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The Ironic Oneiric in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales

Isabelle Boof-Vermesse
p. 175-192

Résumés

Cet article se penche sur l’influence que le Romantisme allemand a pu exercer sur le traitement du rêve, plus précisément des rêves enchâssés, dans les nouvelles de Hawthorne. L’intérêt du Cercle d’Iéna pour l’inconscient et son rapport à la créativité, leur esthétique de la « subjectivité objective », la capacité de l’ironie de dépasser les contractions sont autant de théories susceptibles d’influencer Hawthorne dans sa mise en place de l’onirique comme ironique, à savoir comme révélateur d’une dimension supérieure relevant du métafictionnel plutôt que du métaphysique. L’intense réceptivité de la vie nocturne qui ignore la logique et la morale est celle de l’artiste conscient comme celle du rêveur inconscient. L’article examine “The Haunted Mind”, “The Birthmark”, “Young Goodman Brown”, “Wakefield”, “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, et “The Wives of the Dead”. Il se concentre sur les rêves hypodiégétiques ou rêves enchâssés explicitement assumés comme tels par la narration, par opposition à l’onirisme généralisé souvent associé à l’univers de Hawthorne.

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  • 1 The title is borrowed from Shakespeare, King John, Act III, sc. 4: “Life is as tedious as a twice-t (...)

1Often understood as self-deprecatorily referring to the vicissitudes of the stories’ publication, the title of Hawthorne’s collection Twice-Told Tales1 also points to their being susceptible to revision, reinterpretation, improvisation, and glossing over. If the tales were told again, would they say the same thing? This title suggests repetition with variation, and the wanderings of hermeneutic readings that could complement or contradict each other. It suggests the indeterminacies, paradoxes, and contradictions embraced by the Romantics, the refusal of final choices that would limit the range of possibilities. Doubleness, in short, gestures towards the multiplicity of irony. Not to be reduced to the discourse of the double-voiced Hawthornian narrators, who are shadowed by the “insistent but ironic authorial presence” (Thompson 3), irony is not only audible in voice, but visible in another form of expression—which is the dream. If, as argued by Joseph C. Pattison, “the point of view essential for reading Hawthorne is one of dream” (“Point of View” 363), the function of dreams in his fiction cannot be reduced to a revelation of the “tragic realities of human existence” (363), that is, “the discovery of one’s sinfulness” (366). Dreams are also aesthetic entities.

2Hawthorne was intrigued by the creative potential of dreamwork. In an 1842 notebook entry, he expressed his aesthetic ambition to be able to transcribe dreams into fiction:

To write a dream, which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistency, its strange transformations, which are all taken as matter of course, its eccentricities and aimlessness—with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole. Up to this old age of the world, no such thing ever has been written. (The American Notebooks 99)

Dreams have an artistic value and a narrative role, but they also engage the issue of their ontological status: dreams have the capacity to challenge binary opposition, the foundation of logic; in dreams, things simultaneously are and are not. They allow the dreamer, like the poet, to be receptive to “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” to use John Keats’s definition of negative capability (Letters 71).

3With regard to “The Haunted Mind,” John Holsberry shows that Hawthorne was familiar with the British philosophy of mind, in particular Locke’s associationism and its relation to the unconscious. For Locke, ideas can be connected without the deliberate effort of consciousness; Book II, Chapter I of his Essays in particular addresses the status of the mind (the soul) during sleep as evidence for the case he makes in favor of the existence of the unconscious: “thoughts are sometimes for four hours busy without [our] knowing of it” (94). Locke’s repeated references to sleep tie identity to consciousness: “If the same Socrates waking and sleeping do not partake of the same consciousness, Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same Person” (326). The same issue was raised by Augustine, who in his Confessions addressed ethical implications that the Puritan mind could relate to when he asked God to “quench the impure motions of [his] sleep,” inquiring anxiously about sins committed in his dreams: “Am I not then myself, O Lord my God? And yet there is so much difference betwixt myself and myself, within that moment wherein I pass from waking to sleeping, or return from sleeping to waking!” (Book X). Contrary to the Puritans, however, Augustine concluded that we are not responsible for what happens to us in dreams, since “upon waking we return to peace of conscience: and by this very difference discover that we did not, what yet we be sorry that in some way it was done in us” (Book X). Beyond guilty dreams and in reference to dream theory, Holsberry notes that “virtually every philosopher and aesthetician read by Hawthorne followed in the Lockean tradition, and they all discussed the phenomenon of dreaming and the problem of the mind’s cognitive powers during sleep” (310). Holsberry lists these authors and their works, like Dugald Stewart, whose Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind Hawthorne studied during his years at Bowdoin, and the work of Hawthorne’s former professor in philosophy, Thomas C. Upham, whose chapter on “Dreaming” in Elements of Mental Philosophy (1831) tries to account for the “wildness and inconsistency” of dreams by the fact that “the control and regulation of surrounding objects” and “the control of the will” over our mental operations (Upham 110), which he differentiates from the “volition” manifested within the dream, are no longer monitoring the vagaries of the mind during sleep.

  • 2 Poe’s claim in “Tale Writing: Nathaniel Hawthorne” that Hawthorne’s manner and inspiration were “id (...)

4This essay examines how, besides eighteenth century British philosophers of mind and their American successors (as documented by Holsberry), Hawthorne also inherits from the German Romantics the treatment of dreams in his tales to the point he was called, not always favorably, the American Tieck.2 The theories of the Jena Circle about the unconscious, their aesthetics of “objective subjectivity,” the by-passing of contradictions through an ironic art advocated by the Schlegel brothers, but also the quest for a passage to the mystery of a superior reality inaccessible to reason, could have contributed to Hawthorne’s use of the oneiric as ironic.

  • 3 “A project is the subjective embryo of a developing object. A perfect project should be simultaneou (...)

5Hawthorne thus shared the same theoretical framework about dreamwork, especially regarding its relation to artistic creation, as the British Romantics. In particular, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria revolutionized the “psychology of the inventive process” (Abrams 157) by following Friedrich von Schlegel’s notion that art is “a created as well as a creative power, and under either aspect constitutes perfect organism” (“Poetical Works” 200) and his claim that an artistic project is “a living individual” resulting from the combination of the subjective and the objective.3 Coleridge in turn described mental events generated by the imagination (like dreams or artistic inspiration) using organic metaphors emphasizing energy and growth (Abrams 169-77). Dreamwork is thus not only the material used in poetry and fiction, it creates its own fiction. Dreams as such are ontologically unstable and lend themselves to multiple interpretations, but the treatment of dreams in Hawthorne’s short fiction can also point to a superior reality that is less metaphysical than metafictional or self-reflexive. The present discussion examines how Hawthorne presents dreams as an art form in the following sketches and tales: “The Haunted Mind” (1835), “The Birthmark” (1843), “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), “Wakefield” (1835), “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), and “The Wives of the Dead” (1832). It focuses on explicit hypodiegetic dreams or dreams within the respective tale, as opposed to the general dreaminess or “dreamlike aura of waking events” (Pattison, “Point of View” 367) often associated with Hawthorne’s universe.

The Night Side: Infinite Receptiveness

6German naturalist and physician Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert’s Views on the Nightside of Natural Science (1808) and The Symbolism of Dreams (1814) claimed that dreamlike states (for example somnambulism) were conducive to a form of knowledge unattainable in a waking state, where reason exerted its censorship. He thus put forward the notion that the unconscious, liberated by dreams, was a passage to the great unity of the world. Schubert’s emphasis on the unconscious resonated with the Romantics’ fascination for the irrational and what Hawthorne, in the “Preface to The Snow-Image” (1852), calls the “dusky region” revealed by “psychological romance” (Hawthorne, Tales 321).

7During sleep, volition is suspended and a state of total receptiveness sets in, instead of the exclusion forged by the laws of logic and empirical psychology, “philosophical grotesques” for Schlegel (Athenaeum fragment 75, 27). Dreams create the potential for the bizarre, a quality praised by Schlegel in the novella: “the essence of the bizarre seems to consist precisely in certain arbitrary and strange connections and confusions of the processes of thinking, poetizing, and acting” (Athenaeum fragment 429, 89). Through the bizarre, the unreasonable, the logically impossible, the supernatural can appear.

8A “dreamvision sketch” (Thompson 49), “The Haunted Mind” describes a dark hypnopompic experience or emergence from sleep (“you find yourself, for a single instant, wide awake in that realm of illusions, whither sleep has been the passport” [73]) followed by a more peaceful hypnagogic (falling asleep) relapse. Even if the sketch is less about dreams proper than about the frontier of sleep, it alludes to would-be dreams reminiscent of the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats respectively in two scenes. For the first one, “Christabel” is evoked in the question: “What if the fiend should come in woman’s garments, with a pale beauty amid sin and desolation, and lie down by your side?” (Hawthorne, Tales 76). Keats’s “The Eve of St Agnes,” which deals with the blurred boundaries of dream and reality, or more specifically the blending of the former into the latter, presides over the second one. In “The Haunted Mind,” the dreamer wishes for the presence of some Agnes, a “fond sleeper” who would “involve” him in her dream (76), the former losing all agency in the process, as indicated by the highly original use of the second person (Préher 76). It is as if the American Porphyro would switch dreams to lose himself; as phrased by Keats: “into her dream he melted.” (25). The persona of “The Haunted Mind” thus attributes a superior power to a twice-removed fictional entity, the dream of a dream: “Her influence is over you, though she have no existence but in that momentary image” (76).

9Beyond the singularity of the second person and the embedded dream, the specificity of “The Haunted Mind” also lies in its attempt to evoke a sort of ontological impossibility, the rather paradoxical moment, close to what is now called a lucid dream, when a dream becomes conscious of itself and allows the dreamer to achieve “a perception of [its] strangeness, such as you never attain while the dream is undisturbed” (73-74); if the dreamer is simultaneously inside and outside, does the dream undream itself?

10Friedrich Schlegel defines an idea as “an absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses, the continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts”; in the same fragment, he explains how this availability to contradiction is required to access the universal: “a mind is capable that contains within itself simultaneously a plurality of minds and a whole system of persons, and in whose inner being the universe which, as they say, should germinate in every monad, has grown to fullness and maturity” (Athenaeum fragment 121, 33). Self-contradiction is the encapsulation of the universe. Dreams can then be assessed as privileged access to the infinite.

11The narrator of “The Birthmark” theorizes this by-passing of logic in favor of superior truth as he comments on Aylmer’s dream: “Truth often finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments” (155). Aylmer’s dream of dissecting his wife to get rid of the “symbol of imperfection” (154) finds indeed a shortcut to his psyche:

Aylmer now remembered his dream. He had fancied himself with his servant Aminadab, attempting an operation for the removal of the birthmark; but the deeper went the knife, the deeper sank the hand, until at length its tiny grasp appeared to have caught hold of Georgiana’s heart; whence, however, her husband was inexorably resolved to cut or wrench it away. (155)

  • 4 Spectral evidence was the legal provision used in the Salem witch trials that allowed testimonies b (...)

Georgiana had abruptly enquired about the dream, quoting her husband’s words in his sleep: “‘It is in her heart now; we must have it out!’” (154). The cataphoric, ominous “it” that must be removed is identified in the recollection quoted above. Georgiana had heard the terrible words that sleep could not “confine her [the mind’s] spectres within the dim regions of her sway” (155), and she unwittingly reveals to her husband his own “secrets.” The dream can now “shape itself perfectly,” organically or aesthetically, as it were, in Aylmer’s consciousness, as if the result of inspiration. The organic impulse of dreamwork asserts itself on fertile ground, encountering no resistance. Schlegel aligns the oneiric with the poetic on the grounds that both are the outcome of intense receptiveness, bypassing the censorship of morality: “The essence of the poetical sense, it may be, consists in being impressionable to the point of losing self-awareness, in getting emotionally wrought up about nothing and moved to daydreaming for no reason at all. Moral sensitivity is quite compatible with a total lack of poetical sense” (Athenaeum fragment 43, 90). Schlegel’s wit suggests that “moral sensitivity” and “poetic sense” are incompatible, a proposition that can be tested against Hawthorne’s use of the Puritan imagination. In his ironic treatment of dreams, Hawthorne could tap into a resource not available to his German counterparts: spectral evidence.4

Ironized Prophetic Dreams

12The understanding that dreams can be prophetic is of course not new. The ancient tradition that saw dreams as prophetic was revitalized by Romanticism. In the bestseller The Night-Side of Nature or, Ghosts and Ghosts Seers (1850), British author Catherine Crowe argued that dreams could be equated with double sight or clairvoyance, a thesis expressed in Gnostic terms, based on the dismissal of bodily sensations:

Now, with respect to this so-called dreaming in profound sleep, it is a thing no one can well doubt who thoroughly believes that his body is a temple built for the dwelling of an immortal spirit. . . . If, therefore, the spirit wakes, may we not suppose that the more it is disentangled from the obstructions of the body the more clear will be its perceptions; and that, therefore, in the profound natural sleep of the sensuous organs we may be in a state of clear-seeing? (32)

Dreams are the major gateway to a truth unavailable otherwise, and “those in his [Hawthorne] stories who dismiss or reject dream usually do so at their peril” (Pattison, “Dream-Tale” 227). In “Dream, Imagination and Existence” (1954), Michel Foucault claims that dreams manifest an existential meaning beyond just the deciphering of their enigmatic contents (no “clé des songes” or oneirocriticism), and he deplores that Freudian analysis is only interested in contents, leaving aside form (the medium-specific quality). Adopting at first Sigmund Freud’s position, Foucault shows that meaning and “counter meaning” form a composite in the dream which can be condensed in images, but he claims images are not exhausted by meaning: the imaginary world has its own logic, it is a language that takes part in an “inter-individual lexicon” (36), and “points beyond the contents of human experience, beyond even the discursive knowledge we can attain” (45). A psychological interpretation just does not render justice to the whole picture.

  • 5 It is to be noted that even Cotton Mather, the minister who wrote the pamphlet Wonders of the Invis (...)

13In other words, dreams can express what language cannot; they hover halfway between implicit suggestion and dissolution in explicit formulation. Interestingly, Foucault uses an image that is recurrent in the Hawthornian corpus, that of fire, to stress the specific nature of the oneiric image: “The fire that means sexual fire—shall we say that it is there only to point to that meaning, or to attenuate the meaning, to hide it and obscure it by a new glow?” (34). The central tableau of “Young Goodman Brown,” in which the protagonist witnesses a black mass in the woods involving his friends and neighbors, is presented by the narrator as phantasmagoria, the projection of spectral images on smoke using magic lanterns: “Either the sudden gleams of light flashing over the obscure field bedazzled Goodman Brown, or he recognized a score of the church members of Salem village famous for their especial sanctity” (Hawthorne, Tales 92). The “objective” chiaroscuro espouses the subjective stance of the dreamer, poised in the middle of the fantastic alternation sardonically laid bare by the “either/or” structure. For Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project (1927-1940), phantasmagoria, the projection of illusion, is, somewhat counter-intuitively, related to illumination; the dream-like vision allows one to break through ordinary experience and reach revelation. Young Goodman Brown’s dream-like observation of visible saints consorting with the devil can be seen as ironically prophetic since it reveals the consequences of believing in man’s innate depravity. From a Puritan point of view, the dream ironically confirms the tenets of Calvinist faith and it thus expresses the truth. In Goodman Brown’s case, the disruption provided by the dream vision of the black mass is an opportunity to see through the pretense of visible saints, for visible sainthood is in itself a phantasmagoria which becomes illuminated by its grotesque parody in the forest. Meaning and “counter-meaning” (Foucault’s phrase) are superimposed, fused, which tells Goodman something about the existential truth inherent in the Original Sin: there is no way around it, even through visible sainthood. This irony far exceeds the mere notion of spectral evidence as legitimate in a court of law; given the historical context, whether Goodman Brown saw the townspeople as witches in reality or in a dream would be equally damaging to their reputation.5

14Foucault addresses the prophetic dream in religious terms that are again curiously close to Hawthorne’s aesthetic treatment of these visions. Sent to men as decrees emanating from the divine will, dreams can express Grace (Foucault 46), warnings to avert the dictates of Predestination. Goodman Brown’s adventure in the forest could also, then, be seen as running against Calvinist predestination, another turn of the screw of irony. In the various discussions of spectral evidence in “Young Goodman Brown” that took place before and around Michael Colacurcio’s influential reading, much has been said about Goodman Brown’s dreamlike experience, but little attention has been paid to his wife’s own sinister dream:

“Dearest heart,” whispered she, softly and rather sadly, when her lips were close to his ear, “prithee put off your journey until sunrise and sleep in your own bed to-night. A lone woman is troubled with such dreams and such thoughts that she’s afeared of herself sometimes.” (84-85)

As Faith uses the third person to refer to herself, she suggests that the dream originates in a place that is not the ordinary self. Faith’s dark, untold dream works as an anticipation of what is possibly her husband’s but also as a counter dream, an attempt to avert it—unsuccessfully, as is the case with Georgiana’s dream mentioned above. In terms of narrative and ontological structures, the explicit reference to Faith’s dream is supposed to authenticate e contrario Goodman Brown’s voyage as non-dream, the embedding providing a provisional separation between levels. Returning home, Goodman Brown is incapable of stepping out of his dark dream; he is the victim of anoneirognosis, the incapacity to discern dream from reality. His nightmare has bled into real life; the night residue has invaded his waking state.

15A third female character experiences a revealing dream in “Wakefield,” which features a perpetrator of “marital delinquency” (96), a man who walks out on his wife, relocating in a neighboring apartment to observe the consequences of his absence. In Mrs. Wakefield’s dream of her departed husband, the latter’s disturbing, synecdochic smirk encapsulates the enigmatic meaning of the story:

In her many musings, she surrounds the original smile with a multitude of fantasies, which make it strange and awful; as, for instance, if she imagines him in a coffin, that parting look is frozen on his pale features; or, if she dreams of him in Heaven, still his blessed spirit wears a quiet and crafty smile. (98)

“Strange and awful” for Mrs. Wakefield, the smile is comically incongruous for the reader, given the contexts set up by the dreams. Readers get the impression that the smile has an independent life, like the Cheshire cat’s grin; the secret joke is actually on Wakefield.

Enchantments and Metamorphoses

  • 6 In his article on “The Celestial Railroad,” Pattison focuses on dream vision to contrast it with al (...)

16Like a medieval or Puritan dream allegory6 (Hawthorne was an avid reader of The Pilgrim’s Progress [1678]), embedded dreams in Hawthorne are not nested, self-enclosed, or limited sub-worlds but openings onto a superior reality compatible with a belief in the marvelous. This is the case of “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” which features a woman sharing the characteristics of a flower thanks to magic.

17The German Romantics held that contrary to the novel, somehow constrained by referential illusion, literary tales (Kunstmärchen) could be lifted out of mimesis (see Hawthorne’s claim that he only retains “the faintest possible counterfeit of real life” [Tales 229]). Through reiterated self-reflexivity, such tales would rise above themselves, so to speak:

The fairy tale, unlike the novel, was not expected to deal with the everyday world, but presented a heightened reality in which marvelous figures and situations could readily function as symbols for mental events or for higher forces acting on or in the mind. Moreover, as a narrative with a plot, the fairy tale could describe the dynamic development of the mind from one level to the next. (Birrell 9)

As they lay bare the creative process, embeddings are expressive of Romantic irony, understood as the superimposition of the objective and the subjective, the coexistence of the narrative and the lyrical, in other words, as the metatextuality at work in literary texts.

18Novalis’s writing often features tales within the tale, a device that is also used in “Rappaccini’s Daughter” when Baglioni tells Giovanni the story of the Indian prince and the poisonous woman given to him as a present (246). Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” also shares with Novalis’s work the use of embedded dreams about flowers; in The Disciples at Saïs, the embedded short tale “Hyacinth and Roseblossom” (which features a singing lizard and walking flowers) sees the hero embarking on a journey through the wilderness until he falls asleep. The story then develops a metaleptic dream which takes Hyacinth further and further from “earthliness” only to lead him back to his beloved Roseblossom when he lifts a “diaphanous, shimmering veil” (119). Novalis’s unfinished romance, Henry of Ofterdingen (1800), set in the Middle Ages, opens on a dream which the protagonist feels is “something more than a mere dream”:

But what most attracted his notice, was a tall, light-blue flower, which stood nearest the fountain, and touched it with its broad, glossy leaves. Around it grew numberless flowers of varied hue, filling the air with the richest perfume. But he saw the blue flower alone, and gazed long upon it with inexpressible tenderness. He at length was about to approach it, when it began to move, and change its form. The leaves increased their beauty, adorning the growing stem. The flower bended towards him, and revealed among its leaves a blue, outspread collar, within which hovered a tender face. (26)

The dream of the flower-woman sends him on a transcendent initiation quest, with the Blue Flower, the form of which is said to “move and change,” intimating the various metamorphoses that animate the story. Giovanni’s dream in “Rappaccini’s Daughter” similarly reveals Beatrice’s invisible transformation into a flower, but endows the vision with sinister overtones: “Flower and maiden were different, and yet the same, and fraught with some strange peril in either shape” (233). Beatrice is no Blue Flower, and Hawthorne’s tale can be read as a revision of Novalis, a dark version of the Romantic quest for fulfillment.

  • 7 In “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” (1956), Roman Jakobson briefly a (...)

19Giovanni is first seen standing at his window, looking down into the profusion of Rappaccini’s garden from the restricted space of his garret. Beyond the almost clichéd motif of the open window as signifying Romantic longing of the finite for the infinite, the potentially allegorical implication of the garden is immediately ironized when Rappaccini, as the disturbingly overcautious gardener, enters the scene: “Was this garden, then, the Eden of the present world? And this man, with such a perception of harm in what his own hands caused to grow,—was he the Adam?” (232). Free indirect speech combines Giovanni’s uneasiness with narratorial admission of Biblical misappropriation. The synesthetic, fantasized perception of Beatrice as the temptress (her voice makes him think of “deep hues of purple or crimson and perfumes heavily delectable” [232]) triggers Giovanni’s dream quoted above. Beatrice herself indulges in “fantastic humor” by highlighting in her dress the “analogy” (236) between herself and the flower. The literalization of metaphor at work in the story (Beatrice is a flower and not only “like” a flower), one of the main tropes of the fantastic according to Todorov (77), also allows for the concentration and ironic reversal in language that dreams commonly accomplish.7 Similarly, literary metamorphosis highlights both semantic and tropological instability. Changeability serves uncertainty.

20Giovanni’s reaction to Beatrice’s appearance encapsulates the polysemy of the word “chimera”: “‘Am I awake? Have I my senses?’ said he to himself. ‘What is this being? Beautiful shall I call her or inexpressibly terrible?’” (237). The tale actually concerns itself with Giovanni’s own metamorphosis: his contamination by Beatrice and rejection of his new (or simply revealed) identity. The word “metamorphosis” shares with sleep (Morpheus) the notion of “shape.” Dreams are the ultimate shape-shifters or changelings. When he is told by Baglioni that he has presumably been selected by Rappaccini as “the material of some new experience,” Giovanni mutters to himself: “‘It is a dream. . . . Surely it is a dream’” (247). Beatrice likens her death to a “dream” where evil is reduced to a mere “fragrance” (253) that can evaporate. What is striking in the story, however, is that no tangible “reality” is offered to contrast with the dream-like world of Padua, apart from the playful reference to an extradiegetic dimension where readers can check the narrator’s reference to documents attesting the warfare raging in the medical department of the university of Padua (235). Standing at first sight for the principle of reality and common sense (note that he is “apparently of genial nature” [234, emphasis mine]), Baglioni repeatedly runs into Giovanni whenever the latter leaves his apartment, as if summoned by the ineluctable spatial logic of dreams turning into nightmares. He soon emerges as Rappaccini’s doppelgänger, using words that could easily be placed in his rival’s mouth: he does not want Beatrice’s father to “‘snatch the lad out of [his] own hands’” (240), and he suspects Beatrice will try to steal his professor’s chair away from him (235). What constitutes the integrity of the self is destabilized for all the characters involved, as they exchange properties, with Giovanni turning into Beatrice, Baglioni turning into Rappaccini, and antidotes turning out to be poisons. Giovanni calls Beatrice “poisonous,” but he is described as “venomenous” by the narrator on the same page (251). Upon dying after drinking the fatal antidote, Beatrice exclaims: “‘was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?’” (253). The plasticity of identity and situations in dreams allows for ironic reversals and recognitions; contrast is replaced by contiguity, sequentiality by repetition. Metamorphosis, in fact, does not really entail change. For all their implausibility, transformations in Ovid’s Metamorphoses are flawless, evidence that there is, in fact, “an intimate connection between the before and after states,” so that the shift is in fact “realization and clarification” (Solodow 2). The tropological value of dreams in fairy tales points to topological elasticity. Such energy, however, cannot last forever: in Hawthorne’s tale, Beatrice’s death after the ingestion of the antidote marks the end of the power of magic and of the invulnerability granted by dreams.

Symmetry and Metalepsis

21Devoid of all form of magic, Hawthorne’s “The Wives of the Dead” deals with “simple,” if sad, “domestic incidents” (62), and the story is framed by the narrator’s misleadingly humble justification for the present narrative about two recent widows who learn on the same night that the news of their respective husbands’ death had been erroneous. Yet, for all the ordinariness of the situation, the story deploys an uncanny, if not fearful, symmetry that unsettles any final interpretation about the perimeter occupied by dreams in the story.

22There are two dead husbands, two “young and comely” women, Mary and Margaret, their wives or widows, two sleeping rooms, whose beds are “reciprocally visible,” two “vacant armchairs” and two “humbler seats” next to them (63), two knockings at the door (63, 65), two messengers, the “friendly innkeeper” (64) and the “generous seaman” (66), two resurrections, two reactions marked by joy followed by affectionate concern for the other sister. Spatially, the story is organized around two poles: the central hearth around which four seats are arranged in a circle, and the window, out of which the two women lean in quick succession to hear the good news, elements which testify to a sort of hidden subjectivity, that of the author who experiences “nothing but the pleasure itself of composition” (preface to the second edition of Twice Told Tales, rpt. in Tales 318) in designing a meaningful décor. In a way, one would not want to upset this perfect balance, even with good news. To be sure, the return of just one husband would be the occasion for the exploration of changing relationships, novelistic material rather than the inspiration associated with the tale.

23The story has aroused the same critical controversy as Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw.” As the women are told at night (one being aroused from sleep) about their husbands’ being actually alive, the debate bears on whether or not the two have dreamt the happy outcome. Mark Harris lists the three arguments, fallacious according to him, that are put forward to support the dream thesis: 1. This is a story by Hawthorne; 2. It expresses the desire of the widows; 3. The narrator maintains a dreamlike mood and setting (329). To counter them, Harris emphasizes the deceptive strategy of the story. According to him, “The Wives of the Dead” actually contains “only one dream, which is not described and which is of no direct importance in interpreting the story” (329), that of Mary. However, it is to be noted that in fact another dream is explicitly mentioned, that of Margaret falling asleep right after her visit to Mary’s bed: “Her mind was thronged with delightful thoughts, till sleep stole on and transformed them to visions, more delightful and more wild” (65). This admittedly does not really destroy Harris’s argument. To support his claim, some clues pointing to the veracity of the episode could be added: the business of the window left “unhasped” (65) by Margaret after she has heard the good news, and her bedroom door which “had been closed in the course of the night” (66), material evidence that Margaret had been at the window before. The second coming to the window by Mary, who notices these details, seems to corroborate the first—except that details can also be noticed in a dream. Wakefulness is thus uncertain throughout the story. Rebellious Margaret, who is said to have stayed awake even while “listening to the drops of rain, that came down in monotonous succession” (63), which often induces sleep, is the first to hear the good news. The announcement scene, however, is depicted with a flourish of picturesque details, complete with glowing lamps and dancing shadows, as the narrator describes in overtly aesthetic terms what she sees, thanks to what could be termed free indirect focalization:

A lantern was reddening the front of the house, and melting its light in the neighboring puddles, while a deluge of darkness overwhelmed every other object. . . . So saying, the honest man departed; and his lantern gleamed along the street, bringing to view indistinct shapes of things, and the fragments of a world, like order glimmering through chaos, or memory roaming over the past. (64)

Margaret decides not to wake up her sister-in-law Mary, who had “sunk in temporary forgetfulness” (63), as she bends over her lying in bed. Narratorial intrusions firmly authenticate the fact that Mary is dreaming: “Happy is it, and strange, that the lighter sorrows are those from which dreams are chiefly fabricated” (65). Yet, refusing the privilege of omniscience, and adopting Mary’s own limited perspective on her own dream when she wakes up, the narrator does not tell about the contents of this dream. The ellipsis suggests that it is insignificant, an ironic reality effect: “A vivid dream had latterly involved her in its unreal life, of which, however, she could only remember that it had been broken in upon at the most interesting point” (65). It is hard not to read irony in the combination of climax and ellipsis. In addition, the very nature of dreams, the status of their contents as “unreal life,” is used to reassert the reality of Mary’s sleep. Lastly, seen from the outside, from Margaret’s perspective watching the sleeping face, readers only get the response to this untold dream: the look of “motionless contentment” (65) of the sleeper about which more will be said below. Margaret then turns away and returns to bed.

24The same scene is repeated when Mary is said to emerge from her deep sleep. By a coincidence that is one of the many manifestations of the uncanny in the story, she in turn hears a knock at the door. It takes about twenty lines for her to get to the window. She leans out of the window, and learns about her husband’s resurrection. By another coincidence or dream-like condensation, it is an “unsuccessful wooer” or “rejected lover” (66) who breaks the news. After which he departs, amid stromboscopic light effects, as he “alternately entered the shade of the houses, or emerged into the broad streaks of moonlight” (66). Like Margaret, Mary’s first impulse is to share the news. She bends over the “unconscious form” (66) of her sister-in-law, whose face is also marked by “joy” (66). Like before, the fortunate sister, Mary this time, checks herself so as not to spoil her counterpart’s moment of happiness granted by dreams. The story ends on a famously uncertain outcome Gary Thompson refers to as “negative closure”:

By negative closure I mean that technique of abrupt, truncated, inconclusive denouement by which dreaming and waking, the imagined and the actual, are left ambiguously blurred in a narrative form that undercuts the reader’s preconceived (generic) expectations. (13, emphasis in the original)

  • 8 See Mark Harris for a recapitulation of the various interpretations.

In “The Wives of the Dead,” the ironic uncertainty hinges on the ambiguity of the final pronoun “she,” as has been noted by numerous commentators:8

Before retiring, she [Mary] set down the lamp and endeavored to arrange the bed-clothes, so that the chill air might not do harm to the feverish slumberer. But her hand trembled against Margaret’s neck, a tear also fell upon her cheek, and she suddenly awoke. (67)

  • 9 See Harris’s interpretation (327).
  • 10 “[Romantic poetry] can also—more than any other form—hover at the midpoint between the portrayed an (...)

The present reading proposes that the syntax of this last sentence allows an interpretation based on metalepsis, or inversion of the narrative levels of the two dreams. If we assume that Mary, in this final scene, is actually dreaming that she is bending, full of solicitude, over her sleeping sister-in-law, the “contentment” that Margaret had read on her face earlier on could be reconstructed retrospectively not as resignation9 but as joy, the joy she felt, in her dream, when told about her husband’s survival. “A feverish slumberer” in Mary’s dream, and the object of her tender care, Margaret could be awake in reality, also full of concern for the sleeper, Mary, engrossed in her vivid dream. The two women would act the same way towards each other, one in dream, the other in reality. The compassionate tear that falls on the dreamer, if one follows this hypothesis, would be Margaret’s. We can even imagine that Mary is crying in her sleep at the exact same moment, as is suggested by the tantalizing “also” (“a tear also fell upon her cheek”). Such a reading (by no means exclusive of others) would respect the aesthetics of the story based on concentration, repetition, symmetry and coincidence. In “The Wives of the Dead,” the series of mutually reflective and self-reflexive mirrors praised by Schlegel10 about Romantic poetry deploys the ironic logic of the oneiric.

*

25The intense receptivity that ignores logical contradictions and moral discipline is that of the conscious artist as well as that of the unconscious dreamer. Hawthorne’s treatment of dreams in his fiction is recursive: by inserting elliptic but authenticated dreams within the overall dreaminess of the tales, the writer creates a feedback loop which maintains the reader’s consciousness of fictionality, thus imbuing these nested dreams with Romantic irony. The reiteration of the oneiric through intertextual allusion in “The Haunted Mind,” mise en abyme in “Young Goodman Brown,” “Wakefield” and “The Wives of the Dead,” cautionary tale in “The Birthmark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” seems to be the aesthetic solution found by Hawthorne to achieve his project of combining the “aimlessness” of unconscious material with the necessity of a “leading idea running through the whole,” to borrow from the terms of the entry in his notebook quoted above. Hawthorne thus ironizes the prophetic dreams of his tales: revelation may point to some agency exterior to that of the dreamer, but this revelation is metafictional rather than metaphysical.

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Notes

1 The title is borrowed from Shakespeare, King John, Act III, sc. 4: “Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale.”

2 Poe’s claim in “Tale Writing: Nathaniel Hawthorne” that Hawthorne’s manner and inspiration were “identical” to Ludwig Tieck’s repeats an 1845 article from Democratic Review. For a more thorough examination of Hawthorne’s alleged indebtedness to Tieck, see Pochmann 381-88 and Matenko 71-88. Henry A. Pochmann concludes that the influence of German fiction writers is “inconsequential”; Percy Matenko notes some similarities between Hawthorne and Tieck. More recently, Patrick Labriola has also examined Tieck and Hawthorne’s common reliance on the fairy tale “as a means of creating the supernatural in their stories” (325), but his article does not address the motif of dreams. Like Joseph C. Pattison, Ted-Larry Pebworth sees dreams in Hawthorne’s short fiction as dark forebodings, the “spiritual initiation” (19) to the reality of guilt.

3 “A project is the subjective embryo of a developing object. A perfect project should be simultaneously entirely subjective and entirely objective, should be an indivisible and living individual. In its origin: completely subjective, original, only possible in precisely this sense; in its character: completely objective, physically and morally necessary” (Athenaeum fragment 22, 20-21).

4 Spectral evidence was the legal provision used in the Salem witch trials that allowed testimonies based on apparitions, dreams or visions to be accepted in court.

5 It is to be noted that even Cotton Mather, the minister who wrote the pamphlet Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), advocated caution when using spectral evidence since the devil could also assume the appearance of a virtuous person. Nothing is ever certain in these matters.

6 In his article on “The Celestial Railroad,” Pattison focuses on dream vision to contrast it with allegory: “Use of dream would be primary and would ground the tale in human experience; the allegorical masquers would take on the semblance of life, not remain purely abstract figures, by the strange intensity of dream” (225).

7 In “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” (1956), Roman Jakobson briefly addresses dreamwork as based either on contiguity (metonymy) or similarity (metaphor), thus rephrasing Freud’s “identification and symbolism” for the former and “displacement and condensation” for the latter (132). He interestingly refers to magic in the next sentence, quoting Frazer’s division into “homeopathic” (“imitative”) and “contagious” types of magic. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” fuses together the two forms of magic.

8 See Mark Harris for a recapitulation of the various interpretations.

9 See Harris’s interpretation (327).

10 “[Romantic poetry] can also—more than any other form—hover at the midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer, free of all real and ideal self-interest, on the wings of poetic reflection, and can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless succession of mirrors” (Athenaeum fragment 116, 32).

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Auteur

Isabelle Boof-Vermesse

Université de Lille, CECILLE (ULR 4074)

Isabelle Boof-Vermesse is an Associate Professor at the Université de Lille, France, where she teaches American literature. A member of CECILLE (ULR 4074), her research focuses on genre literature: detective fiction, speculative fiction, metaphysical horror. She recently published an article on the figure of the Hawthornian narrator, “‘Wakefield’ and Romantic Irony,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales, edited by Gérald Préher (Ellipses, 2024).

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