Coda: Hawthorne’s Digby and Mary Shelley’s Milton

At the age of thirteen, Victor Frankenstein comes upon “a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa,” and, allured by its “wonderful facts,” he proceeds “to procure the whole works of this author, and afterwards of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus.”¹Close As Frankenstein’s autobiographical narrative proceeds, a subtle but pointed contrast emerges between these works and the academic “discourse” of “potassium and boron, of sulphates and oxyds” he receives at the University of Ingolstadt, mere “terms” that are meaningless to him (23). Frankenstein cannot understand them because he has missed the professor’s preparatory lectures, but Mary Shelley’s broader suggestion here is that the nuts and bolts of modern chemistry have no charm, and produce no wonder, in and of themselves. The same group of occultists appears in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “The Birth-mark.” As Aylmer attempts to remove the “Crimson Hand” from Georgiana’s cheek, she passes part of the time looking at his books, “the works of the philosophers of the middle ages, such as Albertus Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the famous friar who created the prophetic Brazen Head.”²Close For Shelley and Hawthorne, the occultist tradition has entered into what might be called the scientist’s library. But it is not inert, not merely historical. Acting primarily on the imagination, the occultist tradition provides not instruction so much as aspiration. It represents a vital—but morally perilous—alternative to a technical and trivial-seeming modern science that has divorced knowledge from power.

Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as we have seen, the magic of sympathy increasingly found a cultural refuge in the aesthetic sphere. By way of conclusion I want to extend this narrative of enchantment to the nineteenth century. Shelley and Hawthorne have figured prominently in critical discussions of sympathy over the past three decades, and the general practice has been to set the two authors’ representations of sympathy in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social, intellectual, and aesthetic developments. I will argue that Shelley and Hawthorne actively engaged not only with earlier natural and magical traditions of sympathy but also, and more specifically, with the conceptions of sympathy of two of the seventeenth-century authors central to this book, Milton and Digby. As a principle of mystical connection, sympathy has not simply disappeared, or reappeared as a matter of nostalgia; rather, it emerges as a vital force at the center of Shelley’s Frankenstein (1st ed., 1818) and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850). The two novels sharply expose the inadequacy of the disenchantment narrative for the history of sympathy and serve to reinforce the claim that, long after the ages of Ficino and Fludd, sympathy retained the aura of the magical.

At the beginning of “The Birth-mark,” the narrator explains that Aylmer, “a man of science—an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy,” has recently fallen in love. He has, Hawthorne writes, “made experience of a spiritual affinity, more attractive than any chemical one.”³Close Having experimented with the affinities of matter, Aylmer comes to experience an emotional or “spiritual” affinity with another human being. In Frankenstein Shelley similarly appeals to different registers and valences of “attraction.” As Walton writes of his journey to the North Pole in the opening letter of the novel’s outermost narrative frame, “I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle” (7). In his pursuit of the secret of magnetic attraction, however, Walton keenly experiences an absence of human sympathy. “I have no friend, Margaret,” he laments to his sister; “when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy…. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me; whose eyes would reply to mine” (10). The arrival of Frankenstein fulfills that desire: “For my own part, I begin to love him as a brother; and his constant and deep grief fills me with sympathy and compassion. He must have been a noble creature in his better days, being even now in wreck so attractive and amiable” (15). However diminished and debilitated Frankenstein may now be, he remains a vital source of “attraction.” Seeking “the wondrous power which attracts the needle,” Walton discovers “the wondrous power” that attracts him; he is sympathetically drawn to Frankenstein, and in the idea of eyes “replying” to one another, as if magnetically, Shelley immediately establishes a more mystical idea of sympathy. In effect, she transforms a phrase that appeared in her father’s novel Caleb Williams—“There was a magnetical sympathy between me and my master”—into a guiding conceit.⁴Close In developing that conceit, Shelley looked to and drew from Paradise Lost, energetically engaging with Milton’s complex representation of sympathy as a principle of “genetic” connection. But whereas Milton goes on to redeem the mystical, physical conception of sympathy that binds Adam to Eve at the Fall and Satan to Sin and Death, Shelley narrates no such redemption, ultimately suggesting that Frankenstein and his creature have nothing more than a mystical connection. The truer moral bond that Adam and Eve develop in the aftermath of the Fall never develops between Shelley’s primary couple. Although language presents itself to the creature as a means of establishing such a bond, his newfound linguistic and rhetorical expertise fails to produce anything deeper or more lasting than a transitory feeling of connection. Shelley’s emphasis is finally on the failure of sympathy.

Just as Shelley looked back to Milton in her representation of sympathy as a potentially occult force, so, I argue, Hawthorne looked back to Digby, named in The Scarlet Letter as a kind of alter ego to his “man of science,” Roger Chillingworth. The plot of the novel turns on the idea of sympathetic action at a distance. Seemingly localized in the letter itself, sympathy powerfully connects Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, and both to the mystery of sin. Hawthorne subordinates a secret and secretive science of sympathy, associated with and practiced by Chillingworth, to an open ethic of sympathy, which Hester and Dimmesdale share at the novel’s climax. And yet, as Hawthorne ultimately suggests, the two sympathies are not so easily distinguished and set apart. However rationalized and moralized, sympathy, we see, remains a principle of enchantment, of occult dynamics. The intertwining of the moral and the magical in The Scarlet Letter provides us with one final warrant for thinking of the history of sympathy in terms of integration rather than isolation.

Critics have put forward a variety of possible sources for Shelley’s sustained inquiry into and emphasis on human sympathy in Frankenstein. David Marshall has asserted that “Rousseau is the theoretician of sympathy who most significantly informs Mary Shelley’s investigation”; Janis Caldwell has made a case for Shelley’s engagement with “Romantic theories of physiologic sympathy”; and Jeanne Britton has argued that Frankenstein “brings Smith’s sympathy firmly into the genre of the novel.”⁵Close Marshall’s focus on Rousseau is driven in part by a polemical impulse. “It has been generally accepted,” he writes, “that Frankenstein is deeply informed by Mary Shelley’s reading of Milton. I will argue that the figure of Rousseau is an even more pervasive and significant presence in the novel.”⁶Close I do not see much to be gained by tallying points; it is by now clear that on a metatextual level Frankenstein is inhabited by a variety of “significant presences.” But it seems to me worthwhile to reassert the presence of Milton for two reasons: first, because Shelley also used Milton to explore the topic on which Marshall claims Rousseau was especially important to her—sympathy—and, second, because Milton provided Shelley with a conceptual bridge between the “principles of Agrippa,” which Frankenstein in his philosophical experience deems “entirely exploded,” and the “modern” principles of theorists like Adam Smith.

I have emphasized the word “attractive” in Walton’s reflection on Frankenstein—“He must have been a noble creature in his better days, being even now in wreck so attractive and amiable”—but the central term here is “creature,” a keyword in the novel that highlights both the act of creation at its core and the central relationship established by that act, between Frankenstein and his creature. In Paradise Lost, we recall, Milton represents sympathy as essentially “creaturely”; it is an affective connection originating in the act and fact of creation. The creature appeals to Frankenstein for sympathy on the basis of creaturely connection: “You, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us” (65). At the same time that Shelley is prefiguring the novel’s end here, she is also appealing to a logic analogous to Adam’s in his justification of falling with Eve. The ontological “ties” between creator and creature should, the latter reasons, enforce emotional ties. “Remember,” he remonstrates with Frankenstein, “that I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded” (66). Whereas the creature believes he should have the relationship with Frankenstein that Adam has with God, Frankenstein has turned him into a solitary Satan through, he insists, no fault of his own. The creature turns to art to establish a sympathetic connection that he claims does exist in nature, or, rather, did exist until his creator severed it. “Let your compassion be moved,” the creature implores, “and do not disdain me. Listen to my tale: when you have heard that, abandon or commiserate me” (66–67). He attributes to narrative in particular and language in general a positive sympathizing power. Yet his narrative itself reinforces his claim for a sympathy deeper than, and prior to, language. The creature’s program of distance learning courtesy of the De Lacey family includes, among other things, a lesson about creaturely connectedness, “how the father doated on the smiles of the infant…; how all the life and cares of the mother were wrapt up in the precious charge; how the mind of youth expanded and gained knowledge; of brother, sister, and all the various relationships which bind one human being to another in mutual bonds” (81). This last phrase significantly alludes to Milton’s “Relations dear, and all the Charities / Of Father, Son, and Brother,” which, as we have seen, became a kind of locus classicus in the eighteenth century. The creature considers himself cruelly and unnaturally deprived of “Relations dear.”

The creature’s discovery of a copy of Paradise Lost establishes the verisimilitude of such an allusion and reinforces its point. As he explains, “I often referred the several situations, as their similarity struck me, to my own. Like Adam, I was created apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator…. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition; for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me” (87). Through readerly sympathy the creature becomes more fully aware of the creaturely sympathy that he has been unjustly denied, as if he were the protagonist of an atheodical version of Paradise Lost. The creature’s use of “apparently” in the phrase “created apparently united by no link to any other being in existence” is critical; he is insisting that he has a strong and immediate “link” to Frankenstein and that he deserves “the especial care” of his own creator. The creature’s sympathetic identification with Satan only intensifies when the De Lacey family rejects him. Having read book 4 of Paradise Lost, he proceeds to reenact it. His bitter experience “Of sympathie and love” is not Eve’s—“‘but how was I terrified,’” he reflects, “‘when I viewed myself in a transparent pool!’” (76)—but Satan’s. Like Satan, the creature curses his lack of connection to the world outside him: “‘Oh! What a miserable night I passed! the cold stars shone in mockery, and the bare trees waved their branches above me; now and then a sweet voice of a bird burst forth amidst the universal stillness. All, save I, were at rest or in enjoyment: I, like the arch fiend, bore a hell within me; and finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin’ ” (92). He is like Satan drawn to “pittie thus forlorne / Though [he] unpittied” (PL, 4.374–375).

But just as Milton provides the creature with a means of expressing his suffering, so he also provides him with a way out of it. Before running afoul of the De Laceys, the creature occasionally permitted himself, as he puts it, “‘to ramble in the fields of Paradise, and dared to fancy amiable and lovely creatures sympathizing with my feelings and cheering my gloom; their angelic countenances breathed smiles of consolation. But it was all a dream: no Eve soothed my sorrows, or shared my thoughts; I was alone. I remembered Adam’s supplication to his Creator; but where was mine? he had abandoned me, and, in the bitterness of my heart, I cursed him’” (88). Here the creature refers directly to Adam’s appeal to God for a “human consort” based on his expressed need for “Collateral love, and deerest amitie” (PL, 8.392, 426). Given Frankenstein’s abandonment of him, the creature has been deprived of the opportunity to express his own need for creaturely sympathy. In the presence of his creator, he effectively repeats Adam’s appeal to God, entreating Frankenstein, ““You must create a female for me, with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being’” (98). The creature’s appeal to sympathy produces sympathy in Frankenstein, but not of the deep, durable kind that the creature believes to be his due. Shelley suggests that language can go only so far. “His words had a strange effect upon me,” Frankenstein relates; “I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him; but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred. I tried to stifle these sensations; I thought, that as I could not sympathize with him, I had no right to withhold the small portion of happiness which was yet in my power to bestow” (99–100). Frankenstein’s “compassion” is fleeting and fugitive; the sympathy that the creature desperately desires, he concludes, is beyond his capacity.

And yet, even as Frankenstein denies it, he and the creature share a deeper, more mystical sympathy, which Shelley carefully develops. “There can be no community between you and me,” Frankenstein tells the creature, but there remains a “magnetical sympathy” between them. It is in this sense that Shelley evokes not only the sympathetic connection between God and Adam in Milton’s epic but also that among Satan, Sin, and Death. In conceiving of the birth and animation of the creature, in other words, Shelley looked not only to the electrical experiments of Galvani and Aldini but also to the allegorical experiments of Milton. Like animal magnetism, electricity did not supersede sympathy as a mystical principle but in effect supported and sustained it—indeed, Mesmer advanced the magnetic theory that Van Helmont had used to account for the action of the weapon salve.⁷Close Like Death, Shelley’s creature is a “Sin-born Monster” (PL, 10.596), and, like Sin, he is born without a mother. Investigating the deep and complex relationship between sympathy and gender, Shelley suggests that Frankenstein’s counter-evolutionary exclusion of the mother in the process of reproduction bears materially on the problem of sympathy in the novel, for both creature and creator. As Anne Mellor has argued, “Mother Nature,” disregarded and misused by Frankenstein, “fights back”; she “prevents him from creating a ‘normal’ creature by denying him the maternal instinct or the emotional capacity for empathy.”⁸Close

In his unholy anti-Trinity, Milton provided Shelley with a striking vision not only of unnatural creation but also of a “connatural” sympathy more magical than moral, one that ultimately sets an occult physics of connection against a positive ethics of connection.⁹Close Anticipating Frankenstein, Satan essentially abandons his creature, leaving nature to run its course in the absence of nurture, to the extent that Milton must stage a grim recognition scene to prevent the family romance from devolving into a Greek tragedy. In Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein and the creature interact at both a physical and a textual distance. Frankenstein is mystically informed of the murder of his brother: “The figure passed me quickly, and I lost it in the gloom. Nothing in human shape could have destroyed that fair child. He was the murderer!” (48). This moment is suggestive of that when Adam “divines” Eve’s fall, but the creature is less like Eve here than like Sin and Death. When he exclaims, “ ‘I, like the arch fiend, bore a hell within me; and finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin,’ ” the creature approaches the “situation” of Sin and Death after the Fall, who seek “to destroy,” to “waste and havoc yonder World” (PL, 10.611, 617). In the phrase “bore a hell within me,” he is echoing both Milton and his creator’s own echo of Milton. With William’s death and the arrest of Justine in mind, Frankenstein laments, “Anguish and despair had penetrated into the core of my heart; I bore a hell within me, which nothing could extinguish” (57). The text of Milton’s epic becomes itself a means of expressing the secret sympathy between Frankenstein and the creature. Shelley uses her own narrative to further this effect. To take just a single example, Frankenstein relates, “My abhorrence of this fiend cannot be conceived. When I thought of him, I gnashed my teeth” (60). However much he may “abhor” the creature, he is mystically drawn to him here, communicating with him at a distance. After Frankenstein abandons his project of making a female companion, the creature “gnashed his teeth in the impotence of anger” (116). It is as though creature and creator share a single sympathetic mind.

At the end of the novel, creature and creator reunite, but only, as the former predicted, when one of them has been “annihilated.” Again Shelley sets the artful manipulation and solicitation of sympathy against the ideal of a natural, noncontingent sympathy, as desirable as it is elusive. Confronting the creature, Walton is “at first touched by the expressions of his misery,” but the creature conclusively declares, “No sympathy may I ever find” (154). He holds open only the dimmest hope of a creaturely sympathy beyond life, addressing his dead creator, “and if yet, in some mode unknown to me, thou hast not yet ceased to think and feel… , “ and looking ahead to that time when his “spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus” (156). The novel’s closing phrase, “darkness and distance,” an alliterative pairing suggestive of Milton’s “distance and distaste,” can be seen to sum up its representation of the failure of sympathy. By the end of the novel, Shelley has alluded to nearly all the major moments and modes of sympathy in Milton’s epic, but she ultimately expresses a more pessimistic view of it, as if we are all longing for a prelapsarian state of sympathetic connectedness and looking for it, again and again, in vain. For all of its power, sympathy cannot in the end transcend the distance that matters most.

In the early American novel The Power of Sympathy (1789), whose title alone can be seen to constitute a kind of implicit rebuke to Foucault, William Hill Brown established a tragic conflict between emotional and physical, or biological, connection, drawing sympathy into the orbit of incest.¹⁰Close Like Shelley after him, Brown found in Paradise Lost an authoritative model for a more magical idea of sympathy, one that was inexorably bound up with tragedy. As Harriot writes to Harrington, the lover who is revealed to be her brother, “allied by birth, and in mind, and similar in age—and in thought still more intimately connected, the sympathy which bound our souls together, at first sight, is less extraordinary. Shall we any longer wonder at its irresistible impulse?—Shall we strive to oppose the link of nature that draws us to each other?”¹¹Close As any attentive reader of Milton would recognize at this moment, hearing Adam’s deterministic appeal to mystical attraction, the path of “irresistible impulse” led to disaster.

Milton’s importance to early American culture has been well established, but in developing his own complex conception of sympathy, Hawthorne turned less to Milton than to another seventeenth-century British writer as a significant model—Digby. Hawthorne referred directly to Digby in his biographical sketch of Roger Chillingworth, the principal antagonist of The Scarlet Letter. “His first entry on the scene,” he writes, “few people could tell whence, dropping down, as it were, out of the sky, or starting from the nether earth, had an aspect of mystery, which was easily heightened to the miraculous. He was now known to be a man of skill; it was observed that he gathered herbs, and the blossoms of wild-flowers, and dug up roots and plucked off twigs from the forest-trees, like one acquainted with hidden virtues in what was valueless to common eyes. He was heard to speak of Sir Kenelm Digby, and other famous men,—whose scientific attainments were esteemed hardly less than supernatural,—as having been his correspondents or associates.”¹²Close Chillingworth’s affinity with Digby is established earlier in the novel when Hawthorne narrates his “first entry on the scene.” Introduced as “a man of skill in all Christian modes of physical science,” a kind of Digbeian virtuoso, Chillingworth defines his particular brand of physic as a combination of the naturalistic and the alchemical: “‘My old studies in alchemy,’ observed he, ‘and my sojourn, for above a year past, among a people well versed in the kindly properties of simples, have made a better physician of me than many that claim the medical degree’” (96, 97). He goes on, “‘I have learned many new secrets in the wilderness, and here is one of them,—a recipe that an Indian taught me, in requital of some lessons of my own, that were as old as Paracelsus’” (98). Of the few suggestions in Hawthorne’s works that he had a specific knowledge of Digby’s, this one is especially compelling.¹³Close Hawthorne here evokes Digby’s “genealogie of the Powder of Sympathy” in A Late Discourse, where Digby relates that he learned the “secret” of the powder from “a religious Carmelite, that came from the Indies, and Persia to Florence” after he had had the “opportunity to do an important courtesie to the said Fryer”; it was this “courtesie” on Digby’s part “which induced him to discover unto me his secret.”¹⁴Close Paracelsus, we recall, was often associated with sympathetic cures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Hawthorne appears to echo both Digby’s identification of an “Indian” source and, more strikingly, Digby’s claim to have learned the “secret” by virtue of what Hawthorne calls “requital.” Hawthorne intimates a strong mystical “association” between Chillingworth and Digby.

In his reading of The Scarlet Letter, Gordon Hutner identifies what he calls “a rhetoric of secrecy,” but, in the course of developing that reading, he leaves out the complex history of secrecy.¹⁵Close Hutner observes that the “conjunction” of the terms “secret” and “sympathy” is “habitual in Hawthorne’s prose,” but, as we have seen, that conjunction had a long and eventful history before the age of Hawthorne. Linking sympathy to “a Romantic ideal of communication,” Hutner traces Hawthorne’s emphasis on sympathy back to “his college instruction in the eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers,” and, indeed, there is a record of Hawthorne’s having checked out a copy of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments from the Salem Athenaeum in 1827.¹⁶Close The tendency in critical treatments of Hawthornean sympathy has been to associate it on one hand with Smith’s moral philosophy and on the other with what Robert Levine refers to as “contemporaneous formations of sympathy,” especially those produced in, and in response to, a politically charged culture of reform in mid-nineteenth-century America.¹⁷Close But Hawthorne’s deep interest in history, both regional and global, should alert us to the need for a more expansive genealogy. In a reading attentive to contemporaneous medical culture, Taylor Stoehr has suggested that Chillingworth “anachronistically borrows homoeopathic techniques to treat both body and soul of his patient Arthur Dimmesdale,” but there is no need to resort to “anachronism” here.¹⁸Close In explicitly referring to Digby and alluding to his account of sympathy powder, Hawthorne is suggesting that Chillingworth is skilled in the mystical art of sympathy. Although he wishes to inflict no further punishment on Hester and Pearl, Chillingworth explains, he is desperately determined to avenge himself on the child’s father: “‘I shall seek this man, as I have sought truth in books; as I have sought gold in alchemy. There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or later, he must needs be mine!’” (100–101). Chillingworth conceives of his target as a kind of base metal, the lead on which he will work his alchemical magic, and he believes the father’s identity will be revealed to him by virtue of sympathetic “contagion,” the transfer of a somatic state at a distance. In asking Hester to keep his own identity concealed from the community, Chillingworth enforces on her a “secret bond” that she instinctively resists, at least in part because it puts her in a position analogous to that of his would-be patient.

Incapable of an open, affectionate moral sympathy, Chillingworth can enter into the minds and hearts of others only secretly and magically. Hawthorne keenly develops the irony that he who makes use of sympathy in one sense has no use for it in another.¹⁹Close For Hawthorne, Digby represents the man of unfeeling. Punning on his own name—a characteristic mode of Hawthornean allegoresis—Chillingworth admits, “‘The world had been so cheerless! My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire’ ” (100). As for Aylmer, so for Chillingworth there is an antithetical relationship between the idea of a domestic “fire” and a chemical one; what he cannot kindle in the “household” he burns and distills in the laboratory. Once he had taken up residence with Dimmesdale, the narrator relates, Chillingworth “arranged his study and laboratory; not such as a modern man of science would reckon even tolerably complete, but provided with a distilling apparatus, and the means of compounding drugs and chemicals, which the practiced alchemist knew well how to turn to purpose” (148). And so the mystical “practice” of spiritual alchemy begins. Hawthorne represents in spatial terms the process of secret, sympathetic interchange, or “intercourse” (160), that is simultaneously occurring on the spiritual level: “With such commodiousness of situation, these two learned persons sat themselves down, each in his own domain, yet familiarly passing from one apartment to the other, and bestowing a mutual and not incurious inspection into one another’s business” (148). As Chillingworth mystically penetrates into the interior life of Dimmesdale, so the patient has an occult insight into the physician. In the case of Dimmesdale, Hawthorne appeals to a neurophysiological concept of sympathy: “Mr. Dimmesdale, whose sensibility of nerve often produced the effect of spiritual intuition, would vaguely become aware that something inimical to his peace had thrust itself into relation with him. But old Roger Chillingworth, too, had perceptions that were almost intuitive; and when the minister threw his startled eyes towards him, there the physician sat; his kind, watchful, sympathizing, but never intrusive friend” (151).

The word “sympathizing” is ironically ambivalent here. In an expression that would be at home in a wide range of seventeenth-century texts, not least Marvell’s “Dialogue between the Soul and the Body,” Chillingworth goes on to attribute Dimmesdale’s mysterious condition to a “strange sympathy betwixt soul and body” (158). The sympathy between Chillingworth and Dimmesdale is itself “strange,” a matter of occult communication and interaction.

Sympathetic action at a distance is a driving principle of The Scarlet Letter. Over the course of the novel, Hawthorne maps out a complex of sympathetic interactions in multiple directions. The scarlet letter enables Hester to sympathize at a wide distance. As the narrator explains, “It now and then appeared to Hester,—if altogether fancy, it was nevertheless too potent to be resisted,—she felt or fancied, then, that the scarlet letter had endowed her with a new sense. She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts” (110–111). The sympathetic “sense” that Chillingworth has gained from his studies Hester has gained from her sins. “Sometimes,” Hawthorne writes, “the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or magistrate, the model of piety and justice,” whereas at other times “the electric thrill would give her warning,—‘Behold, Hester, here is a companion!’” (111). Puritan New England is full of the secret sharers of sin; piety and hypocrisy are inseparably twinned. This passage recalls Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” in which the title character enters into the forest and comes upon a “witch-meeting” in which many of the town worthies participate. The minister cries out, “‘By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin, ye shall scent out all the places—whether in church, bed-chamber, street, field, or forest—where crime has been committed…. It shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin.’”²⁰Close But the passage has a more immediate textual sympathy with one later in The Scarlet Letter, when Hawthorne describes a “burden” weighing on Dimmesdale that “gave him sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison with theirs, and received their pain into itself, and sent its own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence” (163). Hawthorne describes an occult process of moral resonance. In a discussion of The Marble Faun, Emily Budick has characterized Hawthornean sympathy as “passive, quiet, like art itself,” but here Hawthorne’s emphasis is on the reverberating power of sympathy.²¹Close Partaking of her sin, Dimmesdale has a more particular sympathy with Hester, and she with him. Hester is said to move Dimmesdale, “instinctively exercising a magnetic power over a spirit so shattered and subdued” (214). On Dimmesdale’s own breast, on “that spot, in very truth, there was, and there had long been, the gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily pain” (168). Like the body and the soul, Hester and Dimmesdale are in secret dialogue.

Hawthorne puts sympathy in a more clearly positive light in two principal scenes, by which he suggests, however provisionally, something like the triumph of the protagonists’ nature over the antagonist’s art. The first scene takes place at night, the second in the light of day. In the seeming secrecy of darkness, Dimmesdale ascends the scaffold on which Hester has been shamed, and soon thereafter she appears with Pearl. After inviting them to join him, Dimmesdale touches Pearl’s hand, and a vital, sympathetic reaction occurs: “The moment that he did so, there came what seemed a tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his own, pouring like a torrent into his heart, and hurrying through all his veins, as if the mother and the child were communicating their vital warmth to his half-torpid system. The three formed an electric chain” (172). The sympathy between mother and child was, as we have seen, a matter of long-standing philosophical speculation, and here, in a newer galvanic idiom, Hawthorne has the father complete the circuit. But it is soon broken when Dimmesdale refuses Pearl’s request to re-form their “electric chain” in “the daylight of this world” (173). The idea of “a meeting-point of sympathy” is both reliteralized and redeemed when Hester, Pearl, and Dimmesdale meet in daylight in the forest.²²Close The public eye is absent, but there is nevertheless a new openness and transparency in their “magic circle” (220). Hester reveals the secret of Chillingworth’s identity, and Dimmesdale realizes that on some level he has been aware of it all along: “‘I did know it! Was not the secret told me in the natural recoil of my heart, at the first sight of him, and as often as I have seen him since?’” (211). As the scene in the forest unfolds, this idea of a secret sympathy gives way to one more openly and truly heartfelt. Hawthorne adds a chapter to Dimmesdale’s extraordinary saint’s, or martyr’s, life: “to this poor pilgrim, on his dreary and desert path, faint, sick, miserable, there appeared a glimpse of human affection and sympathy, a new life, and a true one, in exchange for the heavy doom which he was now expiating” (218). The adjective “human” has an emphatic force here. Hester and Dimmesdale regain a full humanity at this moment. He does not ask so much as announce, “‘Do I feel joy again?’” (219).

Hawthorne expresses the power of this new sympathy by extending it to the forest as a whole. Nature sympathizes with the couple in their woe and then in their sudden joy: “And, as if the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the effluence of these two mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to gold…. The course of the little brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood’s heart of mystery, which had become a mystery of joy” (220). Chillingworth’s dark alchemical art has been itself “transmuted” into a natural process, of illumination and aurification. Hawthorne comments, “Such was the sympathy of Nature—that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth—with the bliss of these two spirits!” (220). The forest is similarly responsive to Pearl; it becomes her “playmate” (221). The birds and animals all embrace her. She adorns herself with flowers that offer themselves to her and so becomes “a nymph-child, or an infant dryad, or whatever else was in closest sympathy with the antique wood” (222). The sympathetic meeting of the novel’s true family bends the arrow of time backward; they are transported to a time and place of original and absolute connectedness.²³Close

In the midst of this rhapsody, however, Hawthorne also gives us a sign that sympathy might not have the power he has ascribed to it, a power that those of the historical period in which the novel is set might have found easier to credit: “A wolf, it is said,—but here the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable,—came up, and smelt of Pearl’s robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand. The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognized a kindred wildness in the human child” (222). This is a rather complex narratorial move. It is as if, in his enthusiasm, Hawthorne finds himself overreaching and retreats—a movement, which I observed particularly in Milton’s Nativity Ode, highlighting the crucial and recurrent tension in the history of sympathy between desire and reality. Hawthorne seems to experience a paroxysm of ambivalence, establishing distance twice in proximity, passing from the parenthetical “it is said” to the more elaborately parenthetical “but here the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable.” Yet even as he pulls back from the extreme verge of imagined sympathetic response, Hawthorne puts forward an alternative account that is hardly more “probable.” The pattern of overreaching and retreat is repeated on a more minute level in the phrase “The truth seems to be.” In the terms of Pratt’s Sympathy, Hawthorne, in the course of painting his “fairy scene” in the forest, has an uncomfortable brush with “fact.” The enchantment is framed as an aesthetic embellishment. When she sees Pearl in her floral state, Hester muses, “ ‘It is as if one of the fairies, whom we left in our dear old England, had decked her out to meet us’ ” (223). This recalls a passage earlier in the novel, when Pearl is similarly associated with fairyland. Mr. Wilson asks her, “ ‘Dost know thy catechism? Or art thou one of those naughty elfs or fairies, whom we thought to have left behind us, with other relics of Papistry, in merry old England?’ ” (132). Both of these passages suggest what Walsham refers to as the “rhetoric of ‘disenchantment,’” and Hawthorne goes out of his way to expose it as a hypocritical falsehood. His Puritan world teems with suggestions and manifestations of the supernatural. The New Englanders who claim that when they left England they left magic and superstition—and Catholicism—behind are the very same ones who spread the rumor that the scarlet letter “was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all alight, whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the night-time” (112). But if the Puritans are hypocritical, Hawthorne’s contemporaries, his audience, are skeptical; theirs is not an enchanted worldview but a probabilistic one. Hawthorne locates magic in the historical past and subjects it to modern standards of aesthetic judgment.

Or so the truth seems to be. In Hawthorne’s keen interest in not only the theory but also the history of sympathy, and in his multiform, multivalent representations of it, we can see a determined resistance to the disenchantment of the world. After relating the supernatural fancies of “the vulgar” about the scarlet letter, Hawthorne adds, “And we must needs say, it seared Hester’s bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the rumor than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit” (112). In his modern desire for the supernatural, Hawthorne challenges “modern incredulity.” In the introductory portion of The Scarlet Letter, “The Custom-House,” set in his own age, Hawthorne tells the tale of his discovery of the scarlet letter in a dusty corner. He finds in the midst of a “mysterious package” what he indifferently calls “a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded.” He proceeds to put it on his breast, and, as he relates, “I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat; and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron.” He reflects, “Certainly, there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from this mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind” (62). The Puritans did not leave the magical and the mystical behind in England, and, Hawthorne suggests, neither did their descendants leave them behind in the Puritan age. The magic and the mystery transcend both time and space. The scarlet letter is a “curious relic” of interest to the “local antiquarian,” but Hawthorne wants us to understand that it is also much more, a “mystic symbol,” a site and source of enduring power, its meaning “subtly communicating itself” to those who come into its sphere of activity. The power of the scarlet letter is the power of sympathy. It cannot be effaced or forgotten.