Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 179include some of his best pieces, such as “The Maypole of Merrymount,” “Endicott
and the Red Cross,” and “The Grey Champion.” And, collectively, they explore the
issues that obsessed him: guilt and secrecy, intellectual and moral pride, the convoluted
impact of the Puritan past on the New England present. For the next five years,
Hawthorne worked as an editor for Goodrich, then became involved briefly in the
experiment in communal living at Brook Farm. Used to solitude, however, he found
communal living uncongenial: its only positive result for him was the one mentioned
earlier – the novel he published in 1852 based on his Brook Farm experience, The
Blithedale Romance. Married now, to Sophia Peabody, he and his wife moved to
Concord, where they lived in the Old Manse, the former home of Ralph Waldo
Emerson. There was time for neighborly visits to Emerson, Henry David Thoreau,
and Margaret Fuller, for the family – three children were born to Sophia and Nathaniel
between 1844 and 1851 – and for writing: in 1846, Mosses from an Old Manse appeared,
containing such famous stories as “Young Goodman Brown,” “Rappacini’s Daughter,”
and “Roger Malvin’s Burial.” There was also time, after Hawthorne left a post he had
held for three years as customs surveyor, to concentrate on a longer fiction, what
would turn out to be his most important work.
The germ of this work, what was to become The Scarlet Letter (1850), can be found
as far back as 1837. In the story “Endicott and the Red Cross,” the narrator describes
a young woman, “with no mean share of beauty,” wearing the letter A on her breast,
in token of her adultery. “Sporting with her infamy,” he goes on, “the lost and
desperate creature had embroidered the fatal token in scarlet cloth, with golden
thread” so that “the capital A might have been thought to mean Admirable, or
anything other than Adultress.” Already, the character of Hester Prynne, the heroine
of The Scarlet Letter, was there in embryo. And gradually, over the years between 1837
and 1849, other hints and anticipations appear in the journals Hawthorne kept. “A
man who does penance,” he wrote in one journal entry, in an idea for a story, “in what
might appear to lookers-on the most glorious and triumphal circumstances of his
life.” That was to become the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester’s secret lover and
the father of her illegitimate child, preaching the Election Day Sermon. “A story of
the effects of revenge, in diabolising him who indulges it,” he wrote in another entry.
That was to be Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s husband and Dimmesdale’s persecutor.
Ideas for the portrait of Pearl, the daughter of Hester and Dimmesdale, often sprang
from Hawthorne’s observation of his own daughter, Una. As he wrote the novel, over
the course of 1849 and 1850, Hawthorne was simultaneously exhilarated and wary.
“He writes immensely,” Sophia reported in a letter to her mother, “I am almost
frightened.” “The Scarlet Letter is positively a hell-fired story,” Hawthorne himself
wrote to his publisher; “it will weary very many people and disgust some.”
The tone or tenor of this “hell-fired story” is suggested by Hawthorne’s general
preference for calling his longer fictions romances rather than novels. It is also
intimated by a passage in the introductory essay to The Scarlet Letter in which
Hawthorne offers an essentially allegorical account of his own creative process.
“Moonlight in a familiar room,” Hawthorne explains in this passage, “is a medium
the most suitable for a romance writer,” because it turns the room into “a neutralGGray_c02.indd 179ray_c 02 .indd 179 8 8/1/2011 7:54:42 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 42 AM