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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...