SOURCE: Valenti, Patricia Dunlavy. “Sophia Peabody Hawthorne's American Notebooks.” Studies in the American Renaissance (1996): 115-28.

[In the following excerpt, Valenti discusses Hawthorne's editing of her husband's journals, contrasting entries written by Sophia and by Nathaniel in the family notebooks from which the published Hawthorne journals were derived.]

Within months of Nathaniel Hawthorne's death, James T. Fields suggested to Sophia Hawthorne the publication of a series of extracts from her husband's journals. Sophia initially rejected this overture, but her financial situation quickly dictated that she accept the enticing offer of ＄100.00 per installment for the publication of “gems” from her husband's notebooks. Sophia thus began the work of selecting, editing, and copying pages from these notebooks. The first installment, an excerpt from Nathaniel's earliest journal,¹ appeared in the January 1866 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Fields then suggested that Sophia further mine the journals to produce a book, and she agreed. In late 1868, Sophia's work culminated in the two volume publication of Passages from the American Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Centenary Edition, [CE] 8:682-84, 693).

Sophia's editorial procedures were influenced by several factors. First of all, she attempted to assume her husband's wishes in editing for correctness. Therefore, she silently corrected Nathaniel's lapses in grammar and spelling. Sophia was also guided in various ways by Fields, although she developed and enforced her own judgments against his, particularly when these involved fidelity to her husband's text. Finally, she enacted conventional Victorian editing practices. She toned down Nathaniel's words and phrases that might have then seemed crude; she dressed up language that might have seemed familiar or colloquial, and she cut sections (sometimes excising sizable portions of the manuscripts) which seemed to her overly intimate or domestic. In short, to protect Nathaniel from embarrassment before public exposure, she excised and emended his text as any late-nineteenth-century editor might have.

But it was Sophia's own revulsion from public exposure combined with her self-deprecation as a writer that prompted a major editorial decision: she deleted entirely those portions of the notebooks which she had written. Beginning within days of their marriage, Sophia and Nathaniel had kept a common journal in two separate notebooks sold in 1909 by Stephen H. Wakeman, a wealthy collector, to the Pierpont Morgan Library, where the notebooks are housed today. The first, designated MA580, contains entries dating through the fall of 1843. The second, designated MA569, commences with entries following Una's birth and continues through 1852, with several entries in Una's hand and one interpolated entry (Sophia's transcription of a verse-like composition by Julian), dated 1854. The Centenary Edition perpetuates Sophia's deletions by publishing only Nathaniel's portions of MA580 as section vi and his portions of MA569 as section vii of volume eight, The American Notebooks. This “considerable fraction,” as it is referred to in the Centenary Edition (8:687), deserves greater attention than endnotes and notes on textual variants acknowledging Sophia's extant 30,000 words. Her contribution is essential to our understanding of the composition of these two sections of the American Notebooks; furthermore, Sophia's presence illuminates Nathaniel's character in light of the transcendental discourse of the woman who was his wife.

Although these two notebooks were a joint venture of husband and wife, the extant manuscripts present themselves primarily as Sophia's texts. The first words of MA580—Sophia cut out the preceding pages of this notebook—are a fragment of her now and forever enigmatic words: “wife. I could not comprehend why.” Sophia's entry ends this notebook, and her entries begin and end the second notebook as well.

The physical condition of MA580—the “honeymoon journal” as it might well be called—demonstrates Sophia's effort to keep her record of private moments just that. Pages or parts of pages have been excised, sometimes causing entries to be chopped off, to begin mid-sentence, or to appear without a date. These excisions weakened the binding of the octavo leaves, necessitating Deborah Evetts', Book Conservator at the Pierpont Morgan Library, skilful repair of pages in order to keep the notebook intact. During this conservation of MA580, Evetts numbered only the rectos of leaves or parts of leaves, with numbers in the right corner. The editors of the Centenary Edition, however, number every page, part of a page, and stub of the octavo leaves; therefore, the pagination of Nathaniel's published portion of MA580 does not correspond to the pagination found on the manuscript.

Neither Sophia's nor Nathaniel's entries follow a regular pattern in MA580. Sometimes weeks go by without an entry from either spouse, while on other occasions both spouses contribute an entry for the same day. Sometimes spouses contribute several entries, followed by a single entry from the other spouse. Sometimes the spouses alternate entries day by day. Despite these irregularities, there is an antiphonal quality to the entries. One spouse calls, the other answers. Topics raised by one spouse initiate further commentary, direct or oblique, by the other. At other times, one spouse communicates messages or requests to the other, and on several occasions Sophia and Nathaniel used the journal in lieu of letters during the other's absence, Sophia sometimes directly addressing her husband on these pages.

The pattern of the spouses' entries in MA569—the “Family Notebook,” as T. Walter Herbert has dubbed it—differs markedly from that in MA580. Gone is the antiphonal quality of the earlier notebook. Although MA569 spans a ten-year period, the spouses alternate only eleven times, sometimes allowing a year or more to elapse between entries or sets of entries. Sophia makes a total of five lengthy contributions, with one brief remark concluding Nathaniel's entry for 23 March 1848, followed by her unfinished paragraph dated 26 March of that year. Following her initial entry is Nathaniel's brief transcription of Una's words on 20 June 1847 (published as the first entry of CE, 8, section vii). In addition to this five-line transcription, Nathaniel makes four substantial contributions to the notebook, his last, entitled “Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny,” beginning on 28 July 1851 when Sophia departs for West Newton with Una and the infant Rose. The last entry, which begins approximately a year later, is Sophia's and might well be entitled “Eighteen Days with Una, Julian, Rose and Little Turtle and Puss.” In fact, Sophia makes explicit the comparison—or perhaps it would be more correct to say the contrast—between her record of events and Nathaniel's. She remarks with some chagrin, “I wish I had leisure to daguerreo-type & paint the hours as they go as my husband did while I was away from Lenox—but I have not a moment all day & it is late at night before I can sit down to write & then I scrawl as fast as my pen can go & write nothing & that illegibly. My dear husband will be disappointed I am sure” (MA580, p. 133).

The physical description and condition of MA569 also differs from that of MA580 in several ways. Pagination, again in Evetts' hand, is found on the outside corner of both the rectos and versos of this notebook, and this pagination corresponds to that used in the Centenary Edition. Although Sophia did cross out some words or passages, MA569 contains no excisions. Therefore, this notebook does not evince the damage to the binding obvious in MA580. At various points, however, Una and Julian drew and scribbled on the notebook, an example of which—an illustration of the inside cover of MA569—is reproduced on p. xv of Herbert's Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family. The children's pencil and ink drawings, scribblings, and ink blots appear with greatest frequency on pages 140 through 149, the last pages of the notebook. Upon these pages Sophia kept the aforementioned account of daily life while Nathaniel travelled to Bowdoin and the Isle of Shoals. Although it appears that Sophia generally wrote around the children's scribblings and drawing—occasionally striking through a word or phrase, microscopic examination suggests that on occasion the children may have scribbled over their mother's writing. Nathaniel's entries are always found on clean pages.

More significant than the physical differences between the manuscripts are the telling differences between the spouses which are revealed by their entries. Nathaniel's entries appear to be more deliberately crafted around what the editors of the Centenary Edition describe as “portraits of striking character, and other exercises in minute observation” (8:678)—the Concord River, his garden, a visit from Ellery Channing or Thoreau, his time alone with Julian. As if writing to an audience beyond the intimate and immediate one of his wife, Nathaniel frequently identifies persons by first and last names; he is careful, for example, to identify Louisa as his sister. Nathaniel's entries indicate a degree of self-consciousness and formality not seen in Sophia's extant entries which seem more spontaneously a record of their day-to-day life—their meals, their walks, their visitors.²

Although the shared general subject of Nathaniel and Sophia's observations in MA580 is nature and the general environs of the Old Manse, tonal and philosophical differences between the spouses are conspicuous.³ In Sophia's first entry, she records a walk with her husband of a few weeks. Nathaniel chides her that she has “transgressed the law of right in trampling down the unmown grass,” and therefore, he “punish[es]” her by not joining her to climb a hill. “This I did not like very well,” Sophia writes. In her next description, undisturbed by fluctuations between sunlight and shade, she employs an oxymoron: “We penetrated the pleasant gloom & sat down upon the carpet of dried pine needles.” Then Sophia—not Nathaniel—initiates the physical contact which leads to a sexually suggestive position: “… I clasped him in my arms in the lovely shade, & we laid down a few moments on the bosom of dear mother Earth. Oh how sweet it was!” This embrace is followed by “a slight diamond shower—without any thunder or lightening, & we were happiest.” As they observe the surrounding landscape, Sophia notes that without wind, “the stillness was profound. There seemed no movement in the world but that of our pulses.” She concludes this entry with her awareness that “the rapture of my spirit was caused more by knowing that my own husband was at my side than by all the rich variety of plain, river, forest, & mountain around & at my feet” (MA580, p. 2). Displacing descriptions of sexual arousal from her body onto nature, Sophia's comparative structure yokes her responses to the natural world with her responses to her husband. Both produce “rapture.”

In this notebook, Sophia frequently describes her responses to nature in terms suggestive of sexual experience. For example, writing about the first spring of her married life, Sophia compares her love for Nathaniel to the rushing waters of melting snow and ice: “I can rush into my husband with all my many waters & sing & thunder with all my waves in the vast expanse of his comprehensive bosom” (MA580, p. 41). In a 23 April 1843 entry, she writes: “Sunday … soft & sunny after a misty dawn, & the birds sang without end—I felt inclined to respond ‘Yes, yes, yes—I know it I know it!’” (MA580, p. 30).

Nathaniel was incapable of these euphoric responses to nature, however, and he laments this disposition in one entry dated 4 September 1842: “Oh that I could run wild!—that is, that I could put myself into a true relation with nature, and be on friendly terms with all congenial elements” (8:358). Nathaniel similarly remarks upon his inability always to view nature as beneficent. He records that on 24 September 1843, a “glorious” autumn day, “it is impossible not to love Nature; for she evidently loves us. At other seasons she does not give me this impression; or only at rare intervals” (8:393).

In Nathaniel's descriptions, the elements of nature are apt to be unpleasant or even noxious. In the second entry in MA580, dated 5 August 1842 (the first to appear in CE, 8, section vi), he writes: “A rainy day—a rainy day—and I do verily believe there is no sunshine in this world, except what beams from my wife's eyes” (8:315). Frequently relying on biblical allusions, Nathaniel describes the Old Manse as a Paradise where he is Adam, and Sophia is Eve. But this Eden is made less so by its lack of “water fit either to drink or to bathe in.” In this paradise, “Providence does not cause a clear, cold fountain to bubble up at our doorstep” (8:317).

Even Nathaniel's allusions to the Old Manse as “Paradise” suggest his anxiety about temporal happiness in that or any other garden. If Eve represents the first woman, untainted in the innocence of Eden, she also represents the temptress whose offer of forbidden fruit precipitates eviction from that very domain of strifeless bliss. And just as the Garden of Eden had its serpent, the grounds of Old Manse contain a potential contaminant—the foul water source from which the Concord River does not, to Nathaniel's mind, offer immediate relief.

Indeed, in the 6 August 1842 entry, Nathaniel moves swiftly from one paragraph about “the bewitched” new cistern at the Old Manse which stubbornly “remains almost empty” to the next paragraph about the Concord River, “the most sluggish stream that I was ever acquainted with.” Nathaniel continues: “Owing to this torpor of the stream, it has nowhere a bright pebbly shore, nor is there so much as a narrow strip of glistening sand. …” The eel which he catches in the Concord “has the prominent flavor of mud” and the river is “fit to compare” only with “torpid earthworms” (8:318, 320). Nathaniel understands how the putrid yellow lily with “its unclean life and noisome perfume” can come from this river, but he “marvel[s] whence [the white] pond lily derives its loveliness and perfume, sprouting from the black mud over which the river sleeps …” (8:318).

This choice of detail is rife with sexual symbolism. As Herbert rightly points out, Nathaniel views “the river as a domain of sexual filth.” The lilies in Concord River, invoking conventional associations of flowers with vagina, are categorically divided, pure from impure.⁴ For Nathaniel, proximity to the real river's overwhelming sexual symbols—the contradictory female symbols of the noisome yellow and pure white lilies (the flowers Sophia wore in her hair during their marriage ceremony) and univocally repulsive male symbol of flaccid eel and worm, cannot give “the ideality which the soul always craves” (8:321).

For Nathaniel, a re-vision of the Concord River is possible only when he distances himself from it. On 7 August 1842 he writes that, from the top of a hill he can recognize:

some injustice in my remarks. … At a distance, [the river] looked … so etherealized and idealized that it seemed akin to the upper regions. … every tree and rock imaged with a distinctness that made them even more charming than the reality. … All the sky, too, and the rich clouds of sunset, were reflected in the peaceful bosom of the river; and surely, if its bosom can give such an adequate reflection of Heaven, it cannot be so gross and impure as I described it yesterday.

(8:320-21)

Nowhere are the differences between Sophia and Nathaniel more telling than in their contrasting descriptions of the Concord River, for on 24 August 1842, Sophia records her returning from a visit with the Alcotts to the Old Manse via the river thus:

[We] floated down the shining stream. It was utterly still, so that it was impossible to tell where the tangible ended & the reflected began on the margin—excepting that the reflected was more beautiful. … The purple pickerel flower & the gorgeous cardinal & spirea of all colors & arrowhead & pond lilies all seemed rejoiced to be in that fairy world beneath the earth. And the clouds of fleecy whiteness floated through the blue ether down far below us—as if we were sailing in mid-air between two firmaments & all the emerald garniture of earth were poised by the power of counter-forces around us. The yellow water of the river turned all the plants that grow in its bed into pure gold—One might imagine it the golden river of Pactolus & the plains beside it those of the enchanting Greece.

In contrast to her husband's view, Sophia's vision endows the river with positive values. Where Nathaniel sees yellow, she sees gold; what for him was sluggish is for her still. While Nathaniel sees but two types of flower—one which represents purity and one which represents impurity—Sophia sees myriad flowers, all of which seem to rejoice in their beauty. Most significant is the fact that immanence—the very act and moment of floating down the Concord—fosters Sophia's rapturous vision. Nathaniel, however, can achieve some degree of appreciation for the Concord only at a distance from it. For Sophia, opposing elements—earth and sky, real and ideal—create a “power of counter-forces” which cause all of nature to be “poised,” balanced, and held together. A true Transcendentalist, Sophia sees the river as an emblem of the commingling of the real and the ideal. For Nathaniel, opposing elements bifurcate, unbalance, and threaten his vision of the natural world. Thus Nathaniel's descriptions of nature, which engender disturbing sexual metaphors, seem all the more discordant when intoned beside Sophia's clear, sensuous harmonies of nature's bounty and love for her husband.

The shared subject of nature in the first notebook yields to the couple's observations of their children in the second; but Nathaniel and Sophia again differ significantly in their depiction of the childhood anties of Una and Julian. Sophia begins this journal exactly one month after Una's birth, recording her delight in putting Una to her breast. Nursing Una is both a joy and a “privilege” (MA569, p. 1c). Sophia extols the infant's great size, her graceful shape, her serenity, and her exceedingly good health. Even the baby's method of eliminating gas causes maternal pride, for Una “suffers less from wind & colic than most babies—She has so much strength that she disposes of the wind by various indescribable noises—I did not know a baby's voice could utter such sounds—” (MA569, p. 2). Una's sounds are elsewhere described as “bird-notes & warbles” (MA569, p. 9), and the infant evokes praise from family, friends, and visitors as “the most beautiful, majestic, queen like reposeful of babies—a picture—a statue—a born lady—a princess—a dream baby—an ideal child—& every fine name that could be applied” (MA569, pp. 7-8).

Sophia's litany of praise for Una makes Nathaniel's litany of contempt for this child all the more conspicuous. The first item in Nathaniel's hand in this notebook is his transcription of Una's expression of ennui: “I'm tired of all sings” (8:398). Significantly, this entry is paralleled by Julian's similar sentiments which Sophia transcribed at the end of her 23 July 1849 entry: “All the world / seems dreary / every where / I go all the / world seems / dreary …” (MA569, p. 46). Thus the father records the daughter's unseemly world-weariness; the mother records the same sentiments in the son.

Nathaniel's first substantial entry records one day's observation of his children, observations cast in the singularly detached mold of a spectator taking notes on someone else's family. This distance is created by a number of rhetorical strategies. At times he refers to himself in the passive voice or in the third person as “the father.” In a similarly formal manner, Julian is “the little boy,” Sophia, “their mother.” As if witnessing a drama he writes “enter Mamma,” and he repeatedly refers to their lives as a history, one which warrants his clarification of the children's ages. Using the present tense, Nathaniel creates a moment-by-moment account—“Now Una offers. … Now Una proposes …,” which highlights his removal from their activities: he is writing about the lives his wife and children are living. So accustomed must Una be to his stance as writer that when she asks, “Where is little Julian?” she is inquiring, “where is the place of little Julian, that you've been writing about him” (8:399-406 passim).

Una endures a catalogue of her father's displeasure. Her “looks [are] cloudy; her aspect is ominous.” Her talk is “babble,” her requests “exceedingly ungracious,” her objections the “harsh and [ill-bred] little croak of a voice.” Although Nathaniel is troubled by what he sees as her lethargy and laziness, her animated movements are disdained as “sudden jerks, and … extravagant postures;—a very unfortunate tendency that she has; for she is never graceful or beautiful, except when perfectly quiet. Violence—exhibitions of passion—strong expressions of any kind—destroy her beauty” (8:403-20 passim).

Even when Nathaniel grants Una a good disposition, she is “as troublesome as a little fly, buzzing around people.” Her quieting after initial resistance at bedtime is “the blessedness and kindliness of a euthanasia.” And his occasional praise is tainted by oxymoron or understatement as when Nathaniel finds Una in a “strangely complaisant mood” or when “[s]he looks not altogether unpretty” (8:407, 418). Nathaniel's only sustained praise for Una comes in the repeated pleasure he takes in her legs which are “praiseworthy,” “the only handsome legs I ever knew a child to have,” or, at the very least, “serviceable.” Yet when Una attempts to make “her leg … a standing joke,” her father remarks without much enthusiasm that “she is rather apt to repeat a witticism that has once been successful” (8:399, 415, 418, 420). Nathaniel's antipathy toward Una, coupled with his singular attention to her legs, suggest that his hostility masks an inappropriate sexual attraction.⁵

Nathaniel's responses to Una and Julian are decidedly gendered. While Nathaniel castigates Una for volatility, he admires Julian's “sturdy and elastic life; there never was a gait more expressive of childish force and physical well-being …” (8:415). When Una complains of being warm and “opens her breast,” Nathaniel interprets her gesture as “the physical manifestation of the evil spirit” (8: 420), but when Julian runs about nude, Nathaniel perceives that his son “enjoys the felicity of utter nakedness.” Nathaniel records that Sophia's attempts to dress Julian on this occasion are greeted with “cries of remonstrance” (8:402), but when—on another occasion—Nathaniel attempts to dress his naked daughter, he describes her resistance as “a terrible struggle—and she gets almost into a frenzy; which is now gradually subsiding and sobbing itself away, in her mother's arms” (8:406).

Sophia's responses to Una are also gendered, but the mother praises the child for her tranquil, graceful ways while the father condemns the child for her lack of these qualities. And Nathaniel recognizes that he differs from Sophia in their perceptions of their daughter: “When Una is mischievous—which is not often—” (a curious remark from Nathaniel considering that his portrait of her is so unremittingly negative) “there seems to me a little spice of ill-nature in it, though I suppose her mother will not agree to this” (8:407).

This “ill-spice” and “manifestation of the evil spirit” seemed all the more apparent to Nathaniel when the family lived in the Mall Street house while Mrs. Hawthorne was dying. To occupy their days, Julian and Una invented various imaginary scenarios in which they alternately pretended to be the doctors, their grandmother, and the family members who nursed her: “The shouts, laughter, and cries of the two children had come up into the chamber, from the open air, making a strange contrast with the death-bed scene.” Though both children create this incongruity between playfulness and dying, vitality and decrepitude, it is Una upon whom Nathaniel projects these dichotomies of nature. In Una, he writes, “there is something that almost frightens me …—I know not whether elfish or angelic, but, at all events, supernatural. … I cannot believe her to be my own human child, but a spirit strangely mingled with good and evil, haunting the house where I dwell. The little boy is always the same child, and never varies in his relation to me” (8:429, 430-31).

Nathaniel's ruminations on this mysterious commingling of good and evil in his female child are reminiscent of his earlier musings upon the Concord River's coexisting symbols of feminine purity and impurity: “It is a marvel whence [the white pond-lily] derives its loveliness and perfume, sprouting as it does from the black mud over which the river sleeps, and from which, likewise, the yellow lily draws its unclean life and noisome perfume” (8:318). His male child may possess a “tenderness, love, and sensibility in his nature” as well as a “disposition to make use of weapons”(8:424, 434) without provoking Nathaniel's misgivings about his son's character or doubts about his own paternity.

Sophia, however, is much more even in her responses to her children. She is far more apt to narrate without excessive judgment the routines of their daily lives—their progress in history and arithmetic, for example. But she does not stint in her expressions of pride over their acquisition of Christian scripture and its application to their moral life. Self-sacrifice and self-control are the hallmarks of this morality for both children. Una learns that her kindness and generosity to Julian prompt the same behavior from him toward her, and these are virtues both children are expected to demonstrate (MA580, pp. 63-64).

Although Sophia writes with hyperbole, “Never were there such divine children,” she concludes this remark with the paradox that they are “far diviner than if more spotless of blame—” (MA580, p. 112). While she celebrates their virtues, she can also qualify her praise by noting the “singular perception [Julian] often or perhaps sometimes manifests” (MA580, p. 117). Una's putting burrs in Julian's hair and Julian's calling Rose “ugly thing” do not disintegrate her perceptions of these children.

Sophia's last entry in MA580 creates an interesting symmetry with the first in that notebook. In her first entry, she recorded beginning to nurse Una; in her last, she records weaning Rose. While the first set of entries reflected the euphoria of the new mother, this last entry reflects the weariness of the mother of three young children who tends to domestic duties while her husband vacations. But the record that Nathaniel kept of his trip to the Isle of Shoals, published in section eight of volume eight of the Centenary Edition (510-43), suggests that he gave little thought home during that period. He makes only one brief remark—“a letter from Ticknor, but none from home” (8:534-35)—regarding his family. Rather, as Rita Gollin has shown, Nathaniel's record of this trip demonstrates him to be “a man who played cards, sang ‘glees,’ drank appletoddy, and believed in ghosts; a frustrated but persistent fisherman; and an afficionado [sic] of storms.”⁶ He is not man who hangs upon the receipt of news from home. Nor does he seem to be a man preoccupied in mourning for a sister who had died but one month earlier.⁷ Rather, he seems a man who easily disassociates himself from the emotional claims of being a father, a husband, and a grieving brother.

Sophia, meanwhile, is “prostrated” from the heat and nights of sleep interrupted by a wakeful baby. She acknowledges feeling “rather skittish” and anxious, with “a heavy responsibility” (MA569, pp. 115, 110). Yet added to her responsibilities is her husband's injunction that she keep a journal during his absence, an effort which produces no gratification for she judges it so poorly executed. “It is not of much use to write such skeletons,” she concludes (MA569, p. 148). Indeed, the physical condition of these last pages paint a telling portrait of Sophia's life. Sophia's dutiful, detailed, daily record is written around and on top of Una's and Julian's drawing, writing, scribbling, and ink blots. Her very sentences are surrounded and superseded by these children.

The appearance of these last pages demonstrates graphically Sophia's lack of control over her life, just as the content of these pages show her reaching for a relationship with her husband which eludes her grasp. His absence creates a vacuum which “All the grace & loveliness & beauty & goodness & radiant intellect of these children cannot make up at all” (MA569, p. 119). She laments that his letters do not arrive frequently, and when a letter does arrive, it causes a pleasurable physical reaction—“awakening, resting, soothing, thrilling”—followed by bitter weeping. Although she rationalizes that her sobbing is “an offset to my blessedness in having such a husband & such children,” she continues, “but yet it is also because I am not better, more beautiful, more worthy to be his wife & to sun in his love. It should be a celestial angel to deserve him—& I am not” (MA569, p. 121).

If Edwin Haviland Miller is correct to assert that Nathaniel swore off sexual relations with his wife at about this time,⁸ Sophia may here be expressing her grief over the loss of their conjugal relations. Because she is not “celestial” but sensual—the spontaneous lover of nature, the woman physically bound to her children—she feels intensely her husband's physical and emotional absence. And she may well have interpreted his various distancing strategies as his rejecting her because she was not sufficiently good, worthy, or beautiful. The loss of her husband's presence and attention affected her profoundly.

Notes

1. This notebook was thought to be lost or no longer extant at the time The American Notebooks was edited by Claude M. Simpson and published as volume eight of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972). Barbara S. Mouffe subsequently discovered and published Hawthorne's Lost Notebook: 1835-1841 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978).

2. In introductory remarks on his edition of “A Sophia Hawthorne Journal, 1843-1844,” John MacDonald makes a similar observation: “… Nathaniel Hawthorne's journals rarely afford that sort of detailed attention to daily activity which allows reconstruction of those specific conditions which so much determine the mood of individual life. … His wife's journals are different. They revel in detail, often becoming the kind of diaries which Hawthorne never kept. … They are simply a record of day-to-day events made in an attempt to capture, the joy and the pain of life as immediately as it was being lived” (Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal 1974, ed. C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr. [Englewood, Col.: Microcard Editions, 1975], p. 1).

3. In August of 1842, Margaret Fuller also noticed “a striking contrast of tone between a man and a woman so sincerely bound together by one sentiment” (Joel Myerson, “Margaret Fuller's 1842 Journal: At Concord with the Emersons,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 21 [July 1973]: 328). Nathaniel and Sophia had responded quite differently to Ellery Channing's request that he and his bride, Ellen (Margaret's sister), board with the Hawthornes. Nathaniel seemed aghast at the suggestion that he might share his home under any condition; Sophia's response, presumably less horrified by these prospects, is lost.

4. T. Walter Herbert, Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle Class Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 144, 122.

5. Part four of Herbert's Dearly Beloved is an elaborate analysis of Hawthorne's autobiographical deployment of the Beatrice Cenci narrative. Although I do not concur with the line of his argument here, I do agree with Herbert that the tone of attraction-repulsion which colors Nathaniel's relation to his eldest child may suggest an unconscious incestuous fascination.

6. Rita Gollin, “Hawthorne on the Isle of Shoals,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, 13 (Spring 1987): 7.

7. Hawthorne's sister Louisa had died on 27 July 1852 when the steamer Henry Clay caught fire on the Hudson River near New York City. Louisa had jumped overboard and drowned. This tragic incident clearly had not affected Nathaniel's travel plans or made him fear travel by ship.

8. Edwin Haviland Miller, Salem is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), p. 397.