Selected Tales and Sketches (2 page)

 

None of the works we might think to identify as Hawthorne's first significant literary production provides a full introduction to the precise historical demands we have been anticipating. His project of “moral history” begins quite early, but it does not appear to have been entirely aboriginal; and that fact seems always to have been part of our critical problem. Accustomed to identify moral “origin” with artistic “epitome,” we have rarely thought to look for swift and significant historical development.

Fanshawe,
a brief, seriocomic novel of sexual intrigue which Hawthorne managed to publish in 1828, is explicitly set in the previous century—in and about a “seminary of learning” located in a “retired corner of one of the New England states”—but its affinities are with literary traditions hardly to be identified with what Hawthorne's contemporaries specifically defined as “the matter of America.” Scholars have patiently identified the influence of Sir Walter Scott, and of the so-called gothic and domestic or sentimental schools of English fiction; and though critics once claimed that this work predicted all that was really essential in Hawthorne's moral vision, no one has ever tried to link it very directly with the short fictions Hawthorne was also writing (and trying to collect) in the years immediately after his graduation from Bowdoin College in 1825. Indeed it now seems something of an embarrassment; not a false start, exactly, which the author subsequently tried to recall, as was once believed; but more like a bid to get
something
published, anonymously; something which lightly mocked even as it traded on the most popular of readerly expectations.

The case of the first of Hawthorne's several projected collections of brief tales is somewhat more complicated and suggestive, though even here the argument for the author's deep involvement in moral history, or in a fully studied art of allusion, would look a little premature. The title of the proposed collection, “Seven Tales of My Native Land,” clearly suggests some patriotic motive, as does the prior fact of Hawthorne's membership in the more “nativist” of the two literary societies (the “Athenean”) in existence at Bowdoin in the 1820s. Apparently Hawthorne began his career as a literary professional in substantial agreement with the widespread (though by no means universal) sentiment in favor of an American literature that should aspire to eventual greatness not formally, by imitating the established genres of British literature, but materially, by emphasizing those experiences that had distinguished American experience from all others. As earlier generations of independent-minded Americans had urged their constituents to “buy homespun,” so American writers of the early nineteenth century were repeatedly urged to “use American materials.” And we can easily imagine the author of the “Seven Tales” trying—in the words of one of Hawthorne's later, more ironic narrators—“to deserve well of [his] country by snatching from oblivion some else unheard-of fact of history.”

Yet the literary image of the “Seven Tales” is blurred indeed. Part of the problem, quite simply, is that we cannot be sure of its precise table of contents, especially as this cardinal uncertainty is linked to some fairly strong evidence that a discouraged Hawthorne may have destroyed the majority of the tales intended for this first projected but never actually published collection. Well after Hawthorne's death (in 1864), his sister Elizabeth remembered reading, in the summer of 1825, a gathering of tales whose subjects she named as “witchcraft” and “the sea”; but she could mention only a couple of titles. One of these she referred to as “Alice Doane,” and most scholars infer that “Alice Doane's Appeal” (1834)—whose clearly fictionalized narrator refers to the tale within his tale as one that chanced to survive some general literary conflagration—is in fact a dramatized redaction of one of Hawthorne's original “Seven.” Beyond this one quasi-fact, however, most of the conditions surrounding Hawthorne's earliest attempts to market his tales remain indeed obscure.

“The Hollow of the Three Hills” (1830), which is surely about witchcraft in
some
sense, may quite possibly be a survivor from Hawthorne's first attempt at self-collection. So may be “The Wives of the Dead” (1832), whose setting and action at least partially invoke the sea. Nor is it entirely fanciful to suppose that “An Old Woman's Tale” (1830)-not included in this collection—might have been designed to serve as a sort of frame for some series or other; most suggestively, it identifies its source as the “strangely jumbled” memory of a cronelike old woman whose tale-telling habits have left “a thousand of her traditions lurking in the corners and by-places of [the narrator‘s] mind.” All we can say with any certainty, however, is that the Hawthorne who returned in the summer of 1825 from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, to his native place of Salem, Massachusetts, had a mind to publish a
collection
of tales that subscribed, at least nominally, to the
nativist
literary program; and that he grew frustrated and even a little angry when he gradually inferred, by 1827, that publishers were not eager to publish his collection as such.

Yet it may be worth pausing a moment to consider the precise quality of Hawthorne's earliest published tale of his native land. For the temptation has been strong to identify “The Hollow of the Three Hills” as
indeed
a first; to decide that its subject recalls the infamous matter of the Salem Witchcraft, in which one of Hawthorne's remote ancestors had been deeply involved (as a surveillant but none too judicious magistrate); and to conclude with satisfaction and in haste that Hawthorne found his true “Hawthornean” métier almost immediately. The problem with this view is that it tends to establish a rather simplistic model of both the motive and the style of Hawthorne's involvement in history: gloomy ancestral wrong elaborated in a basically gothic manner. And while this account may almost serve for “The Hollow,” it definitely reduces the complexity of tales like “Alice Doane's Appeal” and “Young Goodman Brown,” in which Hawthorne's recreation of the past is much more than merely associative or tonal.

Anticipating just a bit, perhaps, the reader should notice that many features of “The Hollow of the Three Hills” are relatively conventional. The unspecified gloom of its setting amid “strange old times, when fantastic reveries were realized among the actual circumstances of life” contrasts quite noticeably with the sense of time and place so narrowly evoked in Hawthorne's two later witchcraft tales—the “Appeal” actually told on the “gallows hill” of the Salem executions, and “Brown” leaving clear traces of Hawthorne's reading of Cotton Mather's weirdly definitive
Wonders of the Invisible World
and deftly establishing a concrete sense of the moral psychology (and even the religious sociology) of the Puritan village. Furthermore, the literary effects of “The Hollow” seem a good deal more predictable than those which come later. The lonely grief of the dishonored father and mother, the madness of the deserted husband (complete with the insane laughter and rattling chains of his madhouse), and the most untimely death of the abandoned child all suggest that Hawthorne's loyalty to gothic and sentimental precedent is stronger than his fidelity to the motives and morphology of “Witchcraft in Salem.” Even the witchery of the tale seems a bit more literary than the seventeenth-century record would justify: the old witch-woman who recreates the events of the tale is “diabolic” chiefly in her lurid enjoyment of domestic tragedy; and her supernatural powers, even if spurious, are largely those of some spiritualistic medium. The whole thing seems a little too pat, too trimly tailored to the taste of a nineteenth-century audience.

In general, then, it is no surprise that historical scholarship has had little to say about the “outré” events of this very early tale; or that existing criticism has analyzed its rhetorical and structural effects rather than elaborated its moral themes. It is as if Hawthorne were making trial of a tone rather than propounding an explanation; as if, in a way we have yet to consider, full seriousness entered a Hawthorne work only with an opening of some significant historical issue.

Nor do we have to wait
very
long for that implied event, as the tales Hawthorne intended for his second projected (but again unpublished) collection take us at once into matters which only a determined commitment to history can adequately follow. Again there is some uncertainty about the complete table of proposed contents. Possibly the tales which survived the fiery failure of the “Seven Tales” were to be included. And scholars have speculated that a number of historical tales published in the mid-1830s were originally written for this collection—the “Provincial Tales,” which Hawthorne's letters clearly show him trying to publish in 1829. But here the ambiguities hardly matter, for a stable center quite plainly emerges. And with it a firm sense of the subtle direction Hawthorne's interest in American materials would take: not democratic patriotism or romantic nostalgia or even a moralized gothicism propels Hawthorne's literary fascination with “provincial” America but instead, and much more soberly, some fairly deep commitment to the project of culture criticism. The facts are the facts of history, and the spirit is that of irony.

At this stable center, then, lie three very significant tales, all of which were published eventually in an 1832 Christmas “gift-book,” The Token. All are very pointedly historical and yet, significantly, each is immersed in materials quite specific to itself; and none deals with the ancestral (and also gothic) matter of the witchcraft. “The Gentle Boy” (omitted from this collection because of its length) takes up the issues of doctrine and religious psychology (piety) that appear to have divided, but also to have joined in mortal combat, the dominant sect of Puritans and their recessive but by no means quietistic antagonists, the Quakers. “Roger Malvin's Burial” leads us at once beyond the supposedly congenial confines of the original Puritan century and propounds a story of true and false heroism in the midst of a bloody but also representative or mythic “fight” for territory disputed by the French and the Indians, in the War which famously bears their allied name. And “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” appears to explore in advance the psychological and rhetorical conditions of the American Revolution, outrageously but deliberately reducing the one truly “majestic” event of American destiny to the contour and proportion of a rum riot, awkwardly occurring somewhere in the 1730s.

The range is surprisingly wide, as the past turns out to be more than a tonal alternative to the rational and recalcitrant conditions of the present; and the literary effects are anything but predictable, as the act of retelling is by no means an obvious or rule-ridden performance. Yet a common motive really does emerge: to insist that past experience is likely to have been far different from the image any present might wish, for whatever reason of identity or power, to project back upon it.

In one sense, of course, the range encompassed by these three tales is perfectly predictable, as theorists of American literary culture had already decided, quite early in the nineteenth century, that the store of peculiarly “American” materials consisted of three essential “matters”: the matter of the Puritans, of the Indians, and of the Revolution. And at some level Hawthorne's three indubitably “provincial” tales merely take up each of these definitive historical matters in turn. Yet those same theorists were clearly calling for something much different from what Hawthorne was prepared to give them in his own highly, often wickedly unorthodox account of the American provinces. The Puritans, for example, were widely understood to be “bigoted”—persecuting the Quakers as fiercely as they had suppressed (and banished) “heretics” such as Roger Williams and Ann Hutchinson earlier, or as they later hounded the accused witches. But they were also supposed to represent a wholesome and valuable strain of dedication and purpose inseparable from the national character; and it was further assumed, more often than not, that their institutions actually contained, beneath the limitations of their own personal will, the seeds of liberal democracy. A fine theory, as Hawthorne surely must have felt. Yet what “The Gentle Boy” dramatizes instead is simply the pain and moral confusion of persons who, though clearly on opposite sides of
some
dialectic of history, all appeal in vain to an apparently uniform God beyond.

Nor are the other members of Hawthorne's tidy little trinity any more forgiving. “Roger Malvin's Burial” plainly announces that it has some reference to a 1725 episode of Indian warfare known as Lovewell's Fight which, though obscure to most modern readers, was widely celebrated on its hundredth anniversary as not only a triumph of advancing white civilization but also as a signal instance of frontier virtue and moral stamina. Well aware that the actual incident had been altogether ragged and unlovely, Hawthorne's response is clearly ironic and pointed, going straight to the express issue of courage and cowardice but also, with equal directness, to the suppressed one of lying about the logic (and even the events) of protective retaliation. And very few critics of “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” —including those who insist that its
real
interest is psychological or mythic—have been able to escape the impression that Hawthorne's version of the Revolution lacks all trace of ordinary American piety.

The psychoanalytic critics have a point, of course: “The Gentle Boy” does indeed suggest that persecuting sadists and suffering masochists have been let loose to play some terrible symbiotic game; and both “Malvin” and “Molineux” exhibit a deep structure it is hard to avoid calling Oedipal, in Freud's own most precise and father-murdering sense. Yet some other point seems just as true and more persistently provoked by the carefully appointed historical surface of these three tales: Hawthorne's provincial dramas are not set “nowhere,” or even just “anywhere” in some remote and tonally appropriate past, but in those precise moments of historical crisis which Americanist theory had somewhat innocently identified as the young nation's most appropriate thematic space. The “Provincial Tales” clearly insist on their own historicity as the earlier “Seven” (as we know them) do not. Apparently something happened, between 1827 and 1829, to Hawthorne's sense of the project of American literature.