To the Editors:
It is doubtful that anyone wants me to dispute the points, such as they are, of Tuttleton’s long-winded and ill-natured assault on my Hawthorne’s Secret. But I will object to his failure to mention the fact that, though the evidence—fictional and biographical—that Hawthorne knew the court records containing his ancestral secret is obviously circumstantial, it is abundant. I also note that the reviewer never gives a clue as to what he means by “the cavalier way” in which I treat the author’s life. Then, misrepresenting my argument, he charges “rhetorical duplicity.”
Last he has me claiming that Hawthorne’s relationship with his sister Ebe was “a displacement of his longing for his mother.” This states what I do not believe and did not say—and makes me a psychoanalytic critic to boot. That established, Tuttleton announces that I am “oblivious” to Frederick Crews’s “rejection of the possibility of the psychoanalysis of dead authors …” Well, whatever he tells himself and his readers, the facts are that I support Mr. Crews on psychoanalysis and literature. Further that Crews read my book last summer “with great interest,” and wrote my editor Bill Goodman (August 10, 1984) with approval. I quote Mr. Crews with permission and thanks.
If Young is right, the sexual preoccupation that some of us have found in Hawthorne’s fiction can be more concretely explained than we had thought. The case is circumstantial but never forced, and I for one find it entirely plausible. But right or wrong, Young knows how to make his tale engaging. Hawthorne’s Secret will give pleasure even to those who resist its argument.
Philip Young
Pennsylvania State University
University Park, Pennsylvania
James Tuttleton replies:
If my review of Professor Young’s study of Hawthorne was “ill-natured,” let me atone here by remarking that the book gave me pleasure too, though it was the pleasure of contesting an argument I regard as insufficiently grounded on verifiable biographical evidence. And if Young is not a psychoanalytic critic in this study, let me also apologize for suggesting it, although his Oedipal palaver and method of ignoring the manifest of the texts in search of latent incest material might have misled a better man than I.
All arguments based on mere circumstantial evidence are likely to have some degree of plausibility. This is especially true of arguments grounded on Freudian presuppositions, which will almost invariably structure the evidence in advance. My point was simply this: if you account for Hawthorne’s life and work by positing an incestuous relationship with his sister Ebe, let us have the indisputable proof, the smoking pistol, as it were. That proof is lacking in .this study; and the exiguous circumstantial evidence, which occupies only a part of this slender book, does not clinch the case. Crews recognized as much in his conditional clause: “If Young is right….”
Perhaps the evidence for Hawthorne’s incest with his sister will turn up in a Massachusetts attic. But for the present, to say that he committed the act and that he wrote about it to get rid of it, without producing verifiable evidence, is to treat Hawthorne in a cavalier way. I think Young has some reservations about his own argument, some ambivalence about his claim for the incestuous “secret.” How otherwise can one explain Young’s remark, in describing Hawthorne’s death: “. . . on May nineteenth Hawthorne learned from his friend [Oliver Wendell Holmes] that Thackeray had died the previous winter in his sleep. He remarked what a boon it would be to go without a struggle, and that night he went— taking with him, if he had one, his secret” (p. 47). Here the conditional clause is Young’s.