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.