Nathaniel Hawthorne
From Philosopedia
Hawthorne, Nathaniel (4 July 1804 -- 19 May 1864)
One of the greatest of American authors, Hawthorne (whose sea captain father spelled his name Hathorne) came from a prominent Puritan family, his mother being a widow with solitary ways and a gloomy outlook.
His Twice-Told Tales (1837) won him some recognition, but he found it necessary to work in a Boston customhouse in order to make a living. For a time he lived at Brook Farm, the transcendentalists’ experiment in utopianism, but found the communal life not to his taste. Blithedale Romance (1852) is based on his experience at the farm.
He married Sophia Peabody, a friend and follower of Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, taking a job as surveyor of the port of Salem (1846—1849), where he began writing his masterpiece: The Scarlet Letter (1850), the first U.S. psychological novel. Salem has never quite recovered from its record of having hanged nineteen in the 1690s, also crushing one to death. Although not one of the alleged witches was burned, some writers mistakenly have stated that they were. The Salem that Hawthorne exposed had a fictional villain, the Puritan minister Arthur Dimmesdale, and a heroine, Hester Prynne, the adulteress required to wear a scarlet “A” but who triumphed over her “sin” because she confessed it openly whereas the minister had not. What Hawthorne excelled in was showing that era’s sex hatred, its repression, its prurience, its relentless pressure to deny reality, its using a child as a pawn in adult power struggles. It has been said that The Scarlet Letter dates the decline of Puritan importance in the U.S., that it speeded the time when a Playboy or a Playgirl could be published, inasmuch as it depicted the effects adultery had on a girl in colonial America.
While living at Lennox, Massachusetts, Hawthorne befriended his neighbor, Herman Melville, becoming his closest emotional attraction, to Mrs. Hawthorne’s dismay. Melville’s elegy, “Monody,” after Hawthorne’s death included the following:
- To have known him, to have loved him After loneness long; And then to be estranged in life; And neither in the wrong; And now for death to set his seal - Ease me, a little ease, my song!
Mrs. Hawthorne was reportedly pleased when Franklin Pierce, her husband’s college friend and now President, appointed him consul at Liverpool (1853—1857), rejoicing that they now would be living a convenient distance from Melville. (In letters discovered in 1983 in a barn in Gansevoort, New York, Ms. Robertson-Lorant noted Mrs. Hawthorne’s description of her husband, “He hates to be touched more than anyone I ever knew.”)
In 1864, while on a trip to the White Mountains with Pierce, Hawthorne suddenly died in Pierce’s arms (which some wags have said was the inspiration for Melville’s “Monody”; Gore Vidal implies it may not have been the first time Hawthorne had been in that proximity).
Recent biographers continue to mention Melville’s opinion, confirmed by Hawthorne’s son Julian, that he was convinced “Hawthorne had all his life concealed some great secret, which would, were it known, explain all the mysteries of his career.” Biographer Philip Young claims that the secret was incest between Hawthorne and his sister Elizabeth. Another theory, mentioned by John Updike (The New Yorker, 28 Sep 1992), is that Hawthorne, a young man whose “androgynous beauty” often excited admiration, “was sexually molested by his uncle Robert Manning, with whom he shared, for a time, a bed in the overflowing Manning household.” Eighteen years later, Hawthorne declined to attend Manning’s funeral, and the villainous Judge Pyncheon in his House of the Seven Gables was a horticulturist, Manning’s occupation.
Whatever the secret, if indeed he had one, Hawthorne’s tales of human loneliness, frustration, hypocrisy, eccentricity, and frailty made him a celebrated writer who remains a model for contemporaries. A work such as The Scarlet Letter, Updike notes, is of the quality of a classic and can be expected “to hold its secrets in living solution and to be, like life itself, ultimately indecipherable.”
J. M. Robertson admired Hawthorne’s lack of faith, “whatever his psychological sympathy with the Puritan past, wrought inevitably by his art for the loosening of its intellectual hold.”
His son Julian in Hawthorne and His Circle tells that when his father was in Liverpool he had a pew at the Unitarian Chapel there, that he used to send Julian to fill it, never going himself. Julian says he “never learned to repeat a creed, far less to comprehend its significance,” to which some Unitarians showed amazement, saying Unitarianism is creedless. Hawthorne had been married in a Unitarian church, and his funeral was held in a Unitarian church.
Hawthorne's wife, Sophia Peabody (1809 - 1871), was a Salem-born illustrator, painter, and writer. A Unitarian and the sister of Elizabeth Parker Peabody, Mrs. Hawthorne gave birth to their three children: Una, Julian, and Rose.
Upon her husband's death, she moved with the children to England and died there six years later of typhoid pneumonia. She and daughter Una were buried at Kensal Green cemetery in London, but in 2006 the two were returned to Concord and interred alongside the author in the family plot.
Hearse Carrying Mrs. Hawthorne and Una to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, 26 June 2006
{CE; CL; FUS; JM; JMR; RAT; RE; U; UU}
