PARTISAN REVIEW
sense of belonging to a social organism and whose relationships with
other men, are, in consequence, disturbed and insecure. When we
consider their relationships with women, we find that this feeling of
insecurity becomes even stronger and more compulsive. A normal
and healthy sexuality is, in fact, conspicuously absent not only from
these writers but from almost the whole of nineteenth-century Amer–
ican literature.
If
this were merely the result of Victorian prudery, it
would not call particularly for comment. What is significant, how–
ever, is not merely the lack of normal sexual emotion but the dubious
or abnormal quality of such emotion as does manifest itself. Once
again, the Elizabethans can appropriately be used as a standard for
comparison. Sexual experience, as presented in the Elizabethan drama,
is sometimes consummatory, sometimes destructive, and sometimes
(as in
Antony and Cleopatra)
both at the same time. But there is
never any doubt that it is fully adult and that each of the two
participants is equally and maturely active.
Hawthorne is the least abnormal of the three writers, but his
normality is apparently associated with a low vitality and lack of
strong positive emotion. He does not regard sexual desire in itself as
evil (the act of adultery in which the plot of
The Scarlet Letter
originates is not presented as inherently, rather than conventionally,
sinful; what is inherently sinful is Dimmesdale's concealment of it
and his consequent isolation). He can feel comfortable, however, only
with a woman who remains passive and lacks vital energy (such as
Priscilla in
The Blithedale Romance).
The woman of strong sexual
vitality (Zenobia in
The Blithedale Romance
and Miriam in
The
Marble Faun)
is evil. Both Zenobia and Miriam are compared to
witches, and are wrapped in a sinister aura of diabolism; and both of
them come to bad ends.
With both Poe and Melville we definitely cross the borders of the
abnormal. With each of them sexuality is conceived in immature
terms, with a dominating mother-image, a strong flavor of incest, and
(with Melville) an apparent element of homosexuality. In the case of
Poe there is an obvious similarity between the fantasies expressed in
his stories and poems and the actual way of life which he adopted
when he took his fourteen-year-old cousin .as a wife and found a
mother in his aunt. From the evidence of his writings it would ap–
pear that he could most easily imagine a close union with a sister
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