31 pages • 1 hour read
Nathaniel HawthorneThe Wives of the Dead
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1832A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Sharing of Sorrow
Nathaniel Hawthorne long took an interest in how women deal with the demands of life and the strictures that society imposed on them. In “The Wives of the Dead,” he brings up the problems women might face after the tragic loss of a husband. The story concerns two young women only recently married to brothers, who simultaneously lose their grooms to tragic deaths and find they have only each other for solace.
Mary and Margaret shared a house with their husbands. Now bereft of the men, the two women face a sudden emptiness in their home—the chairs their husbands once occupied; the beds where their men slept with them, now over-large with their absence; the eerie shadows cast by the lantern on the unused furniture. In a house where, hints the author, the two women quietly, but lovingly, reigned supreme, the women must now fill the gap left by the men.
The women are accustomed to working together. Their house, though modest, is neatly, if sparsely, furnished and decorated with knickknacks and bric-a-brac—symbols of their lives, neighborhoods, and husbands’ livelihoods. Now faced with unbearable torment, they turn to each other. Mary, the calmer and more serene of the two, draws on her good sense and their shared religious beliefs to guide Margaret from near hysteria to a quieter mood that permits a bit of food and then a healing sleep.
Each woman hears a knock at the door and rises from bed to learn good news about her own husband, then hesitates to waken her sister for fear that the report will merely deepen the other woman’s feelings of loneliness and despair. Later, Mary sits for a moment with the sleeping Margaret, rearranging her bedclothes so she may sleep more comfortably.
In these ways, the two women express their love and concern for one another, using intelligent good sense, and offering kindness even when the other doesn’t know they’ve been cared for.
Women’s Struggles in 1800s America
The author sketches very briefly the problems two widows face in a tightly religious colony only recently clawed from wilderness.
When Mary offers Margaret some food, her sister cries, “There is no blessing left for me, neither will I ask it! […] Would it were His will that I might never taste food more!” (6-7) Not only is Margaret in agony over the loss of her husband, she also must now face her world without the income her husband would bring. She states in this quote that she shouldn’t have any more blessings from God and shouldn’t taste food, implying that her husband will no longer be able to do these things and neither should she.
Marriage was a vital institution in those days; the sudden loss of a husband brought with it a loss of status. The sisters cling to each other out of love and affection but also from their mutual need for protection. It will be hard, in the days and months ahead, for them to maintain their little house.
A knock at the door awakens each woman in turn. Margaret expresses fear, now that her husband is gone, about answering to a stranger in the middle of the night: “‘Heaven help me!’ sighed she. ‘I have nothing left to fear, and methinks I am ten times more a coward than ever’” (11). A woman, or even a pair of women, alone in a house felt a certain vulnerability without men at home.
In both her and Mary’s case, however, it turns out that the visitor is a man who simply informs them of good news. That these men offer their help, if only by way of bringing the news to the women, is itself encouraging. One of the emissaries is Stephen, Mary’s ex-suitor; though she would never betray her husband, especially now that he apparently lives again, the fact that the news is brought by someone who loves her can’t be all bad. If the incident is merely a dream, and Mary faces reality in the morning, her wish-fulfillment fantasy expresses the hope that other men will return to court her.
The Surrealness of Grief
Hawthorne thought a great deal about the border between reality and fantasy, a neutral space where the mind can play with facts and rearrange them in more attractive ways. As much as this applies to simple daydreaming, it also attaches to grief and despair. The sudden loss of a beloved mate can be unbearable, and the mind teeters and wobbles under the strain, casting about frantically for any suggestion of hope and relief from agony. For both Mary and Margaret, their thoughts and feelings, hemmed in by the grimness of mourning, begin to warp and bend so that their world takes on aspects of the phantasmagorical.
To Margaret, the sudden emptiness of the parlor is heightened by the weak, flickering light of the lantern. A knock at the door hurls her into doubt, but finally, she decides to answer. The messenger’s news is cause for joy, yet the world outside still appears gloomy. Margaret settles back into bed, and soon she dozes, her mind filled with happy imaginings, “wild, like the breath of winter […] working fantastic tracery upon a window” (16).
Mary awakens to a knock at the door; answering from the upstairs window, she finds, of all people, her ex-suitor Stephen, “wet as if he had come out of the depths of the sea” (18-19). Stephen brings news that Mary’s husband is alive after all. Stephen departs through broken moon shadows that make surreal, to Mary’s mind, the entire incident.
Finally, as Mary rearranges the sleeping Margaret’s bed sheets, one of Mary’s teardrops splashes onto Margaret’s cheek, “and she suddenly awoke” (23-24). But Hawthorne intentionally doesn’t specify which woman woke up, forcing the reader to consider that one or both women have dreamed their respective messengers.
The story, which began as an ode to sisterly love and comfort, appears now to be more about coping with grief through fantasy. Not only is it possible that Margaret merely imagined the knock at the door and her talk with Goodman Parker, it’s also possible that Mary dreamed, not just the good news from Stephen, but the entire night’s events. It’s unclear where reality ends and the dreams begin.
The author has taken us on a journey whose destination lies far from where it began. He submits for our consideration unexpected ideas about Mary and Margaret’s state of mind, and these ideas lead to ever-deeper questions. Given a great enough loss, our minds might thereafter be ruled by the unreal.
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