Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family: 24 - Brossura

Herbert, T. Walter Walter

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0520201558 ISBN 13: 9780520201552

Casa editrice: University of California Press, 1995

Riassunto

The marriage of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne—for their contemporaries a model of true love and married happiness—was also a scene of revulsion and combat. T. Walter Herbert reveals the tragic conflicts beneath the Hawthorne's ideal of domestic fulfillment and shows how their marriage reflected the tensions within nineteenth-century society. In so doing, he sheds new light on Hawthorne's fiction, with its obsessive themes of guilt and grief, balked feminism and homosexual seduction, adultery, patricide, and incest.

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Informazioni sull?autore

T. Walter Herbert is University Scholar and Brown Professor of English at Southwestern University. He is the author of Moby-Dick and Calvinism: A World Dismantled (1977) and Marquesan Encounters: Melville and the Meaning of Civilization (1980).

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Dearest Beloved

By Herbert, T. Walter, JR

University of California Press

Copyright © 1995 Herbert, T. Walter, JR
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520201552
Chapter One—
Indices of a Problem

In September 1852 Hawthorne journeyed to Brunswick, Maine, at the invitation of Bowdoin College, his alma mater, which was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. As a famous writer and a figure of national prominence in the Democratic party, he was among the most distinguished of Bowdoin's alumni. "My adventures thou shalt know when I return," Hawthorne wrote his wife, "and how I was celebrated by orators and poets—and how, by the grace of Divine Providence, I was not present, to be put to the blush. All my contemporaries have grown the funniest old men in the world. Am I a funny old man?" (CE 16:593).

This journey, extended to include a seaside vacation at the Isle of Shoals, gave Hawthorne an occasion to measure the distance he had traveled in the twenty-seven years since his graduation from Bowdoin. He had realized the dream of literary pre-eminence that had set him apart as a student and had led him through an arduous span of striving. Proud of his achievements and aware of his distinguished station in life, Hawthorne nonetheless had reason to feel an uneasy presentiment that his greatest work was behind him, that his remarkable personal adventure was ending, that what remained was to become one of the funny old men.1

Hawthorne was forty-eight years old, and his family was now complete. Una, the oldest daughter, was eight and Julian was six; they had a baby sister, Rose, just fifteen months. Hawthorne had recently moved this family into anew home in Concord, which he renamed the Wayside with the air of a man at long last settling down. "Since I was married, ten years ago," he wrote to G. P. Putnam, "I have had no less than seven homes—the one to which I am now going being the eighth" (CE 16:530). Hawthorne was mistaken in expecting that the family would remain at the Wayside, but of the many places he and Sophia had lived, this was the first he was able to purchase, and he left it permanently only at the time of his death. "I am beginning to take root here," he wrote to Longfellow, "and feel myself, for the first time in my life, really at home" (CE 16:602).

Hawthorne's description of his journey to Bowdoin and the Isle of Shoals evokes an ancient drama of masculine achievement: the hero undertakes an odyssey into the great unknown, while his wife, like Penelope (or Clytemnestra), waits by the hearth to celebrate and reward his adventures when he returns. Hawthorne was living out a version of this drama that was becoming typical of nineteenth-century America: a man's individual struggle to make a name for himself. Sophia played the part allotted to women by a vision of domesticity, also having ancient origins, that was now being consecrated as a middle-class ideal.

On the day of Nathaniel's departure Sophia commenced a series of journal entries that describe the household in his absence. Her first comments indicate how ardently she devoted herself to this sphere of womanly fulfillment. She reports that Una and Julian pined for their father, and

began to wonder how it would seem to Papa when he got back if they should never tease one another, never frown nor fret, always mind when first spoken to—if Papa would hear only lovely tones & see only pleasant faces—and all this joined to baby's angel talk & angel smiles, thought Una, would make Papa think he was in heaven with us—"or," said Julian, "not with us but with some other children"—"Yes," I replied, "with your spirits." "Oh," they exclaimed, "let us try & try & try & perhaps we can!"

(Family Notebook, 30 August 1852)2

As Sophia's journal continues, however, this tableau of domestic felicity is interrupted by gestures that parody and subvert the drama she and her husband are playing out. The routine counterpoint of worldly manhood and feminine nurture was echoed in the relation of crude and refined, earthy and angelic, savage and civilized; and the Hawthornes' daughter Una had a knack for uproarious burlesque that turned these antitheses all topsy-turvy.

She took Julian's turtle & said to him, "Come, we are two boys—you are James Jones." So she went on about the turtle & perfectly amazed me with her talk. The voice & manner & phrases & pronunciations were of the most uncivilized barbarous clodhopper. Where she ever heard—how she ever knew—I cannot imagine. Juliancame near dying of laughter to see & hear her. Where was the grace, the softness, the humanity, the order of my little Una? Utterly gone. No changeling could have been a greater change. What an Elfish element there is in her! What a tract of untameable wilderness, whither she rushes to dens & morasses, to air herself, as it were. I never knew such a combination of the highest refinement & the rudest boorishness—one lies at the door of the other.

(5 September)

Sophia's uneasiness, like the turbulence in Una's conduct, reveals that the conventional gender categories were meant to enforce the maleness and femaleness that they pictured as inherent. To say that a girl is "boorish" when she acts like a boy is to carry forward a disciplinary program, against which Una evidently offered resistance.

Yet Sophia's disapproval of Una's boisterousness is mingled with latent appreciation, even encouragement. Sophia feels a certain exhilaration at Una's "wonderful power," and she likewise relishes Una's success in placing herself at the center of attention, reducing Julian to helpless spasms of laughter. "We had a very merry time after tea," Sophia wrote on another occasion, "for Una undertook to be comical & to imitate characters & she was irresistible. We nearly died of laughing & Julian exploded in a way that was alarming to hear!" (30 August).

Sophia's enjoyment of this unnerving laughter bespeaks her own divided mind. She felt an inward resistance to the proprieties she sought to impose and was aware of the sharp public controversy over the role designated for women. If Una's mock-masculinity expressed resistance to conventional womanhood, so also did the belligerence that Sophia found in her baby daughter, Rose. "She has scolded a great deal lately. I do not know what I shall do about it. She has an idea of woman's rights, I believe, & means to stand up for them in her own person." Sophia hastened to add that Rose also showed signs of feminine solicitude; she "has been very sweet too, going to kiss Julian when he cried, & trying to comfort him & displaying a thousand charming little ways" (5 September).

The domestic sphere Nathaniel left behind as he traveled to Bowdoin and the Isle of Shoals was teeming with covert sexual politics; it was alive with inward debates about the axioms of its own constitution. Gender conflict was also at work in Nathaniel's public endeavors, of which this journey was a triumphal celebration.

In the quarter century since his graduation from Bowdoin Hawthorne had pursued two careers—civil servant and writer—and in both had now attained remarkable success. The story of his literary triumph is famous: justthree years before, he had been ejected from his post at the Salem Custom House and in the midst of severe financial straits had returned to writing. In seven months he produced The Scarlet Letter; as that work was winning international acclaim, he wrote The House of the Seven Gables and a book of children's stories entitled A Wonder Book . To take advantage of the status his publisher James T. Fields was laboring hard to secure for him, that of a "classic" American writer, Hawthorne then re-issued Twice-Told Tales, made a new collection of tales that was published as The Snow Image, and wrote The Blithedale Romance .3

Hawthorne had hardly moved into the Wayside when Franklin Pierce—his close friend and Bowdoin classmate—asked for a biography to aid him in running for the presidency of the United States. The Life of Franklin Pierce was printed soon after Hawthorne and Pierce met at the Bowdoin reunion. Pierce, once elected, rewarded Hawthorne with the consulship at Liverpool, the most lucrative office he controlled.

Hawthorne's two careers embraced a chronic interior tension. He had complained in boyhood, when his job at his uncle's office annoyed him, that "No Man can be a Poet & a Book-Keeper at the same time" (CE 15:132). But he likewise complained about the years of unobstructed artistic effort that produced Twice-Told Tales, because they seemed a departure from normal manliness. In his first civil service job, at the Boston Custom House, he took satisfaction in exercising qualities of manhood that his poetic endeavors had left idle. He described for Sophia his newly acquired "worldly wisdom" and the "stronger sense I have of power to act as a man among men (CE 15:429). By the age of forty-eight he had demonstrated that in nineteenth-century America (as earlier in England for Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Marvell, Swift, and Fielding) a man could discharge worldly responsibilities and exercise political authority and also become a writer of momentous imaginative power. Yet Hawthorne was persistently troubled by a sharp incongruity between these occupations. His poetic identity—centered on cultivating emotional sensitivities in seclusion from the world—was feminine. As a civil servant, he was a man among men.

The crowning success of both Hawthorne's careers released ambivalences that had been contained during the years of struggle, and as he looked around at the funny old men who were his classmates, the confidence born of his achievements threatened to seep away.

In writing The Blithedale Romance Hawthorne sought an ideological solution to gender conflicts that plagued him afresh during this season of triumphant consolidation and new misgiving. He explored alternative views of"Nature" in the effort to grasp the essence of masculine and feminine identity, trying to locate a philosophical and religious Truth that could bring his own life into focus. Hawthorne's yearning for such an authority is evoked in a brief tableau that interrupts the inconclusive ponderings of Blithedale . It portrays a father's return home like the one his own children had imagined on the day of his departure for Bowdoin.

After a summer in a reformist commune, Hawthorne's narrator Miles Coverdale returns to "conventional" life, taking an apartment in the city from which he gazes across the alley at the back windows of a fashionable boarding house:

Two children, prettily dressed, were looking out. By-and-by, a middle-aged gentleman came softly behind them, kissed the little girl, and playfully pulled the little boy's ear. It was a papa, no doubt, just come in from his counting-room or office; and anon appeared mamma, stealing as softly behind papa, as he had stolen behind the children, and laying her hand on his shoulder to surprise him. Then followed a kiss between papa and mamma, but a noiseless one; for the children did not turn their heads.

(CE 3:150–151)

Like a father's departure from home, this is a key ceremonial moment of nineteenth-century American domesticity, when a man crosses the threshold that separates his domain of manly striving from woman's sphere. The children he greets so gently have been "prettily dressed" for the occasion, yet they inhabit an atmosphere not of formal constraint but of deeply ingrained mutual affection. They continue to look out the window as "mamma" appears to receive her delicate kiss. Mamma steals up on papa, just as he had stolen up on the children; the absence of surprise in their encounter implies that these figures have been spiritually present and attuned to one another even when apart. The "noiseless" kiss asserts that a spiritual logic—not physical desire—holds husband and wife together and connects them with their progeny.

"I bless God for these good folks!" Coverdale declares. "I have not seen a prettier piece of nature, in all my summer in the country, than they have shown me here in a rather stylish boarding-house" (CE 3:151).

Coverdale is susceptible to the "nature" symbolized by this moment because his experiences at Blithedale had stirred up severe ideological consternations. He fled to the city, he tells us, because "it was impossible, situated as we were, not to imbibe the idea that everything in nature and human existence was fluid, or fast becoming so; that the crust of the Earth, in many places, was broken, and its whole surface portentously upheaving; that it was a day of crisis, and we ourselves were in the critical vortex" (140).

These images of impermanence, chaotic violence, and directionless motion suggest a "nature" in which no moral order can be grounded, a nightmare that Coverdale dispels as he observes the family in the window. Not merely a reminder of conventional life, the little drama of papa's return is the emblem of a religious reality strong enough to rescue order from the threat of chaos.

The domestic ideal does not resolve the thematic conflicts that Hawthorne elaborates in Blithedale, nor does it describe life in the Hawthorne household. If Hawthorne on returning from Bowdoin should "hear only lovely tones & see only pleasant faces"—his children realized—he would imagine that he was not in this world at all, but in heaven, and "not with us but with some other children" (30 August). Sophia's vision of spiritual felicity and the parable that Hawthorne interpolated into his romance express an ideology that claimed to measure quotidian family life against an eternal order of Truth. Yet this system of ideas generated characteristic dilemmas; it produced confusions as well as resolving them, and a "day of crisis descended when these endemic conflicts became acute. In this respect The Blithedale Romance and the Hawthorne household resemble and cast light on each other: both are wrenched in the critical vortex.

With The Blithedale Romance Hawthorne began to write fiction based explicitly on his personal experience. He had commented on his daily life in the introductions to Mosses from an Old Manse and The Scarlet Letter, but now his months at Brook Farm provide the setting of his tale, much as the family's stay in Italy is worked into The Marble Faun . This emerging biographical focus also appears in the narrative design of Blithedale: unique in Hawthorne's writing, the narrator is himself a writer, Miles Coverdale.

Coverdale tells us that Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla—the three other leading characters—"were separated from the rest of the Community, to my imagination, and stood forth as the indices of a problem which it was my business to solve" (CE 3:69). All four figures embody issues that Hawthorne recurrently sought to puzzle out. Coverdale's pained and retiring temperament is like Arthur Dimmesdale's and like Clifford's in The House of the Seven Gables; Hollingsworth is the typical polar opposite, resembling the blunt and forceful blacksmith who matches the supersensitive watchmaker in "The Artist of the Beautiful." Passive and aggressive males are paired in Blithedale (Coverdale/Hollingsworth), The House of the Seven Gables (Clifford/Judge Pyncheon), and the manuscripts Hawthorne left unfinished at the end of his life (Septimius Felton/Robert Hagburn).

The women in Blithedale are also native to Hawthorne's abiding perplexities. Zenobia is manifestly analogous to Hester Prynne and also to Hepzibah Pyncheon: all three have an air of aristocratic pride and are defiantly at odds with the world around them. The pairing of Zenobia with her docile half-sister, Priscilla, recapitulates a relation Hawthorne had developed in an early tale, "The White Old Maid," and pursued through Hilda and Miriam in The Marble Faun .4

The indices of Hawthorne's problem form a pattern in which male and female serve as defining opposites; and the axis of gender, so established, crosses an axis of power. Considered as a system of coordinates, the four figures define a world of sexual politics in which Hawthorne's imagination recurrently seeks its way. The question that now emerges is ideological; he asks whether the map of his abiding obsessions truthfully represents the contours of reality.

Hawthorne takes up a complex debate about the "natural" essence of gender that Sophia had invoked when she said that Rose—aged fifteen months—had an "idea of woman's rights" yet was also tenderly solicitous toward her brother.

The nineteenth-century claim to equal rights for women was grounded in the principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that such rights are created in human beings by nature's God. In drawing up the "Declaration of Sentiments" for the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton echoed this document to hammer the principle home: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal" (Kraditor, 184). A conflicting tradition asserted that women are defined by the care they provide for others. In ascribing both forcefulness and solicitude to her infant daughter, Sophia suggests the appealing possibility that both these capacities are natural, so that a woman might care for a husband and children and exercise equal rights as a citizen. Yet Sophia did not believe, nor did Nathaniel, that nature had provided such an arrangement: the Hawthornes embraced a tradition that set the nurturing qualities of women at odds with the claim to political equality.

Women of the Revolutionary era were quick to observe that the egalitarian attack on monarchy and hereditary social privilege invoked natural rights that challenged the agelong subordination of women, and men were equally alert to ways in which democratic doctrine could justify male dominance. As natural equality became a sacred principle in America, the pressure toreconsider the place of women in the commonwealth grew ever stronger, and women found a language of moral authority in which to frame their discontents. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman sounded familiar to Americans when it appeared in 1792 because it followed themes that had long been discussed informally.

This Enlightenment controversy was absorbed into the ideal of domesticity that arose in later decades, so that its key issues were still very much alive for the Hawthornes. Wollstonecraft's antagonist was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who sought to justify the subordination of women by appealing to an equality of "natural" differences.

Rousseau focuses on differences in the way men and women pursue sexual satisfaction, from which "arises the first determinate difference between the moral relations of each. The one should be active and strong, the other passive and weak: it is necessary the one should have both the power and the will, and that the other should make little resistance" (Osborne, 108). Rousseau shies away from asserting that the relative muscular strength of males justifies domination and surrounds his declarations about sexuality with an elaborate discussion meant to deny such a claim. Rousseau likewise presents military force as a precondition of rule but not a title to it.5

Rousseau is fastidious on this point for good reason: to hold that male dominance is legitimate because nature awards physical strength to men is tantamount to claiming that might makes right—mere despotic power. Despite Rousseau's defensive maneuvers, Wollstonecraft grasped the central issue. She linked together his remarks about sexuality and male power in a famous accusation: "Tyrants and sensualists are in the right, when they endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former only want slaves, and the latter a play-thing" (Wollstonecraft, 24).

Rousseauist attempts to justify male dominance by invoking biology were virtually guaranteed to backfire. Priscilla Mason seized the initiative in her valedictory oration at the Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia in 1793, invoking male muscle to mount a forceful attack: "Being the stronger party . . . [men] seized the sceptre and the sword; with these they gave laws to society. . . . They doom'd the [female] sex to servile or frivolous employments, on purpose to degrade their minds. . . . The Church, the Bar, and the Senate are shut against us. Who shut them? Man; despotic man, first made us incapable of the duty, and then forbid us the exercise" (Lerner, 214).

If men usurp women's rightful power, Mason recognized, then the mental and psychological weaknesses of women are deformities produced by oppression, not innate properties revealing Nature's law. Elizabeth Cady Stanton reaffirmed this charge at mid-century, noting that male dominance worked "to destroy [woman's] confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life" (Kraditor 186).

Hawthorne was intimately familiar with this array of feminist arguments, and flatly rejected the lot. Despite his ambivalent and androgynous sense of self and the sympathy he extends toward strong women in his works, he never retracted his early condemnation of "a false liberality, which mistakes the strong division-lines of Nature for mere arbitrary distinctions." The woman who feels compelled to seek a career at odds with her "natural" destiny must do so, he argued, "with sorrowing reluctance" because she is "relinquishing part of the loveliness of her sex" ("Mrs. Hutchinson," 168–169).

Hawthorne's mournful spectacle of a woman's forsaking her womanly nature conforms to a well-established feature of male resistance to feminism. Rather than exalting the exercise of muscular force, advocates of masculine privilege scorned distortions of natural womanhood. "Women of masculine minds," John Gardiner wrote in 1801, "have generally masculine manners, nowhere more dismayingly visible than in women who seek political power or in earlier ages actually possessed it. Queen Elizabeth "swore with the fluency of a sailor," Gardiner declared, "and boxed the ears of her courtiers." Womanly aggression was pictured as a misplaced manly trait, and quickly included sexual aggression. Timothy Dwight condemned Mary Wollstonecraft not only as a "hoyden" and a "non descript"—both terms suggesting a sexually anomalous makeup—but also as a "strumpet" (Kerber, 279–283).

This pattern of ideological combat, featuring reciprocal accusations of male despotism and female monstrosity, shapes a major debate in Blithedale . Zenobia condemns "the injustice which the world did to women . . . by not allowing them . . . their natural utterance in public," whereupon Hollingsworth replies that women who make such protests are "petticoated monstrosities" and threatens to "call upon my own sex to use its physical force, that unmistakeable evidence of sovereignty, to scourge them back within their proper bounds!" Coverdale accuses Hollingsworth of the male's reliance on violence, revealing "what he, and millions of despots like him, really felt." Priscilla, docile and timid, is alarmed by this quarrel. Unable to think for herself, she turns to Hollingsworth for guidance, whereupon Zenobia scoffs at her as "the type of womanhood, such as man has spent centuries in making it' " (CE 3:120, 122–123).

So is repeated the rhetorical scheme that asserts women's natural rightsagainst male tyranny. The debate, however, does not resolve itself here; an enlarged and strengthened doctrine of male dominance is also at work. Hollingsworth declares that although men possess superior physical force, they need not use it to subdue women, since "the heart of true womanhood knows where its own sphere is, and never seeks to stray beyond it" (123).

Hawthorne dramatizes this claim by supplying Zenobia with just such a heart: instead of being outraged by Hollingsworth's assertion of masculine pre-eminence, she is "humbled" by it. Her angry defiance dissolves into weeping over her plight, now redefined as a deprivation of womanly fulfillment, not of natural rights. Zenobia's problem is that true womanhood can be realized only in subordination to true manhood, and a true man is hard to find. "Let man be but manly and godlike," she brokenly confesses to Hollingsworth, "and woman is only too ready to become to him what you say!" (CE 3:123–124). Zenobia's impulses are an adult version of those Sophia noted in baby Rose: equipped to speak up boldly for women's rights, she also has a loving heart. Yet these qualities are now put at odds: each capacity disqualifies her from exercising the other.

The feminist argument goes down to self-defeat in keeping with an ideological scheme that remains to be examined, the ideal of "true womanhood" that became dominant in the 1830s and 1840s and transformed the debate concerning equal rights that had emerged in the Revolutionary period.

The emerging domestic ideal offered two rhetorical strategies in defense of male dominance: it enlarged on the "nature" women stood to lose if they demanded economic and political power; and it denied that masculine control of the public arena made women into playthings and slaves. As wives and mothers, women were said to possess a redemptive homemaking spirituality that transcends the scramble for worldly advantage and provides them a fulfillment that obviates political discontent.6 Zenobia's tearful submission doubly vindicates this ideological maneuver: she not only agrees that "true womanhood" can be realized only through marriage to a masterful man but also falls in love with Hollingsworth. Ceasing to seek fulfillment as a public figure, she sets her heart on marrying him.

Sophia Hawthorne explained how "true womanhood" cancels feminist protest in her response to Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century . "If [Margaret] were married truly," Sophia wrote her mother, "she would no longer be puzzled about the rights of woman. . . . In perfect, high union there is no question of supremacy. Souls are equal in love and intelligent communion, and all things take their proper places as inevitably as the starstheir orbits. Had there never been false and profane marriages, there would not only be no commotion about woman's rights, but it would be Heaven here at once" (NHW 1:257).

When Blithedale was published, Zenobia's resemblance to Margaret Fuller was instantly apparent.7 Sophia and then Nathaniel had come to know Margaret in Boston before Nathaniel's stay at Brook Farm. She was closely associated with the reformers who sponsored the communal experiment and paid several visits there when Nathaniel was in residence. Zenobia's intention to speak out for women's liberty corresponds not only to Woman in the Nineteenth Century but also to the "Conversations" Margaret held for women in Boston, which Sophia attended. Zenobia's death by drowning in Blithedale alludes to Margaret's death in 1850 amid the wreckage of the ship bringing her home to America from Italy with her son and Angelo Ossoli, who had been first her lover in Italy and then her husband.8

When the Hawthornes married, they enjoyed a close friendship with Fuller, who twice visited them at the Old Manse in Concord, noting in her journals the long and searching conversations they carried on together. During the second visit, in the late summer of 1844, she was revising Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which appeared the following year. Margaret suffered violent headaches in this effort, and Sophia found a moving response to her friend's inward strife. "Sophia told me a truth for which I thank her," Margaret wrote in her journal: "Each Orpheus must to the depths descend."9 Sophia and Margaret were following divergent paths toward a shared ambition, that of living out their womanly natures to the full. Sophia too had disabling headaches and believed that her spiritual mission as wife and mother required descents into the depths that gave her views an orphic authority as strong as Margaret's.

When Woman in the Nineteenth Century appeared, Sophia found herself in disagreement not only with Margaret but also with her own mother. Sophia voices the emerging domestic vision of womanly self-realization; Mrs. Peabody invokes the egalitarian rhetoric of the Revolutionary period and echoes Wollstonecraft's protest against male tyranny. "I could have written on the very same subjects," Peabody declared, "and set forth as strongly what rights yet belonged to woman which were not granted her. . . . [Man] has the physical power, as well as conventional, to treat her like a plaything or a slave" (NHW 1:258).

Peabody believed that "a consistent Christian woman will be exactly what Margaret would have woman to be; and a consistently religious man would readily award to her every rightful advantage"; but she did not anticipate an early correction of the injustices women suffer. Man will maintain his despotism, Peabody declared, "till his own soul is elevated to the standard set up by Him who spake as never man spoke." Peabody hopes Fuller's book "may do good" but remains doubtful because it makes scant reference to Christian teaching and in fact bears "the look of absolute irreligion" (NHW 1:258).

For Peabody, Christian faith provides the ultimate rationale for women's rights and is the only engine of social change capable of securing those rights. She locates this promised equality far in the future but emphatically declares that the elevation of masculine souls, once achieved, will remove all the barriers to equality for women against which Fuller protests.

Sophia claims, by contrast, that redemption takes place in the present, through a womanly nature attuned to private rather than public activities. Even before she was married, Sophia believed "that each woman could make her own sphere quietly," observing that "it was always a shock to me to have women mount the rostrum." Sophia does not see the home as a prison, but as "the great arena for women" where wives and mothers "can wield a power which no king or conqueror can cope with." Far from perpetuating degraded subservience, women who exercise this spiritual power set an example of moral pre-eminence. "I do not believe any man who ever knew one noble woman would ever speak as if she were an inferior in any sense: it is the fault of ignoble women that there is any such opinion in the world" (NHW 1:257).

This disagreement between mother and daughter illustrates the ideological translation of Enlightenment doctrines of gender equality into the gender complementarity of the domestic ideal in the early nineteenth century. Male force, symbolized by muscular bodies, remains a component of the domestic vision. "The greater physical strength of man," Thomas Dew explained, suits him for "the turmoil and bustle of an active, selfish world," where "he has to encounter innumerable difficulties, hardships and labors." Women must remain within the domestic sphere, "but out of that very weakness and dependance [sic ] springs an irresistible power." Woman's power "is more emblematical of that of divinity," Dew observes: "it subdues without an effort" (Kraditor, 45–46). What Elizabeth Peabody had envisioned as a social apocalypse—when morally elevated men will voluntarily yield political rights to women—now describes the anatomy of a current social arrangement, in which the "kings and conquerors" of worldly strife are subdued by the godlike power of a noble woman.

Sophia may be accused of betraying the interests of women by espousing a doctrine that sprinkles holy water on patriarchal domination; and her remark that "ignoble women" have created the belief in women's inferiority leaps off the page as an instance of blaming the victim. Yet the womanly power enshrined by the domestic ideal had substance; it was grounded in an evangelical Christian vision of moral reality with notable consequences in nineteenth-century America.

The social power of Uncle Tom's Cabin, for example, was derived from its dramatization of the spiritual transformation brought about by women (as well as blacks and children) who lack means of physical or economic coercion and wield only suffering love.10 Scenarios of triumphant victimization, long despised as sentimental trash, take on renewed energy when seen as invoking the religious warrant of domesticity. Evangelical Christianity promoted the story of "salvation through motherly love," a version of the Gospel story at whose center is the crucified Christ.

The evangelical experience of "conversion" restructured personal experience along the line of demarcation that Sophia's language invokes, separating a world of coercive public forces from the sacred privacy in which the sinful heart is transformed.11 The domestic ideology installed this moral interaction at the heart of relations between men and women and in that respect incorporated a protest against male power into the definition of womanly subservience. The power of women lay in their appeal to the conscience of men, presumed to be a guilty conscience.

"If Christianity should be compelled to flee from . . . the throng of busy men," declared Joseph Stephens Buckminster, "we should find her last and purest retreat with woman at the fireside; her last altar would be the female heart." As Nancy Cott observed, Buckminster's pronouns identify Christianity itself as feminine, exiled from the sordid male world (Cott, Bonds, 129–130). In Blithedale Hawthorne presses this conception to its logical end; Coverdale affirms that the "ministry of souls" should be entirely given over to women. "God meant it for her. He has endowed her with the religious sentiment in its utmost depth and purity, refined from that gross, intellectual alloy, with which every masculine theologist . . . has been prone to mingle it." God's love can "stream upon the worshipper" without interference, Coverdale exclaims, "through the medium of a woman's tenderness" (CE 3:121–122).

Hollingsworth agrees that men are obliged to seek the reassurance of women because of generically masculine moral inadequacies. Unable to sustain a belief in his own virtue, a man requires the support of a "Sympathizer," an "unreserved, unquestioning Believer," lest he "should utterly losefaith in himself." Only through the pity of a woman's heart can a man receive "the Echo of God's own voice, pronouncing—'It is well done!'" (CE 3:122).

Middle-class mothers employed the power of suffering love in their rearing of children. Exponents of the rising domestic culture repudiated corporal punishment and sought to instill just such a guilty conscience as Hollingsworth describes, in which a woman's voice has become the voice of God. If a mother has secured "pre-eminence in the sanctuary of his mind," Lydia Sigourney declared, "her image will be as a tutelary seraph, not seeming to bear rule, yet spreading perpetually the wings of purity and peace over its beloved shrine, and keeping guard for God" (128)12 Sophia Hawthorne had no ethical qualms about the emotional manipulation of this strategy; on the contrary, her conception of moral reality required it:

Julian cried hard to go out at noon when it was red hot & I could not quiet him, till at last I said—"Here is a little boy who I believe pretends he loves his mother—" He interrupted me with "I don't pretend." —"Well I think you do not & yet what love is this that gives his mother so much pain instead of happiness?—Because his mother will not let him get sick, if she can help it, he cries & complains so as to hurt her very much, especially as today she is not well. If I did not love you, I would say—'Go & play in the hot sun as much as you like—it is nothing to me.'" He stopped & was perfectly still & when I saw his face again, a smile was struggling out of his beautiful eyes.—I never saw a sweeter effort to prove real love and it lasted all the rest of the day.

(1 September)

Sophia explains to her six-year-old son that it would be easier for her to let him go out and play but that for his sake she must refuse. The emotional dishonesty that requires correction, Sophia believes, is Julian's claim to love his mother while trying to punish her for her conscientious stand. The reality of love is demonstrated by the struggle to attain selflessness; and Sophia hoped to install such altruism in Julian's personality so it would work automatically.

Sophia did not believe that Nathaniel needed lessons in real love. She looked on him with reverent awe, as the creator of works of art embodying divine power. She describes reading "The Chimaera" to Julian: "Was ever any thing so divine as that story? Julian was powerfully affected. He had not heard it for a long time & he was thrilled & stirred by every sentence. . . . The color mounted up to his curls & his eyes softened & were suffused. . . . As for me, I could scarcely read, I was so moved" (12 September).

Sophia did not subscribe to any of the avowedly Christian versions ofromantic religion, believing instead that ultimate reality is conveyed through poetic imagination, supremely in men of genius.13 Instead of invoking a religious standard that might be held over Nathaniel's head, she approaches him in the role of an "unreserved, unquestioning Believer."

In The Blithedale Romance Hawthorne portrays a comparable transformation of evangelical doctrine in the marital relationship between Priscilla and Hollingsworth. Priscilla's entire existence, we learn, is organized around the principle that Hollingsworth is morally faultless; in submitting herself to him with ardent and unquestioning devotion, she gains spiritual power. The key to Priscilla's power, however, is not her divine willingness to sacrifice herself but the blasphemous fury of Zenobia.

In the thematic structure of the Hawthornes' marriage, as of The Blithedale Romance, the romantic ontology of domestic relations has been recast in a form revealing the subversive tensions within it. The complementary "natures" of womanhood and manhood—selfless spirituality redeeming the exercise of worldly power—lose their authority in Blithedale as representations of a divine order, and the moral structure of the marital relation is correspondingly dislocated. The agent of this derangement is Zenobia's feminism, which asserts the "absolute irreligion" that Sophia's mother found in Margaret Fuller's book. Zenobia defies the authority of God Himself, as embodied in the loving relationship between a man who demands submission and a woman who gladly offers it.

Continues...

Excerpted from Dearest Belovedby Herbert, T. Walter, JR Copyright © 1995 by Herbert, T. Walter, JR. Excerpted by permission.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: University of California Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 1995
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0520201558
• ISBN 13: 9780520201552
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 356
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile