Hawthorne and the gender of Jewishness: anti-Semitism, aesthetics, and sexual politics in "The Marble Faun".

On Sunday, April 13 of 1856, Nathaniel Hawthorne attended a banquet in London at the Mansion House, to which he was invited by David Salomons, the Lord Mayor of London. Salomons was honoring Hawthorne in his capacity as U.S. Consul in Liverpool. The United States President Franklin Pierce, of whom Hawthorne had written a campaign biography, had appointed Hawthorne, one of his best friends since their days as college classmates at Bowdoin College, to this position in 1853, at the time an extremely important one given Liverpool's centrality in transatlantic trade and commerce between England and the United States. (The position no longer exists.) Hawthorne may or may not have been aware that Salomons was a pioneering activist for Jewish rights in the simultaneously tolerant and deeply anti-Semitic culture of Victorian England.1 The American author's account of his dinner at the Lord Mayor's Mansion has been central to many discussions of the Hawthorne's representation of Jewish people, nakedly revealing, as it does, both his deep-seated anti-Semitism and his intense fascination with the figure of the Jewess. From the description he provides in The English Notebooks, Hawthorne and David Salomons did not exactly hit it off: "He said little to me," Hawthorne notes, "except that I must hold myself in readiness to respond to a toast which he meant to give; and though I hinted that I would much rather be spared, he showed no signs of mercy" (21: 480). Hawthorne also observed that his lordship "is a tall, hard-looking, white-headed old Jew, of plain deportment, but rather hearty than otherwise in his address." Sneakily availing himself of the privacy ostensibly afforded him by his notebook, Hawthorne deemed Salomons' wife "a short and ugly old Jewess" (CE 21: 479). As if reenacting the movement from the scornful apprehension of the tough old Puritan dames who regard Hester Prynne with such violent contempt in the opening scenes of The Scarlet Letter to his languorously sensual descriptions of that famous, marked heroine, Hawthorne transitions from his harsh description of Salomons' wife to a much more rapturous one of a woman he beholds sitting "nearly opposite me, across the table." His description of this woman and the description of the man at her side need to be quoted at length, and as parts of the one continuous paragraph in which they appear: She was, I suppose, dark and yet not dark, but rather seemed to be of pure white marble, yet not white; but the purest and finest complexion (without a shade of color in it, yet anything but sallow or sickly) that I ever beheld. Her hair was a wonderful deep, raven black, black as night, black as death; not raven black, for that has a shiny gloss, and her's [sic] had not; but it was hair never to be painted, nor described - wonderful hair, Jewish hair. Her nose had a beautiful outline, though I could see that it was Jewish too; and that, and all her features, were so fine that sculpture seemed a despicable art beside her; and certainly my pen is good for nothing. If any likeness of her could be given, it must be by sculpture, not painting. She was slender, and youthful, but yet had a stately and cold, though soft and womanly grace; and, looking at her, I saw what were the wives of the old patriarchs, in their maiden or early married days - what Rachel was, when Jacob wooed her seven years, and seven more - what Judith was; for, womanly as she looked, I doubt not she could have slain a man, in a good cause - what Bathsheba was; only she seemed to have no sin in her - perhaps what Eve was, though one could hardly think her weak enough to eat the apple. I never should have thought of touching her, nor desired to touch her; for, whether owing to distinctness of race, my sense that she was a Jewess, or whatever else, I felt a sort of repugnance, simultaneously with my perception that she was an admirable creature. But, at the right hand of this miraculous Jewess, there sat the very Jew of Jews; the distilled essence of all the Jews that have been born since Jacob's time; he was Judas Iscariot; he was the Wandering Jew; he was the worst, and at the same time, the truest type of his race, and contained within himself, I have no doubt, every old prophet and every old clothesman, that ever the tribes produced; and he must have been circumcised as much as 10 times over. …