Hawthorne's kids sound like they were just as warm, fuzzy, and optimistic as their dear old dad. Daughter Una (an inspiration for Pearl in The Scarlet Letter) once wrote a poem called "Dead Sunshine" (11). Ha.
Hawthorne's Uncle Robert (Manning), an important figure in his life, since Nathaniel's father died when he was only four, once sent his young nephew these words of advice: "Study the hard lessons, learn all you can at school, mind your mother, don't look cross, hold up your head like a man, and keep your cloths [sic] clean" (24). Words of wisdom that still hold up today!
I hadn't come across this reference before, but I imagine it must be the letter that launched a thousand (okay, maybe dozens?) of dissertations/articles/book/conference papers: Fifteen-year-old Hawthorne, bemoaning that his carefree, childish days are behind him and the fact that he has to go to boarding school, writes to his sister Ebe, explaining, "But the happiest days of my life are gone. Why was I not a girl that I might have been pinned all my life to my Mother's apron?" (39). I am sure there were plenty of women who would have gladly switched places with poor Nathaniel.
Beyond these rather incidental bits, Wineapple provides some rather insightful commentary on Hawthorne and his work. I really like these words from her opening chapter, a chapter that begins by discussing where the three Hawthorne children ended up as adults: "With an insight so fine it bordered on the voluptuous, he crafted a style of exquisite ambiguity, of uncompromising passion and stubborn skepticism. Yet his characters are often curiously static, poised between self-knowledge and indifference, and like Hawthorne himself, confounded by what and who they are. For Hawthorne was a man of dignity, of mordant wit, of malicious anger; a man of depression and control; a forthright and candid man aching to confess but too proud, too obstinate, to ashamed to do so; a man of disclosure and disguise, both at once keen, cynical, and intelligent, who digs into his imagination to write of American men and women: isolated in their communities, burdened by their history, riven by their sense of crime and their perpetual, befuddled innocence; people ambitious and vain and displaced and willing, or perhaps forced, to live a double life, a secret life, an exemplary life, haunted and imprisoned, even as his children were--or, in Hawthorne's terms, as are we all" (12).
Work Cited
Wineapple, Brenda. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Life. New York: Random House, 2003. Print.
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