Selected Tales and Sketches by Nathaniel Hawthorne Read Free Book Online Page B

nonspecific “Convention of the Friends of Universal Reform” might be content with nothing less than the burning of the whole earth and all its heart-of-flesh inhabitants. And surely that dire hint is more than confirmed by “The Birth-mark” (1843), where the spiritual aspirations of contemporary “metascience” rise up to a monomania as dangerous to “the world’s body” as the cosmic paranoia of Melville’s Ahab.
    Feminist critics may fairly notice that it is a hapless but worshipful wife who is elected to reveal the mark of fleshly imperfection and on whom, accordingly, the maddened Aylmer must perform his insane experiment. Yet as this gesture is itself problematized, it seems fair to suggest that it too is part of Hawthorne’s historical donnée, especially as the tale appears to make more than a glancing reference to the “Ligeia” of Edgar Poe, whose Platonism repeatedly epitomized itself in the “most poetic” theme of the “death of a beautiful woman.” Evidently Hawthorne wished to observe that certain Western, even Christian attitudes toward “Woman” are embedded in the language often used to express “Man‘s” more than Faustian desire for symbolic transcendence. Probably, if the truth were known, Aylmer’s own body, born of woman, bore some small natal scar of its own; yet of this possibility we hear nothing. Nor would Hawthorne’s idealist, and untrustworthy, narrator know what to make of an (untold) tale in which a wife, scientist or not, seeks perfection in neutralizing the flesh of a husband almost worthy of adoration.
    The explicitly sexual implications of idealism are perfectly evident in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” of course, where once again (in the memorable phrase of D. H. Lawrence) “Woman is the nemesis of doubting man”; but probably it is “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844) which most directly extends Aylmer’s treacherous logic of insatiable aspiration. No one dies, to be sure. And Owen’s precious “Annie” seems happy enough bearing the babies of the local blacksmith. But Owen is left with the austere discovery that the platonizing artist achieves nothing beyond his own “spirit”; and his world is left without any credible figure of the service which celibates of “the beautiful” might render the rest of the endlessly prolific human community. Emerson’s “The Transcendentalist” (1844) might venture to suggest, boldly or shrilly, the high religious benefit of watching the holy watchers; but evidently Hawthorne remained committed to an art which produced “objects” for popular consumption, even if we do tend to crush the butterfly.
    Thus Hawthorne’s historicism continued. Not only thematically, as in the self-embarrassed protests of the narrator of “The Hall of Fantasy” in favor of the endurability of the “great, round, solid self” of the world, themselves in echo of Hawthorne’s own more private expressions of satisfaction (in his notebooks) with the swelling roundness of Sophia’s pregnant belly; but formally as well, in his continuing concern to tell the tale of present-day attempts to nullify the world’s material being. “The Old Manse” ends by regretting that the Concord years had produced “no profound treatise of ethics, no philosophic history, no novel even, that could stand on its own unsupported edges.” We know, as Hawthorne could not, that the novels would come--even if the dazzling Scarlet Letter would require the quizzical “Custom-House” to stand without tipping. Even so, however, the rhetoric protests too much, as Hawthorne surely hoped his kindest readers would notice. For the art of telling America’s “moral history” had gone right on, with undiminished seriousness: interrupted, no doubt, by an extended time out for