ABSTRACT
Serving time as U.S. consul in Liverpool, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a now infamous note to his publisher complaining about the competition from "a damned mob of scribbing women"l-a much quoted remark that has led some critics to speculate about the conflict between Hawthorne and writers such as Susan Warner or Maria Cummins and others to speculate about Hawthorne's misogyny. But an account of misogyny in Hawthorne that takes no account of his own and his culture's gender anxieties is necessarily inadequate: to assess his conflicting views ofwomen, one must first place them in the context of his anxieties about his own masculinity. For, much like the very women from whom he sought to distance himself, Hawthorne described himself as a "scribbler,"2 at once trivial (a scribbler, not a writer) and threatening (part of a "mob"). Even as Hawthorne's success as a canonical author increased, he felt that he was not the "man" he ought to be. In part this was a lingering view that art itself was an unmanly, hence trivial, occupation, while in part this anxiety grew out of his own success as a professional author-success that increasingly aligned him with the professional women he scorned and feared. If critics have rarely examined Hawthorne's relationships to women in the light of his own constructions of masculinity,3 they have also rarely investigated the class implications suggested by that word mob, in which a Carlylean fear of the French Revolution conflates the uncontrolled political expression of the lower classes with the threat of an unbridled sexuality-a conflation already evident in "My Kinsman, Major Molineux. "
