PART TWO—
NUMINOUS MATES

Social hierarchy was being redefined in America when Nathaniel and Sophia were growing up: middle-class hegemony displaced the seaboard landholding gentry that had provided leadership in the Revolution and in the writing of the Constitution, and this shift brought about a transformation in the status system of American society. A new elite emerged as the old elite declined; what changed, however, was not merely the membership of a fixed upper class but the terms on which elite status could be claimed. Individual achievement supplanted family heritage as the keynote of social worth.^[1]

In "The American Scholar" (1837) Ralph Waldo Emerson noted "the new importance given to the single person" (Whicher, 79) as a pre-eminent sign of the times and sought to provide a spiritual underpinning for the emerging ideal of individual autonomy. The story of self-reliant struggle from humble origins to high position became the ruling narrative of manly worth, supplanting that of the well-born lad demonstrating his superior breeding in the exercise of responsibilities that were his birthright. The ideal of the youthful aristocrat enacted by Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson gave way to that of the self-made man. This new model of manly worth was a creation of a bourgeois culture that sought to reconcile the egalitarianism of Revolutionary ideology with continuing social stratification, holding that men are equal at birth and that just inequalities develop as differences of talent and virtue reveal themselves in democratic competition.

Families, especially prominent, powerful families, have been considered sacred from the origins of Western civilization. In early nineteenth-century America, however, the family became a focal point of religious reality in a new way. Social faith in the differential sacredness of bloodlines gave way to a numinous authority newly invested in the domestic circle, with the nurturing presence of the middle-class wife and mother at the center of the sacred tableau.

Lineage through the male line certainly did not cease to count as a marker of identity and an indicator of status in nineteenth-century America, and marriages continued to be made so as to strengthen and perpetuate family wealth and position. Yet it became proverbial by mid-century that a young man could be crippled by distinguished origins, what Nathaniel Hawthorne called inheriting "a great misfortune" (CE 2:20).^[2] As the culture of commercial capitalism became established, social arrangements arose to accommodate the "perennial gale of creative destruction" that Joseph Schumpeter marked as its central quality (84). With all fortunes now apparently at risk, the men who emerged winners in the competitive new society gave credit to

wives who had assisted them by providing a space of retreat from the struggle and the vision of a loftier humanity that ennobled their financial success. The self-made man had his cultural counterpart in the domestic angel, the woman with whom he had formed a marriage based not on inherited property but on mutual affection and moral fitness.

These social issues are easily recognizable in the broad thematic structure of The House of the Seven Gables: the family as lineage is desacralized in the fall of the Pyncheons, and the emerging ideal of domesticity is celebrated in the relation of Holgrave and Phoebe. But the imaginative design of Hawthorne's novel is composed of elements through which Nathaniel and Sophia sought to make sense of themselves. If they had never met one another, they would nonetheless have formed narratives of their personal experience that deployed the emerging conceptions of family and gender and would have spelled out in their lives the warfare of meanings that characterized the social transformation then taking place. The middle-class home did not smoothly replace the dynastic household as a cultural ideal. As typical figures of the "new" arrangement, Nathaniel and Sophia were caught in the struggle to distinguish it from an "old" pattern that still entered strongly into their self-understanding.

Nathaniel and Sophia had already imagined one another before they met; on meeting, they found that their two narratives were already one. They lived out an ideal that asserted not merely "natural" manhood and "natural" womanhood coming into accord, but the perfection of an "individual" accord: their two stories appeared to be written for each other, the marriage made in heaven. This myth of a uniquely preordained interlocking of individual selves lay at the heart of the claim to elite status that such marriages embodied.

As their lives articulated social circumstance, so the Hawthornes became its local exemplars; and for a much larger public The House of the Seven Gables enacts a comparable drama, in which a cultural order is fashioned that both nourishes and consumes its offspring. The story of the Hawthornes as numinous mates does not offer a "source" of The House of the Seven Gables, as though it were raw material that was submitted to the transforming alembic of Hawthorne's creative imagination. Like the selfhoods that Nathaniel and Sophia brought to it, the relationship between them was an imaginative achievement in an especially strong sense.

When Sophia's older sister referred to their marriage as "the coming together of two self-sufficing worlds" (Pearson, 276), she meant more than a late marriage between persons who had become accustomed to living

single. Both Nathaniel and Sophia projected a distinctive aura; neither was an easygoing person, smoothly accommodating the peculiarities of others. Julian Hawthorne frequently refers to the "enchanted circle" (NHW 1:48) his mother cast about her; and evidences are plentiful that Hawthorne projected a momentous "presence."

What is the relation between the spell cast by a work of literature and such personal charisma? How is the collective life of art related to the psychic energy that radiates from a man or woman so strongly as to compel the imagination? Is so urgent an aura the sign of social conflict within the self? Does an individual become a "self-sufficing world" because he or she has internalized unstable and shifting identities, so that the working coherence necessary to sanity becomes precarious? How do two such coherencies become one, as the imaginations of Nathaniel and Sophia postulate and then discover one another? And how do we ourselves, with our workaday selfhoods, find not only that we have imagined Hawthorne's writings before we read them but also that the shamanistic force contemporaries encountered when they dealt with him, or with Sophia, still reaches us?

Chapter Three—
The Queen of All She Surveys

Sophia Hawthorne is the most vilified wife in American literary history, after having been in her own time the most admired. Elizabeth Shaw Melville has been blamed for not having measured up to Fayaway, and although Lidian Emerson was eminently presentable, like her short-lived predecessor, Ellen Louisa Tucker, neither woman is credited with having a vital relation to her husband's imagination. Thoreau, Whitman, and James did not marry, and Henry Adams's wife, Clover Hooper, is omitted—a gasping silence—from the story of his education. Sophia Hawthorne, by contrast, was hailed as indispensable to the flowering of her husband's genius, a role that Hawthorne himself fervently celebrated and impressed upon his friends and his children. "Nothing seems less likely," Julian affirmed, "than that he would have accomplished his work in literature independently of her sympathy and companionship" (NHW 1:39).

Scholars in our own time have found Sophia a force to be reckoned with. When Randall Stewart discovered how extensively she had edited the English Notebooks, he noted "the Victorian ideal of decorum" that guided her and concluded that her interferences cannot fairly be judged against twentieth-century standards of editorial scholarship (English, xxi). Yet compared with Nathaniel's genius for undermining the decorums of Victorian life, Sophia's temperament seems an epitome of moralistic hypocrisy. Frederick Crews has noted the zealous minute care with which her revisions purify

Hawthorne's language, observing that many of her alterations draw attention to indecent meanings that would pass unnoticed if she had not marked them. Crews condemns this as "the work of a dirty mind" (12–14). Not only is Sophia peculiarly alert to what she considers nasty, but the whole course of her censoring impulse runs counter to the openness of Hawthorne's imagination. It has become hard to understand how the man who wrote Hawthorne's works could have married Sophia at all, to say nothing of pronouncing her an indispensable source of spiritual sympathy and support.

The commonly accepted picture of Sophia conceals her playful warmth, her intellectual fervor, and the fierce independence of her spirit. Sophia was a maker of manners; and she continues to stir involuntary loathing because she remains a powerful avatar of a perishing god. (It is not hard to show disinterested curiosity in a divinity one has never worshiped, by whose adherents one has never been injured or aided.) The domestic angel had a primal religious force in the nineteenth century that she no longer enjoys, yet something of the awesome old energy still haunts us.

The growing sadness of Sophia's life, like the growing shrillness of her moralism, results in good measure from a paradox at the heart of her achievement. She pioneered a convention of womanhood that obliged her to deploy her creative powers vicariously, through Nathaniel. Among women who have sought to fulfill themselves through the achievements of a man, few have succeeded better than Sophia. She chose a man bound for greatness, in whom her own ambitions could be realized and to whom she was truly indispensable. The ironies of that triumph and its fearful price will occupy us to the end of her story; and they are already evident at the outset, where the inner meanings of her illness took form.

The "female malady" that harassed and interrupted the lives of other Victorian women became for Sophia an embracing idiom of selfhood.^[1] Her primary symptom was a disabling headache typically tripped off by unexpected noises, at times so slight as the clinking of silverware. Sophia found a spiritual portent in these agonizing experiences and persistently sought their meaning.

All day yesterday my head raged, and I sat a passive subject for the various corkscrews, borers, pincers, daggers, squibs and bombs to effect their will upon it. Always I occupy myself with trying to penetrate the mystery of pain. Sceptics surely cannot disbelieve in one thing invisible, and that is Pain . Towards night my head was relieved, and I seemed let down from a weary height full of points into a quiet green valley, upon velvet turf. It was as if I had fought a fight all day and got through.^[2]

A mythological haziness surrounds accounts of the onset of Sophia's problem, in which one nonetheless finds clear assertions of her having been remarkably vigorous and healthy in girlhood (Cuba, xxx; Tharp, 24). At the age of twenty-four Sophia spent a year in Cuba, hoping that relaxation and the warm climate would cure her; she wrote home that "it would be utter folly to expect a rooted pain of fifteen years or more to be expelled in 'one little month'" (Cuba, 25). Taken as a key to chronology, this remark would indicate that the illness began when Sophia was nine years old or younger; but we are not dealing here with chronological time. This "rooted pain" was deep in the self and thus is felt to be deep in the past. Julian traces the trouble even closer to the sources of Sophia's identity; his version of the family story blames her dentist father, who "incontinently" dosed her with allopathic drugs when she was teething (NHW 1:47).

Louise Tharp's Peabody Sisters of Salem sketches a still earlier myth of origins that suggests why it seemed plausible to blame her father's ineptitude. At the heart of Sophia's illness was an anti-patriarchal impulse that is visible in the tradition of womanly character from which she sprang.

The Peabody family was among the most distinguished in New England during Sophia's girlhood; but the Palmers—her mother's family—figured largest in the claim to high status that the women of the family asserted. Sophia's mother—Elizabeth Palmer Peabody—retained worshipful memories of a grandfather, General Palmer, who was a pre-Revolutionary aristocrat. He made his home at Friendship Hall, a splendid mansion set in the midst of extensive landholdings, where Elizabeth in childhood stretched out on the floor of the library to read Shakespeare and Spenser from leather-bound volumes.

Sophia's crisis of health at her entry into adulthood replays that of General Palmer's daughter Mary.^[3] She too possessed unusual physical vigor and was a crack shot and a fearless rider. So intrepid was she, in fact, that her father consented to a test of nerve proposed by her fiancé, who crept up on her while she was reading in the garden and fired a pistol close by her head. Mary Palmer forthwith went into hysterics, broke the engagement, and secluded herself in her bedroom as a nervous invalid unable to endure sudden noises.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the transition from girlhood to womanhood in democratic America was a drastic change, and while he tried to put an attractive face on it, his description makes clear it was a change for the worse. "The independence of woman is irrecoverably lost in the bonds

of matrimony." She leaves her father's house, an "abode of freedom and of pleasure," to live "in the home of her husband as if it were a cloister" (2:201). This typical crisis may have become more pronounced in the 1830s, when Tocqueville came to America, than it was when young Miss Palmer took to her bed fifty years earlier. Yet the plight of a strong-minded young woman facing the limitations of marriage is a time-honored theme of family relations. It is a staple of Shakespeare's plays—as with Hermia, Portia, Juliet, and Cordelia—where the father's tyrannical command brings on the conflict.

The "joke" played on General Palmer's spirited daughter was a joint enterprise, carried out together by the two men, and it seems evident that her nervous ailment was a protest against the servitude that the gunshot announced, matrimony as a state of subjection to her husband, fully authorized by her father. General Palmer, it seems, yielded to his daughter's protest: he was stricken with remorse and gave orders that members of the household observe silence within earshot of her bedroom.

The rebellious spirit that goes into such a protest strongly characterized Sophia Peabody's foremothers. Her grandmother Betsey Hunt—also brought up in luxury—secretly taught herself to read because her father forbade instruction; and she eloped with young Joseph Palmer, the general's son, who had been willing to supply her with books.

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sophia's mother, inherited a full share of this womanly valor; she struggled all her life to retain some purchase on the social prominence that was jeopardized following the loss of General Palmer's fortune. Having an "earnest wish to gain for herself a decent independence," Elizabeth accepted menial employments in her early twenties, but she also published poems in vigorous heroic couplets on political topics, prominently including the rights of women (Marshall, 45). For a time she set her hopes on her husband, Nathaniel Peabody, but his medical practice yielded only fitful success, and the family's circumstances did not markedly improve when he decided to try his hand as a dentist. Elizabeth developed a significant career of her own as a writer and an educator; her children grew up amid the bustle of the household schools that she established, for which she wrote class materials that were subsequently published as Sabbath Lessons; or, an Abstract of Sacred History and Holiness; or, the Legend of St. George . But this career did not bring financial security, so that her oldest daughter, Elizabeth, was encouraged to begin work as a schoolteacher at the earliest possible date, as was Mary, the next oldest.

Mrs. Peabody pursued these high-minded undertakings in a social situation that riddled them with contradictions. The vision of social eminence she

derived from her memories of Friendship Hall was unrealizable in the turbulent economy of the early nineteenth century. The "unbought grace of life" that the colonial gentry transferred to America from the traditional aristocracy of Great Britain became impossible to sustain as the boom-and-bust cycles of an unregulated capitalism recurrently discomposed the status hierarchy. The New England gentry, responding to this threat by attempting to close ranks, asserted a new form of solidarity, centered on the possession and conservation of wealth as opposed to the maintenance of kin connections cutting across lines of economic difference. The separation of social groupings by levels of affluence meant that the prestige earlier attaching to names like Peabody and Palmer began to drain away (A. Rose, 5–12, 19–22).

For men, the freedom from mercenary struggle that earlier had marked social prominence was now replaced by the claim of having succeeded in that very struggle. Dramas of leisured cultivation were increasingly enacted by the wives of wealthy men, not by the men themselves. Instead of a manorial Friendship Hall presided over by a venerable old gentleman, the new emblems of status were the great McIntire mansions on the residential streets of Salem that were paid for by the profits of shipping ventures and managed by ladies of refinement.

Struggling to keep a school going and prodding her husband to greater efforts was unlike any such life. Because Mrs. Peabody was a married woman (unable to sign a contract, own property, or vote) there was no possibility that the life she led would one day be seen as a temporary encampment on the hard road to a splendid demesne. One of the lessons of Mrs. Peabody's adulthood was that a woman's self-reliant efforts, no matter how intelligent or vigorous, could not be rewarded with economic success.^[4] Yet in her fierce commitment to education as a path to moral and cultural attainment, Mrs. Peabody explored alternative avenues to womanly triumph available in the rising middle-class order.

Sophia Peabody was proud to believe that the Peabodys were descended from Boudicca, the queen of the Britons, who led a bloody revolt against Roman overlordship (Tharp, 19). All three of Elizabeth Peabody's daughters—Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia—were indomitable warriors; Sophia's distinctive armor was the identification of womanhood itself with an aristocratic spirituality, to be kept defiantly aloof from the squalor of mercenary preoccupations.

It seems that Mrs. Peabody assigned to Sophia the task of embodying what she herself had glimpsed in girlhood, the otium cum dignitate that was incompatible with the relentless striving of her adult years. On numerous

occasions Mrs. Peabody declared that Sophia, because of her "delicate" nature, was unable to make a journey, or pay a visit, or take a job that Sophia herself was quite eager to accept. When Sophia was fourteen, her sisters were teaching in wealthy households in Maine, and Elizabeth wrote home in great excitement over meeting a woman who was personally acquainted with Madame de Staël. "Madame de Stael made no distinction between the sexes," she wrote to Sophia. "She treated men in the same manner as women. She knew that genius has no sex" (Tharp, 33). Mrs. Peabody would not allow Sophia to visit her sisters in Maine.

Splitting headaches are not the same thing as aristocratic leisure, and the feminine spirituality Sophia cultivated was a virtue enshrined by the rising American middle class, not by the landed gentry of the late eighteenth century; yet in Sophia's illness these divergent themes were fused, the symbolism of elite status being refashioned in a pattern that ascribed childlike innocence and purity to women while making them exemplars of unworldly cultivation. She lay abed, able to eat no foods except those of the purest white—white bread, white meat, and milk—and, like General Palmer's daughter, suffering dreadfully at the slightest noise. Yet she also deployed her extraordinary energy and ability in the study of literature, geography, science, European and American history, Latin, French (and later Greek, Hebrew, and German), and drawing.

The special treatment accorded Sophia did not set Mrs. Peabody at odds with the two older daughters, at least not overtly. Sophia's care, as well as her education and religious training, was a project in which both sisters cooperated, and in which her sister Elizabeth took a strong hand. The whole family worked together to treat Sophia as having a distinctive quality rightly demanding the utmost solicitude from those who cared about her and appreciated who she was. All her life Sophia expressed heartfelt gratitude for the selfless devotion that had been lavished on her.

The new democratic ethos offered strong incentives to women of gentry origins who carried high abilities and ambitions into the society of post-Revolutionary America. Even as the Constitution was being drafted, Abigail Adams, recognizing that the doctrine of equal rights should apply to herself, wrote the famous letter asking her husband to "remember the ladies." The grounding of human dignity in individual striving, especially where directed toward the public good, inspired women of talent and pride to dream of high achievement; and in the generation of Sophia's mother there was little contradiction between running schools and writing about education while being a wife and mother.

Trained to boldness and independence of mind, Sophia and her sisters

expected to have "careers," lives of significant activity directed by their own choices.^[5] Like men who are indoctrinated with this ideal, they faced the problem of making such lives their own, as distinct from obeying the precepts of their indoctrinators. How was Sophia to lead her own life, rather than live out a compensatory feature of her mother's? The Peabody sisters also faced additional dilemmas as the chasm deepened in their early years between a woman's domestic occupations and the world in which public achievement was possible. The undertakings that were united in their mother's life came under divergent pressures, so that the daughters were forced to choose: Elizabeth remained single as she pursued a public career; Sophia and Mary made marriages. But in the early nineteenth century these were not choices between clearly defined alternatives; each possibility was impregnated with the energies of its opposite. Like these rivalrous devoted sisters, the available possibilities were both united and at odds; and the tensions among them were at stake in the interior conflict that devastated and animated Sophia.

Sophia, whose interest in her inner life never waned, typically idealized her descriptions of formative experiences, celebrating the selfless maternal love that trained her in womanly spirituality. But when her own children were approaching maturity, she recalled a childhood experience that was "slightly bitter" and wrote it up for them in circumstances that indicate the attendant status anxieties.^[6]

In March 1860, when the Hawthornes were preparing to return from England, the family made an expedition to Bath. On arriving at the railway station, they were directed to a hotel much finer than Sophia thought they could afford. A single night in such a place, Sophia wrote her sister, might consume a whole year's income. The family's sitting room was "hung with crimson," and the dining service featured the "finest cut crystal, and knives and forks with solid silver handles, and spoons too heavy to lift easily." Once they discovered that the expense was not prohibitive, the Hawthornes made the most of the occasion. Nathaniel and Sophia styled themselves "the Duke and Duchess of Maine" while Julian became "Lord Waldo," Una "Lady Raymond," and Rose "Lady Rose" (Hull, Hawthorne, 187), titles recalling the Hawthorne family legend of a vast manorial establishment near Raymond, Maine. Thus fortified with emblems of high place, Sophia drafted her story as told by "the Countess of Raymond" to "the Duchess Anna."

When Sophia was four or five years old, she was playing outdoors on a

visit to her grandmother's house and picked up a fat puppy that squirmed too hard for her to manage, slipped from her grasp and dropped to the pavement with a loud squeal. Sophia's aunt rushed from the house, shook her violently by the arm, and gave her a severe scolding. The aunt was "tall, stately, and handsome," Sophia recalled, "and very terrible in her wrath. I felt like a criminal, and as it had never yet occurred to me that a grown person could do wrong, but that children only were naughty, I took the scolding, and the earthquake my aunt made of my little body, as a proper penalty for some fault which she saw, though I did not."

The victim of an injustice that she could not articulate, Sophia is sent off to her grandmother's upstairs bedroom and there, looking out the window, she beholds her nemesis:

I saw a beggar girl, sitting on a doorstep directly opposite, and when she caught sight of me, she clenched her fist and uttered a sentence, which, though I did not in the least comprehend it, I never forgot. "I'll maul you!" said the beggar girl, with a scowling, spiteful face. I gazed at her in terror, feeling hardly safe, though within stone walls and half-way up to the sky, as it seemed to me. I was convinced she would have me at last, and that no power could prevent it, but I did not even appeal to my Grandmamma for aid, nor utter a word of my awful fate to anyone.

Sophia felt compelled to keep secret this terrifying image of her own fury. The beggar girl's wanton unprovoked rage is a perfect opposite to the speechless submission Sophia herself was then suffering, and a replication in small of the attack on her by her aunt. The threat of being "mauled" by the beggar girl could not be excluded by the bedroom walls, nor could Sophia's grandmother dispel it, and Sophia remained certain that this curse would pursue her until it was fulfilled.

It is possible that young Sophia associated the tyranny of her grandmother and her aunt with the minute supervisory attention lavished on her by her mother and sisters. But it is hardly likely that—in her little-girlhood—she connected the beggary of the urchin with the economic dependence of women and secretly sympathized with the beggar girl's defiant fury (and felt all the more threatened by it) because it symbolized a rebellion against the humiliating necessities that prompted her mother and sisters to treat her as they did. But we are not dealing here with a five-year-old's account. Sophia wrote this story after the years of puberty, in which the restriction of her life became fixed, and after seventeen years of marriage. An elaborate pattern of meaning had crystallized around the original incident, and Sophia describes an earlier encounter with the beggar girl that relates directly to her mother and includes broader themes of psychic and social subjugation.

Sophia reports that the advent of the beggar girl banished all thought of her aunt's anger; and as she gazed on the little hobgoblin, she realized they had met before. This had happened

when I had escaped out of the garden-gate at home, and was taking my first independent stroll. No maid nor footman was near me on that happy day. It was glorious. My steps were winged, and there seemed more room on every side than I had heretofore supposed the world contained. The sense of freedom from all shackles was intoxicating. I had on no hat, no walking dress, no gloves. What exquisite fun! I really think every child that is born ought to have the happiness of running away once in their lives at least,—it is so perfectly delightful. I went up a street that gradually ascended, till, at the summit, I believed I stood on the top of the earth. But alas! at that acme of success my joy ended, for there I confronted suddenly this beggar-girl,—the first ragged, begrimed human being I had ever seen.

The encounter with the urchin again takes place against the background of confinement, not at the hands of her wicked aunt, but in her beloved mother's home. The hat, gloves, and outdoor dress are paraphernalia of the genteel nurture that shackled Sophia, and her escape is an exercise of inner strength, the discovery of a larger space, the prospect of climbing to the top of the world. Yet her jubilant freedom leads straight to the encounter with a much more desperate enslavement.

What happened next was a grotesque parody of her lessons in genteel propriety: "She seized my hand, and said 'Make me a curtsey!' 'No!' I replied, 'I will not!', the noble blood in my veins tingling with indignation. How I got away, and home again, I cannot tell; but as I did not obey the insolent command, I constantly expected revenge in some form, and yet never told mamma anything about it."

The story presents Sophia as having her choice of shackles, and choosing with great energy. Fearlessly defying the "insolent" girl, she retains the dignity of her class position as a young lady. But in fleeing home she is fleeing to a world of curtsies, not enforced with rough commands, but enforced nonetheless.

As she amalgamated the two incidents, Sophia became fascinated by the word mauled . "What was that? Something doubtless, unspeakably dreadful. The new, strange word cast an indefinite horror over the process to which I was to be subjected. Where could the creature have got the expression?" Not only does the beggar girl know about curtsies, but she has also acquired somewhere a relatively sophisticated vocabulary. As her years unfolded, Sophia had good reason to dread the prospect of collapsing, with all her education and sensibilities, into poverty. She knew she did not have family

wealth by which to bankroll a life of genteel invalidism, and when the time came for her to scramble for her own living—by way of editing Hawthorne's notebooks after his death—she proved fit for the task. Other New England women of her class and generation did not fare so well and suffered the degradation of carrying their cultural attainments into circumstances of financial ruin and of watching their children grow up in squalor.^[7]

The conventional recourse for a woman in Sophia's circumstances was to uphold the standard of womanly refinement whose imperatives were as harsh as those of the beggar girl but which served as the regalia of the emerging middle class. If a growing girl failed to attain the selfless delicacy of a "true woman," she risked falling into the working class, or beneath, where beggars and bullies lived out their desolate lives and sought occasions for taking futile vengeance on their social superiors, or on the working-class women who often served as vicarious targets. For a woman to unsex herself by asserting her aggressive impulses (to say nothing of her erotic impulses) was to invite consignment to this outer darkness, which was the sharpest social terror now assailing the old New England gentry, that of failing to negotiate the transition into the new elite and falling into laboring-class degradation.

Sophia's story is a parable of the cross-pressures inherent in the ideal of womanhood she sought to make her own. The beggar girl polices the genteel "feminine" order by reduplicating its commands with harsh clarity and by reminding the potential rebel of what lies outside. She is thus the object of the policing action she herself executes. The story invests the beggar girl with two opposed impulses, both of structural significance to the emerging gender arrangement as Sophia came to embody it: violence exploding in opposition to the standard of womanhood that was set before her as mandatory, and violence exerted to support the same standard.

The horror Sophia felt at the prospect of being "mauled" by this figure was generated by the psychosocial contradiction grinding away in her own personality. Her life was conditioned permanently by a psychic autoimmune reaction in which, spontaneously and with fierce dedication, she sought to rid herself of the very qualities of fierce spontaneity that were built into the reaction itself. A feedback loop of inner conflict was established that could be set in motion by a slight external irritation and would then, under its own self-driven dynamic, crescendo to a mind-splitting roar. The experience of being ripped apart, of being made into an "earthquake," of being "mauled," of being "destroyed": all these were imposed on her by the inherent contra-

dictions of a social situation that both cultivated and repressed the direct exercise of her native force.

Sophia managed to place her conflicts—and the illness to which they led—in the service of her own initiative, wresting a degree of mastery from the conditions of her victimization. She became a careful student of her own condition, and as one doctor after another proved unable to "cure" her, she emerged as an authority on the treatment she required. "This morning I awoke very tired," she writes in her journal, "& as if I must take some exercise to change the nature of the fatigue—so although it snowed & Molly [her sister Mary] thought it 'absurd'—I took a drive with Mamma for half an hour & as I expected was relieved of the vital weariness, though I acquired physical." Noting that Mary considers her "wilfully & foolishly imprudent," Sophia insists that she is herself the only judge because the knowledge of her pain is incommunicable. "Heaven grant," she piously concludes, "that none may through experience understand the excruciating sensation I perpetually feel."^[8]

Sophia found one avenue toward mastering her condition in the conviction that it offered spiritual insight. Having disposed of Mary's claim that the sleigh ride was "absurd," Sophia turns to comment on the opinion of a physician she admired: "Dr. Shattuck was right when he so decidedly declared I never should be relieved 'till I heard the music of the spheres'—in other words—till I had put off corruption." Sophia here is not anticipating her own death but referring to a mystical transaction in which her miseries are sublimated in a communion with the divine. The inner conflicts that threatened her with psychic disintegration also gave her experiences of transcendent harmony.

Sophia cherished throughout her life a girlhood dream that portrayed this process, recounting it to her children and to intimate friends as an emblem of her essential spirituality. The dream—as Julian described it—was "of a dark cloud, which suddenly arose in the west and obscured the celestial tints of a splendid sunset. But while she was deploring this eclipse, and the cloud spread wider and gloomier, all at once it underwent a glorious transformation; for it consisted of countless myriads of birds, which by one movement turned their rainbow-colored breasts to the sun, and burst into a rejoicing chorus of heavenly song" (NHW 1:49).^[9]

This is not a dream about a silver lining, or about the sun bursting through a cloud, but of the whole cloud instantly transformed into a heavenly chorus. Sophia would certainly have agreed that the process depicted here is "sublimation," inverting the post-Freudian sense of the term, in which the earthy desires sublimated are considered to be real. Sophia's inward experience attested a central axiom of romantic Neoplatonism, that sublimation gives access to the sublime, the movement from earthly murk into radiant spiritual truth taking place at a single step. As her son declared, the transcendental ontology of Sophia's dream was "among the firmest articles of her faith" (NHW 1:49).

Sophia's experience of redemptive communion with the divine meant that her agonizing sensitivity counted as a moral litmus, unerringly reactive to earthly evils. Since freedom from nervous headaches required "putting off corruption," she acquired a command post within the consciences of all who knew and understood her. Her sister Elizabeth remarked on the voluntary acquiescence Sophia's needs inspired. "All these years mother was her devoted nurse,—watching in the entries that no door should be hard shut, etc. . . . I had a school of 40 scholars, and she became interested in them, and they would go into her room; and the necessity of keeping still in the house so as not to disturb her, was my means of governing my school: for they all spontaneously governed themselves" (Pearson, 272–273).

Elizabeth was one of the most forceful and accomplished American women of the century, accustomed at an early age to managing her own life and to setting plans for others to follow. After opening a school in Brookline in 1825, she became a friend and disciple of William Ellery Channing, with whose endorsement she enlarged her school and took on as partner a prominent teacher of elocution named William Russell. By 1828 the whole family had moved from Salem to Boston, and Elizabeth's long career of educational and cultural leadership in that city commenced. Elizabeth knew a struggle for dominance when she saw one, and she was frankly astonished at Sophia's successes. "I never knew any human creature who had such sovereign power over everybody—grown and child—that came into her sweet and gracious presence. Her brothers reverenced and idolized her" (Pearson, 273).

Sophia found it virtually impossible to act frankly in her own behalf because self-assertion invited a "nervous" attack. At age thirteen she discovered, for example, that she had an exceptional talent for drawing and painting, yet the first dawning of this realization brought on a bout of incapacity. "She was thrown into a sickness," her sister observed, "from which she never rose into the possibility of so much excitation again; and by

a slight accident was disabled in the hand and could not draw" (Pearson, 272). When Sophia returned to drawing and painting several years later, she sought to resolve this dilemma by becoming a copyist instead of creating her own pictures.^[10] She soon became so skillful that knowledgeable observers could scarcely distinguish her work from the originals, and her copies of pictures by Washington Allston, Chester Harding, and other leading painters were much in demand.

Sophia was both fascinated and repelled by Elizabeth's public enterprises. Sophia sent letters home from Cuba, which her sister circulated among friends in Boston, and before the year was out, Sophia's "Cuba Journal" had made a name for itself. Word got abroad that Sophia's "effusions" were "ravishing," so that Elizabeth was able to organize readings for invited guests that on some occasions ran as long as seven hours (Cuba, xxxviii). Sophia professed herself "aghast": "I do not like at all that my journal should be made such public property of—I think Betty is VERY naughty. . . . I assure you I am really provoked. I shall be ashamed to shew my face in the places that knew me—for it seems exactly as if I were in print—as if every body had got the key of my private cabinet & without leave of the owner—are appropriating whatever they please" (249, 470–471). Elizabeth in reply urged Sophia to publish in The Atlantic Monthly, which Sophia refused to do. Early in their courtship, however, she offered the journal to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who—doubtless pleased at being handed the key to her private cabinet—copied sections of it into his own notebook. From him she received a recognition suited to the sovereign aloofness she wished to maintain: he called her the "Queen of Journalizers" (xxxix, xli).

Elizabeth and Sophia present a contrast of spirits deeply alike. The pressure Elizabeth exerted against the conventions of domesticity in her public undertakings was felt by Sophia as an inner imperative, as was the pressure of those conventions themselves. Sophia's psychic struggle was an internalized version of the conflict Elizabeth waged outwardly, so that the drama and danger of Elizabeth's public career were recapitulated as a subjective experience by her younger sister.

Sophia describes her artistic endeavors in the winter of 1832 in language that indicates the blend of overpowering excitement and overpowering dread that accompanied the effort to put her talent to work. "Yesterday I began copying Mr. Allston's picture," she begins.

It was intense enjoyment—almost intoxicating. It was an emotion altogether too intense for my physicals. A most refined torture did it work & has it worked today

upon my head—accompanied with a deathly sickness. After a ride yesterday the sickness passed away in a degree & left . . . [a] headache which seemed to exalt every faculty of my mind & everything of which I thought was tinged with a burning splendor which was almost terrible & I did not dare to let my imagination excurse.^[11]

Observe the fusion of seemingly contradictory emotions. The ecstasy that she expresses in sustaining "a refined torture" is masochistic, yet at the heart of this ravishment is the purposeful exercise of her talent. To "excurse" is to play with fire, a daring and passionate adventure of the mind along the borders of insanity. "What do you think I have actually begun to do?" she writes to Elizabeth on another occasion. "Nothing less than create and do you wonder that I lay awake all last night after sketching my first picture. I actually thought my head would have made its final explosion. When once I began to excurse, I could not stop" (Tharp, 55).

Sophia's effort to comprehend her experience took the path marked out by her Neoplatonic faith. Instead of examining the concrete dilemmas of being a woman, and of being Sophia Peabody, she undertook a meditative exploration of transcendental realities. Here is a journal entry from her twentieth year:

A dubious morning. I felt rather as if a tempest had passed over & crushed my powers when I awoke—for such a violent pain—while it is on me, gives me a supernatural force—combined with an excessive excitement of all my tenderest nerves, which nearly drives me mad. Yesterday whenever a door slammed or a loud voice made me start throughout in my powerless state—I could not keep the tears—burning tears from pouring over my cheeks. . . . Oh how mysterious is this unseen mighty agent. There is evident reason why a murderous instrument should cause anguish—but how is this inward-invisible agony caused? It seems as if a revelation had passed in my head & that I can no more mingle with the noisy world.^[12]

Sophia sustains a supernatural revelation that would not have seized her if she were free of her malady. On the journey to Cuba, undertaken in hopes of a cure, she commented on the spiritual loss entailed by getting well: "I believe I understand in a degree the very great blessing of sickness. . . . Coming years of 'Health' never can be so dear to me as the past years of suffering—I shall go back to them as I would enter the inner chamber of the tabernacle where the throne & the ark—were filled with the presence & commands of the Invisible god (Cuba, 250).

Sophia's pain exalts her from the earthly to the divine by making her

preternaturally aware of the intricacy of her psychic and physical organization, and thus of her own miraculous character as a creation of God. If she were merely a "nervous" woman, she affirms, her mind would have collapsed under the pressure; instead, she is a visionary prophet.

We are indeed fearfully & wonderfully made, & no one can know how fearfully till they are sensitive in the nicest parts of this wonderful machinery—If I had been nervous in the common acceptation of the term, I think I should not only have been mad, but afraid to move or feel. . . . In the extremity of my suffering when I was conscious of a floating off of my senses—a resolute fixing of my mind upon immutable, never changing essence . . . has enabled me to regain my balance so entirely that I feel as if I had had direct revelation to my own mind of the existence of such a Being.

(Cuba, 252–253)

This interior experience opened Sophia's mind to the Godhead spiritually immanent in the creation, not merely to the rational order that natural theologians like William Paley found in it. Sophia's romantic ecstasy testified directly to the great soul pervading nature, the local syntax of her ego dissolving into the universal discourse. "When the omnipresent beauty of the universe comes & touches the cells of Memory," she wrote home from Cuba, "& has an answer from all our individual experiences of the beautiful in thought & act during the Past—& blending with the Present—in symphonious oneness—carries us on to the future by the power of that trust or faith which is nobler because more disinterested than any other attitude of the mind, connecting all. . . . There is no need of logic to convince the hearkening spirit that there is a God—Knowledge by intuition is the unerring truth" (Cuba, 585).

If Elizabeth had succeeded in publishing the Cuba Journal in 1833, Sophia Peabody would be numbered among the earliest public exponents of transcendentalist spirituality. Both sisters were caught up in the ferment among young Unitarian clergymen who were inspired by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle and who published articles in the Christian Examiner seeking to articulate the new consciousness.

Elizabeth had taken charge of her younger sister's education when Sophia was five years old and had inculcated Unitarian convictions regarding rational virtue and the perfectibility of human nature, scrupulously shielding her from the "terrible doctrines" of Calvinism (Pearson, 270). By the time Elizabeth moved the family to Boston in 1828, she was already attuned to the themes in William Ellery Channing's teaching that encouraged the development of transcendentalism and caused the leaders of the new movement to look on him as a spiritual father. Elizabeth is best known for the practical

support she provided for transcendentalists, for her role in Alcott's Temple School, and for establishing the West Street Bookstore, where The Dial was published and Margaret Fuller held her conversations. But Elizabeth was intellectually active as well; she published a series of articles titled "The Spirit of the Hebrew Scriptures" in the Christian Examiner for 1834—grounded on her own reading of the Hebrew and of German criticism. Her ideas greatly alarmed Professor Andrews Norton of Harvard, a defender of Unitarianism against the new movement, so that he ordered the cancellation of Elizabeth's series after the third of her six articles had been published (A. Rose, 54). When Frederic Henry Hedge formed the Transcendental Club in 1836, Elizabeth Peabody (and Margaret Fuller) were invited to join (Miller, 106).

Sophia quickly accepted the transcendentalist doctrine most alarming to orthodox Unitarians, namely that spontaneous impulses of the soul could serve as a guide to truth, replacing the cold conclusions of reason. Unitarians were especially touchy on this point because their Calvinist opponents had claimed all along that liberal worship of reason would lead in the end to wanton irrationalism, and the transcendentalists appeared to fulfill this prophecy. Because it advanced the claims of religious intuition, an 1833 article on Coleridge by Frederic Henry Hedge was seen by proponents of transcendentalism as the "first word" uttered in public in behalf of the new spirituality (Miller, 67).

Sophia started reading Coleridge in 1830 and attempted a conclusion to the unfinished "Christabel."^[13] On the journey to Cuba three years later she was ready to articulate the relationship between Coleridge's romantic ontology and her own aesthetic raptures. "A forest always seems to me to have intelligence—a soul—The trees seem a brotherhood—Especially when they are all motionless—It must be the 'intellectual breeze' of which Coleridge speaks, that wakes that feeling within us, in the presence of nature, or 'the intense Reply of hers to our Intelligence' & we are the 'harps diversely framed'" (Cuba, 480).

In reply, Elizabeth sounded a note of caution that echoes the Unitarian resistance to transcendental teaching and serves as yet another reminder of the way issues of the public controversy were also fought out within the partisans. "Sentiments about Beauty," Elizabeth declared, "do not constitute Religion" (Cuba, xxxiii).

Early in 1835 Sophia drafted a meditation in her personal notebook concerning Coleridge and Plato, exploring the union of self-knowledge with knowledge of the transcendent: "To study our own Life is to study all Life—since in this Life of ours are emblems and representations of every

form and power and spirit of life. And this is Life—to apprehend . . . the Ideal that images itself in our Being, wherein by self study & self representation, sustained and purified by the Actual not less than by the Speculative powers, we find the Absolute, All Representing One, and finding Him we know & in Him image ourselves."^[14]

The purity of soul required for such knowledge, Sophia explained, was possible only for those unsullied by traffic with this world. Far from lamenting her lengthy postponement of conventional adult responsibilities, she celebrated childlikeness. "In the heart of Infancy do I hope for that Light & Life to spring that shall regenerate the Philosophy and Life of future Time, when Literature shall flourish in the greenness of youth . . . when Language shall become the transcript and representative of the unshadowed Life of Childhood."^[15]

Sophia rejected the suspicion that her childlike consciousness was merely naive and that her convulsive recoil from the "earthly" might blind her to realities that deserve to be taken seriously. "My meditations turned upon my habit of viewing things through the 'coleur de rose' medium," she wrote, "when suddenly, like a night-blooming cereus, my mind opened, and I read in letters of paly golden green, words to this effect. The beautiful and good and true are the only real and abiding things, the only proper use of the soul and Nature. Evil and ugliness and falsehood are abuses, monstrous and transient. I do not see what is not, but what is, through the passing clouds."^[16]

Sophia thus adopted an understanding of evil as nonbeing that found expression in the romantic religion diversely articulated in Massachusetts by Emerson and Mary Baker Eddy. To Sophia, as to Emerson and Eddy, the perception of evil is a defect of spiritual sight that leads people to mistake the transient clouds of earth for the eternal sunlight passing through them. But the essential quality of Sophia's mind is not in the conclusions she reached, but in the vigor with which she pursued her spiritual excitements. Well before Emerson issued to the Phi Beta Kappa society at Harvard College his dictum that "the one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul" (Whicher, 68), Sophia was living it out.

She was Woman Thinking, and she laid claim to the poetic power of vision according to which the ennobled spirit is able to refashion reality itself. Yet the plastic power of her eye and its expression in language were only subordinate modes—romantic doctrine equally affirmed—of her personal presence, which brought this creative force to bear on other souls (Fig. 2). "Natures apparently far sturdier and ruder than hers depended upon her, almost abjectly, for support," Julian declares. "She was a blessing and an

Fig. 2.
Sophia Hawthorne as a young woman

illumination wherever she went; and no one ever knew her without receiving from her far more than could be given in return. Her pure confidence created what it trusted in" (NHW 1:48).

Sophia's piety retained a strongly social meaning. Like those throughout New England who responded to transcendentalist doctrines, Sophia felt a desire to buttress an elite identity that was increasingly threatened in the rising commercial economy. Without inherited wealth to defend, transcendentalists asserted an aristocracy of intellect and virtue against whose lofty standards of taste and moral cultivation the rude multitude could plausibly

be scorned or made targets of "improving" enterprises. In Transcendentalism as a Social Movement Anne Rose discusses the defensive consolidation of wealth that split the old elite class into affluent and penurious sectors, and she ably portrays the radical critique of contemporary social developments that the transcendentalists provided; but Rose does not notice the reactionary and defensive impulses arising from the transcendentalists' own elite identity, which they shared with doctrinal antagonists among the Unitarians and Calvinists, as against vulgarian Methodists, Baptists, and the Roman Catholic Irish.

Sophia was aware that the economic instability of American society was forcing a revision in the way elite status was marked. "In America," she wrote in her commonplace book, "greatness can never be predicated of a man on account of position—but only of character, because from the nature of our institutions, place changes like the figures of a kaleidoscope—and what is a man profitted because he has been a President—a Governor, or what not. This comes near to showing how factitious is all outward rank and show and especially American rank & show. In the old world birth, culture, permanence and habit give more prestige and Quality."^[17] Sophia's yearning for the "Quality" conferred by Old World position carries over into the vocabulary she uses to describe the greatness of character that distinguishes superior persons in the New World: they are a nobility whose station is permanent because it is rooted in the eternal.

The transcendental ecstasy in which Sophia gazes out over the Cuban landscape vindicates her claim to aristocratic pre-eminence: "I felt like an eagle & like the Queen of all I surveyed." Sophia was well aware of speaking here for a community of moral sentiment. She articulates what Emerson and Thoreau were to establish as a commonplace of romantic revolt, namely that the true possession of property is enjoyed by those who respond to its inherent poetry, not those who hold the deeds to it. "We who enjoy it, not in proportion to the revenue of gold it yields to our coffers, but in the infinite proportion of unappropriating & immaterial pleasure it pours into our hearts. . . . We it is who possess the earth. It was mine that morning—I was the queen of it all" (Cuba, 566–567).

Sophia was painfully aware that she was not rich: her life of leisure on the Cuban coffee plantation was purchased through the efforts of her sister Mary, who worked in the household as a governess. Sophia realized that cultivated persons may be placed at the mercy of vulgar souls who have the money to hire and fire them. She writes home from Cuba sympathizing with the effort of a Mr. Gardiner to find a teaching job where his "disinterested,

uncalculating, elevated soul" would be properly appreciated, and she lashes out at Salem, where the leaders of society are indifferent to Mr. Gardiner's value, because in Salem "the God Mammon decides all ranks & degrees." Sophia detested the formation of a new moneyed class from which she was excluded: "Oh mean & pitiful Aristocracy! even more despicable than the pride of noble blood & of bought titles!" (Cuba, 305).

Sophia thinks of herself as a queen set apart from the corrupt British aristocracy yet also distinct from the American high priesthood of Mammon. Her response to the troubles of yet another noble-souled teacher—Francis Graeter, who had been her drawing instructor—displays the humiliation and fury at stake in her claim to exalted status:

When you speak of the treatment of our friend Mr. G by the purse-proud mean-souled aristocracy of Salem, my soul is just like a volcano spouting fire & flame. . . . I wonder when the day will come that man will consider money as nothing but a trust for the good of others—instead of making a throne of base metal to sit thereon & look down with disdain upon the far nobler, far more exalted crowd below, who have not the pitiful & dangerous advantage of dollars & cents—but nevertheless are the true & unacknowledged nobility of God's kingdom.

(Cuba, 410)

Sophia envisions a nobility consisting of persons like herself, and she now had a system of religious ideas to account for her own experience and that of her spiritual kindred. The cruel fate of such exalted spirits is to live perforce in a materialistic self-seeking society. Their sufferings appeared to Sophia—like her own sufferings—to be evidence of exceptional stature. "I do not realize how coarse & rough the world is till I see the crushing & bruising of an exquisitely attuned nature under its trampling foot." The victims of this rude world should not give way to despair, she declares, but should remember that vindication is in the hands of God.

Francis Graeter's difficulty in making a living reminds Sophia of her own brother Nathaniel, who seemed unable to find a purpose in life. The idea strikes her "with overwhelming force" that Nathaniel is at heart an artist:

I thought of his contemplative, gentle, uncalculating—solitary disposition—his love of being by himself—his abhorrence of bustle & noise—his fits of abstraction—his purity and singleness of mind—his difficulty in realizing that there could be cheating & falsehood in the world, & it struck me as with a flash of lightning that a great mistake had been made, that God designed him for an artist & that we had been pushing & urging him against his organization & natural gifts.

(Cuba, 411–412)

Sophia imagines here a fit companion for herself, and her imagination races forward to picture their working together. "Nothing must be done rashly," she tells her mother,

but I want to fly home, put the pencil into his hand, & see what he would do at once, giving him the idea that he could do any thing. . . . How delightful to think of having a bona fide brother artist—I could colour & he, with his exquisite truth of eye, could draw & we could be all to one another that each is wanting in. He could illustrate story books—& help me draw my men and women in my landscapes—& we should be as happy as a king and queen in fairy land with creating wands in their hands.

(Cuba, 413–414)

It had long been understood that Sophia would never marry, principally because she looked on herself—so her sister Elizabeth remarked—"as a little girl" (Pearson, 267). Sophia's disabilities rendered her incapable of keeping house with her mother, and marriage would surely entail the added burdens of rearing children. The obstacles to marriage, however, were not only practical. What mate could be found for such an extraordinary being, deep within whose character there lay a violent conflict in which "submission" embraced a vehement self-assertive ambition? Her ambition, moreover, reached out to include projects that could be paid for only by a well-to-do husband.

Sophia envied an elderly Mrs. Kirkland in Salem, doubtless one of the aristocracy of Mammon, who had taken an exciting trip to the Near East. "Shall I ever stand upon the Imperial Palace of Persepolis? Who knows but when I am dried to an atomy like Mrs. Kirkland. . . . And when I go, perhaps my husband will not be a paralytic. Oh! I forget. I never intend to have a husband. Rather, I should say, I never intend any one shall have me for a wife" (NHW 1:185–186). Sophia puts her finger exactly where the central problem lay, not in "having a husband" but in being "had." Subordination to the authority of a man seemed inseparable from marriage, especially if the man—unlike her father—were capable of achieving worldly success sufficient to pay for a journey to the East. In erecting a transcendental philosophy on the sublimation of her inner torment, however, Sophia had opened a way to find a suitable kindred spirit.

The tenuousness of Sophia's membership in the "nobility of the Kingdom of God" comes through clearly in the manic excitement with which she claims it. Was it a nobility only of spiritual communion, or could it be perpetuated on this earth through a noble marriage? How many young men were available who had kept themselves in childlike innocence, unspoiled by

the world, and could also manage to support a wife? These were urgent issues of Sophia's experience when she discovered in 1837 that just a few streets away, in her own home town of Salem, there had lived for years in quiet seclusion a man of unearthly beauty writing great works of literature.

Toward such a figure the yearnings of Sophia's royal soul could be directed: her desire for a life of heroic sacrifice, in which her achievements would be selfless because they were the achievements of another, and her wish to exercise her spiritual influence, strengthening the divine spirit in the artist as he struggled to keep his own supernal vision undimmed by earthly distractions. Here was a relation in which the deepest submission, the most reverent obedience, could lead to a spectacular triumph.

As they were just becoming acquainted, Sophia made the following remarks: "Mr. Hawthorne said he wished he could have intercourse with some beautiful children,—beautiful little girls; he did not care for boys. What a beautiful smile he has! . . . He said he had imagined a story, of which the principal incident is my cleaning that picture of Fernandez. To be the means, in any way, of calling forth one of his divine creations, is no small happiness, is it? . . . He has a celestial expression. It is a manifestation of the divine in the human."^[18]

As her wedding approached, five years later, Sophia rejoiced that her membership in the nobility of the kingdom of God would soon be sealed for all eternity, by way of marriage to the King. "I marvel how I can be so blessed among mortals—how that the very king & poet of the world should be my eternal companion henceforth. . . . Time is so swallowed up in Eternity now that I have found my being in him, that life seems all one—now & the remotest hereafter are blended together. In the presence of majestic, serene Nature we shall stand transfigured with a noble complete happiness."^[19]

Chapter Four—
Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Made Man

Late in life Hawthorne explored his solitary personal anguish in terms that sketch an emerging commonplace of his time:

If you know anything of me, you know how I sprang out of mystery, akin to none, a thing concocted out of the elements, without visible agency—how, all through my boyhood, I was alone; how I grew up without a root, yet continually longing for one—longing to be connected with somebody—and never feeling myself so. . . . I have tried to keep down this yearning, to stifle it, annihilate it, with making a position for myself, with being my own past, but I cannot overcome this natural horror of being a creature floating in the air, attached to nothing; nor this feeling that there is no reality in the life and fortunes, good or bad, of a being so unconnected.

(CE 12:257–258)

This wrenching lament is spectacularly at odds with the story of Hawthorne's boyhood. Far from being alone, Hawthorne grew up in a welter of kinfolk. He was born in his Hathorne grandmother's house on Union Street in Salem, where his mother and older sister crowded in with Ruth and Eunice, his two unmarried Hathorne aunts. Here his father lived during the intervals between ocean voyages, and so did his uncle Daniel Hathorne, who was also a ship-captain.

When young Nathaniel was four years old, after the birth of his younger sister, word arrived in Salem that his father had died of yellow fever in Surinam. Nathaniel's mother then moved with him and his two sisters back

to the Manning family home where she had grown up, and where her parents presided over a household that included her eight brothers and sisters. The Manning house faced on Herbert Street but adjoined the Hathornes' by way of a back lot on which the children played, so that young Nathaniel was immediately surrounded in the early years by over a dozen close relations, apart from his mother and sisters and not including his aunts Sarah Hathorne Crowninshield and Rachel Hathorne Forrester, to whom he refers familiarly in early letters, who had homes of their own where he and his sisters were welcome (CE 15:117–118, 126–127).

Yet in picturing himself as a lad without connections, burdened with "making a position for myself," Hawthorne recapitulates a typical irony in the social construction of the self-made man. Mary Ryan's Cradle of the Middle Class studies the family histories of men in Utica, New York, who embraced the gospel of self-help and were celebrated for having pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. Ryan describes a pattern to which Hawthorne's early life corresponds, in which a collective family strategy is put in motion to supply funds for advanced education and provide a place for the young man to live inexpensively during the early years of adulthood as he gets his career underway (166–169). To refashion such a story of marked dependency into a myth of self-creation required attributing the work of tangible exterior resources to an inward spiritual potency. The denial of an indispensable support network and its absorption into the self-creating self enacted in the careers of business and professional men were also at the heart of Emerson's vision of the selfhood from which a uniquely American intellectual and poetic achievement would spring.^[1]

Sophia had invented Nathaniel before she met him, formulating her ideal of the brother-artist as a nobleman in the kingdom of God. When Nathaniel met Sophia, by contrast, he was struggling to invent himself and loved her for her role in that enterprise. To say that Hawthorne's identity as a writer is rooted in social circumstance is not to deny what was strikingly unusual in his experience. Comparatively few boys lost their fathers in boyhood as Hawthorne and Emerson did; this exceptional experience, however, placed these men (as analogous circumstances placed Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman) in a situation that accentuated conflicts typical of the era: in male relations both with fathers and with patriarchal authority in general. The same is true of Hawthorne's relation to Sophia: it was markedly unusual, but certain of its features make it typical of the social arrangements that gave rise to the domestic ideal. The "cult of domesticity" envisions a self-made man taking to wife an angel, a figure whose religious energies counteract the unreality "of a being so unconnected" as himself.

Like Sophia, young Nathaniel Hawthorne found a "delicate" physical condition useful in managing the internal conflicts that were consolidated into his vocation as an artist. When he was nine years old, he spent more than a year recovering from an injury to his foot that occurred when he was playing with a bat and ball. A procession of local doctors, including Nathaniel Peabody, came through the household to give their opinions. It seemed the boy was unable to walk on the injured foot; then it seemed he simply refused to walk on it. As the months passed by, Nathaniel hopped about the yard or used a crutch to get around; he played with his kittens and read what he wanted to read. A teacher brought in to carry on with his schooling did not find him zealous to follow directions. On the contrary, the boy took the occasion to do just as he pleased. "He amuses himself with playing about the yard, and in Herbert St. nearly all day," his Aunt Priscilla Manning tartly observed.^[2] The doctors warned that the foot would not improve without exercise and noted with alarm that it did not seem to be growing properly. Dr. Smith of Hanover, perhaps suspecting a psychic cause, determined that the lame foot would benefit from cold water poured over it every morning. This advice was followed religiously, and in the following January the family rejoiced at young Nathaniel's full recovery. A more severe illness soon after, however, made the family fear he would always be lame, if he survived.^[3]

It's almost too perfect, this psychologically loaded incident from the boyhood of a man who had trouble learning to stand on his own two feet, the lad refusing to walk so long as there appeared no path before him that he could call his own. Yet the evidence is compelling. Hawthorne's boyhood illnesses "conspired," his sister Elizabeth recalled, "to unfit him for a life of business," and she noted that Hawthorne's lifelong "habit of constant reading" began during this seeming idleness. The suspension of his formal schooling marked his decisive entry into the world of books, which he would eventually command. Self-direction was essential to the development of Hawthorne's true nature, Elizabeth maintained: "intentional cultivation" would have spoiled his talents. If "his genius had not been thus shielded in childhood," she explained, Hawthorne would never have developed "the qualities that distinguished him in after life."^[4] These fourteen months are a harbinger of Hawthorne's "long seclusion" in Salem after college, when he likewise cultivated his genius in his own way.

Studies of Hawthorne's development as an artist generally agree that he needed independence to provide for an innate imaginative power. Such a view is in keeping with the romantic conception of the artist's imagination as an ontological fountain, pouring forth beauty and truth from its own self-contained energies or by way of its contact with transcendental reality.

Nina Baym affirms that Hawthorne's career is given shape by a struggle between the claims of such an imagination and Hawthorne's effort to make his writing acceptable to a "skeptical, practical-minded audience" (Baym, Career, 8). Yet Baym discovers that this audience celebrated Hawthorne loudest when he took his stand—in The Scarlet Letter —on the artist "as an independent person responsible only to his art and to himself" (112). Hawthorne's ascent to fame, rather than confirming the power of a freestanding imaginative faculty acting in defiance of social expectations, recapitulates the ironical conventions of fulfillment that an "individual" perforce obeyed in a society of self-made men. Like many another aspirant to middle-class success, Hawthorne had misfired when he "dependently courted public approbation" only to be "rewarded for independence" (151).

Hawthorne's stance over against the familial community of his boyhood foreshadows the preference for solitude—and the anguish of solitude—that characterized his adult life. But this stance did not originate in his artistic vocation. On the contrary, his artistic vocation offered him one way of managing the psychosocial conflicts that led him to think of himself as a unique being, uniquely obligated (and uniquely entitled) to follow his own destiny. Young Nathaniel did not choose these generative conflicts, which, though intimate, were not private. The symbolic energies surrounding and penetrating the psychic space he claimed for himself were inherent in the large familial community in which he grew up and were linked in turn to the broad-scale social changes amid which self-making emerged as an ideal of male identity.

Hawthorne did not occupy alone the domain of independence that his foot injury provided; he shared it with his mother and sisters. The complicated community of Hathornes and Mannings in the two neighboring houses takes on a starkly contrastive design very early in Nathaniel's responses to it; both the Hathornes and the Mannings appear as aliens, menacing the fragile quartet of mother, daughters, and son.

Students of Hawthorne's life have given careful attention to the atmosphere of the Manning household—its bustling commercial spirit and the psychosexual crosscurrents running through it—and have demonstrated its lifelong impact on Hawthorne and his work.^[5] Yet we would hardly be alerted to the Mannings' existence from what Hawthorne himself said in his volumi-

nous journals and correspondence. His earliest letters express regret at his depending on them and at his mother's depending on them, and then the record goes silent. What little we learn from later years speaks of an icy estrangement and even of vengeance. He pointedly did not attend the funeral of his uncle Robert, who had borne most of his educational expenses. When his own political influence was at its zenith, after Pierce's election to the presidency, Hawthorne wrote a curt letter endorsing his uncle William Manning's effort to get a job as a janitor at the Salem Custom House (CE 16:682). In 1855 he instructed his publisher to make payments "to the extent of $100 (one hundred dollars) for the benefit of W. Manning, an old and poor relation of mine" (CE 17:422). The surviving record gives scant evidence that Hawthorne felt gratitude for the treatment he had received when he was himself the poor relation.

Spurning the Mannings did not mean embracing the available Hathornes. Although the biographical record here is even slimmer, it suggests a corresponding alienation. On a visit to New Haven in his twenties Hawthorne encountered a young man who knew Salem society and who remarked that he didn't "in the least resemble any of the Hawthorne family." To this Hawthorne replied "with considerable force and emphasis. 'I am glad to hear you say that, for I don't wish to look like any Hawthorne.'" (M. Hawthorne, 264–265).

Hawthorne did not make such gestures of repudiation to defend himself as an artist-in-the-making; they began before he entered on that venture and continued long after he had succeeded in it. They arise from a conviction of radical uniqueness that he, his sisters, and their mother cherished in their bereavement. The death of Hawthorne's father sharpened a chronic tension between the Hathorne and Manning households that would have been present even if no marriage had taken place between them, because of the uneasy relation between their social positions.

There were no pre-Revolutionary landed gentry among the Hathorne forebears. Such eminence as the family had enjoyed in Puritan times had declined by the middle of the eighteenth century. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's Salem Possessed demonstrates clearly that the Hathornes were on the wrong side of the witch controversy, economically as well as morally. Hawthorne was right in sensing—as he says in the introduction to The Scarlet Letter —that the deterioration of the family's fortunes was somehow linked with his ancestors' role in those old persecutions. The economic future in Salem lay with the shipping industry, not the farming community where the Hathornes had their stronghold. Hawthorne's great-grandfather was a

farmer of modest means whose sons commanded ships they did not own. Hawthorne's father was a ship-captain, we've seen, who at the time of his death had not managed to move his wife and three children out of his mother's home; no one on the Hathorne side of the family stepped forward to support this small cluster of recent offspring.

Yet as the nineteenth century dawned in Salem, old family connections still counted for social rank, in a restive competition with new wealth. The Hathornes retained an air of social ascendancy, which made the Hathorne daughters attractive to men who had acquired fortunes in the burgeoning commercial economy and wanted to ally themselves with a distinguished name. Hawthorne's aunts Crowninshield and Forrester might be thought to have married "down" socially; they had certainly married "up" financially. Their husbands were among the new rich; and Hawthorne's father turned to them for employment. The Hathorne family experience suggests that among members of the declining pre-Revolutionary elite, women found better prospects through marriage than men did through careers; the social pretensions that disabled men from competitive enterprise made women suitable ornaments of hard-won success. Nathaniel Hathorne's marriage to Elizabeth Manning did not, however, match a woman of position to a man of means.

The most memorable story of the ancestral Mannings was a trial and conviction for incest that took place at Salem in 1680.^[6] The Manning forebears were known for sexual misconduct, and the old Hathorne magistrates were famous for punishing it. By the early nineteenth century Elizabeth Manning's family was less wealthy than the Crowninshields and Forresters, but their prosperity considerably exceeded that of the Hathornes; and the Mannings' current affluence had been gained in the expanding commercial economy. Elizabeth's father had begun as a blacksmith and then made his fortune as owner of the Boston and Salem Stage Company.

Elizabeth Manning was two months pregnant when she married Nathaniel Hathorne, which suggests that the match between them arose from a mutual attraction exercised in defiance of family preferences.^[7] Elizabeth's marriage stands out against the strong ethos of joint effort that bound together the multi-generational Manning household, aimed at keeping the family businesses thriving: none of Elizabeth's brothers or sisters married until fifteen years after her marriage to Nathaniel Hathorne. Since Hathorne was not capable of setting up a household, the marriage can hardly have

appeared desirable to the Mannings, and it certainly created a financial liability when he died.

Elizabeth countered her family's disparagement with a marked commitment to her Hathorne identity, expressed most tellingly in the bosom of the Manning family after her husband's death.^[8] The disputes about her grief for Nathaniel—what Elizabeth Peabody termed "her all but Hindoo self-devotion to the manes of her husband" (Pearson, 267)—began during the lifetimes of those immediately involved and has been continued in twentieth-century scholarship. Although the vision of Elizabeth and her children as paralyzed with sorrow has on occasion been overdrawn, the long-term effects of bereavement may run deep in the lives of people who are not markedly gloomy. Elizabeth's clinging to the memory of her husband redoubled the assertion she had made in marrying him; she formed a pattern of life that insisted on her refinement, at odds with the mercenary scramble of the Manning household.

Other widows of Elizabeth's time and place made second marriages; and while she certainly maintained affectionate ties within the Manning household, Elizabeth was also discernibly reclusive, holding herself apart and somewhat above them. She was referred to customarily as "Madame Hathorne," which if not exactly a taunt, still marked the family's awareness that she cherished an intangible distinction conferred by her marriage, a distinction they did not share. Gloria Erlich, observing that Elizabeth did not take a strong hand in family disagreements about how her children should be managed, interprets her aloofness as revealing a "lack of vitality and trust in her own competence," further demonstrated by frequent bouts of illness (38–40, 44, 51, 62–64). Yet it seems more likely that Elizabeth's sensitive nerves—like Sophia's delicacy—were her effort to impose a meaning she cherished on recalcitrant circumstances. Rather than bespeaking a feeble spirit, her remoteness was the passive-aggressive assertion of her own worth as a being of superior sensibilities in a crude world.

This does not imply a dreary temperament but one whose intelligence and force were most evident in settings where her fragile claim to gentility was acknowledged. The Essex Institute at Salem preserves an unsigned family document that vigorously disputes early biographers who claimed that Madame Hathorne lived in unbroken solitude under "a life-long grief." The

writer points out that the Manning household entertained a great deal of company, because their large family traveled freely to and from Salem on the family-owned stagecoach line. Only later, after others had married and the household had been reduced in size, did Elizabeth begin to seclude herself, because she was "somewhat straitened pecuniarily" so that it was "not easy . . . to mingle in society."^[9]

The bereavement had resulted not in a mood of depression, but in a pattern of living. Within the family, where she was known as she wished, Hawthorne's mother was sociable enough. But she did not have the money to keep up appearances beyond the household. Even in later years, Elizabeth Peabody observed the notable vivacity Mrs. Hathorne displayed when she was confident of being respected for a bygone gentility. "Widow Hawthorne always looked as if she had walked out of an old picture, with her ancient costume and a face of lovely sensibility, and great brightness" (Pearson, 267).

Nathaniel and his sisters took part in this drama as compelled by their own distinctive experience of grief. Children who suffer loss at an early age internalize an impression of the departed parent that becomes a model for their own selfhood; and the child has no further experience of the living adult against whom that early impression can be corrected. This happens with special intensity when the surviving parent sees her children as a link with the lost spouse, seeking to keep alive through them the marital relationship that death has broken. This process aided in forming the magic circle around Elizabeth Hathorne and her children, setting them not only apart from the Hathornes and Mannings but also against them. Hawthorne's sister Elizabeth refused in girlhood to soil her hands with housekeeping chores, much to the Mannings' disgust.^[10]

The fierce pride behind Madame Hathorne's aloofness appears in the bellicose, lucid intelligence of this namesake and oldest child, nicknamed Ebe. Ebe was well recognized within the family for her aggressive and penetrating wit, with which she discussed political and literary affairs. But this identity found little welcome in the world beyond the home, where Elizabeth confronted a respectable society decreasingly prepared to admire aggressive women. After her mother's death Ebe left Salem for good, going to live in retirement with a farm family in Maine, where she occupied herself with reading, walking in the woods, and keeping up a correspondence with her kinfolk.

Ebe cherished Nathaniel's insistent sense of transcendent distinction, asserted in the cross fire of old names and new money in the family connec-

tion. She proudly told and retold the story of an occasion on which his uncle Simon Forrester offered him a ten-dollar bill, which the lad disdainfully refused on the ground that Forrester was not "nearly enough related to have a right to bestow it."^[11] Both Elizabeth and Nathaniel were vividly aware that Simon Forrester—before he got rich, married their aunt, and gave their father a job—had come to America from Ireland as a cabin boy in a vessel commanded by their grandfather. Elizabeth treasured the story of the rejected money because it exposed and spurned Forrester's assumption that he could purchase social rank comparable to Nathaniel's own.^[12] Simon Forrester was a prime exemplar of what Sophia Peabody scorned as the aristocracy of Mammon in Salem, against whom persons of inherited status were hard-pressed to define their own worth. The year before Hawthorne died, in fact, Nathaniel and Sophia reviewed the Forrester relationship—as well as the Forrester offspring—and asserted the orthodox hierarchy: "The only claim to position they had was from connection with the Hawthornes," Sophia affirmed. "They were no descendants of Earls" (CE 18:532).

The complex legacy of Hawthorne's bereavement, whose ultimate consequences are visible in the circumstances of his own death, entered the formation of his artistic vocation and made him exceptionally responsive to pressures bearing generally on young men of his class in the early nineteenth century. Hawthorne accepted the Mannings' sending him to college, but he did not accept them as sponsors of his identity. By altering the spelling of his name to "Hawthorne," he signaled, likewise, that no psychic anchor could lodge securely in his father's family. Hawthorne's artistic self was in that respect self-made; it was formed over against the expectations of those who sought to assume the place of his father, and it engaged him in a professional domain with which they had virtually no experience.

Hawthorne's relation to his family of origin resembled that of many young men during this era who sought their fortunes in places and in occupations inaccessible to their fathers and who discovered that the father's economic position—even if inheritable—could not rival the opportunities that beckoned in the urban centers of mass-market commerce or in the West. Such young men faced manifold ironies arising from the cross-pressures between money making and claims of status grounded in family relation: how to despise a Simon Forrester while attempting to become one? The myth of the self-made man helped provide an answer to this question. Indeed, by the 1860s Hawthorne scorned the Forresters not merely because they were new rich but also because they were immoderately fond of whiskey, failing what the intervening years had established as a conventional test of manly self-

discipline. Old Forrester "drank terribly through life," Hawthorne stated, "and transmitted the tendency, I believe, to all his sons, several of whom killed themselves by it" (CE 18:531).^[13]

To stress the psychosocial dimensions of Hawthorne's artistic vocation is not to deny his talent, without which he would have had no prospect of becoming a writer. But the intimate circle of shared bereavement provided a matrix for creating a writer selfhood that would not have existed had his ship-captain father been alive to point the way toward a maritime career, or even to present Nathaniel with a tangible figure against whom to rebel. Early letters indicate young Nathaniel's growing awareness of his abilities: he speaks, for example, of verses coming profusely and unprompted into his mind (CE 15:114–115). But such letters are addressed to his mother and his sisters, with instructions to keep them secret from outsiders, namely the Mannings.

The earliest evidence of Hawthorne's literary aptitude survives in articulations of his loss. Before he was old enough to "speak quite plainly," Ebe recalled, "he used to repeat, with vehement emphasis and gesture, this line, which somebody had taught him, from Richard Third; 'My Lord, stand back and let the coffin pass.'" More tellingly, he enacted scenes that recapitulate his father's death, with the bereft son in the role of the departed. "He used to invent long stories, wild and fanciful, and to tell us where he was going when he grew up, and of wonderful adventures he was to meet with, always ending with 'and I'm never coming back again.' That, perhaps, he said that we might value him the more while he stayed with us."^[14]

A principal source of such stories were logbooks of his father's voyages, over which Nathaniel dreamed for hours on end. The son's effort to ground his own identity in these traces of his father's life appears most poignantly in his profuse marginalia, often his father's words copied in elaborate script like his father's. Nathaniel wrote his own signature on the flyleaves, again and again and again. On the front fly of the America logbook, his father had written in graceful cursive "Nathaniel Hathorne's Book . . . 1795, Calcutta"; on the facing title page the son's heavy block capitals echo: "Nathaniel Hathorne's Book, 1820, Salem" (Fig. 3). Hawthorne's grief-stricken obsessive effort to work the textures of his selfhood around and through his dead namesake's writing continued from early boyhood at least until his college years (Luedtke, 5–7).

In the microworld inhabited by Madame Hathorne and her three children Hawthorne's identity as an artist took form; and although this setting empowered him, it also entailed conflict. What sort of life would be faithful

Fig. 3.
Title page of Nathaniel Hathorne's logbook

to a true self visible only to the immediate family and in principle too mysterious and aloof to be appreciated by others? Having internalized an identity he was both required and forbidden to fulfill, Hawthorne recurrently sought to reproduce the incestuous self-enclosure of his boyhood home.^[15] He could never negotiate confidently the turbulent passage into the world beyond and lamented the dismal and sordid existence that resulted. Hawthorne makes his most telling observations about his literary consciousness, we shall see in due course, when he tries to explain to Sophia why he cannot tell his mother and sisters that he plans to marry her.

Ebe deserves to be believed when she denies Hawthorne was notably reclusive in boyhood, asserting that "he began to withdraw into himself" only after his return to Salem after college, "when he felt as if he could not get away from there and yet was conscious of being utterly unlike every one else in the place" (Stewart, 325). As Hawthorne became acquainted with Elizabeth and Sophia Peabody during the 1830s, he described his torpid Imprisonment in "Castle Dismal" and blamed the "morbid consciousness that paralyses my powers" (Pearson, 267) on an atmosphere of stale grief at

home. But while the gloom of Castle Dismal had psychological origins in his father's death, the mood of depression did not date from his early boyhood.^[16] The paralysis and stagnation set in when he attempted to start a career that would keep inviolate an inward dignity as fragile as it was vehement.

Nathaniel was able to realize his cherished identity most fully when he lived with his mother and sisters in Raymond, Maine, for a summer in 1816, when he was twelve, and for a period of some eight months during his fourteenth year. In the course of the later stay an effort was made to send him to school in nearby Stroudwater, but after a month of homesickness and rebellion he was restored to the enchanted circle.

For all his fabled ambivalence, Hawthorne never expressed any second thoughts about regretting his departure from Raymond. "Here I ran quite wild," he later said, "and would, I doubt not, have willingly run wild till this time, fishing all day long, or shooting with an old fowling piece; but reading a good deal, too, on the rainy days, especially in Shakspeare and 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' and any poetry or light books within my reach" (NHW 1:95–96). After Nathaniel had been returned to Salem, his aunt Mary Manning thought he would soon reconcile himself to preparing for a career. He "sighs for the woods of Raymond," she wrote, "and yet he seems to be convinced of the necessity of prepairing to do something. I think after he gets engaged in business his views of things will be much altered" (CE 15:113).^[17] But his letters during the next two years keep up his lamentation over the lost felicity. He dreams at night of running wild again, only to waken and find himself in the house on Herbert Street. He resists any plans for his sisters or his mother to return to Salem, seeking to keep intact the tableau within which he felt real. "Do you not regret the time when I was a little boy?" he writes his mother as his seventeenth birthday approached; "I do almost" (CE 15:137).

Hawthorne's sisters were under no obligation to prepare themselves for a career, whether they returned to Salem or not. But young Nathaniel confronted the necessity of establishing relations outside the enchanted circle. His abilities persuaded the Mannings that the best prospect lay with providing him a college education, especially since the economic recession of 1818 made business in Salem very slow. His aunt Mary urged the family to shoulder the expense that college would impose. "I am willing to put down

for 100 Dollars perhaps it will be said thats but a drop. well but it's a great drop and if everyone of his Relations who are as near to him as I am would put down as much I think his buckett would be full" (CE 15:118). Nathaniel himself was not attracted by any of the professions to which college training would lead. "Shall you want me to be a Minister, Doctor or Lawyer?" he writes to his mother, "A Minister I will not be." What he really desired was to go back to Raymond, and as the months passed he complained more and more. "The happiest days of my life are gone. Why was I not a girl that I might have been pinned all my life to my Mother's apron" (CE 15:117).

There appeared no escape from a masculine destiny, yet accepting it put him at odds with his vision of transcendent distinction, of a sort to make his mother proud. These crosscurrents of aspiration and dismay shape his dream of becoming a writer. "Oh that I was rich enough to live without a profession," he writes to his mother. "What do you think of my becoming an Author, and relying for my support upon my pen. . . . How proud you would feel to see my works praised by the reviewers, as equal to proudest productions of the scribbling sons of John Bull. But Authors are always poor Devils, and therefore Satan may take them" (CE 15:139).

This sounds very remote from the ethos of manly striving that was taking form in the culture at large. Instead of welcoming the contest among democratic equals, young Hawthorne yearns for a seclusion that is both girlish and aristocratic. If he can't remain pinned to his mother's apron, then he wishes he were wealthy enough to be excused from the effort to support himself. The prospect of becoming a writer is tainted by the inevitable entanglement with the marketplace and the likelihood of poverty. Yet coupled with this squeamishness is a startling ambition, rising from an interior consciousness of his own capacities: he would create works of literature of the highest rank, equal to the best of the English. Thirty years later he would have at hand reviews of his work—notably Herman Melville's "Hawthorne and His Mosses"—meeting exactly this prediction.

No record survives of what Aunt Mary and the other Mannigs had to say about Nathaniel's wasting the college education they had paid for, but he was known in Salem as an idler and hid in his mother's home in part because he preferred not to be dressed down for his idleness in public. His sister Elizabeth recalled an occasion when he left the house to look at a great fire, only to be accosted by an old woman who "scolded him in threatening terms . . . in her indignation 'at a strong young man's not going to work as other people did'" (Stewart, 322). Elizabeth Peabody seems likewise to have been aware of Hawthorne's reputation as a do-nothing. When she

heard he had written "The Gentle Boy," she did not believe it and decided the author was his older sister, whose brilliance Elizabeth recalled from girlhood. She presented herself at the house on Herbert Street to offer her congratulations, only to be told by Louisa that Nathaniel had actually written the tale. "But if your brother can write like that," said Elizabeth Peabody, "he has no right to be idle" (Pearson, 263).

Hawthorne's "womanly" seclusion and mysterious aloofness were built into the literary career he fashioned. He crystallizes these themes in Fanshawe, whose solitary and sensitive hero treasures up a "dream of undying fame, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities" (CE 3:350). The young man harboring this dream is among the lords of nature. "There was a nobleness on his high forehead, which time would have deepened into majesty. . . . The expression of his countenance was not a melancholy one;—on the contrary, it was proud and high—perhaps triumphant—like one who was a ruler in a world of his own, and independent of the beings that surrounded him" (346). In "works of imagination," Hawthorne was later to say, "the author himself should be despotic and aristocratical" (CE 16:302), there being no appeal from his intuitive verdicts.

Paradoxically, what seems unmanly and undemocratic in this depiction of the romantic artist was inherent in democratic manhood. The ideal of the self-made man incorporated the "womanly" and "royal" qualities that it projected on actual women and kings. To be an individual, after all, is to assert one's absolute right to oneself, a right enshrined in social contract theory, which imagines a state of nature from which solitary individuals chose to enter collective relationships. The classic doctrines of American democracy hold that government exists to secure such rights—deemed inherent in the created nature of all men—and derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. Thus the political substance of kingship is transferred to ordinary men. Political authority in a republic derives from this substrate of intrinsic (or divine) entitlement, which is embodied not in a monarch but in every citizen. Ralph Waldo Emerson—now widely recognized as America's classic ideologue of individualism in poetry, politics, and economics^[18] —hailed the emergence of an America promising "to insulate the individual,—to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state" (Whicher, 79).

Yet to enact this royal autonomy, men must become womanly. As the competitive struggle remodeled male-male relations to resemble international relations, it was discovered that each individual sovereignty needed a

privy council. Survival in the public arena required the maintenance of an inward forum where policies could be evolved in the freedom of creative disarray and uncertainties could be entertained that must be hidden from view in public exchanges with other sovereignties. The self-made man in a society of citizen-kings retains a nurturing inward spirituality, whose broodings are never visible to his fellows but give shrewdness and force to the initiatives by which he makes himself known to others. In a community of poker players, to switch to a homelier metaphor of American entrepreneurship, it is not the cards you hold that measure your manhood, but the way you play them. A subtle, intuitive, and inscrutable interiority—the sacred essence of nineteenth-century "femininity"—lies at the heart of self-made manliness.

Andrew Jackson was celebrated, Amy Lang has shown, as "a male public figure whose greatness is directly associated with his reliance upon an intuitive, oracular, and feminine private self" (150). His eulogists affirmed that instead of merely upholding the law as president, Jackson broke laws so as to create them anew, acting at the behest of "warm and instinctive impulses" that are "more to be trusted than the cold inductions of the understanding" (151). After Hawthorne had secured his own literary standing, he praised Jackson's poetic gift: "The highest, or perhaps any high, administrative ability is intuitive, and precedes argument, and rises above it. It is a revelation of the very thing to be done; and its propriety and necessity are felt so strongly, that, ten to one, it cannot be talked about; if the doer can likewise talk, it is an additional and gratuitous faculty, as little to be expected as that a poet should be able to write an explanatory criticism on his own poem" (CE 14:367). During the years of his solitary struggle in his mother's house, Andrew Jackson had likewise served Hawthorne as a hero. His sister Elizabeth recalled that when the General visited Salem in 1833, Hawthorne "walked out to the boundaries of the town to meet him . . . and found only a few men and boys collected, not enough, without the assistance that he rendered, to welcome the General with a good cheer." Ebe found it hard to picture her brother "doing such a thing as shouting" (Stewart, 325), yet Jackson embodied for Hawthorne the heroic manhood that made sense of his secluded life.

Chapter Five—
Subservient Angel

Studies of American Christianity in the early republic have not recognized the fundamental transformation that attended the sacralization of womanhood. The established historical account emphasizes the surge of evangelical Protestantism in cities and on the frontier and the rise of internal and foreign missions. These developments shaped denominational competition as well as the famous theological controversies that pitted orthodox Calvinism against more liberal teachings better adapted to spreading the gospel (Walker, 509–518; Ahlstrom, 387–614). While male religious leaders in America were maneuvering furiously for advantage on this complex landscape of battle, they were also engaged in making the domestic angel the most powerful Christian goddess since the medieval Virgin. Henry Adams's "Dynamo and the Virgin" was less a contrast of the nineteenth and thirteenth centuries than a description of nineteenth-century culture itself: as machinery became a primary symbol of social relationships among men, a symbolic counterforce came into being. Instead of the Virgin, however, Victorian males worshiped their wives.

Nathaniel's love letters to Sophia explore the emerging structure of male need that imparted a religious force to the domestic angel: he discovers her divine presence when he looks within himself:^[1]

I feel as if my being were dissolved, and the idea of you were diffused throughout it. . . . While I love you so dearly, and while I am so conscious of the deep embrace of

our spirits . . . still I have an awe of you that I never felt for anybody else. Awe is not the word, either; because it might imply something stern in you. . . . I suppose I should have pretty much the same feeling if an angel were to come from Heaven and be my dearest friend—only the angel could not have the tenderest of human natures too, the sense of which is mingled with this sentiment. . . . But I leave the mystery here. Sometime or other, it may be made plainer to me. But methinks it converts my love into religion. And then it is singular, too, that this awe (or whatever it be) does not prevent me from feeling that it is I who have the charge of you, and that my Dove is to follow my guidance and do my bidding.

(CE 15:316–317)

Hawthorne's broodings have led him to a paradox at the heart of the domestic ideal. He feels a religious awe for Sophia; yet it is different from the awe that springs immediately to his mind, the obedient dread aroused by the stern God of Calvinism, or indeed by more liberal versions of the divine Judge. Hawthorne's spirit bows in reverence before a friend who is to do his bidding.

The contradiction is so blatant as to seem downright silly, American husbands claiming the right to make decisions for their wives because they looked up to them. Yet nineteenth-century family correspondence reveals that husbands did attribute moral and spiritual superiority to their wives, even as they exercised masculine authority as head of the household (Degler, 26, 30). The sanctified woman gave her husband the power to take command of her, and his response was reverent gratitude.

Yet Hawthorne is not merely reciting a conventional litany; he actually finds that when his "being" is dissolved, the idea of his "Dove" is "diffused throughout it." This ontological reverie gives rise to a dream:

Since writing the above, I have been asleep; and I dreamed that I had been sleeping a whole year in the open air; and that while I slept, the grass grew around me. It seemed, in my dream, that the very bed-clothes which actually covered me were spread beneath me, and when I awoke (in my dream) I snatched them up, and the earth under them looked black, as if it had been burnt—one square place, exactly the size of the bed clothes. Yet there was grass and herbage scattered over this burnt space, looking as fresh, and bright, and dewy, as if the summer rain and the summer sun had been cherishing them all the time. Interpret this for me, my Dove—but do not draw any sombre omens from it. What is signified by my nap of a whole year? . . . and what was the fire that blasted the spot of earth which I occupied, while the grass flourished all around?—and what comfort am I to draw from the fresh herbage amid the burnt space?

(CE 15:317–318)

Represented here is Hawthorne's anxiety about the years of seclusion in Salem, when he felt trapped in suspended animation while everything

around him continued to grow. Even though this period can be described as a triumph of Jacksonian self-making, Hawthorne never described it in such confident terms. The drama of his self-formation took place in his mother's home, if it took place anywhere, but it was a drama about whose meaning Hawthorne continued to feel acute uncertainties. Unable wholeheartedly to embrace the myth of self-creation, he traces out the cultural contradictions that the myth concealed and the critical role of the domestic angel.

At the height of his fame in 1853, Hawthorne explained that his reclusive quest for a literary career was at best semi-deliberate: "I sat myself down to consider what pursuit in life I was best fit for. . . . And year after year I kept on considering what I was fit for, and time and my destiny decided that I was to be the writer that I am" (NHW 1:95). Hawthorne firmly disavows making a deliberate choice, claiming the now obvious verdict of time and his destiny. But before that authorization was clear, Hawthorne had been haunted by fears of being fit for nothing or of betraying his potential fitness by continuing obsessively to read and scribble. His awareness that he lacked the power to act in his own behalf then took a more sinister form; it seemed he had fallen under an evil enchantment. Even after he received congratulations from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1837 for Twice-Told Tales, his seclusion seemed a stale and dreary horror, which had not ended:

By some witchcraft or other . . . I have been carried apart from the main current of life, and find it impossible to get back again. . . . For the last ten years, I have not lived, but only dreamed about living. It may be true that there have been some insubstantial pleasures here in the shade, which I should have missed in the sunshine; but you cannot conceive how utterly devoid of satisfaction all my retrospects are.

(CE 15:251–252)

Sophia's role in this chronic malaise may be observed by comparing this description to the account he gives Sophia of his dream two years later. The emotional drama of the dream is sharply contrapuntal: he was both "blasted" by fire and "cherished" by sunlight and rain, and within the scorched rectangle there were flowers of dewy freshness. The impression he provides for Longfellow, by contrast, is bleakly monotonous. He concedes nothing more than "insubstantial pleasures," and indicates that he is still only half-alive.

His relationship to Sophia permitted Hawthorne to sustain the awareness of stark terrors and supernal hopes that had earlier been mingled together in a seemingly unreal experience. The puzzling shadows of that recollected

landscape now resolve themselves into violent opposites of divine light and fiery demonic blackness, images that transpose a vague subjective nightmare into the collision of religious realities. Images of hellish darkness and redemptive light pervade both Hawthorne's work and his meditations on the significance he found in Sophia, but the issue here is how his "Dove"—diffused throughout his being—makes real for him an organization of consciousness in which that counterpoint becomes authoritative. Sophia as "Dove" invokes the Holy Spirit as the agent of primordial creation: the separation of the light from the darkness and their joint action at the place where he lay asleep.

Sophia's religious authority as the angel of Hawthorne's self-making is rooted in a culturally specific spiritual hunger: his own desperate need to reinforce the conviction that his selfhood as a man and artist had actually taken form during the years of solitary labor he had sustained before he met her. Sophia enabled him to give firmer credence to the dangerously frail belief that his identity was alive and real and not the delusion of a demon-haunted dreamer. She counteracted a self-mistrust that was inherent in the struggle by which Hawthorne's mature selfhood took form, and in so doing she enacted the spiritual role assigned to the domestic angel generally.

Hawthorne, more severely plagued by paralyzing self-doubts than most men of his time, became a subtle and exact student of distresses that remained unconscious in the lives of the healthy-minded. A self-made man in the making depends, as we have seen, on collective support; yet he is nonetheless compelled to "make" something that earlier had been provided to a young man by his father and the network of "fathers" who shepherded junior males into the roles available to them in a relatively stable hierarchical society. The deferential dependence of young men on established elders continued in the early decades of the republic, but such patriarchal social relationships ceased to predominate, and the confusions of this transitional circumstance harshened the anxieties of individualism. The role of the domestic angel was fashioned in the rearranged relations of men with men.

"In proportion as manners and laws become more democratic," Alexis de Tocqueville declared, "the relation of father and son becomes more intimate and more affectionate; rules and authority are less talked of, confidence and tenderness are often increased, and it would seem that the natural bond is drawn closer in proportion as the social bond is loosened." By the "social

bond" Tocqueville means the formal and ceremonious relations that prevail between fathers and sons in aristocracies, where the father's power compels fear and the son's affection is blurred into the habits of deference required of inferiors in a social arrangement defining a man's "condition" by his position in a hierarchy of rank. "The austere, the conventional, and the legal part of parental authority vanishes and a species of equality prevails around the domestic hearth," now that "the natural warmth of the heart" is allowed to express itself without obstruction.

The "old conventional rules of society," Tocqueville conceded, had given rise to certain conventional habits of feeling whose artificiality is demonstrated by the speed with which they wither away when the social arrangements supporting them are supplanted by democracy and democratic manners. "The remarks I have made on filial love," he asserts, "are applicable to all the passions that emanate spontaneously from human nature itself. . . . Democracy loosens social ties, but tightens natural ones" (2:195–197).

Hawthorne was passionately devoted to the democratic ideology that led Tocqueville to misconstrue a social transformation as the yielding of social reality itself to spontaneous and universal promptings of nature. Hawthorne's interior battle over whether he was "morbid"—which was taken up by his family and by later students of his life—results largely from the guilt he felt for his own preoccupation with the psychic conflicts this social transformation brought about. Hawthorne probed the "foul cavern of the human heart," as the source from which Tocqueville's "natural warmth" emanated.

The psychosocial conflict that Tocqueville absorbed into the new ideology of family relations becomes starkly visible, however, when he turns to the relations of masters and servants. "While the transition from one social condition to another is going on, there is almost always a time when men's minds fluctuate between the aristocratic notion of subjection and the democratic notion of obedience." Male household servants in America are haunted by "a confused and imperfect phantom of equality. . . . [They conceive that they ought] themselves to be masters, and they are inclined to consider him who orders them as an unjust usurper of their own rights" (2:184–185).

In a frankly hierarchical social system these rancorous uncertainties do not arise, because a servant's individuality merges into that of his master. He "detaches his notion of interest from his own person; he deserts himself as it were, or rather he transports himself into the character of his master and thus assumes an imaginary personality" (Tocqueville, 2:180). Hawthorne's

sense of being trapped in shadows is a mark of the transition from one form of manhood to another, when the identities of actual men stand empty, to be haunted by the ghosts that inhabit the two discrepant worlds. On the one side is the vicarious "imaginary personality" generated by habits of deference in an aristocracy; on the other side is the "phantom of equality" in democratic societies, whispering to every subordinated man that he is a sovereign.

Tocqueville glimpses, in fact, that this dilemma is not merely a psychic cost of the transition from one social arrangement to another but is endemic to democratic society itself, where an ideal of natural equality confronts the enduring reality of social stratification. "In democracies servants are not only equal among themselves, but . . . are, in some sort, the equals of their masters." That men who think themselves equal individual sovereigns feel a systemic unrest in the presence of social power and are strongly disposed to deny its reality is a major source of the famous paradox of the middle class, the class that denies the existence of class. "It is in vain that wealth and poverty, authority and obedience, accidentally interpose great distances between two men; public opinion, founded upon the usual order of things, draws them to a common level and creates a species of imaginary equality between them, in spite of the real inequality of their conditions" (2:181). The actual experience of rich and poor men, as of bosses and employees, renders evanescent the most sacred axiom of democratic manhood—that of natural equality; it too becomes a figment of the imagination.

These dilemmas of social transition and status conflict in a democratic society are redoubled in the relation of fathers and sons. The convergence of familial and historical issues on the question of "patriarchy" helps explain why the middle class is chronically described as "emerging," not only in the late Middle Ages but even in the epoch of its greatest power, before corporate capitalism in the later nineteenth century consolidated a relatively stable elite in America.

As Nancy Chodorow has argued, every man—whether a democratic individual or not—begins life as an infant, in a condition of total dependence on powerful superiors to whom he must look not only for physical support but also for his identity. Rather than merely "transporting himself" into the character of his father (or "fathers"), a growing boy receives his personality in large part by internalizing the possibilities of manhood presented to him. The boy comes to know himself as he is seen by his father and as he sees himself in his father. What Tocqueville dismissed as a "conventional" feature of aristocratic social relations has been identified as a psychological process intrinsic to becoming an adult.

Traditional societies harnessed this early filial bond in the service of a hierarchical social order, fully elaborated in doctrines of divinely ordained rank; and it is well known that the historical development of middle-class societies was marked by the formation of social institutions (like the free market, joint-stock corporations, or government by separated powers) that are not analogues of the patriarchal household. But democratic men have hierarchical childhoods: the man who has learned to think of himself as in essence an individual, on an equal footing with his fellows, has a primordial memory of total psychic and physical dependency and a more recent memory of his "emergence" as a individual. A glimpse of the psychic power that democratic men invest in domestic angels may be obtained by recalling that the earliest memories of any such man concern the sponsorship of his being not by a man but a woman.

Hawthorne explores these conflicts of manhood in "My Kinsman Major Molineux," taking advantage of the analogy between the psychic development of the "individual" and the historical emergence of middle-class society that makes social history a vehicle for psychological romance.

Robin Molineux enacts the quandary of a young man who carries the social habits of deferential hierarchy into the era of their overthrow. He comes to town to take up the promise of his kinsman, a prominent colonial official. Major Molineux and Robin's father were brothers' children, Hawthorne informs us. "The Major, having inherited riches, and acquired civil and military rank, had visited his cousin in great pomp a year or two before." Being childless, he had "thrown out hints respecting the future establishment of . . . [Robin] in life" (CE 11:224). Robin, as he enters town, does not expect a competition among democratic equals. His automatic responses are those native to deferential hierarchy, and he assumes that he himself is owed a measure of respect from his kinsman's social inferiors. When an innkeeper addresses him with overelaborate courtesy, Robin mistakenly concludes that "the rogue has guessed that I am related to the Major" and makes his reply, "with such an assumption of consequence, as befitted the Major's relative" (213–214).

The social world in Robin's head is sharply at odds with the actual situation, with the townspeople preparing to tar and feather Major Molineux because they resent the royal administration he serves. This "temporary inflammation of the popular mind" (CE 11:209) sets off a revolution in

Robin's psychic constitution; he is compelled to repudiate, as by an irresistible inborn force, the deferential social habits he brought with him.

The scene in which Robin confronts his ruined kinsman is managed by Hawthorne as an initiation in the emotional realities of self-made manhood. This patricidal ritual—where Robin joins in to shower ridicule on his shattered and degraded kinsman—is also filicidal, aimed at cauterizing the deferential affections of childhood that must be supplanted if sovereign individualism is to be formed in an adult man. His loyalty to his elderly kinsman now repudiated, Robin enters a new frame of mind that allows him to join easily in the cheerfully sardonic manner of his new mentor. "Thanks to you, and to my other friends," Robin says, "I have at last met my kinsman, and he will scarce desire to see my face again" (CE 11:231).

The mentor helps Robin understand the meaning of this wrenching initiation, acting temporarily in loco parentis without the emotional entanglements of kinship; he makes no pretence of arranging Robin's "establishment in life" or of providing him money or land. Instead, he offers Robin insight into his psychological condition, his social environment, and his prospects—in terms that make it clear the mentor assumes no responsibility for the outcome.

The mentor possesses an impersonal authority based on superior knowledge, which displaces the authority of patriarchal sponsorship. He emerges as a precursory embodiment of "the professional" that Burton Bledstein identifies as a central figure of middle-class culture (88–105, 126–127). In refusing to show Robin to the ferry, the old gentleman echoes the youth's sardonic use of the term "friend," but without the sarcasm, indicating an ad hoc affiliation serving Robin's self-interest." 'No, my good friend Robin, not to-night, at least,' said the gentleman. 'Some few days hence, if you continue to wish it, I will speed you on your journey. Or, if you prefer to remain with us, perhaps, as you are a shrewd youth, you may rise in the world, without the help of your kinsman, Major Molineux'" (CE 11:231).

Hawthorne does not portray Robin as making a decisive entry into the ethos of self-help or a clean break with patriarchal dependency. His tale evokes instead the dilemmas of the self-made man-on-the-make, caught between the incompatible moral requirements of these two schemes of value: it is a study in obligatory guilt. Hawthorne celebrates the social changes heralding the advent of democracy, just as he acknowledges the moral dignity that follows from rising in the world on one's own enterprise. Yet he also recognizes the wrong done to Major Molineux. "On they went, like fiends that throng in mockery round some dead potentate, mighty no more, but

majestic still in his agony. On they went, in counterfeited pomp, in senseless uproar, in frenzied merriment, trampling all on an old man's heart" (230).

The intensity of this language—as of the entire tale—results from the shift within it: the collision between aristocratic and democratic orders of meaning merges into a structural conflict within democracy that redoubles the assertion that patricide is both mandatory and prohibited. The mockery directed against the fraudulent authority of a "potentate," Major Molineux, asserts democratic principle; yet because of his lingering "majesty" Molineux embodies the same principle his humiliation exalts. Hawthorne's concluding phrases protest Molineux's degradation as an outrage, not on the prerogatives of the British throne and its colonial representative but on the royalty that democratic doctrine ascribed to all equally created human hearts, here that of an old man in torment. Centrally active here is a contradiction within the ethos of democratic self-sovereignty. The filial revolt required of the democratic individual may free him from the entanglements of deferential dependence, but it also strikes a blow against the source of his own identity: to trample on an old man's heart is to defile one's own. This interior dissonance supports Hawthorne's designation of the moment as unreal—as "counterfeited," "senseless," and "frenzied"—the state of consciousness that arises when experience becomes uninterpretable by reason of conflicts within the system of interpretation that is invoked to give it reality and sense. "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" articulates the interior contradictions of self-made manhood without invoking the domestic angel who holds out the prospect of redemption.

The ideal of manly selfhood that led Hawthorne to doubt his own reality—and to reverence his Dove for helping overcome that doubt—was linked to a correlative vision of "the world" that he likewise traces out in his letters to her. In 1840, the second year of their correspondence, Nathaniel was working at the Boston Custom House, and in October of that year he returned to Salem for a visit, where he drafted the best-known account of his writerly self-creation:

Here sits thy husband in his old accustomed chamber, where he used to sit in years gone by, before his soul became acquainted with thine. Here I have written many tales—many that have been burned to ashes—many that doubtless deserved the same fate. This deserves to be called a haunted chamber; for thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the

world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here; and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent.

(CE 15:294)

The contrapuntal drama of Hawthorne's dream is fully elaborated in this description of the haunted chamber. It is a place of demonic fire, of tales written only to be consumed; yet it is a place of green plenitude as well, where uncountable visions have appeared. Here he "wasted" his youth, yet here his character was formed. Hawthorne now establishes a presence beyond these ambivalences, in the voice that conveys them. "Thy husband" can look on his former joys and despondence with equanimity, and he gestures with confidence toward prospective biographers. Spiritually reinforced by his Dove, Hawthorne's "I" is capable of standing firmly over against "the world": "And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me. . . . By and bye, the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth—not, indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice; and forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought preferable to my own solitude, till at length a certain Dove was revealed to me" (CE 15:494–495).

"The world" had summoned Hawthorne when he published Twice-Told Tales three years before, and the circumstances surrounding that event reveal dilemmas that "the world" as a symbolic construction was adapted to manage. The characters in this comedy of misperceptions are Hawthorne, his wealthy college friend Horatio Bridge, and the successful publisher Samuel Goodwyn Goodrich, each of whom is constrained by a social environment that imposes conflicted standards of manly self-respect.

Goodrich had published several of Hawthorne's tales anonymously in The Token, gaining reputation as well as profit without any of the credit going to Hawthorne. But when Hawthorne approached him with the idea of bringing out a collection, Goodrich was uncooperative. Then Horatio Bridge approached Goodrich and offered a guarantee against losses. Bridge insisted that this offer be kept secret from Hawthorne, because he was fearful that Hawthorne—in his self-reliant pride—would be offended and would refuse to be the object of patronage. Goodrich's change of heart led Hawthorne to conclude that the publisher's personal interest in him had overcome his fear of losing money. Instead of being exasperated by this apparent act of patronage, Hawthorne was overwhelmed with gratitude and replied in kind. He proposed to dedicate the volume to Goodrich.

This dismayed Horatio Bridge, who had actually shown the generosity for which Goodrich now was to be rewarded; so Bridge set about dissuading Hawthorne from the proposed dedication, still without disclosing his own role. To compound the irony further, Bridge wrote to Hawthorne affirming that Goodrich's own selfish interests were well served by the deal, not because of Bridge's guarantee, but because Goodrich expected Hawthorne's writing would make money. "There is no doubt in my mind of his selfishness in regard to your work and yourself. I am perfectly aware that he has taken a good deal of interest in you, but when did he ever do anything for you without a quid pro quo? . . . The Token was saved by your writing" (Mellow, 76). Observe the crosscurrents set up here by opposing ideas of masculine worth: for Goodrich to have "taken a good deal of interest" in Hawthorne suggests the patriarchal relation; his readiness for a "quid pro quo," however, removes him from the role of Hawthorne's fatherly guide and protector and indicates respect for Hawthorne's unaided achievement. Bridge himself actually takes the role of patron, but covertly, so as to confirm an illusion of self-reliance that Hawthorne at once cherishes and is ready to cast aside.

Bridge knew well that Hawthorne's efforts to establish himself were severely hampered by his paralysis in the face of such consternations and scolded him in language that anticipates Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous assertion that self-trust is the prime requisite of the manly soul. "The bane of your life has been self-distrust. . . . I wish to God that I could impart to you a little of my own brass," Bridge declares. "You would dash into the contest of literary men, and do honor to yourself and your country in a short time. But you never will have confidence enough in yourself, though you will have fame" (NHW 2:147, 149).

The harsh tumult of competitive striving was no fantasy in the turbulent economy of early nineteenth-century America; but an unbreakable core of self-confidence was desirable not only because the external strife was intense but also because it aroused inner confusions. Young men were compelled (they are still compelled) to make their way toward middle-class success by securing the assistance of older, established, men, who themselves play out the same ambivalence, expecting gestures of deference while demanding that younger men make it on their own. A psychic maneuver to control such perplexity, as Emerson recognized, was that of setting a firm boundary between the "self" and the "not-self," and such transcendental teachings translated quickly into popular moral advice. "You must be a law to yourselves," David Magie proclaimed in 1853, "or you will soon make a shipwreck of faith and good conscience" (Halttunen, 25). Thus "the world" was

invented as the domain of the not-self, an inhuman unpredictable ocean permanently threatening to drown a man's true inner reality.

To contend with the world, so conceived, was necessarily to endanger one's inner coherence, since worldly dealings mirrored and intensified psychic contradictions. For this reason Hawthorne is grateful that he had remained in seclusion before meeting Sophia: otherwise, "my heart would have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude. . . . But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart, and had these to offer to my Dove" (CE 15:495).

This tribute makes Sophia the recipient of the character he had formed in the secluded chamber. She makes the world worth knowing, makes it preferable to his own solitude; and she confirms the identity that he has made for himself, "keeping my heart warm, and renewing my life with her own" (CE 15:495). But Sophia does more than sustain the completed self; she is an agent in its making:

Thou only hast revealed me to myself; for without thy aid, my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own shadow—to watch it flickering on the wall, and to mistake its fantasies for my own real actions. Indeed we are but shadows—we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream—till the heart is touched. That touch creates us—then we begin to be—thereby we are beings of reality, and inheritors of eternity. Now, dearest, dost thou comprehend what thou hast done for me?

(CE 15:495)

Here self-making reveals its ontological emptiness. How is a man to believe wholeheartedly in an identity he knows he has concocted? How can he deny being counterfeit when the person he puts in circulation carries only the backing of his own sovereignty? At the end of his life, when Hawthorne was internationally famous as a "classic" figure of American letters, he was still unable to overcome his "natural horror of being a creature floating in the air, attached to nothing," nor can he escape "this feeling that there is no reality in the life and fortunes, good or bad, of a being so unconnected" (CE 12:258). In his haunted chamber in Salem, before the social confirmation of his identity had taken place, Hawthorne observed the same dismaying correlation between the unreality of a man's own being and the unreality of his world. "Insincerity in a man's own heart makes all his enjoyments, all that concerns him, unreal; so that his whole life must seem like merely a dramatic representation" (Hawthorne's Lost Notebook, 38).

Unable to endow any version of his own possible selfhood with reality, the

miserable subject of such internal division is subject to thoughts and emotions, judgments and perceptions for which he has no stable location. The pantomime of living then swallows the perceiver himself in experiences of which he can make many kinds of sense or story, none of which he can take to be genuine.

The religious power of the domestic angel redeems the self-made man-in-the-making; she "believes in him" as he wishes to believe in himself. This psychic assurance replaced the support for identity formation that males had supplied one another before competitive individual relations supplanted patriarchal folkways. "A man that knows himself," wrote an exponent of traditional hierarchy, "will deliberately consider and attend to the particular rank and station in life in which Providence hath placed him; and what is the duty and decorum of that station. . . . For a man to assume a character, or aim at a part that does not belong to him, is affectation" (Mason, 51). Yet when Providence ceases assigning parts at birth in the hierarchical pageant, all the players are lost in affectation and self-ignorance until a force appears that can reveal the self to itself; and since psychic coherence depends on this force, the moment in which it is apprehended stands forth as a revelation of the divine Reality, in which one's private reality can be anchored.

Yet Sophia's power to make Hawthorne real does not mean that he told her about his difficulties with Samuel Goodwyn Goodrich. Part of the reason Sophia became his angel was that she came to know him after he published Twice-Told Tales, when her sister Elizabeth found out he had written it and introduced him to her. Sophia's first knowledge of "Nathaniel Hawthorne" was knowledge of a literary reputation he had been excruciatingly anxious not to mar by amateurish early efforts. He published his first novel, Fanshawe, at his own expense, quickly determined that he wanted to disown it, and asked his friends to return the copies he had sent them. He never came to regard this episode with indulgent humor, as a bout of youthful distress long since superseded. On the contrary, the repudiation of Fanshawe was an action essential to the lifelong strategy of his self-making; Sophia learned about it only after his death and refused at first to believe such a book had ever existed (CE 3:308–314).

The religious force of the domestic angel did not depend on her redemptive engagement with the world but on her isolation from it. Since "the world" echoed and magnified the structural conflicts of the self-made man, she must remain sequestered from it if she is to be truly at one with "him"—that is, if she is to help him sustain the delusions innate to his selfhood. This logic helps explain why middle-class men believed so urgently

in the "innocence" of their wives, meaning their freedom from the contaminations of worldly life. Hawthorne found in Sophia a presence capable of assuaging his deepest anxieties and relieving his morbid and guilt-stricken preoccupations by showing no awareness of them.

Nathaniel and Sophia discovered that the two of them were one as a remarkable calmness enveloped their relationship. "You could not have felt such quiet," Nathaniel remarked on one occasion, "unless I had felt it too—nor could I, unless you had. If either of our spirits had been troubled, they were then in such close communion that both must have felt the same grief and turmoil" (CE 15:299). The joint identity thus taking form corresponded—from Nathaniel's point of view, at least—to the legal doctrine of marital unity then in force, according to which a woman at marriage suffered "civil death."

Nathaniel and Sophia formed a single person, namely Nathaniel. The salutations of his letters echo and re-echo this fervent tribute: "Ownest Dove," "My Ownest," and inevitably "My own Self." Hawthorne expresses amazement and joy that his vision of her, so minutely adapted to his needs, is confirmed as their relationship unfolds. "My own Dove, I hardly know how it is, but nothing that you do or say ever surprises or disappoints me. . . . There exists latent within me a prophetic knowledge of all your vicissitudes of joy or sorrow; so that, though I cannot foretell them beforehand, yet I recognize them when they come. Nothing disturbs the preconceived idea of you in my mind" (CE 15:378–379).

Chapter Six—
Democratic Mythmaking in The House of the Seven Gables

As the fall of 1834 gave way to winter, George Bancroft announced a political conversion: he aborted his promising career as a Whig politician and cast his lot with the Democrats. Bancroft's family background, his education at Harvard and Göttingen, and his extensive connections among Unitarian men of letters placed him naturally among the conservative Whigs, where he had swiftly found positions of public leadership. His change of parties was taken as a desertion of his class; it was denounced as apostasy, and gave him a reputation for deviousness and opportunism he was never to live down. The Democrats were quick to reward Bancroft for his services and especially for the tone of distinction he brought to the party of Andrew Jackson in Massachusetts, where—as Emerson observed—the Democrats had the best cause, while the Whigs had the best men (Fox, 439). By 1838 Bancroft had acquired a substantial patronage post as collector of the Port of Boston, in which capacity he appointed Nathaniel Hawthorne to his job as measurer.

Bancroft's decision to become a Democrat was rooted in his vision of America's historical mission to lead the upward march of civilization through stages of struggle in which the forces of liberty are pitted against tyranny and oppression. Bancroft asserted this stirring thesis in the first volume of his History of the United States, which enlarged his reputation for literary learning and established him as a pioneer of modern historical research. Bancroft's career as politician and writer makes a rough but telling parallel with Haw-

thorne's. Hawthorne's social origins aligned him with the old elite class (his sister Elizabeth was a Whig), yet he made an early, ardent commitment to the Jacksonians. Hawthorne likewise in due course became an anomaly, a poet and a cultivated gentleman in the party of the common man.

In announcing his apostasy, Bancroft took up Jackson's attack on the Bank of the United States, charging that it threatened democratic liberties because of "its tendency to promote extreme inequalities in point of fortune" (Schlesinger, 162). Jacksonians denounced the bank as the mainspring of a complex economic mechanism by which the "Whig moneyed aristocracy" retained a position of illicit power over the citizenry at large. Hatred for the "aristocracy of Mammon," such as drew Nathaniel and Sophia together, was given voice in Jacksonian rhetoric, and Jackson's cause was styled a resurgence of the love of liberty that had triumphed in the American Revolution. "Whiggish aristocracy" was now the enemy of the people's rights, as "Tory feudalism" had been a half-century earlier.

In The Jacksonian Persuasion Marvin Meyers finds a complex social meaning in this seemingly anachronistic temperament. The "real people" (18) at the heart of Jackson's rhetoric evoke a virtuous yeoman republic composed of individuals engaged in self-respecting toil for honest gains. Menacing them is a "moneyed aristocracy" that enjoys special privileges and controls the lives of ordinary folk by manipulating "the money power" (22). Meyers demonstrates how shrewdly this rhetoric addressed emergent features of American life. Rather than engaging in a belated confrontation with the pre-Revolutionary past, the Jacksonians struggled to come to terms with alarming features of the society taking form in their midst.

Jackson's war on the bank had the symbolic power of concentrating public anxieties that had been aroused by several interconnected new realities: the mysterious creation of credit during periods of economic boom and its equally mysterious destruction in panic and depression; the complex new politics, with its party apparatuses and national constituencies; the instability of status in a society where rapid changes of fortune were frequent; the scramble for wealth that cannot cease when wealth has been attained. Americans who followed Jackson in assailing aristocratic luxury and illicit power were making war, Meyers observes, on attitudes and conduct in which they were themselves enmeshed (Meyers, 121–141).

A comparable split vision characterizes Hawthorne's treatment of family relations in The House of the Seven Gables . Jaffrey Pyncheon is presented as the embodiment of anti-democratic evil. He is the descendant of a family that traces its origin to an autocratic Puritan magistrate by way of eighteenth-

century ancestors who adopted the dress and manner of British aristocrats. Broadly envisioned, the narrative recounts the collapse of this aristocratic dynasty and its displacement by the domestic family, joining parties (Holgrave and Phoebe) who embody democratic virtues rather than corrupt aristocratic delusions. Yet behind this thematic structure stands another, in which the new family arrangement takes form in response to distinctively nineteenth-century social dilemmas. Like his fellow Jacksonians, Hawthorne deploys the rhetoric of egalitarian revolution in making sense of an expanding middle-class capitalist society. Hawthorne asserts fresh "democratic" energies against a corrupt "Past," but the ogre of the discredited old order represents emerging features of the American society.

The opening of Hepzibah Pyncheon's cent-shop celebrates the fresh breeze of democratic change: Hepzibah's transformation from a "patrician lady" into a "plebeian woman" dramatizes the welcome collapse of inherited hierarchy. "In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning point," Hawthorne observes (CE 2:38). Hepzibah's calamity is painful as well as ludicrous because she retains an aristocratic consciousness. "I was born a lady," she stiffly informs Holgrave, "and have always lived one—no matter in what narrowness of means, always a lady!" (45). Yet Holgrave assures her that being compelled to open the cent-shop is a piece of good fortune, since she will now join the "united struggle of mankind," will enjoy the moral benefits of that "healthy and natural effort," and will realize a true humanity that was obscured by the social arrangements in which she was reared. Holgrave is confident that Hepzibah's humiliation will lead her to discover that it is "better to be a true woman, than a lady" (44–45).

The founding father of the Pyncheon dynasty had built a "family-mansion . . . calculated to endure for many generations of his posterity" (CE 2:9) and had bequeathed landholdings "more extensive than many a dukedom" (18). Yet his nineteenth-century descendants find that their claim to exalted position not only cannot be validated but has lost its meaning. Like other wealthy families in the early national period, the Pyncheons lost out to lowly farming folk who cleared the land on which aristocratic status had been based.^[1] Hawthorne taunts the Pyncheons for continuing to search for the deed to their dukedom after it was occupied by settlers. "These last," Hawthorne observes, "if they ever heard of the Pyncheon title, would have

laughed at the idea of any man's asserting a right—on the strength of mouldy parchments, signed with the faded autographs of governors and legislators, long dead and forgotten—to the lands which they or their fathers had wrested from the wild hand of Nature" (18–19).

The actual Pyncheon legacy is "an absurd delusion of family importance" which breeds in some descendants a "liability to sluggishness and dependence" (CE 2:19) and also produces Jaffrey Pyncheon's ferocious determination to amass a large fortune, so as to impart a specious validity to his claim to aristocratic station. The true tradition of the family is this ancestral curse, the perpetuation of self-contradictory striving, as figured in the dissonant meanings of the term blood .

Persons are related to one another by blood if they are biologically akin: parents and children are thus related; husband and wife are not. Although this sense of blood relations (as opposed to in-law relations) is distinct among living contemporaries, it takes on an altered sense when projected on earlier generations. Then blood refers to a procession of males bearing the family name, so that a mother becomes merely the carrier of the blood relationship, not an agent in it. When blood, as a way of describing descent, takes on the patriarchal bearings inherent in patrilineage, it cuts across the significance that prevails in immediate domestic relations (Schneider, 23–25).

Holgrave asserts that the wretchedness of the Pyncheons—like that of other balked dynasts—results from their frantic entanglement in these contradictions. "To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that, once in every half-century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors. Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in hidden streams" (CE 2:185).

The curse on the Pyncheons' self-confounded existence—"God will give you blood to drink!"—focuses these conflicts. Strangled on the meanings of the dynastic family whose illusion of permanence is embodied in a family mansion, the Pyncheons' collapse validates a new concept of family life, suited to "the future condition of society." Holgrave envisions a wholesale social renovation, in which "no man shall build his house for posterity. . . . If each generation were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that single change, comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform which society is now suffering for" (CE 2:183—184).

In the end, to be sure, Holgrave abandons this view. It turns out that he has not forgotten about his Maule ancestry and has every intention of assigning that name to his wife and perpetuating it in his offspring. Yet

Holgrave's insistence that families be created anew in each generation is integral to Hawthorne's parable of the transition to a domestic family ideology: a family is grounded not in an ancestral establishment but in the mutual love between a self-sufficient man and a "true woman."^[2]

Holgrave's story of Alice Pyncheon portrays the repression of such mutual affections in the aristocratic past, when an impassable boundary was fixed between persons of high and low station, so that the "natural" gender identities of men and women could not find healthy expression and took perverted forms. The denatured manhood fostered by this arrangement is symbolized by Alice's father Gervayse Pyncheon's effeminate dress: his flowered waistcoat, lace-embroidered blue velvet coat, and powdered wig. Matthew Maule, by contrast, is a manly man of blunt and direct address, wearing a woolen jacket and leather breeches, which include a long pocket for his phallic carpenter's ruler. Alice Pyncheon is delighted by "the remarkable comeliness, strength, and energy of Maule's figure" (CE 2:201), and Maule is himself correspondingly stirred. But the sexual spark that leaps between Alice and Matthew ignites a destructive blaze because of the wrongful social distance separating them. Presuming on her social advantage, Alice looks at Matthew as though he were a work of art or a handsome animal; Maule responds with bitter resentment. Alice, however, blinded by the prerogatives of her station, is unaware that she has given offense. She also does not realize that the social convention placing her "above" Matthew Maule cannot defend her against the greater strength he enjoys by nature, because he is a man. When Maule challenges her to submit to hypnotism, she foolishly agrees: "Alice put woman's might against man's might; a match not often equal, on the part of woman" (203).

As Alice is subjugated, her father's dignity is shattered, "natural" reality discomposing the regalia of aristocratic ascendancy. "How the man of conventionalities shook the powder out of his periwig," Hawthorne jeers (CE 2:205). Yet Maule is also degraded; his justifiable indignation finds no healthy expression, so that he enacts an odious exaggeration of his natural dominance over Alice, ordering her to perform shameful and pointless tasks. As Holgrave—Matthew's descendant—tells this story to Phoebe Pyncheon, she (like her equally suggestible and passive ancestor) falls into a hypnotic trance. Holgrave chooses not to bring her under his control, Hawthorne affirms, because of his "reverence" for her "individuality" (212). The eventual marriage of Holgrave and Phoebe is a sign that "the sin of long ago," with its sorry harvest of abortive relationships, is at long last to be abolished.

Hawthorne dramatizes this Jacksonian progressivism by describing a

complex transitional situation, in which elements of the "past" and the "future" are jumbled together. The domestic ideal wins out at the end and asserts a "new" organization of social space in which "home" is set against "the world." Yet this triumph takes place in defiance of a patriarchal social arrangement that remains secretly alive, even as its demise is celebrated.

When the master of a preindustrial household looked beyond the boundaries of his own domain, he contemplated a social landscape of patriarchal units analogous to the one he headed. The church and institutions of government recapitulated the model set by the household, with "fatherhood" as a recurrent metaphor designating authority in multiple realms, including the ultimate authority of Godhead. As William Gouge explained in Of Domesticall Duties, the household was a training ground for positions of responsibility in any institution: "It is as a schoole wherein the first principles and grounds of government and subjection are learned: whereby men are fitted to greater matters in Church or commonwealth" (Demos, xix).

The early nineteenth century witnessed a rearrangement of community life as economic institutions emerged that the household metaphor could not embrace. The relation of master and apprentice in the shoemaker's household included the master's responsibility to provide the young man shelter and guidance and to aid him in finding his eventual place in the community. The "boss" at the shoe factory, by contrast, discharged his responsibility when he paid an employee. Newly estranged also were the relations between the owner of the shoe factory and those for whom the shoes were produced. Mass production required that a marketing and distribution system be created to reach the faceless denizens of a regional market, where earlier the local shoemaker had served neighbors whose lives he knew and who were likewise well versed in his peculiarities. The communal network of local relations was interrupted by a new pattern of social space; a "world" now emerged that transcended local knowledge, in which uncertain new forces were at work (Ryan, Cradle, 147–152).

In The House of the Seven Gables Hawthorne dramatizes this transitional situation. Hepzibah opens her cent-shop amid the small-scale communal life of an earlier era. Working men passing down the street swiftly fix the enterprise in a network of familiar information. "Well, well, this is a sight, to be sure. . . . In the old Pyncheon-house, and underneath the Pyncheon-

elm! Who would have thought it! Old Maid Pyncheon is setting up a cent-shop!" (CE 2:47). Hepzibah's shame and confusion result from the abasement of her aristocratic pride—soiling her hands with "trade"—not from any sense of violating a space sacred to domestic felicities. The notion that business belongs in the "world" and not in the "home" does not occur to her, or to the passing workmen. On the contrary, they observe that such household enterprises are so commonplace that Hepzibah can hardly expect to succeed.

This portrayal of the shop and its social context is sharply contrasted against a vision of urban commerce that comes uninvited into Hepzibah's mind. She sees a

panorama, representing the great thoroughfare of a city, all astir with customers. So many and so magnificent shops as there were! Groceries, toy-shops, dry-goods stores, with their immense panes of plate-glass, their gorgeous fixtures, their vast and complete assortments of merchandize, in which fortunes had been invested; and those noble mirrors at the farther end of each establishment, doubling all this wealth by a brightly burnished vista of unrealities!

(CE 2:48)

The elements of a transformed retail economy are present in this vision: the specialization of shops by products, the large capital outlay, the huge display windows and mirrors that catch the eyes of shoppers crowding an urban business district. Most telling is Hawthorne's disdainful sketch of the "perfumed and glossy salesmen, smirking, smiling, bowing" (49), whose function is identical to that of the shining glass. Their transactions with customers reach no deeper than the exchange of goods for cash, and their miming of friendship is meant to facilitate a brief anonymous encounter.

Hawthorne gives Hepzibah this vision in defiance of narrative logic. We are told she had lived in "strict seclusion" (CE 2:31) for over a quarter of a century, and nothing suggests she ever made a trip to the city where she might have seen such things. This incongruity in Hepzibah's knowledge marks an important feature of the transitional reality that embraces the action of The House of the Seven Gables: instances of the old order and the new are figured as discordant psychic structures even as they illustrate historical change.

Later in the narrative Clifford gazes through the arched window of the old Pyncheon house and is vividly aware of the "novelties" (CE 2:160) that have made their appearance in the street during his years in prison. He observes with distress the omnibus, the cabs, the street sprinkler, and the

railroad cars—features of an urbanized transportation system that have supplanted the stagecoaches Clifford sorely misses. He takes comfort in what remains of "the antique fashions" of a still active local commerce: the butcher's cart, the fish cart, the baker's cart and the itinerant scissor-grinder (161). A major theme of this transition is given in Hawthorne's depiction of an organ-grinder bearing a show-box in which typical characters of village life are represented by figurines: "the cobbler, the blacksmith, the soldier, the lady with her fan, the toper with his bottle, the milk-maid sitting by her cow" (162–163). These seeming individualities are tied together by a single machinery, which is put in motion when the organ-grinder turns his crank. The ultimate reality that drives this pantomime is "Mammon," as represented by the organ-grinder's monkey, who goes about with "joyless eagerness" (164) collecting coins from the audience.

The new order of social relations is not merely juxtaposed against the old, as a butcher's cart might be parked beside the municipal street sprinkler. Hawthorne's organ-grinder symbolizes the capacity of the "money power" to penetrate the traditional patterns of social life and empty them of their apparent meaning. The life of the "new" circulates like a virus through the organs of a familiar social body, so that unhealthy new processes are found to be at work in what look like old virtues.

The ambiguities pervading the social landscape of The House of the Seven Gables are eventually resolved through Phoebe's spiritual force, her ontological power to establish the reality of "home" and to define its character as a redemptive form of the "new." Hawthorne fervently celebrates her numinous homemaking energy: "A wild hut of underbrush, tossed together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the home-aspect by one night's lodging of such a woman, and would retain it, long after her quiet figure had disappeared into the surrounding shade" (CE 2:71–72). In Phoebe the democratic future is already accomplished, Hawthorne explains; she is an "example of feminine grace and availability combined, in a state of society, if there were any such, where ladies did not exist. There, it should be woman's office to move in the midst of practical affairs, and to gild them all—the very homeliest, were it even the scouring of pots and kettles—with an atmosphere of loveliness and joy" (80). The "spontaneous grace" with which Phoebe carries out her housekeeping chores forms a sharp contrast with the "squalid and ugly" character of worldly labor. "Angels do not toil," Hawthorne explains, "but let their good works grow out of them; and so did Phoebe" (82).^[3]

In the Manning household, where Hawthorne was reared, careful accounts were kept assigning a money value to cooking and household maintenance as well as to "business" functions, so that "Madame Hathorne" and her children were charged for the efforts others put forward on their behalf (Erlich, 54–55). In this traditional pattern of household organization, little tension was felt between financial and familial relations. Phoebe herself is a shrewd negotiator and does a thriving trade in Hepzibah's cent-shop precisely because she is able to carry a cheerful home-like atmosphere with her wherever she goes. In this respect she resembles the salesmen in Hepzibah's envisioned department store; yet Hawthorne offers her as their opposite. She embodies the standard of spiritual authenticity against which the sordidness of worldly commerce is to be measured.^[4]

Phoebe's religious power is genuine, Hawthorne asserts, because it is inherent to her being. She does not intend to bring others under her spell; it just happens. Men are drawn toward her because of a masculine anguish of which she herself is unaware:

Phoebe's presence made a home about her—that very sphere which the outcast, the prisoner, the potentate, the wretch beneath mankind, the wretch aside from it, or the wretch above it, instinctively pines after—a home! She was real! Holding her hand, you felt something; a tender something; a substance, and a warm one; and so long as you should feel its grasp, soft as it was, you might be certain that your place was good in the whole sympathetic chain of human nature. The world was no longer a delusion.

(CE 2:140–141)

It is worth noting that the "home" radiating from Phoebe's presence is not so much a refuge from "the world" as an avenue of access to it. She creates a domestic sphere that places a man in contact with "human nature" and makes the world real. Rather than drawing him into solitude, she delivers him from it. Active religious symbols embrace opposed meanings; they are telling paradoxes for those who live within the spell cast by the symbols and look like mere contradictions to those who do not. In Phoebe we find "labor" and "play" at odds and yet trading places, as do "home" and "world."

Hawthorne does not shrink from insisting on such fusions, and his climactic invocation of Phoebe's divinity multiplies them further:

In her aspect, there was a familiar gladness, and a holiness that you could play with, and yet reverence it as much as ever. She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of one's mother-tongue. Fresh was Phoebe, moreover, and airy and sweet in her apparel; as if nothing she wore—neither her gown, nor her small straw bonnet, nor her little kerchief, any more than her snowy stockings—had ever been put on,

before; or, if worn, were all the fresher for it, and with a fragrance as if they had lain among the rosebuds.

(CE 2:168)

At the center of Phoebe's being is a body that is not a body, without sweat or menstrual discharges, a physical presence so intensely pure that it cleanses her garments from within. Phoebe is "a Religion in herself" (168), acting as an ontological laundry that washes away the corruptions Hawthorne designates as "old."

Jaffrey Pyncheon is repeatedly identified with the ancestral crime of the family and meets his death in the ancestral fashion, by strangling on his own blood. This embodiment of the "sin of long ago," however, also represents moral shortcomings of the new urban and industrial society, in particular the predicament arising from a new public anonymity. The rich context of personal knowledge supplied through communal networks of information exchange was absent in the competitive urban environment. Compelled to take each other at face value, men based their mutual knowledge on superficial and uncertain marks of character. In the growing cities they were strangers not merely to the unknown multitude but also to the men with whom they had regular dealings. By mid-century it was a commonplace that "men are not the natural confidants of men" (Rothman, 111); they were compelled, like Jaffrey Pyncheon, to know each other by way of "the external phenomena of life" (CE 2:229).

The ambivalence produced by this situation is reflected in a newly emerging mythic figure: the confidence man. In the 1830s and 1840s a massive advice literature was generated that featured young men entering the urban environment only to be ensnared by new acquaintances in whom they mistakenly put their trust.

A key to Pyncheon's success is thus his feigning of personal interest and personal accountability; he seems to approach others from a world that is no longer there. Yet the appearance of "benignity" that Pyncheon maintains is only one of the new arts of dominance in a social system where power has drained out of communal relations and become vested in impersonal, collective processes. The newly anonymous public order that created an unfamiliar context for personal relations also revolutionized the formation of political power.

One classic form of the confidence man is the demagogue, Karen Halttunen has shown, who takes advantage of the emerging politics. Local communities increasingly lost power to national systems of patronage and publicity that were aimed at mobilizing a mass electorate, securing voters' support for political leaders they could not know firsthand. As professional politicians learned to shape public opinion, Americans came to fear that elections had become a masquerade of republican governance, concealing the cynical manipulations of an all-powerful elite (Halttunen, 16).

On the evening of Pyncheon's death, he was scheduled to secure the governorship of Massachusetts at a private party, his dinner companions having the power to get him nominated and elected. "They are practised politicians, every man of them, and skilled to adjust those preliminary measures, which steal from the people, without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers. The popular voice, at the next gubernatorial election, though loud as thunder, will be really but an echo of what these gentlemen shall speak, under their breath" (CE 2:274). Pyncheon, having worked his way to political power through large contributions, plans that very evening to make a donation better than twice what the party asked. He embodies that classic nemesis of Jacksonianism, the "money power" acting to corrupt republican virtue.

Pyncheon has amassed a fortune by exploiting those aspects of the American economy Jacksonians found most disturbing. He is a financial manipulator whose efforts produce nothing substantial but nonetheless lead to wealth. Hawthorne reviews his speculative investments: "his real estate in town and country, his railroad, bank, and insurance shares, his United States stock." Pyncheon enjoys an inner knowledge of the new financial systems that ordinary citizens cannot obtain; he makes it a custom to visit the "Insurance Office" so as to hear and appraise the current gossip, and to drop some deeply designed chance-word, which will be certain to become the gossip of tomorrow" (CE 2:270). He is also well practiced in creating pseudonymous bank accounts, both foreign and domestic, and in using other arcane methods, "familiar enough to capitalists" (234), to conceal the extent of his holdings.

Jaffrey Pyncheon accordingly represents anti-democratic arrangements that are native to the new economic and political order. He is a figure of the irony according to which a presumptively republican America sponsored the formation of a capitalist elite.

A central emblem of Pyncheon's social character is the timepiece he holds in his hand as he sits dead in the ancestral chair, by which the narrator marks

the hours that pass after his death. The watch—and the daily schedule it measures out—symbolize the improvisational freedom now available to an enterprising man. Far from suggesting confinement, or the dreariness of a "time-disciplined" proletarian life, Pyncheon's watch betokens his freedom to maneuver, ticking off an abstract scale against which he can manage a series of prearranged encounters.

Pyncheon's interviews stand against a social void; they are separate affairs, unconnected except as they serve his personal interests. One of the people on his schedule is a "decayed widow" who has appealed to him for help; he cancels the visit, aware that disappointing her will not injure his reputation for benevolence. The widow has no contact with the other people on his schedule, especially not with the persons among whom his reputation counts. Judge Pyncheon can go through his sequence of appointments without anyone else knowing what his whole day looks like.

The narrator's taunting of Pyncheon's dead body strips away the freedom he had found in anonymity. As the narrator takes us through Pyncheon's date book, the mask of pretended benevolence disintegrates and the judge's ruthless self-aggrandizement stands revealed. Hawthorne presents this exposure as a revelation of moral reality. The narrator's interior knowledge replaces the now defunct communal network in which members of a community were continuously known and appraised from multiple points of view and where the daily round of life routinely brought persons into contact with no need of scheduled appointments.

Yet it turns out that Pyncheon's true character has been known all along, in a "a hidden stream of private talk, such as it would have shocked all decency to speak loudly at the street-corners" (CE 2:310). The deceit inherent in living in public is counterbalanced by the revelations of intimate contact, to which women are by nature attuned. Moral reality is to be found in "the woman's, the private and domestic view, of a public man," Hawthorne informs us, "nor can anything be more curious than the vast discrepancy between portraits intended for engraving, and the pencil-sketches that pass from hand to hand, behind the original's back" (122). Phoebe's aversion to Judge Pyncheon shows her unerring spontaneous moral responses; without knowing his private story, she instinctively draws back from his gestures of affectionate kinship. In place of communal knowledge as a test of virtue we now find "true womanhood," credited with an intuitive awareness of a man's moral essence.

Jaffrey Pyncheon embodies the spiritual emptiness—and ultimately the metaphysical horror—of a man made of masks in an anonymous world.

Pyncheon is actuated throughout by a partly conscious self-disgust, so that outward rebuffs are echoed within him. In describing Pyncheon's smile, Hawthorne observes that it "was a good deal akin to the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his boot-black, respectively, a good deal of hard labor to bring out and preserve" (CE 2:117). The toil of keeping up the smile does not counteract simple malice, which smiles without being prompted; the black smile hides displeasure and inward pain.

This blackness flows out of Pyncheon's being, "darkening forth" to fill his surroundings. Just as Phoebe symbolizes divine light, so Judge Pyncheon embodies the blackness of nonbeing, which is asserted as an ontological principle when his dead body is engulfed in midnight: "Has it yet vanished? No!—yes!—not quite! And there is still the swarthy whiteness . . . of Judge Pyncheon's face. The features are all gone; there is only the paleness of them left. And how looks it now? . . . There is no face! An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe?" (CE 2:276). The desperation that enters the narrator's voice at this juncture indicates that the "darkness visible" into which Pyncheon dissolves is contagious, and the figure most susceptible to infection is Holgrave, who watches obsessively as Pyncheon sits dead in his chair.

Hawthorne offers Holgrave as a representative of self-reliant manhood. Like "many compeers in his native land," he takes pride in having no advantages of inherited wealth and family position. His attitude toward his various lines of work marks him as a figure of the new social instability, in which a young man could not afford to tie his personal worth to the outcome of any given enterprise. Ralph Waldo Emerson describes the collapse of morale that could result: "If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all heart," he observed in 1840. "If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined." Emerson praises by contrast the lad "who in turn tries all the professions"; but instead of becoming a teamster, a farmer, a peddler, a schoolmaster, a clergyman, a newspaper editor, or even a Congressman, "he teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress . . . and always like a cat falls on his feet" (Whicher, 161). Hawthorne similarly describes Holgrave's various ad hoc enterprises, explaining that "his present phase, as a Daguerreotypist, was of no more importance in his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the preceding ones." Hawthorne observes that in "putting off one exterior,

and snatching up another, to be soon shifted for a third," Holgrave "had never violated the innermost man" (CE 2:177).

For all his vaunted autonomy, Holgrave is nonetheless unmanned when he enters the gloom that surrounds Judge Pyncheon's demise, because the demon-ridden non-selfhood of the judge and Holgrave's democratic self-reliance are fundamentally akin. The self-made individual is perforce a confidence man, who succeeds in "self-trust" insofar as he deceives himself, denying that his existence is determined by the vicissitudes of gender, class position, and economic happenstance. The theater of his self-creation is "the rude struggle of man with man" (CE 2:213), where no individual self-in-the-making can have distinctive value, since all are in that respect identical. To measure one's worth by the standards of value that prevail in the world of striving men is to submit oneself to the "great unrealities" of wealth and power from which the inner truth of the self is excluded. The quest for such worldly trophies cannot succeed without the cooperation of other men, and to secure that cooperation it is necessary to make a credible show of concern for their welfare. It follows that the arts of the confidence man and those of the self-reliant middle-class male are the same. One cannot influence people without knowing how to win friends.

Holgrave, shaken to his foundations when he confronts the judge's fate, turns urgently to Phoebe for solace. "'Could you but know, Phoebe, how it was with me, the hour before you came!' exclaimed the artist. 'A dark, cold, miserable hour! The presence of yonder dead man threw a great black shadow over everything; he made the universe, so far as my perception could reach, a scene of guilt, and of retribution more dreadful than the guilt'" (CE 2:306). Why is not Holgrave jubilant, given the agelong injustice done against his family? Why should he be frightened or depressed at this triumphant vindication of the Maules? Pyncheon's death represents the nemesis peculiar to the confidence man and accordingly undermines Holgrave's self-trust. "My past life, so lonesome and dreary; my future, a shapeless gloom, which I must mould into gloomy shapes" (306). Holgrave recognizes that so long as his undertakings are self-ratified, they are spurious. Whatever shape he may give his future can only be formed of shadows.

The strange scene in which Holgrave and Phoebe profess their mutual love, while the day-old corpse sits in the next room, depicts the reorganization of social space in which the polarity of "world versus home" emerges against the background of the old communal order. Holgrave and Phoebe have markedly different visions of the society beyond the house. Phoebe urges him to "'throw open the doors, and call all the neighborhood to see

the truth.' . . . Yet the artist. . . . [was not] in haste, like her, to betake himself within the precincts of common life." Holgrave is not environed by "the neighborhood" or "the precincts of common life": he inhabits an "illimitable desert," whose desolation this moment with Phoebe magically counteracts. "He gathered a wild enjoyment—as it were, a flower of strange beauty, growing in a desolate spot" (CE 2:305).

Holgrave prolongs the moment because "it separated Phoebe and himself from the world, and bound them to each other. . . . [It] kept them within the circle of a spell, a solitude in the midst of men, a remoteness as entire as that of an island in mid-ocean" (CE 2:305). The two share a fragile new intimacy through which they move toward a new pattern of social experience. The "magnetic chain of humanity" that once ran at large through the community is now coiled within their private relation. The blackness that swallowed Jaffrey Pyncheon has now been counteracted by the reality-working power that Holgrave finds in Phoebe. "It was in this hour, so full of doubt and awe, that the one miracle was wrought, without which every human existence is a blank" (307). Holgrave can now face the neighbors, who have assembled outside the house, and is prepared to contend with the questions aroused by Pyncheon's death. The language in which he frames that readiness quietly underscores the social terrain the loving couple now inhabit. "Now let us," he says to Phoebe, "meet the world" (307).

Phoebe's profession of love for Holgrave redeems him from the masquerade of male selfhood even as it consummates his confidence game, whose prize is Judge Pyncheon's fortune, to be obtained by marrying Phoebe.^[5]

Hawthorne does not indict Holgrave as a fortune hunter, but he assembles circumstances that frame such an indictment, and this implicit charge is central to the domestic ideology endorsed here. In the night-vigil scene, in which Hawthorne presented a procession of Pyncheon's deceased kinfolk, we learned that the judge's only son is dead, so that the great estate is to devolve on Hepzibah, Clifford, and "rustic little Phoebe" (CE 2:280). Does one read the anxious rhetoric of Holgrave's lovemaking without being subliminally aware that the judge's bank stock, insurance shares, railroad holdings, and extensive real estate are all riding on the outcome? Holgrave does not reveal the false pretenses under which he has courted Phoebe, nor does the redemptive bliss that makes "all things true, beautiful, and holy" prompt him to show his true colors. He reveals his identity only after it strikes Phoebe as odd that he knows where the old Pyncheon claim to Maine lands is hidden. Then Holgrave mentions—as though casually—that Phoebe will be assuming the name Maule when they marry. The cynical audacity of

Holgrave's game reaches a climax when he tells Phoebe he would have disclosed his identity sooner, "only that I was afraid of frightening you away" (316).^[6]

What are we to make of this thematic pattern, in which Holgrave exploits Phoebe's trustful ignorance and prevents her from becoming economically independent? It would be possible to claim that the domestic ideology works to exclude such mercenary considerations, to mark them as "worldly" and thus irrelevant to the domestic relation. Yet the very reverse is true: the social meaning of this marriage between self-made man and domestic angel necessarily includes his assuming control of her property without her understanding what has taken place. The reader, too, is meant to accept this transaction without objection, tacitly consenting to the ideology that renders Holgrave's acquisition of Pyncheon's wealth legitimate. Staked here, at last, are the ratification of a democratic, middle-class elite supplanting the dynastic landed gentry and the relation of domesticity—that central emblem of middle-class status—to the terms on which that ratification is made to occur.

The House of the Seven Gables is pervasively occupied with the dilemmas of asserting high status in a democratic society. Hawthorne warns against blurring the distinction between the possession of power and its rightful possession:

There is something so massive, stable, and almost irresistibly imposing, in the exterior presentment of established rank and great possessions, that their very existence seems to give them a right to exist; at least, so excellent a counterfeit of right, that few poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in their secret minds. Such is the case now, after so many ancient prejudices have been overthrown; and it was far more so in ante-revolutionary days, when the aristocracy could venture to be proud, and the low were content to be abased.

(CE 2:25)

Can any claim to social rank be sustained now that aristocratic prejudices have disappeared? When a nobleman falls into poverty, Hawthorne observes, he retains the dignity of the order to which his birth assigned him; when the citizen of a republic suffers economic ruin, his status is altogether destroyed. "With us, rank is the grosser substance of wealth and a splendid establishment, and has no spiritual existence after the death of these" (CE 2:38). It would seem to follow that high position and great wealth have no right to exist in a democracy but only acquire the "counterfeit of right" that

their mere possession imposes on the imaginations of men who lack moral force.

Real social worth momentarily seems attainable through the self-help Holgrave recommends to Hepzibah as she opens her cent-shop. Yet commercial enterprise on a scale sufficient to produce wealth, or only to sustain a family in middle-class respectability, requires engagement in the world of "unrealities" that Hepzibah envisions when she measures her chances against the competition from large department stores in the city. Far from cultivating republican virtue, fighting out a battle in the newly developing urban marketplaces of Jacksonian America leads straight to the depravity of Jaffrey Pyncheon. So the dilemma takes form: elite status is contrary to democratic principle if it is inherited, but the self-reliant effort to gain it requires contaminating involvement in the power games of commerce and politics.

A classic response to this dilemma is marked out in Holgrave's way to wealth, which anticipates the pattern of the Horatio Alger narratives, where the likely lad is never compelled to dramatize his self-reliant diligence in economic competition. Despite Holgrave's enthusiasm for the united struggle of mankind, he is exempted from competing against Jaffrey Pyncheon and his ilk, and even from seeking their favor. He displays the virtue that establishes his right to a fortune only in his relation to the woman from whom he filches it, and her love for him cleanses away the stain of his having dispossessed her. At the moment when Holgrave and Phoebe declare their love, he gains his fortune, and her love for him validates his virtue—against his own doubts—as a man deserving a sunlit future. Hawthorne arranges the climax so that Phoebe's subordination to Holgrave and the transfer of her fortune into his hands testify to his social worth and mark his elite status.

Working-class misery is not portrayed at length in The House of the Seven Gables, but it surfaces on one occasion that underscores the role of the domestic angel in legitimating middle-class privilege. Shortly after Hepzibah opens the cent-shop, a man in a soiled blue cotton frock enters and buys a pipe, "filling the whole shop, meanwhile, with the hot odor of strong drink . . . oozing out of his entire system, like an inflammable gas." This "brutal" figure portrays the vices making it appear that the sufferings of working-class men are self-inflicted. His depravity is further marked by the wretchedness of his wife, "one of those women, naturally delicate, whom you at once recognize as worn to death by a brute—probably, a drunken brute—of a husband, and at least nine children" (CE 2:53).

The middle-class claim to elite status is covert; it translates social pre-

eminence into ethical worth, and the gender system featured in the domestic ideal is at the heart of that translation. Holgrave is entitled to control the lives of men in dirty blue frocks because he is entitled to control a far superior being, his wife, who willingly submits to the superior force that nature has granted him. God has provided him with "man's might," meaning the capacity to beat her up and wear her to death with multiple unwelcome pregnancies; but unlike working-class drunkards, he is capable of respecting the natural "delicacy" of his woman. In fact, he worships her.

The mutual adaptation of the spiritualities of husband and wife in the domestic ideal is a sacred paradigm of legitimate subordination. Phoebe's "true womanhood" validates Holgrave's ascent to mastery, just as the abuse of the workingman's wife is an emblem of the disorder that would result if such a brute ever had real power. The spirituality of the domestic sphere is a test of public virtue that takes place in a domain mythically segregated from the conflicts of public life, a domain in which womanly dispossession and subordination are asserted as the ground on which manly virtue is established. Holgrave makes of Jaffrey Pyncheon's numerous economic victims a single victim, namely Phoebe, whose love for him authorizes his dominion over the rest. Thus the sacred radiance of domesticity that surrounds the moment in which they profess their mutual love must incorporate his making himself rich to perfect the legitimation of his rank on democratic terms.

Phoebe's intense purity launders Pyncheon's money as it is transferred to Holgrave. Dynastic pollutions, as well as pollutions arising from the "world," are washed away; they are amalgamated into a "Past" that is entirely transcended by the love that makes all things fresh and new. Because Hawthorne was uneasy with this solution, he gives Clifford a vision of an existence transcending the domestic ideal that will "do away with those stale ideas of home and fireside" (CE 2:259). Clifford pictures a future life in which the railroad and other technological innovations will allow a family to roam from one temporary encampment to the next. He looks forward to an endless landscape of free individual movement, in which the loving couple are the sole inhabitants, their felicity unmolested by even so much worldly constraint as is built into owning a house.

Yet the marital relation itself is implicated in Clifford's horror of fixed dwellings: "Morbid influences, in a thousand-fold variety, gather about hearths, and pollute the life of households" (CE 2:261). Clifford implies that corruptions arise in the domestic sphere itself that are likewise to be escaped by frequent changes of locale before they contaminate the building in which husband and wife lead their lives. The exploitation and oppression of the

emerging middle-class order are made to vanish into the intense purity of Phoebe but remain there, hidden.

In the latter stages of composition, Hawthorne became troubled at his realization that the work "darkens damnably toward the close" and further troubled by the difficulties he encountered in trying "to pour some setting sunshine over it." As Michael Gilmore has noted, Hawthorne's effort to give the work a cheerful ending, and thus to make it more attractive in the literary marketplace, recapitulates Jaffrey Pyncheon's effort to spread a sunny and appealing smile over his avarice (CE 2:106–112). Yet the confidence game in which Hawthorne himself was engaged—as depicted in Holgrave as well as Pyncheon—is more insidious than a market strategy. It engages the substance of the domestic relation, whose "sunshine" is itself a deception. The morbid influences that pollute the life of households result in good measure because the domestic ideal renders invisible the link between social injustice and marital intimacy and denies the political and economic conflict that takes place within the domestic bond.

Hawthorne's conclusion may well leave us wondering how the newly constituted Maule household will lead its life. Will Phoebe continue to clean her clothes by wearing them? How will the fastidious Mr. Maule respond when he finds out that she doesn't? Will Phoebe continue to relieve her husband of the moral uneasiness that he feels when he deceives her? How will she, with her practical shrewdness and her gift for bargaining, reconcile herself to his lifelong control of the family's finances? What if they have a son who insists on living like Clifford? What if they have a daughter with the talents and temperament of Jaffrey Pyncheon? Now that the domestic sphere has been formed, how will they live in it?

As we return to the Hawthornes' family life, it will become apparent that they themselves were disconcerted by such questions. The sweaty toil of running a household and the surprises of child rearing could not be escaped, and they forced political and economic struggles that were supposed to remain in "the world." The courtship of Nathaniel and Sophia reveals how subtly their inner lives coalesced, forming the intimate union at the heart of middle-class marital bliss. Sophia rejoiced, we shall see, in the "miraculous interweaving of spirits" between herself and Nathaniel, and she likewise treasured a close spiritual communion with her children. These psychic bonds, however, were freighted with anxieties and conflicts that set family members at odds, even amid the tenderest affections.