RE-VISIONING THE “GIRLS” IN HAWTHORNE’S A WONDER BOOK FOR GIRLS
AND BOYS AND TANGLEWOOD TALES: A MYTHIC-FEMINIST ANALYSIS
Jill Nicole Buettner
B.A., California State University, Fresno, 2007
THESIS
Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
ENGLISH
(Literature)
at
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACRAMENTO
SPRING
2010
© 2010
Jill Nicole Buettner
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ii
RE-VISIONING THE “GIRLS” IN HAWTHORNE’S A WONDER BOOK FOR GIRLS
AND BOYS AND TANGLEWOOD TALES: A MYTHIC-FEMINIST ANALYSIS
A Thesis
by
Jill Nicole Buettner
Approved by:
__________________________________, Committee Chair
Nancy Sweet, Ph.D.
__________________________________, Second Reader
Mark Hennelly, Ph.D.
____________________________
Date
iii
Student: Jill Nicole Buettner
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University
format manual, and that this project is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to
be awarded for the Project.
__________________________, Graduate Coordinator
David Toise, Ph.D.
Department of English
iv
________________
Date
Abstract
of
RE-VISIONING THE “GIRLS” IN HAWTHORNE’S A WONDERBOOK FOR GIRLS
AND BOYS AND TANGLEWOOD TALES: A MYTHIC-FEMINIST ANALYSIS
by
Jill Nicole Buettner
In Hawthorne’s companion books, A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys and Tanglewood
Tales, Hawthorne creatively retells classical Greek myths. While entertaining and
imaginative, these stories have received far less critical attention than Hawthorne’s
literature for adults because some scholars consider them to be less complex—a notion
that my thesis challenges. Through a close analysis of each of the mythic female
characters in A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, my thesis observes the ways that
gender functions in the stories. With characters such as Baucis and Marygold, Hawthorne
upholds the venerated “Angel in the House” stereotype, but more often, Hawthorne
problematizes the dark/fair lady dichotomy that he is so often accused of perpetuating.
From the androgynous flower children of A Wonder Book to the powerful, enigmatic
Medea and Circe of Tanglewood Tales, Hawthorne has created increasingly evocative,
non-stereotypical representations of femininity.
_______________________, Committee Chair
Nancy Sweet, Ph.D.
_______________________
Date
v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am greatly indebted to my advisors, Nancy Sweet and Mark Hennelly, for your crucial
assistance in my work on this thesis. Professor Sweet, thank you for your scholarly
guidance, critical insight, patience, thoughtful feedback, warm enthusiasm, moral
support, and faith in me as a student and scholar-in-progress. If I am ever half the teacher
that you are, I will consider myself very successful, indeed. Professor Hennelly, thank
you for your expertise, wisdom, honest evaluation of my work, and encouragement.
Thank you especially for your great generosity in working with me after your retirement;
you have been a tremendous source of inspiration, and I feel honored to be your “last”
student at CSUS. Thank you also to my parents for your support and to Alan Ouellette for
your understanding (and for cooking me dinner every night while I wrote this).
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Acknowledgments....................................................................................................... vi
Chapter
1. FLIGHTS OF FANCY AND MYTHIC INSIGHT: AN INTRODUCTION TO
HAWTHORNE’S APPROACH TO LITERATURE ................................................... 1
2. CHEERFULNESS VERUS COMPLEXITY: A CRITICAL READING OF THE
ARCHETYPAL WOMEN OF A WONDER BOOK .................................................. 14
3. “THE LITTLE FRIENDS”: LIMINALITY AND GENDER IN A WONDER
BOOK’S INTERNARRATIVES ................................................................................ 39
4. DESCENT INTO THE LABYRINTH: VIOLENCE, LOVE, AND REBIRTH IN
THE ABDUCTION NARRATIVES OF TANGLEWOOD TALES ........................... 68
5. WEAVERS OF FATE: FEMININE POWER, FEMALE SPACE, AND THE
“BAD” GIRLS OF TANGLEWOOD TALES .............................................................. 91
6. EPILOGUE ......................................................................................................... 118
Works Cited ...............................................................................................................121
vii
1
Chapter 1
FLIGHTS OF FANCY AND MYTHIC IN-SIGHT: AN INTRODUCTION TO
HAWTHORNE’S APPROACH TO LITERATURE
First having read the book of myths…
“Diving into the Wreck” Adrienne Rich
Hawthorne wrote of his ideas for attempting a new kind of writing—children’s
literature—in an 1843 letter to his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “I see little
prospect but that I must scribble for a living. But this troubles me much less than you
would suppose. I can turn my pen to all sorts of drudgery, such and children’s books &c”
(CE 252). The next time he approached the topic of children’s literature with Longfellow,
he suggested that the two former schoolmates collaborate on a collection, tentatively
entitled Boy’s Wonder Horn (Laffrado 2). Though the project never came to fruition due
to Longfellow’s lack of interest, Hawthorne’s letters to Longfellow outline his writerly
intentions in his companion books A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales. He predicts,
“Possibly we may make a great hit, and entirely revolutionize the whole system of
juvenile literature” (CE 266). By hit, he certainly means popularity on a mass level, and,
thus, financial success. Throughout his life, Hawthorne often worried about money, and
he saw the promise of pecuniary stability in juvenile writing. Because he saw writing for
children as a simpler task than the adult romances he toiled over, it would be economical
to write them because “it would require only a short time to complete the volume, if we
were to set about it in good earnest” (CE 276). Last, he was optimistic that the volume
promised “a very fair chance of profit” (CE 288). It is delightfully ironic that such
imaginative tales were to be the fruit of such unromantic ruminations.
2
Hawthorne’s main objective was to revolutionize the genre of children’s
literature: a genre, according to Laffrado, he thought “encouraged poor writing and false
truths” (2). Most of Hawthorne’s contemporaries believed that children’s literature
should, first and foremost, instruct children in the conservative social mores of the era.
Second, children’s literature should not be fanciful; rather, it should be situated in reality
and everyday life. Against this model, A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales introduce
the imaginative, mythic, fantastic, and exotic into the New England landscape and are
written, primarily, to entertain rather than to instruct, though they manage to do both.
Where other antebellum children’s writers were concerned with outward displays of
morality, Hawthorne’s morals tend to direct the reader’s gaze inward toward selfreflection that takes on a mythic significance in its examination of the psyche. This
introduction will briefly discuss the genre of antebellum children’s literature as it existed
before Hawthorne’s contribution as a way to situate and ground our analysis in a
historical context. We will then examine the creative and imaginative ways that
Hawthorne revised or re-visioned children’s literature. Last, we will outline the
theoretical and critical lenses we will be viewing Hawthorne’s literature through in our
subsequent chapters, justifying the need for a mythic-feminist reading of A Wonderbook
and Tanglewood Tales.
Antebellum Children’s Literature
As Anne Scott MacLeod points out in A Moral Tale: Children’s Fiction and
American Culture 1820-1860, antebellum children’s literature was not particularly artistic
or individualistic:
3
There was little creative imagination or highly personal vision in these
stories; stylistically and ideologically they were remarkably similar to one
another. Like other forms of popular literature, they mirrored the
conventional thought of the dominant middle class in their time; indeed,
their didactic reason for being ensured that they would promulgate
accepted ideas almost exclusively and blur or obliterate controversy. (13)
The generally accepted ideas of the time included the notion that the written word has
power to form the malleable minds and hearts of children. As one unnamed early author
of children’s fiction claims, “It is for the books of early instruction, in a great degree, to
lay the foundation on which the whole superstructure of individual and national greatness
must be erected.” He regrets the fact that “the greater part of the juvenile books in the
United States are foreign,” for these books “give a wrong direction to the minds of the
young” (MacLeod 20). This quote illustrates many important aspects of early nineteenth
century children’s literature. First, the literature was treated as a pedagogical tool, and
second, it was motivated by a strong sense of nationalism. The production of American
literature offering “American scenes and American characters” proliferated in the 1850’s.
Part of the Americanization of the setting had to do with promoting literary
realism, or so juvenile authors thought. The stories were meant to be “true to
nature….and the conditions of ordinary life” (qtd. in MacLeod 41). However, the
necessary moralizing of the stories undercut the realism. As MacLeod articulates,
Both consciously and unconsciously, the authors edited reality in order to
teach morality, with the result that the ‘real world’ as it appeared in the
literature was a curious mix of truth and distortion, of acceptance and
denial of things as they were. It was a muted world that served as
background for these moralistic narratives, vague in outline and
constricted in dimension. (41)
4
The narrative landscape, thus, took on a dull, unremarkable patina. Certainly the
children themselves were far from realistically depicted in their unfaltering piety. For
example, in The Juvenile Keepsake of 1851, a tale entitled “How to Be Happy” tells the
story of an entirely altruistic child named Harriet. “I know I am happy when I am good,”
she proclaims.
“Have you done anything for yourself today?” asks her mother.
“No, Mamma; nothing.”
“Then, now, my love, you can understand….The more useful day has been
the happier one….You can never be unhappy while you do everything that
is in your power for others, without the hope of recompense. Kindness
brings its own reward.” (qtd. in MacLeod 87)
I venture to say that no one knows a real child who is as “good” and entirely selfless as
the saccharine Harriet. As one may easily observe, the profession of realism in juvenile
fiction was often false.
The strong reaction against the “foreign” nature of fairy and fantasy tales was
another part of the “Americanization” of children’s literature. In post-Puritan New
England, fiction itself was criticized as a corrupting force, especially for children. Fiction
was often considered to be frivolous at best and demoralizing at worst. “Books of light
reading,” warned another author, “are as numerous and injurious as the plagues of
Egypt….The ruin of many a young man may be traced to the influence of bad books”
(qtd. in MacLeod 22). Hawthorne’s sometimes friend and employer Samuel Goodrich
was conscious of fiction’s reputation and defended his Peter Parley books and his own
vision of fiction with the following: “I am well aware that conscientious scruples are
entertained by many wise and good people as to the use of fiction in juvenile books….but
5
it appears to me that the argument commonly lies against the abuse and not the use of
fiction” (qtd. in MacLeod 23). He defines this abuse of fiction as the telling of fairy
stories that he claims to have abhorred since he himself was a child. In his Recollections
of a Lifetime, Goodrich argues that these tales
calculated to familiarize the mind with things shocking and monstrous; to
cultivate a taste for tales of bloodshed and violence; to teach the young to
use coarse language and vulgar ideas; to erase from the young heart tender
and gentle feelings, and substitute for them fierce and bloody thoughts and
sentiments… (320)
Goodrich believed that fairytales’ descriptions of “giants grinding the bones of children
between their teeth” promised more damage to their minds (321). Goodrich’s extensive
rant ironically concludes, “In short, had it been said that these books were calculated to
make criminals of a large part of the children who read them, I think the truth would have
been….fairly stated” (321).
Hawthorne’s Imaginative Departures and Mythic Implications
In many respects, Hawthorne’s children’s myths attempt to redefine the genre of
children’s literature by consciously departing from conventions that writers such as
Goodrich upheld. Instead, they provide imaginative flights of fancy away from the
supposedly realistic landscape. Though A Wonder Book’s framework takes place in the
comfortable, familiar bourgeois setting of the Berkshires, in each chapter, the children
take an imaginative journey away from their everyday existences. In another letter to
Longfellow, Hawthorne conceived of a “slender thread of story running through the
book, as a connecting medium for the other stories” (CE 266). This description
emphasizes Hawthorne’s intricately woven narrative threads (and anticipates weavers
6
Ariadne, Medea, and Circe), inviting a deconstructive reading that will be worked
through later in this thesis. The two companion volumes do an excellent job of combining
the “Actual” and the “Imaginary,” as Hawthorne discusses in “The Custom House,” and
his depiction of the actual is often more realistic than the realism of his contemporaries.
For example, instead of angelic Harriet, Hawthorne creates “saucy” Primrose, a young
girl with enough wit, confidence, and stubbornness to challenge the narrator Eustace
Bright’s masculine narrative authority. She is not characterized by sentimentalized ideals
of femininity, and she is a more life-like character because of this. The second chapter of
this thesis will further examine Primrose and the unusual ways that gender is represented
its liminal reading of A Wonder Book’s internarratives.
Hawthorne has much to say about his treatment of the Imaginary. In his preface to
A Wonder Book, he explains,
the author has not always thought it necessary to write downward, in order
to meet the comprehension of children. He has generally suffered the
theme to soar, whenever such was its tendency, and when he himself was
buoyant enough to follow without an effort. Children possess an
unestimated sensibility to whatever is deep or high, in imagination or
feeling, so long as it is simple, likewise. It is only the artificial and the
complex that bewilder them. (9)
This passage best illustrates Hawthorne’s authorial and aesthetic purpose. Instead of
“writing downward,” Hawthorne tends to fix his gaze upward and outward to imaginative
themes and a Wordsworthian vision of childhood, or of the child as “father of the man.”
This ideal is best expressed in “The Chimaera”—perhaps his most aesthetically
successful retelling in its fluid integration of moral and narrative. In this tale, the
Transcendentalist values of individualism and the sublime imagination follow the airy
7
nature of the storyline. When Bellerophon goes in search of Pegasus, the symbol of the
imagination, the only person who has seen the magical horse is, of course, a child. The
child describes his encounters with Pegasus: “And sometimes, when I look down into the
water, I see the image of the winged horse in the picture of the sky that is there. I wish he
would come down, and take me on his back, and let me ride him up to the moon!” (136).
Bellerophon believes the child’s story over the story of a disbelieving “old man who had
forgotten the beautiful things of his youth” (136).
These tales, like many others of Hawthorne’s stories, are parables of the inner
workings of the human heart. Though the stories often tell of an external quest, and our
thesis will follow these narrative threads, the true quest is more of a psychological
journey than a physical one. As McPherson aptly notes in Hawthorne as Myth Maker, the
major trial of the quest involves defeating internal phantoms: “[T]he monsters conquered
resemble the ‘monsters of diverse kinds’ which Hawthorne places in the Heart itself; and
the reward of kingship is related to the individual’s achievement of dominion over
himself” (118). The hero must reconcile his or her own inner light and darkness and
integrate the two opposing forces before he or she can be reintegrated into society. In
order for Perseus to marry a “daughter of the sky,” he must plunge into the mouth of the
dragon and bury its teeth in the earth.
A mythic approach to Hawthorne’s children’s literature can illuminate other
aspects of his moral and artistic objectives. First, unlike Goodrich’s tales or the story of
Harriet, which focus the gaze of the reader outward toward accepted social mores, a
surprising number of Hawthorne’s morals have to do with self-analysis or in-sight. For
8
example, the explicit moral of “The Gorgon’s Head” is expressed in the following
narrator’s interruption: “As a general rule, I would advise all people, whether sisters or
brothers, old or young, who chance to have but one eye amongst them, to cultivate
forbearance, and not all insist upon peeping through it at once” (27). When read
metaphorically, this lesson points to cyclopedean myopia. This tale is filled with
characters that cannot see themselves clearly. For example, King Polydectus sends
Perseus to capture the head of Medusa, who can be read as the collective Jungian shadow
of the kingdom. Polydectus threatens to castrate Perseus in a sense, shouting, “Show me
the Gorgon’s head, or I will cut off your own” (33). It is Polydectus, however, who is
truly castrated. When Polydectus and his subjects behold the true evil within themselves,
they are transformed into stone. When Perseus views Medusa to kill her, he sees her
through a reflection, but when Polydectus views her head, he sees that she is a reflection
of himself. The value of “forbearance” or self-control takes on a new significance. The
mythic moral of this story could, therefore, be to acknowledge and control the darker
aspects of the self.
The moral of the “The Golden Touch” is also concerned with vision. When Midas
acquires the golden touch, he turns his spectacles into solid gold, so that he can no longer
see through them. He reacts:
“It is not great matter, nevertheless,” said he to himself, very
philosophically. “We cannot expect any great good, without its being
accomplished with some small inconvenience. The Golden Touch is worth
the sacrifice of a pair of spectacles, at least, if not of one’s very eyesight.
My own eyes will serve for ordinary purposes, and little Marygold will
soon be old enough to read to me.” (47-8)
9
Midas promulgates a parodic moral and shows that he cannot see what is truly of value.
He must lose Marygold in order to gain wisdom and insight into his own heart.
In another story concerning gold, “The Three Golden Apples,” the hero must also
discern between things as they appear and as they are. When Hercules wrestles with the
Old Man of the Sea, he holds the shapeshifter steadfast as the old one transforms into
various monsters: a dog with three heads; Geryon, “the six-legged man monster”; and a
giant snake (91). Again, these mirror the multiplicitous “monsters of the heart.” The
lesson here is: “one of the hardest things in this world is, to see the difference between
real dangers and imaginary ones” (92). This underscores the idea that, again, the “real”
dangers are the internal ones, and Hawthorne’s imaginary monsters help to shed light on
the shadow side of the self. In the tale of another monster within a labyrinth, “The
Minotaur,” Hawthorne once tells his readers,
O, my good little people, you will perhaps see, one of these days, as I do
now, that every human being who suffers any thing evil to get into his
nature, or to remain there, is a kind of Minotaur, an enemy of his fellowcreatures, and separated from all good companionship, as this poor
monster was. (30)
Hawthorne invokes the shadow side of the personality and encourages self-reflection and
an inward gaze. Though Goodrich would shudder at the “shocking and monstrous”
aspects of these tales, if one takes reads this mythically, one may see that these
introductions of danger in fantasy may help a child deal with real-world dangers
(Recollections 320-21).
Ursula Le Guin articulates this idea brilliantly in her essay “The Child and the
Shadow”:
10
There is no right way to act when you’re the hero or heroine of a fairy tale.
There is no system of conduct, there are no standards of what a nice prince
does and what a good little girl doesn’t do. I mean, do good little girls
usually push old ladies into baking ovens, and get rewarded for it? Not in
what we call “real life,” they don’t. But in dreams and fairy tales they do.
And to judge Gretel by the standards of conscious, daylight virtue is a
complete and ridiculous mistake…Because in these
[archetypal/unconscious] terms, the witch is not an old lady, nor is Gretel
a little girl. Both are psychic factors, elements of the complex soul. (66)
In other words, the true “morality” of fantasy is radically different from that of everyday
life. The stories cannot be evaluated by the outward ethical standards of the children’s
fiction of Hawthorne’s time, and they accomplish something different in their aesthetic
purposes too. Hawthorne’s allusion to a child’s lonely inner Minotaur is, according to Le
Guin, teaching her in the correct fashion. As Le Guin concludes,
The young creature [child] does need protection and shelter. But it also
needs the truth. And it seems to me that the way you can speak absolutely,
honestly and factually to a child about both good and evil is to talk about
himself. Himself, his inner self, his deep, the deepest Self. That is
something he can cope with; indeed, his job in growing up is to become
himself. (70)
Indeed, all of these metaphors involving sight and insight encourage metacognitive
awareness, self-knowledge, and perhaps even gnosis. These are, indeed, radically
different values than those offered by the so-called realistic fiction of the day.
In a number of ways, Hawthorne’s Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales truly do
revolutionize the genre of antebellum children’s literature. His purpose is to engage the
emotions of his readers, pointing them to relevant aspects of themselves, so that they may
achieve mythic “dominion over the self,” as McPherson claims.
11
A Feminist Approach
Since sight and ways of seeing are so important to Hawthorne, another “lens” to
consider is that of Hawthorne as revisionist. First, as established, Hawthorne revises or
re-visions the genre of children’s literature. In his retelling of the classical Greek myths,
Hawthorne purposefully and dramatically changes the tales. He suggests that his changes
are made for the purposes of “purification,” but, especially in Tanglewood Tales, his
revisions often carry a current of subtle feminine sexuality. His wrote his tales during the
height of the Cult of Domesticity, which valued women for their purity and sexlessness,
so it was quite revolutionary for him to sexualize characters like Ariadne, Pandora, and
Proserpina. This, too, is a re-vision, but it is a re-vision of conceptions of femininity. In A
Wonder Book, while his female characters, like Marygold, are sometimes fairly
stereotypical, he allows Pandora and Medusa to approach deeper levels of psychological
complexity. Chapter 2 will examine A Wonder Book’s good and “naughty” girls, fixing a
critical eye on the ways that Hawthorne portrays and sometimes complicates femininity.
Though his myths in A Wonder Book offer a glimpse of the complexities to come
in Tanglewood Tales, A Wonder Book problematizes gender in the most unusual and
potentially revolutionary way in the internarratives between myths. Amidst the tales
proper, a group of androgynous children named after flowers reflects on the stories. The
flower children frolic and play in their comfortable home in the Berkshires and
eventually come of age. Though this might suggest a romanticization of life in rural
America and traditional family values (like other children’s fiction of the day),
Hawthorne accomplishes something quite different. Gender roles are decidedly non-
12
traditional; in fact, gender matters very little in this paradise of children. A liminal
reading of the internarratives in Chapter 3 will examine the children’s coming of age
process and the narrative situation Hawthorne creates in which an approximation of a
genderless society is possible.
Chapter 4 will take the mythic threads of our liminal reading and apply it to the
abduction narratives of Tanglewood Tales. This chapter will analyze mother-daughter
relationships and focus on the theme of sexual violence, reading the Europa’s and
Proserpina’s abductions and symbolic deaths as a type of coming of age narrative or
death of the child. The chapter will also follow the Grail Quests of their mothers as they
seek their daughters to the ends of the earth and beyond, recognizing that the ultimate
result of the feminine quest is self-knowledge and mythic integration.
Last, Chapter 5 will examine the shadowy ladies and disobedient helper maidens
Ariadne, Medea, and Circe and their roles in the masculine quests of Theseus, Jason, and
Ulysses. This chapter acts as a sort of sister chapter or corresponding frame to Chapter 2
because it returns to a more global analysis of how particular Hawthornian feminine
archetypes (the dark lady and the fair lady) are portrayed. In a side-by-side reading of
Chapters 2 and 5, the reader may observe that Hawthorne has grown as an artist in the
difficult years between A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales. His character
representations are far more complex. He constructs the three “shadowy” ladies of
Tanglewood Tales as fabulously complicated characters with self-contradictory
personalities and more agency, power, and artistry than anyone else in either book, male
or female. Though all chapters are feminist analyses of some sort, this chapter will
13
engage most heavily with feminist theory in its deconstruction of traditional gender roles
in Tanglewood Tales.
Under the shape-shifting umbrella of myth criticism, each chapter will examine
mythic themes and the roles and representations of women through different critical
lenses. The different angles or perspectives may sometimes seem disparate or even
incongruous, but the justification for this approach is in the fullness of understanding I
hopes to bring to my readers. As Sacvan Bercovitch argues in “The A-Politics of
Ambiguity in The Scarlet Letter,” Hawthorne’s fiction
impresses upon us: the need for personal interpretation; the inevitably
partial nature of such interpretation; the richly varied experiential bases of
interpretation, the tendency of these partial and shifting interpretations to
polarize into symbolic oppositions. . . .the need to recognize that these
polarities, because symbolic, are never an inherent source of conflict, but
instead they are always entwined in symbiotic antagonism and therefore
mutually sustaining; and, as key to it all, the clavis symbolistica, the need
for faith both in the value of experience (shifting, private, and partial
though it is) and in some ultimate hermeneutical complementarity, as in an
ideal prospect that impels us toward an ever-larger truth. (641)
By no means does this thesis claim a clavis symbolistica to the labyrinth of Hawthorne’s
tales, but I hope that the shifting critical perspectives will point to a more complete
understanding of Hawthorne’s re-visions of myth…and perhaps provide a bit of in-sight
as well.
Chapter 2
14
CHEERFULNESS VERSUS COMPLEXITY: A CRITICAL READING OF THE
ARCHETYPAL WOMEN OF A WONDER BOOK
Though he disliked writing during the summer months, Hawthorne composed A Wonder
Book for Girls and Boys with relative ease during June and July of 1851. As George
Parsons Lathrop says of A Wonder Book’s manuscript, “Scarcely a correction or an
erasure occurs, from the beginning to the end” (qtd. in McPherson 38). This quick
turnover may indicate that Hawthorne took pleasure in this particular process. At any
rate, this was not a difficult book for Hawthorne to write during this time of relative
prosperity and good fortune for the Hawthornes. It was a prolific year for the writer, —
The House of the Seven Gables was published less than two months before—and his
journals reveal a general feeling of almost childlike optimism and pleasure in his natural
surroundings and in his own children. Scholars have also noted that A Wonder Book was
the result of Hawthorne’s renewed self-assurance as a writer. Roy Harvey Pearce calls the
collection a product of Hawthorne’s “flourishing self-confidence after the success of The
Scarlet Letter in 1850” (287).
The following year would be (in part) a time of sadness and trouble for
Hawthorne and his family, but his 1851 spring journals, at least, are filled with a bright
sense of hope. They detail his ramblings in the Berkshires with Una and Julian and the
pleasure the family takes in their idyllic surroundings. The setting inspires the author with
a great deal of optimism, and he states that the landscape “has the impression. . . .of life,
not death. One feels a new season has begun” (American Notebooks 404-05). Just before
summer, he remarks, “I think the face of nature can never look more beautiful than now,
15
with this so fresh and youthful green, —the trees not being fully in leaf, yet enough so to
give airy shade to the woods” (406).1 If one were to read these journals in isolation, it
could be difficult to imagine the complex, brooding, knowing nature of much of
Hawthorne’s fiction for adults (and even of Tanglewood Tales). This Edenic imagery is
much like the “golden age of myth” that Hawthorne describes in A Wonder Book’s
“Paradise of Children”: “Then, everybody was a child. . . .It was a very pleasant life
indeed. No labor to be done, no tasks to be studied; nothing but sports and dances, and
sweet voices of children talking. . . .The truth is, those ugly little monsters called
troubles. . . .had never yet been seen on the earth” (65-66). However, as this chapter will
show, the simplistic paradise of children is not a perfect place, and the introduction of
troubles and complexities serves to provide a richer, if more difficult, existence.
Likewise, through an examination of the apparent simplicity of A Wonder Book, we will
find that the text is not as simple as it first appears, but that this makes it more worthy of
critical interest.
Like Wordsworth, Hawthorne’s transcendent idealistic moments with nature could not
last. A few months after the publication of A Wonder Book, he would revoke these
glowing descriptions of the Berkshires, writing with almost adolescent angst and passion:
“This is a horrible, horrible, most hor-ri-ble climate; one knows not, for ten minutes
together, whether he is too cool or too warm; but he always one or the other; and the
constant result is a miserable disturbance of the system. I detest it! I detest it!! I de-test
it!!! I hate Berkshire with my whole soul, and would joyfully see its mountains laid flat”
(American Notebooks 439). Of course, this often quoted passage is evidence that the
Hawthornes’ time in the Berkshires was not without troubles, but the journals leading up
to A Wonder Book are remarkably positive.
1
16
Many scholars consider A Wonder Book to be more successful than its darker
companion, Tanglewood Tales. As Nina Baym argues in The Shape of Hawthorne’s
Career,
I have suggested that it was Hawthorne’s earnest wish after The Scarlet
Letter to write a cheerful book, and in A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys
he certainly succeeded. One of its reviewers commented that ‘the spirit of
the book is so essentially sunny and happy, that it creates a jubilee in the
brain as we read.’ Unfortunately, when he attempted to replicate his
achievement eighteen months later in Tanglewood Tales, he lost his magic
touch; the second book of children’s myths is a much more grim affair.
(179)
I question Baym’s use of “unfortunately,” but we will leave a prolonged discussion of
whether or not Tanglewood Tales constitutes a Fortunate Fall (a favorite thematic motif
of Hawthorne’s) for the last two chapters of this thesis. In Hawthorne’s Literature for
Children, the first and only full-length book on the subject, Laura Laffrado posits that the
darker tone of Tanglewood Tales is the result of tragedy in Hawthorne’s personal life,
and so he was unable to maintain the (qualified) sunny tone of the companion book. This
thesis will associate this sunniness, in part, with simplicity and acknowledge that some of
A Wonder Book’s optimism stems from the author’s unwillingness to address some of the
darker aspects of the myths he retells, though he covertly alludes to the tales’
complexities. In his “purification” of the myths, he simplifies the mythic characters, at
least superficially.
In the fallen Eden of “Rappacinni’s Daughter,” Hawthorne’s narrator makes the
relevant claim: “Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid
intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions”
17
(195). Hawthorne is seemingly concerned with the “blessedness” of his children’s tales.
In Tanglewood Tales, his narrator worries about how the “blessed sunshine” is to be
“thrown” into the myths (4). The distinction between darkness and brightness brings to
mind Leslie Fiedler’s classification of many of Hawthorne’s female characters into two
groups of archetypes: “fair” and “dark” women: a version of the Madonna/prostitute
construction that this chapter will examine. Hawthorne’s (perhaps unreliable) narrator
states that the mixture of binaries is infernal or hellish, but it is also illuminating; thus, a
mixture of “light” and “dark” may shed light on new insights. In short, this is what this
chapter will attempt to do. It will examine representations of seemingly simply
represented feminine types: Pandora, Marygold, Baucis, Athena, and Medusa and
demonstrate that, through their connections to one another and through Hawthorne’s
sympathy for the “fallen” women, the character types are not uniformly one-dimensional.
Through Hawthorne’s presentation of more “loaded” or suggestive feminine archetypes,
namely Medusa, the simple representations are necessarily complicated, whether they
were intended to be so or not. Though he does not fully achieve the character complexity
that he masters with Medea and Circe in Tanglewood Tales, one may see glimpses of this
in A Wonder Book. The illumination provided by the “lurid intermixtures,” then, will
show that A Wonder Book is not a bourgeois domestic paradise but a text occasionally
“troubled” with ambiguities.
In “Deadly Innocence: Hawthorne’s Dark Women,” Gloria Chasson Erlich argues
that the Fall, and the role of women therein, is one of the major narrative structures of
Hawthorne’s fiction. She declares:
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Hawthorne’s range and interest are indeed much narrower than is generally
thought. They are, in fact, obsessively narrow. Despite the apparent variety of
period, setting, and character, we find that a great many of his plots are really
versions of the Fall, that a large number of his settings are new Edens, and
that a conspicuous number of his characters are representatives of Satan,
Adam, and Eve….The role of women in the Fall brings us to the very center
of Hawthorne’s concern, perhaps to the very source of the Fall itself. (Erlich
164)
In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Beatrice represents the lurid intermixture as the beautiful but
deadly temptress who leads Giovanni to his downfall, though she is not truly at fault. She
is a pawn of her father, the botanist Rappaccini. Interestingly, Rappaccini embodies both
creator and destroyer—God and Satan—in this particular garden. Though the characters
of A Wonder Book are simpler than these, the same Edenic character types apply.
The most obvious example of the narrative structure of the Fall is “The Paradise of
Children.” Eustace Bright claims that “this shall be a story of what nobody but myself
ever dreamed of,—A Paradise of children” (63). Indeed, Hawthorne takes artistic liberties
with this story, and the Edenic Paradise of children is described in a great deal of
imaginative detail. For example: “Whenever a child wanted his dinner, he found it
growing on a tree; and, if he looked at the tree in the morning, he could see the expanding
blossom of that night’s supper” (65). Instead of adult Adam and Eve figures, Hawthorne
represents Pandora and Epimetheus as children. Pandora sullies the paradise through her
obsession with Quicksilver’s box, a fantastically carved vessel. Even though Pandora is
supposed to be desexualized as a child, Hawthorne’s word choice in his descriptions of
Pandora carries sexual connotations. Her Eve-like thirst for knowledge is described as
“pettish” and “naughty” curiosity. Her obsession and coy mischief suggests subtle
19
sexuality, though she is still immature and undeveloped. She sulks, calling the box ugly,
kicks it, and bickers with her more rational playfellow, Epimetheus. She hypothesizes
that there are pretty dresses waiting for her within the box. In other words, she is a
stereotypical representation of an undisciplined girl.
The most effective element of the story is not the depiction of Pandora herself, but
the psychological realism of her curiosity. Hawthorne is a master at dramatizing internal
conditions, and the suspense builds for a majority of the story. The narrator, at times, will
sympathize with Pandora and appeal to his readers to put themselves in Pandora’s place:
“Just imagine, my little hearers, how busy your wits would be, if there were a great box
in the house, which, as you might have reason to suppose, contained something new and
pretty for your Christmas or New-Year’s gifts. Do you think that you should be less
curious than Pandora? If you were left alone with the box, might you not feel a little
tempted to lift the lid?” (69). Bright’s tone sounds teasing, almost goading here. Though
Bright blames Pandora for her curiosity, he invites his listeners (and readers) to be
complicit as well—first in her curiosity and, consequently, in the Fall itself. Bright’s
mention of Christmas and New Years emphasizes that these are ritualistic, transitional
times that contextualize the significant change is about to occur for Pandora in a way that
children can understand.
It is also mythically significant that Quicksilver brings the box, and his involvement
plays an important role in all of the stories this chapter will examine. Epimetheus
describes Quicksilver as a person “who looked very smiling and intelligent, and who
could hardly forbear laughing when he put it [the box] down. He was dressed in an odd
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kind of a cloak, and had on a cap that seemed to be made partly of feathers, so that it
looked almost as if it had wings. . . .[His staff] was like two serpents twisting around a
stick, and was carved so naturally that I, at first, thought the serpents were alive” (67).
His appearance seems to be a mixture of benevolence and possible ill will; his smile and
sense of humor make him seem almost like a Saint Nicholas (to compliment Bright’s
allusion to Christmas). His cloak and “wings” are transitory symbols, making him a
liminal figure, a gatekeeper to neophytes Pandora and Epimetheus. However, his
snakelike staff is remarkably similar to that of the Satanic figure in “Young Goodman
Brown,” and of course, this alludes to the Biblical serpent in the original story of the Fall.
Indeed, he is difficult to pin down, but this is his nature as Mercury—the alchemical
Mercurius—an agent of transformation and complex intermixture himself.
The physical description of the box is also an intermixture of both beautiful and
disturbing images (as are its contents), and the outward ornamentation is as tempting and
provocative as the imagined presents inside. Bright’s narrative displays ambivalence
toward the box: “I am not quite sure that the box was not a blessing to her in its way. It
supplied her with such a variety of ideas to think of, and to talk about, whenever she had
anybody to listen!” (69). For Bright, one of the values of the box is in its evocation of
Pandora’s creativity. Again, the reader is invited to participate and imagine possibilities
in the same way Pandora does. The following description of the box gives an interesting
description of Pandora’s lack of insight:
It was made of a beautiful kind of wood, with dark and rich veins spreading
over its surface, which was so highly polished that little Pandora could see her
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face in it. As the child had no other looking-glass, it is odd that she did not
value the box, merely on this account…Around the margin there were figures
of graceful men and women, and the prettiest children ever seen....and these
various objects were so exquisitely represented, and were wrought together in
such harmony.…But here and there, peeping forth from behind the carved
foliage, Pandora once or twice fancied that she saw a face not so lovely, or
something or other that was disagreeable, and which stole the beauty out of
all the rest. Nevertheless, on looking or closely….she could discover nothing
of the kind. Some face, that was really beautiful, had been made to look ugly
by her catching a sideways glimpse at it. (67-68)
This passage is preoccupied with ways of looking. First of all, the shiny surface of the
wood acts as a mirror for Pandora’s self-reflection, but she does not seem to value
looking inward at this point in the story. Instead, she becomes a sort of Narcissus, looking
only at her outward appearance. The box seems beautiful most of the time, but
occasionally, Pandora will see an evanescent glimpse of ugliness, though it is not
apparent upon closer examination. Interestingly, Pandora can only see the ugliness
through sideways glances, a gaze that is important in A Wonder Book. Instead of being
unreliable as one might imagine, for Hawthorne, the sideways glance enables Pandora to
see what she cannot ascertain through her direct gaze. Pandora also glances indirectly at
Epithemetheus when she suggests, “‘You might open it,’” while “looking sideways at
Epimetheus” (66). Lafrado proposes that this deceptive glance and sly Edenic request
show that she cannot see Epimetheus clearly because she does not observe the horror on
his face (Lafrado 82). This may be so in this context; however, it is important to note that
in “The Gorgon’s Head,” when Perseus looks sideways at Quicksilver, “out of the corner
of his eye, he seemed to see wings on the side of his head; although if her turned a full
gaze, there were no such things to be perceived” (22). Here, through a sideways glace,
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Perseus can see the fantastical but also what truly is there. Though Pandora may not be
able to see herself clearly, she too can see elements of the unseen or the implied, which
are also hints at the world to come.
In addition, the sideways glance carries antistructural or liminal connotations.
Because the unaware Pandora is about to initiate a monumental change for humankind,
the moment where she pauses to decide whether or not to open the box is a threshold of
no return. Her sideways gaze is unconventional, uncustomary, even. (It is interesting that
Hawthorne famously plays with notions of the actual and the imaginary in “The Custom
House,” which was an uncustomary way of looking at storytelling). Indeed, even as
Pandora’s sideways glance provides insight, so Hawthorne himself becomes the master of
the indirect gaze with his own use of narrative irony. Hawthorne’s narrator, Bright, builds
up a great deal of intrigue surrounding Pandora, the mysterious Quicksilver, and the
enigmatic box itself. Yet, as eager as he is to build these expectations, he quickly shuts
them down, scolding, “But you would not do it. Oh, fie! No, no!” (69). Over and over,
the narrator tempts the reader into sympathizing with Pandora and then distances himself
from her through judgment, calling her “very naughty and very foolish Pandora!” (71).
Carol Billman finds this frequent chastisement to be heavy-handed: “He [Bright] renders
judgment on virtually every aspect of the tale, even the box itself…Nor are her playmate
Epimetheus’ faults overlooked: for one, the audience is told that he was too fond of figs
and as a result of his appetite left Pandora alone with the box” (110). Billman, with her
straightforward critique of Hawthorne’s judgemental qualities, misses his narrative irony.
Hawthorne is having fun with his readers at this moment. Of course, he cannot write a
23
children’s book in which he openly encourages children to disobey; this would decrease
his ethos as a “purifier” of myth. Instead, he encourages disobedience indirectly by
tantalizing his reader with the delicious intrigue of the box. Transgression becomes so
much more exciting than obedience. On the other hand, Billman brings up an interesting
point: though Pandora is blamed for releasing the Troubles into the world, Epimetheus,
too, is guilty for his passivity (although to a lesser extent). In this way, both the Adam
and Eve characters are culpable in the Fall. Hawthorne does not indict the feminine as
much as he could have because he distributes the blame between both characters.
Through this and through Hawthorne’s interest in Pandora’s thought process, he shows
sympathy for the naughty girl: a somewhat benign foreshadowing of the Dark Lady.
Hawthorne explains the introduction of Troubles (and Hope) into the world as a
Fortunate Fall. In other versions, for example Hesiod’s, Pandora is created expressly as a
punishment for humankind, but Hawthorne views her in a more compassionate way
(McPherson 59). As in Milton’s Paradise Lost, through the Fall, humanity’s disobedience
allows God to show His mercy and compassion—a gift that would have not been fully
realized had Adam and Eve not disobeyed. Likewise, Hawthorne’s introduction of Hope
makes amends for all the Troubles. As Bright concludes,
I cannot help being glad—(though, to be sure, it was an uncommonly naughty
thing for her to do)—but I cannot help being glad that our foolish Pandora
peeped into the box. No doubt—no doubt—the Troubles are still flying about
the world….But then that lovely and lightsome little figure of Hope! What in
the world could we do without her? Hope spiritualizes the earth; Hope makes
it always new; and, even in the earth’s best and brightest aspect, Hope shows
it to be only the shadow of an infinite bliss hereafter! (76)
If this is so, then the paradise of children was not a paradise at all. Or perhaps it was a
24
paradise of only corporal and tangible pleasures. There were no unseen elements, no lack
of fulfillment, and, thus, no desire and yearning for the spiritual. The paradise of children
is analogous to the first of Blake’s Four Zoas, Beulah, in which Albion—the prototype
for humanity— exists in a state of childlike unawakened consciousness. “The Paradise of
Children” is a coming of age story for Pandora. Though she is represented fairly simply
as a naughty child, the story values the complexities that the Troubles and Hope bring.
This indicates that there is value in both sunniness and darkness, as long as there are
glimmers of hope in the latter. Though Pandora may seem like a stereotypical “naughty
girl,” she is an active subject and a force for change. Her disobedience, though perhaps
unadvisable to antebellum girls, is necessary for the development of humankind.
Where Pandora is a stereotypical naughty girl, A Wonder Book also contains
stereotypical “good girls.” Marygold and Baucis are both unrelenting in their innocence
and goodness—maddeningly so, according to McPherson (70). If the narrator admonishes
Pandora for her pettishness as unbecoming for a young lady, the narrator praises
Marygold and Baucis for the way they uphold feminine domestic values. Both are loving,
obedient, generous, and most of all, they take delight in simple, natural things. As Helen
Collins says of Marygold, “[she] is innocent, trusting, and a lover of home and homely
things; she prefers clay bowls and living roses to gold ones” (17). Baucis is also “content
with the simple and homely, sharing gladly with her husband and all travelers her humble
food and home” (Collins 18). Both are, to some extent, examples of the venerated “Angel
of the House” ideal, which was itself a Victorian stereotype.
Like “A Paradise of Children,” “The Golden Touch” is also a tale of a Fortunate
25
Fall. At the beginning of the tale, Marygold is carefree and spends much of the day
playing in the Edenic garden, gathering flowers for her father. In contrast to Pandora, she
is described as “one of the cheerfullest little people whom you would see in a summer’s
day, and [she] hardly shed a thimbleful of tears in a twelvemonth” (48). Midas, a loving
but myopic father, wishes for the golden touch so that he may provide unmeasured
wealth for his daughter. Quicksilver, again, plays the role as the mischevious agent of
transformation, and Midas achieves power in his own ability to alchemically transform
objects into gold. Though Marygold is known for her cheerfulness, she deeply mourns
the loss of the natural beauty of her roses after her father’s touch turns them all to gold:
“[I]t is not beautiful, but the ugliest flower that ever grew….Such a misfortune! All the
beautiful roses, that smelled so sweetly, are blighted and spoilt!” (49). Midas, however,
still does not value the simple domesticity that his daughter treasures, and he must lose
her in order to truly gain her and know what she already understands. After his touch
turns her to gold, he cries, “I would not have given that one small dimple in her chin for
the power of changing this whole big earth into a solid lump of gold!” (53). We see,
paradoxically, that there is influence in Marygold’s innocence because she understands
what kings cannot see.
Marygold understands the holiness of natural aesthetics (roses over gold) and
domestic values, and she was created by Hawthorne to teach these values to Midas, the
masculine subject (she does not exist in Anthon’s version). However, she can achieve her
purpose by becoming inanimate and frozen—the ultimate state of disempowerment. In a
sense, she is “frozen” throughout the tale because she is too perfect to be particularly
26
interesting. Perhaps only the luridness of intermixture makes a hero or heroine intriguing.
Marigold’s purposes are primarily didactic. She is not allowed Pandora’s psychological
realism. Where Pandora becomes a character in her own right through Hawthorne’s
attention to her mind, the final description of Marygold is of her physical appearance:
“little Marygold’s hair had now a golden tinge…This change of hue was really an
improvement, and made Marygold’s hair richer than in her babyhood” (55). In “Puritans
Preferred Blondes: The Heroines of Melville and Hawthorne,” Frederic Carpenter argues
that in The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun,
a blonde maiden opposes a brunette, and in each the blonde is preferred.
When the ending is happy, the blonde marries the hero; while the brunette is
deserted. Most significantly, the blondeness and darkness are continually
emphasized by the authors until their symbolic intention becomes
unmistakable. And this symbolic intention is always the same. The maiden
with blue eyes and blonde hair is invariably “innocent,” “good,’ and “pure”;
while the dark lady is “impetuous,” “ardent,” and “passionate.” Usually the
moral is clear, but often the reader doubts the justice of this moral—and even
feels that the author, also, doubted it in his heart of hearts. This doubt is
perhaps, the most significant thing of all. (254)
For Carpenter, darkness and fairness are not only moral values; they have physical
significance as well. Marygold’s physical attractiveness—her golden hair—is evidence of
her preciousness to her father and of her inner value and moral refinement.
The story of Philemon and Baucis brings to light another domestic but also mythic
value: the sacredness of hospitality. In quest tradition, the hero (or heroine) often finds
necessary places of rest and nourishment along the way, and Baucis and Philemon
provide for this. If “The Paradise of Children” and “The Golden Touch” are Edenic tales,
“The Miraculous Pitcher” is analogous to the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, at
27
least in regards to its emphasis on xenia. Though the rest of the town is inhospitable to
the traveling Quicksilver and his unnamed companion (presumably Zeus), Baucis and
Philemon take them in. They only possess a crust of bread and a pitcher of milk (in other
versions it is wine), but they give all of their sustenance to these strangers, and, as a
result, they never are without food again. Baucis’s miraculous pitcher is mythically
significant as a feminine (yonic) symbol and counterpart to Quicksilver’s magical staff.
Both have the power to create and transform. Baucis, though she has no biological
children, is nevertheless a classic embodiment of the Great Mother archetype.
Quicksilver calls her “Mother Baucis,” and the milk in the pitcher is symbolic of a
mother’s milk and nurturing of her children. Since countless travelers stay with Baucis
and Philemon, she is, in a sense, a mother to all.2
In contrast to their welcoming home, the community in which Baucis and
Philemon live is a type of wasteland. It is not a physical wasteland, however, in which
crops and children cannot grow. Rather,
never was there a prettier or more fruitful valley. The very sight of the plenty
around them should have made the inhabitants kind and gentle, and ready to
show their gratitude to Providence by doing good to their fellow-creatures.
But we are sorry to say, the people of this lovely village were not worthy to
dwell in a spot on which Heaven had smiled so beneficently. They were a
very selfish and hard-hearted people. (110)
This is a spiritual wasteland, and in the end, Quicksilver punishes the community by
allowing the physical environment to mirror the spiritual state of the people. The fertile
2
In From Ritual to Romance, Jessie Weston discusses the significance of the symbolism of Grail romances
and argues that Grail legends contain record of the secret rituals of ancient fertility cults. The symbols of
the cults, including the lance and the grail (staff and pitcher), are always integral parts of any Grail legend
(Weston). Indeed, the grail itself is often a Cauldron of Plenty, which is mythically significant, since Baucis
and Philemon’s home is a sort of symbolic cornucopia.
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valley becomes a lake, and the people are transformed into fishes. The townsfolk’s
transformation can function as a parody or perversion of Christ’s miracle of the loaves
and fishes—a similar supernatural multiplication of food. More relevantly, it is also a
version of the Circe/Ulysses myth. On the other hand, “there needed but little change, for
they were already a scaly set of rascals, and the coldest-blooded beings in existence”
(121). Like Ulysses’ men when they are transformed into pigs in Tanglewood Tales, the
townspeople become truer versions of themselves.
One day, in their old age, Baucis and Philemon transform into truer versions of
themselves: an oak and a linden tree with bows intertwined. They “embraced one
another, so that each tree seemed to live in the other tree’s bosom much more than in its
own” (122). Like the embracing vines that grow from Hester’s and Dimesdale’s graves,
Baucis and Philemon are also united in death, though truly, it is more of a reincarnation
or rebirth.3 Trees are mythically significant figures that represent physical and spiritual
shelter as well as the connection between the earth and the sky—a sort of axis mundi.
More meaningfully, Linden trees are often associated with the Virgin, again, tying Baucis
to the Great Mother archetype.
This chapter has, thus far, focused on the fair (or in Pandora’s case, benignly
3
Though a mythical analysis of Philemon is not integral to this thesis, Jung wrote about a being he called
Philemon whom he originally thought was part of his psyche, but he later determined that he was a separate
being—a sort of spirit guide: “Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial
insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have
their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations
with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who
spoke, not I….Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me.
At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality. I went walking up and down the
garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call a guru. (Memories 183) Though we could write a
whole chapter on this peculiar passage, I want to emphasize the importance of insight—a characteristic that
is associated with Philemon.
29
naughty) representations of women in A Wonder Book. Hawthorne’s ambivalence toward
fairness and whiteness emerges in his notebooks and other writings. In one of
Hawthorne’s sketches, he describes “the pure, modest, sensitive, and shrinking woman of
America,--shriking when no evil is intended, and sensitive like diseased flesh, that thrills
if you but point at it; and strangely modest, without confidence in the modesty of other
people; and admirably pure, with such a quick apprehension of all impurity” (“Sketches
from Memory” 490). Though, to contextualize this description, it was included as a part
of a satirical comment on English travelers in America, and it very well may be that
Hawthorne disagreed with this statement. The fact remains, however, that these ideas was
present in his mind. Elsewhere, he described the smoke-black walls of London’s Saint
Paul’s: “It is much better than staring at white….The edifice would not be nearly so
grand without this drapery of black” (English Notebooks 370). In other words, the
architecture is richer and more complex with its sable drapery, and darkness is privileged
over light.
This is suggestive of the ultimate dark lady of A Wonder Book: Medusa. She is
more than a Hester or a Zenobia, though. She is a monster, an all-together different
species. Like Medea of Tanglewood Tales, who is described as “serpent-like,” Medusa is
also reptilian, so we may read her as the extreme dark woman because, at one point, she
was a woman. Hawthorne describes her appearance in the following:
The moonlight glistened on their steely scales, and on their golden
wings….Their brazen claws, horrible to look at, were thrust out, and clutched
the wave-beaten fragments of rock, while the sleeping Gorgons dreamed of
tearing some poor mortal all to pieces. The snakes that served them instead of
hair seemed likewise to be asleep; although, now and then, one would write,
30
and lift its head, and thrust out its forked tongue, emitting a drowsy
hiss….The Gorgons were more like an awful, gigantic type of insect,—
immense, golden-winged beetles, or dragonflies, or things of that sort, —at
once ugly and beautiful,—than like anything else….And, with all this, there
was something partly human about them too. (29-30)
In many respects, this is a fairly standard description of the Gorgons. In fact, it is quite
similar to the description in Charles Anthon’s Classical Dictionary, which was
Hawthorne’s primary source. A side-by-side comparison will prove useful here:
According to the mythologists, their hairs were entwined with serpents, they
had wings of gold, their hands were of brass, their body was covered with
impenetrable scales, their teeth were as long as the tusks of a wild boar, and
they turned to stone all those on whom they fixed their eyes. (Anthon 799)
Hawthorne’s fidelity to Anthon is immediately apparent. In some respects, Medusa is a
composite being or shapeshifter like Proteus, another sort of “lurid” intermixture.
However, several things are unique about Hawthorne’s revision. First, Hawthorne brings
the shiver of moonlight into the tale, providing the Gothic imagination that the classicist,
Mr. Pringle, criticizes in Eustace Bright’s storytelling. Hawthorne embellishes the
Gorgons, using descriptive adjectives and figurative language to compare them to
dragonflies. In a sense, he attempts to enter the minds of the Gorgons, imagining what
they might be dreaming about. According to Hawthorne, Medusa is both beautiful and
ugly at the same time, with “the fiercest and most horrible face that was ever seen or
imagined, and yet with a strange, fearful, and savage kind of beauty”—a paradox we will
examine in a moment (30).
Medusa, as object of the quest, is subject, first, to Polydectes’s curiosity and
malevolent desire to harm Perseus and second, of Perseus’s ambition. Rather, her head is;
31
she matters little as a whole. Since we have been discussing sideways glances, we may
also note that Perseus cannot see Medusa clearly because he views her not sideways, but
through a second medium: his shield; thus, he is even further removed from her.
Quicksilver and Athena assist Perseus with all sorts of magical aids, while Medusa,
sleeping and passive, does not stand a chance against these forces. Like Hawthorne’s
Jason in Tanglewood Tales, who, with the help of Medea, takes the Golden Fleece and
steals away while the rest of the world is asleep, Perseus’s attack on the sleeping victim
also is stealthy, if not cowardly.
According to Freud, the masculine dread of the Medusa is the projection of fears
about one’s own fragile masculinity. Thus, Perseus’s and Polydectes’s obession over
Medusa’s head may have something to say about their own insecurities regarding their
masculinity. In Tanglewood Tales, Medea has much to say about the shortcomings of the
male quest, but we will save this for our final chapter. In Freud’s essay “Medusa’s Head,”
he argues that decapitation is analogous with castration, and he claims that terror of
Medusa is, thus, castration anxiety. He posits, “Numerous analyses have made us familiar
with the occasion for this: it occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to
believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an
adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother” (Freud 212). The snaky
hair on Medusa’s head, for Freud, is analogous to pubic hair. The terror and frozenness
(erection) comes from the observance of the absence of a penis. This “horrific” vision of
female genitalia is experienced in relation to an ordinary woman—the mother; thus, in
this context, all women are “monstrous” and Medusa is not unique.
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For Freud, every woman is a “type” of Medusa. For many feminist scholars, for
example, Hélène Cixous, who have reclaimed the Medusa as an empowering feminist
symbol, this is also true, but in a different way. Feminists see Medusa as representative of
a shared fury held by women who have been essentialized and, thus, dehumanized.
According to Victor Turner’s work on liminality, monsters such as Medusa demonstrate
certain perceptions regarding the natural and unnatural. During Hawthorne’s time, people
were particularly concerned with natural femininity or the Cult of True Womanhood,
which projected women as naturally pure and good. Dark ladies such as Hawthorne’s
Medusa (and later Medea and Circe) problematize the notion that there is such a thing as
“true” womanhood, or they provide cause for reflection on essentialist views regarding
gender roles. In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Dr. Rappaccini creates Beatrice as unnatural or
“monstrous” so that she will not be victim to the violence. It may be that the rage and
fury of Hawthorne’s Gorgons is linked to feminine victimization. Their embittered cries
at the end take on a heart-wrenching meaning if one knows Medusa’s history as a
victimized woman. Hawthorne, however, does not give us the back-story, and we must
turn to other versions of the myth to uncover it.
According to Ovid, Medusa was once a beautiful maiden who was raped by
Poseidon in Athena’s temple. When Athena caught them, she turned Medusa into the
snaky-haired monster as an act of vengeance. As Ovid explains in The Metamorphoses:
Her beauty was far-famed, the jealous hope
Of many a suitor, and of all her charms
Her hair was loveliest; so I was told
By one who claimed to have seen her. She, it’s said,
Was violated in Minerva’s shrine
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By Ocean’s lord, Jove’s daughter turned away
And covered with her shield her virgin’s eyes,
And then for fitting punishment transformed
The Gorgon’s lovely hair to loathsome snakes.
Minerva still, to strike her foes with dread,
Upon her breastplate wears the snakes she made. (98)
In this way, the terrifying Medusa is twice a victim; she was both raped and decapitated
through no fault of her own. Though Hawthorne’s version does not tell this side of the
tale (it would have been much too graphic for children), his revision does seem to suggest
some sympathy for Medusa. Hawthorne acknowledges that she seems “partly” human
and mentions her strange and frightening beauty twice. He notes that there was an
“unquiet expression disturbing her features, as if she was troubled with an ugly dream”
(30). Hawthorne’s Medusa is troubled and full of unrest, even in her submissive sleeping
position. These descriptions hint at Medusa’s dark history without acknowledging it
outright and are subtle reminders of the story of Medusa’s rape and punishment. Either
way, they are subtle pointers that Hawthorne’s conception of Medusa is more complex
than it appears on the surface.
Though Anthon does not detail Medusa’s rape, he does mention that she was
pregnant by Neptune and that, upon her decapitation, Pegasus and Chrysaor sprang forth
from the blood of the neck-wound. Her wound, then, becomes a type of womb.
Hawthorne completely omits this portion of the story. However, the last tale of a Wonder
Book describes Pegasus as:
a snow-white steed, with beautiful silver wings….He was as wild, and as
swift, and as buoyant, in his flight through the air, as any eagle that ever
soared into the clouds. There was nothing like him in the world....Pegasus
hardly seemed to be a creature of the earth. Whenever he was seen, up very
34
high above people’s heads, with the sunshine on his silvery wings, you would
have thought that he belonged to the sky, and that, skimming a little too low,
he had got astray among our mists and vapors, and was seeking his way back
again. (134)
Pegasus appears as the pure, unadulterated masculine incarnation of the Transcendental
imagination. Yet, as Gilbert and Gubar note in The Madwoman in the Attic, Pegasus is a
revision of the woman whose death gave him life: “created from the blood of Medusa’s
decapitated head,” the horse is “thus magically linked with female power and female
inspiration” (529). Even though he is represented as pure and perfect, he too is a hybrid
being and composite “monster,” so why is he not portrayed as a lurid intermixture like his
feminine counterparts? Where intermixture is monsterous in the feminine, in A Wonder
Book, its result is beauty when it is manifested in the masculine.
Pegasus’ birth is remarkably similar to the virgin birth of Athena. Athena makes her
presence known in “The Gorgon’s Head,” though it is only a presence; she remains
invisible. She is only knowable by the rustling of her garments and her “melodious”
voice, described as “grave and mild” (29). If Medusa is the ultimate “dark lady,” Athena
is even more spiritual than a “fair lady” because she entirely transcends the flesh. Where
several pages are needed to describe the body of Medusa, Athena remains disembodied
and fully spiritual. She is never given a name, and Quicksilver describes her as being so
“immoderately wise, that many people call her wisdom personified” (23). In Hawthorne’s
descriptions, Medusa and Athena could not be more different from one another, and yet
they are intrinsically and necessarily linked. Though Athena is a virgin, Medusa’s body is
violated in her temple, linking her to the violence. In Hawthorne’s text, Quicksilver states
35
that Athena has “such eyes, too! Why, she can see you, at this moment, just as distinctly
as if you were not invisible” (29). In Homer, Athena is consistently described using the
epithet “grey-eyed Athena.” Hawthorne gives much attention to both Athena’s and
Medusa’s gaze. Last, according to Ovid (Freud notes this too), Medusa’s face is engraved
upon Athena’s shield. The warrior goddess is consistently associated with this shield and
carries it with her always. Though Athena cursed Medusa and ultimately contributed to
her death, Medusa acts as a talisman to protect Athena.
The question remains: is Hawthorne’s omission of details of the Medusa myth an
attempt to simplify the myth for the sake of children? Second, does his hesitation to
problematize the tale by introducing the connection between the mythic figures of
Medusa and Athena betray anxiety about “lurid intermixtures” or even prejudice or onesidedness? An unresolved tension lingers between what Hawthorne portrays and what he
omits or between what his version of the story does and what the myth in its entirety
does. Like Anthon, he could have avoided the issue of rape and just stated that Pegasus
sprung from Medusa’s body. Perhaps, for him, associating Pegasus with Medusa would
have adulterated the purity that the winged horse symbolizes. Yet, Hawthorne seems
fascinated with figurative and literal alchemical mixtures and amalgamations (he
certainly shows this in his representation of Quicksilver), so it seems strange that he
would conspicuously avoid an overt expression of the mixture of archetypal associations
here. He approaches complexity when he describes Medusa as both ugly and beautiful at
the same time, but his analysis does not go very far beneath the surface to explain why or
how she can be both. We know he is capable of teasing out complexities in individual
36
characters, both from his adult fiction and even in his feminine representations
Tanglewood Tales.
We may hypothesize, however, that the seeds of complexity are sown in A Wonder
Book to be later developed in Tanglewood Tales. Though Baym calls Tanglewood Tales
“a grim affair,” like the soot-stained walls of Saint Paul’s, Tanglewood Tales may be a
grander endeavor “because of its drapery of black.” While we may be looking for
complexities that are not there in the case of Marygold, the other three: Baucis, Pandora,
and Medusa (in that order) increasingly approach the intricacies of character that Circe
and Medea achieve in Tanglewood Tales. Hawthorne’s apparent sympathy for Pandora
and Medea also indicate the author’s ambivalence toward “fair”/”dark” lady construction.
It may be that Hawthorne was attempting throughout to maintain the simplicity and
singularity of the “Golden Age of Children” in his Wonder Book. To maintain a sunny
tone, perhaps he feared clouding the atmosphere with ambiguities. In the introduction to
the tale, Eustace Bright promises the children “a sweet pretty story of the Gorgon’s
head,” but, by the nature of the myth he is retelling, a “pretty” story is impossible. By
avoiding acknowledgment of the complex interrelationships of Athena, Medusa, and
Pegasus, Hawthorne does not fully articulate the mythic beauty or insight of the
relationships’ significance. In showing that Athena, the ultimate mythic fair woman, and
Medusa, the ultimate vision of feminine darkness, are deeply connected to one another,
the reader is given the key to deconstructing the binary between darkness and light.
Again, we will see a fuller manifestation of the way the Madonna/prostitute binary
deconstructs in our discussion of Tanglewood Tales.
37
The ultimate effect of the Athena/Medusa relationship is the birth of Pegasus—the
reconciliatory symbol that transcends bitterness and vengeance. In all of the stories, there
is hope in the mythic cycle of death and rebirth. In “The Paradise of Children,” that hope
is made explicit through the personification and embodiment of Hope given to the
children to assuage their troubles. In “The Golden Touch,” Midas undergoes an
ideological rebirth when he discovers that he had the most valuable object, Marygold, all
along (though she herself cannot transcend her objectification). Baucis and Philemon
experience rebirth in their reincarnation as trees. Finally, Medusa should experience
rebirth through her son Pegasus, but Hawthorne does not make the final move to grant
her this. He does not acknowledge this as one last (and perhaps most important)
Fortunate Fall, which is unfortunate, indeed.
And so, A Wonder Book, by the nature of the stories it tells, is not as sunny as it
appears upon a first reading. Anytime one begins to pull apart the narrative threads, neat,
organized conceptions cannot hold. Perhaps, though, this is, again, a Fortunate Fall.
When we are unable to place Hawthorne’s characters into “types,” it allows us to take a
step back and appreciate the complexity in spite of potential bewilderment. We may not
fully understand what Medusa “is,” but we must learn to accept the mystery. There is
freedom, I believe, in resisting a pigeonhole approach, and mythic ways of reading
require this flexibility in the reader. In regards, once more, to the “lurid intermixture of
emotions,” Gloria Chasson Erlich puts it best: “The blaze is infernal but also
illuminating, like the knowledge of good and evil gained from the forbidden fruit. If man
does not achieve this torturing double-view of woman, the painfully paradoxical
38
understanding, he will be, like [The Marble Faun’s] Donatello before his fall, charming
but trivial (173). Indeed, if one is able to better see complications and complexities, one
may sacrifice cheerfulness. Innocence may be lost, but as Pandora’s story shows us,
something far better is gained.
39
Chapter 3
‘THE LITTLE FRIENDS”: LIMINALITY AND GENDER IN A WONDER BOOK’S
INTERNARRATIVES
Besides “sunniness” (or lack thereof), one of the major differences between A
Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales is A Wonder Book’s use of internarratives.
Tanglewood Tales does not use framed narratives; and, though several scholars have
commented upon this,4 none, in my opinion, has offered particularly persuasive
explanations as to why Hawthorne made this choice. Elizabeth Peck discusses the
apparent “non-sexism” of these framed narratives; yet she is speculatory as to why the
children are created so androgynously. She thoroughly illustrates the balanced nature of
the way the children are genderized and the fact that gender is often de-emphasized, but
she also cites the aforementioned assertion by Helen Collins that the adult mythic
characters of A Wonder Book are usually female stereotypes. Why, she asks, would
Hawthorne be more “progressive” in the creation of his young characters? We have, in
the previous chapter, problematized the assertion that Hawthorne’s women are
characterized by “two opposing and limited types” and have shown that Pandora and
Medusa are more complex than they appear, but they still fall into the dark/fair
dichotomy in many respects.
Moreover, the “flower children’s” representations complicate an easy explanation
of Hawthorne’s treatment of gender. Peck’s explanation for the unusually rambunctious
girls is that the internarratives reflect his personal experience with his own children.
4
Baym, McPherson and Laffrado all note this distinction between the companion works.
40
According to Hawthorne’s journals, his daughter Una was bolder than her brother Julian,
and Peck posits that this may have been the reason that Hawthorne placed females
“momentarily in a primary position: hence, A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, instead of
his working title, Boy’s Wonder Horn” (118). Certainly, biography may have been an
influential factor. This chapter, however, will explore the indefinite gender roles through
a liminal reading of A Wonder Book’s internarratives. We are defining liminality through
the lens of anthropologist Victor Turner’s work on the subject: as a period during
important rites of passage in which neophytes enter a subjunctive and indefinite space
between fixed identities. Though the liminal stage can be found in any significant lifechange, this chapter will focus specifically on adolescence as a liminal period. We can
come to a better understanding of some of the ambiguous characteristics of the flower
children of Tanglewood manor if we read them as a community of transitory and
statusless neophytes participating in the transformative act of telling and listening to
myths or sacral metatexts. Our reading moves chronologically through the internarratives
as Hawthorne guides his readers through the passage of the seasons. We focus
specifically upon the physical surroundings of Tanglewood manor because they are the
most ostensible examples of liminal motifs and the corresponding process that the
neophytes are undergoing. From the misty autumnal forest at the beginning to the clarity
of vision achieved atop the mountain summit in late spring, the children achieve a new
sense of maturity through their narrative and vicarious experience of the retold Greek
myths.
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Turner’s ideas on liminality stem from Arnold van Gennep’s Rites de Passage,
published in 1909, in which van Gennep outlines the three stages of liminal passage:
separation, limen, and aggregation. The liminal stage of betwixt and between is not easily
defined. Turner describes the intiate as moving “from one [stage] to another [finding]
himself physically and magico-religiously in a special situation for a certain length in
time: he wavers between two worlds” (van Gennep 18). Perhaps because of its ambiguity,
Turner finds the liminal stage particularly interesting and focuses much of his attention
on this specific period of passage. He outlines his definition of the liminal most clearly in
his chapter entitled “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage” in
The Forest of Symbols. Here, Turner defines liminal rites of passage as “rites which
accompany every change of place, state, social position and age” (94). Turner argues that
the earlier state and the later state represent relatively stable conditions, but the state of
the “passenger” traveling between the two is ambiguous: “he passes through a realm that
has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming stage” (“Betwixt” 94).
First, it is important to note that the structure of the internarrative is, by its very
nature, a liminal phenomenon. It looks both backward at the previous story and forward
to the following story. It acts as a Janusian threshold or negotiable space between the
tales “proper.” In focusing on the frames instead of the tales themselves, we are, as
Derrida claims to accomplish in The Truth in Painting, “writing around” the stories
(Derrida 13). The process of writing around opens up space for multiple interpretations.
Indeed, a liminal reading embraces potentiality, “delights in disorder and dwells in
possibility” (Hennelly “Carmilla”). For Derrida, a particular sort of frame, which he calls
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the passe-partout (French for the matting in a picture frame), is, by its nature, in a space
of betwixt and between:
Neither inside nor outside, it spaces itself without letting itself be framed
but it does not stand outside the frame. It works the frame, makes it work,
lets it work, gives it work to do. . . .It is situated. It situates between the
visible edging and the phantom in the center, from which we fascinate. . .
Between the outside and the inside, between the external and internal
edge-line, the framer and the framed, the figure and the ground. . . .and so
one for any two-faced opposition. (11-12)
We may read the frames, or internarratives, as a sort of passe-partout, with the book
covers functioning as the actual frame, while the stories are the art: that upon which we
fascinate, or in this case, “wonder” at. In fact, the very title of A Wonder Book suggests
both awe and uncertainty. For Derrida, though, the frames are as artful as the inset art.
This is certainly the case with A Wonder Book as well; as this chapter will argue, the
internarratives are more interesting and ambiguous than the tales proper when it comes to
representations of gender. At any rate, the existence of the frame within the frame, or the
tale within the tale, begins to deconstruct these “two-faced oppositions” because it brings
into question the dialectic of outside versus inside. Indeed, the purpose of a liminal
experience, for Turner, is to question the fixed nature of identity. In a broader sense, as
Wolfgang Iser has argued, fiction itself is a liminal construct, being neither completely
fact nor entirely imagination. It is a third term between the two, making fact matter and
imagination take form: “This act of fictionalizing cannot be deduced from the repeated
reality and so clearly brings into play an imaginary quality which links up with the reality
reproduced in the text. Thus the fictionalizing act converts the reality reproduced into a
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sign which endows the imaginary with an articulate gestalt” (Iser 205).5 In form alone,
the framed narratives of A Wonder Book invite a liminal reading.
Liminal imagery often distinguishes sites of potentiality: thresholds, doors,
(magic) portals, “tombs and wombs”—places that provide for movement, transition,
change, and creation (Turner “Betwixt” 99). It is fitting, then, that A Wonder Book opens
with multiple images of thresholds. The first internarrative begins on a “fine autumnal
morning,” and autumn is the season of fruition and visible environmental changes
(Wonder Book 13). The children are planning a nutting expedition in a misty atmosphere,
which obscures the natural surroundings:
[They] were waiting for the mists to roll up the hill-slopes, and for the sun
to pour the warmth of the Indian summer over the fields and pastures, and
into the nooks of the many-colored woods. . . . As yet, however, the
morning mist filled up the whole length and breadth of the valley. . . .It
completely hid everything beyond that distance, except a few ruddy or
yellow tree-tops, which here and there emerged, and were glorified by the
early sunshine, as was likewise the broad surface of the mist. . . . Four or
five miles off to the southward rose the summit of Monument Mountain,
and seemed to be floating on a cloud. Some fifteen miles farther away, in
the same direction, appeared the loftier Dome of Taconic, looking blue
and indistinct, and hardly so substantial as the vapory sea that almost
rolled over it. The nearer hills, which bordered the valley, were half
submerged, and were specked with little cloud-wreaths all the way to their
tops. On the whole, there was so much cloud, and so little solid earth that
it had the effect of a vision. (13)
Mist is also highly liminal imagery because it hides boundaries, obscures distances, and
makes objects appear indistinct and different from the way they look in broad daylight. A
person standing in the midst of a low cloud will not be able to see what is behind her, nor
Similar distinctions can be drawn between the role of myth and the “real” lives of those listening to it or
performing the rituals associated with it. One should not make the false distinction between the “fictional”
myth and the lives of those who engage with it because, for all intensive purposes, the two are the same in
the sense that they are part of a greater whole.
5
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what is before her. If only for a moment, she “wavers between two worlds” (van Gennep
18). Though this is a vapor that renders the landscape indistinguishable, it is not an
ominous or spectral fog, for it is warmed by sunlight. Further, fog is neither water nor air;
it is something between the two—a hybrid phenomenon like the neophytes themselves.
The two sizeable mountain landmarks that endow the setting with a sense of realism
become “blue and indistinct, and hardly so substantial as the vapory sea that rolled over
it” (13). The structure of the mountains and the anti-structure of the fog mix to produce a
new landscape—“a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas. . . .
may arise” (Turner “Betwixt” 97). The observer’s understanding of what is actual and
what is illusory becomes uncertain. Monument Mountain, which appears to be floating on
a cloud, becomes a sort of Mount Olympus, transporting the initiates back to the age of
classical mythology. Liminal imagery, such as mist, and liminal times, such as the
breaking of dawn are significant to our reading because they indicate to the reader that a
transition is happening. Physical, observable, outward changes such as these also indicate
that a similar internal or spiritual condition is occurring within the initiates. Hawthorne’s
narrator states that the lack of solid earth and the abundance of cloud lend the “effect of a
vision” (13). Indeed, the liminal stage is often characterized by visions, dreams, and,
especially in this case, stories. The purpose of the sacra is to teach gnosis, or sacred
cultural knowledge which initiates learn in the liminal stage. We will discuss the role of
sacra and gnosis later in this chapter.
Once we are familiarized with the Berkshires, Hawthorne also introduces the
children, but he does so in an unusually vague manner: “The children above-mentioned,
45
being as full of life as they could hold, kept overflowing from the porch of Tanglewood,
and scampering along the gravel-walk, or rushing across the dewy herbage of the lawn. I
can hardly tell how many of these small people there were; not less [than] nine or ten,
however, no more than a dozen of all sorts, sizes, and ages, whether girls or boys” (1314). First of all, this description, too, is concerned with thresholds, and the children are
eagerly crossing the domestic boundaries of the familiar lawn and walkway in order to
pursue adventures in the liminal woods. Here, and elsewhere in Hawthorne’s fiction, the
woods provide a retreat from structural civilization.6 In contrast to the inquisitive Sweet
Fern, who queries Eustace about specific quantities and measurements after each of the
stories, Hawthorne almost teases his reader by refusing to name the exact number of
young people. This is liminally significant because the group is undergoing the rite of
passage together: “If a whole social group is in ritual transition, there is frequently an
annulment or invalidation of the distinctive arrangement of specialized and mutually
dependent positions that composed its preritual structure; nor as yet has its postritual
structure been anticipated” (Turner “Myth” 567). In other words, as it happens in rites of
passage, the role of the group matters more than the identities of the individuals that
make up the community. Paradoxically, though, liminality is also about identity recreation. As such, individual personalities—specifically those of Primrose and Eustace—
Indeed, the woods are a common liminal motif in Hawthorne’s work. Hawthorne often contrasts the rigid
societal expectations of Puritan society with the freedom and antistructure that the woods allow. For
example, in The Scarlet Letter, Hester and Dimmesdale meet and speak freely in the woods. It is there (and
only there) that Hester takes off her scarlet letter and imagines running away with Dimmesdale. However,
these liminal fantasies cannot come to pass because both must return to the structure of society. Likewise,
Young Goodman Brown leaves town and enters the woods in order to participate in the forbidden ritual of
the Black Mass.
6
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do make important contributions to the process, but Hawthorne’s general emphasis is on
the group as a whole.
Nor does Hawthorne specify the genders of the children in this introduction.
Rather, he gives them androgynous pseudonyms, such as “Primrose, Periwinkle, Sweet
Fern, Dandelion, Blue Eye, Clover, Huckleberry, Cowslip, Squash-Blossom, Milkweed,
Plantain, and Buttercup; although, to be sure, such titles might better suit a group of
fairies than a company of earthly children” (14). Indeed, this list sounds like the cast of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, suggesting mischief and transformative possibilities. Eustace
Bright is also endowed with a seemingly supernatural ability; he is described (in this
introduction and elsewhere) as “light and active as if he had wings on his shoes”—
language that connects him to the trickster Quicksilver, who is also the alchemical
Mercurius, an agent of transformation. Eustace also has a penchant for crossing
thresholds and is described as being “much addicted to wading through streamlets and
across meadows” (14). The threshold imagery in the first few paragraphs suggests that
Eustace has entered the subjunctive stage of the liminal process.
When Hawthorne does mention a child’s gender, it is not often the gender that the
particular flower-name connotes. For example, I would imagine Sweet Fern to be a girl
rather than a boy on the basis of his name at least. Huckleberry, the “mischievous little
elf” that “snatched the spectacles from his [Eustace’s] nose and clapped them on her
own” is unexpectedly female because of her rambunctious behavior (14-15, emphasis
mine). Hawthorne’s explanation for the flower-names is rather uncompelling: “I am
afraid to tell you their names, or even to give them any names which other children are
47
called by; because, to my certain knowledge, authors sometimes get themselves into great
trouble by accidentally giving the names of real children” (14). This may be a reference
to Hawthorne’s own children, who read and offered suggestions for his children’s tales
and who may have been offended or embarrassed had they found direct references to
themselves in the text. We do know that Hawthorne’s most famous child—The Scarlet
Letter’s Pearl—was based, in part, on Una Hawthorne (Herbert). Hawthorne also had
difficulties with claims that his recent novel, The House of the Seven Gables, contained
portraits of actual people, so perhaps this was an ironic comment.
Still, an autobiographical explanation is not the only or the most interesting or
compelling answer to the writer’s purposeful vagueness on the children. I do not believe
that the imprecise description of the children indicates that their role is purely
decorative—that they are designed only to listen to the stories. After all, they do not
appear in Tanglewood Tales, and the stories are told just the same. Rather, I think the
children offer an important commentary on the role of storytelling in the development of
a person. When we read Tanglewood manor as a liminal space, as the imagery of mist
and thresholds suggests, then the fact that the children are not clearly articulated makes
more sense. As Turner states, an initiate is not in “a stable or recurrent condition that is
culturally recognized”; rather, she is in the midst of a “process, a becoming, and in the
case of rites de passage even a transformation” (“Betwixt” 94). To put it differently, “the
ritual subject (the passenger) is ambiguous; he passes through a realm that has few or
none of the attributes of the past or coming state” (94). The key term here is
“ambiguous,” and, as Turner shows, this ambiguity often has to do with gender. He states
48
that societies generally have normative ways of defining or categorizing people. For
example, “a society’s secular definitions do not allow for the existence of a not-boy-notman, which is what a novice in a male puberty rite is (if he can be said to be anything)”
(“Betwixt” 95). Likewise, and more specifically, “Bemba [An African tribe] speak of
‘growing a girl’ when they mean initiating her” (“Betwixt” 101). In other words, these
initiates are not fully gendered yet, or at least they cannot be defined by typical
classifications regarding their gender. Of course, this is not a physical state; it is more of
a spiritual or symbolic state. Further,
neophytes are sometimes treated or symbolically represented as being
neither male nor female. Alternatively, they may be symbolically assigned
characteristics of both sexes, irrespective of their biological sex. They are
symbolically either sexless or bisexual and may be regarded as a kind of
human prima material—as undifferentiated raw material. . . . Since sexual
distinctions are important components of structural status, in a
structureless realm they do not apply. (“Betwixt” 98)
This last sentence most succinctly describes why the children’s genders are
deemphasized and why Hawthorne freely questions stereotypical conceptions of
femininity and masculinity. In the liminal stage, these stereotypes cannot apply. We have
mentioned the delayed gender identification of Huckleberry and Sweet Fern, but it is
important to note that a number of the children—Buttercup, Clover, Milkweed, and
Plantain—are never identified as male or female. As Peck concludes, “the gender of these
children is of so little importance to Hawthorne’s depiction of them that for the most part,
both their roles and their gender assignments are virtually interchangeable” (117).
The fact that they are given the names of flowers is significant to a liminal
reading as well. The following passage from Turner will shed light on this particular
49
phenomenon: “[The neophytes are] identified with the earth, the generalized matter into
which every specific individual is rendered down. Particular form here becomes general
matter; often their very names are taken from them and each is called solely by the
generic term for ‘neophyte’ or ‘initiand’” (“Betwixt” 96). Instead of the “trouble” the
author may get in by sharing their “real” names, the giving of temporary names that are
closely connected to the natural world is part of the ritual.
Though Hawthorne often avoids gender-specific pronouns, he tends to refer to the
group collectively, as “little folks,” “small people,” “juvenile party,” “small populace,”
and “little friends.” This emphasizes the mutual interests, common activities, and rapport
between all the children. The repeated diminutions also emphasize the childlike state of
all the initiands (despite their age diffence). Turner calls this closeness with fellow
initiates “communitas.” Communitas is an essential part of the liminal process, and, as
anyone who has gone through a trying or formative time with another person knows,
deep friendships are formed in common experience. As Turner explains,
This comradeship must be distinguished from brotherhood or sibling
relationship, since in the latter there is always the inequality of older and
younger. . . .This comradeship transcends distinctions of rank, age, kinship
position, and, in some kinds of cultic groups, even of sex. Much of the
behavior of ethnographers in seclusion situations falls under the principle:
“Each for all, and all for each”. . . .Deep friendships between novices are
encouraged. . . .People can “be themselves,” it is frequently said, when
they are not acting institutionalized roles. (100-101)
Even though A Wonder Book’s neophytes’ individual identities are not emphasized,
paradoxically, they are more like themselves because they are allowed the freedom to be
so within their community of equals. Throughout the book, the children play joyfully and
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unreservedly with one another. There are no fights and few harsh words. Even their
mentor, Eustace, joins in the capers and roughhousing. The best example of this is the
winter scene, in which all participate in sledding, fort building, and a snowball fight (we
will discuss this scene in further detail in a moment).
This equitable relationship among the young people brings up an important point.
When we discuss communal rites of passage, we usually assume that the neophytes are
around the same age. This is not so at Tanglewood, and we must not overlook the fact
that some of the children are grade school age, while others are teenagers. This may be
the largest obstacle for our liminal reading. As the above quote provides, however,
friendships between neophytes transcend rank and age (as well as gender, as we have
begun to establish). The younger children (such as Periwinkle) sometimes possess
wisdom beyond that of the older children. At times, the older children (particularly
Eustace and Primrose), though they attempt to demonstrate their sophistication,
participate in childlike behavior as well. For example, after “The Paradise of Children,”
Sweet Fern states that he cannot believe there is enough trouble in the world to fill an
entire box. Primrose sighs “with an air of superiority, saying, ‘How little he knows about
the troubles of this world! Poor fellow! He will be wiser when he has seen as much of the
world as I have.’ So saying, she began to skip rope” (77). She undermines her adult airs
by jumping rope, a thoroughly childlike activity. In the end, though, Primrose sheds what
Peck calls “an all too feminine tear” at the closure of one of Bright’s more moving stories
(18). I do not necessarily read this as a sign of feminine weakness, however, but as an
indication that Primrose has moved beyond her witty critiques and haughtiness. She is
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able to connect emotionally with both her fellow initiates and with the sacral text,
showing that she too feels the strong bond of communitas.
So, we may argue that age matters little in this particular initiation process and
that the group collectively represents all initiates (and readers) that are introduced to
myth for the first time. We may also read this as an induction from childhood to
adulthood because the majority of Hawthorne’s attention is given to the older characters,
namely Primrose and Eustace. In the first internarrative, Primrose is introduced as a
“saucy” girl of twelve that teases and consistently challenges Eustace’s storytelling
abilities. Eustace, the storyteller, has the primary voice, which may be read as an
assertion of male superiority. In addition, he is the only one who is given a “real” name.
However, Hawthorne’s speaker playfully challenges Eustace more often than not and
undermines his masculine authority, as does Primrose. Though he is called a “learned
student,” Hawthorne gently mocks his scholarship, calling him “feather-brained” (36) and
noting that his glasses are most likely not needed for nearsightedness caused by scholarly
endeavors, but in order to appear sophisticated (14). Indeed, most of his attempts at
maturity are cosmetic. The following spring, Hawthorne notes: “if you gazed quite
closely at his upper lip, you could discern the funniest little bit of mustache upon it.
Setting aside this mark of mature manhood, you might have considered Cousin Eustace
just as much a boy as when you first became acquainted with him” (105). In other words,
physical signs of maturity do not, in this case, signify adulthood. Rather, the characters
achieve maturity through the ritual process. Nor does Eustace meet with critical success,
at least with Mr. Pringle. When he tells the story of the golden apples to classicist Mr.
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Pringle, the scholar critiques his skill, telling him that his gothicization has the effect of
“bedaubing a marble statue with paint” (102). Eustace defends his stories with
Emersonian self-assuredness, citing the authority of his imagination. He calls the myths
“the common property of the world” and claims that a purely classical telling renders the
myths “cold and heartless” (102). In response, Mr. Pringle laughs at his earnestness and,
like Hawthorne’s speaker, does not take him seriously as a scholar. Nevertheless,
Eustace’s intended audience is not adults; it is the initiates, and instead of an adult
authority, his function is that of a peer mentor. As such, his imaginative tales achieve
their rhetorical and liminal goals: to inspire the children and to teach them their mythic
inheritance.
The mentor or guardian figure is an essential part of the liminal journey. The main
purpose of the guardian figure is to instruct the neophytes and communicate the sacred
knowledge (in this case, that knowledge is conveyed by way of the stories). Turner
argues that “between instructors and neophytes there is often complete authority and
complete submission” (“Betwixt” 99). In A Wonder Book, however, Eustace’s authority
is constantly questioned by Primrose’s witty repartee. In the introduction, she is described
as “a bright girl of twelve with laughing eyes” (15). Because Hawthorne puts so much
emphasis on sight and types of seeing (as indicated in the previous chapters), Primrose’s
intelligent gaze, when contrasted with Eustace’s spectacled visage, indicates that she is
the more clear-sighted of the two. Because of this, she also acts as a mentor because she
offers another perspective in contrast to Eustace’s youthful, somewhat arrogant
masculine one. In the introduction, Primrose’s first line is, “The morning is certainly the
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best time for stories with which you so often tire out our patience. We shall be in less
danger of hurting your feelings by falling asleep at the most interesting points,—as little
Cowslip and I did last night” (15). This gentle mockery brings the skill of the storyteller
into question, and her remarks, occurring throughout the book along a similar vein, show
that she is as quick with her words as her cousin. As Peck argues, “The mirthful badinage
that Primrose and Eustace engage in is a staple of most Wonder Book interchapters; in
each case, however, neither truly gets the better of the other. The verbal battles are evenly
fought because the combatants are equally provided with wit, intelligence, and youthful
charm” (118). Indeed, even though Eustace and Primrose are clearly a boy and a girl,
their banter emphasizes their similarities rather than their differences, and the relationship
between the two is about a meeting of clever minds and not about the genders of the
speakers.
The guardian mentor is often a tormentor or trickster figure, especially in postliminal societies, but in literary liminality, the roles often blur. Here, that particular role
may be split into two: if Eustace is the mentor, Primrose can be read as the opposing
tormentor.However, this sort of torment is not done in ill will; rather, Primrose’s
challenges have an important liminal function. It is appropriate that she takes on this role
because, etymologically, the threshold is also a thrashing place where the grain is
separated from the husk. Along with that, Eustace’s name also means “good harvest” or
“fruitful,” so, in order for his tales to produce a “good harvest” of grown neophytes, he
must undergo Primrose’s challenges. In a way, Primrose acts as Eustace’s best (and
worst) critic. In this banter, he becomes not only a teacher but also a fellow learner. As
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the neophytes’ childlike ideas are refined, Eustace’s art is also developed, and he will
emerge from the liminal stage as a better storyteller. Though Turner’s description of the
role of guardian is rather clear-cut, in literature and in practice, these motifs sometimes
become blurred. Eustace acts as both teacher and novice as do Primrose and the rest of
the children. We may call this blurring of roles “contamination”—a Jungian term for the
way motifs and characters combine and influence each other as archetypes do in dreams.
This contamination is a positive thing because it provides a more nuanced and “real”
understanding of the theoretical ideas. In this way, theory can inform our understanding
of literature, and literature, in turn, can better our comprehension of theory.
Let us, however, return for a moment to Primrose’s claim that the morning is the
best time for storytelling because the listeners are least likely to fall asleep. Though this
statement is meant to instigate an argument, Cowslip’s response is more thoughtful:
“Naughty Primrose. . . .I did not fall asleep, and I only shut my eyes, so as to see a picture
of what Cousin Eustace was telling about. His stories are good to hear at night, because
we can dream about them asleep; and good to hear in the morning, too, because then we
can dream about them awake” (15). Though this is the beginning of the story, Cowslip
seems to have the clearest understanding of the multiple senses of dreaming, both
conscious and unconscious. He indicates here that storytelling and dreaming are
connected. Storytelling produces a dreamlike consciousness, and through dreaming, one
continues to develop the story and participate in the creative process. Through various
modes of “fantasy-making,” as Turner calls it, whether by dreaming or storytelling, the
initiand is participating in creative self-reflection. As Turner states:
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Liminality may be partly described as a stage of reflection. In it those
ideas, sentiments, and facts that had been hitherto for the neophytes bound
up in configurations and accepted unthinkingly are, as it were, resolved
into their constituents. These constituents are isolated and made into
objects of reflection for the neophytes. . . . (“Betwixt” 105)
In Jungian ideology, dreams and dream analysis allow for self-reflection in a conscious
state when one awakens. As so often happens in dreams (and in Eustace’s brand of
storytelling), objects and people take on symbolic and archetypal values, and the dreamer
can analyze their meanings through the representational contexts provided.
The key here is to resist the temptation to interpret these symbolic values literally,
as Sweet Fern is in the habit of doing. After almost every tale, he inquires as to exact
sizes and measurements of people and objects. For example, at the end of “The
Miraculous Pitcher,” Sweet Fern asks how much the Pitcher can hold, missing the
symbolism, and thus, the magic in the story. As Turner argues in “Myth and Symbol,”
“Many mythic and ritual symbols belong to the class of nonlogical symbols and cannot
therefore be analyzed as though they operated by the rules of logic” (579). Eustace semiindulges Sweet Fern, answering, “It did not hold quite a quart, but you might keep
pouring milk out of it, till you should fill a hogshead, if you pleased. The truth is that it
would run forever. . . .” (128). Fern asks what has become of the pitcher, and Eustace
replies that it was broken “about twenty-five thousand years ago. . . .The people mended
it as well was they could, but, though it would hold milk pretty well, it was never
afterwards known to fill itself of its own accord” (128). Of course, twenty-five thousand
years is far before the time of the ancient Greeks, so even though Fern is asking for exact
specifications, Eustace refuses to give them to him. The pitcher mended by humans fails
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to be miraculous any longer. This shows that practical, rational endeavors at
understanding do not capture the mythic qualities of the story. The magic is somehow
lost. Sweet Fern’s inability to understand the symbolic nature of the tales functions as a
cautionary tale to Hawthorne’s readers regarding the way they should not read the tales
(and it also may function as a challenge to literary realism). In order to embrace the
mythic value of the stories, the reader (listener) must recognize that “rites and myths
must be told in a prescribed order and in a symbolic rather than a literal form” (Turner
“Myth” 577). Imaginative thinking is a skill, and, for Fern, Primrose, and Hawthorne’s
adult readers (like Samuel Goodrich, for example), it can be challenging to suspend usual
modes of thinking and open one’s self to liminal possibilities.
Most of the children, however, have no trouble with the imaginative nature of
storytelling and mythmaking. During the next story, “The Golden Touch,” the children
leave the comfort of Tanglewood and enter the liminal forest. Again, the description of
the natural surroundings is somewhat obscured. Though the mist has been driven away,
“the shade of so many clustering branches, meeting and intermingling across the rivulet,
was deep enough to produce a noontide twilight. Hence came the name of Shadow
Brook” (39). Like dawn, twilight, the space between day and night, is a liminal period. In
addition, when one enters the woods, he or she also symbolically and homophonically
enters the “woulds,” as the Gnat suggests to Alice in Through the Looking Glass. Alice is
lost and worries, “‘I was in a wood just now –and I wish I could get back there.’ ‘You
might make a joke on THAT,’ said the little voice close to her ear: ’something about
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“you WOULD if you could,” you know’ (Carroll). In Hawthorne’s fiction in particular,
the woods/woulds present the ultimate anti-structural space.
Fittingly, Eustace gives the children a hypothetical situation at the end of “The
Golden Touch,” asking them, “Would any of you, after hearing this story, be so foolish as
to desire the faculty of changing things to gold?” (57, emphasis mine). In this, he is
asking them to identify with the characters in the story. In “Myth and Symbol,” Turner
argues that the participant in ritual or the believer in myth “enacts its episodes in
imagination by identification with its characters” (577). Periwinkle (specified as a girl)
responds cleverly, by saying that she should like “to have the power of turning everything
to gold with my right forefinger; but with my left forefinger, I should want the power of
changing it back again, if the change did not please me” (57). With this power, she would
touch the golden leaves, she says, “and make them all green again; so that we might have
the summer back at once, with no ugly winter in the meantime” (57). Eustace responds
differently, stating that he would “make nothing else but such golden days as these over
and over again, all the year throughout”—a wish for a sort of prolonged or eternal
liminality. Indeed, one may see why Eustace would wish for this. The liminal stage and
the myths associated with it provide “limitless freedom, a symbolic freedom of action
which is denied to the norm-bound incumbent of a status in a social structure. . .
.Liminality is pure potency, where anything can happen” (Turner “Myth” 577). In many
ways, this space of absolute potential, where one is always in process—always becoming,
can be a liberating existence. In fact, Hawthorne may participate in this wish also in the
process of writing A Wonder Book. Many current scholars, such as bell hooks and Homi
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K. Bhabha are fascinated with the idea of unfixed spaces between identities, or
borderlands. Deleuze and Guattari call this existence a “line of flight”—away from
singularity and static conditions. (In many ways, Turner’s ideas anticipate this later
work.) It is difficult, however, to achieve a constant state of liminality in real life. Truly,
then, this too would become static. At some point, the process must end and the product
of the liminal must emerge.
As we discussed earlier, frames, or internarratives, look backward and forward.
This particular narrative, in which Eustace claims he wants these golden days to last
forever, looks forward to “The Paradise of Children,” in which he shows that unchanging
paradise is not, in fact, perfect. The “golden age of children” he describes and the gold of
the leaves is reminiscent of Frost’s poem, “Nature’s First Green is Gold,” which begins,
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour. (1-4)
Like A Wonder Book, this poem centers on the changing seasons and the effervescence of
life. Like the Fall of humankind in “The Paradise of Children,” Frost’s poem is also a
Fortunate Fall. The poem uses language of loss in the line: “So Eden sank to grief” (ln.
6), but the paradoxical line: “So dawn goes down to day” is hopeful (ln. 7). In fact, the
sun rises; it does not fall, and day brings more clarity, warmth, and substantiality than the
beautiful, but fragile and unfinished dawn. In thinking through and reconciling with the
changing of the seasons, Eustace and the children are dealing, in a metaphorical sense,
with issues of death and change—an essential part of the liminal process.
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Neophytes are considered to be structurally “dead” because, for a time, they do
not exist within the typical societal constructs. In addition, they have “died” to their old
selves and are reborn into a new status at the end of the process. Knowledge of death, like
the process of puberty, is another essential part of growing up. Indeed, in some cultures,
menstrual blood is associated with both birth and death. In “Betwixt and Between,”
Turner analyzes the symbolic themes of death and rebirth:
Undoing, dissolution, decomposition are accompanied by process of
growth, transformation, and the reformulation of old elements into new
patterns. It is interesting to note how. . . .logically antithetical process of
death and growth may be represented by the same tokens, for example, by
huts and tunnels that are at once tombs and wombs, by lunar symbolism
(for the same moon waxes and wanes), by snake symbolism (for the snake
appears to die, but only to shed its old skin and appear in a new one. . . .
(99)
As the natural world displays, death and birth are intimately connected to one another,
and part of the growing process is not only understanding it, but also acting it out and
participating in it in a symbolic way.
It may seem counterintuitive that such a “sunny” text would deal with issues of
death, but it does (if briefly and in a playful way). The next time we see the neophytes,
the seasons have changed, and it is winter—the ritualistic Christmas season. (Christmas is
a mythic paradox because it celebrates birth in the midst of seasonal death.) Once again,
the lack of clarity in the physical landscape makes it evident that the children are still in
the midst of the liminal stage: “So thick were the fluttery snowflakes, that even the trees,
midway down the valley, were hidden by them the greater part of the time” (61). In this
internarrative, the children play boisterously together in the snow. Again, gender is
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deemphasized. Gender-specific pronouns are avoided: “The whole party. . . .slid down
hill into the valley, a hundred times, nobody knows how far; and, to make it all the all the
merrier, upsetting their sledges, and tumbling head over heels, quite as often as they came
safely to the bottom” (82). The narrator emphasizes that everyone participated in these
antics, not just the boys. The carnivalesque act of tumbling head over heels is indicative
of the reversal of nineteenth century readerly expectations that the girls would stay inside
doing domestic activities while the boys roughhoused. The scene continues:
Half-way down, the sledge hit against a hidden stump, and flung all four
of its passengers into a heap; and, on gathering themselves up, there was
no little Squash-Blosson to be found! Why, what could have become of
the little child? And while they were wondering and staring about, up
started Squash-Blossom out of a snow-bank with the reddest face you ever
saw, and looking as if a large scarlet flower had suddenly sprouted up in
midwinter. . . .When they had grown tired of sliding down hill, Eustace set
the children to digging a cave in the biggest snowdrift that they could find.
Unluckily, just as it was completed, and the party had squeezed
themselves into the hollow, down came the roof upon them, and buried
every soul of them alive! (82)
Again, male and female pronouns are not used in this passage. Moreover, I want to
emphasize that images of the life cycle, of death and rebirth, dominate this passage. Here,
we see the “tombs and wombs” that Turner speaks of. The snowdrift becomes a sort of
tomb, and the children are buried within it. However, in an image of rebirth, SquashBlossom “sprouts” out of the snow like a flower in springtime—a scarlet flower no less,
which brings to mind blood (as blood imagery common to both birth and death). Both of
these ideas are significant to the children’s games, and, again, perhaps they understand
them a bit better by viewing them within the context of play.
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In the final internarrative, spring has arrived. The last time we encounter the
children, they are climbing a mountain together to listen to stories atop its summit. This
summit offers a contrast from the cave in the previous internarrative, transitioning from
the concave to the convex. When they reach the highest point, for the first time, they can
clearly see their surroundings:
Eustace led the children thither, and bade them look around, and see how
large a tract of our beautiful world they could take in at a glance. And their
eyes grew wider as they looked. Monument Mountain, to the southward,
was still in the center of the scene, but seemed to have sunk and subsided,
so that it was now but an undistinguished member of a large family of
hills. . . . Our pretty lake was seen, with all its little bays and inlets; and
not that alone, but two or three new lakes were opening their blue eyes to
the sun. . . .There were so many farmhouses, with their acres of woodland,
pasture, moving-fields, and tillage, that the children could hardly make
room in their minds to receive all these different objects. There was, too,
Tanglewood, which they had hitherto thought such an important apex of
the world. In now occupied such a small space, that they gazed far beyond
it, and on either side, and searched for a good while with all their eyes,
before discovering whereabout it stood. (130)
We can read this climb and emergence from the domestic hearth or the symbolic cave as
an emergence from the liminal stage. For the first time, the sun shines brightly, and the
children can see clearly. They discover that their perspectives have changed. Here too,
there is a great deal of emphasis on sight and seeing. Even the lakes seem to be opening
their eyes, and this entire passage acts as a great awakening for the children. Monument
Mountain, which was their reference point until this moment (Sweet Fern understands the
giant in relation to this mountain) loses its importance and becomes one of a “family” of
hills. The word “family” is important here because, in the domestic internarratives, the
“little friends” have become a family. Now they have left the domestic protection of the
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Tanglewood hearth, and their community must find its place within the larger
community. Again, we have left the liminal stage and have entered the aggregation step
of the process. This new emphasis on the outer world indicates a return to structure and to
societal expectations. Other lakes and farms crowd the landscape, and it takes the
children awhile to locate Tanglewood, which seemed so significant up until now. In other
words, the mist has cleared, and their horizons have expanded. They now have a
broadened worldview and a more sophisticated perspective because they have spent a
year listening to stories from distant times and places, and now they are beginning to see
the vastness of the world and to experience it for themselves. The children have moved
out of the vicarious experience of myth telling and are now ready to begin their own
quest narratives.
In the final internarrative, Eustace introduces the children to other stories and
other storytellers in order to encourage them to seek out other tales and narratives beyond
his own:
In Stockbridge, yonder, is Mr. James, conspicuous to all the world on his
mountain-pile of history and romance. Longfellow, I believe, is not yet at
the Ox-bow, else the winged horse would neigh at the sight of him. But,
here in Lenox, I should find our most truthful novelist, who has made the
scenery and life of the Berkshire all her own. On the hither side of
Pittsfield sits Herman Melville, shaping out the gigantic conception of his
“White Whale,” while the gigantic shape of Greylock looms upon him
from his study window. (152)
This passage does several interesting things. First, it functions as an acknowledgement of
the artistry of Hawthorne’s author-friends. Second, Eustace does not tell the children any
more of his own stories, indicating that the mentor has taught them all he knows, and the
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“sacred knowledge” of the force of revision and imagination has been communicated to
the best of the mentor’s ability. In introducing the children to Melville and his epic of the
white whale, Eustace indicates that they are ready for new narrative and mythic
adventures.
We must address, before concluding, the question of what the flower children
learned and why they learned it through the medium of Eustace’s storytelling. As Turner
states, the ultimate purpose of the liminal stage is to achieve gnosis: the sacred cultural
knowledge that the children will need to be reintegrated into society as adults. As Turner
puts it, in the liminal stage, the neophytes “return to secular society with more alert
faculties. . . . they are shown ways of acting and thinking alternative to those laid down
by the deities or ancestors” (“Betwixt” 106). The children’s previous example was the
structuralist Mr. Pringle, the classical scholar who believes in literal, traditional, and
noncreative ways of telling stories. In contrast, Eustace’s attempts to put “warmth of
heart” and imaginative “passion and affection” into the stories breathes life into old
values and provides an example of new, more generative and creative modes of knowing.
In “Liminalty and Fiction in Cooper, Hawthorne, Cather, and Fitzgerald,” Robert
Daly discusses a similar theme in Hawthorne’s sketch entitled “Main Street.” Daly
analyzes Hawthorne’s assertion that history must be artistically reenacted in order for
children to relate to it. The typical mythic stories “their fathers and grandsires tell them”
have become “a vain legend! They cannot make it true and real to their conceptions.”
Though they are familiar with the stories, “nothing impresses them, except their own
experiences” (71). As Daly puts it, “These children need a usable past, one that will be
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‘real to their conceptions’” (80).7 Hawthorne’s advocacy of mixing the fantastic with the
real creates, as Iser argues, a third term between imagination and fact—or a liminal space
in which the “Actual and the Imaginary may meet.” Though Pringle claims that Eustace’s
revisions of the mythic tales do them an aesthetic injustice, in fact, as Hawthorne argues
in “Main Street,” artistic and imaginative reinterpretation is the only way to keep these
mythic traditions alive. If Eustace Bright describes the myths as “plastic in my hands,” it
follows that the flower children will view the tales and traditions in the same way,
remolding them when needed in order to keep them culturally relevant (102). Part of the
gnosis that the children gain from these stories is trust in their own imaginative faculties.
In fact, these myths and stories are even more important in modern, de-ritualized
times. Much of Turner’s anthropological work was done on pre-industrialized societies:
“small-scale, relatively stable and cyclical societies, where change is bound up with
biological and meteorological rhythms and recurrences rather than with technological
innovations” (“Betwixt” 93). In industrialized societies, these sorts of rituals are less
common. Turner calls the former a liminal society, the later, a limoid society. In
“‘Betwixt ‘em Somewheres’: From Liminal to Liminoid in David Copperfield, Bleak
House, and Great Expectations,” Mark Hennelly highlights the difference between
Turner’s notions of liminal and liminoid and the importance of distinguishing between
Speaking of a “useable history,” we can also situate liminality in the larger historical context of
antebellum America. Matthew Arnold speaks of Victorian England as a nation “wandering between two
worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born” (Arnold ln. 85-86). In many ways, antebellum
American was going through a similar process through its industrialization, modernization, and impending
split during the Civil War. We may argue that the United States has never been more politically,
ideologically, and culturally divided than it was during Hawthorne’s lifetime. In a way, the use of common
myths and the development of the idea of communitas in fiction may have been an attempt to address the
increasingly fractured community of the United States.
7
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“symbolic systems and genres which have developed before and after the Industrial
Revolution” (qtd. in Hennelly 199). Turner claims that in the “so-called ‘high culture’ of
complex societies, liminoid is not only removed from a rite de passage context, it is also
highly ‘individualized’” and liminoid societies “grow increasingly bereft of the
communal benefits of such ritual” (Hennelly 200). Thus, this is why the vicarious nature
of myth is so important. Because the children do not directly participate in coming-of-age
rituals, they can experience them through the medium of the stories. Through listening to
the stories together, there is solidarity in their shared experience, and the group develops
a strong sense of communitas. The storytellers, artists, and authors become the new
liminal mentors. In this, we see that we as readers are the ultimate intended initiates here,
and Hawthorne is our guardian mentor, writing these tales in hopes that we too are able to
expand our imaginations and embrace the inevitable changes that life brings.
After all, all of these stories have to do with change, with metamorphosis. As
Turner establishes in “Myth and Symbol,” “Myths usually related to how one state of
affairs became another: how an unpeopled world become populated; how chaos became
cosmos; how immortals became mortal; how the seasons came to replace a climate
without seasons” (576). In A Wonder Book, Midas experiments with the transformative
power of the golden touch. Baucis and Philemon become trees, and the selfish villagers
become fishes. Medusa’s head turns humans into stone. Bellerophon becomes a hero.
Pandora brings about the Fall of humankind. Nevertheless, it is a Fortunate Fall because
of the introduction of Hope into the world, and, through the process, Pandora and
Epimetheus grow up. Some of these transformations are positive ones; others are
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negative and cautionary, but all the characters become more of what they already were.
For example, Baucis and Philemon are gentle, kind, and generous, and they reincarnate
into a welcoming arbor of trees. Both the selfish villagers and King Polydectes have cold
hearts, and so it follows that they are turned to fishes and stone, respectively. In his essay
on liminality in Hawthorne, Daly notes the Turnerian concept that “liminality guarantees
nothing. It merely occasions the freedom to imagine alternatives; it does not compel one
to exercise that freedom or imagine wisely or well” (76). This brings up the existential
element of liminality. The children have vicariously participated in mythic
metamorphoses and have pondered life, death, and the changing of the seasons. As they
leave the “dawn” of childhood and head into the broad daylight of adulthood, it is up to
them to make the choices that will allow their transformations to be positive ones. In
addition, by the nature of transitions, though important lessons are gained, some things
must be lost. As Hawthorne shows in his nostalgic introduction to Tanglewood Tales in
which he bemoans the loss of childhood, significant life-changes can be a wistful,
melancholy time. They are, however, an essential part of being human.
The flower children do not appear in the later Tanglewood Tales. Instead,
Hawthorne briefly tells of the children’s progress: “Primrose is now almost a young lady,
and Eustace tells me, is just as saucy as ever. . . .Periwinkle is very much grown, and is
expected to shut up her baby-house and throw away her doll in a month or two more.
Sweet Fern has learned to read and write, and has put on a jacket and a pair of
pantaloons, —all of which improvements I am sorry for” (6). The baby-house and doll
can be read as liminal sacra that help Periwinkle role-play and experiment with the ideas
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of home and family. As she grows and develops toward adulthood, she no longer needs
these substitutional playthings. For Sweet Fern, the jacket and pants act as physical
markers of the changes he has undergone. In learning to read and write, he is learning to
participate more actively in the process of storytelling. The children have passed through
the stage they experienced in A Wonder Book, and they cannot be recreated in the same
way in the companion book. Though Hawthorne’s narrator seems a bit melancholy
because of these changes, as we know, “nothing gold can stay” (Frost ln. 8). The
“Paradise of Children” or the golden days of autumn cannot be revisited in the same way,
but, as the tales taught the children, stasis is not possible, nor is it an enviable condition.
The fact that the children have matured shows that the liminal stage of A Wonder Book
was successful.
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Chapter 4
DESCENT INTO THE LABYRINTH: VIOLENCE, LOVE, AND REBIRTH IN THE
ABDUCTION NARRATIVES OF TANGLEWOOD TALES
As the flower children are changed into adults through the telling of the mythic
stories, so Hawthorne also shows himself to be changed in Tanglewood Tales. Instead of
the playful frame narratives, Tanglewood Tales begins with a mature, jaded version of
Hawthorne, who discusses the ethics and aesthetics of revising myth with Eustace Bright.
Hawthorne’s speaker shows himself to be repelled by the tales:
These old legends, so brimming over with everything that is most
abhorrent to our Christianized moral sense,—some of them so hideous,
others so melancholy and miserable, amid which the Greek tragedians
sought these themes, and moulded them into the sternest forms of grief
that the world made of! (4)8
While Bright merely calls the myths “cold” in A Wonder Book (102), here they are
“hideous” and “abhorrent.” This negative, judgmental tone may be read as narrative
irony, but it also suggests potential questions and doubts about the purpose of the book
that were not present in A Wonder Book. In contrast to A Wonder Book’s framed
narratives, this gloomy introduction (which was written after the tales were completed)
does not promote the same sort of child-like excitement as A Wonder Book does, though
some readers might find the transgressive nature of Tanglewood Tales appealing.
As mentioned in Chapter 2, scholars tend to favor A Wonder Book as the more
successful collection of stories. Baym claims that in Tanglewood Tales, Hawthorne
8
This claim contradicts the purpose of myth as defined by Turner and Le Guin and discussed in previous
chapters: that myth’s goal is not to teach conventional morality but to transcend the everyday sense of the
word.
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“loses his magic touch” and that the collection is “a grim affair” (179). Laura Laffrado’s
Hawthorne’s Literature for Children is unique in that it offers a biographical explanation
for the more anxious and somber nature of Tanglewood Tales. Laffrado argues that the
gloomy tone is a result of a series of personal losses and disappointments in Hawthorne’s
life. In the months between the two books, Hawthorne’s sister drowned (his father was
also a victim of drowning), Sophia’s mother died, early rumblings of the Civil War were
beginning, and Hawthorne’s relationship with Melville started to disintegrate. His own
children were growing up and losing their perceived innocence as well (Laffrado 100).
These events could certainly have soured the optimism and vision of domestic simplicity
in A Wonder Book.
Though Bright once again attempts to make the Greek myths appropriate for an
audience of children, his endeavors to “purify the tales” often fail to displace the
melancholy in the stories. As Baym puts it, “Apparently, the adult problems he
[Hawthorne] thought to escape by retelling classical myths for children returned to him in
these very myths—which, after all, are not tales for children” (214). The sadness, then,
may come from both the events of Hawthorne’s personal life and from the nature of the
stories themselves. Where idyllic images of Tanglewood manor characterize A Wonder
Book, lending it a cheerful tone in spite of some of its dark content, Tanglewood Tales is
preoccupied by instability and loss. Parental bereavement is, in fact, the most deeply felt
sense of loss communicated in the book. Tanglewood Tales is not a “Paradise of [nor for]
Children” but a sometimes sinister world in which “Troubles” plague the characters. In
“The Dragon’s Teeth” and “The Pomegranate Seeds,” daughters are taken from their
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mothers through forceful, violent means. The rapes of Europa and Proserpina, however,
are not named as such by Hawthorne, likely in an attempt to “purify” the stories. The
nineteenth-century understanding of the word “purity” connotes sexuality, or rather,
sexual purity.9 Though sexuality and violence are deemphasized in the stories, they do
not disappear; rather, like Proserpina, they go “underground.” Part of the de-emphasis of
sexuality also, interestingly, mirrors popular seduction novels of the time, placing
Hawthorne’s versions of the myths within a nineteenth-century context. Though there is a
strong current of violence underlying the stories, especially when they are read literally,
this chapter will engage with recent feminist readings of rape myths and ultimately argue
that redemption and empowerment occur in the ritualistic and cyclical nature of the
stories. Whether Hawthorne experienced healing on a personal level is something we
cannot know, but we can see hints of hope thorough the endless changing cycles that
include both death and rebirth.
The stories of Europa and Proserpina and their mothers’ exhaustive searches for
them essentially begin the same way. Both are abducted while gathering flowers, which
is mythically significant because flowers can be symbolic of innocence, youth, and
springtime. Europa is directly compared to a flower: “Seated on the grass, the child was
almost hidden under an abundance of buds and blossoms, whence her rosy face peeped
merrily out and, as Cadmus said, was the prettiest of all the flowers” (56). On a
seemingly contradictory note, flowers are also sexually charged symbols. Yonic roses are
One of the attributes or “virtues” of the nineteenth-century feminine ideal of the Angel in House is purity
or asexuality. In a Foucauldian sense, though, through de-emphasis of the sexual desires of women, the
literature on the Angel in the House actually draws attention to feminine sexuality.
9
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often associated with female sexuality, and the flowers in “The Pomegranate Seeds” are
described quite sensually, almost like the fruit in Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”:
She strayed further into the fields and found some [flowers] that made her
scream with delight. Never had she met such exquisite flowers before,—
violets, so large and fragrant,—roses, with so rich and delicate a blush,—
such superb hyacinths and such aromatic pinks. . . .she could not help
thinking that a tuft of most splendid flowers had suddenly sprouted out of
the earth before her very eyes, as if on purpose to tempt her a few steps
farther. (115)
The flowers are described with sensory language, focusing particularly on smell, which is
the sense most closely connected to the emotions. The flowers feature a rosy blush as if
they too are virginal and embarrassed by Proserpina’s attention. Proserpina reacts
physically to them, shrieking in delight. The flowers seems to tempt the girl to cross
beyond her usual boundaries into unchartered space and experience. Though the sexual
implications of the passage are beneath the surface, one need not dig very deep to find
them. Shortly after this passage, Proserpina herself becomes a flower that has been
“plucked before her time” or abducted by Pluto as the incarnation of death (though his
role, which will be discussed in a moment, is purified also). Flowers are often used in
poetry to describe the fleetingness of life, for example, in Herrick’s “To the Virgins to
Make Much of Time”: “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, / Old Time is still a-flying: /
And this same flower that smiles today / Tomorrow will be dying” (1-4). This is a poem
encouraging young women to enjoy the sensory pleasures of youth because old age and
death will follow shortly. Sex is often thought of as a kind of death (le petit mort), and, of
course, the loss of virginity is known as “deflowering.”
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The inherent contradictions in Hawthorne’s mythic use of flower symbolism are
not unique to Tanglewood Tales. In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” he uses flower imagery as
an extended metaphor for Beatrice’s sexuality. Beatrice is always arrayed in flowers, and
Giovanni images that “here [Beatrice] is another flower, the human sister of those
vegetable ones, as beautiful as they, more beautiful than the richest of them, but still to be
touched only with a glove, nor to be approached without a mask” (190). Like the
poisonous flowers, her sexuality is perceived as dangerous and potentially contaminating.
In The Blithedale Romance, another dark lady, Zenobia wears a hothouse flower in her
hair, another indicator of sexuality. Where floral imagery regarding Beatrice is viewed by
Giovanni as suspect and unnatural, as Nina Baym says of Zenobia’s flower in “The
Blithedale Romance: A Radical Reading,” “ It is sensual, but neither evil nor unnatural.
That is its point: it proclaims that Zenobia’s nature is passionate as well as pastoral. It
may frighten the sexually morbid, but in itself it is innocent. One may hazard that what
Hawthorne is trying to do here is precisely to reinstate sexuality as a legitimate and
natural element of femininity” (355). As Baym expresses, a significant factor in
Hawthorne’s mythic use of floral imagery is one’s point of view on the matter. As the
perspective shifts, so does the symbol’s interpretation. Hawthorne’s use of contradictory
imagery, for flowers are symbolic of both innocence and experience, displays his
unwillingness to label Proserpina as a “pure” archetype in any sense of the word.
In Herrick’s poem, Time is personified as a flying being; in another seduction
poem, Marvel’s “To His Coy Mistress,” Time is also described as a “winged chariot”
(22). It is, thus, interesting that Pluto also drives a “splendid golden chariot” drawn by
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fantastic sable horses (116). I mention the seduction narrative because, in many ways,
“The Pomegranate Seeds” mirrors the structure and character types of popular seduction
novels, such as Pamela and Clarissa. Pluto plays the darkly alluring wooer: “In the
chariot sat the figure of a man, richly dressed, with a crown on his head, all flaming with
diamonds. He was of a noble aspect, and rather handsome, but looked sullen and
discontented” (116). He does not appear as the monstrous incarnation of Death; rather, he
is gentlemanly—almost like the suitor in Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for
Death.” His attempts at soothing and enticing Proserpina are not successful, so he
promises friendship and material wealth:
“Why should you be afraid, my pretty child,” said he, trying to soften his
rough voice. “I promise not to do you any harm. . . .Wait till we come to
my palace, and I will give you a garden full of prettier flowers than those,
all made of pearls, and diamonds and rubies. Can you guess who I am?
They call me Pluto, and I am the king of diamonds and all other precious
stones. . . .Oh, we shall be very good friends, and you will find me more
agreeable than you expect.” (117-118)
Proserpina, like Pamela and Clarissa, remains imprisoned but resists the temptations of
her wealthy seducer as long as possible. He promises her pearls and precious stones,
indicating that he values her company; she is a pearl of great price. In attempting to retain
her innocence and virtue, she refuses to submit to his wishes in eating his food. Again, as
in “Goblin Market,” sexual experience is equated with eating, and Lizzie retains her
purity because she refuses the fruit of the goblin men. It is here that Hawthorne
incorporates some of the didacticism discussed in the introduction. The reason Proserpina
gives for refusing to eat is that she prefers wholesome, healthy, natural food to Pluto’s
delicacies. Pluto tempts her with “all manner of sweetmeats and richly preserved fruits,
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and delicacies of every sort such as young people are generally most fond of. But her
good mother had often told her of the hurtfulness of these things; and for that reason
alone, if there had been no other, she would have resolutely refused to taste them” (137).
Like Pamela and Clarissa, she attempts to retain the values of her childhood.
Yet, Hawthorne’s choice to make this a lesson about nutritious eating and simple,
non-materialistic living displaces the mythic impact of the tale. If Proserpina were to eat
something, she would be bound to Pluto, not because this is an arbitrary rule of his
domain, but because the act of eating is an act of communion. From Christ’s last wish—
that his disciples eat bread and wine as the incarnation of his own body and blood—to the
wicked queen who desires to eat Snow White’s heart in order steal her beauty, when one
eats ritual food, he or she retains the power and identity of that which the substance
symbolizes. In making Proserpina’s fast about everyday ethics, Hawthorne buries the
mythic meaning to advocate for everyday values, appealing to the parents of his young
readers. Even so, mythic displacement doesn’t necessarily rid the story of mythic or
figurative significance, but it makes it more subliminal and mysterious, giving the story
different levels of meaning. Hawthorne’s euphemistic interpretation may be a thinly
disguised attempt to conceal the highly sexual implications from the literalist eye. When
Proserpina gives in and eats the fertile pomegranate—a seedy yonic fruit the color of
hymenal blood— taking Pluto’s food into “her little red cave,” this consummates their
alliance. She has formed an unbreakable bond with Pluto, and her new identity as his
companion and as possessor of adult knowledge has been conceived. Fittingly, some
scholars believe that the pomegranate was the fruit consumed by Adam and Eve in the
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garden—an act that is often associated with sexual knowledge and with the introduction
of mortality to humankind (Schneider). Here, sexuality and knowledge of death are
similarly intermingled. Hawthorne’s version of the tale does not elaborate upon the
sexual aspect of this relationship, but the symbolically rich nature of the tale makes it
almost impossible to not read this as a sexual union.
Hawthorne’s Pluto, though, is not given the full power of his fear-producing
identity: that of his true name, Hades. His palace, while gloomy, is still august and
beautiful. In other words, Hawthorne does not give his version of the Underworld the full
horror of death. In Life’s Daughter/Death’s Bride: Inner Transformations Through the
Goddess Demeter/Persephone, Kathie Carlson argues that Hades was a figure so
terrifying that people were afraid to call him by name:
Hades apparently evoked such dread and terror in the ancient Greeks that
most of the time this god was approached only through euphemisms
designed to appease rather than evoke his power. Thus the Lord of Death
was spoken of as. . . .Pluto, “riches,” and the terror of passage to his
underworld kingdom was contained by speaking of his “hospitality.”
These euphemisms pretended that there was a positive side to Hades but
this pretense was apotropaic; his real name, Hades, remained barren, a
word of taboo or teratology. (107)
In not giving Pluto the full implications of his power, Hawthorne makes him a less
frightening character, which serves to familiarize death and the Unconscious. In fact,
Hawthorne’s Pluto comes across as a lonely old man whom Proserpina pities and actually
grows fond of: “And little Proserpina, when she turned about, and beheld this great king
standing in his splendid hall, and looking so grand, and so melancholy and so lonesome,
was smitten with a kind of pity. . . .‘I love you a little,’ whispered she, looking up in his
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face” (138). This is precisely what he craves to hear, and so, to some extent, she has a
measure of power over him in this regard. She cautions her mother at the end of the story:
“Do not speak so harshly of poor King Pluto. . . .He has some very good qualities; and I
really think I can bear to spend six months in his palace. . . .it has made a wonderful
change in his spirits to have a little girl to ran up the stairs and down. There is some
comfort in making him so happy” (143). Proserpina’s docile, accepting reaction to her
imprisonment is Hawthorne’s addition; though, in Anthon’s version (or in many of the
classical versions), the reader is not privy to Proserpina’s thoughts on the matter at all.
Moreover, Hawthorne does not seem to take Proserpina’s reactions to her abduction
seriously. For example, when she cries, the narrator explains: “Young people’s tears have
very little saltness or acidity in them, and do not inflame the eyes so much as those of
grown persons; so that it is not to be wondered at if, a few moments afterwards,
Proserpina was sporting through the hall almost as merrily as she and the four seanymphs had sported along the edge of the surf wave” (138). In other words, her grief is
shallow, and while it is not necessarily inauthentic, this line may indicate that the reader
should not take her tears to heart; she is young and, thus, resilient. Besides, she is
teachable and will learn to care for Pluto. 10
10
In “‘The Willing Captive’: Narrative Seduction and the Ideology of Love in Hawthorne’s A Wonder
Book for Girls and Boys,” Lesley Ginsberg analyzes Hawthorne’s version of the story of Pegasus and
Bellophron, in which Pegasus learns to love his captor, and, upon being offered his freedom, the beautiful
creature chooses to remain with Bellophron out of love, not obligation. Ginsberg compares this
romanticized captivation narrative to the political climate of the 1850’s, in which the issues of slavery,
women’s rights and “the ethics of domestication” were being questioned (260). Ginsberg examines
Hawthorne’s writing on slavery in Life of Franklin Pierce, in which he advocates a weak and passive
approach to slaver, claiming that it “will vanish like a dream” (qtd. in Ginsberg 257). When Hawthorne
discusses abolition (or any political act, for that matter), he takes on a highly sentimental tone, appealing to
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If read literally, the de-emphasis of the violence and horror in the story, even
more than the abduction itself, is the most disturbing aspect of Hawthorne’s version of
the tale because it implies that women learn to love their abductors—a destructive,
misogynistic ideology that relieves Pluto of some of his culpability as abductor. It is,
however, consistent with Pamela, as she consents to love Mr. B. when he asks her to be
his wife and not his mistress, legitimizing their relationship. When Mr. B. follows the
socially accepted rules of the courtship ritual, Pamela agrees to marry him, and the story
ends “happily.” Hawthorne’s narrator’s use of evaluative language, such as “abhorrent”
and “hideous,” in Tanglewood Tales’ introduction implies that a literal reading of the
abduction myth demands a sort of moral judgment. If we read the captivation myth as a
literal rape and kidnapping, an almost universal sense of horror at the act is justified.
At the same time, though, it is quite possible that Hawthorne is utilizing narrative
irony in his characterization of the judgmental narrator because it is evident that there are
greater mythic implications beneath the literal meaning. One can gain more insight by
reading the story on an allegorical/mythic level. On a deeper level, the myths of
Proserpina and Europa can be about the violent and tragic nature of unexpected death—
especially when the one seized by Death is young and undeveloped. Hawthorne was
certainly familiar with the manifestation of this myth in his own life. In addition, the
death of a child was, sadly, a common experience for people in Hawthorne’s day. It was
also a common theme in the contemporary literature, and much of that literature utilizes
emotions rather than reason. Though Ginsberg does not apply these ideas to “The Pomegranate Seeds,” we
can easily see how the same connections can be made.
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sentimental appeals. For example, Lydia H. Sigourney’s “Death of an Infant” associates
death with sleep as Hawthorne does with his description of Europa (as we will see in a
moment): “There spoke a wishful tenderness,--a doubt / Whether to grieve or sleep,
which Innocence / Alone can wear” (5-7). Hawthorne’s softening and sentimentalization
of Pluto’s character may have been his way of trying to engage with the literary discourse
of the time or as an attempt to imagine or deal with the great loss of a child. Interestingly,
literary representations of death are sometimes described, rather sensationally, as a sort of
sexual assault. Again, as Marvel puts it: “then worms shall try / That long preserv’d
virginity” (27-28). It is fitting that death is analogized as ravishment because, as Joseph
Campbell states in The Power of Myth, “The experience of Eros is a kind of “seizure’”—
a violent emotional reaction (186).
As the sexual imagery indicates, we can also read the Proserpina myth as another
type of death—a loss of childhood—because sexual maturation is a sort of “death of the
child.” Indeed, this myth could very easily sustain a liminal reading as well, as a comingof-age story. Victor Turner explains: “They [neophytes] are at once no longer classified
and not yet classified. In so far as they are no longer classified, the symbols of death that
represent them are, in many societies, drawn from the biology of death, decomposition,
catabolism…” (96). We can certainly read Proserpina as “structurally dead” during her
liminal, transitory period with Pluto because she is removed from her usual society. We
also see that she goes through significant transformations in the process and emerges with
a new status. In some versions of the myth, Proserpina is called Kore before she is
abducted (which comes from the Greek koritse, meaning “girl”), and she assumes the
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name Persephone/Proserpina after her transformation process, marking her changed
identity into a woman (Carlson 83). Along a similar line, the Proserpina myth can also be
read as an earthdiver myth or even a dream-like descent into the (collective) unconscious
to uncover the shared, inevitable knowledge of sex and mortality. Though knowledge and
understanding are gained in the maturation process, there is significant loss experienced
as well. Read this way, Hawthorne is suggesting or perhaps advocating for a coming to
terms with the loss of innocence that accompanies the knowledge and experience of life
and death.
We have, thus far, prioritized a discussion of Proserpina and Pluto’s relationship
over that of Europa and the bull because we are given much more information about the
former. Europa is described very simply as a pretty girl who gathers flowers with her
brothers. Interestingly, though Europa’s character is lacking in psychological
development, the reader begins the tale privy to her perspective: “For awhile, she listened
to the pleasant murmur of the sea, which was like a voice saying, ‘Hush!’ and bidding her
to go to sleep” (57). As Pluto is a more benign name for the Hades, sleep certainly can be
read as a euphemism for death. Because several of Hawthorne’s family members
drowned, it is particularly significant that the sea lulls Europa into a state of
unconsciousness and later takes her out of sight forever.11 In Europa’s eyes, the bull
appears to be a friendly, attractive animal:
On looking at him more attentively, she began to see that he was a
beautiful animal, and even fancied a particularly amiable expression in his
face. As for his breath,—it was as fragrant as if he had been grazing on no
11
Likewise, in “The Minotaur,” King Aegeus is a victim of drowning.
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other food than rosebuds. . . .Never before had a bull have such bright and
tender eyes. . . .and, from the gentleness and playfulness of his actions,
soon came to consider him as innocent a creature as a pet lamb. (57).
Like Europa, the bull is (ironically) associated with flowers and springtime. His wide
eyes appear innocent and sincere. Like the white bull, Europa’s pale face resembles a
“white lily,” and Hawthorne juxtaposes Pandora’s pale hand with the flesh of the bull, as
though comparing the relative purity of each. That the bull is analogized to a
domesticated lamb is another indication of his simplicity and supposed docility. It is
particularly interesting that the reader receives no indication of malevolent intent in the
bull except for Hawthorne’s one sly parenthetical aside: “The gentle and innocent
creature (for who could possibly doubt he was so?) pranced round the children as
sportively as a kitten” (59). This remark is likely for Hawthorne’s adult audience, who is
probably familiar with the myth and aware that the bull was, in fact, the amorous Zeus in
one of his many disguises. For the “intended” audience of children, though, this
seemingly gentle bull is a highly ambiguous character, even more so because he and
Europa are never seen again. It may be that the “domestication” of the bull is an attempt
to ameliorate social taboos about sex by making it seem less frightening and dangerous. It
seems, though, that any amount of pretty comparisons would not make even the child
reader forget that the animal is a bull, and is, thus, inherently dangerous. Europa’s
perspective ends here, and we see that her disappearance acts as a catalyst for the more
substantial part of the story: her family’s—more specifically, her mother’s—quest to find
her. “The Dragon’s Teeth” proves, if possible, to be a grimmer myth than “The
Pomegranate Seeds” in that Europa’s family experiences no sense of closure. From their
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perspective, it is likely, though unconfirmed, that she is dead. This loss lasts eternally,
and the story fails to provide emotional resolution for most of the family.
It may be argued that, because of its inescapable violence and sorrow,
Tanglewood Tales represents an artistic failure, for it does not, as Baym claims, appeal to
its intended audience of children. Critics have certainly taken this stance. (Though, by
this measure, most fairy tales and children’s stories, such as those of the Grimm brothers,
would be inappropriate for children.) In contrast, I believe that through Hawthorne’s
treatment of the mothers’ quests for their daughters, he achieves both artistic and mythic
success. We have mentioned that Europa and Proserpina are lacking in psychological or
emotional development, but their mothers, Telephassa and Ceres, are not. In fact,
Hawthorne’s version of the maternal quest is the most moving, poignant part of the book.
In fact, as Edith Wharton’s Demeter expresses in “The Pomegranate Seed,” her sorrow at
losing her daughter is a type of death. She laments, “Since I have sat upon the stone of
sorrow, / Think’st thou I know not how the dead may feel?” (Wharton 290). Indeed, this
very well may be a fate worse than death. In contrast, though, Tennyson’s Demeter
claims that the “heart of motherhood” is deathless in that it continuously experiences the
equally painful emotions of love and loss (l. 41).
After Europa is abducted, in another act of patriarchal injustice, her father, King
Agenor, expels her brothers from the house. In the ultimate act of motherly self-sacrifice,
fearing for the safety of her other children, Queen Telephassa agrees to go as well. In her
haste, she forgets to remove her crown and royal garments, but as she begins her search,
her clothing becomes tattered and worn: “By and by, they came to have such a homeless
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aspect; so that you would have much sooner taken them for a gypsy family than a queen
and three princes” (62). Telephassa’s appearance changes drastically. Her ragged body
becomes a physical marker of her internal grief, and she takes on a new archetypal role—
that of the crone.
Telephassa and her sons’ search becomes a classic Grail Quest. As Joseph
Campbell puts it, “The theme of the Grail romance is the land, the country, the whole
territory of concern has been laid waste. It is called a wasteland. And what is the nature
of the wasteland? It is a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other
people are doing, doing as you are told, with no courage for your own life” (196-197). On
the most surface level, Telephassa and her sons travel through a physical wasteland, or
“the pathless wilderness of the earth” (62). The Fisher King, or the impotent, wounded
ruler is another essential part of Arthurian Grail legends. Because of his powerlessness,
the Fisher King’s kingdom suffers and becomes a wasteland in which crops, animals, and
people cannot grow or flourish. The unjust King Agenor becomes a sort of Fisher King
who is unable to accept the loss of his daughter but who is unwilling to seek her out. The
reader leaves him in a static state, sitting uselessly on his throne: “Year after year King
Agenor sat in the solitude of his beautiful palace, listening in vain for their returning
footsteps. . . .But so long a time went by, that, at last, if they had really come, the king
would not have known that this was the voice of Telephassa” (61-62). Though in some
versions of the Grail Quest, the Fisher King is the custodian of the Grail, here, the ever
evasive Europa becomes idolized and idealized as the Grail itself, though, as her brother
Phoenix points out, he probably would not even know her if he saw her:
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I can go no farther. . . .It is a mere foolish waste of life, to spend it, as we
do, in always wandering up and down, and never coming to any home at
nightfall. Our sister is lost, and never will be found. She probably perished
in the sea. . . .It is now so many years ago, that there would be neither love
nor acquaintance between us should we meet again. (63)
For Phoenix, who quits the quest, and his brother, Cilix, who also gives in, lamenting,
“[M]ethinks we are like people in a dream,” the search for a boon they do not
authentically desire is “a waste of life”: another type of wasteland forced upon them by
their father. They do not have the courage or the will to go on. Though the other
characters leave Phoenix in a place of spiritual desolation, as his name indicates, he rises
from the ashes and becomes a just and effective ruler of his own kingdom.
Telephassa, does not blame her sons for giving up because the quest was not her
sons’ choice; it was hers. As she states, “You are a grown man and must do as you judge
best” (63). At the same time, the failure of the male questers may function as a critique of
the obsessive masculine quest for external objects. Medea also critiques Jason’s quest
later in Tanglewood Tales, but we will elaborate on this in the following chapter. There is
an existential element to the quest; it must be done through one’s own free will. As Curtis
Dahl argues in “The Victorian Wasteland,” “The mortal world seems dry and thorny to
those whose thirst is too spiritual for its waters to quench. Dust swirls up from the
wasteland, and lightnings without rain strike. But the road is not one that all men must
travel. It is a way consciously chosen by knights. . . .For all ordinary men, even for
ordinary Knights of the Round Table, it is a lonely and barren path” (341). Indeed, the
Grail Quest is an isolated, desolate journey, but Telephassa, as the feminine quester,
cannot conceive of living any other way. As she firmly states to Cilix, “At noon, at night,
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journeying onward, sitting down to rest, her childish voice is always in my ears, calling,
‘Mother! mother!’ Stop here who will, there is no repose for me” (65). She feels the
calling to find her daughter deep within herself, and her reward is spiritual as well. As
Campbell puts it, “The Grail becomes. . . .that which is attained and realized by people
who have lived their own lives. The Grail becomes the fulfillment of the highest spriritual
potentialities of the human consciousness (197). Though Telephassa never finds Europa,
upon her death, she prophesizes to her most loyal son Cadmus, telling him to stop the
quest and to seek enlightenment at the Oracle of Delphi. She lived her life in the only
way she could, and she dies with a smile on her face, sighing, “ I go now to the better
world, and, sooner or later, I shall find my daughter there” (69). Cadmus feels “convinced
that, at her first step into the better world, she caught Europa in her arms” (69). This is,
indeed, a particularly moving section, and it illustrates a mythically significant point: that
the utmost spiritual value of the Grail Quest is not the boon or objective but the process
of the quest itself. Throughout Cadmus and Telephassa’s quest, they also develop
compassion and a deeper love for one another, which is a result of shared suffering.
Cadmus supports his mother when her body grows weary, and she constantly fortifies
him with emotional and spiritual strength. Compassion is one of the defining values and
major objectives of the Grail Quest, and Cadmus and Telephassa have had the
opportunity to express their deep love, though they have not reached their pre-defined
“end.”
Hawthorne’s version of Telephassa’s quest emphasizes (perhaps to provide selfcomfort) that resolution may not occur in this life and that one must have faith in the
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cycle of death and rebirth. Telephassa puts her hope in the world to come, and perhaps
this is Hawhthorne’s own attempt at an assertion of faith. At any rate, “The Dragon’s
Teeth” concludes with a series of cycles. Cadmus follows a cow, which is a nurturing,
life-giving feminine symbol to a field where he slays a dragon. Dragons are symbols of
destruction, but often dragon slaying suggestion the destruction of the psychic enemy, or
even of the negative parts of one’s own psyche. Cadmus is told plant its teeth in the earth.
The “seedlings” grow into warriors who destroy each other and finally help build a new
kingdom. The kingdom of the Fisher King is not restored, but a substitute kingdom,
where Cadmus is a just and effective king, is established in its place. At last, Harmonia,
“a daughter of the sky” (and entirely Hawthorne’s addition) is given to Cadmus as a
compensatory boon “instead of a sister, and brothers, and friend, and mother” (83). A
voice tells him that he will “find all those dear ones in her alone,” and the two achieve a
hieros gamos or sacred marriage, which is, in its own sense, a harmonization of
opposites, befitting Harmonia’s name (83). Laffrado argues, however, that, despite this
ending of renewal, sorrow and bereavement still overshadow the positive ending:
Cadmus does achieve spiritual harmony with Harmonia, and thus his quest
for Europa (for lost innocence) has resulted in his selfhood. However, the
adult reader knows that Harmonia and Cadmus’s happy lives together are
Hawthorne’s construct. In classical mythology the dragon slain by
Cadmus was sacred to Mars, who, in retaliation, caused their daughters
and grandchildren to perish. Cadmus’s union with Harmonia suggests
fulfillment, but the literal and symbolic loss of Europa dominates the text.
With permanent loss behind him and the loss of children and
grandchildren ahead of him, Cadmus’s spiritual harmony at the end of
“The Dragon’s Teeth is a temporarily achieved balance, a moment apart
from the misery of a loss filled life. (116)
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It does seem a bit too simplistic that in the last few pages of the story, all conflict is
resolved and that Harmonia can provide atonement for the great losses Cadmus has
suffered. Cadmus’s life is framed by grief, but for now—at least for a moment— he is
able to achieve harmony with another and, more importantly, with himself and his own
experiences. In Hawthorne’s own quest, for the act of writing is certainly an exploratory
journey of the self, he may not achieve consistent harmony with himself or with the
stories he creates, but he is able to create a mythic and imaginative space where loss can
be explored and somewhat resolved.
“The Pomegranate Seeds” resolves in a decidedly more cheerful manner with the
reconciliation of mother and daughter, but the representation of the feminine quest
narrative is similar, if not more mythically determined. Like Telephassa, Ceres also
leaves her stately dragon-drawn carriage behind and wanders on foot like a gypsy in her
search for Proserpina. Hawthorne describes her as “a sad and anxious woman, with. . .
.withered poppies on her head” (125). Interestingly, the poppy, the flower of
forgetfulness, is associated with both Pluto and Ceres, and this mythically connects the
two adversaries. She asks for news of her daughter from humans and also from mythic
creatures, such as dryads, naiads, fauns, and satyrs. The introduction of these
mythological creatures shows that Ceres is a powerful, supernatural being. Though
Hawthorne does not identify Ceres directly as a goddess, he does give her magical
nurturing powers. For example, she becomes a nurse for a baby named Prince
Demophoon, placing him in the fire to make him live forever. She explains, “Do you
imagine that earthly children are to become immortal without being tempered to it in the
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fiercest heat of the fire?” (135). She is certainly thinking about the loss of her own
daughter and wishes to save Demophoon’s mother from a similar misfortune.
Alchemical imagery is significant here, as it was thought that the heating and
combining of less precious metals would produce gold. Through Ceres’s own “trial by
fire,” her will grows stronger, and her love for Proserpina becomes further refined and
purified. Like Proserpina, Ceres must also become an earthdiver, and she descends into
Hecate’s cave to inquire as to her daughter’s well-being. She also ascends into the sky to
ask Phoebus if he has seen Proserpina from his lofty place in the heavens. Both Hecate
and Phoebus are simplified into extreme versions of their mythic forms and create a
binary opposition between above and below, light and darkness, male and female, mirth
and gloom. In Ceres’s quest, she must find a way to go between the two. As Campbell
says of the Grail Quest: “One early writer says that the Grail was brought from heaven by
the neutral angels. You see, during the war in heaven between God and Satan, between
good and evil, some angelic hosts sided with Satan and some with God. The Grail was
brought down through the middle by the neutral angels. It represents that spiritual path
between pairs of opposites, between fear and desire” (195-196). This is, indeed, an
excellent example of the ability of myth to examine oppositions and to seek a third term
(like Harmonia), which reconciles the rift. As Carlson puts it:
To the ancients, this myth was seen as an intense portrayal of the seeming
opposition of life and death and, in the end, the transcendence of this
opposition. . . .Human beings could find their own grief written large in
the mourning and rage of the Divine Mother, follow her path of resolution
and reconciliation and. . . .participate in her power to confront the forces
of death and transform them. (2)
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For Ceres, this transformation takes place literally and symbolically through the process
of sowing and reaping plants. Because of Ceres’s grief, she stops the earth from
producing vegetation, so the earth becomes, once again, a physical and metaphorical
wasteland. The conventional reading of the myth is that Proserpina’s six-month return
accounts for the changing of the seasons—when she is beneath the earth and Ceres
misses her, it is winter, and plants do not grow. When she returns to her mother, spring
arrives, flowers bloom, and the earth is warmed by her presence. As Carlson notes, after
the initial abduction, Proserpina returns of her own volition, and “[t]he experience is no
longer a rape but a ritual, a voluntary descent” (10). Proserpina is able to recognize the
mythic, ceremonial aspect of the descent and claim it as her own.
Moreover, the references to the cyclical nature of the seasons and the cultivation
of plant life points to a deeper, more ancient mythic significance. In the goddess-centered
religions of old, the goddess was an all-powerful being who was associated with the
earth. As Campbell puts it, “Since her [woman’s] magic is that of giving birth and
nourishment, as the earth does, her magic supports the magic of the earth. In the early
tradition, she is the first planter. It is only later, when the plow is invented. . . .that the
male takes over the agricultural lead again” (101). Campbell also points out that huntingbased societies tend to have more aggressive masculine gods that forcefully take the
place of the agricultural societies’ feminine deities. Some of the violence of the
Proserpina myth has to do with the spiritual violence of the usurpation of the goddess
cult. As Carlson notes,
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Over a period of thousands of years, the New Religion with its dominant
masculine gods overcame and assimilated the Old Religion of the Mother.
Mythically, this assimilation was repeatedly pictured as the Goddess being
raped, dismembered, slain by a hero figure, or married (and subordinated)
to the invading god. Thus the myth of Demeter and Persephone can also
be seen within its ancient framework as a drama of religious tensions and
oppositions. (3)
Though this violence is disturbing on a literal level, it also becomes highly symbolic.
Once again, as Le Guin points out, we cannot judge mythic figures by the standards of
“daylight” morality; we must evaluate them in archetypal terms because they are
“psychic factors” and elements of the “complex soul” (66).
There is a marked difference between the mythic objectives of the Old Religion
and the New. As Campbell perceptively points out: “[T]he planting mythology, which
has to do with the cultivation of the plant, the planting of the seed, the death of the seed,
so to say, and the coming of the new plant is more inward turned”(102). Unlike the
masculine quest narrative, in which the hero seeks something outside himself, the
feminine quest—that of the mother—is focused inward. Because Telephassa does not
find Europa, one might say that her quest was a failure, but from the perspective of the
feminine quest, the objective—to express her love for her daughter—was within her the
whole time. The journey inward is the essence of the earthdiver myth. For Ceres, the
cyclical process of planting and reaping is made more explicit. As Campbell explains,
“There is no such thing as a self-contained individual in the plant world. You cut a plant,
and another sprout comes. . . .So in the forest and planting cultures, there is a sense of
death as not death somehow, that death is required for new life. And the individual isn’t
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quite an individual, he is the branch of a plant” (102). Individual births and deaths are
part of a larger, inclusive mythic cycle.
Through Hawthorne’s specific attention to the Mother-quest, he is able to create a
fictional, creative discourse to dramatize the nature of death and loss. This chapter began
by examining the violence inherent in the rape narratives, and, while underemphasized,
violence is still present. As Carlson puts it, however, feminist readers can find elements
of triumph and hope in spite of the violence:
Through effective protest, gestation, and transformation of the would-be
usurper, the Feminine triumphs from this perspective, reuniting death with
life as well as re-membering herself in the ancient fullness of her powers.
And what began as patriarchal invasion becomes the prima materia of her
capacity to recycle and transform (13).12
Perhaps Hawthorne was able to recognize this element of triumph in the cyclical nature
of transformation and rebirth. The reader can certainly hope so. Though Tanglewood
Tales does not scale the sunny heights of A Wonder Book as symbolized by Pegasus, it
certainly plumbs the depths of Pluto’s labyrinth in its search for reconciliation with and
healing from profound loss. It is a darker text, yes, but it is also deeper. Ultimately, like
Cadmus, Tanglewood Tales is able to find—if only for a moment—a balance and a third
term between light and darkness.
When Carlson mentions the goddess in “the ancient fullness of her powers,” she is referencing the threefold goddess who manifests herself as the maiden, the mother, and the crone. Carlson argues that, through
the birth of male-dominated religion, the goddess is broken apart. She perceptively notes that the goddess
trinity is brought back together, with Proserpina the maiden, Ceres the mother, and Ceres the crone (she
takes on the appearance of an old woman when she becomes Demophoon’s nurse). Likewise, Telephassa
performs both the mother and crone through her aging process. Instead of the rape and deconstruction of
the goddess, Carlson argues that the Proserpina/Ceres myth reunites the ancient elements of the feminine.
12
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Chapter 5
WEAVERS OF FATE: FEMININE POWER, FEMALE SPACE, AND THE “BAD
GIRLS” OF TANGLEWOOD TALES
In Chapter 2, we examined the archetypal female characters of A Wonder Book
and argued that some of them are simple types, but others approach the complexity and
character development realized in Tanglewood Tales. Ceres and Telephassa are
emotionally complex characters, but the “bad girls” of Tanglewood Tales—Ariadne,
Medea, and Circe—are the most provocative of all. Throughout Hawthorne’s literature
for adults, his authorial interest tends to favor the dark ladies, such as Hester and
Zenobia, and these prove to be his most psychologically rich characters, perhaps because
of their “drapery of black” (English Notebooks 370).13 Though different from one
another, Ariadne, Medea, and Circe all interconnect. Hawthorne envisions Ariadne and
Medea as both “helper maidens” and disobedient daughters who challenge patriarchal
authority while working within the confines of male-dominated society. Ariadne and
Medea are also, in a sense, mythic weavers and manipulators of threads that shape the
destinies of their male counterparts. Last, Medea and Circe are related by blood: they are
cousins.
13
Frederic Carpenter first introduced the terminology of the dark and the fair lady, and Leslie Fiedler
expanded on and popularized the terminology, arguing that Hawthorne creates two distinct types of
women. The color/light imagery in Fiedler’s categories refers to moral qualities as well as sexuality, to
inner as well as external states. The terms “light” and “dark” also carry racial significance, since “fair”
ladies are often blonde and “dark” ladies are often dark haired and exoticized. In Chapter 2 of this thesis,
however, we problematized these terms and showed that even the darkest prototypes like Medusa still
possess sympathetic qualities. Medea, Circe, and Ariadne are more complex; thus, the term “dark” doesn’t
quite do. Instead, along the lines of Fiedler’s light imagery, this chapter will use the word “shadowy” to
describe the Tanglewood ladies. “Shadowy” combines light and darkness and connotes mystery and
ambiguity.
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Though the tales they participate in are male quest narratives, the women emerge
as the true mythic heroes because they possess the creative, artistic, imaginative, and
problem-solving capabilities necessary to control the outcomes of the male characters’
stories. Theseus’ and Jason’s objectives cannot be accomplished without Ariadne’s and
Medea’s help, and the quests can only be successful through the collaboration (or the
symbiosis) of male and female. Even more, the women are knowing subjects and weavers
of their own fates who use their creative capabilities to create unclassifiable femalecontrolled spaces, which challenge masculine authority and the symbolic order. This
chapter will engage with several critical perspectives, including J. Hillis Miller’s
deconstructive narrative theory and Hélène Cixous’s notions of feminine linguistic space,
as points of departure in its reading of Hawthorne’s myths. We will examine the
interconnectedness of the shadowy ladies of Tanglewood Tales and the ways that the
women wield their creative powers to create anti-structural feminine spaces of
potentiality and possibility. Hawthorne is most free and imaginative in his telling of
Ariadne’s, Medea’s, and Circe’s tales, and it is with these that he departs most
significantly from his primary source, Anthon’s version of the tales. Hawthorne’s
authorial voice comes through clearly at certain moments in the tales, reminding the
reader of the conscious, purposeful way he crafted these tales and characters. For
example, he uses Medea as a mouthpiece to express his views on war, indicating that he
connects with the strength and ambiguity in her character. Perhaps Hawthorne’s affinity
with and interest in the shadowy ladies is because he himself was also an artist and the
ultimate manipulator of narrative threads in his weaving of Tanglewood Tales.
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Tanglewood Tales begins with Theseus’s and Ariadne’s story. Hawthorne greatly
expands Ariadne’s role in the tale. He does not characterize her as wicked or witch-like
as he does Medea and Circe. Rather, she is beautiful, tenderhearted, and “good.” Yet she
behaves unlike the fair ladies of A Wonder Book—she is not a “goody goody” as
McPherson calls Baucis, nor is she naïve and unquestioningly obedient to her
wrongheaded father like Marygold (70). When her father belittlingly tells her to “go
water thy flowers” (the characteristic activity of Marygold, Proserpina, and Europa), she
ignores his order. She is disobedient, but she is also distinct from unknowing, “naughty”
Pandora, who has no father. Instead, her disobedience is crafted and purposeful; her
character has agency, and she accomplishes her objectives in a covert, “underground”
manner while functioning within the strictures of patriarchal society.
Tanglewood Tales is characterized by multiple earthdiver myths: tales of descents
into physical and psychological depths. We see this in the abduction narratives of Europa
and Proserpina, and we re-encounter the labyrinth in Ariadne’s tale. Once again,
descriptions of sexuality are cloaked in metaphor and situated “underground” so that the
tales may prove “appropriate” for young readers. Ariadne steals into Theseus’s dungeon
unawares: “Just before midnight, the door was softly unbarred, and the gentle Ariadne
showed herself, with a torch in her hand. ‘Are you awake, Prince Theseus?’ she
whispered. . . . ‘Then follow me. . . .and tread softly’” (27). Midnight is a liminal time—a
transitory period between days and moment of potentiality in which transformation is
possible. Particularly relevant to the shadowy lady, fairytales often associate midnight
with witchcraft and feminine magic. Doors are important liminal images because they
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signify movement, transition, and transformation. As the opener of doors, Ariadne acts as
a mentor figure who aids Theseus in crossing the liminal threshold.
Theseus is already awake, but this scene can certainly be read as a sexual
awakening for Ariadne, who carries a brightly burning torch for Theseus: a metaphor for
sexual desire. She returns his phallic sword to him, which symbolizes a return of
Theseus’s virility and masculine sexual power. It is interesting that, both here and in the
relationship between Medea and Jason, masculine agency can only be realized through
the aid of the feminine. On the other hand, Ariadne is incapable of completing the quest
on her own, and she needs the male figure as a sort of catalyst to accomplish the
objective. Despite our assertion that Hawthorne’s shadowy ladies represent his strongest
figures, the fact that they cannot accomplish the quest alone might indicate that they are
not, in fact, entirely capable, and our feminist reading does not hold up. Instead, though, I
believe that Hawthorne’s use of the helper maiden suggests the need for companionship
during the quest, and this functions as a critique of the intense masculine individualism of
Theseus and Jason. A single-minded quest toward a self-aggrandizing objective can be a
lonely and unsuccessful endeavor, indeed.
At any rate, the Ariadne story puts strong emphasis on physical touch and human
intimacy as the two enter the darkness holding hands. In a highly liminal passage,
Hawthorne describes the physical characteristics of the labyrinth:
[T]hey came to a dark, shadowy grove, where the moonlight wasted itself
on the tops of trees, without shedding hardly so much as a glimmering
beam upon their pathway. After going a good way through this obscurity,
they reached a high marble wall, which was overgrown with creeping
plants, that made it shaggy with their verdure. The wall seemed to have no
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door, nor any windows, but rose up, lofty, and massive, and mysterious,
and was neither to be clambered over, nor, so far as Theseus could
perceive, to be passed through. Nevertheless, Ariadne did but press one of
her soft little fingers against a particular block of marble, and, though it
looked as solid as any other part of the wall, it yielded to her touch,
disclosing an entrance just wide enough to admit them. (28)
In “The Custom House,” Hawthorne uses moonlight to mystify and aestheticize everyday
life, transporting it to the realm of the imaginary, of Romance. Here, though, moonlight
cannot cast its softening effect and fails to illuminate the heights and depths of the
labyrinth. This does not make the structure any less otherworldly, but it emphasizes the
psychological effects of complete darkness and obscurity as well as the liminal
significance of this mid stage of the quest. The moon also functions as liminal sacra,
suggestive of feminine transformative cycles. Oppositions characterize the imagery of
this passage. Gravelike, the sepulchral marble walls bespeak both death and human
artifice, while the shaggy plants that have overtaken the structure seem wild and
untamed. The hard wall contrasts with Ariadne’s “soft little fingers.” The wall is solid,
and even Theseus with his phallic sword cannot penetrate its secrets. Ariadne, however,
is the gatekeeper and guardian of this murky, tangled realm, and with her “trembling”
fingers, she touches the wall, and the monstrous structure opens to her gentle stroke.
The power of physical, sexual touch is key to accessing the labyrinth, which
Hawthorne analogizes to the human heart: “There can be nothing else so intricate, unless
it was the brain of a man like Daedalus, who planned it, or the heart of any ordinary man;
which last, to be sure, is ten times as great a mystery as the labyrinth of Crete” (29). As
with any good tale, the mythic significance points to the internal rather than the external,
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though sex breaks down the opposition between internal and external. The heart and the
body synergize, and the pleasure is experienced physically and emotionally; it is “felt in
the blood, and felt along the heart” as Wordsworth would put it (29). Partners penetrate
and are penetrated. Though the male may be the physical penetrator, as Theseus is,
Ariadne penetrates emotionally; she is the “self-opener” as Cixous would say. They are
both essential to the process, and neither can complete it without the other.
As Hawthorne famously wrote to his fiancée, Sophia, “We are but shadows: we
are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real to us is but the thinnest
substance of a dream,—till the heart is touched. That touch creates us—then we begin to
be—thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity” (Letters, v.15 495). Just
as Ariadne’s touch breaks the spell of the shadowy grove, so the emotional and physical
contact of an intimate relationship makes Hawthorne “a being of reality.” The role of the
feminine touch, then, takes on an almost divine quality, and the feminine is associated
with creative, generative, life-giving power. Like Harmonia, Hawthorne imagines Sophia
as a “daughter of the sky,” and the union between her and Hawthorne becomes a sort of
hieros gamos. The sacred marriage implies some notion of androgyny, which fits with the
dual penetration of Ariadne and Theseus’ relationship. It may be that when partners are
joined together in psychic or spiritual union, boundaries are broken, and gender
differences no longer matter as much. In Hawthorne’s life and in this story, the
transformative power of human, sexual touch becomes a counteracting force to the inner
darkness and the shadows that even moonlight cannot illuminate.
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Though Hawthorne eroticizes touch and weaves subtle sexuality throughout the
story, the relationship between Ariadne and Theseus is never consummated; and their
connection becomes a more spiritual kind of love:
[Theseus] would have felt lost quite lost, and utterly hopeless of ever
walking in a straight path, if, every little while, he had not been conscious
of a gentle twitch at the silken cord. Then he knew that the tender-hearted
Ariadne was still holding the other end, and that she was fearing for him
and hoping for him, and giving him just as much just as much sympathy as
if she were close by his side. Oh, indeed, I can assure you that there was a
vast deal of human sympathy running along that tender thread of silk. (30)
Both love and desire transmit themselves along the twitching thread. The story becomes a
Christian allegory, and Theseus’s weapon functions as a sort of “sword of the spirit” as
he conquers the Minotaur, who represents inner darkness and bestiality. If we read this as
a Christian allegory, Ariadne, in her purity, represents the virgin goddess. In The Power
of Myth, Joseph Campbell theorizes the various virgin births that characterize different
religions and argues that virgin birth is spiritual birth that happens “when you awaken at
the level of the heart to compassion, com-passion, shared suffering” (174). Indeed, it is
Ariadne’s compassion for Theseus that prompts her to help him in the first place, but this
compassion is born out of sexual desire. Like many Renaissance painters’ depictions of
the Virgin as both pure and voluptuous and physically desirable, Ariadne is both sexual
and “most holy,” as the meaning of her name suggests. We may read the midnight scene,
then, as both a sexual and a spiritual awakening. In the age of the “cult of true
womanhood,” in which the Angel in the House figure was a pure, sexless being, to
imagine Ariadne as both holy and sexual was a bold suggestion indeed. Hawthorne was
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not only revising or re-visioning the classical Greek myths, he was also re-visioning ideas
about sexuality and femininity.
As it turns out, unlike most versions of the myth, romantic companionship is not
the primary motivator for Ariadne. She tells Theseus that losing her would break her
father’s heart, so, in another act of compassion, she remains on Minos to care for him.
This is a blatant revision, and Hawthorne explains his change in the following:
Now, some low-minded people, who pretend to tell the story of Theseus
and Ariadne, have the face to say that this royal and honorable maiden did
really flee away, under cover of the night, with the young stranger whose
life she had preserved. They say, too, that Prince Theseus (who would
have died sooner than wrong the meanest creature in the world)
ungratefully deserted Ariadne, on a solitary island, where the vessel
touched on its voyage to Athens. But, had the noble Theseus heard these
false-hoods, he would have served their slanderous authors as he served
the Minotaur. (33)
Hawthorne calls his source, Anthon, and the original creators of the myth “low minded”
and “slanderous,” suggesting that they are the ones telling a false myth, when he, in fact,
changes the story. Laffrado is particularly hard on Hawthorne at this moment, arguing,
“Here, the objectionable qualities remain, the myth is untransformed. This is not a revision, a new way of seeing, but denial, implying that there is no other truth here but the
one we fear to acknowledge” (110-111). In fact, I think Laffrado overlooks Hawthorne’s
sly narrative irony. For a writer who embraces possibility and multiple interpretations as
evidenced by his “wildcard” characters like Medea and Circe, it would be absurd for him
to insist that his version is the only authentic one. There are certain places in the text in
which Hawthorne’s voice clearly interjects, and this represents one of them. He
purposefully intervenes in the tale in a self-conscious and almost postmodern way.
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Hawthorne is showing himself to be the ultimate storyteller and the master of the
narrative. Instead of a denial of Theseus’s rejection of Ariadne, we can certainly argue
that in Hawthorne’s revision she made a more judicious and empowering choice. True,
when Ariadne leaves with Theseus in other versions, she opens herself up to weakness
and abandonment, and she protects herself from this fate in Hawthorne’s version. More
significantly, if she were to leave with Theseus, she would be subject to his authority, and
his identity would eclipse hers. When she remains on Minos, her power and
individualistic personhood remain intact. Hawthorne does not require her to resign her
power for the sake of the love of a man. She can have both, and in fact, unconsummated
relationships are often more romantic than actualized ones because of the unrealized
potential. On the other hand, perhaps both helped the other achieve the desired potential
already. Mythically speaking, Ariadne’s separation from Theseus may be ultimately less
significant than I am making it out to be. If we read Theseus as Ariadne’s animus, the
counterpart and contrasexual other half needed to join against the dark psychoscape of
the labyrinth, then perhaps a physical union or proximity are no longer important. The
recognition of a counterpart and equal in another may be the ultimate form of intimacy.
We have yet to discuss the important symbolic and narrative role of Ariadne’s
thread, the self-same title of J. Hillis Miller’s deconstructionist work. In his first chapter
in Ariadne’s Thread: Narrative Lines, Miller establishes the critical dilemma:
How should the critic thread her or his way into the labyrinthine problems
of narrative form, and in particular, into the problem of repetition in
fiction? The line of the line itself? The motif, image, concept, or formal
model of the line, however, far from being a clue to the labyrinth, turns
out, as the passage from Ruskin suggests, to be itself the labyrinth. To
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follow the motif of the line will not be to simplify the knotted problems of
narrative form but to retrace the whole tangle from the starting place of a
certain point of entry. (4)
In other words, language is not a clue to the narrative; language (and writing) represents
the labyrinth itself. As we have shown throughout this discussion, Hawthorne tends to
repeat character types and mythic frameworks, especially the dark/fair lady dichotomy.
Miller argues that to follow the repetition of these motifs will not simplify or “untie” the
knot; rather, deconstruction has the potential to underscore how complex and “tangled”
narrative structures can actually be. Hence, Tanglewood Tales is quite a fitting title.
In the rest of the chapter, Hillis Miller describes the common confusion between
Ariadne and Arachne, the woman who challenges Athena to a weaving contest and loses,
ultimately transforming into a spider. Their characters seem to inhabit opposing sides of
the feminine archetypal spectrum, since Arachne represents individualism and reason,
while Ariadne becomes the consort of Dionysus in some versions of the myth, connecting
her with passion and unreason. Yet both are united by the images of thread, weaving, and
storytelling. Through the threads and through the “accidental” similarity of their names,
the two identities become as one. For example, Shakespeare makes use of the hybrid
word “Ariachne,” in Troilus and Cressida. Also, the conflation of identities is implied in
Ruskin’s painting of the labyrinth’s victim eaten by the “monster in midweb” (Miller 14).
In the combination of their names, Miller shows that the differences between the two
collapse, as does the difference (différance) between the self and the Other, between
outside and inside.
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As Miller claims, “All these stories [myths] turn on enigmatic oppositions:
making, solving; hiding, revealing; female, male, united in ambiguous or androgynous
figures, like Dionysus himself, or like Ariadne, who is perhaps too aggressive to be
purely ‘feminine’ in the male chauvinist sense of the word, or like Arachne, devouring
phallic mother, weaver of a web” (14). Enigmatic figures, like Ariadne, Medea and Circe,
challenge the dichotomies that typical ideological and linguistic structures rely upon,
such as dark versus fair, empowered versus powerless, and male versus female. As Terry
Eagleton succinctly explains in Literary Theory: An Introduction, structural and classical
modes of understanding define concepts “by what they exclude: they are part of the sort
of ‘binary opposition’ beloved of structuralism. Thus, for male-dominated society, man is
the founding principle and woman the excluded opposite of this; and as long as such a
distinction is tightly held in place the whole system can function effectively” (114-115).
In fact, though, as man defines himself as opposite of woman, he intimately connects
himself to her because he requires her to understand himself. As Eagleton puts it, “Man
therefore needs this other even as he spurns it, is constrained to give a positive identity to
what he regards as no-thing…Perhaps what is outside is also somehow inside, what is
alien is also intimate” (115). This is the nature of deconstructive theory. If so-called
opposing traits cohere in an individual person, word, or text, simplistic, safe (and
sometimes oppressive) modes of understanding language and identity collapse. To
clarify, texts do not require theorists to deconstruct them; they deconstruct themselves.
Though we do not have an Arachne figure in Tanglewood Tales, exactly, Circe is
probably the closest to Arachne’s counterpart because she weaves tapestries. However, I
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think the better answer is that Hawthorne himself is the spider figure—the spinner of
tales and creator of the mesmeric labyrinth that readers are invited to explore. The
labyrinth is a motif that is carried throughout the book. While I’m not sure that “The
Minotaur” actively deconstructs itself (I think the whole of the text does), the threads that
weave through the labyrinth do provide an effective image for the way that complex
narratives function. It is the role of the critical reader to follow the threads into the
labyrinth of the tale. By placing such a diverse group of female characters in Tanglewood
Tales, Hawthorne deconstructs normative conceptions of femininity. The women
represent opposing sides of the feminine archetypal spectrum as a group and as
individuals. Ariadne is both pure and sexual. Even more than Ariadne, Medea embodies a
variety of character types and archetypal roles in one figure. But let us turn our attention
to the other Tanglewood women to achieve a better sense of how binaries such as male
versus female, good versus evil, and powerful versus powerless become problematized.
Even more than Ariadne, who is, as Miller puts it, “perhaps too aggressive to be
purely feminine,” Medea, represented in literature and myth as helper maiden, witch,
mother, and murderess, truly dramatizes a broad spectrum of feminine representations
collapsed into one character (14). In doing so, she problematizes any simplistic
categorization of femininity. In Chapter 3, we established the importance of narrative
framing techniques, so it is interesting to note that Medea acts as a frame to both ends of
Tanglewood Tales. Once again, according to Derrida, frames work “Between the outside
and the inside, between the external and internal edge-line, the framer and the framed, the
figure and the ground. . . .and so one for any two-faced opposition” (11-12). In her
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framing of Tanglewood Tales, Medea is probably the most memorable character, and she
provides a context or a point of reference for interpreting the other characters.14
Hawthorne also portrays Medea in two very different lights in the beginning and the end,
illustrating her character’s range. At the beginning, she is a fairly standard rendering of
the calculating, manipulative enchantress, but she appears more complex and ambiguous
as the crafty princess—a younger version of herself—at the end. As a frame, Medea
functions as Derrida describes, defying any two-faced opposition.
In the Theseus/Ariadne story, Medea appears as Theseus’s father’s wife, “the
wicked enchantress” (14). Her various malevolent activities include “boiling old people
in a large caldron, under pretence of making them young again,” flying about in her
“fiery chariot, drawn by winged dragons,” and “amongst a thousand other bad things,”
preparing a “poison that was instantly fatal to whomsoever might so much as touch it
with his lips” (15). In this tale, the jealous Medea plots to poison the rightful heir of
Athens, but her scheme is thwarted when Aegeus recognizes Theseus as his son. Her
power is ineffectual against the patriarchal bond; and she departs in a spectacular rage:
[B]ehold! [T]here was her fiery chariot, and four huge winged serpents,
wriggling and twisting in the air, flourishing their tails higher than the top
of the palace, and all ready to set off on an aerial journey. . . .Medea,
almost bursting with rage, uttered precisely such a hiss as one of her own
snakes, only ten times more venomous and spiteful; and, glaring fiercely
out of the blaze of the chariot, she shook her hands over the multitude
below, as if she were scattering a million of curses among them. (18-19)
Though I reference Derrida again, I’m using the concept of framing differently here than I did in my
liminal reading of the internarratives of A Wonder Book. In A Wonder Book, the narratives involving the
flower children act as frames for the tales. Here, Medea herself is the frame—in her multiplicity, she is a
type of narrative in and of herself.
14
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In this scene, Medea herself is transformed into a vicious snake, an animal associated
with temptation, original sin, and evil. Hawthorne typically represents his shadowy ladies
with Medusa-like serpentine qualities. Even so, Medea’s characterization is made more
intriguing by the mythic implication of her Quetzalcoatl-like winged serpents. These are
hybrid beings, a synthesis of opposites, connecting earth with sky. Most of this tale is set
in Crete, the birthplace of Minoan society. One of the most famous pieces of art from this
ancient culture is the Minoan Snake Goddess. The statuette is partially nude and holds
two serpents in her hands. She is a representation of a powerful household deity
associated with fertility, magic, and rebirth. Indeed, in some matrilineal, non-JudeoChristian societies (and literatures, such as Gilgamesh), the snake is a positive symbol,
associated with renewal because it sheds its old skin. Like Medea herself, the serpent she
is associated with is fraught with contradictions and symbolic richness.
Miller points out the “accidental similarity” between Ariadne and Arachne’s
names and the identity conflation that occurs, in part, because of this. We may argue that
Medea and Medusa’s names function in the same way (alongside their serpentine
descriptions, of course). This name similarity implicitly connects Medea to the idea of
feminine writing that we will explore more thoroughly in a moment. In “The Laugh of
the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous explains that écriture féminine will
tear her [woman] away from the super-egoized structure in which she has
always occupied the place reserved for the guilty (guilty of everything,
guilty at every turn: for having desires, for not having any; for being
frigid, for being 'too hot'; for not being both at once; for being too
motherly and not enough; for having children and for not having any; for
nursing and for not nursing...) (880)
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Medea’s mythic depiction covers many of these categorizations, and she is condemned in
all her representations. In her relationship with Jason, she is either too passionate—too
sexual—or a cold, man-eating witch. As a mother, her love is either out of control and
“too thick,” as Toni Morrison’s murderess, Sethe’s, is described in Beloved, or she is a
heartless, loveless monster, as Euripides depicts her. Either way, she is guilty of grievous
misbehavior. Yet, it is through writing, argues Cixous, that women can find a place
outside of these condemnatory binaries. In writing a Medea that encompasses multiple
possibilities in the same text (though he does not approach the mother role), Hawthorne
takes a step forward in creating a Medea that, like her dragon-led chariot, rises above the
oppositional roles typically provided for women.
The first thing we notice about young Medea is her straightforwardness,
confidence, and fearlessness. She introduces herself to Jason with the following: “I am
the king’s daughter, and my name is Medea. I know a great deal of which other young
princesses are ignorant, and can do many things which they would be afraid so much as
to dream of. If you will trust me, I can instruct you how to tame the fiery bulls, and sow
the dragon’s teeth, and get the Golden Fleece” (167). In her promises to teach and guide
him, she functions as a potential liminal mentor, as Ariadne does. She immediately
separates herself from other naïve princesses (like Marygold and even Proserpina and
Europa) and alludes to her supernatural knowingness. Like Ariadne, she possesses the
key to the hero’s ultimate objective, but Medea does not desire the boon herself. Of
course, neither does Jason. For both, the acquisition is a means to some other end. For
Jason, the Golden Fleece provides a way to gain the throne of King Pelias’ kingdom; so
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the gold color may symbolize his avarice and desire for power. On the other hand, the
reclamation of his father’s throne would provide a return to justice or restored order, so
the gold could symbolize the color of the crown. Medea’s ulterior motive, however, is
less easily determined. Unlike Ariadne, I suspect that Medea could perform this quest on
her own—she has the strength of character and the magical know-how. Why, then, does
she choose Jason? This is Jason’s concern with Medea: he does not know her motivation,
and he cannot classify her or pin her down, so to speak.
As with many of Hawthorne’s characters in these companion books, the reader
can ascertain much about Medea’s character by looking at her eyes. For Hawthorne, the
“eye” is a window into the “I”—the innermost self:
Gazing at Medea, he [Jason] beheld a wonderful intelligence in her face.
She was one of those persons whose eyes are full of mystery; so that,
while looking into them, you seem to see a very great way, as into a deep
well, yet can never be certain whether you see into the farthest depths, or
whether there not be something else hidden at the bottom. If Jason had
been capable of fearing anything, he would have been afraid of making
this young princess his enemy; for, beautiful as she now looked, she
might, the very next instant, become as terrible as the dragon that guarded
the Golden Fleece (167).
Unlike the shallow, one-dimensional Jason, Medea is complex and unreadable, and that
makes her dangerous and frightening from his limited perspective. As Hawthorne’s
speaker puts it, “These enchantresses, you know, are never to be depended upon” (175).
Yet, throughout the entirety of the quest, Medea shows herself to be quite dependable.
She is cleverer, wiser, and more courageous and powerful than Jason. In the first tale,
Medea creates potions to kill and destroy, but here, her herbs and magical concoctions are
designed to heal and protect. She gives Jason a balm that will shield him from the fiery
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breath of the bulls. She holds his hand to guide him and assures him when he is afraid.
She brings the dragon’s teeth to plant, and she instructs him and guides him each step of
the way. As readers who have patiently followed Hawthorne’s narrative line, we have
earned the insight to see more in her than Jason does. We can acknowledge and better
appreciate her depth, and we too can gain insight from the astute philosophical questions
she poses along the way—commentary that speaks to the true spirit of the quest itself.
For example, Medea makes a disdainful remark about the nature of masculine
ambition. When the dragon-teeth army self-destructs, Medea scoffs, “Let them sleep in
their bed of honor. The world will always have simpletons enough, just like them,
fighting and dying for they know not what, and fancying that posterity will take the
trouble to put laurel wreaths on their rusty and battered helmets” (173). She sees this
blind heroism as a foolish and laughable masculine endeavor. Like Jason in his quest for
the Golden Fleece, these soldiers are willing to risk their lives for an intangible, illunderstood ideal held by another, more powerful man. Medea finds the same self-conceit
and blindness in Jason, but he fails to recognize the double meaning in her critique. Jason
remains unable to interpret and understand the depth in Medea’s eyes because he is blind
to his own intentions, and his motivations are mysteries.
We saw Hawthorne’s ironic voice coming through in his explanation of his
revisions in the Ariadne story, and we also see it here, not from third person narrator’s
perspective, but through Medea’s own voice. Laffrado posits that the darker tone of
Tanglewood Tales is as a result of personal hardships and anxieties in Hawthorne’s life.
The book was published in 1853, and the rumblings of the Civil War were beginning. As
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Brenda Wineapple has argued, Hawthorne was decidedly against the conflict—so much
so that his progressive abolitionist friends accused him of not being sympathetic to the
plight of the slaves. This is a complex biographical matter that the scope of this thesis
cannot address, but we see Hawthorne’s strong anti-war sentiments through Medea’s
critique of the futile battle of the dragon teeth army. That he uses Medea as a mouthpiece
for his political or ethical beliefs is evidence of his unique affinity with the shadowy lady.
Jason replies that the deaths of the soldiers make him sad, and he wonders if the
Golden Fleece is as “well worth the winning” as he thought. Medea replies, “True, the
Golden Fleece may not be so valuable as you have thought it; but there is nothing better
in the world; and one must needs have an object, you know” (173). In fact, this may not
be alchemical gold, capable of producing transformation; it may be the fool’s gold of
false promises and quickly fading attraction. Laffrado explains the mythic significance of
Medea’s and Jason’s interchange in a particularly articulate way. Medea, Laffrado
explains, understands “what every woman in Tanglewood Tales knows: that dwelling on
the object of quest blinds one and that it is the quest itself, like life itself, that should
demand one’s attention and command one’s best efforts” (127). It is interesting that
Hawthorne’s revision of the myth (and its refocus on the feminine) approaches a more
significant mythic value than some original versions of the myth do, in that it is able to
gain enough critical distance to self-critique. Though I think it is stereotypical to
designate an emphasis on process as a feminine value and a focus on outcome or product
as a masculine value, the Tanglewood women do possess in-sight into the mythic or
ritualistic natures of the events that the single-minded male heroes take for granted.
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Hawthorne consistently labels Medea as a duplicitous figure, and this
categorization indicates that there is something dishonest and dangerous about her Janusfaced character. Perhaps there is, but she also possesses the capacity for change, and,
ultimately, this is offered as a more viable alternative to Jason’s self-limiting
steadfastness to his object. As in the Ariadne story, Medea meets Jason under the blanket
of night. Night is certainly meant to obscure the forbidden mission, but it is also rich with
symbolic possibilities. Again, night is a liminal time of dreams and potentialities. If we
choose to read this tale liminally, Medea is a gatekeeper who is an essential part of
Jason’s rite of passage. We could also read Jason’s journey and trials as a night-sea
voyage as a Jungian might and so interpret his battle with the dragon as a spiritually
fraught long dark night of the soul. Hawthorne’s claim that the Minotaur’s labyrinth is
analogous to the human heart indicates that he was consciously using allegorical
frameworks. Yet I cannot confidently support these readings because, simply put, Jason
does not change. His experience lacks the necessary doubt and despair of a night-sea
voyage. Jason, it seems, is too shallow to fully experience a dark night of the soul. He
leaves with the same assumptions (about Medea, the quest, and himself) that he came
with. Instead of an agent of transformation for Jason, night represents an obscuring veil.
It hides his cowardliness as he leaves with the unfairly won boon. Medea assures him that
he has won the Golden Fleece, but this is untrue—she has won it. If one could make a
fairly accurate generalization about myth, it is that authentic myths involve
transformations—metamorphoses. Here, even though the boon is won, the quest itself is a
failure, at least as far as the masculine hero is concerned. We are left, then, with Medea.
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As the character who is most able to transform, she emerges as the true mythic hero of
this story.
In Ariadne’s story, and, as we will see in a moment, in Circe’s, weaving imagery
underscores the narrative maneuvers that Hawthorne is performing in Tanglewood Tales,
and it provides a common thread that connects the shadowy ladies in spite of their
differences. In Medea’s story, the common thread is a bit more implicit, though we have
already referred to the Medea/Medusa connection and the way writing frees women from
binary condemnations. It is interesting to note that, according to Derrida’s Glas, the
Greek word for thread, “erion” means wool, fleece, and/or pubic hair. Jason’s Golden
Fleece, then, is even more significant for Medea than it is for Jason because it is what
connects her to the artistry and feminine sexuality of her weaving sister characters (qtd.
in Hillis Miller 14). Perhaps the quest for the fleece is a coming into sexual maturity for
the young Medea so that she can become the forceful adult enchantress we see earlier in
Tanglewood Tales (but later in Medea’s life, chronologically speaking). The etymology
of the Greek word contains multiple connotations that connect the women. Laffrado links
Medea back to Hawthorne himself and his own understanding of narrative forms:
The complex nature of Medea’s characterization shows Hawthorne
creating a woman who herself exists as a neutral territory, a place where
the actual and the imaginary continually meet. . . .In Medea, Hawthorne
voices his admiration for the powerful women in his collection. He
constructs Medea herself as a wild card, a living representation of the
discourse with which he felt most confident, a discourse that allowed room
for the full play of the imagination, a place where the exertions of
powerful women could be read as brief, well-executed moments of art.
(128)
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Instead of existing within the narrative, then, Medea becomes a sort of narrative thread in
and of herself because her person contains the complexity and potentiality Hawthorne
admired. “Wild card,” in fact, is a term Derrida uses to describe Thoth, the Egyptian god
of writing. Thoth is an important deconstructive tool for Derrida. In Phaedrus, Plato
makes Thoth out to be the arch-enemy, the Other to Logos and the dialectic (“Plato’s
Pharmacy”). (Interestingly enough, Medea is often represented as racially “Other” or, like
Thoth, not Greek.) The French feminists take this idea a step further and argue that the
opposite of phallogocentrism is feminine discourse—is écriture feminine. In “The Laugh
of the Medusa,” Cixous is emphatic that the site of écriture feminine is the female body—
one writes oneself. It fits, then, that Medea can be the embodiment of a feminine
discourse that is foreign to Jason. Because Jason cannot interpret this wild card, he is
afraid of her artfulness and power, and he perceives her duplicity as artifice, whereas,
like Hawthorne himself, Medea personifies the truly talented artist.
Finally, we see feminine power and narrative control displayed most fully in the
female-created and dominated world of Circe’s island. According to Northrop Frye, there
are some archetypes that do not fit into his neat classifications, and Circe’s island is one
of them. Where Medea and Ariadne must work covertly within masculine structures to
achieve their objectives, Circe completely rejects masculine authority and typical gender
roles in favor of her own powerful constructions. As Hélène Cixous describes in “At
Circe’s, or the Self-Opener,” “Here things are other things. Everything is endlessly
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transformed” (388).15 Circe’s island becomes an anti-structural space—a feminine realm
that subverts the masculine order. For Ulysses’ men, nothing is as it seems. Even so, in
their uncanny transformations, the men become more of what they already are, or more
authentic versions of themselves.
The physical space of Circe’s island is described more thoroughly than any other
location in Tanglewood Tales. From Ulysses’ original point of view, Circe’s “stately
towers” seemed to be built of “snow white marble,” rising in the “midst of a grove of
lofty trees. The thick branches of these trees stretched across the front of the edifice, and
more than half concealed it, although, from the portion which he saw, Ulysses judged it
to be spacious and exceedingly beautiful, and probably the residence of some great
nobleman or prince” (86). Ulysses notices its size and imagines that a powerful man
owns this beautiful palace, but the text indicates that his vision is obscured by trees, his
own assumptions about men and women, and his preoccupation with power. To Ulysses’
men, who are only concerned with physical satisfaction, the palace appears as a sort of
sunny pleasure dome, “large and lofty with airy pinnacles upon its roof” (93). Later,
when Eurylochus has seen Circe’s magic at work, he is terrified, and, according to him,
“the marble palace, magnificent as it looked, [is] only a dismal cavern in reality” (102).
Unlike the phallic turrets, the cave of ice is a yonic space, connected with the earth and
containing the secrets of the feminine. The reality of Circe’s island depends upon one’s
perspective and point of view. In reference to caverns, Plato’s allegory of the cave
15
Though Cixous is referring to the Circe episode in Joyce’s Ulysses, the same idea applies here.
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provides a useful ironic context for thinking about Circe’s island. The shape-shifting
figures in Circe’s fountain are analogous to the shadows on the cave wall:
The water of this fountain, as it spouted upward, was constantly taking
new shapes, not very distinctly, but plainly enough for a nimble fancy to
recognize what they were. Now it was the shape of a man in a long robe,
the fleecy whiteness of which was made out of the fountain’s spray; now it
was a lion, or a tiger, or a wolf, or an ass, or, as often as anything else, a
hog, wallowing in the marble basin as if it were his sty. (94)
Ulysses’ men are imprisoned by their own shortsightedness, and they cannot interpret
their own inner realities (or anything outside of themselves). Though the clear water of
the fountain shows the men reflections of themselves as swine, they cannot interpret the
symbolism, and Circe’s use of foreshadowing is lost on them. The phantasms in the
fountain are reminiscent of another important point from “The Laugh of the Medusa.”
Cixous argues that “Women's imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing:
their stream of phantasms is incredible” (867). Circe’s artistry is prolific, and her island is
a wellspring of creative potential.
On Circe’s island, much depends on one’s ability (or inability) to interpret signs.
The men recognize that something is amiss when a regal looking bird “with a crown-like”
tuft upon its head seems to try to warn them against continuing on (90). They do not
understand and fail to heed his cautionary chirping. Wild animals appear as friendly and
mild as domesticated dogs, yet the men do not put the semiotic clues together, and they
do not know what they signify. These animals were once powerful, conceited men put
under Circe’s more powerful spell. When Circe invites Ulysses’ men to dine and they
gluttonously and rudely devour the food, Circe changes them into pigs because they have
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failed to recognize the ritualistic significance of the meal. Their singularity, selfishness,
and denial of complexity are punished, and Circe transforms them into “truer” porcine
versions of that which they already are.
On Circe’s island, in an almost carnivalesque manner, typical power structures are
subverted. We have identified Medea as being a personal representation of Hawthorne’s
favorite mode of creative discourse and argued she becomes a type of narrative herself in
her complexities and contradictions. This idea is developed most completely in “Circe’s
Palace,” and Circe’s entire island can be read as an embodiment of feminine discourse.
The French feminists, particularly Cixous, often pose the idea of a primeval feminine
space free of the Lacanian Law of the Father (phallogocentrism), where what Cixous
calls the Voice of the Mother, can emerge. This Voice, according to Cixous, is the well
source of all feminine linguistic and artistic creativity and power: the inspiration for
écriture féminine. As Verena Andermatt Conley explains in Hélène Cixous: Writing the
Feminine, “The father is only a linguistic convention, but the mother is in body and
name. She has a presence. . . .It is because of her proximity to the body that woman’s
writing is close to voice and rhythm (rhythmos, a respiration, an exhalation, a breath of
life, souffle)” (61). Again, creative and regenerative energy is associated with the
feminine.
Though Circe does not write, exactly, she weaves extraordinary tapestries, which
are a type of writing, and—pertinent to Cixous’ emphasis on voice and breath—her
beautiful singing is the first sound the men hear upon entering her palace. Much emphasis
is placed on Circe’s song: “A woman’s voice was singing melodiously in another room of
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the palace, and with her voice was mingled the noise of a loom, at which she was
probably seated, weaving a rich texture of cloth, and intertwining the high and low
sweetness of her voice into a rich tissue of harmony” (94). Circe’s voice plays in
harmony with the pattern of her threads; therefore, sound no longer signals just presence
and writing absence. Rather, the two are one, and neither is privileged above the other.
High notes and low notes work together to create a richness and depth in her art. Like
Medea, Circe is characterized by her ability to combine oppositions. Circe’s tapestry
suggests an arachnid “web of cloth,” and to the men’s
vast astonishment, they saw their own figures perfectly represented in
different colored threads. It was a lifelike picture of their recent
adventures, showing them in the cave of Polyphemus, and how they had
put out his one great moony eye; while in another part of the tapestry they
were untying the leathern bags, puffed out with contrary winds; and
farther on, they beheld themselves scampering away from the giant king of
the Laestrygons, who had caught one of them by the leg. (96-97)
Here, we see the thread imagery that connects the three “bad girls” of Tanglewood Tales
most clearly. As Gilbert and Gubar point out, single women or spin-sters are often
represented as “duplicitous witch-like weavers of webs in which to ensnare men (like
Circe), metaphysical spinners of Fate (like the Norns), and fictionalizing weavers or
plotters of doom” (632). Yet, in Hawthorne’s text, Circe is not burned as a witch or
beheaded like the Medusa. Ulysses does overpower her, but he had an unfair advantage in
Quicksilver’s help. Here is yet another assisted male quest hero. Even so, as Laffrado
puts it, “Ulysses’s condemning tone at sword’s point is not Hawthorne’s, nor is Circe’s
fate at swordpoint Medusa’s. In keeping with the text’s ambivalence about Circe, she
must be defeated, but she need not—either in traditional myth or in Hawthorne’s version
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of it—be decapitated. Even after her surrender, her power remains intact, her art in a state
of flux for the future” (120). She has not lost power; she has simply had to renegotiate her
power temporarily. Instead of condemning Circe, Hawthorne celebrates her power—
perhaps because he can relate to her. Just as Circe creates and controls the signs in her
realm, so Hawthorne does the same in his own fictional one. Ariadne and Medea help to
fashion their heroes’ fates, but, like the author himself, Circe imagines and weaves
Ulysses’ men’s fate before it even unfolds.
Hillis Miller connects different archetypal representations through the knotted
threads of labyrinthine texts in which narratives crisscross. Hawthorne does the same
with Ariadne, Medea, and Circe. Though each tale may not fully deconstruct on its own,
together the tales hold opposing representations of women close to one another, showing,
as Cixous claims, that “you can't talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous,
classifiable into codes—any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling
another” (867). Hawthorne does an insightful job representing a diverse range of complex
female characters in Tanglewoood Tales. Especially in characters like Medea, the
“Other” is actually within oneself, which is as uncomfortable as it is liberating.
Tanglewood Tales arguably deconstructs the dark/fair lady binary that even modern
Hawthorne critics hold as a legitimate framework for understanding Hawthorne’s
feminine characters. Instead, we have powerful shadowy figures that are capable of both
compassion and vengeance. They are capable of much because they are the weavers of
their masculine hero’s fates; they control the direction of the quests. Ultimately, though,
Hawthorne is the meta-weaver of the tales. His authorial presence comes through
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multiple times in the shadowy ladies’ stories in both irony and seriousness, lest we forget
who is really in charge of the tales. The question remains: If the creative power of
language is used most effectively in the Hawthorne’s representation of the shadowy
ladies, is Hawthorne channeling the Voice of the Mother? Is Tanglewood Tales, like
Circe’s island, a type of feminine discourse? Perhaps. Is Hawthorne, then, a
protofeminist, or one who anticipates modern feminist concepts before the advent of
twentieth century feminism? Maybe he is, but not necessarily. Since écriture féminine is
so closely connected to the female body, it seems gendered in an inescapable way.
Hawthorne, consequently, may be incapable of feminine writing (or “scribbling” he
would call it) because he a man.16 The point to take away is this: in his creation of the
shadowy ladies, his text achieves a level of complexity in regards to representations of
gender that he does not accomplish in A Wonder Book. Even in a book dominated by loss,
Hawthorne is able to find and signify something of himself in the narrative. Like in his
most artistically successful works for adults, in Tanglewood Tales he is able to establish
that liminal place of potentiality where the Actual and the Imaginary can meet. He
becomes the ultimate Arachne figure, who weaves something beautiful and evocative in
spite of pain and loss, or perhaps because of it.
As an interesting (and possibly relevant) sidenote, Hawthorne’s shy disposition and career as a writer
associated him with the feminine. Many of the professional writers of his time were women. He was quite
aware and self-conscious of this. Margaret Fuller concluded that Hawthorne’s “The Gentle Boy” possessed
“so much grace and delicacy of feeling that it must have been written by a woman” (198) and Longfellow
commented that Hawthorne’s “genius” included “a large proportion of feminine elements” (10). For
Fuller, this would have been a compliment, but for Longfellow, it may have been a slight.
16
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Chapter 6
EPILOGUE
The words are purposes
The words are maps…
“Diving into Wreck” Adrienne Rich
Among other themes, this thesis has examined liminal journeys, coming of age
stories, and quest narratives. It has analyzed the way these processes help construct
feminine identity and give the quester self-knowledge and access to mythic gnosis.
Literary analysis is also a type of quest. When one analyzes a text, one becomes a sort of
earthdiver like Proserpina or Ariadne, journeying into the psychological depths of the
linguistic labyrinth and following the path of the narrative threads. In pursuit of the
semiotic clues and guideposts, the reader gains insight, for example, into Medea’s
mysterious character and motivations—a privilege that even the characters themselves
(like Jason) cannot access. Like the flower children, we are also neophytes; we are the
intended initiates that metaphorically come of age through the process of listening to
Hawthorne’s stories. There are perils and theoretical pitfalls in the literary quest, but
there are also incredible rewards. The ultimate objective and grail is the (even
momentary) insight or understanding gained through the reading and writing process.
For feminist myth critic Adrienne Rich, the act of literary criticism is like a dive
into a shipwreck:
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
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slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth (52-63)
Rich observes the damage that patriarchal narratives have had on society and seeks the
treasures that remain, the pearl of wisdom or insight that is buried beneath the rubble—
that which can be saved, restored, or revised. Rich does not seek the stories themselves,
though; she is in search of something “real,” or something permanent to take away from
her analysis.
For feminist readers and critics in particular, the object of the literary quest is not
only theoretical; it also has important implications for understanding oneself and for
learning how to live. Rich puts it so well in “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision”:
Re-vision-the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an
old text from a new critical direction—is for us more than a chapter in
cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the
assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And
this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity:
it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated
society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take
the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living,
how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped
as well as liberated us; and how we can begin to see—and therefore live—
afresh. (18)
There is a dual sense of re-vision here. First, Hawthorne himself is the ultimate revisionist. He reads Anthon’s versions of the myths and consciously and purposefully reweaves them. He greatly expands his female characters’ roles. Pandora and Medusa are
120
made to be sympathetic women, and Hawthorne endows their characters with
psychological realism. Where Ariadne was an afterthought in Anthon, Hawthorne makes
her essential for accomplishing the quest in his version. He gives her both the love of a
man and agency and self-determination; she does not have to choose between them. Circe
is no longer an evil witch who ultimately becomes “tamed” as Ulysses’ lover as she is
constructed in Homer. In Hawthorne, she is the artistic storyteller, manipulator of
narrative threads, and negotiator of a feminine-controlled realm. Medea is perhaps most
like Hawthorne as re-visionist because she is able to see Jason’s objectives with fresh
eyes. She possesses the perspective to be able to critique the shortsightedness and selfaggrandizement of the masculine quest. Therefore, even as Hawthorne is revising the
myths, he is also doing something much more significant. He is, in a small but definite
way, re-visioning gender roles to imagine a space for femininity outside of the accepted
Angel in the House stereotype or even outside of the fair/dark lady dichotomy that he is
so often accused of perpetuating. A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales provide an
alternative to Rich’s “book of myths in which our names do not appear” (93-95). Second,
in seeing ourselves in these tales, recognizing the ways that gender functions in the
stories and drawing attention to it—in grabbing hold of this narrative thread and
following it in our analysis—we, too, are participating in the re-vision process. The
implications of feminist re-vision and criticism matter deeply. They speak not only to
new ways of reading, but also to new ways of imagining and becoming.
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