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  • 2 Hawthorne
  • Thomas R. Mitchell

It was a good year for Hawthorne. As one would expect, the bicentennial of his birth occasioned an outpouring of scholarship celebrating his achievement. Highlights of 2004 include a special double issue of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review celebrating the bicentennial with essays by major Hawthorne scholars and the Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne featuring a provocative collection of new essays. Also significant are critical studies by Richard Kopley, Philip McFarland, and Magnus Ullén and the first volume of Patricia Dunlavy Valenti's proposed two-volume biography of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne.

i General

a. Books

Over recent decades the reputation of Sophia Hawthorne crafted originally by her, Nathaniel, and their son Julian as an eternally supportive wife and an endlessly devoted mother has been subjected to skeptical, if not outright hostile, scrutiny by among others T. Walter Herbert, Brenda Wineapple, and me. Patricia Dunlavy Valenti's Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, volume 1: 1809–1847 (Missouri) intends to change all that. This first volume in a projected two-volume biography presents a scholarly, thoroughly researched account of the first 38 years of Sophia's life, including of course the first five years of her marriage to Nathaniel. Valenti seeks "to present Sophia on her own terms and to examine her life within the context of her era, not merely within the context of her marriage." Nevertheless, complaining that Hawthorne [End Page 31] scholars have "barely glanced at Sophia" as they have looked at everyone else in Nathaniel's life as a source of creative influence, Valenti seeks to demonstrate that a thorough study of Sophia's life is also justified in that Sophia "exerted the most profound influence upon his life and his writing" (her emphasis). Because Valenti believes that Sophia's life has been undervalued largely because of uncritical scholarly acceptance of Nathaniel's "conception of her," Valenti's strategy in the first part of this volume is to write twin, alternating biographies of Sophia and Nathaniel in order to emphasize the autonomous nature of their lives up to the point at which they met each other—she at 28, he at 33. Thus, of the first 15 of the volume's 22 chapters, 7 are devoted primarily to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

In Valenti's account of Sophia's life prior to meeting Nathaniel, Sophia's year-and-a-half residence in exotic Cuba holds center stage. Describing in sensuous detail her intoxication with the tropical landscape and climate—its heat, its color, and its fecundity—Sophia's letters home to her mother came to be widely circulated in manuscript as her Cuba Journal. As Valenti notes, Sophia acculturated easily, learning Spanish and accepting, largely in silence, the slave economy that supported the luxury of her hosts. Though no evidence exists of a later correspondence and Sophia is silent on the subject, Valenti argues that the Cuba Journal suggests that Sophia in the summer of 1834 fell in love with Fernando Zayas, the son of one of the leading Cuban landowners and political leaders. Sophia's descriptions of her relationship with Zayas move "beyond a romantic rhetoric into a symbolic eroticism." In Cuba she seems to have escaped the excruciating pain that plagued her much of her early life, finding relief in the tropical heat and in frequent physical exertion (horseback riding being a favorite activity).

The importance of Sophia's Cuban experiences extend beyond just her personal history. Valenti, in fact, argues "that as Nathaniel's fascination with the Cuba Journal grew, so did his relationship with Sophia." In the Cuba Journal, Valenti asserts, Nathaniel discovered "a thinking and sensual woman, enlivened with the warmth of passion and unafraid to document the minutest reflection or to expose the most intense emotions on paper," a woman in direct contrast to his "cold" and "reticent" mother and sisters as well as to the superficial and untrustworthy Mary Silsbee. The influence extends to Hawthorne's fiction: "The elements of the Cuba Journal to which Nathaniel was so powerfully attracted began to lay the groundwork for both the recurring figure of [End Page 32] the dark, sensuous woman and the rich, exotic landscapes in some of his subsequent...

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