The Wives of the Dead

“The mourners, though not insensible to the kindness of their friends, had yearned to be left alone. United, as they had been, by the relationship of the living, and now more closely so by that of the dead, each felt as if whatever consolation her grief admitted were to be found in the bosom of the other. They joined their hearts, and wept together silently.” 

After two colonial brothers die unexpectedly, their brides—closely acquainted and having experienced identical tragedies at the same time—realize that only they can truly understand and console each other. Here, Hawthorne introduces the parallelism that will follow the women throughout the tale. 

“[…] [O]ne of the sisters, all of whose emotions were influenced by her mild, quiet, yet not feeble character, began to recollect the precepts of resignation and endurance which piety had taught her, when she did not think to need them.” 

Stricken and grieving, like her sister, from their shared tragedy, Mary is first to calm herself, calling on the precepts of her religious faith—precepts easy to learn by rote and then ignore in good times but suddenly helpful during a disaster—to give her strength. She then turns to her sister-in-law and helps to calm her as well. 

“‘Come, dearest sister; you have eaten not a morsel to-day,’ she said. ‘Arise, I pray you, and let us ask a blessing on that which is provided for us.’” 

Prayers and devotions, normal and common among most of the Massachusetts colonists, were part of the strict and sober doctrines of the time. In the story, they suggest the power of belief to comfort those who suffer an unbearable loss; they also add a layer of heavy seriousness to the tale. 

“Mary experienced the effect often consequent upon grief quietly borne, and soon sunk into temporary forgetfulness, while Margaret became more disturbed and feverish, in proportion as the night advanced with its deepest and stillest hours.” 

Each of the sisters experiences her sudden loss in a different way. Mary is calmer, and she processes her grief more smoothly. Margaret wrestles with her tragedy, resisting it and struggling to sleep. 

“Two vacant arm-chairs were in their old positions on opposite sides of the hearth, where the brothers had been wont to sit in young and laughing dignity, as heads of families; two humbler seats were near them, the true thrones of that little empire, where Mary and herself had exercised in love a power that love had won.” 

The author makes a pointed statement about the politics of traditional marriages, in which husbands believe they’re in charge while wives quietly guide the decision-making. Hawthorne implies that women often love their men in a manner that, during decision-making, wins them over, and that they have ways of working around the marital strictures imposed on them. 

“It is difficult to be convinced of the death of one whom we have deemed another self.” 

The sudden loss of her husband, and the tearing-away of a part of her soul, causes Margaret’s heart to leap at the sound of a knock at the door, as she hopes against hope that, somehow, her beloved husband might still be alive. 

“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.” 

The deep gloom of a cloudy, rainy night echoes Margaret’s mood. The lantern, signifying hope, is held by a messenger, but it seems to have little chance of overcoming the powerfully somber state of the sisters’ house. 

“[…] [H]is 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.” 

The things outside her house seem, to Margaret in her mourning, to be a mere tangle of randomness that reflects the scramble of thoughts and feelings within her stunned and sorrowful mind. The lantern is carried by an innkeeper who has just reported to her that her husband isn’t dead after all. His lamp casts beams of hope onto her dark circumstances.

“‘Poor Mary!’ said she to herself. ‘Shall I waken her, to feel her sorrow sharpened by my happiness? No; I will keep it within my own bosom till the morrow.’” 

Margaret has learned that her husband is still alive. She yearns to share her sudden happiness with Mary, but fears her sister, mourning her own husband’s death, will simply feel all the more alone at the news. Ironically, Mary felt the same.

“Her face was turned partly inward to the pillow, and had been hidden there to weep; but a look of motionless contentment was now visible upon it, as if her heart, like a deep lake, had grown calm because its dead had sunk down so far within.” 

The balm of sleep often cures, for a little while at least, the most painful sorrows. Mary—the less agitated of the two sisters at the news of both their husbands’ deaths—is better able to let sleep take her by the hand and guide her down into the deep recesses of healing unconsciousness. 

“Her mind was thronged with delightful thoughts, till sleep stole on, and transformed them to visions, more delightful and more wild […]” 

Margaret’s joy at the good news about her husband’s survival blends with other thoughts as she drifts off into slumber. This foreshadows the story’s strange ending, in which the sisters’ experiences seem to be dreams rather than reality.

“He hurried away, while Mary watched him with a doubt of waking reality, that seemed stronger or weaker as he alternately entered the shade of the houses, or emerged into the broad streaks of moonlight.” 

Mary’s ex-suitor Stephen, having dutifully reported to her the good news that her husband has been seen alive and well, walks away. Mary’s doubts and hopes about this stunning news are reflected in Stephen’s passage through the shadows and gleams of a moonlit night, a flickering, almost surreal leave-taking that also suggests the possibility that Mary is merely dreaming the scene. In a form of symmetry that echoes Margaret’s encounter with Goodman Parker and his report of her own husband’s survival, Mary receives wonderfully good news amid the gloom of a night whose bleakness seems to overwhelm all news good and bad. It’s as if both women, regardless of the fate of their husbands, are somehow trapped in a murky darkness from which they can’t escape. 

“Margaret lay in unquiet sleep, and the drapery was displaced around her; her young cheek was rosy-tinted, and her lips half opened in a vivid smile; an expression of joy, debarred its passage by her sealed eyelids, struggled forth like incense from the whole countenance.” 

Mary assumes Margaret is enjoying a brief respite from her agony with a pleasant dream; the reader understands that Margaret is happy because she has learned that her husband is alive after all. A third possibility will arise shortly, that one or both women have simply dreamed the events of the evening.