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MITCHELL, THOMAS R. Hawthorne's Fuller Mystery (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 318 pp. $39.95.
In this fascinating and judiciously argued study, Thomas R. Mitchell makes the risky attempt to coordinate the historical source of Nathaniel Hawthorne's obsessive genius with an interpretation of the major fiction-a risky project not because it is pioneering, but because so many have tried to do it before. In the case of Hawthorne's stormy relationship with Margaret Fuller, the matter seems already to have been settled by his famous journal entry in 1858 indicting her as "poor Margaret," whose moral and intellectual "collapse" made her death at sea a blessing of Providence. As Mitchell shows in convincing detail, however, the relationship between these two mercurial New Englanders was far more durable and intimate than we have thought, and Hawthorne's continuing struggle to come to terms with Fuller-his "passionate attraction" to her and his "defensive reasoning against that attraction" (p. 223)-so preoccupied him that "to one degree or another he wrote some of his most powerful fictions in an attempt to solve the 'riddle' of her life" (p. 10).
Buttressed with a wealth of biographical and textual evidence, Hawthorne's Fuller Mystery weaves two argumentative threads: the compelling intimacy between Hawthorne and Fuller, and the "allegorical representation" (p. 46) of that relationship in "Rappaccini's Daughter," The Scarlet Letter (1850), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860). To establish the first point, Mitchell returns to Julian Hawthorne's "biography" of his parents, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (1884), where the dismissive journal entry of 1858 first appeared in print. Attempting to reconstruct an image culturally satisfying to Gilded Age gentility, Julian posited a Hawthorne happily married and possessed of "masculine sanity" (p. 18) against a Fuller tainted and fallen, a "potentially disruptive" influence (p. 20) he successfully resisted. Fuller's remaining friends-particularly her 1884 biographer, Thomas Wentworth Higginson-objected both to the vitriol of Julian's portrait and to the implication that Hawthorne found Fuller's character distasteful. But the "essential antagonism at the heart of Julian's re-creation of their relationship" became the accepted view (p. 43).
Mitchell reveals a quite different scenario, an "intimate, if short-lived, friendship" that left Hawthorne feeling the "ambivalent admiration for Fuller" which prompted the allegorical representations in his fiction...