Some Observations About Hawthorne's Women

Some Observations about Hawthorne's Women

by Barbara Ellis

At the start of the 19th century, Sir Walter Scott, the best-selling author of the historical potboiler (114,000 books sold in France alone during his lifetime1) may have changed the role of women characters forever in this country when he created Jeanie Deans. This heroine of his vastly successful The Heart of Midlothian (1818) played none of the stereotypic roles assigned women: Magdalene/Eve, madonna, wife of Bath, drudge, vampire. She was an Innocent who did murder.

Scott did not seize the opportunity to employ the usual slant on Eve, Motherhood, or the Sixth Commandment. Instead, he documented what happened to a woman who committed infanticide because she was ground down by the powers of economics, society, and institutionalized religion. When an author made a murderer his principal character and evoked sympathy for her, even spurred humane laws for women caught in such binds -- and still earned significant royalties -- editors and writers paid attention. Perhaps a woman could play a principal role instead of being part of the scenery or a victim of a benighted Poe hero, walled up, hacked up, or dug up. In America, only Hawthorne dared such a mission and on an equally towering theme: that man's fear of women keeps him forever lonely and is the chief bar to a harmonious hearthside. But what editor or publisher thought this theme was saleable? Practicality, therefore, dictated that Hawthorne dress the message in allegory. Better a cryptic message than none at all.

Hawthorne read Scott avidly -- as well as Rousseau's revolutionary ideas about equality at all levels. He never viewed women as unimportant or as threatening Eves, but, rather, as men's vital emotional, intellectual, and spiritual cohorts. He grew up with two sisters and a widowed mother, married an intellectual and emotional peer, and fathered two outspoken daughters. Women were companions, not threats.2

He may have concluded that it was testosterone and perceived threats to the testes, and not Eve, that from antiquity had blocked the kind of deep, soul-to-soul relationship he came to hallow. Battering and, particularly, child molestation may never have been mentioned in his day, but they are scarcely new phenomena in human life; they are the byproducts of ancient attitudes about Eve, contempt for women, or natural urges gone haywire.

How to ameliorate such views and deeds, how to overcome deep-rooted fears of women, and yet carry these messages in the literature of the day was/is a monumental challenge. Hawthorne's subliminal pleas seem always to go over men's heads; and if they are scholarly types, scathing denigration of such a hypothesis may boil down from Olympus -- anger revealing fear of its probability. Why else do some colleagues see more tragedy in, say, Arthur Dimmesdale than Hester Prynne? Only in stories like "The Gentle Boy" did Hawthorne risk showing, through tragedy, the magnificent benefits of love and compassion when men put aside their great fear: loss of power. Alas, he had to use a child, not a woman, to carry that message.

Despite women's equal roles in founding this country, authors of the era ignored that fact. Interestingly, almost no Hawthorne scholar except Roy Male seems to have noted the paucity of women as major characters in early American literature despite their known value in settling this country. Male writes:

In this predominantly masculine enterprise [writing], the role of women has always been anomalous. The notorious ineptitude of the heroine in Western films serves as a constant reminder that in a world of movement in space, a woman was simply an encumbrance. Her alternatives were to remain behind in the ancestral covered wagon and the squatter's hut. Without density and ... flamboyant marksmanship of Hurricane in the dime novels. Before The Scarlet Letter no American writer understood the values of time, tragedy, or womanhood well enough to create a woman in fiction.3

Then came the best-selling Scott to belie that echolaliac myth with the lowborn heroine, Jeanie Deans, who kills her newborn. Hawthorne took notice that such a risky theme sold books and drew attention to harsh laws about unwed mothers. It is the Salem witch trials that may have served as a springboard by which Hawthorne launched his first tale, "The Hollow of the Three Hills," in 1835. Witches not only packed court rooms, but theaters, as box-office receipts attest with Macbeth. Their supposed deeds and hideous deaths had been dramatic material for centuries. His ancestor, a judge at the Salem trials, certainly was the recipient of many terrifying exit lines from women ("God will