Hawthorne

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A Note from Brenda Wineapple

Hawthorne is a man who wrote about women, and I am a woman writing about a man—not just any man but a canonical American author. As the first female biographer of Hawthorne, I confront the man who, unlike his male contemporaries, wrote fiction about illicit love, marriage, motherhood, women's rights, and spiritualism—and who was increasingly surrounded by the women writers whose work outsold his, much to his distress (“a damned mob of scribblers,” he called them). Nonetheless, Hawthorne was the only major nineteenth-century American author (before Henry James) to make women the central figures in his novels. And they are powerfully erotic, intellectually radical characters, very much with us today. (Who hasn’t heard of Hester Prynne and her scarlet letter?)

His relationship to women is a central part of my biography, but Hawthorne was also a political man. Best friend to Franklin Pierce, arguably one of the worst American presidents ever elected, Hawthorne was a political idealist and a political operator—and an anti-abolitionist. I explore Hawthorne’s connection with antebellum leaders; after all, the same era that produced him also spawned John Brown, William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth. As the biographer who delves into the question of Hawthorne’s response to the antislavery movement, I neither apologize for his captious views nor explain them away. Instead I explore them seriously, for Hawthorne remains a complex creature.

I am also the first biographer to write the story of Hawthorne and friendship, not only with Pierce, but also with other men who have fallen beneath the literary radar. My book tells of their unswerving devotion to him and his to them—and how Hawthorne's friends helped to shape his career.

In terms of career, I also look at economics and ask what it means to be a man and a writer in America; the question still resonates. Hawthorne sought a place of quiet as a psychological precondition of writing, but a room of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf knew, must be bought and paid for. Hawthorne had no secure income for himself or his family. Yet he had the temerity to make fiction his calling—a choice fraught with psychological conflict in a man who, at every turn, heard the scoffing of ancestors like his great-grandfather, a zealot magistrate who helped hang the so-called Salem witches. “What is he?” Hawthorne imagined these dubious, civic-minded forefathers as snorting. “A writer of story-books!” I therefore suggest the formative role played in Hawthorne’s life by family and particularly by two maternal uncles, Robert and Richard (the latter ignored until now), to help understand the psychological causes of Hawthorne’s early lameness and its lasting effects.

My account of Hawthorne thus addresses aspects of his life and time that other biographers have not explored.