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Two Rodericks and Two Worms: “Egotism; or, the Bosom Serpent” as Personal Satire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Alfred H. Marks
Alfred H. Marks*
Affiliation:
Ball State Teachers College, Muncie, Ind
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Extract

There are a number of passages in Hawthorne's “Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent” which seem to allude to Edgar Allan Poe or his writings. The passages are, in fact, so numerous as to indicate that one of Hawthorne's principal reasons for writing the tale when he did was to criticize through personal satire Poe's outlook on literature and life. In this connection it may be rewarding to take another look at this most repulsive of Hawthorne's tales.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 74 , Issue 5 , December 1959 , pp. 607 - 612
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1959

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References

1 Ladies' Companion, Oct. 1842.

2 The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York, 1902), x, 80, hereafter cited as Works.

3 For dating, cf. Elizabeth Lathrop Chandler, A Study of the Tales and Romances written by Nathaniel Hawthorne before 1853. Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, vn, iv, 61.

4 See Harold P. Miller, “Hawthorne Surveys His Contemporaries,” AL, xn (May, 1940), 228–235, and R. E. Streeter, “Hawthorne's Misfit Politician and Edward Everett,” AL, XVI (Mar., 1944), 26–28.

5 Salem, June 17, 1846. In George Woodberry, The Life of Edgar Allan Poe (Boston, 1909), ii, 212.

6 The American Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Randall Stewart (New Haven, 1932), p. 93.

7 Graham's Magazine, xx (April, 1842), 254 (Works, xi, 115).

8 Chandler has him writing “Egotism” in this month.

9 At one point in the story Hawthorne writes: “A man of impure life, and a brazen face, asking Roderick if there were any serpent in his breast, he told him that there was, and of the same species that once tortured Don Rodrigo, the Goth.” Undoubtedly the legend of Don Rodrigo, treated earlier in the 19th century by Southey, Scott, Landor, and Irving, was in Hawthorne's mind as he wrote “Egotism.” Rodrigo was tortured by guilt because of his rape of a woman named Florinda (cf. Rosina), A “ording to one legend—not used by Southey or the others—he spent his last hours in the company of several serpents. Rodrigo's last words, as translated by John Gibson Lockhart (Ancient Spanish Ballads, London & New York, Frederick Warne & Co., n.d. [printed from the ed. of 1823], p. 23) begin, ”He eats me now, he eats me now, I feel the adder's bite.“ Lockhart refers, however, to the words in Don Quixote that quote Rodrigo as saying, ”Now they eat me, now they gnaw me, in the part where I sinned most“ (p. 20). The edition of Don Quixote translated by Charles Jar vis and printed in London in 1839 comes even closer to the words of Hawthorne's Roderick: ”Now they gnaw me, now they gnaw me in the part by which I sinned most“ (p. 131). See Ramon Menéndez Pidal, Rodrigo el ultimo godo (Madrid, 1944), ii, 12–20, for several Spanish texts of this poem.

10 Whether Rufus Griswold was at this time spreading calumnies about Poe it is difficult to determine. Certainly some words he used in the “Ludwig” memoir he wrote a few days after Poe's death are very close to the words of Hawthorne in “Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent.” At one point he said of Poe, “You could not speak of wealth, but his cheek paled with gnawing envy.” At another place he showed Poe in actions much like those of Roderick Elliston: “He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayers … or with his glance introverted to a heart gnawed with anguish, and with a face shrouded in gloom, he would brave the wildest storms; and all night, with drenched garments and arms wildly beating the wind and rain, he would speak as if to spirits that at such times only could be evoked by him from that Aidenn close by whose portals his disturbed soul sought to forget the ills to which his constitution subjected him .. . ” (Works, I, 355–357).

11 Doctor Grimshawe's Secret, ed. Edward H. Davidson (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), p. 105.

12 The American Notebooks, pp. 173, 318, n. 401.

13 James Russell Lowell, whom Poe used as an intermediary in reaching Hawthorne at the very time “Egotism” was published, wrote in 1845 his opinion that in the Channing review Poe ignored many of Channing's merits in order to strike a blow for “one or two pet prejudices on which he prides himself” (Works, i, 369).