Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life Of Nathaniel Hawthorne

by Edwin Haviland Miller

In one of his public disavowals of autobiography, Nathaniel Hawthorne informed his readers that external traits "hide the man, instead of displaying him," directing them instead to "look through the whole range of his fictitious characters, good and evil, in order to detect any of his essential traits." In this multidimensional biography of America's first great storyteller, Edwin Haviland Miller answers Hawthorne's challenge and reveals the inner landscapes of this modest, magnetic man who hid himself in his fiction. Thomas Woodson hails Miller's account as "the best biography of this most elusive of American authors."

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History

648 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1989

About the author

Edwin Haviland Miller was professor of English emeritus at New York University and editor of the six-volume Correspondence of Walt Whitman. Author of Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Iowa), he also wrote a biography of Herman Melville and books and articles about other nineteenth-century American authors.

Reviews

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hawthorne is a tough person to write an interesting biography about, as his exterior life was pretty uneventful. Born in l804 he spent most of his life in New England as a semi-recluse and on the surface, nothing much happened.. He lived with his mother and sister until he was nearly 40, then tore himself away from them with great difficulty, even though he didn’t move very far away. He had three children, a very conventional marriage, struggled financially, traveled briefly, and died at the age of 64.

Most of my interest in Hawthorne lies in his fiction, wonderfully ambiguous about almost all important matters in life. But knowing little about his life, I thought a knowledge of his existence might make his narratives more interesting, and in fact it does. Hawthorne had no interest in autobiography, saying that if anyone was interested in him as a man, “he should make quite another kind of inquest and look through the whole range of his fictitious characters, good and evil, to detect any of his essential traits.” That’s peculiarly modern advice, telling anyone who’s interested in him, to pay attention to his creative output, not to the person behind it. Does Hawthorne have something to hide? Probably, so in an oblique way, The details of his life do help to illuminate his fiction, forget Hawthorne’s statements to the contrary. Often, as reveled in this biography, you can see Hawthorne acting in ways that parallel some of the characters’ actions in his fiction.

For example, one of Hawthorne’s better-known short stories is “The Minister’s Black Veil” in which a minister never takes off his mask. His veiled appearance gives him a strange power over people, some thing like Arthur Dimmesdale’s personal secret in THE SCARLET LETTER makes him a powerful preacher. Miller comments that “Hooper’s black veil transforms a mediocre preacher into a dynamic figure, but at the price of the abandonment of love and family . . .[he] finds the world filled with the negations of “secret sin” which originates in Hooper’s projection of his malaise on the world.” Miller adds that “in life and art Hawthorne assumed many poses and delighted in the masquerades provided by his veils . . . he was an isolate surveying the world from a protective fastidious distance. Miller warns against a critical oversimplification of Hawthorne, though, and generally I think he heeds his own advice.

Where do Hawthorrne’s real life “veils” and “disguises” come from? Hawthorne lost his father at age 4 and was raised by an overprotective mother. He obviously loved his mother and felt obligated to her, but at the same time there was a rebellious streak in him that never really found an outlet. There were severe tensions in his family and it’s safe to say that all of his stories and novels at heart are about dysfunctional family relationships and variations on the the equally dysfunctional ways that family deal with them.

Miller emphasizes Hawthorne’s conflicted attitude toward strong male figures, Herman Melville being one of them. In a way he needed strong male figures, but at the same time he feared them and even felt uncertain about his own masculinity. That’s certainly understandable, given the females that surrounded him most of his life. Hawthorne was not analytical, that’s to say that ideas or ideology interested him. But as a creative artist exploring these familial relationships he was without peer.

There were many influences in Hawthornes’s life, of course, but the tangle of feelings within a family is a key into his work. I think any reader can connect with him here who otherwise might find him irrelevant. For me the book was a success, making me want to reread his stories (he didn’t write that many) and his four longer efforts, THE SCARLET LETTER, THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE, THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES, and THE MARBLE FAUN.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thorough, well-researched life of Hawthorne, with some excellent readings of most of his texts. I found the early part of Hawthorne's life fascinating to read about, but was truly sorry to read of his later souring and his indefensible position on the Civil War. I've always through that "Young Goodman Brown" was a critique of the Pilgrim's views on original sin, but it seems he may have fallen into Brown's error himself. The story of his wife, Sophie, is also touching and sad. Very enjoyable and informative book.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

After p. 145

At this point Miller's narrative of Hawthorne's life brings his subject into his thirty-fifth year. I find it all terribly confusing - and highly annoying. As far as I can tell, Miller has no idea how to account for his subject's most peculiar development. I won't belabor the point, but I will illustrate it in one example.

Miller - and others - have read Hawthorne's early tales biographically, and with good reason. Hawthorne, who stated on more than one occasion that those who seek him will find him among his fictional characters, authorized such readings. And so Miller devotes a short chapter to "The Gentle Boy," one of Hawthorne's earliest tales. Miller writes (pp. 37-8): "It is his quintessential childscape, composed of his memories of rejection and loss, and, to draw upon the description of Ilbrahim's life, 'moments of deep depression.' Ilbrahim's lot is Hawthorne's burden. ... The depiction never altered even as he found fame, established a family of his own, and grew in years. Time healed no losses, altered no perspectives." That character in his ninth or tenth year, mind you, experienced abuse and betrayal of the most monstrous and hideous varieties imaginable, and it was unremitting. Mercifully, Ilbrahim dies.

No wonder, if this was also Hawthorne's burden, that from a very early age, Hawthorne found this world an exceedingly dangerous place - for specific reasons that may never be known with high confidence. He withdrew into seclusion. And as Miller wrote of Elizabeth Peabody (p. 141), his prison was his protection.

Then we have Miller's assessments of Hawthorne's characterizations of his life, expressed in letters, journal entries, etc., as an imprisonment from which he could not free himself, and might well be unwilling to exit even if he could. Miller uses these words: overstatements, gothic posturing, self-dramatization, melodramatic stance, and so on, quite in the sense of discount, minimization, even dismissal, of the information content of these sources of biographical information.

So what exactly does Miller leave us?

My understanding of the biographical method that Miller applied is that one may interpret the life courses of Hawthorne's fictional characters as credible evidence of the author's own, but that when corroborating evidence appears in letters, journals, records of conversation, then characterizations of the same import represent overstatements, self-dramatizations, melodramatic stances of dubious biographical significance. Illuminating perhaps, in ways he doesn't describe, of course, but dubious nonetheless. Preposterous. Beautifully composed and expressed nonsense, but non-sense just the same. And to repeat myself - highly annoying.

I will credit Miller with a very deft characterization and assessment of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, and he suggests a conclusion which he does not venture to state. Obviously he needs my help in this matter.

Sophia Peabody was thought an invalid, most likely a sufferer of severe migraine headache, who became invalided as a side effect of her treatments - which included morphine and many mercury-based drugs. Sophia's relationship with her mother was most peculiar. Well, Mrs. Peabody was most peculiar - living in and through her children, with the intent of reducing her youngest daughter to complete and utter dependence. Mrs. Peabody had decided that Sophia would never marry, and abide with her at home to sustain her (Mrs. Peabody's) vampiric existence. Sophia responded in kind: "We seem bound up in some inexplicable way, so that I feel even her bodily pains." (p. 130) And in response Sophia's health did not improve until as a very young woman, she spent eighteen months in Cuba, where her symptoms vanished "almost at once" (p. 131), only to reappear just as quickly upon her return to Salem. As Miller writes: "It would appear that Sophia's health improved when she was free of her mother." (p. 131). But Sophia exerted great power in her "prison" as well. As her sister, Mary Peabody Mann, wrote, expressing more resentment than she knew, I suspect, "[you] always had just what was convenient, & all the world to wait upon you ..." (p. 130). So on the one hand Sophia's imprisonment was killing her, on the other, it defined her way of being in the world. Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne shared that predicament.

I'm a believer that persons afflicted with complementary pathologies always, always, always find each other. [Once upon a time, I, a rather depressive sort, found persons possessed of narcissistically inflated - not to say disordered - personalities, well nigh irresistible.] So I am not the least surprised that Sophia and Nathaniel were perfectly enthralled with one another, and lived in perfect harmony during the first years of their marriage - before their children entered adolescence. As Elizabeth Palmer Peabody wrote: "If there was ever a 'match made in Heaven' - it was that..." (p. 144). So both partners got what they wanted. Sophia lived in seclusion with a surrogate mother, who attended to her every need, remained limitlessly devoted to her, and whose dependence upon her was complete. She exchanged one mother for another. As Miller writes (p. 132), 'In a sense her greatest praise of her future husband was that 'his vigilance & care are comparable only to a mother's, & exceed all other possible carefulness & watching." And Hawthorne got what he wanted- very pleasant companionship, unremitting, starry-eyed adoration, sex and power that he exercised nowhere else - in a prison of sorts, but nonetheless, a situation that met every need and extinguished momentary impulses to venture any farther than his front door - out into a very dangerous world.

At End.
All I can say at this point is that I glad I'm done, both with Miller's book and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Regarding Miller. It is beyond my power to imagine how this biographer could pen such a bundle of contradictions. His rejection of directly pertinent biographical information in letters, diaries memoirs, etc., one the one hand, that, on the other, corroborate the statements of fictional characters, which Miller accepts as biographical fact. ""If in a depressed mood he overstated, as he frequently did in his all-too-human self-dramatizations, he eloquently voiced the lostness of his fictional wanderers: 'I feel quite homeless and astray, and as if I belonged nowhere.' " (p. 407)

Moreover, Miller's last chapter is entitled "The Crack-up," in which he describes quite thoroughly and vividly the intense and unremitting emotional agony of Hawthorne's last years. But if we believe what Miller accepts as the facts of NH's life excluding as evidence the emotional states of Hawthorne's fictional characters, Miller's account leaves NH's breakdown entirely inexplicable, as if it came from nowhere. Worse he seems not to notice that he has undermined the credibility of his own narrative by all but dismissing the evidence that would account for the origins of this terrible end-of-life scenario. Well, enough of that sort of thing.

Regarding Hawthorne.

I am grateful for Miller's account of NH's crack-up, which derives from letters, diaries, the memoirs of contemporary observers. I do believe this chapter.

Imagine Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, victims of complementary pathologies, in their exclusionary withdrawal and seclusion. All went smoothly - emotionally, until the children born to them grew up a little. Sophia home-schooled, adamantly refused to allow her children to form connections with peers or with anyone outside the home and family, would not allow them to read newspapers, or their father's books, censored their reading, their writing, including their letters, and so on. She never once recognized or valued or allow any expression of autonomy to develop in them - willingly, that is. So she attempted to render them dependent and helpless in the same way that Sophia's mother had attempted her soul murder - hyper-vigilant, unremitting, relentless control. The more so as her husband became more reclusive and withdrawn even within the exclusionary solitude of the family life that he and Sophia created. So during their adolescence these children rebelled. Sustained conflict ensued - which NH could not tolerate. And that's the background of his construction of the writing tower he build on to the Wayside, which I have visited, after his return from Europe, the room which he entered by ladder and trap door in the floor of that room, upon which he sat in his chair while he wrote - or didn't write. And, of course, he escaped the continuing hostile confrontations between Sophia and eldest child and daughter, Una, whose life did not end happily, let us say. It hard for me to imagine more egregious dysfunction, which obliterated NH's imagination and extinguished his power of expression. A really sad story, and a bit difficult to endure.

I am grateful for this chapter because in all of this Miller evokes in me a sympathy for NH that I had not experienced in reading Mellow or Wineapple. Again - yet further reasons for reading more than one biography of any complex individual. I will also say that Miller provides clearer insight into Sophia Peabody Hawthorne's personality and emotional disorders than any other biographer I can recall. I must read Megan Marshall's "The Peabody Sisters" again.

[Gabriela · Rating 4 out of 5]

I argue that this is the best Hawthorne Bio.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Academic and dense, but IMMENSELY helpful in my research! Detailed, comprehensive biography with loads of direct quotes and letters.