unconscious and to penetrate human psychology in its hidden recesses. He had a spell with
fellow-oddities and writers amid the utopian onion-growing of Brook Farm, then spent most of
his life as a customs official and consul. But always there was the shadow of guilt, and Salem.
Hawthorne transformed his Brook Farm experiences into The Blithedale Romance, and he
used his judgmental ancestor as the villain in The House with Seven Gables. But it was the
chance discovery of penitential material from the 17th century, found in the Salem Customs
house, of which he was controller, that inspired his greatest, deepest, and most moving tale, The
Scarlet Letter. It contains a key passage, written half a century before Sigmund Freud published
his first book, which has been cited as containing the best and shortest summary of what the
whole of psychotherapy is about:
If the doctor possesses native sagacity, and a nameless something more-let us call it
intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeable prominent characteristics of
his own; if he have the power, which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such
affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares have spoken what he imagine
himself only to have thought; if such revelations be received without tumult, and
acknowledged not so often by an uttered sympathy, but silence, an inarticulate breath, and
here and there a word, to indicate that all is understood; if, to these qualifications of a
confidant be joined the advantages afforded by his recognised character as physician-then,
at some inevitable moment, will the soul of the sufferer be dissolved, and flow forth in a
dark, but transparent stream, bringing all its mysteries into the daylight.
In his own day, Hawthorne charmed readers, not merely by his Tanglewood Tales and other
children's stories, but by his emphasis on the bliss and tenderness of happy married life-the
Hawthorne of his own day was cherished for the moral, delicate, spiritual, sentimental, and
exquisite' qualities of his writing. But, as D. H. Lawrence pointed it in his deeply, perhaps surprisingly, penetrating study of American literature published in 1923, Hawthorne was a complex protomodernist psychologist of the depths whoseblood knowledge' throbbed beneath
the surface of the sunbeams' which the readers of his own day loved. Hawthorne fitted into the kind of cultural gentility for which Longfellow stood, and even the meritocratic values Emerson trumpeted were not so remote from the comfortable middle-class lifestyle, based on family solidity, which Hawthorne seemed to epitomize, however much the hidden depths below them, which he examined, were full of future threats to mainstream American certitudes. But Walt Whitman (1819-92) was altogether harder for 19th-century America to rationalize or digest. He was born in the same year as Queen Victoria herself, from an old 17th-century founding family, with a touch of Dutch blood, which owned slaves until New York State abolished slavery. His father was a patriotic Long Island builder, who named three of Whitman's brothers George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Thomas Jefferson. But of his father's eight children, one was defective, three were psychic disasters, and Walt was, or became, a homosexual. Homosexual acts were capital crimes in all the Thirteen Colonies, the Connecticut law code actually using the words of Leviticus (20:13) on which the legal condemnation was based:If a man also lieth with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of
them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon
them'-this statute, so worded, remained on the law books until well after Whitman's birth. At
least five men were executed for sodomy in colonial times. After the Revolution, Jefferson
proposed that the death sentence for such behavior be replaced by castration; but most states
declined to follow his advice, and North Carolina retained the death penalty for sodomy until