370
PARTISAN REVIEW
be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter";
Zenobia, who is something of a litterateur and a crusader for
women's rights,* has an aptitude for extreme ideas that fill her
interlocutors with dismay; and Miriam evolves a conception of sin
which amounts to a justification, for she takes the view that sin is
a means of educating and improving the personality.
The dark lady is a rebel and an emancipator; but precisely
for this reason Hawthorne feels the compulsion to destroy her.
He
thus converts the principle of life, of experience, into a principle
of death.
Incessantly haunted by the wrongs of the past, by the
memory of such brutal deeds directly implicating the founders of
his family as the witchcraft-trials and the oppression of the
Quakers, this repentant puritan is nevertheless impelled by an
irresistible inner need to reproduce the very same ancestral pat·
tern in his work. Roused by long-forgotten fears and superstitions,
he again traces the footprints of the devil and hears demonic
laughter in the woods as darkness falls. His story of the dark lady
renews, in all
es~entials,
the persecution of the Salem witches.
Beatrice is "as lovely as the dawn and gorgeous as the sunset," yet
the "rich perfume of her breath blasts the very air" and to embrace
her is to die. Passionate love becomes Zenobia best, yet through
insinuating symbols she is pictured as a sorceress. She wears an
exotic flower in her hair, and perhaps if this talismanic flower
were snatched away she would "vanish or be transformed into
something else." Miriam, too, has the "facuity of bewitching
people." When her nerves give way and she fancies herself un·
seen, she seeks relief in "fits of madness horrible to behold." Such
is the twice-told tale of the dark lady. The victim, in her earlier
incarnations, of grim black-browed puritan magistrates, she is
now searched out by a secluded New England author who condemns
her because she coerces his imagination.
Her figure is first evoked by Hawthorne in
Rappaccini's
Daughter
( 1844), an entirely fantastic tale generally ranked
among the most brilliantly effective of his earlier writings. Beatrice
is the daughter of a malignant old professor, who, in his search of
*This is the basis of the widespread impression that she is modelled after Mar–
garet Fuller. Henry James thought there was no truth in the legend. Hawthorne's
references to the Boston sibyl in his notebooks are uniformly unkind; he describes her
as devoid of the "charm of womanhood" and as a "great humbug" to boot.
