Incarnational Poetics: Embodiment and Literary Influence in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Stories from the Old Manse Period

“It is the inward thought alone that renders the body either material or angelical” (133): these words by Sophia Peabody Hawthorne belong to the Notebook she kept during her three years at the Old Manse with Nathaniel after their marriage (1842-45). While not directly referring to her husband’s work, she points to a network of themes that recur obsessively in his production during that period: the relationship between the inner and the outward, the dialectic between the ideal and the bodily. While Hawthorne addresses these topics in the Manse writings, he subtly dismantles any sense of polar opposition or binary contrast between them: the relationship between the “material” and the “angelical,” to borrow Sophia Hawthorne’s terms, is mediated in the tales by the trope of incarnation or embodiment, and that trope is not taken as a site of easy transition from soul to body, but of a complex intertwining between them. This trope is also fundamental to at least two of Hawthorne’s literary models, Edmund Spenser and John Milton; I will show that Hawthorne’s recovery and exploration of this theme is one of the ways (perhaps the major way) in which he negotiates the influence of these two poets in order to reframe his own artistic identity in ways that simultaneously assert and question it. The first Manse period was transcendental for Hawthorne’s self-definition as a writer. (1) He assumed a conscious distance from his Salem years, and reassessed his position in relation to his cultural history, one that involved his Puritan ancestors and the weighty literary presences of figures such as Shakespeare, Bunyan, Milton and Spenser. The latter two authors are especially significant to his reconsideration of the past, and of the role he assigned to that religious inheritance in his own artistic project; their relevance for him is heightened by their strong links to the European Renaissance and their inheritance of visual and artistic legacies against which the Puritan tradition had strongly reacted, both in England and in America. Hawthorne had an intense awareness of these tensions. They had been present in the cultural debates fostered by Protestantism since its beginnings in the sixteenth century, and they had fully modulated both the English Renaissance and the American absorption of that religious inheritance, including the Puritan sense of moral distance from it. Between 1842 and 1845, Hawthorne’s relation to these deep-seated conflicts was inevitably troubled in ways that went beyond his attempts to assert artistic independence or the new links that he was forging (thanks to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller) to a revitalized and forward-looking American culture. In “The Old Manse,” his idealized account of his Concord years, Hawthorne expresses a lack of connection (tinged, however, by curiosity) with the literature and thought of the American past: he emblematizes this in the indifference that overcomes him when browsing through the ancient library he has found at the Manse, much of which has come down “from the days of the mighty Puritan divines” (10:18). Theological and moral discourse seems to have withered quickly, since “thought grows moldy. What was good and nourishing from the spirits of one generation affords little sustenance for the next” (10:19). This distancing gesture is a necessary part of the authorial image that Hawthorne attempts to create for himself at the Manse; and yet ancient struggles are revived again and again in the few tales that he wrote there. Central to these conflicts is the obsessively recurring topic of incarnation or, to put it in more qualified terms, the seeming projection of spirit into matter, and the difficulty of neatly demarcating the former from the latter. It is no coincidence that this thematic pattern should have been framed by Hawthorne in terms that are distinctly Spenserian and Miltonic. Spenser and Milton represent, in different and complementary ways, a central trend in English-speaking Protestantism: one which, while integrating the rich traditions of the Continental Renaissance, with all its detailed attention to form and ornamentation, also warns repeatedly against the temptations of art, and strongly questions its validity when devoid of a firm moral intention.