Hawthorne Shines a Light

“Everyone is scared, everyone's alone

Unless hand reach for hand when the trouble comes

All around the world when the dark night falls

We should be sitting around the fire…telling stories.”- Greg Brown

“I like Nathaniel Hawthorne,” I said quite innocently one summer evening as I sipped my glass of Chardonnay under a lovely, starlit sky. A writer friend looked over at the PhD in Literature friend and they both turned their gaze on me as one and peered incredulously over their glasses. “Na-than-iel Haw-thorne?” they said together – in a, shall I say condescending, tone that translated as, “Seriously? You would actually say that out loud? You would defend this publicly?” Then they proceeded to poo-poo Hawthorne with a dismissive wave of the hand. Too preachy, obvious metaphors, lugubrious writing, dark, stilted, stale, a thing of the past that should stay in the past. I don’t mind admitting that I was bristling inside as I took a larger sip of wine than usual. Poor, set-upon Hawthorne. I wish he had been there to defend himself! And why was it that I loved him?

I returned home that night, dusted off my trusty 1957 Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume 11, and immersed myself in his life story.

Hawthorne’s world was not a happy one. He was born in Massachusetts, but not just any Massachusetts. His home was Puritanical Salem. His own grandfather had been a judge in the Salem Witch Trials. One of the only judges who did not repent of his verdict. That is why the “w” was added to the family name. To help them hide from this unfortunate truth. Salem, “in the 18th century was a town that enjoyed a temporary prosperity from overseas commerce, and thrifty sea-captains built dignified houses out of the profits of the China trade. Then came a swift decline, the passing of commerce to other ports, and a musty quiet about the wharves.” Hawthorne was a child of this “Salem eclipse.” It was the grim decay of a former prosperity. This was the Salem that fed Nathaniel’s imagination. His father married a young woman from one of the established families of Salem, and Hawthorne was quite young when he died. Nathaniel was left with his mother and two sisters, in a “strange household reared in a sort of Puritan nunnery with the mother and daughters slipping wraith-like from room to room, fearful of every contact, given to solitude.” Their life was financially meager, but they covered this fact over with a deep family pride that remembered greater, more prosperous days. However, along with this pride came a repressed, mirthless, and passionless life, and an all-consuming obsession with sin. Nathaniel Hawthorne was steeped in this atmosphere, permanently stained by it down to his soul. He grew into a solitary, aloof person, suspicious of the outer world he didn’t know. And over the years, “a barrier slowly rose about his soul over which he was never willing or able to climb, and within this barrier he dwelt alone.” Later, he was sent off to school, and experienced the wider world. But he never quite recovered from his years in Salem. He managed to confront the Calvinistic dogma of his upbringing and threw it off completely, eventually. “But he could not quite free his mind from the specter of sin that haunted the waking hours of his ancestors.”

Hawthorne was born with a gift. He was a sensitive artist, a gifted writer. He was a master of observation and his patience was great. Nathaniel was, through his descriptions, masterful at showing the tragedy of a mouldering, Puritanical hierarchy in New England. He did it mostly through physical description of the characters' faces, bodies, mannerisms, voices. He described people the way a botanist from that time period would painstakingly draw a new found flower, or a scientist from that age would need to draw by hand what he saw under the microscope. Humans for Hawthorne were studied carefully and were endlessly fascinating, as they should be. The beauty, for him, was in the details. In our more fast paced society, we don’t have much patience for this slow, unfolding beauty coming from his pen. And yet, this very beauty was Hawthorne’s saving. And I for one would posit that the modern world needs that exact, patient, unfolding beauty Hawthorne offers. That it would teach us to slow down and observe the world about us. An important world we too easily dismiss with a wave of our hand, but perhaps might also be our own saving if we let it.

Nathaniel was an artist who lived a prisoner behind the cold, Puritanical barrier built by his family, but miraculously, he could not be entirely repressed. He looked for release and truth through words. He began to weave stories, creating fantastical images in his imagination, finding symbolism in every Puritanical fact that surrounded him, wrestling with questions and longings within. And from that dank, obsessive world of darkness, he, the artist, uncovered and released….beauty.

How else can you explain Phoebe? Hawthorne’s character Phoebe emerges suddenly like a happy little miracle from one of his heavier, darker stories. She shines in her own beautiful and tender light. In his semi-autobiographical novel, The House of the Seven Gables, we enter a moldering, sagging old house, once prosperous, where lives an elderly spinster named Hepzibah Pyncheon. (Can there be a better name?) She is near-sighted, which makes her look severe and irascible. In reality, she is timid, and anxiety ridden with shouldering the outer appearances of her aristocratic heritage, dressed in somber black and simple lace with bonnet, wandering from room to room in lonely solitude, clinging solely to family dignity. Outside her door, if she had ventured forth, she would have found a happier world. A town with tradesmen and bustling with people smiling, working, walking in the sun, and blissfully unaware and unimpressed by her old-fashioned and fading way of life. But she does not emerge from her house. She is too afraid to leave its dark security and so she is a prisoner in its world and is unaware that any other world exists.

Enter, by happy fate, little cousin Phoebe, sent to Hepzibah to live for a time. She is a cheerful, light-stepping young woman prone to singing and filled with bright and optimistic thoughts. Phoebe enters Hepzibah’s dark, Puritanical monster of a house and is… undaunted. She is not at all afraid or even repulsed by Hepzibah’s sour face and dowdy clothing. She hugs the poor, surprised woman and stirs a tender space in Hepzibah’s old heart. Phoebe moves the furniture around, she dusts, she brings flowers from the overgrown garden into the house and opens the windows. She takes down the solemn, frightening portraits of ancestors and puts up lovely curtains. She bakes cakes and serves Hepzibah tea on her own fine but seldom used china. She breaks all tradition. All this while Hepzibah is simultaneously wringing her worried hands at change, and yet following Phoebe around like an ancient heliotropic plant drinking in a newfound sun. In a series of events sparked by a dark and sinister Pyncheon history, Hepzibah finds herself edging closer and closer to the front door of her dark life. In the end, with Phoebe’s help, she steps over the threshold, closes the door to her sad and moldering past and finds a happier life where love exists and is willing to open its arms to her. Hepzibah at last smiles and steps tentatively forward with the deepest breath she has taken in a long time.

In the end, Hawthorne astounded me. He can perhaps be accused of many things, by those who know better than I about literature. But Nathaniel told a story that needed to be told. He wanted us to know he was there behind his wall, with night falling about him. He wanted us to know he tried and failed to fly. He did not want us to forget his valiant effort. He sent his message through a story. I cried real tears at this tale. I cried even more after reading Hawthorne’s life. He climbed nearly to the top of the wall that his past had built up around him. He saw a light over that Puritanical space. And he called it Phoebe, the Greek word for bright dawn. He knew it was there. He longed for it to be there. For “he resented the inhibitions of Puritanism” with its stifling obsession with sin and guilt and lonely despair. But he was unable, all his life, to place his trust in a more kind and forgiving God, though he tried. His wounds ran deep. He could not quite make that leap, but Hepzibah leapt for him right over the wall, following Phoebe to a better world. And you can almost hear him crying out in this beautiful story, “Run, Hepzibah! Run! Be free at last.”

For all of us who may be haunted by the past mistakes or hurtful events in our lives, thinking we will never be set free, feeling our wounds and wondering if we too dare pass their dark but familiar threshold, Hawthorne’s Phoebe beckons with her cheerful face and gives us a hope that we too can cross into the light that holds out its hand to us. And we might hear her whisper, “Nathaniel sent me. Take up and read.”

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