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Hawthorne on Romantic Love and the Status of Women
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The women that Hawthorne created divide rather neatly into three groups. Such fragile creatures as Alice Pyncheon and Priscilla, who are easily dominated by other personalities, form one of these groups. Another is made up of bright, self-reliant, and wholesome girls, such as Ellen Langton, Phoebe, and Hilda. The third consists of women whose beauty, intellect, and strength of will raise them to heroic proportions and make them fit subjects for tragedy. Hester Prynne, Zenobia, and Miriam—these women are capable of tilting with the world and risking their souls on the outcome. With them in particular Hawthorne raises and answers the question of the proper status of women in society and the relation, whether subordinate or superior, that love should bear to the other demands that life makes upon the individual. With the other types Hawthorne fills out his response to that question.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954
References
1 I am indebted to Randall Stewart for this classification: The American Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne (New Haven, 1932), Introd., pp. lv-lx.
2 The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Norman Holmes Pearson (New York, 1937), p. 200. All references to Hawthorne's works will be to this edition unless otherwise indicated.
3 Lloyd Morris is an example: “He had not condemned either Hester Prynne or Arthur Dimmesdale for their sin; their love, having had a consecration of its own, never caused them repentance” (The Rebellious Puritan: Portrait of Mr. Hawthorne, New York, 1927, p. 229). John C. Gerber provides another instance of this kind of interpretation: “though Hester submits to the public exhibition and to the wearing of the scarlet letter, it is clear that her heart has not been touched” (“Form and Content in The Scarlet Letter,” NEQ, xvii [March 1944], 31).
4 Mark Van Doren is an example: “Somewhere, if not in the New England of his time, Hawthorne unearthed the image of a goddess supreme in beauty and power; … Nor was the woman of his imagination's choice deficient in the mysterious powers belonging to her sex… . Hawthorne … did not … protest against the might he recognized. He recorded it as one true, and let it work… . The Scarlet Letter is one of the great love stories of the world although it gives us no details of love. Hawthorne went to the center of woman's secret, her sexual power, and stayed there” (Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Sloan Associates, 1949, pp. 154-155). This passage is beautiful, but it apparently springs from Anatole France's idea that good criticism is simply an adventure of the soul among masterpieces.
5 Quoted by Morris, p. 227.
6 The Blithedale Romance, p. 464. If the reader objects that Coverdale is speaking in character and that his views in respect to such a woman as Zenobia might well be stronger than Hawthorne himself would express, I refer him to Hawthorne's account of Anne Hutchinson, as one of many corroborations that might be cited. In this sketch Hawthorne declares that “there are portentious indications, … which seem to threaten our posterity with many of those public women, whereof one was a burden too grievous for our fathers.” Elsewhere in the essay he refers to female writers of his own time as “ink-stained Amazons,” and concludes that “there is a delicacy … that perceives,… a sort of impropriety in the display of woman's natal mind to the gaze of the world” (“Anne Hutchinson,” Complete Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Boston, 1918, xvii, 1-3).
7 The Blithedale Romance, p. 510. Mrs. Hawthorne was in hearty agreement. Speaking of Margaret Fuller and her book on women's rights, she wrote, “It seems to me that if she were married truly, she would no longer be puzzled about the rights of woman, … Home, I think, is the great arena for women, …” Quoted by Julian Hawthorne in Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (Boston, 1884), i, 257.
8 “The Romantic Lady,” in Romanticism in America, ed. George Boas (Baltimore, 1940), pp. 66-67.
9 Complete Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Boston, 1900), v, 271.
10 Quoted by Van Doren, p. 154.
11 Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York, 1893), p. 47.
12 This contrast between Zenobia and Phoebe, which I am making, is not unlike, of course, the contrast which Hawthorne himself makes between Zenobia and Priscilla, the other heroine of The Blithedale Romance, and between Miriam and Hilda in The Marble Faun. It is also similar to his juxtaposition of Dorothy and the Quaker enthusiast in “The Gentle Boy”: “Her mild but saddened features, and neat matronly attire, harmonized together, and were like a verse of fireside poetry. .. . while the enthusiast, in her robe of sackcloth and girdle of knotted cord, had as evidently violated the duties of the present life and the future, … The two females, … formed a practical allegory; it was rational piety and unbridled fanaticism contending for … empire …” (p. 900). Phoebe, incidentally, is also described as “a verse of household poetry” (p. 328).