A Companion to the American Short Story

by Alfred Bendixen

  move forward into a new and healthier direction. Ironically, he fi nds himself com-

  pelled to return to the very place where he left his old friend and where he now

  accidentally shoots his own son in a perverted ritual of sacrifi ce and expiation. The

  return of the repressed 4 comes with a terrible price as the sins of the father are visited

  upon the son. The frontier becomes the site where past actions come back to haunt

  the present, not the place of new beginnings.

  “ The Gentle Boy, ” which provides a chilling portrayal of persecution and masoch-

  ism, appears to have been among the most highly regarded of his early historical tales.

  It not only found a place in the fi rst edition of Twice - Told Tales (1837), but also was

  published separately in a special edition, The Gentle Boy; a Thrice - Told Tale (1839), with

  illustrations by Hawthorne ’ s future wife, Sophia Peabody. This exploration of the cruel

  mistreatment of Quakers focuses much of its attention on the victims of persecution,

  but that attention is not fully sympathetic. The title character, Ilbrahim, exemplifi es

  the appealing innocence of childhood, but he is caught between Puritans and Quakers

  in a process that increasingly equates religious zealotry with sadomasochism. There are

  a number of crucial contradictions at the heart of the great democratic experiment that

  Hawthorne and the Short Story

  61

  emerged from the American Revolution. The most obvious is the fundamental contra-

  diction of a land of liberty occupied by slaveholders and slaves, but Hawthorne rarely

  deals explicitly with slavery in his fi ction. “ The Gentle Boy, ” however, clearly punc-

  tures New England ’ s claim to be a refuge for those seeking freedom of religion by

  depicting the inhumanity of both persecutors and persecuted. The story exemplifi es

  Hawthorne ’ s fi erce distrust of all extreme positions, but if there is a dialectic here, it

  certainly does not move to any meaningful synthesis. Ilbrahim ’ s death redeems neither

  his fanatical mother nor persecuting Puritans. Although the passing of time brings a

  “ spirit of forbearance, ” it is not marked by Christian mercy and genuine compassion,

  but by a variety of “ superfl uous sympathies ” that enable the community to fi nd a

  remarkably unimportant place for the woman they once tormented: “ every one spoke

  of her with that degree of pity which it is pleasant to experience; every one was ready

  to do her the little kindnesses, which are not costly, yet manifest good will; and when

  at last she died, a long train of her once bitter persecutors followed her, with decent

  sadness and tears that were not painful, to her place by Ilbrahim ’ s green and sunken

  grave ” ( Tales and Sketches 138). Both “ Roger Malvin ’ s Burial ” and “ The Gentle Boy ”

  would have been part of the conversation about the meaning and future of American

  society that I believe is the foundation of the historical tales making up Provincial Tales ,

  and they would have been among the most disturbing and pessimistic parts.

  Hawthorne returned to the source material of American history in the unjustly

  neglected “ Legends of the Province - House ” (1838 – 9), a frame narrative featuring four

  tales told in a tavern which served as the mansion of the royal governors in colonial

  times. The fi rst two accounts depict men whose arrogant opposition to New England

  freedom meets with apparently supernatural disapproval, while the fi nal two focus on

  haughty women who become ghostly victims of a changing world. The fi rst three are

  told by Bela Tiffany, a narrator who clearly supports the heroes of the revolution, but

  the fi nal one is narrated by an old loyalist whose words, we are assured, have been

  fi ltered through the perspective of the more democratic frame narrator. The series

  begins with the promise of supernatural justice for the opponents of liberty and ends

  with profound sympathy for the loyalists who have lost everything except perhaps their

  illusions. One of the most remarkable facts about Hawthorne ’ s treatment of the Ameri-

  can Revolution is that he always insists on evoking empathy for the loyalists who

  opposed it and in the process lost almost everything. The fi nal legend ends with John

  Hancock expressing a moment of compassion for the last loyalist and then proclaiming

  “ We are no longer children of the Past! ” ( Tales and Sketches 677). The frame narrator

  has come to the Province - House seeking to be charmed and entertained by the truth

  of history, but fi nds himself forced to confront a past that entails much more than the

  “ tinge of romance and historic grandeur ” (639) he seeks to throw over the present, a

  past that includes pain and suffering as well as heroism and triumph. In the fi nal

  sentence, he retreats from both the tavern and history, “ being resolved not to show my

  face in the Province - House for a good while hence – if ever ” (677). “ Legends of the

  Province - House ” preceded the writing and publication of The Whole History of Grand-

  father ’ s Chair , but it would be the last historical tale for adults that Hawthorne would

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  Alfred Bendixen

  write for a decade. Although he returned to historical materials with his masterpiece,

  The Scarlet Letter (1850), he was moving into other terrains and other times.

  H awthorne Beyond History

  A full appreciation of Hawthorne ’ s contribution to the short story requires a larger

  recognition of his willingness to experiment with a wide range of subjects and forms

  and of his conscious attempts to expand the possibilities of short fi ction. 5 Although

  now known mostly as the author of powerfully tragic tales set mostly in New England ’ s

  past, Hawthorne was admired in his own time as a writer of many moods and diverse

  interests. Melville seized on only a small portion of them in his famous 1850 review

  of Mosses from an Old Manse when he proclaimed that Hawthorne said “ No, in Thunder! ”

  but other reviewers valued other aspects of his art. Although Poe linked Hawthorne

  to the German romantic, Ludwig Tieck, reviewers were much more likely to evoke

  comparison to Charles Lamb, the British writer of genial essays. In his review of the

  1837 Twice - Told Tales , Longfellow largely ignored the powerful tales we admire today

  and singled out three sketches for special praise: “ Sunday at Home, ” “ Sights from a

  Steeple, ” and “ A Rill from the Town Pump. ” 6 The sketch as a literary form currently

  receives almost no scholarly attention, but it was a well - established and immensely

  popular genre that had not only launched Washington Irving ’ s career as an author but

  also went on to dominate American magazine publication for much of the nineteenth

  century. As a literary genre, it was, in fact, more established and more respected than

  the short story, a relative new - comer to literature. The requirements of the literary

  sketch also seem especially congenial to Hawthorne ’ s talents and inclinations. While

  his tales rely on a strong sense of plot and structure, his sketches tend either to offer

  a pleasant ramble through a specifi c location or to assume a single vantage point from

  which the author provides a blend of precise visual description, moral refl ection, and

  ironic commentary.
The sketch allows a creative writer to assume an imaginative stance

  that relies more on a point of view than the telling of a story, more on the demonstra-

  tion of a fi ne sensibility actively engaged in reading the world than on the development

  of narrative. Hawthorne produced sketches throughout his career, included signifi cant

  numbers of them in his collections of stories, employed them to introduce both his

  collections and his novels, and ultimately found that this literary form enabled him

  to use the English material that he had been unable to shape into a romance to con-

  struct his fi nal book, Our Old Home . His most important comments on his literary

  values and his own position as an American writer appear in the literary sketches that

  he used as introductions to his book. The inclusion of sketches also allowed him to

  ensure that his books had the wide variety of moods that he believed to be essential

  to maintaining the reader ’ s interest in collections of short works.

  His most ambitious attempt to shape a coherent book out of sketches and tales

  would have been The Story Teller , which we can only partly reconstruct through the

  fragments that were published out of context. It seems likely that the completed

  Hawthorne and the Short Story

  63

  volume would have detailed the travels of an itinerant storyteller through a specifi cally

  American landscape (including the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and Niagara

  Falls, the Erie Canal, and old Ticonderoga in upstate New York), providing stories

  inspired by various scenes and events, and probably offering some account of the

  various audiences and their responses to his tales. According to his sister

  -

  in

  -

  law,

  Elizabeth Peabody, after the book was dismantled, Hawthorne lost interest in the

  individual stories “ which had in their original place in the ‘ Storyteller ’ a greater degree

  of signifi cance ” (Wineapple 81). Given the care Hawthorne took with frame narratives

  throughout his career, this “ greater degree of signifi cance ” might have come from the

  relationship of a specifi c narrative to the site that inspired it or the development of

  thematic patterns in which individual pieces form a kind of debate or conversation

  on various topics. For instance, some of the stories that were probably intended for

  the projected volume focus on a basic confl ict between an unsettled life of roving

  ambition and the stable values of home and family. Both “ The Ambitious Guest ”

  (1835) and “ The Great Carbuncle ” (1837) are clearly connected to the White Moun-

  tains, and both emphasize the dangers posed by various abstract desires that remove

  individuals from the human connections offered by home, marriage, and family. If

  these works are placed in the context of other stories with similar themes, such as

  “ The Wedding Knell ” (1836) and “ The Threefold Destiny ” (1838), and perhaps even

  with the perverse violation of the marriage bond in “ Wakefi eld ” (1835), then it seems

  likely that Hawthorne was building towards a larger exploration of the value of home

  and the danger of any ambition or abstraction that cuts human beings off from what

  he later called “ the magnetic chain of humanity ” ( “ Ethan Brand, ” Tales and Sketches

  1064). This strong affi rmation of home is actually central to American travel writing

  in the early and mid - nineteenth century, much of which explicitly declares the chief

  purpose of travel to be the acquisition of a greater appreciation of one ’ s own home

  and native land. This discovery of the importance of home and human connection

  might even have been the primary lesson that the narrator of The Story Teller fi nally

  learns as well as the one that is incorporated in many of its narratives.

  It seems likely that one of Hawthorne ’ s most impressive tales, “ The Minister ’ s

  Black Veil, ” might have been part of The Story Teller , because it clearly alludes to

  another story, “ The Wedding Knell, ” suggesting that they were meant to be part of

  the same volume. If so, then the way the minister ’ s act of putting on a veil separates

  him from his community and his fi anc é e would have been a crucial part of the book ’ s

  larger study of the dangers of human isolation. Parson Hooper cuts himself off from

  his congregation by two acts, the wearing of the black veil and the refusal to explain

  his reasons for this strange act. The veil generates an amazing number of possibilities.

  A reader familiar with the conventions of the Gothic romance is likely to conclude

  that any tale about a minister with secret guilt must involve some kind of sexual

  transgression, probably with a parishioner, a plot element that eventually formed the

  basis of The Scarlet Letter . In his discussion of the tale, Edgar Allan Poe even identifi es

  the parishioner as the woman in the coffi n. Those wishing to emphasize the sexual

  implications of secret guilt also note that the donning of the veil enables the minister

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  Alfred Bendixen

  to escape the marriage bond as his fi anc é e refuses to marry a man who hides his face.

  Of course, the veil immediately raises the issue of perception because it obscures and

  darkens the vision of the minister as well as preventing others from perceiving what-

  ever emotions or revelations might be expressed in his face. Nevertheless, in a very

  different way, the veil connects Parson Hooper to his parishioners, whose reactions

  often suggest that the veil actually refl ects their secret guilt and hidden anxieties. The

  power of the veil lies in its ability both to provoke questions and to deny answers, to

  elicit interest in the minister while creating a barrier that isolates him. Ultimately,

  it is the veil ’ s almost endless capacity to create a multiplicity of meanings that endows

  “ The Minister ’ s Black Veil ” with extraordinary power. It is possible that it might

  generate even more meanings if we could restore it to its place within The Story Teller .

  The framework Hawthorne devised for The Story Teller certainly would have been

  an important part of his lifelong fascination with the place of the literary artist in a

  democratic society. No American writer of fi ction, except possibly Henry James, has

  devoted more attention to the artist, to the capacity of art to redeem or alienate, and

  to the inherent confl icts between meaningful aesthetic values and a materialistic

  culture. The projected volume would have integrated fi ction and descriptive sketches

  within a framework that explored the relationship between author and audience, thus

  foregrounding the social role of narration. The book also would almost certainly have

  emphasized the special diffi culties American writers faced in realizing an artistic

  vision. The traveling storyteller who appears in “ The Seven Vagabonds ” (1833) and

  “ Passages from a Relinquished Work ” (1834), the fragments that clearly would be

  among the earliest parts of the book, is remarkably cheerful and carefree as he embarks

  on his great adventure. The pieces, however, that probably were designed to appear

  towards the end of the volume, “ Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man ” and

  “ The Devil in Manuscript, ” portray an author at the point of despair, o
ne who burns

  his manuscripts and ends up setting the town on fi re. The fragmentary nature of these

  pieces and the degree to which Hawthorne ’ s framework has been destroyed make it

  impossible for us to make any fi nal judgments, but it is diffi cult to see how the fi nal

  fragments could lead to anything but the most pessimistic conclusions about the

  possibilities for the literary artist in America.

  Hawthorne continued to devote much of his literary energy to exploring the nature

  of art and the artist, producing a number of intriguing stories about the power and

  limits of art. “ The Prophetic Pictures ” (1837) emphasizes the ability of a great artist

  to capture the true qualities of his subjects, including a capacity for murder. “ Drowne ’ s

  Wooden Image ” (1844) explores the way in which a carver of ship fi gureheads creates

  an artistic masterpiece. A couple of stories offer insights into Hawthorne ’ s view of his

  British and American contemporaries. “ P ’ s Correspondence ” (1845) provides the

  comic ramblings of a deranged mind who fantasizes that several dead writers are still

  alive and bemoans the untimely death of literary fi gures who were really still alive

  and working. The allegorical visit recounted in the “ The Hall of Fantasy ” (1843)

  included some intriguing comments on other American writers in its magazine

  version, which were unfortunately deleted in book publication. Hawthorne ’ s most

  Hawthorne and the Short Story

  65

  fully developed and most impressive story about the role of art in materialistic

  America is “ The Artist of the Beautiful ” (1844), which uses the mode of science fi ction

  to explore the power and limitations of art and the artist. In the act of creating a

  machine endowed with spiritual qualities, a mechanical butterfl y, Owen Warland

  commits himself to the ideal of the Beautiful and separates himself from the earthly

  worlds of commerce and love. Annie, the woman he loves, marries Robert Danforth,

  a blacksmith who clearly embodies the brute force of a materialistic reality, and their

  child ultimately crushes the beautiful, but fragile butterfl y that Warland has created.

  The story ends with a surprisingly transcendentalist affi rmation of the ability of the