alert to other forms of defilement. He insists on maintaining the holy secrecy of their love because he fears that it might be lost, or fatally compromised, if exposed to "worldly" circumstances.

Nathaniel's effort to prevent contaminating intrusions was spurred in good measure by impulses native to his relation with Sophia. This was the central paradox of their marital collusion: psychic forces capable of tearing the marriage apart were among the strongest of those holding it together. Nathaniel and Sophia joyously avowed a divine communion, but they were also bound together in a union they did not avow. Their "heavenly marriage" had an "earthly" counterpart, which they experienced as a violation of the marriage. They were uneasily aware of a relation that was adulterous, not by the standards of the "world" but by their own standards, a matrimonial adultery in which felicity and wretchedness were indissolubly united.

The language of transcendental love offers a way to understand these interior complexities; in it Nathaniel and Sophia negotiated issues they could not openly confront. Their tireless rejoicings over their premarital marriage reveal an intriguing play of double meanings as the hidden substance of their opposition and their union discloses itself. The Hawthornes carried on a lengthy and searching mutual reconnaissance; it was an "engagement," the conventional precursor of a companionate marriage, in which they worked out ways to manage their controversies within the terms of an intimacy they were planning to continue for life.

During his employment at the Boston Custom House, Nathaniel routinely declares that his "belovedest" preserves him from spiritual decay. He looks

to her for rescue from the soul-withering circumstances of his worldly life. It is easy to see the rhetorical disadvantage that follows: in advance of any dispute, Nathaniel concedes that Sophia possesses divine truth while his own moral character is deteriorating. How could he question her judgment?

In November 1839 a disagreement arose (over issues now unknown) that makes visible the resultant rhetorical interplay. Sophia had wept with sorrow when Nathaniel implied that she had done (or thought) something morally wrong, and her tears placed the issue between them on her strongest ground, that of her exquisite moral sensitivity. This was an occasion of strategic significance in their unfolding marital combat, so that Nathaniel outlines at length the framework within which he will meet such occasions in the future:

Little Dove, why did you shed tears the other day, when you supposed that your husband thought you to blame? . . . Dearest, I never think you to blame; for you positively have no faults. . . . But it is because you are too delicate and exquisitely wrought in heart, mind, and frame, to dwell in such a world—because, in short, you are fitter to be in Paradise than here. You needed, therefore, an interpreter between the world and yourself—one who should sometimes set you right, not in the abstract (for there you are never wrong) but relatively to human and earthly matters;—and such an interpreter is your husband, who can sympathise, though inadequately, with his wife's heavenly nature, and has likewise a portion of shrewd earthly sense, enough to guide us both through the labyrinth of time. Now, dearest, when I criticise any act, word, thought, or feeling of yours, you must not understand it as a reproof, or as imputing anything wrong, wherewith you are to burthen your conscience.

(CE 15:375)

Now reaching the crux of his countering maneuver, Nathaniel blandly accepts the rhetorical contradiction into which Sophia's strategy had forced him—that of correcting her even as he acknowledges her moral superiority. He also repulses the emotional side of her appeal, by ordering her to obey him cheerfully. "Then do not grieve, nor grieve your husband's spirit, when he essays to do his office; but remember that he does it reverently, and in the devout belief that you are, in immortal reality, both wiser and better than himself. . . . Hear what I say, dearest, in a cheerful spirit, and act upon it with cheerful strength" (CE 15:375).

The "office" of the husband outlined here, arising from his traffic with a defiling world, is that of intimate and exhaustive domination. Nathaniel does not want an unquestioning robot-like obedience but invites her to express her disagreements openly so they can be removed. "Do not give an undue weight to my judgment," he continues, "nor imagine that there is no appeal from it, and that its decrees are not to be questioned. Rather, make it a rule always to question them and be satisfied of their correctness." Nathaniel

pictures their relation as an extended tutorial in which Sophia will add worldly wisdom to her already complete knowledge of divine things, "and so shall my Dove be improved. . . till she become even earthly-wiselier than her sagacious husband" (CE 15:375–376).

As her tutor, Nathaniel will decide when his "little Dove" has acquired enough earthly wisdom to think for herself and to receive obedience from him. Meanwhile, she is to discontinue the practice of weeping at his decrees, since he worships her infallible judgment on the questions that really matter, questions of angelic truth. This maneuver strikes from Sophia's hands the weapons she had sought to forge from his avowals of her moral superiority, and it provides him a virtually limitless charter.

More than once Nathaniel declares his intention to exercise an authority that will reach exactly as far as he chooses. He observes, for example, that she cannot enjoy "an independent and separate right" in her mother's Salem household. Her true home is his apartment in Boston, because of his exclusive claim to it: "my dwelling, my castle, mine own place wherein to be, which I have bought, for the time being, with the profits of mine own labor. Then is it not our home?" (CE 15:385–386). A letter written the following week enlarges his fantasy of their living together, in terms that picture her independence as an expression of his mastery. "Now if my Dove were sitting in the easiest of our two easy chairs—(for sometimes I would choose to have her sit in a separate chair, in order to realize our individuality, as well as our unity)—then would the included space of these four walls, together with the little contiguous bed-room, seem indeed like home" (CE 15: 387). Sophia will realize her individuality when Nathaniel chooses to have her do so.

Another stratagem of control, grounded on the separation of Sophia's "angelic" domain from the workaday world, is Nathaniel's reluctance to give Sophia information about his daily life. He writes in dove-talk, which is hazy, fanciful, and strikingly uninformative. Concerning his work at the Custom House, he speaks of "durance" in the "darksome room," or about the "sons of toil" or of his labors in the "coal-pit," but only rarely does the name of a person come through or any concrete description of his duties, his boss, or his co-workers. Sophia is his "reality," and "nothing else is real for me, unless thou give it that golden quality by thy touch" (CE 15:486, 321, 511). Yet there are important matters he does not want her to touch, even when their plans are involved.

In March 1840, for example, Nathaniel wrote to John L. O'Sullivan about a clerkship he had been offered in Washington, D.C., raising a series of practical questions: Will he be at liberty between sessions of Congress? Will

his salary continue during the intervals when his duties lapse? He points out that travel to Washington would be costly and living expenses high. In the end he asks O'Sullivan to hold the position open, if possible, so he will have time to consult with Franklin Pierce, who is currently out of town. On the same day, Nathaniel writes to Sophia about the opportunity:

How would my Dove like to have her husband continually with her, twelve or fourteen months out of the next twenty? Would not that be real happiness?—in such long communion, should we not feel as if separation were a dream, something that never had been a reality, nor ever could be? Yes; but—for in all earthly happiness there is a but—but, during those twenty months, there would be two intervals of three months each, when thy husband would be five hundred miles away—as far away as Washington. That would be terrible. . . . Do not be frightened, dearest—nor rejoiced either—for the thing will not be. It might be, if I chose; but on multitudinous accounts, my present situation seems preferable.

(CE 15:418–419, 421–422)

It is hardly momentous that Nathaniel tells Sophia he will not take the job while telling O'Sullivan to hold it open, because for all practical purposes he has told her nothing. The channel of his communication with Sophia ran deep into his personality but was nonetheless remarkably narrow. When the rhetoric of their divine union ceases to probe the urgent and complex psychic forces in which it is grounded, an oppressive decadence sets in. The relentless sweetness and vagueness and earnestness, and the iteration of "belovedest" and "ownest Dove," make a ludicrous fustian that itself became a theme of mawkish joking. "Will not my Dove confess that there is a little nonsense in this epistle? But be not wroth with me, darling wife." "Thy husband writes thee nonsense, as his custom is," Nathaniel later remarks. "I wonder how thou managest to retain any respect for him" (CE 15:352–353, 521).

Sophia wanted to know what Nathaniel's life was like, not only the mystical depths but his everyday pursuits. But he found himself unable to give her an account. "Thou wilt have a volume to tell me, when we meet, and wilt pour thy beloved voice into mine ears, in a stream of two hours' long. At length thou wilt pause, and say—'But what has thy life been?'—and then will thy stupid husband look back upon what he calls his life, for three or four days past, and behold a blank!" (CE 15:517). Nathaniel speaks here of a future conversation, and of the muteness that will then ensue. His life is not particularly uneventful at present, but his daily activities do not occupy the part of his mind that is open to his Dove.

The rhetoric of their relationship made it easy for Nathaniel to keep his

practical dealings to himself. But when Sophia urged him to go hear the famous "sailor-preacher," Edward Taylor, Nathaniel's refusal required an elaborate defense. "Now, belovedest, it would not be an auspicious day for me to hear the aforesaid Son of Thunder. Thou knowest not how difficult is thy husband to be touched and moved, unless time, and circumstances, and his own inward state, be in a 'concatenation accordingly.' A dreadful thing would it be, were Father Taylor to fail in awakening a sympathy from my spirit to thine" (CE 15:420–421).

Nathaniel doesn't want to go hear the preacher, and he knows that if he does go he won't like it. But Father Taylor's eloquence is manifestly a spiritual issue, about which Sophia has infinite wisdom. Refusing to go would cast doubt on his professions of worship for her; but to attend the service would be worse. When Sophia asked for his response, he would be compelled to argue against her infallible knowledge of celestial truth.

If Sophia had looked forward to such a debate, she was to be disappointed. Nathaniel writes her two weeks later in terms that eliminate his problem. He promises that he will go, "at some auspicious hour, which I trust will soon arrive," but only if she also makes a promise. She must agree "not to be troubled, should thy husband be unable to appreciate the excellence of Father Taylor." He points out that "our souls are in happiest unison; but we must not disquiet ourselves if every tone be not re-echoed from one to the other—if every slightest shade be not reflected in the alternate mirror." They must agree to disagree, in short, before Father Taylor gets "an opportunity to make music with my soul" (CE 15:431).

Sophia must understand that while Nathaniel's spirit is minutely in tune with her own, he is not necessarily susceptible to what moves her. "Thou art not to suppose," he informs her, "because his spirit answers to every touch of thine, that therefore every breeze, or even every whirlwind, can upturn him from his depths." The spiritual sympathy between the two of them does not extend to third parties, or to anything that lies outside their relationship. She is the master of spiritual things, of all things divine, he ceaselessly repeats; but this mastery applies only to the sacred interior of their relationship and is real there only through his unprompted confession. He does not welcome any effort on her part to shape his sentiments or his conduct: "I forewarn thee, sweetest Dove, that thy husband is a most unmalleable man" (CE 15:431).

Nathaniel's elaboration of the union of souls between himself and Sophia thus arrives at a contradiction that points toward anxieties built into its structure. Nathaniel dreads disturbances of their sacred intimacy that

threaten from multiplying sources. Their oneness must be protected from contact with such worldly business as Nathaniel's job offers and his current conditions of work; but purely spiritual matters are likewise to be sealed up in a separate compartment, where they cannot disturb the "inward and eternal union" binding Nathaniel and Sophia together. Nathaniel can have communion with his "Dove" only so long as that sweet bower is protected from connections to the life beyond it.

Nathaniel did not, in fact, prohibit Sophia from challenging his sentiments, but he strenuously resisted accepting any grounds on which such challenges might be decided. Looked at one way, this is patently a tactic of domination; yet Nathaniel's way asserting his dominion bespeaks an inward fear. He demands not only her compliance but also her heartfelt assent, and he strives to limit topics of potential discord because he dreads losing a communion so fragile that the slightest opposition could damage it. This anxiety prompts Nathaniel to insist on a system of shields, to shut out potential contaminants, and it also shapes the interior of their mystical autocosm.

Nathaniel saw two distinct personalities in Sophia. We have already met the "Dove"; the other he called "Sophie Hawthorne," a figure who emerges at the outset of their premarital marriage, bearing Sophia's "married" name. "Sophie" is associated with saucy smiles and playful kisses (as opposed to holy kisses), and with rebellion:

My dearest, what a delightful scene was that between Sophie Hawthorne and my Dove, when the former rebelled so stoutly against Destiny, and the latter, with such meek mournfulness, submitted. Which do I love the best, I wonder—my Dove, or my little Wild-Flower? I love each best, and both equally; and my heart would inevitably wither, and dry up, and perish utterly, if either of them were torn away from it. Yet, truly, I have reason to apprehend more trouble with Sophie Hawthorne than with my Dove.

(CE 15:359)

Sophia herself, a composite of "Sophie" and the "Dove," is thus given an androgynous character. Nathaniel, in ascribing assertiveness to "Sophie," shows his respect for her active and acute intelligence, and he looks forward to submitting his literary work to her criticism. "I have a high opinion of . . . [Sophie Hawthorne's] critical acumen, but a great dread of her severity—which, however, the Dove will not fail to temper with her sweetness."

This interplay of "masculine" and "feminine" qualities in Sophia corresponds to a counterpoint in Nathaniel's own nature: "I live through my Dove's heart," he observes, while living "an intellectual life in Sophie Hawthorne" (CE 15:364, 428–429).

The fusion of genders becomes even more striking, however, in Nathaniel's characterizations of Sophie herself. His earliest description states that her soul and intellect "breathe forth an influence like that of wildflowers," and images linking her to flowers, and the odor of flowers, frequently recur as he praises her (CE 15:343). Nathaniel employs in his fiction the convention linking flowers with the vagina, especially when erotic womanhood appears dangerous, as in Beatrice Rappacini and Zenobia.^[5] This circuit of associations endows Sophie Hawthorne's headstrong intellectuality with a note of sensual provocation, so that her "masculine" assertiveness is tantamount to a stimulating yet unsettling womanly sexuality.

These gender blendings are compounded further by a phallic image equally typifying Sophie Hawthorne. With the half-deliberate condescending playfulness Nathaniel adopts when he treats questions that are both compelling and touchy, he persistently focuses attention on her nose, which becomes an emblem of her "defiance" (CE 15:372). He makes a teasing issue of his worshipful desire to kiss Sophie's nose, which she would saucily not permit. "I have even serious thoughts of giving up all further designs upon her nose," Nathaniel mock-mournfully relates, "since she hates so much to have it kissed. . . . I have a particular affection for that nose, insomuch that I intend, one of these days, to offer it an oblation of rich and delicate odours" (CE 15:379). Instead of receiving Nathaniel's attentions at his pleasure, Sophie Hawthorne, it appears, characteristically demands and then rejects them. Imperious sensuality is linked, accordingly, to sexually suggestive smells, further underscoring Hawthorne's intuition that Sophia's erotic energy is manlike but alluring nonetheless. She "breathes forth" the aroma of wildflowers and then becomes the organ by which the rich odors of Nathaniel's submission are to be relished.

Aggressive sexuality in women was branded as masculine by the ideological conventions Hawthorne invokes in depicting Zenobia, but here the reverse logic is at work: Nathaniel finds Sophia's manly traits sexually exciting. His imagery points toward a polymorphous engagement with both sides of an erotic interplay that he pictures taking place within Sophia, such that reverent kisses are offered by the Dove and resisted by "Sophie," Nathaniel taking a role that is both supervisory and beseeching. He appeals to "Sophie's" stubborn pride on behalf of the yearning and affectionate Dove:

Well-a-day! I have strolled thus far through my letter, without once making mention of naughty Sophie Hawthorne. Will she pardon the neglect? Present my profound respects to her beloved nose, and say that I still entreat her to allow my Dove to kiss her cheek. When she complies with this oft-repeated petition, I shall hope that her spirit is beginning to be tamed, and shall then meditate some other and more difficult trials of it. Nonsense! Do not believe me, dear little Sophie Hawthorne. I would not tame you for the whole Universe.

(CE 15:398–399)

Nathaniel's deeper yearnings and anxieties were aroused by an untamed spirit in Sophia that held forth the prospect of bisexual fulfillment. His obsessive baby talk holds his uneasiness in abeyance, even as it conveys the quality of Nathaniel's desire. A homoerotic impulse within his own sexuality is aroused by "naughty" Sophia's willful strength, yet that impulse is contained within the yearning for a wholly merged identity. "Are we singular or plural, dearest? Has not each of us a right to use the first person singular, when speaking in behalf of our united being? Does not 'I,' whether spoken by Sophie Hawthorne's lips or mine, express the one spirit of myself and that darlingest Sophie Hawthorne?" (CE 15:355). He speaks of her as a baby, but not from an adult point of view; he wants them to merge in a "darlingest" infancy together.

The domineering side of Nathaniel's relation to Sophia was rooted in a powerful contrary impulse, his desire not to govern but to submit. The androgynous character he discerns in Sophia, whereby her "womanly" submissiveness conveys and partly conceals a purposeful will, is analogous to his own inner paradox. He anticipates "trouble" with Sophie Hawthorne yet does not want her "tamed"; he expects to "have charge" of his Dove, yet offers her abject worship.

Nathaniel was addicted to passive enjoyment, as distinct from any intention to assume mature responsibilities. He felt obliged to assume a caring and conscientious manly posture in relation to Sophia, yet he also rebelled against that role for the sake of an infantile freedom that revels in polymorphous delight, leaving to others the initiation and guidance of events. Nathaniel playfully rejoices in this androgynous whimsical pleasure—feeling that the "deepest tenderness" takes place between them in moments that permit him to toy with a fusion of conquest and submission. "Most beloved, I am thinking at this moment of thy dearest nose! Thou canst not think how infinitely better I know and love Sophie Hawthorne, since, in moments of our deepest tenderness, she has yielded up that fortress. And, in requital, I yield my whole self up to her, and kiss her be-

loved foot, and acknowledge her for my queen and liege-lady forever more" (CE 15:621).

Collapsed polarities thus lie at the core of Nathaniel's love: the opposition of male and female sexual identity, and that of dominance and submission, are absorbed into an even more radical fusion in which the distinction between himself and her is erased. His fantasy of spending the night with Sophia pictures a spiritual ménage à trois in which he and Sophia and the Dove melt together into a blissful composite childlike selfhood. "And now if my Dove were here, she and that naughty Sophie Hawthorne, how happy we all three—two—one—(how many are there of us?)—how happy might we be! . . . Oh, beloved, if you were here now, I do not think I could possibly let you go till morning—my arms should imprison you—I would not be content, unless you nestled into my very heart, and there slept a sweet sleep with your own husband. My blessed Dove, how I long to hear your gentle breathing, as you lie asleep in my arms" (CE 15:357).

Much remains to be said concerning the psychic substance of Nathaniel's "inward and eternal" union with Sophia, but it is important to recognize here that such felicity places heavy demands on the person from whom it is obtained. Acting freely on his own impulses will necessarily result in giving offense, Nathaniel recognizes, and he begs her to indulge him. "Dearest, I beseech you grant me freedom to be careless and wayward—for I have had such freedom all my life. Oh, let me feel that I may even do you a little wrong without your avenging it (oh how cruelly) by being wounded" (CE 15:332).

Supplying Nathaniel with mystical bliss imposed psychological burdens on Sophia, but it also placed her in a position of strength. Granting him the "freedom to be careless and wayward" allowed her likewise to withhold that freedom or implicitly to place a price on it. The character of his attachment to her entailed a vulnerability answering to the menace it offered her. "What misery . . . would it be," he observes, "if, because we love one another better than all the Universe besides, our only gain thereby were a more exquisite sensibility to pain from the beloved hand, and a more terrible power of inflicting it" (CE 15:332). The fusion of dominance and submission that takes place in the magical solipsism of Nathaniel's yearnings thus has its counterpart in the practical politics of the relationship. By satisfying his demands, Sophia acquires a form of dominance; Nathaniel's submission is necessary if he is to get from her what he wants; and their sacred marriage is sealed by intimate reciprocal threats.

The "divine light" that results from the sublimation of selfish impulses—as celebrated in the joint identity of "Phoebe" and "Apollo"—was only the

visible portion of a broader spectrum of psychic radiation. The intense atmosphere of holiness that pervaded Sophia and Nathaniel's relationship, giving it a self-consecrating interior glow, was generated by impulses of mutual antagonism. A union whose essence is the fusion of such antitheses—tenderness/vengeance, male/female, dominance/submission, self/other—depends for its meaning on the continuing energy of those oppositions, their continuing power to split the relationship apart. Like atoms of plutonium, the union of Nathaniel and Sophia was radioactive: the strong forces binding them together were barely capable of restraining the countervailing forces of disintegration: the uncanny divine light that bathed them was the result of nuclear instability.

Nathaniel insisted on maintaining an impermeable boundary between the sacred inwardness of this relationship and the "world" because he sensed that a stray particle from the outside might fatally disturb the uneasy balance of interior forces. In the normal course of living this was exceedingly difficult. Not only did the two of them have other friends and relationships, but they would also be obliged sooner or later to obey the requirements of the "world" by getting married, and in due course there would be children. To consider how Nathaniel and Sophia confronted such exigencies requires that we translate the metaphor of thermonuclear reactions back into their idiom of divine love.

Chapter Eight—
Transplanting the Garden of Eden

Nathaniel pleads for reassurance throughout his love letters. "Dost thou love me?" he asks Sophia. "Dost thou love me at all?" "You love me dearly—don't you?"^[1] He can't stop asking because he fears their love is unreal, that it will vanish as magically as it appeared. This distress arises most sharply when they see each other in the presence of other people.

He describes a social occasion in October 1839 as a chance "to meet in the wide desert of this world, and mingle our spirits in a conjugal embrace," and indicates that it would have troubled him to see her at all, if they'd not had a few moments in private. "It would have seemed all a vision then. . . . You looked like a vision, beautifullest wife, with the width of the room between us—so spiritual that my human heart wanted to be assured that you had an earthly vesture on, and your warm kisses gave me that assurance (CE 15:350). They had an understandable desire for some time to themselves; but in Nathaniel the situation provoked an enduring anxiety.

Writing to Sophia about the event, he launches into an extended fantasy in which his "Dove" resumes the instincts of her animal counterpart and flies away. "'Come back, naughty Dove!'" the bereft husband cries, "'and fold your wings upon my heart again, or it will freeze!'" (CE 15:350). But the Dove refuses, insisting that her true home is in the air. "Then would the poor deserted husband do his best to fly in pursuit of the faithless Dove; and for that purpose would ascend to the top-mast of a salt-ship, and leap desper-

ately into the air, and fall down head-foremost upon the deck, and break his neck. And there should be engraven on his tombstone—'Mate not thyself with a Dove, unless thou hast wings to fly'" (351). Seeing Sophia at the party had stirred a helpless suicidal desperation at the prospect of her deserting him.

Nathaniel disowns any serious meaning in "this foolish flight of fancy"; but the next day he appends a note, still vainly seeking to quiet his feelings. "I dreamed the queerest dreams last night, about being deserted, and all such nonsense—so you see how I was punished for that naughty romance of the Faithless Dove. . . . You have warmed my heart, mine own wife; and never again can I know what it is to be cold and desolate, save in dreams. You love me dearly—don't you?" (CE 15:351, 352).

In the course of any engagement one of the parties (or both) may become fearful the other will break it off. But Nathaniel's dread of being deserted was strong enough to persist through their wedding and the birth of two children; it showed up in a dream nine years after his fantasy of the Faithless Dove, when Sophia was visiting her sister Mary at West Newton:

The other night, I dreamt that I was at Newton, in a room with thee, and with several other people; and thou tookst occasion to announce, that thou hadst now ceased to be my wife, and hadst taken another husband. Thou madest this intelligence known with such perfect composure and sang froid —not particularly addressing me, but the company generally—that it benumbed my thoughts and feelings, so that I had nothing to say. Thou wast perfectly decided, and I had only to submit without a word. But, hereupon, thy sister Elizabeth, who was likewise present, informed the company, that, in this state of affairs, having ceased to be thy husband, I of course became her's; and turning to me, very coolly inquired whether she or I should write to inform my mother of the new arrangement! How the children were to be divided, I know not. I only know that my heart suddenly broke loose, and I began to expostulate with thee in an infinite agony, in the midst of which I awoke; but the sense of unspeakable injury and outrage hung about me for a long time—and even yet it has not quite departed.

(CE 16:228–229)

Nathaniel's terror is provoked by Sophia's membership in a community of women having the power to control his life. Sophia does not inform him in advance about having taken another husband, and, like her, the women to whom she announces it assume that Nathaniel will take no part in choosing his new wife. He frantically asserts a right to speak for himself amid the colloquy of women who are deciding his future; the dream indicates how infirm he felt that right to be.

Nathaniel was anxiously uncertain whether he could lay claim to his own life in resistance to the claims that others made, even so mildly as by their

presence. Sophia had become indispensable to him, he goes on to explain, because she assuaged this abiding restiveness and the panic of self-alienation that lay behind it. "I was always more at ease alone than in any body's company, till I knew thee. And now I am only myself when thou art within my reach, and most myself when closest, closest to thee. Thou art an unspeakably beloved woman. How couldst thou inflict such frozen agony upon me, in that dream!" (CE 16:229).

A pattern of imagery linking these dreams is the warm embrace that counteracts a terrible disabling cold. Nathaniel's "frozen agony" echoes both the sang froid of Sophia's announcement and Elizabeth's "very coolly" inquiring whether she or Nathaniel should inform his mother. As in the earlier dream, the Dove "warms" his heart by keeping her wings folded and leaves him "cold and desolate" when she exercises her power to fly.

Nathaniel's panicky need to draw Sophia into seclusion created a problem when she paid a visit to Boston in May 1840. They had opportunities to get together, but he was aware that she was also seeing other people. Sophia's long-standing friend Connie Park invited Nathaniel to an evening party, but he went straight home to bed after work and spent a wakeful and restless night. Four days later, although he had seen Sophia privately in the interval, he was still in anguish. Far from acknowledging that he had shunned her company—as he certainly had done—he complains that she has abandoned him. "My spirit knows not whereabout to seek thee, and so it shivers as if there were no Thou at all—as if my Dove had been only a dream and a vision, and now had vanished into unlocality and nothingness" (CE 15:461).

Nathaniel's distress called for an explanation. Why should he feel as though her being in Boston, seeing other people as well as himself, abolished their mutual love? Why should he refuse to meet her in the company of her women friends? Sophia had noticed that he was perturbed throughout this visit and that he kept a gloomy silence even during the afternoon and evening they had spent together alone. But Nathaniel writes that he cannot talk about it: "Why didst thou look up in my face, as we walked, and ask why I was so grave? If I was grave, I know no cause for it, beloved. Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know neither whence they come nor whither they go; nor do I inquire too closely into them. It is dangerous to look too minutely at such phenomena. It is apt to create a substance, where at first there was a mere shadow" (CE 15:461–462). Nathaniel fears that exploring his unhappiness will provoke thoughts and feelings he could not bear to confront. So long as they remain mere shadows—flitting across the inward sky—he can avoid choosing words in which to articulate them and having to answer for those words to her.

What is one to make of this stunning contradiction? Nathaniel had tirelessly repeated that Sophia rescued him from an inward torment of "shadows" and "unrealities" and had celebrated their "full communion. But now she herself has slipped momentarily into his nightmare world of "unlocality and nothingness." Nathaniel vehemently insists that she is not to press him on this matter; nor is she to question anything that remains puzzling in their relationship. "If there should ever seem to be an expression unintelligible from one of our souls to another, we will not strive to interpret it into earthly language, but wait for the soul to make itself understood; and were we to wait a thousand years, we need deem it no more time than we can spare" (CE 15:462).

Nathaniel explains that the bond between himself and his Dove is best realized in the wordless and exclusive communion of physical embraces. Words are innately social; they carry specifiable implications and commitments that hugs and kisses do not. "It is not that I have any love for mystery," Nathaniel continues, "but because I abhor it—and because I have felt, a thousand times, that words may be a thick and darksome veil of mystery between the soul and the truth which it seeks. Wretched were we, indeed, if we had no better means of communicating ourselves, no fairer garb in which to array our essential selves, than these poor rags and tatters of Babel" (CE 15:462). Fallen humanity lives under a divine curse—Nathaniel knew the Calvinist doctrines well—of which a central feature was the corruption of language, setting people at odds even as they strive to understand themselves and others. A perfect communion is that of Adam and Eve, arrayed in the garb of Eden.

Even so, Nathaniel knew that he was presenting Sophia with a mystery that he abhorred. He says explicitly that he must himself obey the prohibition he declares upon Sophia's questions. He is forbidden to "inquire too closely" into the shadows of his own mind, maintaining a safe distance from issues that had troubled him from boyhood and would pursue him to the grave. Critical features of this abiding terror are suggested by a seemingly trivial boyhood prank the year his father died, when he filled a hollow bust of John Wesley with water and put it out on a winter night, in hopes the ice would rupture it (R. H. Lathrop, Memories, 453–454). Hawthorne dreaded a "frozen agony" that seized him when he felt deprived of maternal solicitude or subjected to matriarchal control. This inner coolness, however, when suitably moderated, also served to numb him against the torments arising directly from his grief. This agony was unfrozen, years later in Rome; it broke out of its icy stillness, and his creative identity was devastated by the resulting unsustainable torture.

The androgynous bliss of childlike tenderness that Nathaniel cherished in his relation to Sophia allayed the fear that his inward freezing would itself bring on psychic disintegration, bursting his fragile selfhood from within. Their sexuality—as he represents it—is not a passionate adventure but a source of compensatory repose in a world otherwise provoking psychological distress. He talks freely enough about embraces and about resting his head on Sophia's bosom. Yet these caresses have a notably bland and diffuse tenor: when he imagines spending the night with his Dove and "naughty" Sophia, he evokes the even breathing of a sound childlike sleep.

Nathaniel visualizes Sophia as a child in order to claim her as a mother. The "Dove" not only nestles in Nathaniel's heart but also takes him under her wing. We have already noted how his relationship to Sophia replays the emotional pattern established in response to his father's death. The charmed circle that bound Nathaniel to his mother and sisters bears a telling resemblance to his and Sophia's sacred oneness, which formed a similar bulwark against his exposure to an unendurable pain of abandonment.

His terror of Sophia's disappearing into "unlocality and nothingness" repeats the anguish he had expressed years before in trying to persuade his mother to remain at Raymond. "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 round you, shut out from the world, and nothing to disturb us. It will be a second Garden of Eden" (CE 15:150). If his mother is caught up in the life of the Manning household, she and Eden will vanish. Yet when he met Sophia, Nathaniel represented his mother as the gloomy mistress of "Castle Dismal" where his young manhood had been wasted. To Elizabeth Peabody, and then to Sophia, Nathaniel represented his long seclusion in his mother's Salem household as "no life at all," which produced the "morbid consciousness that paralyses my powers" (Pearson, 266–267).

The myth of "Castle Dismal" forms the background against which Nathaniel celebrates Sophia's rescuing him; she brings blessed sunlight to scatter the shadows of unreality. This rhetorical maneuver was very flattering to Sophia, as it was meant to be; yet it also contained a double layer of denial. Nathaniel retained a strong attachment to his mother that is repeated, not eclipsed, in his relation to Sophia.^[2] The courtship had already ripened into their premarital marriage when he sat for the glorious portrait by Charles

Fig. 4.
Portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne by Charles Osgood, 1840

Osgood (Fig. 4), which took its place in his mother's home to assuage the pain of his separation from her and from his sisters.^[3] Sophia was not to "save" him from his mother's household without replacing the solace and psychic support he had received there. He transferred to her the anxious demands that his mother and sisters had met, hoping to anchor more firmly the identity they had sponsored. As he did so, the "shadows" ostensibly confined to Castle Dismal began to infiltrate the union with his Dove.

Nathaniel maintained a "childlike" persona because his effort to become

a "man" was complicated by the difficulties of crossing the gap between the maternal/marital sphere and the world beyond. To make a "worldly" career was to violate his deepest self, submitting to the desires of intrusive and uncaring aliens. To act independently in keeping with his true character was to remain within the solicitude of a powerful motherly figure who treasures him for who he is and guarantees his well-being. In Nathaniel's emotional world, submission to a loving woman's indulgent care is independence, whereas striving for manly self-sufficiency in contention with other males is servitude. Nathaniel's rebellion against the conventions of worldly manhood was intermingled with dread and resentment at lacking the strength to break these matriarchal bonds. Nathaniel's relationship with Sophia permitted him, as we shall see in due course, to exact vengeance for this intimate humiliation.

Long before he met Sophia, Nathaniel's mother and sisters indulged him in ridiculously high-handed demands. His sister Elizabeth related that Nathaniel was "particularly petted" in boyhood and that during the long seclusion his sisters were "almost . . . absurdly obedient to him." He required Elizabeth to bring him books from the Salem Athenaeum and also to choose them for him, since he would not soil his hands with looking through the catalogue. Nathaniel once observed that Elizabeth's ridicule was the only thing he had ever feared, and she indeed enjoyed a unique vantage from which to poke fun at the vulnerable self-importance she devoted herself to sustaining.^[4] Louisa also joined in his game of imperial loftiness, taking the role of abject subservience to his whims. "I also send the bag of coins," he wrote her on one occasion. "I believe there is a silver threepence among them, which you must take out and bring home, as I cannot put myself to the trouble of looking for it at present" (CE 15:220).

Despite its element of playful humor, this hauteur was a persistent and deeply rooted trait, and it was well known to close friends. Nathaniel enjoyed a small circle of whist-playing companions in Salem during the late 1820s, in which each member was given a title: Harold Conolly was "The Cardinal"; others were "The Chancellor," "The Duchess," and "The Count." Nathaniel's title was "The Emperor."^[5]

Nathaniel's grandiose self-importance flourished in his relation with Sophia. His mock-playful assertion that the institution of marriage had been invented solely for them was not meant to be taken "seriously"; yet Sophia subscribed to its inner meaning and considered herself uniquely fitted to cultivate his imperial pre-eminence. After paying him a visit at Brook Farm, she decided that his life there was unsuitable:

A sacred retreat thou shouldst have, of all men. Most other persons would not desire or like it, but notwithstanding thine exquisite courtesy & conformableness & geniality there, I could see very plainly that thou wast not leading thine ideal life. Never upon the face of any mortal was there such a divine expression of sweetness & kindliness as I saw upon thine during the various transactions & witticisms of the excellent fraternity. Yet it was also the expression of a witness & hearer rather than of comradeship. It seemed to me, that quite unconsciously on thy part, it was the assent & sympathy of a more celestial nature. Had I perceived a particle of even the highest kind of pride in thy manner, it would have spoiled the perfect beauty and fitness, but there was only thy inevitable superiority, which thy true & thorough loveliness could not entirely conceal. I do not wonder that they all worship thee, for nothing is so fascinating as the combination of intellectual greatness with angelic affections. Reverence & love, after struggling in vain for preeminence in those around thee, are finally obliged to sit down side by side on the same throne at thy feet & do thee homage with simultaneous movement. O King by divine right! no one can love & reverence thee as does thy wife. In her heart centers the world's admiration, & from its depths sparkles up, beside, the starry foam of her own separate & incomparable love.^[6]

Did Nathaniel actually believe that the Brook Farmers were dazzled by his divine majesty? Did he believe that they offered him simultaneous love and reverence as an inevitable response to his celestial superiority? He would never openly subscribe to such ridiculous delusions, yet he drank in "the starry foam" of Sophia's adulation with the awareness that it nourished a vital inward self.

Nathaniel and Sophia were bound together by interlocking patterns of unconscious need, their two narcissisms becoming one.^[7] Nathaniel's despotic self-assertions conceal a deep dependency, and Sophia's worship of his divine-right kingship bespeaks her equally repressed impulse to take charge of him. In this marriage of unavowed desire Nathaniel treasures a delicious wayward freedom in which the demands of "others" can be ignored, while Sophia hungers for the display of great intellectual and artistic powers and seeks worldly acclaim vicariously through him. Her worship of him, which was her fulfillment in him, entered the substance of his grandiose and fragile sense of self. Nathaniel's sister Elizabeth resented Sophia with increasing vehemence as the years passed and came to believe that she had enthralled Nathaniel by "the atmosphere of subtle flattery with which she surrounded him."^[8]

As the date of their wedding approached, Sophia was distressed to realize that Nathaniel had not told his mother and sisters about their plans. She

begged him to make the announcement on a visit he made to Salem in February 1842; instead, he wrote in a letter why he could not and indicated the link between his dependence on Sophia and the distinctive character of his art. "I cannot take my heart in my hand, and show it to them," he explains, "as if it would be as indecorous to do so, as to display to them the naked breast, on which God is well pleased that thou shouldst lay thy head" (CE 15:611–612).

The divine communion between them can only be wronged if put into words. "I doubt whether I ever have really spoken of thee, to any person. I have spoken the name of Sophia, it is true; but the idea in my mind was apart from thee—it embraced nothing of thy inner and essential self" (CE 15:612). Yet this "divine" unspeakableness, it now appears, is linked to the "strange reserve, in regard to matters of feeling," that prevails between himself and his mother and sisters. Nathaniel recognizes that "something wrong in our early intercourse" brought about "this incapacity of free communion," but his anguished protestations conceal the fact that he need not "gush out" his "deepest heart-concernments" in telling his mother and sisters of his plan to marry Sophia. Even if his mother and sisters asked to hear all about his relationship with Sophia, he could easily omit its sacred profundities (611–612).

Nathaniel's failure to disclose his marriage plans in a timely manner was a way of taking revenge all around.^[9] What his silence conveyed, once the inevitable belated disclosure finally took place, was his impulse to let them know there were important matters in his own life about which he had told them nothing. Their intense attachment to him opened them to the blow that he strikes, and he likewise stealthily strikes out at Sophia, since she is inevitably implicated in the deception.

Nathaniel's sister Elizabeth, furious, sized up the dimensions of Nathaniel's affront exactly: "My brother has desired me to say only what was true, she wrote to Sophia,

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 engagement of her only son; it is much more difficult to inform her of it at this late period.^[10]

Nathaniel had not struck a "manly" blow but had given injury passively. Yet he was right to blame psychic forces he did not command. The moment

drew him into a scenario of renewed grieving, stirred to life by his prospective departure from the incestuous solidarity with his mother and sisters, whom he now places in the position of knowing him as he had known his father, as one who had departed without warning and without explanation. Nathaniel had repeated in boyhood the fantasy that he was "going away to sea" and would "never come back again" (G. P. Lathrop, A Study, 64). He now confounds and grieves his intimate kin by his mysterious and agonizing remoteness.

Hawthorne seeks to establish a comparable relationship of tantalizing absence with the readers of his fiction. A central feature of his literary temperament is his provocation of troubled yearning. Psychic distress shocked Hawthorne into assuming a pose of transparent ease, even nonchalance, through which he lures the reader into a turbulent emotional engagement. Writing offered Nathaniel an ideal vehicle, since written language simply lies on the page, unaccompanied by a personal presence. Nathaniel's famous equivocations, even his "ambivalence," serve a paradoxical strategy of drawing attention to his remoteness, persistently reminding readers that he is inaccessible.^[11] The conclusion of his letter to Sophia makes his strategy clear:

I tell thee these things, 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. Thou wilt not think that it is caprice or stubbornness that has made me hitherto resist thy wishes. Neither, I think, is it a love of secrecy and darkness. I am glad to think that God sees through my heart; and if any angel has power to penetrate into it, he is welcome to know everything that is there. Yes; and so may any mortal, who is capable of full sympathy, and therefore worthy to come into my depths. But he must find his own way there. I can neither guide him nor enlighten him. It is this involuntary reserve, I suppose, that has given the objectivity to my writings. And when people think that I am pouring myself out in a tale or essay, I am merely telling what is common to human nature, not what is peculiar to myself. I sympathize with them—not they with me.

(CE 15:612–613)

Sophia did not easily set aside her determination that no man would ever have her for a wife. Happy in her psychic union with Nathaniel, she shrank from the prospect of wedlock. Early in their courtship she proposed to be his "sister" and later suggested that "husband" and "wife" should continue

in a spiritual relation, without actually getting married (CE 15:305, 452). As the wedding day drew near, her nervous disabilities grew more intense, and she asked Nathaniel for a postponement.

The womanly rebellion implicit in Sophia's headaches and prostrations drew her into an alternative communion. Through her beloved sisters she had made her way into a circle of Boston friends, women who frequented Elizabeth's West Street bookstore, and attended the readings that Margaret Fuller gave there.

The parties given by Mrs. Cornelia Hall Park that so alarmed Nathaniel were gatherings for this community of spirited women. Sophia's friendship with Connie Park reached back more than ten years, to a time before her marriage to Thomas Park in 1830. When Thomas departed in 1836 to seek his fortune in California, Connie supported herself alone in Boston, where Sophia (and Nathaniel) first met Margaret Fuller at one of her parties in 1839. Connie spent some time at Brook Farm in the early 1840s, resuming the name "Hall," since she had heard nothing in the intervening years from Mr. Park. When the Hawthornes were married in 1842, she was well on her way to obtaining a divorce (CE 15:383, 560).

Nathaniel did not approve of Sophia's friendships with cultivated and independent-minded women and warned against their parties as harmful worldly distractions. "Why do not people know better what is requisite for a Dove, than thus to keep her wings fluttering all day long, never allowing her a moment to fold them in peace and quietness? I am anxious for thee, mine ownest wife. When I have the sole charge of thee, these things shall not be" (CE 15:459).

The imposition of "peace and quietness" on a woman of nervous temperament corresponds to well-attested contemporary medical doctrine. Kathryn Sklar's biography of Catharine Beecher discusses the health spas for women that offered opportunities for just such a respite, and for strengthened womanly communion as well. But Nathaniel wants to eliminate Sophia's associations with other women; he wants her to "glide away from all the world" into her husband's control. Charlotte Perkins Gilman in "The Yellow Wallpaper" describes a comparable course of domestic seclusion, in which the husband insists that solitary rest is the cure that his wife requires, with the result that she goes altogether mad.

Sophia received "magnetic" treatments at the hands of Connie Park that helped to quiet her anxieties. She had been treated in Salem by Dr. Joseph E. Fiske, whose successes contributed to the wave of publicity mesmerism received during the 1830s (Stoehr, 41–42). Sophia's sister Elizabeth was

enthusiastic about the spiritual insight and healing mesmerism provided and apparently tried to treat Sophia after the family moved to Boston. But Sophia found no help until she discovered that Connie Park had the touch.

Nathaniel was horrified by the proposed new treatments because they would give Connie access to Sophia's soul. "There would be an intrusion into thy holy of holies—and the intruder would not be thy husband! Canst thou think, without a shrinking of thy soul, of any human being coming into closer communion with thee than I may?" (CE 15:588). The rhetoric of his oneness with Sophia leads Nathaniel to the bizarre conclusion that Connie will penetrate Sophia sexually in their seances, as only he should do, and that in consequence an adulterous connection will be established between Connie and him. "I really do not like the idea of being brought, through thy medium, into such an intimate relation with Mrs. Park" (CE 15:588).

Sophia did not obey Nathaniel's commands, however, and as their wedding date drew near, she continued to avail herself of Park's treatments. The borderline states of consciousness into which Connie led her, and the womanly solidarity Sophia found there, seem to have assuaged her unconscious conflicts and moderated their physical consequences. Nathaniel's tone meanwhile shifted from the imperious to the pathetic: "My pillow was haunted with ghastly dreams . . . about thy being magnetized. God save me from any more such! I awoke in an absolute quake" (CE 15:634).

Although they claimed that "the ceremony is nothing," Nathaniel and Sophia knew they were approaching a great divide. The ethereal union they expressed in hugs and kisses would now sustain the full force of real sexual intimacy and the rhetoric of childhood would come into contact with actual children. Nathaniel was confident, however, that Sophia's nervous ailments would subside once he had taken control. "Oh, my poor little Dove," he wrote in response to her last fit of illness before their wedding, "thou dost need a husband with a strong will to take care of thee; and when I have the charge of thee, thou wilt find thyself under much stricter discipline than ever before" (CE 15:633).

Chapter Nine—
Androgynous Paradise Lost

"I seem to be translated out of that former Sophia Peabody's body-corporate entirely," Sophia rejoiced as the newlyweds settled into the Old Manse, "& now inhabit the fair, round, dancing, rosy, elastic form of Mistress Sophie Hawthorne. Nothing can be farther from my purposes than to be upon a sickbed."^[1] Living with Nathaniel fostered her saucy independence, what he had called the "Sophie Hawthorne" side of her character. She describes romping across a field that was waiting to be harvested; in the round of affectionate teasing that follows, she flaunts her "naughtiness" against his mock-serious authority:

He told me I had transgressed the law of right in trampling down the unmown grass & he tried to induce me to come back, that he might not have to violate his conscience by doing the same thing. And I was very naughty & would not obey & therefore he punished me by staying behind. This I did not like very well, & I climbed the hill alone. We penetrated the pleasant gloom & sat down upon the carpet of dried pine leaves. Then I clasped him in my arms in the lovely shade & we lay down a few moments on the bosom of dear Mother Earth. Oh how sweet it was! And I told him I would not be so naughty again, & there was a very slight diamond shower without any thunder or lightning & we were happiest. . . . There was no wind & the stillness was profound. There seemed no movement in the world but that of our pulses.^[2]

Their communion of souls was now consummated sexually, and Sophia's narrative—culminating in the thunderless diamond shower—traces the

emotional pattern of their lovemaking when it flowered as harmless play. Sophia takes the initiative, leading the way to the hilltop bower and clasps her man in her arms. The paradoxes of dominance and submission now appear in a complex minuet: Sophia's impudent assumption of leadership is framed so as to court her husband's need to yield himself up to her; yet the scene overtly acknowledges his authority, which is defied, asserted, and relaxed only in fun. These psychic complexities imparted a mysterious wealth to the newlyweds' intimacy. "We spend hours," Sophia writes, "in miraculous interweavings of spirit which confound my understanding. We find both that we did not imagine, with all our vivid imaginings, what wonderful happiness it is to dwell together, and interchange life every moment" (15 August 1842).

In keeping with the sexual conventions of the domestic ideal, the Hawthornes found that erotic pleasure was the medium of spiritual union, what Sarah Grimke termed "that yearning for mutual absorption into each other, which alone gives vitality to every true marriage" (Degler, 266).^[3] The Hawthornes themselves referred to sexual relations as "blissful interviews," a mutual communication for which "intercourse" came to be the accepted name.^[4] The famous prudery that policed the boundaries of the middle-class household and the repressive strategies at work within it take part in constituting Victorian sexual relations as a supremely meaning-intensive experience. The work of Michel Foucault and Peter Gay describes this Victorian paradox of repressed and proliferating sexuality, and the Hawthornes' experience amply illustrates its central element,^[5] the role of sex as a sensuous language.

As Sophia's headstrong spirit becomes a theme of sexual pleasure, so also does Nathaniel's imperial pre-eminence. She made him a purple robe, clearly designed as royal regalia, to adorn and accentuate his breath-catching physical beauty. "Nathaniel wore it out once to walk with me," she tells his sister Louisa, and "he looks very imperial in it. I wish you could see him. He does not need any garnishing to make him splendid, but splendid attire becomes him very much. Miss Burley, you know, thinks he ought to dress in velvet, & sit in a sumptuous chair & write & muse" (CE 16:5). Hawthorne himself joined in the spirit of this occasion by adding the following peremptory notice to his sister: "I want you to send those pearl buttons—they being all that is wanting to the perfection of the imperial robe. Hereof fail not" (7–8).

Sophia was happy to play up to Nathaniel's role as "Emperor." "My dancing days have returned," she informs her mother. "I dance before him to the music of the musical box & of my own thoughts & he said once that

I deserve John the Baptist's head. I know I danced very well once. Now I can better" (5 August 1842). Thus Sophia announces her pleasure in figuring as a latter-day Salome, inflaming the desire of King Herod. The seduction of Nathaniel—as lustful oriental potentate—replays the paradox in which a worshiping Sophia stoops to conquer. Sophia danced to the tune of a music box that the Hawthornes called "our domestic harmony," but the music of the box was only a meager token of the ecstasy they found when erotic playfulness brought on orchestral thunder. "My husband & I do not need it now," Sophia declared after they lent the box to Thoreau. "All Beethoven is within us now, all the Symphonies ever composed & all that lay slumbering in his mighty soul that never found utterance" (2 October 1842).

Mrs. Peabody was hardly delighted by the implication that Sophia had joined herself in marriage to a voluptuary tyrant; she had long feared that her daughter's romantic impetuousness would lead to "ruin," and Sophia's oblique reference to Herod was a taunt, aimed unerringly at this maternal anxiety. Sophia's description of her dancing specifically invokes a conflict that arose during her voyage to Cuba, where she had become enamored of James Burroughs, whose bad reputation was quickly brought to the attention of her mother and sisters. When it was reported in Boston that Burroughs was reading Sophia's love letters aloud for the entertainment of his companions in a New Orleans boardinghouse, the ensuing moral panic prompted Mrs. Peabody to forbid dancing—at the parties Sophia attended in Cuba—on the ground that such excitement was bad for Sophia's health.^[6] Now Sophia saucily reports that her husband is pleased by her return to the languorous and impulsive freedom of the tropics: "I sleep as I did in Cuba & can at any time take a good nap. Then I wake all dewy fresh & am ready to walk miles, or dance the Cachucha, Cracovienne or whatever jig. I was lazy exactly so in Cuba" (11 August 1842).

King Herod figured as a commonplace warning, in the imagery of republican manhood, against the failure of moral self-command that would doom the American experiment in democracy, ensuring its collapse into despotism. Slaves of passion, so the convention taught, would become slaves in fact, or slavemasters. In her running debate with her mother about Nathaniel's character, Sophia defiantly insists that his taste for oriental luxury was a mark of his perfect independence and self-government, not of despotic license. "Mr. Hawthorne said this morning that he should like to have a study with a soft, thick Turkey carpet upon the floor," Sophia wrote after eight years of marriage, "& hung round with full crimson curtains, so as to hide all rectangles." But Mr. Hawthorne would never accept such a voluptuous

tabernacle, so long as it "would demand the slightest extravagance, because he is as severe as a stoic . . . & never in his life allowed himself a luxury. . . . It is both wonderful & admirable to see how his taste for splendor and perfection is not the slightest temptation to him; how wholly independent he is of what he would like" (29 September 1850).

Sophia also defended her husband against the related charge of womanish weakness, which rested on the conventional belief that erotic feeling "unlocks every manly power of the soul" so that "the body become effeminated."^[7] The Peabodys were offended by Nathaniel's aversion to visiting in their homes, and his addiction to solitude appeared to them suspiciously feminine. Sophia concedes that it is often "a real torture to him to enter the room" when they have guests but insists that "he always faced that occasion like a man" (9–10 October 1842).

Her family fails to recognize, Sophia declares, that Nathaniel possesses a divine poetic manhood, into which feminine qualities are incorporated. He is not "a social visitor & chatting companion" but "a poet of the highest grade—who must stand apart and observe." Nathaniel's "extremely fine & harp-like organization" makes it difficult for him to meet people; and he simply cannot bandy words about in casual talk. To him words are "worlds—suns and systems—& cannot move easily and rapidly. The light of them radiates from his well-like eyes" (3 September 1843).

To comprehend Nathaniel's androgynous character as an "Apollo" of divine light, the Peabodys must understand that he tenderly absorbs his experience into a nurturing inward space. He allows his creative work to gestate, so that his own intentions are not rudely imposed but "clothed upon with language after their own will & pleasure" (9 January 1844). Sophia demands that her family cease to judge Nathaniel by a commonplace standard of manhood, pointedly observing that "Mr Emerson who is ever searching after a man, used always to call him 'The Man.' " As for Sophia's sister Mary, who had complained about his shyness, "she had not the smallest notion of him. What she regards as weakness in [him] is but a very strong resolution" (3 September 1843).

Reinforcing Sophia's faith was Margaret Fuller, who had praised Nathaniel's androgyny when she learned that he and Sophia were to marry. "I think there will be great happiness," she declared, "for if ever I saw a man who combined delicate tenderness to understand the heart of a woman, with quiet depth and manliness enough to satisfy her, it is Mr. Hawthorne."^[8] Fuller visited the Hawthornes at the Old Manse a month after they were married and again when she was working on Woman in the Nineteenth

Century, where she declared that "there is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman" and that "all men of genius" share "the feminine development." Fuller's remark that "man partakes of the feminine in the Apollo" may well echo Sophia's nickname for Nathaniel (113, 116).

Sophia staunchly defended her husband's androgynous character, and the "miraculous interweavings" of their intimacy, against her family's suspicions and disapproval. As in their courtship, they found a fulfillment in their life together that satisfied yearnings of their inmost souls. The complexity of their interdependence created misery enough, in due course, but it also meant they were suited to each other, and they clung to their precious union amid the sexual anxieties that now assailed them. For middle-class Americans in the early nineteenth century erotic experience became a language of sacred intimacy, as noted; it was also an arena of meanings in collision. The cultural arrangement that made sex a fountain of bliss simultaneously rendered it a morass of loathing and dread.

Companionate marriage provided a locale in which a man could make tangible his own reality, a haven from the dehumanizing forces of a competitive capitalist economy. Yet the manhood required for surviving worldly turmoil was not laid aside when the man escaped his disconcerting relations with other men and came home to his wife. On the contrary, his domestic existence was arranged so as to reinforce the necessary worldly virtues of stoical severity and self-reliance, not least because the failure to exercise these virtues at home could destroy the family's prospect of entering the middle class or remaining in it. Middle-class couples perforce became "prudent procreators," in Mary Ryan's memorable phrase, because having too many children could overwhelm a family's finances.^[9] Erotic life was given its paradoxical character by the effort to make sex wholly voluntary, to fashion a sign of consummate self-control from an experience that has stubbornly involuntary features.

The emerging middle-class obsession with maintaining self-control in the face of sexual desire was expressed in the theories of John Humphrey Noyes, who proposed an alternative to monogamous marriage to preserve the spiritual communion enshrined as its essence. Although Noyes was denounced as a threat to public morals, his radical stance illuminates central themes of the sexual code becoming established as conventional. In the "free love" commune he founded at Oneida, New York, Noyes drew a sharp line between "amative" sexuality, which remained within voluntary control, and "propagative" sexuality, in which orgasm took place. In "amative" union, a couple engaged in mutual caresses, including penetration, so as to realize the

exalted fusion of souls that is the God-given function of the penis and the vagina. These Noyes considered to be "organs of union," quite distinct from the testicles and the uterus, which were "organs of propagation." "Sexual Intercourse," Noyes explained, "is the conjunction of the organs of union, and the interchange of magnetic influences, or conversation of spirits, through the medium of that conjunction." The discharge of semen is no more necessary to sexual intercourse than the discharge of urine, Noyes taught, and must take place only when the couple has obtained specific authorization from the community to conceive a child.^[10] It is doubtful that sexual continence has ever been put in practice more heroically, but the self-restraint enshrined at Oneida makes explicit a criterion of moral adequacy whose demands were felt in every middle-class home.

The ideal of self-sovereign middle-class manhood produced an autophobic sexuality, such that erotic arousal was chronically attended by dread and was experienced as disgust and guilt when it was felt to stray beyond the boundaries of self-control. Male terror and loathing in the presence of female sexual power were not invented in the nineteenth century; evidence of them is abundant at the mythological fountainheads of Western culture, in the image of Medusa, for example, and in the solitary Hebrew god Yahweh, who is notable among the divinities of the ancient Near East for lacking a consort. But the element of male self-loathing in this ancient scheme of responses was accentuated in the nineteenth century as men sought to hold themselves to a standard of inward self-sovereignty.

As the studies of G. J. Barker-Benfield and Stephen Nissenbaum have illustrated at length, middle-class males found involuntary sexual excitement a markedly disagreeable and frightening experience. An extensive advice literature appeared, promoting "male purity" and vividly portrayed the miseries of sexual "pollution." Sylvester Graham's program of diet and hygiene acquired many adherents, who hoped to escape the dreaded consequences of "excessive lasciviousness" within marriage as well as without. This literature of masculine panic referred to orgasm—when involuntary processes take control altogether—as a "paroxysm"; and Graham himself likened orgasm to the convulsions of acute cholera, epilepsy, and heart attack (Nissenbaum, Sex, 109–110). The relaxation that follows orgasm was felt as a penalty for the overmastering desire that precedes it and was termed "debilitation," a feverish state of erotic preoccupation that leads to additional failures of sexual self-command, lust once unbridled having a nasty self-propulsion that keeps running until exhaustion and self-disgust are complete. "Diseased prurience," "nervous melancholy," and "polluted lassi-

tude" were terms for this all-too-familiar condition (Nissenbaum, Sex, 106–108).

Nathaniel projects images of such contaminated masculine sexuality into the Concord River, which ran close by the Old Manse, where he spent many hours fishing and gathering flowers for Sophia. "I can find nothing more fit to compare it with, than one of the half torpid earthworms, which I dig up for the purpose of bait. The worm is sluggish, and so is the river—the river is muddy, and so is the worm—you hardly know whether either of them is alive or dead." From his first fishing expedition Nathaniel brought home only "an enormous eel"—which he and Sophia ate—"and truly he had the taste of the whole river in his flesh, with a very prominent flavor of mud" (CE 8:320). Even when his luck at fishing improves, Nathaniel's vision of the river as a domain of sexual filth remains strong. "It seems as if we could catch nothing but frogs and mud-turtles, or reptiles akin to them; and even when a fish of reputable aspect is drawn out, you feel a shyness about touching him. As to our river, my little wife expressed its character admirably, last night; she said 'it was too lazy to keep itself clean' " (345). The voluptuous Cuban laziness Sophia had flaunted before her mother now reappears as the torpor of Nathaniel's sexual exhaustion, his penis after orgasm symbolized by the flabby muddy slime of worms and eels.

Nathaniel had long been devoted to a pattern of life—cultivating his own fancies in a compulsive bookish solitude—well recognized as conducive to prurient lassitude, and in particular to masturbation, a practice especially beset by the anxieties of self-made manhood. "Allow me to lift up a loud voice against those rovings of the imagination," the prominent anti-masturbationist Reverend John Todd cried out, "by which the mind is at once enfeebled, and the heart and feelings debased and polluted. It is almost inseparable from the habit of revery" (Barker-Benfield 173). Editing Hawthorne's notebooks for publication, Sophia discovered that her husband had written—about his long seclusion in Salem—that he had won fame "in this dismal and squalid chamber"; she promptly canceled the term "squalid" to remove the implication of sexual pollution.^[11]

Nathaniel's custom, well established during the Salem years, was to counteract his own languor in the way recommended by the literature of sexual hygiene, by taking various forms of vigorous exercise, especially swimming.^[12] But his conscientious efforts to keep himself clean by swimming in the Concord River only involve him further in its eerie defiling power. "I bathe once, and often twice a day, in our river; but one dip into the salt-sea would be worth more than a whole week's soaking in such a lifeless tide. I have read

of a river somewhere . . . which seemed to dissolve and steal away the vigor of those who bathed in it. Perhaps our stream will be found to have this property" (CE 8:319). Nathaniel now had to contend not merely with his own reveries but with the round, dancing, rosy, elastic body of his wife, and his preoccupation with the sluggish, filthy river reflects the anxiety that he felt at her power to arouse him, bring him to "paroxysm," and leave him exhausted.

The ideal of feminine "purity"—that indispensable virtue of the domestic angel—recruited women to the task of allaying male sexual anxiety. Mrs. Peabody's distress about Sophia's reputation and her prohibition of dancing during the Cuban sojourn illustrate a familiar matronly role, that of policing conduct in relation to this code. But no matter how prominently women figured as enforcers, the politics of purity was rooted ultimately in male needs.

A pure woman aided men in retaining self-control by transmuting masculine lust into reverent admiration. Prompting her man to pay her adoring attentions that would not get her pregnant, this wifely virtue was a form of psychic birth control, necessary to limit family size and thus maintain middleclass status. Because the domestic angel did not seek her own pleasure, she did not become the target of her husband's self-disgust, which was projected upon such "impure" women as might illicitly arouse him.

Hawthorne was fascinated all his life by the male psychodynamics of feminine purity and treats them in such early tales as "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Minister's Black Veil." As Nina Baym observes, however, the vein of hostility against women deepens in the works he produced following his marriage, so that "The Birthmark" and "Rappacini's Daughter" depict a male imagination for which sexual attraction is virtually indistinguishable from revulsion.^[13]

Reverence for the purity of woman is associated with chronic sexual guilt and convulsive misogynist loathing in Nathaniel's description of gathering flowers for his wife to arrange, a favorite ritual of their early married life. Nathaniel discovers that the filth of the river produces two sorts of lilies, of which the "pond lily" becomes a symbol of Sophia's purity. "It is a marvel whence it derives its loveliness and perfume, sprouting as it does from the black mud over which the river sleeps, and from which, likewise, the yellow lily draws its unclean life and noisome perfume." Hawthorne likens the yellow lily to persons who soak up and embody the evil of the world, whereas the "spotless and fragrant pond-lily" transforms the evil into loveliness. "I possess such a human and heavenly lily, and wear it in my bosom. Heaven

grant that I myself may not be symbolized by its yellow companion" (CE 8:318–319).

Since the purity of the domestic angel inspires her husband to sublimate the sexual filth that stains his life, his worship conceals an inner liability to panic and disgust. Sophia plays her role in the Hawthornes' floral drama by arranging the flowers that Nathaniel brings in by the armful. Yet as he observes that she has a natural gift for putting all this erotic imagery in order, his language veers compulsively into loathing. "She has, in perfection, the love and taste for flowers," Nathaniel affirms, "without which a woman is a monster" (CE 8:319).

This invocation of womanly monstrosity serves notice that the bodily capacities expressing the Hawthornes' marital communion also had the power to drive them apart. Once sexual experience moved beyond the playful and the "naughty" and the full force of passionate desire entered their relationship, the imperial aloofness through which Nathaniel shored up his self-possession threatened to give way, and the underlying dread was stirred into fitful expression. Nathaniel's allusion to Herod and Salome, so jauntily reported by Sophia to her mother, arises through a reference to John the Baptist's head on a platter, a hideous image of unmanning. In saying that Sophia "deserves" such an offering, Nathaniel repeats the psychic strategy by which he sought to manage his fears, that of casting himself as a voluptuary emperor, and Sophia sustained this strategy by playing a spirited Salome. But Sophia had also internalized with special intensity the conventional wifely role: she was superangelic. She embodied an immaculate purity that shielded Nathaniel against the terrors of self-loss, the nightmare that erupts in his momentary hallucinations of monster women and the prophet's severed head.

The erotics of middle-class purity were inherently precarious, and for the Hawthornes the characteristic tensions were unusually strong, so that Sophia envisions sexuality as an all-but-forbidden fruit of wonderful deliciousness that is available only when the purity of the sexual partners is absolute:^[14]

It is the inward thought alone that renders the body either material or angelical. . . . Before our marriage I knew nothing of its capacities & the truly married alone can know what a wondrous instrument it is for the purposes of the heart. . . . The unholiness of union on any other ground than entire oneness of spirit, immediately & eternally causes the sword of the flaming Cherubim to wave before this tree of life. The prophane never can taste the joy of Elysium, because it is a spiritual joy & they cannot perceive it.

(Family Notebook, undated entry)

The bliss of sex is perfect so long as it meets the demands of self-possession, remaining an "instrument" for expressing the "entire oneness" that makes up a true marriage. The two hearts must have exactly the same purposes if the couple is not to be cast forever out of Paradise.

This doctrine had practical consequences apart from the Hawthornes' sexual relations. To maintain "oneness," the couple must agree on decisions about the ordinary business of living. Mrs. Peabody was dismayed at Sophia's worship of Nathaniel, but soon after the newlyweds' arrival at the Old Manse, Sophia explains that his divine perfection gives her freedom. "Do not fear that I shall be too subject to my Adam," she writes to her mother.

He loves power as little [as] any mortal I ever knew & it is never a question of private will between us, but of absolute right. His conscience is too fine & high toned to permit him to be arbitrary. His will is strong, but not to govern others. Our love is so wide & deep & equal that there could not be much difference of opinion between us upon any moral point. He is such a simple transcript of the angelic nature . . . that even should he will me to do, I should find my highest instinct correspond with his will. I never knew such etherial delicacy of nature.

(30 August–4 September 1842)

This hardly looks like a charter of womanly power; yet it clearly asserts Sophia's right to pronounce on the quality of Nathaniel's character. The ideal of feminine purity provided grounds from which women could resist oppression, since "pure women enjoyed a markedly enhanced moral authority, including the right to refuse sexual advances and to demand that men adhere to a new standard of moral rectitude. As sexual morality took on a heightened significance during the Victorian period, women emerged as arbiters of male virtue both in the home and beyond it.^[15]

The ideal of purity plays this dual role in the Hawthorne household. Sophia looks on Nathaniel as a god but asserts her right to declare him one. Who better than Sophia could identify "etherial delicacy of nature"? As to Nathaniel's sexuality, Sophia claimed it was perfectly adjusted to the requirements of her own nature, even when these requirements became more complex as the months of marriage passed and her early physical exuberance gave way to returning spells of nervous distress. Rather than intruding his own demands, Nathaniel's body responded like a barometer to the fluctuating pressures of her delicate psychic organization. "He has no brute force; but every part of his frame seems in perfect diapason, as a bird's. I should be afraid of him if he were in ferocious health, unable to conceive of delicate bodies or untuned nerves. But he is as comprehensive of every imaginable

state I could be in as if his own physique were my barometer . . . & as if the same plectrum struck both our chords together. This I call heavenly health" (21–22 January 1844).

Sophia believed Nathaniel as pure as she herself, having a communion like her own with absolute right, which canceled merely private will. This language of joint purity modifies their earlier rhetoric of "inward and eternal union" and forms the code within which they managed the new stresses of married life. Nathaniel's insistence on Sophia's absolute pond-lily purity aided him in overcoming his dread of sexual pollution through her; and her insistence on his "heavenly health" allayed her own sharp misgiving at the threat of subordination to him, including sexual subordination. But sexuality was not the only source of opposition they sought to master through a reassertion of their entire oneness; such reassertions become obsessive, in fact, as their marriage chronically set them at odds.

Both Nathaniel and Sophia were psychically dependent on their mothers and sought to perpetuate infantile satisfactions in their life together. "I wish I could be a wife & daughter at the same time," Sophia wrote to Mrs. Peabody within a month of her wedding (5 August 1842). After a visit in March 1843 she wrote, "Goodbye dear Mamma. . . . I shall sit in your corner with you a great deal & see the world from under your wing. Your happy child Sophiechen."^[16] To Nathaniel their life in paradise secured an exemption from "the fight with the world—the struggle of a man among men—the agony of the universal effort to wrench the means of life from a host of greedy competitors." He leads, instead, a life of "boyish thoughtlessness" (CE 8:332).

Nathaniel demanded exclusive mothering attention from Sophia, and his desire to cut her off from other relationships could now be enforced. Within a week of the wedding, Nathaniel forbade her to write to her mother: "My noble lord has been so anxious lest I should do too much," Sophia explains, "that he has prevented my sending you another greeting" (15 July 1842). Sophia never overtly complains about such treatment, but after three years of marriage she writes a description of Nathaniel's petty tyranny in which her own gesture of adoring submission is all but frankly sarcastic. He "never lets me get tired. The intuitions of his heart are so unerring that he arrests me the moment before I do too much, & he is then immitigable, & I cannot obtain grace to sew even an inch more, even if an inch more would finish

my work. I have such rich experience of his wisdom in these things, that whatever may be the inconvenience, I gratefully submit" (6 March 1846).

Sophia likewise professed herself blissfully happy with their isolation at the Old Manse. Nathaniel noted that she "has come to me from the midst of many friends, and a large circle of acquaintance; yet she lives from day-to-day in this solitude, seeing nobody but myself and our Molly [Mary O'Brien, the maid], while the snow of our avenue is untrodden for weeks by any footstep save mine; yet she is always cheerful, and far more than cheerful" (CE 8:367). Sophia enthusiastically agreed that satisfying Nathaniel's desire for "sole intercourse" was all the life she needed: "Not at balls & routs should I care to walk in silk attire, but in the profound shelter of this home, I would put on daily a velvet robe . . . to gratify my husband's taste. . . . Behold a true wife's world! It is her husband only."^[17]

A journal Sophia kept during December 1843, however, recorded her misery at being kept within "a true wife's world," together with the hysterical outbursts that provide an outlet for her torment and allow her to place some modest demands on her husband. She describes a suffocating routine of sewing and reading, and reading with Nathaniel, and teaching the maid to read. When Nathaniel goes to the village, she waits anxiously for him to return and notes that "he brought no letters nor news" ("A Sophia Hawthorne Journal," 4). Only three times during the month does she go to the village herself. She takes walks in the lane, sometimes, but more frequently Nathaniel requires her to walk indoors, in the "gallery." When Mary O'Brien becomes ill, Sophia tires herself providing care but states that she was chiefly "wearied by the excessive anxiety of my beloved husband, who thought I should be injured" (11). Sophia rejoices when Nathaniel permits her the felicity of sitting silently in his company while he reads or writes. She herself struggles recurrently to paint, despite a besetting nervousness and drowsiness. More than once she cannot help interrupting her husband, without his permission, because she was "terribly homesick down stairs without him" (18).

Noting that the effort to paint distresses her, Nathaniel advises her to refrain, and for a time she acquiesces. On her next attempt she is "possessed with an obstinate fiend" that drives her to seek her husband's company, only to find she has again interrupted his writing, and, "conscience stricken," she goes back downstairs. "I felt desolate & nervous & as if I wanted to weep a river. I had to return to the study, it was so cold & comfortless below, & the wind all the while confusing my brain." The wind continued to blow and to haunt her dreadfully through the rest of the day, and into the following

night, when she "dreamed of women in fits, & many horrors" ("A Sophia Hawthorne Journal," 19–20).

Sophia's frantic inner distress rose to the surface when Nathaniel accidentally knocked over a bust of Ceres, "who came tumbling down, scattering her remains over me & the room with an astounding crash." At first Sophia felt very quiet"; then she "began to feel nervous & shocked & as if I must have a thunder gust of tears to relieve myself"; finally, she gave way to shattering sobs ("A Sophia Hawthorne Journal," 18). She is thankful for the kindness of "the best husband in the world," who soothes her "with his divine caresses & seraph tones" and comforts her in the night with stories of his boyhood paradise at Raymond (10, 18). As her chronicle of boredom, restlessness, hysteria, and terrifying nightmares comes to a close, Sophia invokes the uncanny union between herself and her husband as an all-sufficient solace. She records painting happily and well one day: "Every thing went right & I succeeded quite to my mind. I felt sure my husband above me must also be having a propitious morning with his muse, or I could not feel so altogether content. When he came to dinner, I asked him, & he said he did not know as he ever felt so much like writing on any one day. We seemed to respond to one another exactly, as if particularly united & I think it was so. Were we two persons?" (22).

Nathaniel's determination to keep Sophia within a regimen of rest and quiet was particularly resolute during this period because she was entering the last months of her second pregnancy, her first having ended in a miscarriage in February 1843. The Hawthornes eagerly looked forward to the birth of a child, and after the miscarriage Hawthorne consoled himself with the thought that the baby's coming had only been delayed. "The longer we live together—the deeper we penetrate into one another, and become mutually interfused—the happier we are. God will surely crown our union with children, because it fulfils the highest conditions of marriage" (CE 8:366).

For the children of Eden, to contemplate having a baby brought unacknowledged conflicts to a new pitch of intensity. Not only would the newcomer increase the burden of household expense, but it would also challenge Nathaniel's claim to Sophia's exclusive care and place unwonted burdens on Sophia. Hawthorne was distressed by the miscarriage, yet it appears that the temporary loss of Sophia's attention troubled him as much as losing the baby. "It was the first time I had been taken from him," Sophia explained to her mother, "& the world seemed standing on its head to him, boulversing himself with it. One can hardly estimate, except me, what an entire change of life it was to him. It seems now as if some invisible James Clarke had married us again" (February 1843; misdated 1844).

The Hawthornes met the anxieties of parenthood through a massive deployment of their characteristic strategy, sublimating discord into an exaltation of their union. The resultant emotional pattern defined the child's nurture in a system already taking form when her parents agreed on a name. "Many months before she was born," Sophia remarked, "we anticipated a daughter, & named her Una" (Family Notebook, 7 April 1844).

In choosing this name the Hawthornes asserted their "oneness" and declared its quality, invoking the nineteenth-century convention that had transformed Spenser's maiden of holiness into an icon of Victorian purity. Mrs. Peabody had herself produced a prose version—in contemporary English—of the first book of The Faerie Queene and focuses on the incident that became central to the Victorian meaning of Una's character, when the maiden's radiant beauty so overawes a charging lion that instead of devouring her, he becomes her willing slave and protector. "Una is more than Eve," Mrs. Peabody explained. "Innocence and truth melt into one, to form ideal woman, before whom bow the Lionhearted, in the service that elevates the very quality of their nature" (Holiness; or, the Legend of St. George, 177).

Sophia was quick to assert, however, that the name did not celebrate feminine virtue at her husband's expense. Nathaniel himself displays this sublime purity, and she hopes the baby will live up to the standard that he sets. "If she be like her father, as well in mind as face, she will be rightly named—of most delicate spirit, impatient of wrong & ugliness—demanding beauty of all things & persons & like the 'heavenly Una' of Spenser" (Family Notebook, 7 April 1844). This adulatory remark has a troubling sound and strikes a note that becomes more and more insistent in Sophia's responses to the child. She pointedly avoids intimating that she dotes on her baby any more than on Nathaniel: "Every morning when I wake & find the darling lying there" is "an additional felicity to my previously sufficient bliss" (5 April 1844).

The baby administered a powerful shock to the Hawthornes' relationship, as revealed by Sophia's abrupt announcement that Nathaniel is sending her home to her mother. "He feels a great desire that baby & I should change air & that I should change scene, & he wants me to stay a fortnight!! Was ever heard such a thing?" Unwilling to let this explanation stand, Nathaniel required Sophia to add a postscript about her "malady": "a congestion of blood in my head. . . . [which] feels as if it had had a blow . . . & my nose has bled three or four times" (May 1844).^[18]

Sophia mentions several causes: "One is the heat I am in while washing & dressing baby in the morning for I must have a little fire, or she shivers—another is the stretch of mind I have had because I want to accomplish so many things & have time to do none—another is rocking while I hold baby

sometimes. . . . My head not only feels as if it had had a blow, but once in a while I seem to have a new knock upon it. . . . It troubles my husband so much that I should like something to cure it if possible directly" (May 1844).

Both Sophia and Nathaniel were temporarily confounded, and each ascribed the collapse of their oneness to the other. Nathaniel had confidently expected that Sophia's nervous condition would clear up once he had removed her into the "natural" relations of marriage. Sophia herself had boasted, in the early weeks of marriage, that a physical metamorphosis had taken place; and later, when her headaches and hysterical weeping returned, she found the seraphic caresses of her husband an all-sufficient remedy. But in the midst of washing and dressing and rocking the baby she had received a blow to the head that Nathaniel's attentiveness could not cure; and Nathaniel was likewise severely disconcerted.

His letters to Sophia during her absence indicate how acutely he desired a restoration of the exclusive relation he had enjoyed before the child was born, when there was no third party to spoil his Eden. "Ah, why canst not thou be with me here—and no Mary—no nobody else!" As he acknowledges that Una's birth has now made this impossible, his language takes on a sinister ambiguity: "But our little Una! Should not she be of the party? Yes; we have linked a third spirit forever to our own; and there is no existing without her" (CE 16:39). Hawthorne conveys both love and loathing here; that "there is no existing without her" celebrates their fulfillment and expresses his bitter regret.

The fusion of contraries that was present in the union of Sophia and Nathaniel was thus focused on their newborn child. Una is made to represent the central tension of her parents' relationship, in which mutually divergent energies are sublimated into an Edenic childlike purity. As we shall see, Sophia found it relatively easy to project this supernatural energy into the child's character, to see her as a maiden of holiness in fact. Nathaniel, meanwhile, struggled with a hostility he could not openly express, trying to acknowledge his divided response in terms that would insist on the inviolacy of his union with Sophia. His first letter during Sophia's stay in Boston seems to find a solution. "How does our belovedest little Una?—whom I love more than I ever told thee, though not more than thou knowest—for is she not thine and mine, the symbol of the one true union in the world, and of our love in Paradise" (CE 16:37).

Una's birth sharpened Nathaniel's need to make money. Despite its claim on his emotional makeup, his escape into Eden from the scramble of "greedy competitors" had never been complete. He had married knowing that Sophia's delicacy forbade her to keep house, so that a maid would have to be provided, and he quickly resumed the effort to find a dependable source of income. Within six weeks of moving to the Old Manse, he hopes for an editorship with the Boston Miscellany; four months later he fails to land a job at the Salem Post Office and hopes another government position will show up soon. By March 1843 he cannot pay his bills; he himself had not been paid by his publishers and is enraged at being forced to break his word.^[19]

Hawthorne thus confronted a bitter irony: the paradise in which he cultivated his art exposed him to the uncertainties of commerce in a way that holding a regular job would not. Fluctuations in the national economy, as well as the hazards of maintaining any particular magazine, struck directly at his pocketbook. So long as he depended on literary endeavors for a livelihood, the mercenary scrimmage bore in on him with added force.

Once Una was born, this dilemma grew more acute. He tells Hillard that the birth of a child "ought not to come too early in a man's life—not till he has fully enjoyed his youth—for methinks the spirit never can be thoroughly gay and careless again, after this great event. . . . It will never do for me to continue merely a writer of stories for the magazines—the most unprofitable business in the world." Earlier he had cherished a fantasy that the earth (with its "system of credit") might be smashed to pieces by a comet. Now he declares he would rather starve than be a writer for bread, but the baby makes this unthinkable. "In that case, poor little Una would have to take refuge in the alms-house—which, here in Concord, is a most gloomy old mansion. Her 'angel face' would hardly make a sunshine there" (CE 16:22–23).

After Sophia's return from Boston in June 1844, the Hawthornes dismissed their maid and vainly sought a replacement they could afford. By August Nathaniel had assumed a major share of the housekeeping. "My Hyperion is cook & maid," Sophia reports. "It is no poetry to cook and wash dishes. . . . But as the only way we can make money now seems to be to save it & as he declares we can manage till September, we will remain alone till then" (19–20 August 1844). Nathaniel's housework extended at least until Thanksgiving, however, when Sophia writes that "he will consent to cease to be kitchen-maid" since the Democrat James K. Polk has been elected president, and prospects for a government job have improved. A plan is now in motion for Sophia's sister Elizabeth to make an appeal on Nathaniel's

behalf, as she had done before, and Sophia insists that Lizzie must not settle for a "moderate" income. "The greater the amount of thousands, the sooner can there be Otium cum dignitate—when works divine can be elaborated with an uncarefull mind" (20 November 1844).

Yet Hawthorne had just completed the greatest work of the Manse period, in the midst of cooking and housekeeping. It was not otium cum dignitate now or later that prompted his most powerful creations but circumstances forcing him into his internal torment. "Rappacini's Daughter" explores the fusion of celestial love with sexual loathing in an Eden of poisonous flowers (CE 16:66).

At the heart of the narrative is the interactive relationship between the "nature" of Beatrice Rappacini and the way she is viewed by her lover, Giovanni, an interaction that probes the dread of womanly sexuality that was hidden within the ideal of purity. Giovanni perceives that lethal toxins pervade Beatrice's body, yet she also strikes him as "worthiest to be worshipped" because endowed "with all gentle and feminine qualities" (CE 10:114). As he basks in "the Oriental sunshine of her beauty," Giovanni soon finds himself powerless to resist the "fierce and subtle poison" he conceives her to have instilled in him (110). He feels a "lurid intermixture" of contradictory emotions that make a "continual warfare in his breast": the poison within him is a "wild offspring of both love and horror" that "burned like one and shivered like the other" (105).

Giovanni's passions, like the "nature" of Beatrice, are contained within a larger framework of male contention, the rivalry between Giovanni's friend, Professor Baglioni, and Beatrice's father. Baglioni condemns Rappacini for pursuing a theory that restates the fusion of opposites Hawthorne pursues in the tale itself, that "all medicinal virtues are comprised within those substances which we term vegetable poisons" (CE 10:100). Rappacini cultivates his toxic garden for the sake of advancing this theory. "Was this garden, then, the Eden of the present world?" Giovanni asks; "and this man . . . was he the Adam?" (96). Rather than providing an innocent retreat from worldly competition, the garden is a laboratory where Rappacini carries out the ruthless experiments on which his fame is grounded, of which the most horrible is embuing Beatrice herself with the poison that is virtue.

Hawthorne's tale is fiercely engaged with the buried issues of his life at the Old Manse. It portrays an Edenic retreat where worldly striving is intensified, where male sexual horror is innate to the worship of feminine purity. Hawthorne's intimate struggles are at work here: his professional dilemma (where paradise was a cauldron of competitive stress) and his

sexual confusion (where the pond lily of perfection was rooted in muck). Yet his personal anguish was a sharper version of male experience in the culture at large, where torments were objectified and controlled in the proliferating array of oppositions (home versus world, innocence versus corruption, woman versus man) that sustained the domestic ideal. "Rappacini's Daughter" dismantles the definition of moral reality, in particular womanly reality, that helped men conceal their helplessness and frailty behind the necessary facade of self-possession. The terms defining the "goodness" or "evil" of Beatrice are themselves put in question by the narrative. Yet those very terms were the accepted language of the Hawthornes' life together. When Nathaniel read the partly finished tale to Sophia, she asked whether Beatrice would turn out to be a demon or an angel, and he could only say that he had no idea (NHW 1:360).

Hawthorne's intuition of the bedrock stresses of his family life is also displayed in the uncanny accuracy with which Beatrice's death foretells the fate of Una Hawthorne. Rappacini claims to have made his daughter poisonous so she will be invulnerable to the evils of the world. Yet this fatherly precaution causes Beatrice to self-destruct when she falls in love with Giovanni, that is, when she attempts to find a life beyond her father's garden. As the Hawthornes drew Una into the emotional economy of the household as the exemplar of its absolute purity, her life was correspondingly poisoned. She acquired a character that forbade her to find fulfillment outside the sacred inwardness of her parents' relationship.

Sophia found new happiness in her life at the Old Manse after she returned from the stay with her mother in Boston. "It is beyond words enchanting to be alone as we are," she declares. "It seems much more Paradise than ever. But the floor wants washing & I must sew a little, & it will not do to have so much of my husband's time taken up with housewifery; for I assure you his office is no sinecure. He actually does everything & I sit up stairs & out of doors with baby, more of a queen than ever, for I have a king to my servitor" (19–20 August 1844). Sophia's royal condition was especially fulfilling because she had found a spiritual mission in motherhood. Hawthorne felt his child-self displaced by the coming of Una, but Sophia found her own to be redoubled; in communion with her baby, she could advance her own spiritual development, earlier pursued through meditative study and art.

Sophia had extensive connections in the network of educational reformers and theorists of child rearing who relied on the premise that infants are not infected by original sin but bring a primal innocence into the world to be preserved and cultivated. Sophia's sister Mary—author of The Moral Culture of Infancy —was a major figure in this network, as was her husband, Horace Mann. Sophia's sister Elizabeth and Bronson Alcott founded the Temple School, where children were encouraged to respond freely to moral and biblical questions; and Elizabeth drafted Conversations with Children on the Gospels, which presented the resultant discussions as "a natural history of the undepraved spirit" (xiii). Elizabeth had also encouraged Nathaniel to join in the "great moral enterprise" of "creating a new literature for the young" (CE 6:290), and in due course Hawthorne produced several volumes of children's stories in response to the emerging new market. Transforming the morally "hideous" Greek legends for retelling to children turns out to be surprisingly easy, he explains in A Wonder Book, "the instant he puts his imagination in sympathy with the innocent little circle, whose wide-open eyes are fixed so eagerly upon him" (CE 7:179).

During her stay in Boston, Sophia at last had an unobstructed opportunity to visit with the women friends who gathered at the West Street bookstore and at Connie Park's parties. Their responses to her baby testified to the greatness of soul she herself saw in the child. "When she was in Boston," Sophia explains in a letter to Louisa, "she had constant levees of all the great & good, & the testimony from all was the same as to her peerlessness. She was called 'a piece of statuary'—'a Picture'—'an Ideal child'—'a Queen,' 'a born-lady' 'a Princess'—'Morning glory'—'Morning star a Dove' & more sweet names than I can account" (CE 16:57).

Sophia also noted that Una was a remarkable "discerner of spirits" who was able to see into the souls of visiting adults with the unerring eye of perfect innocence and was even able to encompass the profound mystery of Margaret Fuller:

At Margaret she gazed with earnest & ever frowning brow for a long time without recognizing her. Here she found a complex being, rich & magnificent but difficult to comprehend & of a peculiar kind, perhaps unique. But when Margaret next took her, after another examination she smiled approvingly & from that moment distinguished her by the gladdest welcome whenever she appeared, & sat in her arms with full content by the hour. She detected at last her greatness & real sweetness & love & trusted her wholly.

(Family Notebook, 24 September 1844)

Just as Sophia found a vicarious life in Nathaniel, so she made a psychic counterpart of Una, with whom she could also enjoy a childlike communion.

Soon after the baby was born, Sophia initiated the practice of writing letters in the child's name. "You will consider that I am fresh from Paradise," writes Sophia/Una, "& have not learned the ways of the old world yet & therefore express my thoughts & the truth with angelic simplicity. Babies cannot be vain. They are truth itself."^[20]

Sophia's impulse to merge her identity in Una's was to have unwelcome consequences. Her maternal attentiveness, however, joins her to the nineteenth-century social movement that first explored the rich mental and emotional life of babies. When Margaret Fuller visited the Old Manse in the summer of 1844, she too was fascinated by Una. "She acted like a little wild thing toward me," Margaret observed on their first encounter; and like Sophia, Margaret sought to establish spiritual communion. "Her prettiest and most marked way with me is to lean her forehead upon mine. As she does this she looks into my eyes, & I into hers. This act gives me singular pleasure. . . . It indicates I think great purity of relation."^[21]

Sophia was riveted by inborn qualities of the infant that she took as revelations of the divine nature. "She listens to me . . . with comprehending attention," Sophia remarked just before Una's first birthday, "once in a while responding with that upward inflection of tone which evidently means 'Yes' & her eyes full of the deepest thought, as if her little mind was very busy. I never imagined any thing so enchanting as her rapid developments. I find I never really knew anything about an unfolding intelligence before. In heaven or earth there can be nothing more interesting & marvelous" (26 January 1845). Although Sophia found she had to suspend her former intellectual and aesthetic pursuits, her absorption in Una's life provided an equally satisfying spiritual diet. "I have no time to read anything excepting my little daughter," she wrote, "with which belle literature I am quite content" (6 March 1845).

Sophia was thrilled by Una's aggressive independence of spirit, which she likewise perceived as an innate quality. Before the child could walk, Sophia reports, she would "take a small chair & travel all about the room. When she comes hard up against an obstacle, she pushes with force enough to go through the side of the house, her cheeks deepening in color, till finally she shouts 'Make way' as loud as her lungs will let her" (12 January 1845; misdated 1844). When Una could manage without the chair, Sophia wrote a letter of celebration that begins with extra-large calligraphic capitals: "Una walks alone! . . . Her whole being, body & soul, is wholly occupied with steering through the infinitude of space on her own responsibility. Her father calls it 'putting out to sea.' . . . It is very pretty to see her when she is undressed because then we see the action of

her limbs, all in a quiver with eagerness and newly discovered power" (16 February 1845).

Una's unspoiled nature, radiant in the energy of her naked body, appeared to Sophia the harbinger of navigating on her own in adulthood. Just as the child was learning to walk, Margaret Fuller published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, with its demand that barriers to womanly self-development be removed, so that women could become ship-captains, if their native endowments were suited. Sophia finds just such a spirit of self-sufficient command in her daughter: "She is all awake inwardly & outwardly & so strong that her father calls her Samsona. My barricades of chairs round forbidden places such as [the] stove . . . are now of not much use. She pulls aside those great heavy oaken chairs . . . and walks off with entire independence" (16 February 1845).

Yet if Una was robust, she was also divinely pure. "Did you ever hear of a five months' baby keeping herself in perfect order so as not to be wet from morning till night—& from night till morning?" Sophia wrote to Louisa, "She sits on a funny little chair which I found up garret, & is exemplary in her proceedings thereon" (CE 16:61). Sophia asked her mother for medicine "to prevent baby from having foul breath" on those rare occasions when she ceased to smell "like clover and violets" (4 April 1844). To Sophia, Una's body is purity made flesh. Not only is her breath and bottom (mostly) sweet, but "she is in herself a perfect rose & lily of fragrance, & people who take her in their arms say they never held so sweet a baby. Her breath is like the perfume of a pond lily" (CE 16:61).

As Una was displaying her purity and sailor-like boldness, Nathaniel struggled unavailingly to support the family. He had written enough new tales to make up another collection, to be issued as Mosses from an Old Manse, and he submitted to the "humbug" of a new edition of Twice-Told Tales . He received a fee of $125 for editing his friend Horatio Bridge's Journal of an African Cruiser and was due a percentage of the profits. He also regularly turned to Bridge for loans.^[22] His efforts to find a government post were incessant, especially by way of John L. O'Sullivan, the editor of the Democratic Review who represented Hawthorne as "dying of starvation" in the effort to obtain him an appointment at the Chelsea Hospital (CE 16:93).

Nathaniel was humiliated by gossip circulating in Salem, "the most pitiable stories about our poverty and misery; so as almost to make it appear that

we were suffering for food. Everybody . . . seems tacitly to take it for granted that we are in a very desperate condition, and that a government office is the only alternative of the alms-house" (CE 16:70–71). Nathaniel did in fact lose flesh during what he called "our long Lent" (67) and feared that an extended absence from Concord would lead his creditors to believe he had run away from them (73). By late June 1845 there were creditors aplenty, as indicated in a note to an autograph seeker who surmised that Nathaniel Hawthorne was a pseudonym. "That it is my real name," Nathaniel replies, can be proved by reference not only to his own books but also to those of "the butcher, the baker, the tailor, the doctor, and the tax-gatherer, all of whom are likely to hold it in everlasting remembrance" (104).

The creditor who administered the final humiliation was the owner of the Old Manse, the Reverend Samuel Ripley. In March 1845 he informed the Hawthornes that he wanted to occupy the place himself the following spring, giving them better than a year to find a new situation. When the Hawthornes failed to pay their rent in the ensuing months (CE 16:99), Ripley proposed that they accept Caroline Sturgis as a "boarder," since she could provide some payment to the Ripleys, perhaps by way of doing the chores for which the Hawthornes were now paying their new servant, Mary Pray. Nathaniel himself was absolutely opposed to having a boarder, and when Mary Pray departed in early June he was less able than ever to afford a replacement, to say nothing of paying Ripley.

The Ripleys got rid of the Hawthornes by means of a familiar ruse. They informed Mr. Hawthorne that their plans had changed, and that they wanted the Manse early in the fall rather than the following spring. Sophia's sister Mary understood what this meant, passing along a "rumour" that Ripley did not really intend such an early move (CE 16:117). When Ripley requested on 1 September that the Hawthornes depart immediately, Nathaniel responded that he would need a month to make other arrangements, and on 2 October he and his family moved out. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who knew the Ripleys' side of the story, commented tersely that "Mr Hawthorne leaves Concord today. Mr Ripley comes not till spring" (117). Nathaniel himself summed it up in terms that underscore his powerless shame: "Our landlord has driven us out of our Paradise at Concord" (126).

In the fall of 1845, just as the expulsion was taking place, Nathaniel and Sophia conceived another child, and, given the circumstances, it is hard to believe they intended to. Rather than fulfilling the masculine ideal of economic self-sufficiency and prudent procreation, Nathaniel had quite visibly failed. During the ensuing year, as the family took lodgings with relatives in

Salem and Boston, and as Nathaniel kept hoping that an official position would come his way, he was compelled to acknowledge that he could not provide an adequate living for his wife and first child and that a second child would only make things worse. Although Nathaniel was now living at "Castle Dismal," he did not tell his mother and sisters of the pregnancy; it was Sophia—staying with her sister Mary Mann in Boston—who broke the news in a letter to Nathaniel's mother from "Una." "I read Una's note," Nathaniel wrote back, "then sealed it up and threw it down stairs. Doubtless, they find it a most interesting communication; and I feel a little shamefaced about meeting them. They will certainly rejoice at the prospect of another baby, and only temper their joy with the serious consideration of how the newcomer is to be provided for" (CE 16:129–130).

No name had been prepared for this child, and at least eight months elapsed—after his birth in June 1846—before he was given one. Sophia was partial to "Theodore" and then to "Gerald," but Nathaniel resisted both, and it may have been a full year before they were able to agree (See CE 16:201–202). Meanwhile Nathaniel called his son "Bundlebreech."

It is the opposite of "Una." Instead of sublimating the child's sexual and excretory capacities into a vision of transcendent purity, the name all too insistently calls attention to them, emphasizing the bulk of his diapers and the bundle of male genitals within them. As compared to the anxieties constraining Una, "Bundlebreech" has a refreshing air of candor. Yet behind its anti-genteel male bravado lies a deep qualm. Nathaniel had the physical capacity to father children, but could he sustain them? Did he have the moral and psychological equipment necessary for "putting out to sea," like his ship-captain father? Or would he leave his dependents to the charity of in-laws, as his father had done?

These conflicted issues had been deferred during his long solitude after college, and through his bachelor years; they were deferred again in the androgynous bliss of life at the Old Manse. During this long moratorium Nathaniel had sought to cultivate an artistic identity with intrinsic "feminine" capacities, passive and voluptuous susceptibilities that Sophia treasured in her divine "Apollo." But that identity required material support. Nathaniel gave his son a name only when he was securely established in his Custom House job and could seek a house for his wife and children that could also accommodate his mother and sisters.^[23]

Chapter Ten—
Soul-System in Salem

In his paradise at Concord Hawthorne made no money of consequence; during his service at the Salem Custom House he did little imaginative writing.^[1] Hawthorne had sought to hold in abeyance the problems of gaining a livelihood while he cultivated his poetic identity; and the same root dilemma pursued him no less relentlessly now that he was bringing home regular pay. The demands of worldly manhood and those of his creative inwardness still seemed incompatible. In the late summer of 1849 the inter-linked dilemmas of gender and vocation came to a head in the twofold crisis of his removal from the Custom House job and the death of his mother. These events have been taken singly as significant to the writing of The Scarlet Letter; befalling Hawthorne together, however, they formed a forcing-house of bitter confrontation, in which his poetic capacities were crossbred with worldly competence.

Hawthorne's battle to keep his job fused the two sides of his dual selfhood despite his effort to keep them distinct. In "The Custom House," Hawthorne pretends that he welcomed his removal from the post of surveyor because it had interfered with his true vocation as a poet, but not because the work coarsened his feminine sensibilities. On the contrary, Hawthorne claims that the monotonous security of government service had endangered his "manly character," sapping "its sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance" and leading him to wonder whether he could stay in office much longer "and yet go forth a man" (CE 1:39–40).

Yet Hawthorne fought an intense public battle to keep the job, invoking his sacred calling to claim immunity from the squalid turmoil of spoils-system politics. He speaks scornfully of "common political brawlers" who understand nothing higher than their own dreary scrimmages (CE 16:270), but he knew that he had himself stirred up the brawl by refusing to give up the office without a fight after the Democratic party lost to the Whigs in the national elections of 1848. Charles W. Upham, a leader among his Whig opponents, was quick to point out that Hawthorne's being fired under these circumstances was "a liability to which all political office-holders are subject, and to which men of Mr. Hawthorne's true manliness of character have learned to submit with dignity and in silence" (Nissenbaum, "The Firing," 74). Hawthorne is "too old a soldier," wrote another enemy, "to whine at the fortunes of war" (67).

To acquit oneself as a man in the competitive worldly struggle is to accept the terms of the conflict, not to snivel at the misfortunes of the battlefield. But Hawthorne sought to make his presumptive exemption from the rules of combat into a fortress and to use his poetic capacities as a weapon. His rage at the "violation" of his sacred identity by his political opponents was harshened by his awareness that he had himself compromised it. Writing to Longfellow, he indulges an extended fantasy of worldly revenge, to be carried out by literary means. If his enemies prevail, Hawthorne "may perhaps select a victim"—most probably he was thinking of Charles Upham—

and let fall one little drop of venom on his heart, that shall make him writhe before the grin of the multitude for a considerable time to come. This I will do, not as an act of individual vengeance, but in your behalf as well as mine, because he will have violated the sanctity of the priesthood to which we both, in our different degrees, belong. I do not claim to be a poet; and yet I cannot but feel that some of the sacredness of that character adheres to me, and ought to be respected in me, unless I step out of its immunities.

(CE 16:270)

The interior contradictions of this outburst arise straight from the conflicts in which Hawthorne's poetic calling was now enmeshed. He claims membership in the "priesthood" so as to battle his greedy political competitors, who would not be so quick to challenge him if they realized that even in defeat he can damage their reputations by exercising his priestly powers.

Hawthorne's claim to have kept himself untainted by the squalor of politics was a readily demonstrable falsehood. He had authorized the assignment of overtime work to inspectors who were members of the local Demo-

cratic party, with half of their additional wages being paid back into the party treasury. When certain party members refused to pay the kickbacks, Hawthorne gave them letters suspending them temporarily from their jobs. His chances of keeping the surveyorship were destroyed when his enemies made public his role in this routine of political graft and extortion. But even had he never acted as an enforcer of party discipline, Hawthorne's sacred poetic identity would have been politicized. The Salem Democrats did not need Hawthorne's administrative skills to make the political machine work. His political value consisted in his name, his reputation as a man distinguished for achievements "above" the political tumult. Publishing literary reviews in the local Democratic newspaper was a political act; and the party featured him as a member of the Democratic Town Committee and a delegate to the state party convention, though he took no part in either (Nissenbaum, "The Firing," 80).

Hawthorne retained the traditional conception of literary endeavor as a gentleman's diversion, the avocation of a man whose social and economic advantages were secure. He sought to retain such an identity in an era of unprecedented commercialization, in which book publishing became an industry serving a mass market. Hawthorne shared the difficulty that Mary Kelley describes as plaguing the women who made a profession of writing, that of becoming public figures who market an identity that retains a distinctive quality of the private. The "classic" male writers of this period negotiated the paradox of the public and private, not because it was considered unsuitable for a man to have a public role but because their sense of the writer's true identity featured the stewardship of an inward flame of inspiration, antithetical to the sordid traffic of the marketplace. As women writers were struggling with the prohibition against "masculine" undertakings, male writers were forced—like clergymen—to confront the feminization of their social role. Even after he was celebrated as the choicest ornament of American letters, Hawthorne knew that several women had attained far more economic success as writers than he, and his humiliation prompted the famous outburst to his publisher, that the public taste was taken up by a "d---d mob of scribbling women."^[2]

For now, however, a major effect of the Custom House fiasco was to harden his sense of the literary profession as a competitive enterprise. Writing to Evert Duyckinck in despair over being ejected from his paradise at the Old Manse, Hawthorne had recognized that the demands of the marketplace forbade his continuing as a writer of tales and sketches. It was necessary now to attempt a book-length work and to court the public. His

letter to James T. Fields about publishing The Scarlet Letter amply demonstrates the resentment Hawthorne brought to this task. He considers whether the narrative of Hester Prynne might not be published together with several shorter tales, envisioning the public as quarry to be slain. "A hunter loads his gun with a bullet and several buck-shot; and, following his sagacious example, it was my purpose to conjoin the one long story with half a dozen shorter ones." Hawthorne stifled genteel qualms about the sexual titillation of his subject matter and considered whether "The Judgment Letter," would make a better title than anything "Scarlet." But as he thinks this over, an additional marketing idea comes to him, which the publisher adopted: "If 'The Scarlet Letter' is to be the title, would it not be well to print it on the title-page in red ink? I am not quite sure about the good taste of so doing; but it would certainly be piquant and appropriate—and, I think, attractive to the great gull whom we are endeavoring to circumvent" (CE 16:307–308).

In soliciting buyers by devices of questionable taste, Hawthorne bottled up an inward distress whose dimensions the novel itself explores, the dilemmas of a gender system requiring men to form and maintain a public identity, while women cultivate in retirement a sensitivity to the moral mysteries of the human heart. Since these definitions make Hester Prynne a manly woman and Arthur Dimmesdale a womanly man, their relationship richly elaborates these issues, but the disposition with which Hawthorne took them up was strongly conditioned by his strenuous determination to assume a manly" posture.

Hawthorne's harsh inner turmoil is suggested by a daguerreotype image that survives from this period (Fig. 5). His mouth is drawn tight beneath coldly glaring eyes, and his arms are locked behind him, making the shoulders rigid. In telling contrast against the beautiful Osgood painting he gave his mother (see Fig. 4), this Hawthorne is wary, hostile, and tightly controlled. Whether requested by Fields or by John L. O'Sullivan, the picture seems to have been made in an effort to put Hawthorne before the public, "manufacturing you thus into a Personage," as O'Sullivan termed it. It appears that Sophia vigorously disliked the picture, not surprisingly, and would not allow it to be published.^[3]

As news of the Hawthornes' return to poverty spread, George Hillard took up a collection for them. Hawthorne did not shrink from confessing that Hillard's generosity had moved him to tears. "I read your letter in the entry of the Post-Office; and it drew—what my troubles never have—the water to my eyes; so that I was glad of the sharply cold west wind that blew

Fig. 5.
Daguerreotype of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1848

into them as I came homeward, and gave them an excuse for being red and bleared." The gift had driven home—so Hawthorne relates—a hard lesson concerning the maintenance of manly self-respect. "Ill-success in life is really and justly a matter of shame. I am ashamed of it, and I ought to be. The fault of a failure is attributable—in a great degree, at least—to the man who fails. I should apply this truth in judging of other men; and it behoves me not to shun its point or edge in taking it home to my own heart. Nobody has a right to live in this world, unless he be strong and able, and applies his ability to good purpose" (CE 16:309).

Four years later—after The Scarlet Letter had been followed in quick succession by The House of the Seven Gables, A Wonder Book, The Snow Image, The Blithedale Romance, the campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, and the appointment as consul at Liverpool—Hawthorne was able to repay the sum with interest. These years of relentless effort, Hawthorne explains, were driven by his determination to remove the shame of accepting it. "I have always hoped to . . . [repay], from the first moment when I made up my mind to accept the money. It would not have been right to speak of this purpose, before it was in my power to accomplish it; but it has never been out of my mind for a single day, nor hardly, I think, for a single waking hour" (CE 17: 154–155).

Hillard had offered the sum as imperfectly covering "the debt we owe you for what you have done for American literature."^[4] But Hawthorne insists on treating it as a business proposition—an unsecured loan at interest, rather than a grant—since it brought him the supreme moral benefit: "making me sensible of the necessity of sterner efforts than my former ones, in order to establish a right for myself to live and be comfortable. For it is my creed (and was so, even at that wretched time) that a man has no claim upon his fellow creatures, beyond bread and water, and a grave, unless he can win it by his own strength and skill" (CE 17: 154–155).

In the androgynous paradise of Concord, Hawthorne had sought to live by the opposite creed. There, an exemption from the harsh struggle seemed necessary to the poetic nature he was cultivating. Even the trouble of putting in a vegetable garden grated on his sensibilities: "There is . . . an abominable quantity of labor to be done, or which ought to be done," he had complained. "I hate all labor, but less that of the hands than of the head" (CE 8:386). Sophia knew well how to coddle such proclivities and gloried in the divine creativenesss they expressed. "Dearest husband, thou shouldst not have to labour . . . & thou hatest it rightfully. Thou art a seraph come to observe Nature & men in still repose. . . . The Flower of Time should only unfold. It should be put to no Use. I wish I could be Midas long enough to

turn into sufficient gold for thy life's sustenance & embellishment whatever I touch. But woe's me! I can do nothing but love thee" (Family Notebook, 9 May 1843).

Yet Sophia's worship also expresses an ambition she could not satisfy as the wife of a surveyor of custom, no matter how stable might be the resultant income. She had chafed at the interruption of her husband's literary endeavors, and was "overjoyed"—so the family legend runs—when he came home to say he had been fired. "'Oh,' said his wife, gayly, 'now you can write your Romance!'" When he asked her how the family was to be fed, she produced a substantial sum of money, and to his astonished question how she had obtained it, she replied, "You earned it."^[5]

Nathaniel knew nothing, it appears, about the way Sophia managed the household budget. He had simply turned his paychecks over to her and applied to her when he wanted cash for his own needs. He had no idea she had been laying money aside. This parable of wifely solicitude illustrates a major paradox in the cultural construction of domesticity at large, the close economic connections between the "woman's sphere" of home and the ostensibly separate outward world. As much as the gift/loan from Hillard, Sophia's sacrificial management of the domestic economy put Hawthorne on his manly mettle. His "ownest," "belovedest," "own self," in whom he had sought a psychic anchor for his unworldly poetic identity, had displayed more worldly shrewdness and foresight than he concerning the sponsorship of time for writing. During the months in which he composed The Scarlet Letter, she continued to bring in money by decorating cambric lampshades for sale (G. P. Lathrop, "Biographical Sketch," 497).

Nathaniel's mental life was shaken to its foundations by his mother's death. His literary identity, with its fragile aura of sacred privilege, was grounded in a prior selfhood that still bound him to her. "In taking to myself a wife," he had written home after their wedding, "I have neither given up my own relatives, nor adopted others" (CE 15:639). The issues underlying his maternal fixation were never to be resolved, nor was the anguish it entailed. But as his mother lay dying, Nathaniel sensed that the "involuntary reserve" that shielded him from unmanageable emotion was threatening to give way:

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 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 injunction 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, I knelt there, holding her hand; and surely it is the darkest hour I ever lived.

(CE 8:429)

The woman Nathaniel refers to as "Mrs. Dike" was his aunt Priscilla, who had known him intimately since he was four. She had joined in the Mannings' effort to bring him up properly, insisting that he prepare himself for a constructive adult life instead of "playing about the yard" all day (Erlich 38, 44). "Madame Hathorne," by contrast, had indulged her children's waywardness; yet she had found no way to secure young Nathaniel's future other than to put him through the course of schooling that the Mannings planned out and paid for. A source of the "coldness" between Hawthorne and his mother may well lie in his confused resentment at having been encouraged to defy necessities to which he would eventually be required to submit. Only so long as he was a child within her protection could he indulge his own whims, and when he was forced to shoulder manly responsibilities, he suffered the liability of feeling that they wronged his nature.

The beautiful cherished boy was now forty-six years old. He had succeeded in proving that writing tales would not support a family, while his efforts to secure a regular income had yielded two short-lived civil service jobs. Hawthorne could not be certain what his mother was trying to say, though he knew she was speaking to him, and he hears an expression of well-founded anxiety: "an injunction to take care of my sisters." Although Elizabeth and Louisa had a little income, they looked to Nathaniel for help. More than once during the years at the Old Manse he had apologized for his inability to send money.^[6] Now that the Custom House position was all but lost, they faced again the prospect of desolate penury.

What "Mrs. Dike" made of all this is not knowable directly. But it is hardly likely she viewed the wretchedness of Mrs. Hathorne's death, the financial incompetence of her expensively educated son, and the threatened destitution of his sisters as a poignant stage in the development of Hawthorne's godlike genius. Nor is it likely that Priscilla looked on her dying sister as a creature of tragic beauty who, with uncanny faithfulness to her

son's promise, had promoted the conditions in which—albeit belatedly—he would rise to the first rank of living writers for a masterwork of ravishing beauty and truth. The only person attending the death of Mrs. Hathorne who could have embraced such rapturous conceptions, so obviously delusionary and so soon to be fulfilled, was Sophia; and Sophia's testimony suggests that Aunt Priscilla took a very cold view. "Mrs. Dike has been like some marble-souled fiend. But of that I cannot speak now, or perhaps ever. I hope God will forgive her, but I do not see how He can!" For Nathaniel the psychic agony was virtually unendurable; after this hour with his mother, Sophia relates, he came near suffering a "brain fever."^[7]

His mother's death stirred up a deep and compounded grief; the loss of his father and the resultant stunting of his mother's life had bequeathed him a virtually unlivable existence. After his sobbing ended, Hawthorne stood at the window, "and now, 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. Oh what a mockery, if what I saw were all,—let the interval between extreme youth and dying age be filled up with what happiness it might!" (CE 8:429). The lifespan reaching from Una's childhood to his mother's deathbed makes human life appear a woman's doom in which innate promise is wrongfully thwarted and human dignity intolerably affronted.

Nathaniel looks to Una for assurance that personal existence does not end at the grave. If there were "nothing beyond," he declares "it would have been a fiend that created us, . . . and not God. It would be something beyond wrong—it would be insult—to be thrust out of life into annihilation in this miserable way." Yet the child does not provide comfort. "Little Una's voice came up, very clear and distinct, into the chamber—'Yes;—she is going to die.' I wish she had said 'going to God'—which is her idea and usual expression of death; it would have been so hopeful and comforting, uttered in that bright young voice" (CE 8:429–430).

Looking to Una for divine consolation, Nathaniel is startled by glimmers of the fiendlike. Not only does the child speak bluntly of death, but she is also fascinated by the slow failure of his mother's body. Nathaniel is appalled by this specter of annihilation, while Una "takes a strong and strange interest in poor mother's condition, and can hardly be kept out of the chamber—endeavoring to thrust herself into the door, whenever it is opened" (CE 8:430). On the day following Nathaniel's paroxysm of sobbing, Una playacts the deathbed scene in hypnotic detail: "She groans, and speaks with diffi-

culty, and moves herself feebly and wearisomely—then lies perfectly still, as if in an insensible state. Then rouses herself, and calls for wine. Then lies down on her back, with clasped hands—then puts them to her head." As Nathaniel witnesses this performance, he is startled to realize that the child appears to take pleasure in torturing him. "It recalls the scene of yesterday to me," Hawthorne writes, "with a frightful distinctness; and out of the midst of it, little Una looks at me with a smile of glee" (431).^[8]

Returning Nathaniel to the darkest hour he ever lived, Una appeared to him an unaccountable compound of the divine and the demonic. "I now and then catch an aspect of her," he muses, "in which I cannot believe her to be my own human child, but a spirit strangely mingled with good and evil, haunting the house where I dwell" (CE 8:430–431). Hawthorne was intuitively aware that the enigma in Una's nature was somehow linked to the dilemmas of gender and vocation that were carried forward into the writing of The Scarlet Letter, during "the period of hardly accomplished revolution and still seething turmoil in which the story shaped itself" (CE 1:43). There seemed to him an uncanny communion between his own severest torments and the strange soul of this child.

In modeling the character of Pearl on Una, Hawthorne sought to make sense of the enigma he saw in her. His experience of domestic intimacy, since its inauguration at the Old Manse, now moved him to envision "the symbol of the one true union in the world, and of our love in paradise" as "the scarlet letter endowed with life." Yet this transformation did not occur exclusively in Hawthorne's imagination, as though it were an autonomous center of creative alchemy. The "hell-fire" in which the book was written had cast its glow on the hearthside of his Salem household.

Sophia wrote to Horatio Bridge in December 1846 to congratulate him on his marriage. "Human beings are wretched Arabs, until they find central points in other human beings around which all their highest & richest sentiments shall revolve. Every true & happy family is a soul-system that outshines all the solar-systems in space & time" (CE 16:193–194). The systemic character of family relations is stronger than Sophia asserts; rather than being solitary until they form families, persons exist communally from the outset.^[9] Hawthorne was torn at his mother's deathbed by conflicts instilled in him when he was a child; Una's personality was likewise receiving an imprint that would never be effaced. Erik Erikson once remarked that insofar as psychic illness is the consequence of trouble in one's family of

origin, it gains a cosmic forgivableness; yet since it produces mental agony in one's children, it seems equally unforgivable. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne made his own the harsh side of this observation, blaming himself for his daughter's misery; but that gesture also took place within the soul-system.

The outward pattern of the Hawthornes' life changed dramatically after their departure from Concord in October 1845. Their precious seclusion gave way completely for eleven chaotic months: Nathaniel and Sophia lived for a while in Salem at Castle Dismal; then Nathaniel stayed on with his mother and sisters while Sophia and Una moved to Boston; then they all returned briefly to Castle Dismal before moving again to Boston, where Bundlebreech was born and Nathaniel commuted to his job at the Custom House. In August 1846 they all finally settled in Salem, in a small house on Chestnut Street. But a new arrangement was established: their daily lives conformed to the division between "man's world" and "woman's sphere." At the Old Manse Nathaniel had read his tales to Sophia, sometimes while they were still taking form; and before Una was born, Sophia had struggled with her painting while he labored over his stories. Now Nathaniel left the household every morning to go to his job, in a realm wholly alien from Sophia's. Her letter to Bridge offers a bit of news about his work at the Custom House, to which Nathaniel appends a contemptuous postscript: "My wife knows no more about these matters than I do about baby-linen" (CE 16:194).

Sophia responded to her exclusion from Nathaniel's working life by assuming control of her "babydom," exercising the authority that was celebrated by heralds of the domestic ideal. "You have gained an increase of power," Lydia Sigourney informed new mothers. "How entire and perfect is this dominion, over the unformed character of your infant. Write what you will, upon that printless tablet, with your wand of love" (10). Yet Sophia did not see an unformed soul in Una; on the contrary, the child evidently possessed the same boldness and independence of spirit with which she herself had been endowed. "Una's force is immense," Sophia declared.

I am glad to see such will since there is also a fund of loveliness. No one, I think, has the right to break the will of a child, but God; and if the child is taught to submit to Him through love, all other submission will follow with heavenly effect upon the character. God never drives even the most desperate sinner, but only invites or suggests through the events of His providence. I remember my own wilfulness, and how I used to think, when quite a child, that God was gentle and never frowned upon me, and that I would try more and more to be gentle to everybody in gratitude to Him.

(NHW 1:306–307)

The work of loving motherhood does not include breaking a child's will; the mother establishes an intimate bond with her child that elicits an ethical consciousness the child will recognize as God's voice. Sophia's sister Mary Mann, in The Moral Culture of Infancy, insisted that mothers should make children aware that God has "given everybody a conscience which was sometimes called 'the voice of God within us'" (147). Sophia faithfully recorded that "for many months Una has liked very much to hold certain conversations after going to bed . . . of behaviour & goodness—God and Christ. . . . [This evening] she was very full of thought. 'I am sorry for all who do wrong'—said she—'very very sorry. I pity all, but I think that those who have had kind mothers to tell them what is right & yet choose the wrong, are the most wicked'" (Family Notebook, 9 February 1850).

Sophia's success at conscience-building was demonstrated in a crisis that arose while the Hawthornes were sharing the house with Nathaniel's mother and sisters. Una formed the custom of paying her aunt Elizabeth a daily visit. "On one occasion, however, when her mother was about sending her up as usual, Una said, 'I don't want to go to Aunt Ebe any more!' 'Why not?' her mother inquired. 'Because,' Una replied, 'Aunt Ebe makes me naughty. She gives me candy; and when I tell her you don't let me have candy, she says, "Oh, never mind; your mother will never know!"'" (NHW 1:328). A confrontation followed, Una's visits ceased, and Aunt Ebe became an "invisible entity" in the household.

Yet a lifelong friendship formed between Una and her aunt Elizabeth, at whose heart was a protest against Sophia's suffocating moral tyranny. "She always said that her Mother would be utterly astounded," Elizabeth observed, "at the things she was in the habit of saying to me." Una had been imprisoned during childhood in Sophia's mind, Elizabeth believed, pointing out that the child was not taught to read until she was seven years old, "and then she was forbidden to practice it. Her mother wished to keep her children in complete mental dependence upon herself. She would read to them in such books as suited herself." To be sure, Elizabeth hardly provides unbiased testimony; she bitterly hated Sophia and remarked what a "comfort" it was to "ascribe every infelicity and every short-coming to her."^[10]

Sophia's obsessive involvement with her children's lives, however, was noted even by persons who dearly loved her. Mrs. Peabody urged her to develop social relationships in Salem that would give her a break from child-care; Sophia refused. "I have not been to church since Una was born, nor spent an evening away from home. I should like very much [to go to church]. . . . but I must wait till the children are old enough to go with me.

I shall never leave them with hired people for any reason whatever—And it is no cross to me to be confined to them. I consider it to be the highest privilege to be able to be their sole attendant" (30 August 1846). Nathaniel likewise noted Sophia's absorption. "Thou must not fear to leave Una occasionally," he wrote when the child was three months old. "I shall not love her, if she imprisons thee when thy health requires thee to be abroad" (CE 16:47). But Sophia insisted on keeping her child within reach. After Julian's birth three years later, Sophia decided that Aunt Louisa might be able to watch one of them, but only so that she herself can take the other for a walk. Sophia concedes that "it is barely possible that I may take a real walk with my husband again while in the body, and leave both children at home with an easy mind" (NHW 1:314).

Caring properly for Una was impossible, it seemed to Sophia, when other children were about. In March 1846 her sister Mary Mann invited her to take a house on Carver Street in Boston that the Manns were soon to vacate, but Sophia refused to come until they had actually moved out. "Keeping peace between Una and Mary's two children would be hard," Sophia explains. "It would worry my soul every minute to have the children together. . . . I cannot bear to have her loving ways repelled, nor her opposition excited by constant rebuff." Describing the "conversations & dramas" that Una ceaselessly devises with her dolls, Sophia proudly observes that they are "original," since "she has never seen nor heard children play" (22 March 1846).

"Una has had a day of infinite ennui," Sophia noted when the child was three, "like a bird with wings tied to its side. 'I'm tired.' 'I am tired!' was her cry all day. Finally she sighed out 'I am so tired I wish I could slip into God!' I read her Miss Barbauld's Hymns & her eyes looked vast & deep as she listened—at last she did not want to hear—she said she was tired of lying down, & of sitting up & of reading & of all sings" (Family Notebook, 20 June 1847). Nathaniel recorded Una's litany of tedium on the same day, and probed toward its sources in the family's life. "'I'm tired of all sings, and want to slip into God. I'm tired of little Una Hawsorne.' 'Are you tired of Mamma?' 'No.' 'But you are tired of Papa?' 'No.' 'I am tired of Dora [the maid], and tired of little Julian, and tired of little Una Hawsorne.'" Two years later Nathaniel observed that "it would be an excellent thing to send her to school" because "we should see no more of this premature ennui," and Una would "have a much happier childhood than . . . we can secure to her by a home-education." Yet he concedes "there are reasons of greater weight on the other side," in language that clearly echoes Sophia's view: "Unless an angel should come down from Heaven

for the purpose, I should hardly be willing to trust her to any schoolmistress" (CE 8:398, 422).

In The Moral Culture of Infancy, Mary Mann warned against the "home influence" becoming "too exclusive and oppressive" (186). Because families cannot offer a sufficient "variety of views," the minds of children "cannot easily expand, still less choose the best of several good ways. I have seen the victims of private education perpetuate family faults, and in later life left standing alone in the world, knowing little of its interests, and having no sympathy from without. I have seen morbid sensibility thus nourished into insanity itself" (190).^[11]

Nathaniel and Sophia of course possessed notably divergent impulses and views. Sophia became obsessed with governing her "babydom" in part because there she could assert herself against his imperial domination; and his subsurface hostility toward the children resulted from his resentment at their having displaced him as the object of Sophia's mothering attention. But this opposition did not provide Una with psychic options; all potential conflicts were absorbed into the solid front of marital unity that husband and wife sustained for each other, and for which they had named her. Their "oneness" was rife with conflict that could not be acknowledged, so that Una was denied psychological room to maneuver and to find her own distinct reality. She could not do otherwise than subscribe to their strenuous claims of felicity.

"How I love thee!—how I love our children! Can it be that we are really parents!—that two beautiful lives have gushed out of our life!" So Nathaniel rhapsodized in the summer of 1847, when Sophia kept the children at her parents' home in Boston. Nathaniel wishes she could "now and then stand apart from thy lot, in the same manner, and behold how fair it is. I think we are very happy—a truth that is not always so evident to me, until I step aside from our daily life" (CE 16: 212). Sophia in reply tacitly scolds his dissatisfaction.

I do not need to stand apart from our daily life to see how fair & blest is our lot, because it is the mother's vocation to be in the midst of little cares & great blisses & the little cares make no account by the side of the great blisses. . . . This I tell thee all the time, but thou canst not believe it. . . . In the very center of simultaneous screams from both darling little throats, I am quite as sensible of my happiness as when the most dulcet sounds are issuing thence. The screams are transient & superficial. The beauty & lovliness & nobleness & grace which possess me in the shape of these fairest children which enchant all peoples—these lay hold on the basis of being—these are permanent & immortal. . . . Above all, beyond them is thyself—who art my everlasting satisfaction—my ever present felicity—my pride & glory & sup-

port—my sufficiency. . . . I am the happiest of women. Thou, beloved, oughtst not to be obliged to undergo the wear & tear of the nursery. It is contrary to thy nature and to thy mood. Thou wast born to muse & to be silent & through undisturbed dreams, to enlighten the world. I have suffered only for thee in my babydom. When I can once shut thee away in thy study & shew thee our jewels only when they are shining—then it will be unalloyed delight day by day."^[12]

This letter is a monument to repressed motherly and matrimonial fury. Sophia at times wanted to slit the darling little screaming throats, and Nathaniel's throat as well. She accordingly found a degree of satisfaction in Una's increasing disobedience and tantrums. Mrs. Peabody, alarmed at Una's misbehavior, urged Sophia to exercise firmer discipline; but Sophia reasserted her faith in the child's independent and defiant soul:

Una is a superb child & I do not feel troubled at all about her pranks, because they are all innocent as regards herself, and only troublesome & inconvenient to others. . . . She is all nobleness and sweetness, & her crack-of-doom NO which always raises the roof of the house, will serve her a good turn in maturer life, & so will her independent choice in action. She will never be made an automaton of while the breath of life is in her—I do not care for her not obeying in every point, because she does not disobey from sullenness, nor obstinacy, nor want of love—but because she chooses another way. . . . I have no pride of authority which I desire her to gratify. She is much more satisfactory to me than if she were very docile & less trouble & in consequence what people call "good."

(8–9 August 1846)

A major source of the distress underlying Una's explosive rages—as well as her ennui—was the advent of her little brother. Sophia stoutly affirmed that Una "has never once, in the smallest thing or greatest, shown the least shadow of jealousy, though I was always her sole companion & nurse for so long a time" (30 August 1846). Considering Sophia's knack for identifying hostility in the act of denying its existence, this remark might be accepted as sufficient evidence of sibling rivalry. Yet the birth of Julian did more than present a competitor for the adoring attention Una already had to share with her father; it also imposed with redoubled force the requirements of "feminine" conduct.

Conceived as a being fresh from the shores of paradise, Julian brought with him seemingly innate masculine qualities that threw into relief the divine femininity Sophia now saw in his sister. His parents gave him nicknames—in addition to Bundlebreech—that accentuated his manly force: they called him "the Black Prince" and "the infant Hercules." They had called Una "Samsona" when she was a toddler, but now her robust aggres-

sion is found to make way for selfless solicitude, a character both tender and fragile. She "looks like 'Fairy Gold-hair' beside him," Sophia relates; "she is opaline in lustre and delicacy, & she loves him most dearly" (12 November 1846).

Sophia explains that Una recognizes her brother's essential goodness in spite of his infuriating conduct. "If he seizes her hair with his titan-grasp so as to hurt a good deal, she disengages herself as gently as possible & succeeds in smiling instead of crying, because she knows he has no design of hurting her & she likes to have him do anything whatever to her, because it is he" (12 November 1846).

Sophia foresees "the most charming relation" between her daughter and her son. "She will I think repose securely in his large, genial, generous heart, & feel protected by his brave mind," while "her exquisite delicacy & loveliness of soul will touch with beauty every point of his character" (12 November 1846). Una will show her brother sweet forbearance, not in compliance with social convention, but because of her inner nature. Una faced a relentless pressure to deny her own impulses when they crossed the divinely innocent hair-pulling impulses of her brother; and this yielded an increasingly pronounced remoteness in Una's character that was subsumed into her presumptively divine endowment of feminine delicacy.

"She looks more like a seraph than ever by the side of his sturdiness," Sophia writes.

She develops more & more that exquisite delicacy of soul which transcends all culture & never can be taught. At what makes most children shout and laugh—she bursts into tears—I mean anything grotesque or unseemly. . . . On account of her deepest sentiment, so deep & genuine, she cannot bear any vehement expression of it in others. She seems to wish to veil & to have veiled all profound emotion. She makes me think [of] Mozart sometimes from the fineness of [her] organization both physical & mental.

(18–20 September 1846)

The misery of this little girl thus becomes a parable of the psychic entrapment of women. The torment imposed on her by the domestic ideal acts to endow that ideal with the uncanny glow of transcendent truth. Sophia finds in her daughter the same "exquisite delicacy of soul" she cherished in herself, the essence of her own childlike womanhood. Sophia describes Una taking "the character of a housewife" on the occasion of her eagerly volunteering to wash the dishes and focuses attention on the "opaline" quality of Una's inward changefulness, all the more divinely mysterious because it is hidden behind a veil. As Una stands on a chair to reach the washbasin on

the kitchen table, Sophia gazes with fascination at "her bright hair half veiling her sweet little face." It looks to her like "a pearl glancing through sunbeams" (18–20 September 1846).

It was not solely through her relation to Sophia, however, that Una came to resemble a pearl.

Nathaniel's entries in the family journal during this period describe the children's behavior in remarkable detail. He himself participates in several of the scenes and on occasion writes as the events take place before him. The entries resemble home videos, in which the person operating the camera is acknowledged to be at work by the people being taped and from time to time turns the camera on himself.

The domestic ideal obscured the father's role in child rearing; in keeping with the convention, Nathaniel defers to Sophia's judgments about managing the children. Yet nothing could forestall his enormous power to shape the children's lives, especially since it was household doctrine that he was a model of moral perfection. Nathaniel and Sophia shared a secret admiration for womanly strength, and both covertly encouraged Una's independence of spirit; both checked her, however, when she responded to that encouragement openly. But Nathaniel's gestures of prohibition were not merely dutiful, as were Sophia's; they were laden with anxiety, and at times with malice and disgust.

Nathaniel was delighted when Una submitted to Julian's aggression. "Una is in her sweetest mood," Nathaniel once noted, "and bears with [Julian's] unreasonableness like a little saint. Just now, when she was doing her best to amuse him, he struck her; whereupon she looked up so martyrlike that it was most touching to behold;—not with that sort of martyrdom, either, that is more provoking than the utmost malice and impatience" (CE 8:408).

Like Sophia, Nathaniel observes the "opaline" beauty produced by Una's effort to contain her inward confusions, and he tries to see it as a revelation of her soul, but with imperfect success. "Her beauty is the most flitting, transitory, most uncertain and unaccountable affair, that ever had a real existence," he observes.

It beams out when nobody expects it; it has mysteriously passed away, when you think yourself sure of it;—if you glance sideways at her, you perhaps think it is illuminating

her face, but, turning full round to enjoy it, it is gone again. Her mother sees it much oftener than I do; yet, neither is the revelation always withheld from me. When really visible, it is rare and precious as the vision of an angel; it is a transfiguration—a grace, delicacy, an ethereal fineness, which, at once, in my secret soul, makes me give up all severe opinions that I may have begun to form respecting her. It is but fair to conclude, that, on these occasions, we see her real soul; when she seems less lovely, we merely see something external. But, in truth, one manifestation belongs to her as much as another; for, before the establishment of principles, what is character but the series and succession of moods?

(CE 8:413)

The Hawthornes sought to establish principles that would confirm Una's ethereal fineness. "It is a very good discipline for Una to carry a book on her head," Nathaniel later observes,

not merely physical discipline, but moral as well; for it implies a restraint upon her usual giddy, impetuous . . . demeanor. She soon, however, begins to move with great strides, and sudden jerks, and to tumble about in extravagant postures;—a very unfortunate tendency that she has; for she is never graceful or beautiful, except when perfectly quiet. Violence—exhibitions of passion—strong expression of any kind—destroy her beauty. Her voice, face, gestures—every manifestation, in short—becomes disagreeable.

(CE 8:420)

Hawthorne found Una's irregular conduct particularly alarming because it appeared to arise from a disordered nature. He begins to form "severe opinions," not about Una's behavior, but about the child herself. Julian's misbehavior seems basically good-hearted; he "is a little outlaw or pirate—fonder, I think, of mischief than Una, and yet, more easily kept within rules. Now he has stolen the book I was reading, and refuses to give it up. . . . All this in perfect good humor." Una disobeys less frequently than Julian, but her disobedience is never playful. Nathaniel observes the note of defiance that Sophia treasured as a mark of her independent spirit, but he finds it sinister. "When Una is mischievous—which is not often—there seems to me a little spice of ill-nature in it, though I suppose her mother will not agree to this" (CE 8:407).

It was a household custom in Salem for the children to romp about naked before they were put to bed, and Nathaniel's description of Julian strikes again the note of boyish good humor. It delights him to look upon the animal vitality of his son: his appetite, his pleasure, and his mischievous little penis. "Enter mamma with the milk. He sits on his mother's knee, gulping the milk with grunts and sighs of satisfaction—nor ceases till the cup is exhausted, once, and again, and again—and even then asks for more. On being un-

dressed, he is taking an air-bath—he enjoys the felicity of utter nakedness—running away . . . with cries of remonstrance, when she wishes to put on his night-gown. Now ensues a terrible catastrophe—not to be mentioned in our seemly history" (CE 8:402).

When Una was learning to walk, Sophia had been delighted by her naked vitality, and Nathaniel certainly takes notice of her body during the Salem years. But he does not celebrate Una's earthy force: on the contrary, his admiring comments illustrate the decorum that was swiftly becoming conventional in the discourse of respectable Victorian families, whereby repression draws pointed attention to erotically loaded circumstances. "Una is dressed in a dark, shaded, mousselin de laine morning gown, which her mother thinks unbecoming to her complexion; she being fair. But I think she never looked more comely in anything, perhaps owing to its cut—it not descending so far to conceal her very praiseworthy legs, below the knee" (CE 8:399). Nathaniel conveys his pleasure in the child's body by fastidiously obscuring it. His eye is taken not by the color of the gown, but by its cut, how it draws a line between what lies innocently below the knee, and what lies above. The term "very praiseworthy" participates in the same anxiety: to describe concretely what pleases him would convey an excitement Nathaniel considered impure. He found his daughter's thighs and buttocks sexually appealing, and as she romped about the house, she revealed what he wanted—yet did not want—to see. "Una is performing gymnastics by tumbling over a chair, thereby discovering much length of leg, which—to give them their due—are the only handsome legs that I ever knew a child to have" (CE 8:415).

Nathaniel could not celebrate Una's "felicity of utter nakedness" when she took her air-bath. Her exuberant prancing aroused a strong conscientious impulse to bring her (and thus himself) under control.

Little Una . . . has an air-bath for a moment or two. Then complaining of cold, father wraps her in a blanket;—she resists—father insists—there is a terrible struggle—and she gets into almost a frenzy; which is now gradually subsiding and sobbing itself away, in her mother's arms. Meantime, Julian sits on father's knee, and sees him write—making remarks in some unknown tongue. He gets down and goes to Mamma, saying 'Nona'—(Una)—not knowing what to make of the scene that has just passed.

(CE 8:405–406)

This struggle carried Una beyond her own control, yet Nathaniel predicts that she will be angelic once the convulsive rage is out of her system. "Una is now quiet—having expended all her forces—and will probably be sweet and gentle in her next manifestations. And so it proves—she comes out of

the trouble like the moon out of a cloud—with no shadow of sulkiness hanging about her. Or rather, perhaps, like a rose-bud out of a thundershower; for there is a sort of dewy softness remaining, although there is the brightness of sunshine in her smile" (CE 8:406).

The tantrum had the effect of a spiritual purification, and the emotional atmosphere has returned to normal, or to a state of dewy brightness even better than normal. But the inward filth that has been purged away—the dark thermodynamics that produced the thunder and lightning—are inherent in not only the relation between Hawthorne and Una but also the divided self that Una is forming. The irony could hardly be more terrible: Una now finds within herself the uncanny mutability of a Duessa.^[13] Spenser's great monster—a classic imaginative achievement of anxious male power denigrating female sexuality—becomes an active agent in this five-year-old girl's mental life.

The reciprocal interplay of Nathaniel's fascinated repugnance and Una's inner tumult is sharpened as the entries continue. One evening Nathaniel leaves for a walk during the tense period before bedtime, but not before forming a clear mental picture of the conduct that disgusts him. Una is "running about the room in her chemise, which does not come down far enough to serve the purpose of a fig-leaf; never were seen such contortions and attitudinizing—prostrating herself on all fours, and thrusting up her little bum as a spectacle to men and angels, being among the least grotesque" (CE 8:417). Do Una's giddy antics reveal an inward awareness of doing something "bad"? Does she thrust up her anus as a gesture of defiance? Or does she simply want to catch her father's attention before he goes out the door? To ask such questions is to realize that Una had no choice but to respond to her father's disgust, and on this occasion he reacts as though she is "attitudinizing," aggressively seeking to provoke him.

At times it appears to Nathaniel that an alien presence has invaded Una's body, becoming most active when she gives herself up to strenuous play. He watches Una and Julian romp until they are exhausted, whereupon Una makes what strikes him as a sexually suggestive gesture. "Una, heated by the violence with which she plays, sits down on the floor, and complains grievously of warmth—opens her breast. This is the physical manifestation of the evil spirit that struggles for the mastery of her; he is not a spirit at all, but an earthy monster, who lays his grasp on her spinal marrow, her brain, and other parts of her body that lie in closest contiguity to her soul; so that the soul has the discredit of these evil deeds" (CE 8:420–421). That the child's pulling open her shirt should seem monstrous shows how deeply the conven-

tions of feminine purity and filth structured Nathaniel's responses to her. It is significant that the "monster" that has laid hold of Una's spinal marrow is a "he." The vision of monstrosity that overwhelms Nathaniel's imagination is of a male spirit—passionate, violent, and aggressive—living within his little girl.

Nathaniel was especially troubled when Una's masculine spirit exploited her little brother's vulnerabilities. He observes that Julian has "more imagination" than Una, so that when their games involve playacting, Julian becomes emotionally identified with the drama in a way that Una does not. "The idea seems to enter deeply into him, and take possession of him. With her, it is merely intellectual." The result was that Una could torment him when the game placed his feelings at her disposal. "She has just blacked her face with ink, and calls herself an old coal-man; and Julian screams with positive terror—which she greatly enjoys. He possesses one masculine attribute, however—a disposition to make use of weapons—to brandish a stick, and use it against an adversary; and this, I believe, is the only way in which he is ever terrible to Una. She is sufficiently sensitive to the reality of hard knocks" (CE 8:434–435).

Una's power over Hawthorne's imagination may be read back through virtually all the situations in which Hawthorne's gender conflicts are projected, where Una delights, revolts, battles, or frightens him. Her mimicking his mother's death had arrested his attention, as had her thrusting up her buttocks. The fight over the air-bath was an occasion in which issues of sexuality and power running deep into Hawthorne's character were profusely engaged, so that little Julian was not the only person present who did not know what to make of the scene. Nathaniel's unstable vision of Una's "ethereal" delicacy, and of her victimization by an "earthy monster," likewise bespeak the hypnotic fascination that her personality exerted over him.

The profoundest level of Nathaniel's uneasiness toward Una was not erotic; he was haunted, rather, by the awareness that she was seeing things in himself, and in his ideal relation to Sophia, that were invisible to him. Both Nathaniel and Sophia were unnerved by Una's seeming intuitive penetration. "Una fixes her eyes on mamma's face, with such stedfastness that mamma beseeches her not to look so directly into her soul. She has often abashed me in the same way—not, however, by the depth of her insight, but because there seems to be a want of delicacy in dwelling upon any one's face so remorselessly" (CE 8:414).

Nathaniel was commonsensical enough to reject the idea that Una could make an articulate analysis of his inner life; he objects to her probing gaze

as indelicate, such aggression being a masculine prerogative. But his concluding remark indicates how deeply it unsettled him; "it seems to embarrass the springs of spiritual life and the movement of the soul" (CE 8:414). Una made Hawthorne aware that young children may register emotional realities that their parents cannot recognize in themselves, or—more troublesome yet—they may take an absorbing interest in emotional issues toward which their parents have a confused and guilty response.

Nathaniel's uneasiness was augmented because the features of Una's conduct that repelled and disgusted him, and the strain of "ill-nature" in her psychic constitution, cast him into doubts about himself. The doctrine of childhood innocence made it impossible to conclude that such evils were inborn or that they belonged innately to a child's soul. Sophia's resolute denial of Una's malicious conduct and mental torment was rooted in her conviction that such defects simply could not exist in her angel-child; and Nathaniel likewise ascribed to an "earthy monster" the moral defects for which Una's soul wrongly gets the blame. Yet if such evils were not inborn, where did they come from? Mary Mann observed in The Moral Culture of Infancy that a bad child "seems an anomaly in nature" (156–157) and must be produced by the malign influence of bad parents. Yet the subject of "parents not having the right views of their parental duties," Mary observes, "would take me still farther back, to the subject of being married on the right principles" (185). Both Nathaniel and Sophia had exulted in Una as the consummate expression of their relationship, the "symbol of the one true union in the world." Now Nathaniel was compelled to wonder whether there was something deeply amiss in that union.

An intimate and tormented communion between Nathaniel and Una was interwoven with Hawthorne's experience of domestic life as it had unfolded from the Eden-like days at the Old Manse to the current crisis. The anguish with which he recalls his androgynous paradise is fused with his alarm at his daughter's anomalous nature, yet his feelings toward her are tinged with hostility, now as before. "The infant was worthy to have been brought forth in Eden," Hawthorne writes of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, and "worthy to have been left there, to be the plaything of the angels, after the world's first parents were driven out" (CE 1:90).

Hawthorne's masterwork embodies his brooding on the interior of the domestic "sphere," not as a place of refuge from the conflicts of a selfish world, but as a scene in which psychic and sexual intimacy brings on emotional torments as severe as anything the world beyond might inflict. He now bitterly reconsiders the androgynous joys of his paradise at Concord and

projects his own unwelcome transformation into worries about what will befall his son:

Julian has too much tenderness, love, and sensibility in his nature; he needs to be hardened and tempered. I would not take a particle of the love out of him; but methinks it is highly desirable that some sterner quality should be interfused throughout the softness of his heart; else, in course of time, the hard intercourse of the world, and the many knocks and bruises he will receive, will cause a morbid crust of callousness to grow over his heart; so that, for at least a portion of his life, he will have less sympathy and love for his fellow-beings than those who began life with a much smaller portion. After a lapse of years, indeed, if he have native vigor enough, there may be a second growth of love and benevolence; but the first crop, with its wild luxuriance, stands a good chance of being blighted.

(CE 8:424–425)

Two months after writing these words Hawthorne was prodigiously at work on a romance in which the "wild luxuriance" of a guilty androgynous passion produces a strange inhuman little girl.

Chapter Eleven—
Double Marriage, Double Adultery

At the conclusion of The Scarlet Letter Hester Prynne returns to her lonely seaside cottage and becomes a counselor to persons suffering "the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion": women, in particular, come to her asking "why they were so wretched, and what the remedy." Hester shares her faith that the miseries accompanying intimate relationships will someday be corrected at their source. "At some brighter period . . . a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness." Hester foretells that "the angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman" and recognizes that the "destined prophetess" must be "lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end" (CE 1:263). Thus Hawthorne's narrative conclusion hails the advent of the domestic ideal, with the domestic angel as the embodiment of its sacred truth.

This passage culminates a rhetorical framework that quietly governs The Scarlet Letter from the outset, in which the anguish of the principal characters results from the inopportune social arrangements in which they are fated to live. Yet what Hawthorne proposes as the future remedy for these dilemmas is actually their source: the domestic ideal produces the "mighty trouble"

that Hester's story depicts. The details of Hawthorne's setting—and such ancillary figures as the Reverend Wilson, Governor Bellingham, and Mistress Hibbins—provide elaborate linkages with seventeenth-century Puritan Boston. But Hester, Arthur, Roger, and Pearl have no counterparts in the colonial record, and the torments they suffer are characteristic of nineteenth-century family life.^[1]

In the opening scaffold scene Hawthorne includes a young wife holding her child by the hand, who serves as a harbinger of the coming revelation. In contrast to the "manlike" Puritan women who demand a harsher penalty, so that a proper lesson will be enforced upon the public, the young mother focuses sympathizing attention on Hester's inner pain. The view of punishment she represents is that of Sophia's child-rearing practices as well as that deployed in response to violations of the law: Victorian criminal "corrections" sought to rehabilitate criminals through an inward discipline, rather than use their bodies as instruments of public instruction enforced by terror. "Is there no virtue in woman," protests a witness to Hester's public shame, "save what springs from a wholesome fear of the gallows?" (CE 1:52). As the "iron-visaged" matrons loudly debate what additional sufferings Hester should undergo—a public flogging, or perhaps death—the young mother pleads with them: "Do not let her hear you! Not a stitch in that embroidered letter, but she has felt it in her heart" (54).^[2]

Hawthorne himself denounces the public pillory as an "outrage" against "our common nature" because it makes a public spectacle of the suffering conscience and forbids the culprit "to hide his face for shame." In Hester's case the outrage is redoubled since the initial wrongdoing has an intimate character, involving "the taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life" (CE 1:55–56).

Placed on the scaffold by Puritan law, Hester is compelled to express her essential womanly nature by engaging in conduct that violates it, that is, by taking a public stand. She has "fantastically embroidered and illuminated" the letter so as to turn the tables on her accusers, reversing the meaning of the sentence they imposed. "Why, gossips," says one of the vindictive crones, "what is it but to laugh in the faces of our godly magistrates, and make a pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment?" (CE 1:53–54). Hester's public defiance, which paradoxically asserts the sacred privacy of intimate relations, culminates in her refusal to divulge her lover's name. Dimmesdale makes explicit the underlying principle, albeit for reasons of his own, in affirming "that it were wronging the very nature of woman to force her to lay open her heart's secrets in such broad daylight,

and in presence of so great a multitude" (65). Hester's quandary—the necessity of asserting her nature by wronging it—introduces the dilemma that pervades The Scarlet Letter . Such vexations will not be typical of the future dispensation, once the "new truth" has been revealed. Or so Hawthorne's rhetorical schema implies.

This thematic system was not Hawthorne's invention; it was a conventional feature of the argument by which the domestic ideal became established. George B. Loring's early review of The Scarlet Letter observed that in former ages marriage was merely a legal obligation, the "bulwark of hereditary rights, and a bond for a deed of conveyance." But there is now a true form of marriage, Loring declared, founded on obligations "more sacred and binding than any which have been born of the statute-book" (Crowley, 170). Harriet Martineau's demand that marriage should be separated from "its impious alliance with worldly interest" replays these issues. "Designed to protect the sanctity of the love of one man for one woman," marriage "has become the very means of obstructing such love, and destroying the sanctity of it." Adultery is the inevitable result: "Is anyone irrational enough to expect fidelity in marriages thus made in markets?" (Martineau, n.p.).

Hester Prynne has two husbands, in keeping with these divergent conceptions of marriage. Roger is her husband at law; and Hester frankly declares that when she married him, she "felt no love, nor feigned any" (CE 1:74). Between Hester and Arthur, by contrast, there exists a bond of sacred love. The adultery they committed against Roger was the consummation of their soul-marriage, which they passionately reassert after years of punishment. "What we did had a consecration of its own," Hester cries out. "We felt it so! We said so to each other!" (195). Hawthorne unobtrusively yet firmly endorses this self-consecrating marriage by speaking routinely of Roger as Hester's "former husband" (167).^[3]

In light of her soul-marriage to Arthur, Hester comes to realize that her sexual relationship to Roger was a defiling and degrading experience. She recalls with convulsive loathing the scenes of their life together and "deemed it her crime most to be repented of, that she had ever endured, and reciprocated, the lukewarm grasp of his hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle and melt into his own. And it seemed a fouler offence committed by Roger Chillingworth, than any which had since been done him, that, in the time when her heart knew no better, he had persuaded her to fancy herself happy by his side." In short, her relation to Roger was adulterous: "He betrayed me!" Hester concludes bitterly, "He has done me worse wrong than I did him" (CE 1:176).

Inherent in Hester's double marriage is a double adultery. The legal and public bond of matrimony establishes a requirement of sexual fidelity that the narrative questions but never discards. Yet marriage as a communion of souls is equally hedged about with sacred obligations, against which Roger offended when he took Hester to his lukewarm bed. He is the victim of the adultery between Hester and Arthur; yet his relation to Hester is revealed as a betrayal when judged by the sacred bond joining her to Arthur. The Puritan community is thus guilty of enforcing a wrongful standard: Hester's youthful mistake could be corrected in a healthier social arrangement, where she could obtain a divorce from Roger and proceed to formalize at law the true marriage of her heart; the development of matrimonial legislation since the early nineteenth century bears witness to the social force of this rhetoric.^[4]

Yet the conflict between "worldly" requirements and the claims of the "heart" was sharpened, not moderated, by the emergence of the domestic ideal. The ostensible progress from a former to a future social condition bespeaks a tension within domesticity itself. Colonial life was not free of marital distress; and the same is true of its European antecedents. Indeed, the Hebrew and Greek literatures at the origins of Western culture portray the manifold tragic dilemmas inherent in family relations. But The Scarlet Letter depicts the quandaries of its own age and sets forth the heraldic emblem of middle-class marriage in its final sentence: "On a field, sable, the letter a, gules" (CE 1:26). Hester is enmeshed in a matrimonial adultery generic to the domestic ideal; her two marriages dramatize a conflict in the terms of its constitution.

Students of domesticity have described the troubles produced by the sharp division between "home" and "world." The expectation of deepened emotional satisfactions within marriage appeared simultaneously with the separation of the "spheres," so that husbands and wives were driven apart by their occupations—and by the temperaments suited to those occupations—even as they sought increased marital intimacy. As John Mack Faragher observes, this "marriage-defining conflict" was complicated by the difference in social power between men and women; like slaves attending to the personal needs of their owners, women formed intimate relationships on terms set by men. It follows that the definition of "woman's sphere" is itself a male creation and serves male needs, however much countervailing power it may afford the subordinated sex (1–3).^[5]

Hester's difficulties arise, accordingly, from a problem deeper than the conflict between legal obligations and heart's desire. Her discrepant marriages subject her to an internally divided masculinity, to Roger and Arthur

as fragments of a divided manhood. These reciprocal cuckolds spend more time with each other than either spends with Hester, and they are more intimately involved in each other's lives than in hers. Hawthorne tells us that they took "long walks on the sea-shore, or in the forest" (CE 1:123). "They discussed every topic of ethics and religion, of public affairs, and private character; they talked much, on both sides, of matters that seemed personal to themselves," so that a "kind of intimacy" (125) grew up between them, from which Hester was excluded. They decide to live together, and in the end they die together. Hester's two husbands are inseparable opposites; they are figures of the split manhood that sustained the domestic ideal, and Hester cannot have one without the other.

Hester demonstrates her continuing love for Arthur in her refusal to name him before the community and in the revival of their passion that takes place in the forest, where they agree to make a new life for themselves elsewhere. Hawthorne does not fail to observe that this faithfulness renews her adultery against Roger. Yet Hester also keeps faith with Roger, in response to a matrimonial claim that invokes not merely law but the intimacy of the domestic bond. Roger demands what Hester had given Arthur, namely her promise to keep secret their marital relation, and he includes Arthur within that sacred privacy. "Elsewhere a wanderer, and isolated from human interests, I find here a woman, a man, a child, amongst whom and myself there exist the closest ligaments. No matter whether of love or hate; no matter whether of right or wrong! Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me. My home is where thou art, and where he is." Roger blackmails Hester into keeping their secret by threatening a public revenge against Arthur, whose identity he appears to have discerned from the outset: "His fame, his position, his life, will be in my hands. Beware!" (CE 1:76). This deadly interior menace deepens and complicates the three-way bond of "home" that links Hester, Arthur, and Roger, a tormented and inwardly conflicted intimacy in which faithfulness and adultery are interfused.

While she was living at the Old Manse, Sophia quarreled with the view—put forward by her sister Elizabeth—that her relation to Nathaniel was a union of "self-sufficing worlds." Elizabeth had derived this marital ideal from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and she thought it applicable to several marriages; to Sophia, however, it was a flat contradiction in terms. "No one who has ever become one with another being, as true husband & wife must

become if really united, will ever, can ever, say that each is wholly independent of the other, except intellectually. Heart & spirit are forever indissolubly one." If a husband and wife "be indeed twin souls, if they belong together, they are no longer each 'self-sufficing.' Waldo Emerson knows not much of love. He has never yet said any thing to show that he does. He is an isolation—He has never yet known what union meant with any soul."^[6] Sophia's jab at Emerson is not only personal; it goes to the marital dilemmas generated by the ideal of self-made manhood, of which Emerson was a classic exemplar.

Sophia is saying in effect that the Emersons have an adulterous legal marriage, like that of Hester and Roger; and in bringing this charge, Sophia echoes a domestic anguish that Waldo and Lidian did not conceal. Margaret Fuller visited the Emersons in 1842 and noted Lidian's pain: her "hope that Waldo's character will alter, and that he will be capable of an intimate union." Waldo himself feigned no such capacity; he stated frankly that "the soul knows nothing of marriage in the sense of permanent union between two personal existences"; and this view was in keeping with his broader doctrines of the self-sufficient soul (Myerson, 330–332). "Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse," he had proclaimed in "Self-Reliance." "Say to them, 'O father, O mother, O wife . . . I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth's.' " The self-reliant man agrees to remain "the chaste husband of one wife," Emerson concedes, but his soul belongs to himself alone (Whicher, 160).

Emerson enshrined psychic self-sovereignty as the essential manly virtue and set his face against any impulse or duty that threatened it. "Nothing is at last sacred," he declared "but the integrity of your own mind" (Whicher, 149). Yet maintaining this self-directed inward coherence is incompatible with the union of souls that true marriage demands and sexual intercourse within true marriage enacts.

The dread of sexuality—including marital sexuality—as a threat to masculine self-sovereignty was not invented in America, nor is it solely a product of the rising middle class. But this concern was sharply accentuated in the early national period, and it became a middle-class obsession as the culture of individual competition became dominant. John Adams proposed that the national seal of the United States should be engraved with a scene depicting the Choice of Hercules, the hero's decision to pursue mighty endeavors rather than the "Effeminacy" of amorous dalliance. In Adams's recurrent discussions, sexual desire became an inclusive metaphor for activities menac-

ing the self-disciplined pursuit of manly distinction: "let no Girl, no Gun, no Cards, no flutes, no Violins, no Dress, no Tobacco, no Laziness, decoy you from your books," he sternly counseled himself. Adams condemned wasting time and spirit in "unmanly Pleasures," which he obsessively details: "a softening, enervating, dissipating series of hustling, pratling, Poetry, Love, Courtship, Marriage." Adams's anxiety is projected into fretting over his children's future: "I sometimes tremble when I hear the syren songs of sloth, least they should be captivated with her bewitching Charms, and her soft, insinuating Musick" (Greven, 246).

The discourse of self-sufficient manhood is a duet, more richly realized in Adams than in Emerson; yet the two voices are audible in both. The division in Adams's mind appears in the caressing eloquence with which he lists the allurements he seeks to repudiate; he is enormously attracted to poetry, love, courtship, and marriage, as well as to laziness and his gun, and he implicitly acknowledges the psychic wealth they offer. Emerson, by contrast, reduces such distractions to the "deceived and deceiving" presences that he dismisses in the act of summoning them up: "O father, O mother, O wife." Like Odysseus himself among the "syren songs," Emerson does not allow himself to hear the "soft, insinuating Musick."

This anxious dialectic, in which manly self-control speaks against a disconcerting yet alluring prospect of self-loss, is dramatized in Hawthorne's presentation of Roger and Arthur. The split between law and the heart, as between the spheres of world and home, now appears in the polarization of male selfhood. Hester's "worldly" marriage to Roger, with its legal authorization, joins her to a figure of notable self-possession; Arthur languishes, almost overwhelmed by his emotional impulses, taking a voluptuous pleasure even in his spasms of guilt. Yet neither marriage is visible to the public; both are contained within the sacred compacts that Hester keeps secret. She is an antitype of the domestic angel, in whom the moral anatomy of that role becomes visible, the queen and victim of a domestic intimacy given structure by the interior contradictions of self-sovereign manhood.

The Scarlet Letter drastically heightens the psychosexual drama of manhood split by desire; it portrays an intense inward battle along lines drawn up in a literature excluded from the canonical precincts inhabited by Adams and Emerson: the literature of masturbation phobia that burgeoned in the 1830s and 1840s. Masturbation sharply focused the interior contradictions

of manly self-reliance; instead of setting men against violins and tobacco and wives, it put them at war with their own bodies.^[7]

Masturbation is both a failure and a triumph of sexual self-command. Like sexual activity generally, it involves yielding to impulses that are not under voluntary control, which express themselves in erotic dreams and nocturnal emissions if orgasm is successfully avoided during waking hours. Masturbation is also a form of sexual self-sufficiency; it requires no entangling liaisons or commitments and no financial cost. The effort to realize oneself as a self-made man is ultimately self-liquidating because it embraces contradictory requirements that become inescapable in the presence of desire.^[8] Masturbation thus came to possess contaminating power for men who sought to incarnate self-sovereign self-control.

As the ideal of self-sufficient manliness began to develop historically, masturbation was flagged early as a critical issue; in 1724 Onania appeared, with a subtitle that gave the deed its definitive new name: Self-Pollution. Onania presents the two voices that carry on a tireless dialogue throughout the succeeding tradition, the voice of the author and that of the self-polluted self. Onania includes letters, presented as the work of afflicted readers, with the author's replies appended, so that the work has an epistolary form, which remained standard in this literature well into the nineteenth century.^[9] Brief pamphlets of admonition as well as learned treatises present the characteristic duet.

The voice of the author is self-contained and authoritative, probing the disgusting morass of self-pity, self-loathing, and dissolving ethical fiber from which the other voice speaks. Here is a nineteenth-century instance of the counterpoint: "My constitution . . . is broken down, and my mind, as well as body, completely enervated. I am haunted day and night with lascivious thoughts and dreams; suspicious of my friends and disgusted with myself. My memory has lost its power—unable to fix my attentions—my mind is filled with terrible forebodings—fear of insanity, and at times it has cost me a continual effort to retain my reason." In such squalor the author finds evidence of a stern and inflexible order: "We cannot, with impunity, violate the laws of our being. This organic law of our formation, is imperative and abiding—no abuse of it will go unpunished—suffering will follow, if it be not scrupulously obeyed" (Woodward, 8, 10).

Hawthorne's Chillingworth likewise pursues scientific knowledge with cold composure and comes to focus that pursuit obsessively on Dimmesdale's soul while Dimmesdale is ravaged and enervated by the conviction that his existence is "utterly a pollution and a lie" (CE 1:143). These dichoto-

mous psychic constellations define a world of male erotic experience: Roger's self-possession and Arthur's self-loathing are both forms of masculine sexuality.

Roger's emotional containment is itself compulsive, as appears in the opening scene. He sees his wife on the scaffold, with another man's child in her arms; this spectacle triggers an involuntary effort at self-control. "A writhing horror twisted itself across his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them, and making one little pause, with all its wreathed intervolutions in open sight. His face darkened with some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so instantaneously controlled by an effort of his will, that, save at a single moment, its expression might have passed for calmness. After a brief space, the convulsion grew almost imperceptible, and finally subsided into the depths of his nature" (CE 1:61). Roger masters this passion by exercising his "will," but so "instantaneously" that the effort itself is marked as automatic. Momentarily visible is a snake-like writhing, which intimates the erotic energy invested both in the hidden feelings and in the compulsion to keep them concealed. The "keen and penetrative" glance that precedes this "convulsion" likewise bespeaks the sexual passion Chillingworth has incorporated into his commitment to a ruthless self-possessed rationality. As Frederick Crews aptly remarked, Roger's libido sciendi is heavily charged with libido (126).

From the outset of his researches into the identity of Hester's beloved, Roger looks forward to the crescendo of sexual excitement that will mark his progress. "There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or later, he must needs be mine!" (CE 1:75). His desire for such moments of delicious tremor is Roger's chief motive in pursuing Arthur. Hawthorne describes nothing in the way of a real investigation: no other suspects are even considered, and Roger makes no effort to dig up tangible evidence. He satisfies himself, instead, by torturing Arthur into bursts of unguarded feeling. "It is as well to have made this step" Roger gloats, after his questions drive Arthur into a rage. "See, now, how passion takes hold upon this man, and hurrieth him out of himself! As with one passion, so with another! He hath done a wild thing ere now, this pious Master Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his heart!" (137).

Hawthorne repeatedly draws attention to the unconscious compulsion that takes control of Roger's seemingly self-regulated life. "He had begun an investigation, as he imagined, with the severe and equal integrity of a judge, desirous only of truth, even as if the question involved no more than the air-drawn lines and figures of a geometrical problem. . . . But, as he

proceeded, a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce, though still calm, necessity seized the old man within its gripe, and never set him free again, until he had done all its bidding" (CE 1:129). Yet the covert eroticism of Roger's investigation bespeaks the autophobic sexuality that had marked his earlier life. Roger's compulsive self-containment—his inability to yield himself to Hester—lies at the heart of his failure to consummate a passionate union with her. "Let men tremble," Hawthorne warns "to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth's, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality" (176–177).

As sexual anxiety governs Roger's craving, so it generates the emotional provender that Arthur serves up. As the clergyman writhes in the torture of a self-abused selfhood, Roger implicitly recognizes his own prospective plight, as does the community at large. Arthur provides his congregation, indeed, a diluted form of the gratification Roger derives from observing him, offering the public a chance to participate vicariously in the torment of his inner life. Arthur's sermons are powerful because of the emotional burden in his "tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and broken" voice (CE 1:67). His listeners are attuned to a "cry of pain" that softens their hearts, no matter what his ostensible topic may be (243).

Arthur's clerical selfhood is an anguished hymn of erotic submission, tacitly acknowledging that passion compels him to violate the principles of male virtue. The manliness he has polluted through yielding is the same as Chillingworth has demonized through unconscious denial and the quest for vicarious fulfillment. This specific form of pollution—the vice correlative to just such a manliness—gives Arthur "sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison with theirs" (CE 1:142).

Arthur knows, moreover, that he nurses and cultivates his desire in the act of repenting it, so that his displays of righteous self-abuse are themselves masturbatory and strongly solicit an erotic response. "The virgins of his church grew pale around him, victims of a passion so embued 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" (CE 1:142).

I do not propose Roger and Arthur as neurotics in the conventional Freudian sense, as though their professions of scientific curiosity and of moral suffering cover up an autonomous sexuality that they could learn to enjoy if only they had the courage to face their true feelings. They represent sexualities produced by the cultural formation that self-made men perforce inhabited, in which erotic sentiment was experienced in the forms of anguish Hawthorne depicts here.

The literary power of Hawthorne's portrayal results in part from the density of such local resonances. The pair dramatize an all-ramifying semantic interplay whose logic reaches across the boundaries separating distinct zones of social experience. Roger and Arthur display this reverberant centrality in relation to the split voices of Adams and Emerson and the intrapsychic hothouse of masturbation phobia. But their interaction also engages the public order of male endeavors, as figured in the emerging relation of the clergy and the medical profession.

Hawthorne's description of the living quarters of the two men underscores their rival eruditions. Arthur

piled up his library, rich with parchment-bound folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis, and monkish erudition, of which the Protestant divines, even while they vilified and decried that class of writers, were yet constrained often to avail themselves. On the other side of the house, old Roger Chillingworth arranged his study and laboratory; not such as a modern man of science would reckon even tolerably complete, but provided with a distilling apparatus, and the means of compounding drugs and chemicals.

(CE 1:126)

Each learned man occupied "his own domain"; in Hawthorne's time the relation of the two domains was changing.

The disestablishment of religion in the United States involved more than the removal of the ordained ministry from the list of tax-supported institutions. The intellectual authority of the clergyman's professional stock-in-trade was critically damaged by the interminable theological disputes to which Hawthorne obliquely refers; and the emerging secular order of business and politics presented a host of issues that the knowledge of things divine could do little to explain. In the reshaping of the social landscape that separated the home from the world, the pastor found his professional place shifting into the domain of women.^[10]

During his stay at the Old Manse, Hawthorne encountered a Reverend Mr. Frost, who seemed blissfully unaware of occupying an effeminated role. "We certainly do need a new revelation," Hawthorne remarked, "for there

seems to be no life in the old one. Mr. Frost, however, is probably one of the best and most useful of his class; because no suspicion of the necessity of his profession . . . has hitherto disturbed him; and therefore he labors with faith and confidence, as ministers did a hundred years ago, when they had really something to do in the world" (CE 8:352). Dimmesdale's professional station, by contrast, offered a direct pathway to public authority. "Even political power," Hawthorne states, "was within the grasp of a successful priest" (CE 1:238). Dimmesdale, more akin to Mr. Frost than to his Puritan forebears, possesses the skills through which nineteenth-century ministers attained social power by exploiting the womanly domain to which they found themselves consigned.

Tender womanhood being exalted as the true expression of Christian love, pastors cultivated a sensitive life of sympathetic emotion that male denizens of the cold cruel world found it difficult to maintain. As women became leaders in the politics of local churches and in the proliferating system of volunteer organizations that churches sponsored, the preacher's ability to arouse the enthusiasm of women parishioners became essential to his professional success. The sexual conflicts of middle-class culture came to focus on the relationship between women and ministers, and when the spiritual, political, and erotic connections between shepherd and sheep were strongly mutual, they were likely to become explicit. The love affair of Henry Ward Beecher and his parishioner Elizabeth Tilton attained notoriety when it was revealed in 1872 because it dramatized issues concerning the meaning of "true" marriage and the sexually ambiguous character of the clergyman's role—precisely those Hawthorne had explored two decades earlier.

Victoria Woodhull, the advocate of sexual freedom who revealed the Beecher-Tilton affair to the public, extolled "the coming together of these two loving natures in the most intimate embrace" (Cott, Root, 260). Woodhull asserted that Beecher's deepest convictions were identical to her own but that he could not muster the courage to break with the "social slavery" he secretly despised. Woodhull's stand invokes the cultural logic at work in Sophia's assessment of Waldo and Lidian. In each case true marriage exists where loving natures are at one, and sexual intercourse is the outward and visible sign of that inward and spiritual union. Hawthorne's portrayal of the minister as a sex symbol strikes a chord that is still vibrating in American religious life.

The paradox in which anguished confessions of sin become incitements to sexual pleasure produced a related set of dilemmas for clergymen. The Reverend John Todd, who wrote voluminously about "manhood"—which

always already means sexual self-control—was quick to warn his readers against books that pollute the mind; and he was particularly alarmed about writing whose pornographic effect is covert or springs on readers before they can prepare themselves. He complains that gifted but perverted writers "adorn and conceal a path which is full of holes, through which you may drop into the chambers of death" (Barker-Benfield, 171). Yet Todd could not help realizing that his own treatises might inspire the depravities they condemn; and when he wrote directly about the "secret vice," he did so in Latin (169–170).

The Reverend Arthur Cleveland Coxe, in reviewing The Scarlet Letter, finds that Hawthorne exploits the opportunities for pornographic euphemism provided by the erotics of pious guilt. Coxe declines to convict Hawthorne as a "literary pimp," because his work is not coarse in its details, or indecent in its phraseology." But Hawthorne's very fastidiousness, Coxe finds, advances the work of corruption, as the blunt language of the Bible does not: "Damsels who shrink at the reading of the Decalogue, would probably luxuriate in bathing their imagination in the crystal of . . . [The Scarlet Letter 's] delicate sensuality" (Kesterson, 44). Coxe goes on to describe his encounter with a group of schoolgirls who were polluting themselves with Hawthorne's "delicately immoral" story by sharing their enthusiasm for it. The girls agreed it was about "a very fascinating young preacher," and a "hateful creature named Chillingworth, who persecuted the said preacher" (44–45).^[11] My point here is not (or not only) that Hawthorne was scolded by the champions of prudery, and not that he refashioned the erotic conventions of his time into an autonomous work of art, but that his work fiercely intensifies the ambivalent sexual rhetoric that informed the responses both of the Reverend Mr. Coxe and of the schoolgirls.

The sexual anxieties that express themselves in the dilemmas of middle-class clergyman are also at work in the emerging science of sexuality, which became a province of the medical profession.

Chillingworth's professional character reflects the displacement of the minister as a counselor to sick souls and the acquisition of that role by physicians. John and Robin Haller observe that the medical doctor "had more opportunity than any other person outside the family circle to enter it on terms of intimacy," becoming "a party to family secrets in the natural course of his duties" (The Physician and Sexuality, x). The physician also enjoyed authority as the possessor of scientific truth, which increased in power and scope as the credibility of theological knowledge deteriorated. The psychoanalytic movement, now so multifarious, had its origins in Sigmund Freud's insistence that he had created a verifiable "science of the

unconscious," to be based on conversations between doctors and persons suffering mental distress. In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne indicates that the physician's power to gain knowledge of spiritual matters was well advanced by mid-century, especially if he was skilled in exploiting the confessional qualities of the diagnostic interview:

A man burdened with a secret should especially avoid the intimacy of his physician. If the latter possess native sagacity, and a nameless something more,—let us call it intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeably prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power, which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares have spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought; if such revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so often by an uttered sympathy, as by silence, an inarticulate breath, and here and there a word, to indicate that all is understood; if, to these qualifications of a confidant be joined the advantages afforded by his recognized character as a physician;—then, at some inevitable moment, will the soul of the sufferer be dissolved, and flow forth in a dark, but transparent stream, bringing all its mysteries into the daylight.

(CE 1:124)

For all its claim to objective scientific authority, however, medical literature retained the language of sexual disgust. "A Brief and Intelligible View of the Nature, Origin and Cure of Tubercular Disease,"—a title dispassionate in tone—finds the source of such a disease in masturbation, which is characterized as a "polluting stream" that befouls the most genteel. Even those "who have been surrounded by every thing that could inspire the heart with sentiments of virtue and purity, have desecrated the scene . . . by indulgence in a vice, in view of which angels . . . weep, and creation sighs" (Rosenberg, 136). Like Roger Chillingworth, presumptively disinterested investigators of this "disease" found themselves enmeshed in a loathing fascination, and prescriptions for cure were often sadistic.

Leopold Deslandes advised that the masturbator should be placed in a straitjacket, with his feet tied apart, in such a way that his penis would not be tickled by his thighs. Deslandes also recommended the use of a "genital cage," which secured the penis and scrotum within a metal truss, to be held in place by springs (Haller and Haller, 207–208). Other practitioners employed bloodletting and applied leeches and heated pneumatic cups to the genitals, so as to draw forth "congestion." Inserting a metal ring in a hole punched through the foreskin was another form of treatment, as was cutting the foreskin apart with jagged scissors. Red iron, tartar emetic ointment, and Spanish fly-blister were applied to make the genitals painful to the touch, so that straying hands would not seek them out. "It is better . . . to endure any

physical discomfort," wrote Henry Guernsey, M.D., in his Plain Talks on Avoided Subjects, "than to sacrifice one's chastity" (Haller and Haller, 208–209).^[12]

The erotics of cruelty illustrated by such medical counsel answers to the clerical erotics of guilt. The root identity of these seemingly opposite psychic formations is evoked by Hawthorne's suggestion that the pain in Arthur's chest—and the wound presumably visible there—may have arisen equally from Arthur's self-torture and the poison vengefully administered by Roger.

Roger's sadistic gratification reaches its climax in the famous moment of his observing Arthur's naked breast. Like the "convulsion" Roger momentarily experienced when he first saw Hester on the scaffold and the "shudder" he expected to feel when he drew close to his quarry, this is a spasm in which involuntary responses take command. "What a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror! With what a ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features, and therefore bursting forth through the whole ugliness of his figure, and making itself even riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor!" (CE 1:138).

Figures of a manhood that is self-alienated under the pressure of sexual passion, Arthur and Roger live together and die together, leaving Hester to live on alone. In describing Roger's death, Hawthorne proposes that the hatred the two men bore each other testifies to a bond as deep as love. He wonders, indeed, "whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object" (CE 1:260). The factor linking hatred and love is the interdependence of the parties in question: both are "passions" of the sort that menace the self-containment of self-made men. Hawthorne's concluding remark emerges accordingly as a hope that this internal split in the male psyche might someday be healed. "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" (260–261).

In the meanwhile, however, Hester's two marriages join her to inseparable figures who are convulsively at war; they dramatize a torment endemic to the sexual intimacy of middle-class marriage, the lurid balefire of matrimonial adultery.

Chapter Twelve—
Domesticity as Redemption

As a woman "stained" with sin, Hester represents the classic opposite of domestic purity. Instead of sublimating male desire into worship, her nature has "a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic" (CE 1:83). Roger's addiction to voyeuristic cruelty and Arthur's addiction to exhibitionist guilt are correlative transformations of the passion she stirs up. Yet even as Hester plays her part in this system of interlocking emotional contradictions, Hawthorne gives her qualities of the "true womanhood" that promises to place the relation of the sexes on a new footing. Like the brief description of the young woman at the scaffold, her story is a harbinger of the redemption she foretells in her old age but will not live to see. Hawthorne seeks, that is, to contain his material within the rhetoric of the domestic ideal, even as he lays open the dilemmas intrinsic to that ideal. This pervading metabolism of meanings—in which domesticity is established in the act of being subverted—strongly contributes to the cultural power The Scarlet Letter has been found to possess.

The narrative intimates that Roger and Arthur are indissolubly united, yet it manifestly presents them as two different men between whom Hester may choose. Hester eventually decides, not surprisingly, to keep faith with Arthur, breaking the promise she had given Roger to keep their "former" marriage a secret. She confirms her commitment, that is, to marriage as a sacred communion of souls, and her relationship to Arthur is a parable of

redemptive spiritual intercourse. Hester's love rescues Arthur from his debilitated effeminacy, and in displaying such love Hester transcends the "manlike" qualities in herself. Yet she does not become a "true woman until Arthur likewise asserts a self-sufficient "manhood." The reciprocal creation of these ideal gender identities has a further redemptive effect: it delivers Pearl from her unreal existence.

Hester bitterly resents the thwarted life her society has compelled her to accept and sees her plight as bearing on "the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting, even to the happiest among them?" She is appalled at the social changes that are necessary to remove the injustices women suffer:

As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms, until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change; in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated.

(CE 1:165–166)

Thus manhood and womanhood are affirmed as gender identities ordained by nature and nature's God, universal essences at once biological and ethereal. Yet this affirmation is surrounded by the chronic ambivalences. Is it the "nature" of the male sex that must be changed, or merely its "long hereditary habit?" Is it necessary for the "truest life" of a woman to be sacrificed, or is that only a danger? Is the psychosocial revolution Hester contemplates a perversion, or is it simply very difficult?

Hester's pursuit of such speculations is itself presented as an "exercise of thought" at odds with her feminine nature. In taking up this baffling intellectual quest, she has forsaken woman's natural engagement with concerns of the heart. "There seemed to be no longer any thing in Hester's face for Love to dwell upon; . . . nothing in Hester's bosom, to make it ever again the pillow of Affection. Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman" (CE 1:163). Hester's lost femininity is not irretrievable, however. Looking forward to her meeting with Dimmesdale in the forest, Hawthorne observes that she "might at any moment become a woman again, if there were only the magic touch to effect the transfiguration" (164).

Well before that transfiguring moment, however, Hester gives evidence of innate womanhood prevailing still amid the oppressive social circum-

stances that tempt her to replace it with an unnatural masculinity. She is preserved from the wilder excesses of rebellion by the devotion she pours into the rearing of Pearl; and in her relation to the community at large she displays compassionate self-sacrifice. Hawthorne speaks of her uncomplaining submission to the abuse she received from the public and celebrates the "blameless purity" of her life. Sickbed and deathbed scenes best reveal her distinctive feminine virtue; there "Hester's nature showed itself warm and rich; a well-spring of human tenderness, unfailing to every real demand, and inexhaustible by the largest" (CE 1:161). The townsfolk begin to tell each other that the scarlet A "meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength" (161).

The reciprocal magic touch, in which Hester recovers her womanhood and, in the consummate exercise of her woman's strength, makes a "man" out of Arthur Dimmesdale, is enacted in the forest. As Hester sees Arthur approaching, she observes his "nerveless despondency" (CE 1:188); and the ensuing scene reveals that he has lost the ascribed masculine qualities of public initiative and self-possession, of rational judgment and resolute will. When Dimmesdale learns that Roger "was" Hester's husband, he collapses altogether and turns to Hester for guidance. "Think for me, Hester! Thou art strong. Resolve for me!" (196). Hester has already contrived the plan that she now persuades Arthur to adopt. She wants them to leave the colony for a better life elsewhere; in the course of pursuing this objective, she asserts her psychological dominion over him. " 'Is the world then so narrow?' exclaimed Hester Prynne, fixing her deep eyes on the minister's, and instinctively exercising a magnetic power over a spirit so shattered and subdued, that it could hardly hold itself erect" (197).

This encounter does not bring Arthur under her power for long, however. Instead of complying with her plan, he conceives and executes a plan of his own to extend and, indeed, to culminate his public responsibilities. Hester is startled and dismayed, after the Election Day sermon, when Arthur approaches the scaffold to proclaim his guilt. Yet something within her compels her to acquiesce: "slowly, as if impelled by inevitable fate, and against her strongest will" (CE 1:252), Hester joins him. Innate womanly submission undermines the long-practiced assertion of her will now that Arthur assumes command. She has rendered him capable of fulfilling his manhood, which includes taking charge of her, and he continues to depend on her "woman's strength," now subordinated to the purpose he has chosen without consulting her. As they mount the scaffold together, they form a tableau in which the domestic vision of natural genders is triumphant:

essential manhood and essential womanhood have been mutually re-created and are reciprocally confirmed. "Come hither now, and twine thy strength about me! Thy strength, Hester; but let it be guided by the will which God hath granted me!" (253).

Pearl's redemption occurs at this moment of confession and expiation and fulfillment. The child has inherited Hester's defiance and seems to anticipate that she too will eventually be at odds with the world. Instead of playing with the children of the town, Pearl invents imaginary playmates, whom she regards with vehement hostility: "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. It was inexpressibly sad—then what depth of sorrow to a mother, who felt in her own heart the cause!—to observe, in one so young, this constant recognition of an adverse world, and so fierce a training of the energies that were to make good her cause, in the contest that must ensue" (CE 1:95–96).

Just as Hester's rebellion puts her at odds with her own "womanly" nature, so Pearl's character is a battleground. She is an agent of Hester's punishment, upholding the validity of the order Hester violates: her preoccupation with the scarlet letter, her persistent allusions to it, and her eerily apt questions to Hester about Arthur fill out her character as an enforcer of the lawful order of society. Yet she herself "could not be made amenable to rules" (CE 1:91).

This contradictory situation comes to a head in the forest after Hester has removed the scarlet letter from her breast and the severe cap from her head, so that her dark hair flows voluptuously down over her shoulders, stirring Arthur to a resumption of his manhood. Having agreed to flee the colony, they call the child to join them, but instead of responding with sympathy, Pearl throws a tantrum that is at once commanding and uncontrolled. "Assuming a singular air of authority, Pearl stretched out her hand, with the small forefinger extended, and pointing evidently towards her mother's breast," and then "stamped her foot with a yet more imperious look and gesture." When Hester sternly repeats her demand, Pearl "suddenly burst into a fit of passion, gesticulating violently, and throwing her small figure into the most extravagant contortions. She accompanied this wild outbreak with piercing shrieks" (CE 1:209–210), whereupon Hester gives in and restores the letter.

Pearl's peremptory force, here as elsewhere, recalls what Hawthorne saw in Una; his notebook entries complain that she was often "exceedingly ungracious in her mode of asking, or rather demanding favors. For instance, wishing to have a story read to her, she has just said, 'Now I'm going to have some reading'; and she always seems to adopt the imperative mood, in this manner. She uses it to me, I think, more than to her mother, and, from what I observe of some of her collateral predecessors, I believe it to be an hereditary trait to assume the government of her father" (CE 8:414).

Pearl gains control of others by losing control of herself, a stratagem Una found successful with her father. Hawthorne's journal returns again and again to the "tempestuous" protests that erupt when Una's will is crossed (CE 8:411); and he preferred not to contend with "little Tornada in one of her tantrums" (CE 16:231). When Hawthorne was overawed by Una's fury, as on the evening of the air-bath fight, he looked to Sophia to calm her, and Arthur Dimmesdale is likewise intimidated by Pearl. "I know nothing that I would not sooner encounter than this passion in a child," he says to Hester. "In Pearl's young beauty, as in the wrinkled witch, it has a preternatural effect. Pacify her, if thou lovest me" (CE 1:210).

Pearl's hysterical insistence on maintaining decorum carries the note of inward desperation that was audible in Una's outbursts. Sophia once read aloud a story titled "The Bear and the Skrattel," and her imitation of the Skrattel's unearthly shrill voice set Una off. "Little Una cries 'No; no!' with a kind of dread," Hawthorne noted, and he then specifies with an unnerving serenity the chronic distress of which this outcry gave evidence. "It is rather singular that she should so strongly oppose herself to whatever is unbeautiful or even unusual, while she is continually doing unbeautiful things in her own person. I think, if she were to see a little girl who behaved in all respects like herself, it would be a continual horror and misery to her, and would ultimately drive her mad" (CE 8:419).

Hawthorne uncannily predicts the psychic breakdowns that befell Una in later years, yet he could see that the child's mental torment was already severe. It could hardly have escaped him that she was doomed to her own company. More startling than Hawthorne's insight, however, is the tone of detached inquiry in which he pursues the "rather singular" puzzle of Una's inward war. Just as Dimmesdale's terror at Pearl's rage bespeaks Una's power to disconcert her father, so this cold diagnosis—with a vengeful impulse lurking beneath its objective surface—discloses Hawthorne's kinship with Chillingworth.

In Pearl these contradictions are resolved as Hester helps Arthur mount

the scaffold: "The great scene of grief, in which the wild infant bore a part, had developed all her sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her father's cheek, they were 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" (CE 1:256). The child's "manlike" imperiousness gives way to tears of sympathy, and the "elflike" impersonal remoteness gives way to warm human relations. Like Pinocchio, Pearl is transformed from an unnatural creature, endowed with life but not truly human, into a "real little girl." Hawthorne expresses the confidence, as the narrative closes, that "her wild, rich nature had been softened and subdued, and made capable of a woman's gentle happiness" (262).

As many critics have observed, however, Pearl's prospective domestic felicity is not located in the United States or in any other clearly definable place. It is supported by a fabulous inheritance, which makes her "the richest heiress of her day," and Hawthorne is careful to point out that the seals on her letters have "bearings unknown to English heraldry" (CE 1:261–262). Hawthorne's conclusion exempts Pearl from the dilemmas that the book portrays but does not resolve them.

Even the concluding scaffold scene, where Pearl's redemption takes place, testifies to the interior disharmonies of the domestic ideal. The completed family group obeys Pearl's demand that Dimmesdale acknowledge her and her mother before the community. Yet that tableau also includes Chillingworth, "as one intimately connected with the drama of guilt and sorrow in which they had all been actors" (CE 1:253). While Chillingworth concedes that Dimmesdale has finally escaped his vengeance, his claim on Dimmesdale's conscience is vindicated—not dismissed—by the clergyman's final confession. The self-divided manhood represented by Arthur and Roger is not healed at the final scaffold scene; it comes to a crisis that neither man survives.

Hawthorne establishes a special relation between Pearl and Chillingworth that probes issues beyond the dilemmas of split manhood and of "true womanhood," namely the responsibilities of child rearing. The sin of Hester and Arthur is not only their defiance of Roger's legal claim; their soulmarriage fails to provide adequate nurture for Pearl. Hester refuses the injunction to break the child's will by a "frequent application of the rod" and instead "sought to impose a tender, but strict, control over the infant

immortality that was committed to her charge" (CE 1:91–92). Yet Pearl's stubborn waywardness makes a mockery of sentimental blandishments. She is an incorrigible, like the slave child Topsy, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, who becomes tractable only when little Eva's death brings tears to her eyes, like those Pearl sheds over the expiring Arthur. Hester "grew acquainted with a certain peculiar look, that warned her when it would be labor thrown away to insist, persuade, or plead. It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, so perverse, sometimes so malicious, . . . that Hester could not help questioning . . . whether Pearl was a human child" (92). Unlike Topsy, who has been beaten into hardness of heart, Pearl is demonically rebellious because her father does not acknowledge her.

Hawthorne repeatedly asserts the connection between Roger's claim and Pearl's need. As Hester refuses to name her lover, Roger calls from the crowd, "Speak, woman! . . . Speak; and give your child a father" (CE 1:68). In the midnight scaffold scene, when Hester and Pearl join hand in hand with Arthur, Pearl gestures toward Roger standing alone in the shadows, and includes him in the family group. Roger bequeaths his fortune to Pearl, a circumstance all the more striking in view of Arthur's failure to make provision for his child's support at any point in the narrative.

It never dawns on Arthur, despite his orgy of guilt over falling into sin, that he has any moral or material responsibility for his child. When the magistrates propose to remove Pearl from Hester's care, Arthur defends Hester's "indefeasible rights" by invoking "a quality of awful sacredness in the relation between this mother and this child" (CE 1:113–114). Yet the Reverend Wilson underscores the material responsibility that Arthur ignores, the need for "a father's kindness towards the poor, deserted babe." (116). As David Leverenz rightly noted, the relation of Pearl and Arthur presents a sharply intensified version of domesticity, in which the mother is overpresent and the father is absent, busy attaining distinction in the world (274).

As Dimmesdale marches toward the Election Day ceremony where he will consummate his career, Hester becomes miserably aware of the gulf that stands between them: Dimmesdale seems "so unattainable in his worldly position, and still more so in that far vista of his unsympathizing thoughts" (CE 1:239). Dimmesdale's prospective worldly triumph will be fueled by the emotional energies awakened by his conversation with Hester in the forest. Yet to Hester, that renewal of their self-consecrating love evaporates. "Her spirit sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and that . . . there could be no real bond betwixt the clergyman and herself" (239–240).

This moment dramatizes a paradox that has existed from the outset of the narrative, in which Hester and Dimmesdale are bound by a compelling intimate tie yet live solitary and apart. The daily experience of their communion of souls is, for the most part, an alien proximity in which each keeps a pained and guilty silence. Hester "could scarcely forgive him" Hawthorne tells us, "for being able so completely to withdraw himself from their mutual world; while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold hands, and found him not" (240).

This marriage-defining wretchedness besieges them even at the fullest dramatization of their marital bond. In the forest scene where Hester and Arthur re-enact their self-consecration, Hawthorne presents a collision between the claims of their relationship and the obligations represented by Pearl. Instead of staging a triumph of "natural" genders over social convention, this conflict pits nature against nature.

The renewal of marital communion begins as Arthur "put forth his hand, chill as death, and touched the chill hand of Hester Prynne." The two engage in commonplace small talk, which opens "the doors of intercourse," so that they could move onward, "step by step, into the themes that were brooding deepest in their hearts" (CE 1:190). Their spiritual and sexual bond comes slowly back to life, until at length Hester removes the letter from her bosom and throws it away, whereupon "there played around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very heart of womanhood" (202). As we have seen, the "womanhood" expressed here is not submissive and angelic domesticity, but the triumph of Hester's purposeful intelligence, releasing the full wealth of her sexual power. She has persuaded Arthur to begin a new life in a new place and has promised to sustain him with her strength and courage.

This moment of androgynous consummation is blessed by a flood of sunshine. "Such was the sympathy of Nature—that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth—with the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world" (CE 1:203). Yet this validation of their mutual world is soon crosscut by Pearl's refusal to accept it, and Hawthorne specifies this refusal as equally blessed by Nature.

During her parents' conversation, Pearl enters a prelapsarian communion with creatures of the forest: a partridge, a pigeon, a squirrel, and a fox. Even a wolf lets her pat its head. "The mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognized a kindred wildness in the human child" (CE

1:204–205). Decking herself out with flowers and greenery, Pearl becomes "a nymph-child, or an infant dryad, or whatever else was in closest sympathy with the antique wood" (205). So adorned, Pearl fulfills her parents' sacred union. "It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before experienced, that they sat and watched Pearl's slow advance. In her was visible the tie that 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. . . . Pearl was the oneness of their being" (206–207).

Yet the child of nature is excluded from the relationship whose nature she embodies. "Another inmate had been admitted within the circle of the mother's feelings, and so modified the aspect of them all, that Pearl, the returning wanderer, could not find her wonted place, and hardly knew where she was" (CE 1:208). Pearl accordingly demands that the letter, with its "withering spell" be restored. Hester loses her power to animate Arthur's natural manhood as "the warmth and richness of her womanhood departed, like fading sunshine; and a gray shadow seemed to fall across her" (211). The soul-marriage of Arthur and Hester is again marked as adulterous, not by outmoded marital legislation or the self-division of self-made men, but by a logic that asserts itself when sexual intercourse is made a sacrament of the marital bond. The spiritual communion of the two souls is checked by the offspring that its enactment produces.

Running through the forest episode is an emblem of this native dissonance, a little brook that almost never flows clear in the sunlight because it is obstructed by fallen branches, boulders, and the roots of great trees. These obstacles, as natural as the stream itself, "choked up the current, and compelled it to form eddies and black depths" (CE 1:186). The stream has a wordless voice, like Dimmesdale's sorrowful and haunting undertone; it "still kept telling its unintelligible secret of some very mournful mystery that had happened—or making a prophetic lamentation about something that was yet to happen—within the verge of the dismal forest" (187). At the conclusion of the episode, after the communion of souls has been revived and self-stifled, Hawthorne tells us that "the melancholy brook would add this other tale to the mystery with which its little heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages heretofore" (213).

This device will serve as an emblem of Hawthorne's literary power, by which the miseries attendant on a specific form of marital intimacy are made to appear the blight that man was born for. The brook ceaselessly intimates

a sorrow arising from the nature of nature and offers a mild and rueful comfort more compelling than Arthur's triumphant confession or Hester's messianic vision of a future day. The voice of the brook will not cancel the torments intrinsic to the domestic ideal but will keep saying them forever: "kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy, like the voice of a young child that was spending its infancy without playfulness, and knew not how to be merry among sad acquaintance and events of sombre hue" (CE 1:186). The allusion here to Una's psychic disorder and early sorrow marks the paradox of Hawthorne's greatest art. The most luminous passages, whose wave fronts seem to travel across the relativities of history at an absolute speed and to create a radiance independent of any local reference, are entangled with the painful contingencies amid which they originate.

Hawthorne's masterwork occasioned a communion between Nathaniel and Sophia from which the rhetoric of domestic bliss was notably absent. Nathaniel later recalled "my emotions when 1 read the last scene of the Scarlet Letter to my wife, just after writing it—tried to read it, rather, for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean, as it subsided after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state, then, having gone through a great diversity and severity of emotion, for many months past. I think I have never overcome my own adamant in any other instance" (English, 225). That Nathaniel should consummate the months of creative torment in the image of an ocean storm is uncannily suited to its sources in himself, recalling his lost ship-captain father and the unresolvable grief that lay at the root of his lifelong struggle with the meaning of manliness. The "adamant" that allowed him to hold this suffering at bay, and thus to maintain the working coherence of his own mind, was relaxed for a moment here, so that it was almost impossible for him to read his own words. Yet the image also implies that the struggle had reached a pause; what Nathaniel feels is the subsiding.

Sophia was likewise filled with distress. "It broke her heart," her husband wrote the following day, "and sent her to bed with a grievous headache." His adamant now restored, Nathaniel considered Sophia's anguish "a triumphant success" (CE 16:311). When Sophia likewise regained her composure, she sent a letter to her sister Mary: "I do not know what you will think of the Romance," she wrote. "It is most powerful, & contains a moral as terrific & stunning as a thunder bolt. It shows that the Law cannot be broken" (313).

Sophia and Nathaniel were brought together and set apart by the same text, which each felt to be overpowering. Sophia contains her celebration in an assertion of unbreakable moral law, as though anyone reading it would receive the same thunderbolt of truth. Yet in admitting she has no idea what her sister will think, Sophia indicates her awareness of having passed through a distinctively personal and intimate experience. She was herself prospectively designated by Hawthorne's description—which he read to her that night—of the "angel" of the coming revelation who will show "how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end." Yet her headache was hardly caused by this compliment, even if she took it ironically. The thunderbolt lay in Hawthorne's compelling depiction of the burdens that were entailed on women by this ideal, the burdens borne by Hester Prynne.

It has long been customary to propose Hester as an opposite of Sophia, as a figure of erotic vitality and womanly defiance in contrast to Sophia's pasteboard propriety. Yet Sophia, too, had a "rich, Oriental characteristic," visible as she danced like Salome for her husband at the Old Manse. She was also a woman of resolute will, jealous of her independence. She met efforts to subdue her, including Nathaniel's efforts, with stubborn resistance; and her worshipful obedience and delicacy of soul were mobilized as stratagems of defiance. Sophia's headache indicates that she shared the experience her husband described in the Custom House Introduction, when he placed Hester's letter against his own breast and felt a burning heat. Sophia knew the demonic energy as her own, having long sought to quash it through the transcendant power of art, including her husband's art. When her sister Elizabeth proposed that Nathaniel had "purified himself by casting out a legion of devils" in The Scarlet Letter, Sophia denied it with her customary vehemence: "It was a work of the imagination wholly & no personal experience, as you know well."^[1]

A critical separation was now taking place, however, because the book was ready to lead an independent life. It was just beginning a career of literary power that has run on for nearly a century and a half, while the Hawthornes continued their daily lives in the allotted span. Nathaniel lived another fourteen years, until 1864; Sophia died seven years later. They had sustained difficulties during the years of struggle that were to be augmented in the wake of success and were sharply visible in the scenes with which we began, at the Wayside in Concord.

The domestic ideal best served the needs of self-made men-in-the-making, recruiting women and children into subordinate roles. Yet once manly self-making is complete, the ideal loses its imperative urgency and its power

to hold conflicts in abeyance. A woman who bolsters her husband's self-trust finds her importance diminished as he gains recognition beyond the home. A man who marries "my own self" will be disconcerted to confront her distinctive ambitions. Once their alliance attains its goals, the accustomed comradeship decays and symptoms of alienation mark the ordinary business of the household. At the Old Manse, as later in Salem, Sophia shared her husband's work before it went to the publishers. She was stung when word arrived at the Wayside that Nathaniel's biography of Pierce was in print. "It is rather too bad," she snapped, "that all the world should read it before I do" (Family Notebook, 8 September 1852).

If worldly triumph is spectacular, as it was for Hawthorne after the publication of The Scarlet Letter, both husband and wife will contend with the adulation of strangers and the jealousy of former friends, now of lower status. Yet the wife may have grounds for jealousy as well and may reflect bitterly on what she has suffered for the sake of her husband's victory. Such gestures of gratitude as she receives (and Sophia received many) are necessarily qualified, since the ethos of self-making portrays her husband as the unaided author of his own success. Did Sophia notice that she is never mentioned in the introduction to Mosses from an Old Manse, where Nathaniel creates the impression that he is an autonomous genius, working alone?^[2]

The self-made husband soon discovers that he is only as good as his most recent success and that fulfillment lies in making a self-made self, not in occupying one. He may feel the impulse to re-enact the struggle from youthful obscurity and may look for a new "my own self" to inspire him. His achieved position now becomes an obstruction; and if his wife continues to seek vicarious fulfillment in it, she is wedded to a reputation that seems a death trap for him.

These commonplace difficulties of middle-class married life may be more or less severe, of course, and they may be surmounted. The domestic ideal in its early formation, however, scarcely provided even the means of recognizing them. The sharp segregation of home from world and the idealization of wifely self-sacrifice cooperated to sustain a utopian illusion that counteracted awareness of such problems or made them appear unthinkably terrible when they broke through the veil of bliss.

After Nathaniel had finished The House of the Seven Gables, Ellery Channing visited the "little Red House" at Lenox and wrote to his wife how much the Hawthornes had changed for the worse since their newlywed days at the Old Manse. His description is unfriendly and was doubtless sharpened by envy; yet it evokes the marital politics that prompted Hawthorne to say

that the house "looks like the Scarlet Letter." Channing observed that Hawthorne's "having written nine books [has] made him a lion," but that he is more reclusive than ever. "He has lived here . . . a year & a half I believe, & I suppose he has hardly seen a face beyond that of his wife and children."^[3] What strikes Channing's eye is a scene of domestic disenchantment:

I would think Sophia could not realize his ideal of beauty at all. She is by no means prepossessing and has not added to her beauty by time. And she has none of the means whereby elegance and refinement may be shed over the humblest apartment. The children brought up in the worst way for visitors, by themselves, never having been to school, have of course nothing but bad manners. They break in when not required & are not in fact either handsome or attractive. But how could the parents help this. I have formed a very different opinion of the [Hawthornes] this visit from any I have ever had before, and [Hawthorne] has greatly altered.

In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne had brooded over the "thousand-fold" morbid influences that infiltrate the domestic hearthside and impel a family to roam unrestfully from one place to another. Now Channing reports that Hawthorne "thinks a good deal of coming to Concord and possibly to buy a place"; but Channing "would not encourage" such a plan. "Assuredly he would get tired of his purchase, and then he would be obliged all his days to think of selling or again to go to work moving. He always I believe finds fault with the people among whom he settles." When the Hawthornes moved to the Wayside in Concord in 1852, it was the eighth home they had occupied in ten years of marriage; at least eleven more would follow in the next eight years, during the family's European sojourn, as one place after another dissatisfied one or both of them.^[4] "I do not know what sort of character it will form in the children," Hawthorne remarked on one of their English moves, "this unsettled, shifting, vagrant life, with no central home to turn to, except what we carry in ourselves" (English, 425).

Hawthorne's emergence from obscurity and severe financial hardship had been remarkably swift: less than four years had elapsed between his ejection from the Custom House at Salem and Pierce's election to the presidency. The years of steady work in Liverpool brought a measure of wealth, and his writings consolidated his international fame. In 1858 he was able to treat the family to a stay in Rome and even thought of living there permanently. But this luxurious prospect turned into a nightmare, throwing the family "soul-system" into crisis, and breaking through Hawthorne's adamant altogether.