Selected Tales and Sketches

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Genres: Classics; Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

The short fiction of a writer who helped to shape the course of American literature. With a determined commitment to the history of his native land, Nathaniel Hawthorne revealed, more incisively than any writer of his generation, the nature of a distinctly American consciousness. The pieces collected here deal with essentially American matters: the Puritan past, the Indians, the Revolution. But Hawthorne was highly - often wickedly - unorthodox in his account of life in early America, and his precisely constructed plots quickly engage the reader's imagination. Written in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s, these works are informed by themes that reappear in Hawthorne's longer works: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance. And, as Michael J. Colacurcio points out in his excellent introduction, they are themes that are now deeply embedded in the American literary tradition.

Release date: March 3, 1987

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Print pages: 480

Sample

Table of Contents

 

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

 

The Hollow of the Three Hills

Sir William Phips

Mrs. Hutchinson

The Wives of the Dead

My Kinsman, Major Molineux

Roger Malvin’s Burial

Passages from a Relinquished Work

Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe

The Haunted Mind

Alice Doane’s Appeal

The Gray Champion

Young Goodman Brown

Wakefield

The Notch of the White Mountains

The Ambitious Guest

The May-Pole of Merry Mount

The Minister’s Black Veil - A PARABLE

Sunday at Home

The Man of Adamant - AN APOLOGUE

Endicott and the Red Cross

Night Sketches

Edward Randolph’s Portrait - FROM LEGENDS OF THE PROVINCE-HOUSE

The Hall of Fantasy

The Birth-mark

Egotism; or, The Bosom-Serpent - FROM THE UNPUBLISHED “ALLEGORIES OF THE HEART”

The Christmas Banquet - FROM THE UNPUBLISHED “ALLEGORIES OF THE HEART”

The Celestial Rail-road

Earth’s Holocaust

The Artist of the Beautiful

Rappaccini’s Daughter - FROM THE WRITINGS OF AUBÉPINE

Ethan Brand - A CHAPTER FROM AN ABORTIVE ROMANCE

 

Suggestions for Further Reading

HAWTHORNE: SELECTED TALES AND SKETCHES

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, where, after his graduation from Bowdoin College in Maine, he wrote the bulk of his masterful tales of American colonial history, many of which were collected in his Twice-told Tales (1837). In 1839 and 1840 Hawthorne worked in the Boston Customs House, then spent most of 1841 at the experimental community of Brook Farm. After his marriage to Sophia Peabody, he settled in the “Old Manse” in Concord; there, between 1842 and 1845, he wrote most of the other tales in this volume, first gathered in a collection entitled Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). His career as a novelist began with The Scarlet Letter (1850), whose famous preface recalls his 1846-1849 service in “The Custom-House” of Salem. The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) followed in rapid succession. After a third political appointment—this time as American Consul in Liverpool, England, from 1853 to 1857—Hawthorne’s life was marked by the publication of The Marble Faun (1860) but also by a sad inability to complete several more long romances. Ill health, apparently, and possibly some failure of literary faith finally eroded Hawthorne’s striking ability to make imaginative sense of America’s distinctive moral experience.

 

Michael J. Colacurcio is the author of The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne’s Early Tales and of various essays and reviews in the field of American literature. He has also edited and contributed to a volume of New Essays on The Scarlet Letter. He is currently Professor of English and American Studies at UCLA.

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First published in the United States of America by Penguin Books 1987
Published simultaneously in Canada

 

 

Introduction and compilation copyright © Viking Penguin Inc., 1987

All rights reserved

 

The text of the stories in this collection is that established by the Centenary
Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne published by the Ohio State University
Center for Textual Studies and Ohio State University Press. The selections are
from the volumes entitled Twice-Told Tales, Mosses from an Old Manse, The Snow-Image
and Uncollected Tales, and Miscellany. Copyright © Ohio State University
Press, 1974, 1987. All rights reserved.

 

Acknowledgment is made to The Library of America for their assistance in the
production of this book.

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864.
Selected tales and sketches.
(Penguin classics)
Bibliography: p.
I. Colacurcio, Michael J. II. Title.
PS1852.C’.3 86-21247

eISBN : 978-1-101-07780-1

 

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Introduction

When Hawthorne recollected, in the often quoted Preface to the third edition of his Twice-told Tales (1851), that he had once found himself “the obscurest man of letters in America,” he was speaking of a phase of his career that had long since lapsed. The Scarlet Letter (1850) had not yet had time to establish itself as the classic we now universally recognize—that miracle of meditation which transcends provincial origin and subject matter to become a standard of World Literature; but it was already a significant critical and popular success. The House of the Seven Gables ( 1851), which Hawthorne himself in some moods preferred to The Scarlet Letter, would further secure his reputation. And by the time The Blithedale Romance (1852) was making its way among reviewers and booksellers, a somewhat envious Herman Melville could write his recently estranged friend that “this name of ‘Hawthorne’ seems to be ubiquitous.”

But if these three extended fictions—the “American Romances,” as Henry James would name them in his critical biography of 1879—established Hawthorne in that rich and catholic world we treasure as “fiction in English,” and also at the center of an ongoing critical debate we recognize as “novel versus romance,” it remains true that those shorter fictions Hawthorne produced in the decades prior to 1850 amount to far more than a long foreground to worldly success. Indeed the total achievement of his earlier tales and sketches is so remarkable that Hawthorne would merit a place in the first rank of American authors even if he had written none of his longer works. Nor would the literature of any modern nation-state be anything but significantly enhanced if Nathaniel Hawthorne had happened to be born there and to have subjected its peculiar moral history to his unique style of fictional analysis.

Yet Hawthorne remains emphatically an American writer—self-consciously then and distinctively now. Most obviously: as no one escapes the pressures of history, so this notable descendant of the American Puritans could scarcely have eluded all trace of their conscientious and symbolic manner of taking the world. More significantly, his American-ness reveals itself in terms he consciously learned, by immersing himself, at the outset of his career, in the whole sequence of colonial and provincial texts which inevitably express the Puritan Mind and arguably control American Identity.

That is to say, Hawthorne did not merely inherit his status or assume his function as an “American” author; rather, he studied to recreate and meditated to judge the special quality of moral experience in his native land. More incisively than any writer of his generation, he placed the moral argument both for and against Calvinism. Further, he had the critical intelligence to discern how much of the familiar politics of mission and destiny was but the public face of a piety that flourished in America distinctively. And eventually, especially in the 1840s, he acquired the perspective to notice how much of the morale of his own generation of intellectuals was suitably understood as neo-Puritan, despite their vigorous rejection of the theological idioms of the older orthodoxy. The continuities are clear and strong enough to suggest that, after he had written out his account of the Puritan conscience, he deliberately turned to something like a moral history of his own times. Thus even Hawthorne’s more contemporaneous tales maintain a firm sense of involvement in a reality that is both concrete and continuous.

From this observation it follows that the enduring, even dazzling achievement of Hawthorne’s early fiction is not sufficiently appreciated in the terms modern readers find readiest to hand: not in that formalism which regards literary meaning as utterly internal to the work itself; and not even in those systems of psychoanalytic analysis which help us find, in literature as elsewhere, some structure deep enough to inform all possible experience of the world. For, contrary to the implication of both these famous critical schemes, the typical Hawthorne tale appears to insist that we cannot get along without historical reference. Not thematically, of course, as the tales frequently set out to judge the import of experiences that have been altogether real and definite. And not even formally—should we find ourselves insisting on that once proud distinction—for the reality of history usually introduces, quite deliberately, some contrary or discordant element into the otherwise smooth and plausible rhetoric of the Hawthorne tale itself. As history in Hawthorne usually signals irony, so we often find an entire reordering of values is triggered by some local but altogether strategic reference or allusion.

This is not to say, of course, that some subtle “historicism” may serve as our only system of critical notice. No one should fail to observe that Hawthorne’s plots are often crafted for exquisite swiftness and precision of impact; or that his patterns of sight and sound are arranged with an artist’s sense of repetition and difference. And only the studiedly naive will resist the intimations of psychic complexity that lurk (even unconsciously) behind his most innocent-looking image or symbol. Yet the reader is also invited to pursue, with equal vigor and tact, the significance of allusions that seem to incorporate history into the imaginative world of the fiction. It might be too much to claim that we must always begin or end with such references. Yet it may be fair to suggest that Hawthorne fully emerges from his early obscurity only when the reader is determined to trace his art back to the real-life sources in the history that sustained it.

 

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.

 

Literary maturity, we might safely suppose, is no less remarkably mysterious than any other kind: it comes, if at all, whenever it does; its forms may be structural, and therefore predictable, but hardly its causes. Yet it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the most important thing Hawthorne ever did for the maturing of his own literary career was to undertake, beginning in 1827, an exhaustive and fairly systematic study of American history in its colonial, provincial, and revolutionary periods. The early results of this program of purposive reading and imaginative “re-cognition” bear sharply on the historical density and difference of the “Provincial Tales.”

The leading facts of “Hawthorne’s Reading” have long been clear, for the surviving records of his borrowings from his local subscription library, the Salem Athenaeum, were published in 1949. This well-thumbed list, itself but a minimum suggestion of Hawthorne’s voracious habits as a reader, clearly suggests that one of Hawthorne’s principal and vital interests swiftly became something we might almost risk calling by the name of “American Studies.” In an age when Everyman was, famously, “his own historian,” Hawthorne merely fulfilled the role more faithfully than almost anyone else. In an age when many local institutions like the Salem Athenaeum were anxiously trying to preserve and collect everything that might shed light on the prerevolutionary identity of the nation’s colonial experience, Hawthorne simply tried to read it all. Not only the obvious and crucial masterworks such as John Winthrop’s Journal and Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, which together form a magisterial frame around the original Puritan century, but more local and embattled texts as well: Edward Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour, for example, whi