storytelling in a democratic society.
56
Alfred Bendixen
In a larger sense, Grandfather ’ s Chair is about the way in which a new nation fash-
ions the facts of its history into a coherent shape, a mythology that creates a sense of
national identity and affi rms a specifi c set of defi ning values. It is not surprising that
Hawthorne discovers sources for the American revolutionary spirit in the Puritans
with stories that emphasize courage and perseverance and a desire for freedom. It is,
however, surprising to discover a history for children that is fi lled with so many
accounts of cruelty and needless human suffering. Some of the most vivid episodes in
this history are stories of persecution: Grandfather speaks honestly and sometimes
passionately about the banishments of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, the
tormenting of Quakers, the extermination of American Indians, and the accusation
and execution of witches, as events for Americans to acknowledge with humility and
shame while also remembering the nobler aspects of their past. Hawthorne ’ s engage-
ment with American history in Grandfather ’ s Chair reveals a brave willingness to face
the contradictions embedded in the national experience: the ways in which the New
England pioneers seek freedom and justice for themselves but deny it to others form
the narrative expression of a larger confl ict between democratic ideals and historical
reality. 3
During his youth, Hawthorne undoubtedly heard the numerous calls for the
development of a national literature, one that would exploit the dramatic potential
of native materials and create brilliant comedies and moving tragedies out of specifi -
cally American experience. Of course, this literary nationalism was fundamentally
patriotic, with an underlying assumption that the resulting literature would affi rm
the superiority of democratic values. But there were unpleasant facts in the way,
including a history that encompassed slavery and persecution as well as real moments
of courage and achievement. Some of Hawthorne
’
s historical tales, perhaps most
notably “ Roger Malvin ’ s Burial ” (1832) and “ The Gentle Boy ” (1832), seem to
provide very grim views of a psychologically repressive or even sadomasochistic
culture. Others, mostly those that are less likely to be anthologized today, such as
“
The Gray Champion
”
(1835) and
“
Endicott and the Red Cross
”
(1838), appear
remarkably patriotic in their affi rmation of an heroic principle that is central to the
Puritan spirit and ultimately culminates in the American Revolution. Hawthorne ’ s
grappling with the past involved a deep awareness of historical wrongs tempered by
faith in the possibilities of the great democratic experiment. The vision of history
expressed in Grandfather ’ s Chair and some of Hawthorne ’ s other works seems quite
compatible with Hegel
’
s view of the human past as a series of dialectical forces
moving humanity ever forward. This sense of dialectic is probably clearest in “ The
May - Pole of Merry Mount, ” in which “ Jollity and gloom were contending for an
empire ” ( Tales and Sketches 360). Even though gloom wins, the story ends with both
a marriage ceremony and the suggestion that a new synthesis has emerged which will
temper the harshness of the Puritans. Of course, other tales seem to reject the notion
of progress almost entirely. It is impossible to detect Hawthorne ’ s view of American
history from any single story, but it is important to remember that he conceived of
most of his best historical tales as part of a larger whole, as elements of a larger vision
Hawthorne and the Short Story
57
that not only acknowledges past injustice but also insists on exploring its psycho-
logical dimensions while simultaneously expressing an underlying faith in the pos-
sibilities inherent in democratic life.
Any attempt to reconstruct Provincial Tales must rely on a good bit of speculation,
but it is likely that the underlying view of American history that would emerge entails
the same mixture of critique and affi rmation that marks much of Hawthorne ’ s works,
and that each piece might assume greater resonance from its placement into a larger
pattern. For instance, both “ Young Goodman Brown ” (1835) and “ My Kinsman,
Major Molineaux ” (1832) are initiation stories in which a young male protagonist
enters a symbolic realm and fi nds himself forced to confront the meaning of his own
identity through a series of encounters with various authority fi gures. Of course, there
are crucial differences between the two works. Brown enters a wilderness apparently
prepared to sell his soul to the devil and leaves believing that the world that he has
cherished for its superior virtues is hopelessly corrupt. Robin goes into a town with
the belief that his life will be easy because of his social status as the nephew of an
important man, but learns that he cannot defi ne his identity this way in a revolution-
ary world. If Brown ’ s experience encompasses the gloomy sensibility that Hawthorne
and others of his generation ascribed to the Puritans, then the lesson Robin learns
seems to be one fully appropriate to a new democratic order in which family connec-
tions and social positions must be less important than a shrewd youth ’ s willingness
to work hard. Yet, there are striking similarities embedded in the basic structure of
the two tales. Both move from an opening that emphasizes historical reality, a setting
in a specifi c time and place, into an increasingly surreal world in which the elements
of setting seem to be projections of a terrifying landscape that is fundamentally psy-
chological. Moreover, the male character ’ s loss of innocence in both tales is tied to
speculations about the moral purity or corruption of a female fi gure. Both characters
fall asleep and awake to fi nd their perceptions of the world radically transformed. In
both cases, the climax of the initiation story is denoted by a shocking moment of
recognition that leads to a kind of demonic laughter. The endings of both stories
explicitly raise the question of whether the chief character has been dreaming. If we
presume that these similarities are not coincidental but evidence of a carefully devised
framework in which a recurrent pattern of images, motifs, and themes places the
stories into conversation with each other, then we must conclude that Provincial Tales
was intended to offer a complex dialogue about the meaning of the American experi-
ence as embedded in specifi c historical moments. If so, then we should attempt to
place the stories back into conversation with each other as well as reading each tale
as an individual literary artifact with its own internal integrity.
The resulting conversation is partly about the nature of American history as
Hawthorne envisioned it, which seems to be a complex dialectic between aspirations
for freedom and moments of repression, between the ideals of a democratic society
and the realities of persecution, injustice, and psychic turmoil. Yet,
an appreciation
of the resulting discourse ultimately depends upon a fuller recognition of the ways in
which Hawthorne ’ s narrative artistry penetrates beneath the surface of the human
58
Alfred Bendixen
psyche and resists simple conclusions. Along with Poe, Hawthorne deserves credit for
transforming the American short story into a form capable of psychological investiga-
tion. While he is generally credited with inventing the short story, Washington
Irving had a limited sense of the value of form and structure, viewing plot largely as
a framework on which to display his materials and demonstrate his stylistic mastery.
Hawthorne and Poe brought a greater commitment to plot structure, to form and
shape, to the dramatic expression of climactic scenes, to a process in which the devel-
opment of both character and setting became increasingly and perhaps inevitably
psychological. There is a sense of dramatic shape to both “ Young Goodman Brown ”
and “ My Kinsman, Major Molineaux ” that makes the movement from history to
psychology possible: both stories are built around grand, almost operatic scenes of
nightmare and revelation that compel the protagonists to abandon their own easy
preconceptions about the world and their places in it. The difference, of course, is
that Brown goes on a journey and then returns as a bitter and angry man while Robin
enters a new world, discovers he is not welcomed on the terms he assumes, but is
ultimately invited to stay. Although he presumably will stay in the town he has
entered, psychologically speaking, Robin is still moving forward into the complex
world of adult responsibility. On the other hand, Brown ’ s movement home ends with
psychological stagnation and an arrested development that is manifested in the depic-
tion of the return to the town as a perverted replay of the journey into the wilderness
and his peculiarly juvenile insistence on oversimplifying all questions of good and
evil. In short, Goodman Brown and Robin Molineaux ultimately represent two
different outcomes, two different possibilities for the human psyche in specifi cally
American landscapes.
Hawthorne developed an aesthetic form that enabled the short story to explore
moral dilemmas and psychological traumas as well as historical facts. When Irving ’ s
Rip Van Winkle retreats into the forest and ends up sleeping through the American
Revolution, his motivation is largely limited to escaping the demands of a nagging
wife. The journey away from the wife assumes many more dimensions in “ Young
Goodman Brown. ” In the opening paragraph, Brown steps into the street, but puts
his head back to exchange a kiss with his wife, who is “ aptly named ” Faith ( Tales and
Sketches 276). Thus, the story opens on a threshold, informing the thoughtful reader
that the story will be about a “ threshold ” in the life of the protagonist, a symbolic
boundary that may or may not be fi nally crossed. It is only his head that Brown puts
back, suggesting the unhealthy division between mind and body – or head and heart,
as Hawthorne usually expresses it – that often marks the Gothic mode in nineteenth -
century literature. For many readers, Faith is the thinnest of characters, defi ned simply
by her allegorical name and pink ribbons, but that is because readers often make the
same mistake that Brown does, the mistake of failing to listen to her. She has only a
few lines but they are quite revealing:
“ Dearest heart, ” whispered she, softly and rather sadly, when her lips were close to his
ear, “ pr ’ y thee, put off your journey until sunrise, and sleep in your own bed to - night.
Hawthorne and the Short Story
59
A lone woman is troubled with such dreams and such thoughts, that she ’ s afeard of
herself, sometimes. Pray, tarry with me this night, dear husband, of all nights in the
year! ” (276)
The lines reveal a richly complex woman, one with dreams and thoughts and fears,
who speaks “ softly and rather sadly ” as she asks her husband to stay with her that
night. Brown ’ s failure to hear what she is trying to tell him becomes clear when we
learn that just before turning the corner “ by the meeting - house, he looked back, and
saw the head of Faith still peeping after him, with a melancholy air, in spite of her
pink ribbons ” (276). Signifi cantly, he sees only the head, not the body and not the
complete woman, indicating both the limits of his perception and his inability to
unite head and heart, mind and body. His words reinforce his failure to understand
her, to accept her as a complex human being with fears and needs: “ Well, she ’ s a
blessed angel on earth; and after this one night, I ’ ll cling to her skirts and follow her
to Heaven. ” This is bad theology in almost any religious scheme, including that of
the Puritans, but it is also evidence that he has failed to acknowledge his wife as a
real woman with a body, mind, and soul who wants her husband to listen to and care
about her dreams, thoughts, and fears. In short, the story is ultimately about Brown ’ s
failure to understand Faith, his wife, as well as the religious concept of faith.
The opening prepares the reader to appreciate the carefully structured journey into
and out of the forest, which for Hawthorne usually represents a moral wilderness free
of human law and normal boundaries. As he moves into the woods, Brown gradually
discovers the depravity, hypocrisy, and corruption of every representative of moral
authority that he has ever admired. His guide may be the Devil assuming the shape
of his grandfather or just a fabrication of his own twisted imagination. Certainly, the
landscape becomes increasingly symbolic and psychological as the story builds to the
witch ’ s Sabbath at which Brown collapses after imploring his wife not to pledge her
soul to the devil. After awakening from this trauma, Brown exits the forest and on
the way home confronts and condemns each of the fi gures of moral authority that he
met on the previous night. The man who entered the wilderness believing in a world
fi lled with virtue leaves believing only in the corruption and depravity of everyone
around him. Ultimately, he settles into a life of grief and sorrow with his wife and
their posterity that will end only with death. The story that opens on the threshold
of a Salem street at a certain moment of Puritan history moves from the world of
historical fact into a symbolic realm fi lled with surrealistic imagery, psychological
confrontation, and moral confusion, a symbolic realm that resists easy interpretation.
Hawthorne ’ s much - praised insistence on ambiguity even explicitly raises the issue of
whether Brown has fallen asleep “ and only dreamed a wild dream ” (288). It is much
too easy to say that it does not matter whether he was dreaming or not because the
end result is a life of endless gloom. The author wants us to ponder the questions he
raises and not dismiss them. He wants us to engage the multiple dimensions – both
ontological and epistemological – of his fi ctional realms in all of their implications,
which may be historical, theological, psychological, and oneiric.
60
Alfred Bendixen
As I su
ggested earlier, it is tempting to place “ Young Goodman Brown ” into
conversation with “ My Kinsman, Major Molineaux ” and see young Robin ’ s response
to disillusionment as ultimately a healthy counterpart to Brown ’ s regression into
misery. Throughout the story, Robin repeatedly asks others for directions to his
kinsman, a sign that he is asking the wrong question about the direction of his own
future. By the end of the story, Robin has a mentor, a guide who will help him accept
the adult world of work and personal responsibility and escape the juvenile world of
easy judgment. While we are told about the gloom that follows Brown to his dying
day, we leave Robin as a young man about to face the future without any presump-
tions of his right to a certain place in an endlessly fl uid world. The ending is not
about the closure of a life, but about a new beginning and new possibilities to create
a meaningful identity in a complex and changing world. In some respect, Hawthorne ’ s
historical tales are about the ways in which individuals and nations grow to achieve
complex, fl uid, and life - affi rming identities or regress into tyranny and grief.
The fascination with the formation or destruction of meaningful identity certainly
shapes “ Roger Malvin ’ s Burial ” (1832) and “ The Gentle Boy ” (1832), both of which
focus on a special capacity for self - destruction within the American psyche. When he
leaves his dying friend, Roger Malvin, to end his life alone in the wilderness and then
misleads Roger ’ s daughter, his future wife, into believing that he had provided a
proper burial, Reuben Bourne fi nds himself almost accidentally falling into a life of
secret shame and personal dishonor. The psychic burden of concealed guilt, a theme
that occurs in many of Hawthorne ’ s strongest works, leads the protagonist to under-
mine almost all opportunities for happiness and success and fi nally forces him to seek
a new life for himself and his family in the frontier. In some sense, the psychic drama
here points to a national myth, the idea of an America that continually provides the
opportunity for new beginnings and fresh starts. Nevertheless, Reuben Bourne cannot
fi nd happiness in a simple change of place. He cannot remake himself and cannot even
A Companion to the American Short Story Page 14