Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family by T. Walter Herbert (review)

Book Reviews 177 pragmatic, and leadership-oriented route lay de-radicalization of the SPA, and an easy transition for many centrists to the commodious compound of progressivism. Pettinger's book is a wonderful recapitulation, both synthetic and analytical , of the intellectual odyssey of American socialism. Central to his thesis is the proposition that American socialists were an integral part of an AngloAmerican -European intellectual community in which scientism suffused political debate. I have the feeling, albeit tentative, that he is so enthusiastic about the thesis that he permits his account of evolutionary and 'scientific' determinism to minimize too far the roles of other more political and historical traditions. After all, the socialists used climate-of-opinion notions to justify their vision of the future in exactly the same way as did everyone else. The general decline of scientism was by no means the only reason for the 'de-radicalization' of the SPA, or the defection of most of its intellectuals into Woodrow Wilson's progressivism. The frailty of the right of dissent in the American democracy and the related power of patriotism had more to do, I suspect, with the fate of the SPA than did the fact evolutionary and scientific determinism fell into disrepute coincident with the incarceration of Debs. Kenneth McNt1ught University ol Toronto T. Walter Herbert. Dearest Beloved: The Hawthomes a11dthe Making ol the Middle-Class Family. Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1993. Sophia Hawthorne included among her circle of friends some of the more prominent women of her day. Her sisters, Mary and Elizabeth Peabody, as well as Margaret Fuller and Cornelia Hall Parks, all made up a circle of intimates with whom she could exchange conversation and philosophical dialogue. But rather than assert herself into the public sphere as these women did, she chose to live vicariously through her husband, Nathaniel, nurturing him while he was alive, and editing and publishing his manuscripts after his death. She believed that her domain was the private realm of the home, and in that sense epitomizes the philosophical underpinnings of the cult of "true womanhood." 178 Canadian Review of American Studies T. Walter Herbert's recent book, Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making olthe Middle-Class Family, explores the concept of "true womanhood " and the corresponding notion of the "self-made man," extensively using the Hawthornes as a kind of case study. It dramatizes the kind of masochism inherent in both these philosophies by detailing the history of the Hawthornes. True womanhood required its adherents to assert themselves by subordinating their desires, including sexual desires, to the establishment and maintenance of an 11 unpolluted 11 home for husband and children. The self-made man must venture forth into the "masculine," "impure" world to establish himself earning a livelihood, knowing that he requires the sanctity of true womanhood to redeem him from his tarnished labours. Sophia idolized Nathaniel, and in turn Nathaniel venerated Sophia as morally supreme. But the practical dynamics of their interactions illustrate the kind of impersonal manoeuvring these philosophies created. In order to exercise her will beyond the limitations of her home, the true woman had to manipulate her husband. And in order to guard his salvation, the self-made man had to "protect" and dominate his wife. Herbert begins "Part Two" of the book by contextualizing both Sophia's and Nathaniel's early lives up to the point at which they met and declared their "premarital marriage" (113). He examines both Sophia struggling with her strong-willed mother's insistent urging of women's rights, and Nathaniel's trying to come to terms with his retiring nature and devotion to the "feminine" occupation of writing, which would follow him much of his life. Herbert places The House of the Setien Gables within the ideology of the self-made man and explores the ways in which Hawthorne examines Jacksonian democracy through the character of Holgrave Maule. The reading is cogent and interesting, and makes clear the competing forces of the declining aristocracy's claims to preeminence, and the national fervour towards laissezfair capitalism operating in Hawthorne's youth. This book relies heavily throughout on both Nathaniel's and Sophia's journals, detailing the...