The Egotism; or Bosom Serpent

Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Here he comes!" shouted the boys along the street. "Here comes the man with a snake in

his bosom!"

This outcry, saluting Herkimer's ears as he was about to enter the iron gate of the Elliston

mansion, made him pause. It was not without a shudder that he found himself on the point

of meeting his former acquaintance, whom he had known in the glory of youth, and whom

now after an interval of five years, he was to find the victim either of a diseased fancy or a

horrible physical misfortune.

"A snake in his bosom!" repeated the young sculptor to himself. "It must be he. No second

seemed to imitate the motion of a snake; for, instead of walking straight forward with open

front, he undulated along the pavement in a curved line. It may be too fanciful to say that

something, either in his moral or material aspect, suggested the idea that a miracle had been

wrought by transforming a serpent into a man, but so imperfectly that the snaky nature was

yet hidden, and scarcely hidden, under the mere outward guise of humanity. Herkimer

remarked that his complexion had a greenish tinge over its sickly white, reminding him of a

species of marble out of which he had once wrought a head of Envy, with her snaky locks.

The wretched being approached the gate, but, instead of entering, stopped short and fixed

the glitter of his eye full upon the compassionate yet steady countenance of the sculptor.

"It gnaws me! It gnaws me!" he exclaimed.

Roderick Elliston in the visage that now met the sculptor's gaze. Yet it was he. It added

nothing to the wonder to reflect that the once brilliant young man had undergone this odious

and fearful change during the no more than five brief years of Herkimer's abode at Florence.

The possibility of such a transformation being granted, it was as easy to conceive it effected

in a moment as in an age. Inexpressibly shocked and startled, it was still the keenest pang

when Herkimer remembered that the fate of his cousin Rosina, the ideal of gentle

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womanhood, was indissolubly interwoven with that of a being whom Providence seemed to

have unhumanized.

"Elliston! Roderick!" cried he, "I had heard of this; but my conception came far short of the

truth. What has befallen you? Why do I find you thus?"

"Oh, 'tis a mere nothing! A snake! A snake! The commonest thing in the world. A snake in

the bosom--that's all," answered Roderick Elliston. "But how is your own breast?"

continued he, looking the sculptor in the eye with the most acute and penetrating glance that

it had ever been his fortune to encounter. "All pure and wholesome? No reptile there? By

With this exclamation, the most frequent in his mouth, the unfortunate man clutched both

hands upon his breast as if an intolerable sting or torture impelled him to rend it open and

let out the living mischief, even should it be intertwined with his own life. He then freed

himself from Herkimer's grasp by a subtle motion, and, gliding through the gate, took

refuge in his antiquated family residence. The sculptor did not pursue him. He saw that no

available intercourse could be expected at such a moment, and was desirous, before another

meeting, to inquire closely into the nature of Roderick's disease and the circumstances that

had reduced him to so lamentable a condition. He succeeded in obtaining the necessary

information from an eminent medical gentleman.

Shortly after Elliston's separation from his wife--now nearly four years ago--his associates

himself,--but could not be satisfied of its existence there. Some thought that their once

brilliant friend was in an incipient stage of insanity, of which his passionate impulses had

perhaps been the forerunners; others prognosticated a general blight and gradual decline.

From Roderick's own lips they could learn nothing. More than once, it is true, he had been

heard to say, clutching his hands convulsively upon his breast,--"It gnaws me! It gnaws

me!"--but, by different auditors, a great diversity of explanation was assigned to this

ominous expression. What could it be that gnawed the breast of Roderick Elliston? Was it

sorrow? Was it merely the tooth of physical disease? Or, in his reckless course, often

verging upon profligacy, if not plunging into its depths, had he been guilty of some deed

which made his bosom a prey to the deadlier fangs of remorse? There was plausible ground

Meanwhile, Roderick seemed aware how generally he had become the subject of curiosity

and conjecture, and, with a morbid repugnance to such notice, or to any notice whatsoever,

love for all the creatures of his hand. The dusky twilight was now too transparent for

Roderick Elliston; the blackest midnight was his chosen hour to steal abroad; and if ever he

were seen, it was when the watchman's lantern gleamed upon his figure, gliding along the

street, with his hands clutched upon his bosom, still muttering, "It gnaws me! It gnaws me!"

What could it be that gnawed him?

After a time, it became known that Elliston was in the habit of resorting to all the noted

quacks that infested the city, or whom money would tempt to journey thither from a

distance. By one of these persons, in the exultation of a supposed cure, it was proclaimed

far and wide, by dint of handbills and little pamphlets on dingy paper, that a distinguished

gentleman, Roderick Elliston, Esq., had been relieved of a SNAKE in his stomach! So here

horror--while, at his bosom, he felt the sickening motion of a thing alive, and the gnawing

of that restless fang which seemed to gratify at once a physical appetite and a fiendish spite.

He summoned the old black servant, who had been bred up in his father's house, and was a

middle-aged man while Roderick lay in his cradle.

"Scipio!" he began; and then paused, with his arms folded over his heart. "What do people

say of me, Scipio."

"Sir! my poor master! that you had a serpent in your bosom," answered the servant with

hesitation.

"And what else?" asked Roderick, with a ghastly look at the man.

"Nothing else, dear master," replied Scipio, "only that the doctor gave you a powder, and

that the snake leaped out upon the floor."

"No, no!" muttered Roderick to himself, as he shook his head, and pressed his hands with a

morbidness which now pervaded his nature. All persons chronically diseased are egotists,

whether the disease be of the mind or body; whether it be sin, sorrow, or merely the more

tolerable calamity of some endless pain, or mischief among the cords of mortal life. Such

individuals are made acutely conscious of a self, by the torture in which it dwells. Self,

breast; and the fouler the crime, with so much the more difficulty does the perpetrator

prevent it from thrusting up its snake-like head to frighten the world; for it is that cancer, or

that crime, which constitutes their respective individuality. Roderick Elliston, who, a little

while before, had held himself so scornfully above the common lot of men, now paid full

allegiance to this humiliating law. The snake in his bosom seemed the symbol of a

monstrous egotism to which everything was referred, and which he pampered, night and

day, with a continual and exclusive sacrifice of devil worship.

He soon exhibited what most people considered indubitable tokens of insanity. In some of

his moods, strange to say, he prided and gloried himself on being marked out from the

ordinary experience of mankind, by the possession of a double nature, and a life within a

the streets, aimlessly, unless it might be called an aim to establish a species of brotherhood

between himself and the world. With cankered ingenuity, he sought out his own disease in

every breast. Whether insane or not, he showed so keen a perception of frailty, error, and

vice, that many persons gave him credit for being possessed not merely with a serpent, but

with an actual fiend, who imparted this evil faculty of recognizing whatever was ugliest in

man's heart.

For instance, he met an individual, who, for thirty years, had cherished a hatred against his

own brother. Roderick, amidst the throng of the street, laid his hand on this man's chest, and

remembered the profligacy of his only son? And whether he stung, or whether he frolicked,

did you feel his poison throughout your body and soul, converting everything to sourness

and bitterness? That is the way of such serpents. I have learned the whole nature of them

from my own!"

"Where is the police?" roared the object of Roderick's persecution, at the same time giving

an instinctive clutch to his breast. "Why is this lunatic allowed to go at large?"

Often it pleased the unfortunate young man to vex people with a lighter satire, yet still

characterized by somewhat of snake-like virulence. One day he encountered an ambitious

fisted old fellow, of great wealth, but who skulked about the city in the guise of a

scarecrow, with a patched blue surtout, brown hat, and mouldy boots, scraping pence

together, and picking up rusty nails. Pretending to look earnestly at this respectable person's

stomach, Roderick assured him that his snake was a copper-head and had been generated by

the immense quantities of that base metal with which he daily defiled his fingers. Again, he

assaulted a man of rubicund visage, and told him that few bosom serpents had more of the

devil in them than those that breed in the vats of a distillery. The next whom Roderick

honored with his attention was a distinguished clergyman, who happened just then to be

engaged in a theological controversy, where human wrath was more perceptible than divine

inspiration.

"Profane wretch!" exclaimed the divine; but, nevertheless, his hand stole to his breast.

life, and a brazen face, asking Roderick if there were any serpent in his breast, he told him

that there was, and of the same species that once tortured Don Rodrigo, the Goth. He took a

body, and the sharpest sting of any snake save one.

It was a dark-browed man who put the question; he had an evasive eye, which in the course

of a dozen years had looked no mortal directly in the face. There was an ambiguity about

this person's character,--a stain upon his reputation,--yet none could tell precisely of what

Archipelago.

if by a reluctant necessity, and grew pale while he was uttering it.

own breast. Hark! my serpent bestirs himself! He acknowledges the presence of a master

fiend!"

with freer countenances and covered their breasts less carefully with their hands.

His confinement, however, although it contributed not a little to the peace of the town,

operated unfavorably upon Roderick himself. In solitude his melancholy grew more black

and sullen. He spent whole days--indeed, it was his sole occupation--in communing with

the serpent. A conversation was sustained, in which, as it seemed, the hidden monster bore

a part, though unintelligibly to the listeners, and inaudible except in a hiss. Singular as it

may appear, the sufferer had now contracted a sort of affection for his tormentor, mingled,

however, with the intensest loathing and horror. Nor were such discordant emotions

incompatible. Each, on the contrary, imparted strength and poignancy to its opposite.

Horrible love--horrible antipathy--embracing one another in his bosom, and both

concentrating themselves upon a being that had crept into his vitals or been engendered

Sometimes, in his moments of rage and bitter hatred against the snake and himself,

Roderick determined to be the death of him, even at the expense of his own life. Once he

that it would not fail to kill either himself or the devil that possessed him, or both together.

Another mistake; for if Roderick had not yet been destroyed by his own poisoned heart nor

the snake by gnawing it, they had little to fear from arsenic or corrosive sublimate. Indeed,

the venomous pest appeared to operate as an antidote against all other poisons. The

physicians tried to suffocate the fiend with tobacco smoke. He breathed it as freely as if it

were his native atmosphere. Again, they drugged their patient with opium and drenched him

with intoxicating liquors, hoping that the snake might thus be reduced to stupor and perhaps

be ejected from the stomach. They succeeded in rendering Roderick insensible; but, placing

their hands upon his breast, they were inexpressibly horror stricken to feel the monster

wriggling, twining, and darting to and fro within his narrow limits, evidently enlivened by

He was kept but little longer under restraint. After minute investigation, the medical

directors of the asylum decided that his mental disease did not amount to insanity, nor

would warrant his confinement, especially as its influence upon his spirits was unfavorable,

and might produce the evil which it was meant to remedy. His eccentricities were doubtless

great; he had habitually violated many of the customs and prejudices of society; but the

will know whether, and when, to make your appearance."

primeval growth flung their shadows cross its bosom. How strange is the life of a

fountain!--born at every moment, yet of an age coeval with the rocks, and far surpassing the

venerable antiquity of a forest.

"You see," observed Elliston, pointing to the book of serpents, while a smile gleamed upon

his lips, "I am making an effort to become better acquainted with my bosom friend; but I

find nothing satisfactory in this volume. If I mistake not, he will prove to be sui generis, and

akin to no other reptile in creation."