The end a/Judge JYncheon: "A veteran politician, such as he. would neverfall asleep with wide-open ryes, lestsome ene".!)l or mischief-maker . .. shouldpeep through these windows into his consciousness, and make strange discoveries among the reminiscences. projects. hopes, apprehensions. weaknesses. andstrongpoints, which he has heretofore shared with nobo<!J. " fllustration £y Hiram Putnam Barnes. From Nathaniel Hawthorne. The House of the Seven Gables: A Romance (Philadelphia, HemyAltemus, 1892), pt. 2, p. 167, image facingp. 166. Different from Himself: Hawthorne and the Masks of Masculinity T. WALTER HERBERT A former generation of Hawthorne criticism, intent upon locating the "sweet moral blossom" that The Scarlet Letter promises at its outset, seized eagerly upon the following words near its close: "Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence :-'Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred .' "1 Notice that this seemingly straightforward maxim reverses itself midcourse, when the logic driving its opening segment is replaced by its opposite. In the act of proposing the forthright self-disclosure that Dimmesdale never makes, the sentence recommends an equivocal self-disclosure that he makes again and again. Several traits-Dimmesdale's pallor, his emotionally overwrought preaching, the convulsive grasping at his bosom-make it easy for Chillingworth and the reader to infer the worst. So we are ushered into what our own generation of criticism defines as a paradigmatic Hawthornian moment, where self-revelation and self-concealment unite: the moral maxim unsays what it says. Comparable examples abound. When Coverdale reveals his love for Priscilla at the conclusion of The Blithedale Romance, he simultaneously reveals that there exists a body oftruth about Coverdale that the reader will never learn, all those missing elements ofthe narrative that would make that final disclosure make sense. As Hawthorne yields to the "autoESQ I v. 50 14TH QUARTER I2004 269 T. WALTER HERBERT biographical impulse" that seizes him at the outset ofthe "Custom - House" introduction, he underscores the concealment that accompanies self-declaration, pointedly drawing attention to "the inmost Me behind its veil" (GE, I: 3-4). Commenting on this persistent trait, David Leverenz notes that Hawthorne turns his readers into detectives-that students of his work from Herman Melville to Philip Young have convinced themselves there was some "secret" in Hawthorne's life, a bit of personal information that would clear up the mysteries , if onlywe could figure out what it is.~Was Hawthorne mortified by the incest trial of Anstice Manning, as Young proposes ? Was he gay? Was he sexually abused in boyhood by his uncle Robert? Did he suffer lifelong from unresolved grief at the boyhood loss ofhis father?3 Unearthing further biographical information may cast light on these possibilities, or suggest others. Gordon Hutner introduces Secrets and ~mpatl:!Y, a study of Hawthorne's romances, by inviting the reader to resolve that "this alleged 'great secret' cannot be ascertained." He disengages the persistent Hawthornian theme from its presumptive biographical source, so as to pursue a telling investigation of Hawthorne's "rhetoric of secrecy" as a literary motif in itself, with strategic potentialities and deficiencies that playa central role in forming the world into which Hawthorne's writing takes us. Richard Millington's Practicing Romance likewise focuses on literary structure, yet issues of personal disclosure and secrecy enter powerfully into the definition of "romance" that Hawthorne is found to establish. In Noboqy's Home, ArnoldWeinstein similarly enlarges upon the thematics of secrecy as a constituent of genre, but in terms that reach well beyond Hawthorne. "The mythic project ofself-enactment," Weinstein argues, is a peculiarly Atnerican concern, pursued by a tradition of writers that extends from Hawthorne and Melville to Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo. He discusses Hawthorne's Wakefield as an archetype of this tradition, a protagonist who "experiences self as unreal, who appears spectral or 'fictive' both inwardly and outwardly. "4 This paper likewise takes up broadscale Atnerican issues, but concentrates attention on historical and psychosocial pro270 HAWTHORNE AND THE MASKS OF MASCUUNITY cesses that pervaded Hawthorne's personal experience and receive treatment in his writing. The ambivalences proliferating around self-revelation in Hawthorne arise significantly from what was commonplace in his experience, as distinct from any individual peculiarity, namely his compliance with an emerging culture of manhood whose inner contradictions haunted him. Hawthorne chronically fellt different from himself as he sought to perform the masquerade of middle-class masculinity .5 The gender ideology taking form in the early nineteenth century held that manliness is autonomous agency, that the character and career of a real man is fashioned by the man himself. Self-made men act with sovereign self-reliance, as Emerson proclaimed, unlike those whose bloodline advantage cripples them in the competition, or the self-enslaved at the bottom of the social scale. This ideology aided in creating an "imagined fraternity of white men" that claimed identification with the American nation itself, Dana Nelson has argued. 6 The ideal ofself-making served to conceal the gender and class privilege inherent in this "national manhood," as well as the systemic contradictions that entailed chronic tOJrID.ents for men like Hawthorne, who were privileged to live out the ideal. The publication of Twice-Told Tales (1837) first established Hawthorne in the seHhood he had devoted himself to creating , that of a major American writer. His well-·placed male friendships, as Jane Tompkins has demonstrated, helped to place him on this cultural stage. 7 Yet the machinery of privilege did not operate smoothly in Hawthorne's behalf; its workings provide a parable of the alienation of self from self that the ideal of self-making imposed. Leading characters in this masculine masquerade are the successful publisher Samuel Griswold Goodrich and Hawthorne's wealthy college friend Horatio Bridge, who played their parts in October of 1836. Goodrich had published several of Hawthorne's tales anonymously in The Token, gaining reputation as well as profit without any public recognition going to Hawthorne. But when Hawthorne approached him with the idea of bringing out a collection, Goodrich was uncooperative. Then Bridge offered Goodrich a guarantee against losses, but insisted that the offer 271 T. WALTER HERBERT be kept secret, for fear Hawthorne would refuse to accept such a favor from a friend. For Goodrich to back the project, by contrast, would be acceptable: he was a professional associate, ostensibly animated by his professional judgment of Hawthorne 's writing. Grateful for the apparent change of heart, Hawthorne now proposed to dedicate the volume to Goodrich. This dismayed Horatio Bridge, who had actually shown the generosity for which Goodrich was to be rewarded, and he set about dissuading Hawthorne from the proposed dedication, still without disclosing his own role. Goodrich's own selfish interests were well served by the deal, Bridge wrote. "There is no doubt in my mind of his selfishness in regard to your work and yourself.... [W] hen did he ever do anything for you without a quidpro quo ;'''8 From his position as Hawthorne's secret patron, Bridge hammered hOlne the Emersonian maxims. "The bane ofyour life has been self-distrust. ... I wish to God that I could impart to you a little of my own brass. "9 This little comedy illuminates the pretense endemic to self-reliant masculinity. Bridge's help may serve as an emblem for the massive complex of unacknowledged, and often no more than half-recognized, assistance-from family and friends, women and other less fortunate men, both white and black-that was eclipsed by the ideology of self-making, and that supported Hawthorne lifelong. Men who conformed successfully to the ideal of masculine self-making were only distantly aware, if they were aware at all, of this interior contradiction. But Hawthorne was unable to achieve the necessary self-deception. He could not wholeheartedly believe in an identity he knew he had concocted. Knowing that the personhood he put in circulation had no backing apart from his own self-asserted self-sovereignty, Hawthorne felt like counterfeit coin. He lacked "brass," said Bridge: truer would be to say that he knew his brass was brass. The commonplace term-brass-betokens the commonplace subliminal uneasiness of ambitious entrepreneurial men in nineteenth-century America, that the self they put forward, and on which they relied to make their way among other such men, was a fiction. IO Hawthorne was acutely troubled by this dilemma during 272 HAWTHORNE AND THE MASKS OF MASCUUNITY the early years of writing in Salem, before any social confirmation of his authorial identity had taken place, and he was struggling to believe in the self he was trying to form. "Insincerity in a man's own heart," he wrote in his notebook, "makes all his enjoyments, all that concerns him, unreal; so that his whole life must seem like merely a dramatic representation. "II Receiving congratulations from HenryWadsworth Longfellow in 1837 for Twice-Told Tales did not banish Hawthorne's lingering horror of a "witchcraft" that had enmeshed his developing selfhood in unreality: "I have not lived," he told Longfellow, "but only dreamed about living" (OE, 15:251). At the end of his life, when Hawthorne was hailed internationally as a "classic " American writer, he was still enthralled by this "natural horror ofbeing a creature floating in the air, attached to nothing ," and the feeling that "there is no reality in the life and fortunes, good or bad, ofa being so unconnected" (OE, 12:258). Hawthorne's inner distress over this predicament can be glimpsed in a daguerreotype image that survives from the tumultuous period that witnessed his emergence as a public figure , namely the months that extend from his troubles at the Salem customhouse to the publication of The Scarlet Letter. Although it is customarily dated "about 1848," the exact provenance of this remarkable image is not known. Hawthorne's friend John L. O'Sullivan had urged him some time earlier to have a daguerreotype made for purposes of "manufacturing [himself] thus into a Personage," and there is reason to believe that James T. Fields, who published The Scarlet Letter in 1850, paid for the daguerreotype in hopes it would be suitable for promoting the book.'2 The rigid, glaring image is unique in the gallery of Hawthorne portraits for the harsh inner turmoil it conveys, the struggle to attain self-confident self-possession all too apparent (see fig. I). Besieged by the demoralization that this conventional dilemma entailed, Hawthorne celebrated the conventional remedy for it. "Thou only hast revealed me to myself, " he wrote to Sophia Peabody (soon to be Sophia Hawthorne), "for without thy aid, my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own shadow ... and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions." Vesting Sophia with such powers, Hawthorne 273 FIfJ. 1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, around 184:8. Daguerreopype fry Whipple and Black. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-10992. HAWTHORNE AND THE MASKS OF MASCUUNITY transformed her into the domestic angel, who had spiritual force in the life of the antebellum self-made man because she counteracted the paralyzing self-distrust concealed behind his mask of masculinity. "We are not endowed with real life," Hawthorne explained, "and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream-tin the heart is touched. That touch creates us-then we begin to be--therebywe are beings of reality" (CE, 15:495). The domestic angel redeemed the self-made man by believing in him as he wished to believe in himself, providing an intimate assurance that dispelled the nightmare of affectation and self-ignorance. Sophia's first knowledge of "Nathaniel Hawthorne" was mediated through a literary reputation that he had been excruciatingly anxious should not be marred by amateurish early efforts. Her power to make him real does not mean that he told her about his difficulties with Goodrich and ahout Bridge's role in them. She became Hawthorne's angel in part because she came to know him after he published Twice-Told Tales. The spiritual force of the domestic angel thus compounded the masculine masquerade, since the reality she underwrote was his unreality, the hction by which he wished to he known. Hawthorne had puhlished his first novel, Fanshawe, at his own expense in 1828., yet quickly determined that he needed to disown the hook-and asked his friends to return the copies he had sent them. He never came to regard this episode with indulgent humor, as a bout ofyouthful distress long since superseded . On the contrary, the repudiation of Fanshawe was an action essential to the lifelong strategy of his self-making; Sophia learned ahout it only after his death and refused at first to helieve such a hook had ever existed (CE, 3: 308-14). Hawthorne was different from himself even with Sophia, the guarantor of his heart's reality. The concealed self of the self-made man was not only an "inmost Me" pervaded by spiritual tremors that could he allayed through the sacred intimacy of marriage. It was a matter of professional strategy and financial arra:ngements: Sophia was startled when Nathaniel published his campaign biography of Franklin Pierce without showing her the manuscript. And it is highly unlikely she knew anything about the kickbacks to the 275 T. WALTER HERBERT Democratic Party that he had demanded of subordinates during his term at the customhouse.13 Dimmesdale's deception, likewise, follows from the requirements of his professional position, not from some inner necessity. 11111 The chronic dilemmas of masculine self-making take center stage in the The House ofthe Seven Gables, where forthright selfreliant manliness and outright hypocrisy converge to become indissolubly united. Jaffrey Pyncheon is made to represent "the sin oflong ago" (GE, 2: 41), but his career also exemplifies the opportunities and predicaments facing men in the anonymous public order brought into being by the urban capitalist society that emerged in the early nineteenth century. The "confidence man" was a mythic figure of this new environment, as Karen Halttunen has demonstrated in her study of the advice literature of the 1830s and 1840s that cautioned young men against placing their trust in plausible new acquaintances seeking to deceive them. For the "confidence man," the fictions of selfmaking induded deliberate fabrication and self-concealment, aimed at constructing and maintaining a negotiable public illusion , andJaffrey Pyncheon exemplifies the operations of such a figure in financial manipulations, political demagoguery, and interpersonal deceit.14 Pyncheon's acquisition of the family legacy has bankrolled a spectacular career of exploitative self-making. He has made a vast fortune on his own by investing in growth sectors of the antebellum economy, in railroads, banking, and insurance. Pyncheon enjoys an inner knowledge of the new financial systems , making it a custom to visit the "Insurance Office" so as to appraise the current gossip, and to drop "some deeply designed chance-word, which will be certain to become the gossip of tomorrow'" (GE, 2 :270). He creates pseudonymous bank accounts and employs other arcane methods, "familiar enough to capitalists" (GE, 2:234), by which the maze of financial institutions may be used to conceal his maneuvers. Pyneheon likewise exploits the new systems of patronage and publicity aimed at mobilizing mass electorates, securing 276 HAWTHORNE AND THE MASKS OF MASCUUNITY voters' support for political leaders they cannot know firsthand . Pyncheon's political contributions have purchased the support of men "skilled to adjust those preliminary measures, which steal from the people, without its knowledge, the power ofchoosing its own rulers" (CE, 2:274). He expects to be elected governor, but the election will be a sham, concealing the power of an economic oligarchy. And he is likewise skilled at performing the interpersonal gestures of the masculine masquerade. He has pursued his career of ruthless self-aggrandizement by projecting a carefully crafted image of harmless benevolence and unfailing warmth. Yet there has developed "a hidden stream of private talk" that tells the true story ofhis cruelty. Hawthorne declares that moral reality is to be found in "the woman's, the private and domestic view," and emphasizes the "vast discrepancy between portraits intended for engraving, and the pencil-sketches that pass from hand to hand, behind the original's back" (CE, 2:3IO, I22). The intimate spiritual authority of the domestic angel, by which she blesses the systematic self-deceptions of the selfmade , is confirmed by her ability to detect moral flaws that are invisible in the public world ofmen. Phoebe's aversion toJudge Pyncheon marks her as possessing the moral and religious touchstone that Hawthorne found in Sophia; without knowing any ofPyncheon's private story, she instinctively draws back from his gestures of affectionate kinship. Yet Pyncheon himselfis haunted by a partly conscious selfdisgust , so that the outward rebuffs that greet him strike home to an inner misery. In describing Pyncheon's benevolent smile, Hawthorne observes that it "was a good deal akin to the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his bootblack , respectively, a good deal of hard labor to bring out and preserve"(CE, 2:II7). The menial toil that goes into keeping up the smile does not counteract simple malice, which smiles without being prompted; the black smile hides displeasure and inward pain. This blackness flows out of Pyncheon's being, "darkening forth" to fill his surroundings, and becomes the blackness of nonbeing as his dead face is engulfed in midnight: "The features are all gone; there is only the paleness of them left. And 277 T. WALTER HERBERT how looks it now? ... There is no face! An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe ?"(CE, 2:276). The desperation that enters the narrator's voice at this juncture indicates that the "darkness visible" into which Pyncheon dissolves is contagious; and the figure most susceptible to infection is his seeming opposite, Holgrave, who remains alone in the house with the body after he discovers it, making pictures and brooding over what Pyncheon's demise means for his own life. Hawthorne makes a decisive thematic investment in Holgrave as Pyncheon's opposite number, a wholly self-reliant man who takes pride in having no advantages of wealth and family position. His life-story echoes Emerson's praise for the seIfsufficient lad "who in turn tries all the professions ... teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school. "'5 Holgrave too has a record ofad hoc enterprises-as schoolmaster, salesman, newspaper editor, peddler, and now as daguerreotypist. He has "never violated the innermost man," Hawthorne tells us, in "putting off one exterior, and snatching up another, to be soon shifted for a third" (CE, 2:I77). Yet the innermost man crumbles when Holgrave enters the gloom that surrounds Judge Pyncheon's demise, because the demon-ridden nonselfhood ofthe judge and the consummate self-reliance ofHoigrave are fundamentally akin. The assertedly self-made man is perforce a confidence man, who succeeds in "self-trust" insofar as he deceives himself and denies that his existence is conditioned by the vicissitudes and injustices of gender, class position, and economic happenstance. In desperation , Holgrave turns for spiritual solace to Phoebe, exclaiming, "the presence of yonder dead man threw a great black shadow over everything; he made the universe, so far as my perception could reach, a scene ofguilt, and ofretribution more dreadful than the guilt'" (CE, 2:306). Phoebe supplies the spiritual antidote to this nightmare as the two profess their love for each other and their intention to make a life together. "It was in this hour," Hawthorne comments, "so full of doubt and awe, that the one miracle was wrought, without which everyhuman existence is a blank" (CE, 2:307). Phoebe's profession oflove for Holgrave redeems him from 278 HAWTHORNE AND THE MASKS OF MASCUUNITY the masquerade of male self-sufficiency, yet also brings that masquerade to its consummation. The Holgrave that Phoebe loves is a man without consequential family background, pursuing his work as a daguerreotypist in the old Pyncheon house as just another happenstance. Holgrave's announcement that he is a member ofthe Maule family resembles Coverdale's disclosure of his love for Priscilla, revealing that we have hardly come to know this character at all; nothing we have learned means what it seems to have meant when we learned it. The prize for the confidence game Holgrave has been playing is Judge Pyncheon's fortune, to be obtained by marrying Phoebe. As she redeems his soul from the horrors of inner unreality, he relieves her of control over her inheritance. Hawthorne does not indict Holgrave as a fortune hunter, but he assembles circumstances that unmistakably frame such an indictment. In the very scene that centers on Pyncheon's dead body, Hawthorne has presented a procession of his deceased kinfolk, in which we learn that his only son is dead, so that the great estate is to devolve upon Hepzibah, Clifford, and Phoebe (GE, 2:280). Does one read the anxious rhetoric ofHolgrave's lovemaking without being subliminally aware that the judge's secret bank accounts, insurance shares, railroad holdings, and extensive real estate are all staked on the outcome ? Holgrave does not reveal the false pretenses under which he has courted Phoebe, nor does the redemptive bliss that "makes all things true" prompt him to show his true colors. Holgrave mentions quite casually that Phoebe will be assuming the name of Maule when they marry, explaining that he would have disclosed his identity sooner, "only that [he] was afraid of frightening [her] away" (GE, 2:307, 316). Holgrave is simply not burdened by the practical deceptions entailed by his pursuit of self-made masculinity; instead he lavishes attention on the spiritual distresses ofhis inner life. The fate of Pyncheon causes him to view "the universe" as "a scene ofguilt, and ofretribution more dreadful than the guilt," but his own culpability does not come into the accounting. It is handsomely rewarded rather than punished. The interior conflicts of self-made manhood arise in good measure from the systematic exploitation of women, and of other subordi279 T. WALTER HERBERT nate contributors to the well-being that middle-class males claim as unaided achievements. The imaginative power of Hawthorne's work rests in good measure on his incessant probing at the interior contradictions and the emotional dilemmas generated by the ideology of self-making, but in settings that insistently (though often covertly) point outward toward the social conditions that give this self-canceling ideal its appearance of validity. "'Be true! Be true! Be true!'" never stands clear as a summary maxim; it is forever enmeshed in a set of moral failures and enigmas that make a self-made man different from himself. When Hawthorne yields to an autobiographical impulse, he perforce writes fiction. Southwestern Universi!y NOTES I. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, vol. 1 of The Centenary Edition ofthe "WOrks ofNathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et aI., 23 vols. to date (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1962-), 260, 48. Except where noted, all references to Hawthorne's writings are to this edition, hereafter cited as CE, with volume and page number. 2. David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), 230. 3. For embarrassment about the Manning trial, see Philip Young, Hawthorne's Secret: An Un-Told Tale (Boston: David Godine, 1984), 12532 . For Hawthorne as gay, see Edwin Haviland Miller, Salem Is ~ Dwelling Place: A Life ofNathaniel Hawthorne (Iowa City: Univ. ofIowa Press, 1991). For boyhood abuse, see Gloria C. Erlich, FamilY Themes and Hawthorne's Fiction: The Tenacious *b (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1984), lI8. For unresolved grief, see T. Walter Herbert, Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making ofthe Middle-Class FamilY (Berkeley and Los Angeles : Univ. of California Press, 1993), 65-70. 4. Gordon Hutner, Secrets and ~mpatlry: Forms ofDisclosure in Hawthorne 'sNovels (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1988), 1; Richard H. Millington, Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne's Fiction 280 HAWTHORNE AND THE MASKS OF MASCULINITY (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), 44-47; ArnoldWeinstein, Noborfy's Home: Speech, Self, andPlace inAmerican Fictionfrom Hawthorne to DeLillo (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 5. 5. I have discussed Hawthorne's relations to this eInerging culture of manhood in considerable detail elsewhere. See T. Walter Herbert, DearestBeloved; and Sexual Violence andAmerican Manhood (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002), chaps. 3-4. 6. Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraterni !yofWhiteMen (DurhaIn: Duke Univ. Press, 1998). 7. Jane Tompkins, SensationalDesigns: The Cultural Work ofAmerican Fiction, 17901860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 3--39. 8. Horatio Bridge, quoted inJaInes R. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 76. 9. Horatio Bridge, quoted in Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife: A Biograplg (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884) 1:147-49. 10. Joel Pfister, in The Production ofPersonal Life: Class, Gender and the P~chological in Hawthorne's Fiction (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991), has argued that a cultural invention Inore cOInprehensive than self-Inade Inanhood was being asseInbled during this era, naInely the conception that human beings possess personal lives and that these lives have a psychological content. In such a case, any self-awareness of a personhood sustaining psychological experiences Inight be accoInpanied by a sense of its fictive and arbitrary character. II. Hawthorne's LostNotebook, 1835-1841: Facsimilefrom the PierpontMorgan Library, ed. Barbara S. Mouffe, with an introduction by Hyatt Waggoner and a foreword by Charles RyskaInp (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1978), 38. 12. For a full discussion of this daguerreotype iInage, see Rita Gollin, Portraits ofNathaniel Hawthorne: An Iconograplg (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1983), 26-29. 13. Stephen Nissenbaum, "The Firing of Nathaniel Hawthorne," Essex Institute Historical Collections 114 (1978): 57-86. 14. See Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Sturfy ofMiddleClass Culture inAmerica, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982). Warwick Wadlington, in The Confidence Game in American Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), provides a subtle investigation of the constructive features of this new ethos, and the role of "confidence" within it. 15. Ralph Waldo EInerson, "Self-Reliance," in Essqys: First Series, ed. Jo281 T. WALTER HERBERT 282 seph Slater, Alfred R. Ferguson, and Jean Ferguson Carr, vol. 2 of The CollectedWOrks ofRalph WIldo Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1979), 43· ...