By some fatality, we all seemed to be brought back to Salem, in spite of our intentions, and even resolutions.
Elizabeth Hawthorne
IT WAS A MEAN season. Snow piled high on the narrow streets. The gutters were caked with ice, and at night the wind blew so cold it chilled the floorboards under the carpet. Uncle Samuel coughed a hollow, hacking cough. Betsy Hawthorne complained of exhaustion.
But Robert Manning, now a father, seemed spry and optimistic. His marriage had taken him to the dappled groves of North Salem, where he pruned his trees, imported new varieties of fruit, and built two houses, one for himself and a small gambrel cottage next door, at 31 Dearborn Street, for the Hawthornes. They moved in December of 1828, and Mrs. Hawthorne again fell ill.
“When sorrow is as selfish as hers was, there is no end to its inflictions,” said Mary Mann, who didn’t know her; doubtless this is the period in Betsy Hawthorne’s life that inspired such summary judgment. For Betsy’s years in Maine had taken effort and spunk, as did her Sabbath school of thirty students, and until coming back to Salem, she had not withdrawn from her children, her family, or her church. It was her return to Herbert Street in 1822 that sapped her strength; and the death of her mother seemed to break her spirit.
By 1829 the Widow Hawthorne was still mired in the lethargy her son would remember as indifference to his writings, though not to him. But he’s an unreliable witness, so sensitive was he to what he considered his shortcomings: three years after college, and this strapping young man still had no discernible vocation. “I, being heir to a moderate competence,” he explained in one of his autobiographical stories, “had avowed my purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of life. This would have been a dangerous resolution, any where in the world; it was fatal, in New-England.”
And nowhere more so than in Salem.
By that spring Uncle Sam had recovered, and in the late summer Hawthorne joined him on that trip to Connecticut where he met Horace Conolly, who pointed out several of New Haven’s historical monuments to Hawthorne, in the market for good material. Spurred by some friendly reviews of Fanshawe—John Neal himself thought its author promised “a fair prospect of future success”—Hawthorne intended to write fiction steeped, as he said, in “the superstitions of this part of the country.”
He mailed a few of these stories to Samuel Griswold Goodrich, a self-made publishing entrepreneur eager to print native authors like novelist Charles Brockden Brown. Brown was considered by many to be the first professional author in America; he died penniless, not an auspicious beginning for American literature. Goodrich, however, was determined to make something out of—or from—American authors. It was slow going. So he also juggled several more lucrative projects, such as the popular series of children’s books, many ghostwritten, that he churned out under the name Peter Parley. By 1829 he was devoting most of his time to the Parley books and to another moneymaking venture, The Token, a gift book timed to appear each year just before the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.
A feral man with a stout heart and a nose for good writing, Goodrich claimed to have initiated the meeting with Hawthorne. He’d read an anonymous publication—Fanshawe?—“which seemed to me to indicate extraordinary powers,” he said. More likely is that Hawthorne’s Bowdoin classmate the Reverend George B. Cheever, himself a Salem writer, encouraged Hawthorne to approach Goodrich after Hawthorne had complained that no one wanted to publish his book. Goodrich remembered Hawthorne as “unsettled as to his views; he had tried his hand in literature, and considered himself to have met with a fatal rebuff from the reading world. His mind vacillated between various projects, verging, I think, toward a mercantile profession.”
Looking over “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” which Hawthorne had given him, Goodrich cautiously offered to help find a publisher for his new collection of stories, called Provincial Tales of My Native Land. “You do not anticipate much success,” Hawthorne wrote, acknowledging Goodrich’s offer—and his hesitancy. Undaunted, though, Hawthorne sent Goodrich three more stories in December, all finished, he said, “a considerable time” ago, except for the titles. These were “Alice Doane,” “The Gentle Boy,” and “My Uncle Molineux,” undoubtedly each of them a version of stories originally intended for Seven Tales. (Other stories slated for Provincial Tales may have included “The Wives of the Dead,” “Young Goodman Brown,” “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” “The Gray Champion,” and “The Minister’s Black Veil.”)
Representing American history as a series of victories and betrayals, confused motives and ambiguous ends, these early stories, especially “Roger Malvin’s Burial” and “My Uncle Molineux” (published as “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”), rate among Hawthorne’s best. Thematically, they set historical fiction within a psychological theater, suggesting that one creates and develops character in time, real time and internal time. And they showcase what rapidly became a signature style: phrases and clauses well-calibrated and modulated into sentences, sentences expanded into paragraphs, each grammatical component—and ultimately the whole tale—having accrued a meaning far beyond the literal. “It was near nine o’clock of a moonlight evening, when a boat crossed the ferry with a single passenger, who had obtained his conveyance, at that unusual hour, by the promise of an extra fare,” Hawthorne writes at the opening of “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” his classical allusions half hidden in a story about the initiation of a young man into history, his own and the country’s.
“Deep as Dante,” Melville would write of Hawthorne’s layered work, and he wasn’t wrong.
Set against the backdrop of colonial-period politics in the 1730s, 1760s, and 1770s, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” as we saw, tells of Robin Molineux’s benighted search for the rich uncle who he hopes will help him rise in the world. But the quest for patrimony is over, it seems, when Robin discovers the uncle is a loyalist about to be tarred and feathered. In Hawthorne’s hands, uncles inevitably disappoint nephews, especially nephews who rely too heavily on them.
Naturally, Hawthorne understood Robin’s dilemma, that attachment to and animosity toward an ancestral name (Hathorne) and a living inheritance (Manning); they provide status, a sense of belonging, and an income while depriving the bearer of autonomy, the ability to make one’s way alone “without the help of your kinsman,” as Hawthorne writes at his story’s end. Thus it’s with slow steps that Robin lurches toward a self-reliant manhood free from aristocratic privilege, like the nation which he partly represents; to be a man, Robin must shuck his patrimony, just as the country must shake off England. But America’s coming of age, like Robin’s, is no uncomplicated assertion of independence. To throw off monarchy in the name of freedom or democracy is to subject oneself to an ugly crowd of rabble-rousers, called patriots, who tar and feather the major.
When the uproarious mob jeers at Robin’s uncle in the story’s climactic scene, Robin joins in the brutal merriment, his shout “the loudest there.” Illusions punctured, particularly about himself, Robin finds that he, like the cruel merrymakers, is capable of trampling an old man’s heart.
“Had ‘Fanshawe’ been in the hands of more extensive dealers,’ Goodrich baited Hawthorne, “I do believe it would have paid you a profit.” He rejected “Alice Doane,” and assuming Hawthorne wanted to keep the other two for Provincial Tales, Goodrich offered him thirty-five dollars to print “The Gentle Boy” in The Token, promising Hawthorne that he could afterward reprint it in Provincial Tales.
Though Hawthorne wasn’t sure he’d take the offer, in May he sent two shorter stories, as Goodrich had requested. Presumably they were better suited to The Token, especially the sketch “Sights from a Steeple,” a depiction of Salem from the vantage point of a “spiritualized Paul Pry,” or one who stands atop a church, the image of the spectator revived.
That Goodrich both championed Hawthorne and exploited him, there can be no doubt. Writers in America had to finance their own books—even Washington Irving had—with publishers operating mainly as booksellers or distributors, themselves dependent on regional outlets. And publishers undertook American books reluctantly. Since there were no international copyright laws, cheap editions of British books flooded the market. As a consequence, a man like Goodrich didn’t worry too much about taking advantage of his authors since he also took the publishing risk. Of course, the author viewed the matter differently. Hawthorne would characterize Goodrich as an unscrupulous opportunist growing fat on someone else’s labor, “born to do what he did, as maggots to feed on rich cheese.”
For his part, Goodrich would remember Hawthorne as sturdy, dark, distrustful, with steel-gray eyes, a stony complexion, and a sarcastic mouth. Both men probably judged one another correctly—after the fact, of course—and Hawthorne was justifiably suspicious. Goodrich paid him poorly, between fifty-two and seventy-two dollars for the ten stories that appeared in the 1831, 1832, and 1833 Tokens. And since the stories were published anonymously, Goodrich could easily stuff his Token with more than one story by the same writer, “particularly,” he rationalized, “as they are as good, if not better, than anything else I can get.”
If Goodrich was able to capitalize on Hawthorne’s obscurity, Hawthorne acceded to the arrangement, as if afraid of the recognition he desperately sought. No one associated him with stories trickling into periodicals and newspapers. Historical sketches like the “The Battle Omen,” “Sir William Phips,” and “Dr. Bullivant” appeared in the 1830 Salem Gazette unsigned, presumably at his own behest, and although he was reaching out to other publishers, more confident now since his work was appearing in The Token, he continued to say he “should not wish to be mentioned” as the author of his tales.
“He never liked to have his writings spoken of,” said Ebe; “he knew their merit, and was weary of obscurity, but yet he shrank from observation.” Hawthorne’s son Julian also meditated on his father’s enforced anonymity. His father, he intuited, “was resolved not to declare himself until the curiosity and enthusiasm aroused by his anonymous writings had reached such a pitch, as to render concealment no longer possible.” This way he’d save himself embarrassment by bounding, as it were, onto the literary scene, without an audience for his work having been established. It was a calculation, savvy and self-protective and fully in keeping with the pose of author as the gentleman on the steepletop who didn’t write for money.
Hawthorne wasn’t successful. He’d planned to bring out Fanshawe, said Ebe, to whet the public’s appetite for Seven Tales, but the novel had not sold and the tales went uncollected.
So too the manuscript of Provincial Tales, which probably languished in Goodrich’s drawer, especially since he could make use of individual stories in The Token. Of course, Hawthorne consented to carving it up: what choice did he have? he must have wondered. He gave Goodrich “The Gentle Boy,” “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” and “The Wives of the Dead” for the 1832 Token, published at the end of 1831. And perhaps he justified the decision. The antiquarian Joseph B. Felt had brought out the very popular Annals of Salem in 1827, and in 1831 both John Greenleaf Whittier’s Legends of New England and Delia Bacon’s Tales of the Puritans appeared. The field was small and crowded.
But with Goodrich still eager for more material, Hawthorne was launched after a fashion, and none too soon. In 1831 he turned twenty-seven. Ebe said he had not expected to live to be twenty-five. “I nourished a regretful desire to be summoned early from the scene,” he wrote in mock retrospect, explaining that “he who has a part in the serious business of life, though it be only as a shoemaker, feels himself equally respectable in youth and age, and therefore is content to live.… [I]t is far otherwise with the busy idlers of the world.”
Yet not three years after the publication of Fanshawe, Hawthorne wanted to expunge it from his past. It mortified him. So he got hold of Ebe’s copy, which she never saw again, and at Hawthorne’s request Horatio Bridge destroyed his. Hawthorne’s wife would never even learn of Fanshawe’s existence until after his death.
An avid reader, Hawthorne carefully assessed the work of his competitors—Ebe recalled him studying a great many novels—and, in particular, works by women writers, those “ink-stained Amazons” who, he feared, could bump their male rivals right out of the field, petticoats triumphant.
The terms are Hawthorne’s, and they appear in the introductory paragraph of his historical sketch “Mrs. Hutchinson,” published in the Salem Gazette in December 1830. Hawthorne was using “Mrs. Hutchinson” to some extent to inveigh against women writers and the troubling question of “feminine ambition.”
His argument goes like this: at present there are no women quite like the brave Anne Hutchinson, an Antinomian banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for preaching, especially at her trial, that God communicated by direct revelation; she needed no priestly interlocutors, or patriarchs, to parcel out God’s word. These days, says Hawthorne, contemporary women exploit the popular press, not an apostate church, as the “medium through which feminine ambition chiefly manifests itself.” The phenomenon, however, isn’t entirely positive. To be any good as a writer, a woman must sacrifice “a part of the loveliness of her sex,” Hawthorne declares; and she is obliged to expose her “naked mind to the gaze of the world, with indications by which its inmost secrets may be searched out.” Authorship, then, implies public exposure, unbecoming, improper, and shameful. Or, from another point of view, why should women have to endure the various trials that authors undergo, Hawthorne wonders with facetious gallantry. The condescension is obvious.
But the issue is personal. Hawthorne is reflecting on the choices he’s made, or has felt compelled to make, having taken up a profession—story-telling—fraught with insecurity, vanity, and humiliation, a profession regarded as irresponsible and disreputable and likely to become even more so if women successfully enter it. That would prove that fiction is a kind of women’s work, decorative and useless, an idler’s trade, not a manly one. “It is one of my few sources of pride,” Hawthorne defended himself in another context, “that, ridiculous as the object was, I followed it up with the firmness and energy of a man.”
If the writer is a pariah, he is also a hero of sorts—ironically like Anne Hutchinson, who emerges in Hawthorne’s sketch as pilloried and yet grand, intelligent, standing unafraid before her judges with “a flash of carnal pride half hidden in her eye.” However, he has to make sure that she, as his signal female—courageous, smart, and sexy—does not best him. For she is not only complex but composite: a version of Ebe; a version of his mother, the widow who for a time ventured a different life; and something of himself as author, surmounting inhibitions and “relinquishing the immunities of a private character,” as he admits elsewhere, “and giving every man, and for money, too, the right … of treating me with open scorn.”
But “Mrs. Hutchinson” excepted, in most of Hawthorne’s early tales and sketches women function largely as cardboard props in which Hawthorne is not invested: the damsel in distress (Fanshawe); the anguished wife (in “Roger Malvin’s Burial”); innocence wronged (“Alice Doane’s Appeal”); and, inevitably, temptation (the woman with a scarlet petticoat in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”). Though peopled with stock women, these stories nonetheless shiver with a phantom sexuality, fearsome and inappropriate. Funeral bells toll at marriages, strange old spinsters interrupt wedding ceremonies, loving husbands intend to kill their loving wives, and a young minister dons a black veil for no apparent reason.
In the particularly fine “Young Goodman Brown,” marital bliss sours after the newlywed Brown deserts his wife, Faith, for a night’s frolic in the woods, losing his moral virginity and, one infers, his sexual innocence. But unable to confront his own desires, more subversive than he knew, Young Goodman Brown cannot endure anyone else’s, and he returns to the village a harried man, condemned for his squeamishness to a lonely, desperate death.
It will not be the first time that the Hawthorne character comes home trapped, confused, and lonely.
“I very often say with Job,” Richard Manning wrote to his family, “cursed be the day in which it was said there is a Manchild brought forth, and with Burns, Oh death the poor Mans dearest friend … and Oh that Mother had let me have burnt up in the Cradle, then I was sinless, and Oh that I was now prepared.” At forty-eight, hands numb and body palsied, Richard Manning was mortally ill. He died just before the spring of 1831.
Old-time Calvinism, even if on the wane, and Richard’s death, after that of so many others, helped shape Hawthorne’s sense that the world is banked in sorrow. Uncle Robert was shattered. “The loss of Brother Richard will be like loosing the head of the family a second time, for he has truly been the head of the family since father’s death,” he told Mary Manning. She in turn warned the surviving men of the family, “Brother William and Robert and Samuel and Brother John and Nathaniel … [to] all improve this loud call, to improve the present time, to attend to the one thing need-full, to secure their best interest, a Treasure in Heaven wich faileth not.”
Hawthorne decided to “improve the present time,” though not quite the way Aunt Mary imagined. Again accompanying his uncle Sam, this time through New Hampshire in the summer of 1831, he envisioned writing yet another collection of tales, The Story Teller, based loosely on their travels. It would be a sketchbook of sorts, like Washington Irving’s, replete with motley comrades and harmless summer escapades. That summer he didn’t get as far as Canada, which he’d hoped to do, so the next year he set off again; he wanted to see Niagara, then Montreal and Quebec, and then go home through Vermont and New Hampshire, as he explained to Franklin Pierce, “on account of a book by which I intend to acquire an (undoubtedly) immense literary reputation.”
With two hundred dollars, part of the Manning legacy, Hawthorne evidently sped through the rugged White Mountains, and by the fall of 1832 was climbing Mount Washington in a snowstorm, traipsing to Burlington, Vermont, and voyaging west toward the watery turnpike, the Erie Canal. He cruised to Niagara Falls in a dirty canal boat pulled by three moth-colored horses. To judge from his stories and sketches, he was home by December.
Although The Story Teller was never published as a complete book, the various sections that were printed, once reassembled, do suggest a framework for the group. Hawthorne evidently planned to organize the stories around the first-person adventures of an itinerant novelist who peddles his own “extemporaneous fictions to such audiences as I could collect,” or so the storyteller explains in “The Seven Vagabonds,” probably one of the first tales. Spontaneous, lighthearted, and without responsibility, the picaresque rambler meanders through life, nomadic, easy, and liberated from that “dull race of money-getting drudges” who couldn’t begin to comprehend a creature like him. “I had not of that foolish wisdom, which reproves every occupation that is not useful in this world of vanities.” Instead, he says, “I manufactured a great variety of plots and skeletons of tales, and kept them ready for use, leaving the filling up to the inspiration of the moment.”
Pretty maids with smiling eyes cavort with him (nothing happens); pretty women from the West take off their clothes on the canal boat, right before his prurient eyes (nothing happens). He flirts with an irresistible person of “doubtful sex” (nothing happens), and he joins forces with a preacher, Eliakim Abbot, a fellow outcast dressed in rusty black carrying a Bible in his pocket. “We kept together,” says the storyteller, “day after day, till our union appeared permanent.” This unlikely pair—the poet and his scruples—plan to entertain and edify the populace, one with a tale and the other with a sermon, as if each made up for the deficiencies of the other. And so Hawthorne salved his conscience, revealing the split within it.
According to his sister-in-law, Hawthorne submitted The Story Teller, which had grown to two volumes, to Goodrich, who refused to take it whole. Keeping “The Canterbury Pilgrims” and “The Seven Vagabonds” for himself, Goodrich passed the manuscript on to the New-England Magazine, which printed “Sketches from Memory by a Pedestrian” in the November and December 1834 issues. (These sketches included a related story, later known as “Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe.”) In 1835 Park Benjamin, a mediocre poet and the new editor of the New-England Magazine, ripped out a few more of the tales and then took the remainder of The Story Teller to New York, where the New-England Magazine merged in early 1836 with American Monthly. “So they tore up the book,” said Hawthorne’s sister-in-law Elizabeth Peabody, “and Hawthorne said he cared little for the stories afterwards, which had in their original place in the ‘Storyteller’ a greater degree of significance.”
And Hawthorne was probably paid a dollar a page, when, that is, Benjamin had the money.
But disillusion was stalking the storyteller long before the book’s dismemberment. In a fragment called “My Home Return,” the itinerant narrator comes home. He is sick. “It had been long enough for me to wander away and return again, with my fate accomplished, and little more hope in this world.” Something terrible had happened.
Thirteen years older than Hawthorne and the youngest of his uncles, Samuel Manning was a good-natured man who had failed in business and in farming and these days, working for Robert, found his health to be failing too. For seven years he had battled the tubercular cough that kept him from the travel and horse trading he liked to do. He died on November 17, 1833, one month before his forty-third birthday.
Hawthorne’s breezy storyteller, having hoped to wander the world untroubled, headed home to Salem, chastened and depressed.
“It was only after his return to Salem,” recalled Ebe, “and when he felt as if he could not get away from there, and yet was conscious of being utterly unlike every one else in the place, that he began to withdraw into himself.”
The last installment of The Story Teller, which Hawthorne never reprinted, appears in a sequence called “Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man,” published in July 1837 in the American Monthly Magazine. It features a cadaverous character, Oberon, named for the figure in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or perhaps in Ben Jonson’s masque Oberon; Oberon is also the sobriquet Hawthorne sometimes used when writing to Horatio Bridge.
Hawthorne’s Oberon is mortally ill, but before coughing his last, he begs a friend to burn all the papers in his escritoire. Obliging, the friend saves one journal, which he then reproduces for the reader. It’s a pinched tale of defeat. Damning himself and his journey, Oberon delivers advice that one might have expected from Parson Thumpcushion or Uncle Robert:
Adopt some great and serious aim, such as manhood will cling to, that he may not feel himself, too late, a cumberer of this overladen earth, but a man among men. I will beseech him not to follow an eccentric path, nor by stepping aside from the highway of human affairs, to relinquish his claim upon human sympathy. And often, as a text of deep and varied meaning, I will remind him that he is an American.
The disgruntled character of Oberon also crops up in a sentimental revenge fantasy, “The Devil in Manuscript,” possibly another fragment from The Story Teller, in which he peevishly despairs, “I have become ambitious of a bubble, and careless of solid reputation.” What is writing or the writer’s life? An existence surrounded by shadows, drawing one away from “the beaten path of the world” into “a strange sort of solitude—a solitude in the midst of men—where nobody wishes for what I do, nor thinks nor feels as I do. The tales have done this.”
Collecting his manuscripts “like a father taking a deformed infant into his arms,” Oberon edges toward the hearth. “Would you have me a damned author?” he hysterically demands of his friend, who vainly protests as Oberon gleefully tosses them onto the logs. The papers curl and sputter in the fire, embers popping and sparking and flying up the chimney to spread over the town, which bursts into flame.
Oberon is vindicated. At last the town is ablaze, so to speak, with his work.
If anything, Oberon’s theatrics keep Hawthorne in print, albeit anonymously. He signs “The Devil in Manuscript” as Ashley A. Royce, possibly in comic homage to Edgar A. Poe, and he contributed three stories to the 1836 Token, “The Wedding-Knell,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” unsigned; ditto contributions to the New-England Magazine, published monthly and which contained at least one of his stories and sometimes as many as three.
Yet a curtain seems temporarily to fall over Hawthorne. Clustered together in Salem since the death of Richard, the Mannings had no occasion to write about themselves in letters, and so very few family documents illumine this period of Hawthorne’s life. The documents that do survive—even the portrait of Hawthorne by Henry Inman—don’t reveal why, for instance, the Hawthornes left their Dearborn Street house to move back to Herbert Street shortly before Samuel’s death. All we know is that Ebe was translating Cervantes’s tales, Louisa making her seasonal visits to Newburyport, and that Hawthorne, thirty-one years old and—to judge by his portrait—intense, continued to live in a diminished household increasingly dominated by women: his two sisters, his mother, his aunt Mary.
He also complained about Salem, took his summer vacations in the country, and later referred to himself with some bitterness as “the obscurest man of letters in America.” He hadn’t achieved much success; in fact, his failed ventures in the book trade left him prey to the wags of “public opinion,” as Hawthorne noted in one of the Story Teller tales, “and felt as if it ranked me with tavern-haunters and town-paupers,—with the drunken poet who hawked his own fourth of July odes, and the broken soldier who had been good for nothing since [sic] last war.”
In stories recently published, like “The Haunted Mind,” he dropped the image of the open road for the metaphor of small spaces. Like Fanshawe, the artist burrows within himself, remote and watchful and separated for better or worse from ordinary people and events. “In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon.”
A sodden sky hangs over Hawthorne’s eeriest tales like the visor of guilt and remorse dimming the features of so many of his characters—or the blanket of anonymity covering the name of their author. And with a psychological insight that reveals even as it conceals—much like Hawthorne’s fictional method—his stories delineate human character with a truly awful power of insight, as William Henry Channing would call it, into the unnameable strangeness of the everyday. Nowhere is this more true than in “The Minister’s Black Veil,” when, for some unexplained reason, Parson Hooper, a bachelor about thirty years old, arrives one Sunday at the meetinghouse, his face wrapped in a black veil of “two folds of crape.” Hiding his features except his mouth and chin, the veil “probably did not intercept his sight, farther than to give a darkened aspect to all living and inanimate things.”
“He has changed himself into something awful, only by hiding his face,” a parishioner mumbles. With a gesture made more frightful by its inexplicable simplicity, Parson Hooper is a walking symbol—of what, no one can decide. Nor will he enlighten anyone as to why he wears his strange veil. Elizabeth, his fiancée, begs him to lift it just once. He refuses, and she leaves him. After a while the townspeople become so spooked they begin to doubt his very existence. “I can’t really feel as if good Mr. Hooper’s face was behind that piece of crape,” says the sexton. How odd, comments one prescient woman, “that a simple black veil, such as any woman might wear on her bonnet, should become such a terrible thing on Mr. Hooper’s face!”
Separating himself from everyone in a performance that draws attention to himself, Parson Hooper, veiled as a woman is veiled, is a parable of the artist: Hawthorne the storyteller embarks on a solitary journey that takes him, again and again, back home, where he burns his manuscripts and, tortoiselike, wears anonymity like a shell. “Have I dreaded scorn like death, and yearned for fame as others pant for vital air,” the storyteller cries, “only to find myself in a middle state between obscurity and infamy?”
Obscurity and infamy, the Scylla and Charybdis of his temper, motivate the storyteller’s journey, and because Hawthorne himself experienced writing as a kind of exhibitionism—the gist of “Mrs. Hutchinson”—he made much of hiding, or pretending to hide. “So far as I am a man of really individual attributes, I veil my face,” he would write in subsequent years; “nor am I, nor have ever been, one of those supremely hospitable people, who serve up their own hearts delicately fried, with brain-sauce, as a tidbit for their beloved public.” Dreading obscurity but half ashamed of his ambition and his profession, he wraps anonymity about him like a dark cloak, itself a kind of monastic identity that protects him from—terrifying to consider—nothing at all.