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Dearest Beloved

University of California Press

In September 1852 Hawthorne journeyed to Brunswick, Maine, at the invitation of Bowdoin College, his alma mater, which was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. As a famous writer and a figure of national prominence in the Democratic party, he was among the most distinguished of Bowdoin's alumni. "My adventures thou shalt know when I return," Hawthorne wrote his wife, "and how I was celebrated by orators and poets—and how, by the grace of Divine Providence, I was not present, to be put to the blush. All my contemporaries have grown the funniest old men in the world. Am I a funny old man?" (CE 16:593).

This journey, extended to include a seaside vacation at the Isle of Shoals, gave Hawthorne an occasion to measure the distance he had traveled in the twenty-seven years since his graduation from Bowdoin. He had realized the dream of literary pre-eminence that had set him apart as a student and had led him through an arduous span of striving. Proud of his achievements and aware of his distinguished station in life, Hawthorne nonetheless had reason to feel an uneasy presentiment that his greatest work was behind him, that his remarkable personal adventure was ending, that what remained was to become one of the funny old men.1

Hawthorne was forty-eight years old, and his family was now complete. Una, the oldest daughter, was eight and Julian was six; they had a baby sister, Rose, just fifteen months. Hawthorne had recently moved this family into anew home in Concord, which he renamed the Wayside with the air of a man at long last settling down. "Since I was married, ten years ago," he wrote to G. P. Putnam, "I have had no less than seven homes—the one to which I am now going being the eighth" (CE 16:530). Hawthorne was mistaken in expecting that the family would remain at the Wayside, but of the many places he and Sophia had lived, this was the first he was able to purchase, and he left it permanently only at the time of his death. "I am beginning to take root here," he wrote to Longfellow, "and feel myself, for the first time in my life, really at home" (CE 16:602).

Hawthorne's description of his journey to Bowdoin and the Isle of Shoals evokes an ancient drama of masculine achievement: the hero undertakes an odyssey into the great unknown, while his wife, like Penelope (or Clytemnestra), waits by the hearth to celebrate and reward his adventures when he returns. Hawthorne was living out a version of this drama that was becoming typical of nineteenth-century America: a man's individual struggle to make a name for himself. Sophia played the part allotted to women by a vision of domesticity, also having ancient origins, that was now being consecrated as a middle-class ideal.

On the day of Nathaniel's departure Sophia commenced a series of journal entries that describe the household in his absence. Her first comments indicate how ardently she devoted herself to this sphere of womanly fulfillment. She reports that Una and Julian pined for their father, and

began to wonder how it would seem to Papa when he got back if they should never tease one another, never frown nor fret, always mind when first spoken to—if Papa would hear only lovely tones & see only pleasant faces—and all this joined to baby's angel talk & angel smiles, thought Una, would make Papa think he was in heaven with us—"or," said Julian, "not with us but with some other children"—"Yes," I replied, "with your spirits." "Oh," they exclaimed, "let us try & try & try & perhaps we can!"

(Family Notebook, 30 August 1852)2

As Sophia's journal continues, however, this tableau of domestic felicity is interrupted by gestures that parody and subvert the drama she and her husband are playing out. The routine counterpoint of worldly manhood and feminine nurture was echoed in the relation of crude and refined, earthy and angelic, savage and civilized; and the Hawthornes' daughter Una had a knack for uproarious burlesque that turned these antitheses all topsy-turvy.

She took Julian's turtle & said to him, "Come, we are two boys—you are James Jones." So she went on about the turtle & perfectly amazed me with her talk. The voice & manner & phrases & pronunciations were of the most uncivilized barbarous clodhopper. Where she ever heard—how she ever knew—I cannot imagine. Juliancame near dying of laughter to see & hear her. Where was the grace, the softness, the humanity, the order of my little Una? Utterly gone. No changeling could have been a greater change. What an Elfish element there is in her! What a tract of untameable wilderness, whither she rushes to dens & morasses, to air herself, as it were. I never knew such a combination of the highest refinement & the rudest boorishness—one lies at the door of the other.

(5 September)

Sophia's uneasiness, like the turbulence in Una's conduct, reveals that the conventional gender categories were meant to enforce the maleness and femaleness that they pictured as inherent. To say that a girl is "boorish" when she acts like a boy is to carry forward a disciplinary program, against which Una evidently offered resistance.

Yet Sophia's disapproval of Una's boisterousness is mingled with latent appreciation, even encouragement. Sophia feels a certain exhilaration at Una's "wonderful power," and she likewise relishes Una's success in placing herself at the center of attention, reducing Julian to helpless spasms of laughter. "We had a very merry time after tea," Sophia wrote on another occasion, "for Una undertook to be comical & to imitate characters & she was irresistible. We nearly died of laughing & Julian exploded in a way that was alarming to hear!" (30 August).

Sophia's enjoyment of this unnerving laughter bespeaks her own divided mind. She felt an inward resistance to the proprieties she sought to impose and was aware of the sharp public controversy over the role designated for women. If Una's mock-masculinity expressed resistance to conventional womanhood, so also did the belligerence that Sophia found in her baby daughter, Rose. "She has scolded a great deal lately. I do not know what I shall do about it. She has an idea of woman's rights, I believe, & means to stand up for them in her own person." Sophia hastened to add that Rose also showed signs of feminine solicitude; she "has been very sweet too, going to kiss Julian when he cried, & trying to comfort him & displaying a thousand charming little ways" (5 September).

The domestic sphere Nathaniel left behind as he traveled to Bowdoin and the Isle of Shoals was teeming with covert sexual politics; it was alive with inward debates about the axioms of its own constitution. Gender conflict was also at work in Nathaniel's public endeavors, of which this journey was a triumphal celebration.

In the quarter century since his graduation from Bowdoin Hawthorne had pursued two careers—civil servant and writer—and in both had now attained remarkable success. The story of his literary triumph is famous: justthree years before, he had been ejected from his post at the Salem Custom House and in the midst of severe financial straits had returned to writing. In seven months he produced The Scarlet Letter; as that work was winning international acclaim, he wrote The House of the Seven Gables and a book of children's...