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Hawthorne's Fair-Haired Maidens: The Fading Light

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Virginia Ogden Birdsall
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Extract

Probably no reader of Hawthorne's four major novels can have failed to notice the similarities which exist among certain of the participating heroines. It would seem that if a lady had handled her first assignment well, Hawthorne could nearly always manage to find a place for her in his next production. Hence, not only did Hester of The Scarlet Letter turn up again as Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance and as Miriam in The Marble Faun, but, even more obviously, Phoebe of The House of the Seven Gables later found parts as Priscilla in Blithedale and Hilda in The Marble Faun.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 75 , Issue 3 , June 1960 , pp. 250 - 256
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960

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References

1 See Frederic I. Carpenter, “Puritans Preferred Blondes,” NEQ, IX (June 1936), 253–272, and Philip Rahv, “The Dark Lady of Salem,” PR, viii (September–October 1941), 362–381. Rahv calls Hawthorne's blondes “the sexually anes thetic females to whom he officially paid homage” and his dark woman “a dream-image of sexual bliss” (p. 369).

2 The Novels and Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Nor man Holmes Pearson (New York, 1937), p. 343. References to this volume will hereafter be indicated by parentheses in the text.

3 Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Village Uncle,” Twice-Told Tales II (Boston and New York, 1900), pp. 109, 110.

4 Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Sketches from Memory,” Mosses from an Old Manse (Boston, 1883), p. 490. Since this descrip tion, in context, is included as part of a satirical comment on English travellers in America, it reflects a point of view with which Hawthorne probably did not agree. The fact remains, however, that such ideas were present in his mind.

5 For a convincing statement of this somewhat controver sial position, see Darrel Abel, “A Masque of Love and Death,” UTQ, xxiii (October 1953), 9–25. “Through their association with Miriam, all the other characters enact their roles. That is, we see what happens when worldly experience enters the lives of nature and instinct, of egotism and the con viction of sin, of innocence and Puritan orthodoxy and of art” (p. 21).

6 Philip Rahv suggests that the relationship between Coverdale and Zenobia is “intrinsically the relationship be tween New England and the world” (“The Dark Lady of Salem,” p. 378).

7 Morton Cronin, “Hawthorne on Romantic Love and the Status of Women,” PMLA, LXIX (March 1954), 97.

8 Carpenter, “Puritans Preferred Blondes,” p. 262.

9 Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Up the Thames,” Our Old Home (Boston and New York, 1900), p. 370 n.

10 “The happy man,” says Holgrave to Phoebe, “inevitably confines himself within ancient limits. I have a presentiment that, hereafter, it will be my lot to set out trees, to make fences,—perhaps, even, in due time, to build a house for another generation,—in a word, to conform myself to laws, and the peaceful practice of society. Your poise will be more powerful than any oscillating tendency of mine” (p. 428).

11 Quoted in F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1951), p. 255.

12 At the end of Blithedale, Coverdale speaks of his love for Priscilla as “one foolish little secret, which possibly may have had something to do with these inactive years of me ridian manhood, with my bachelorship, with the unsatisfied retrospect that I fling back on life” (p. 585).

13 As Carlos Kling points out in his article on “Hawthorne's View of Sin” (Personalist, XIII [April 1932], 119–130), “Purity and innocence in Hilda and Kenyon are shown to be hard and rigid and unforgiving; and virtue should be warm and human and bending, not a marble whiteness” (p. 128).

14 Whether intentionally or not, Hawthorne seems here to suggest that Hilda was guilty of much the same thing as the Puritans in The Scarlet Letter. Guided by a rigid moral code, she has forced a human being to live outside the circle of humanity.

15 Hawthorne, “English Poverty,” Our Old Home, p. 440.

16 Hawthorne, says Morton Cronin (“Hawthorne on Ro mantic Love,” pp. 95, 96), would “extend woman's historic role as the spiritual fortifier of man to include the professional ministry of souls.”

17 Hawthorne, “A Virtuoso's Collection,” Mosses from an Old Manse, p. 541.

18 In Hawthorne's “The Hall of Fantasy” (Mosses from an Old Manse, p. 204), sunshine is specifically referred to as a medium: “ ‘the fantasies of one day are the deepest realities of a future one.’… ‘The white sunshine of actual life is necessary in order to test them. I am rather apt to doubt both men and their reasonings till I meet them in that truth ful medium’.”

19 In his American Notebooks, Hawthorne speaks of love, “the divine, the life-giving touch,” as having made him “A man with the right perception of things—a feeling within him of what is true and what is false.” The American Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Randall Stewart (New Haven, 1932), pp. 89, 90.

20 It does not seem mere coincidence that Hilda is later described as having acquired “a deeper look into the heart of things; such as those necessarily acquire who have passed from picture galleries into dungeon gloom and thence come back to the picture gallery again” (p. 806).

21 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Dolliver Romance, Fanshawe, and Septimius Felton (Boston, 1883), pp. 400, 401.

22 Ibid., p. 382.