The Celestial Railroad and Other Stories Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Roger Malvin’s Burial

  My Kinsman, Major Molineux

  The Wives of the Dead

  The Gray Champion

  Wakefield

  The Ambitious Guest

  Young Goodman Brown

  The Minister’s Black Veil - A PARABLE

  The Maypole of Merry Mount

  The Great Carbuncle - A MYSTERY OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS

  Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment

  Lady Eleanore’s Mantle

  Egotism , or, The Bosom Serpent

  The Celestial Railroad

  The Birthmark

  Rappaccini’s Daughter - [FROM THE WRITINGS OF AUBÉPINE]

  The Snow Image - A CHILDISH MIRACLE

  Ethan Brand - A CHAPTER FROM AN ABORTIVE ROMANCE

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804, the son of a sea captain and descendant of John Hathorne, a judge who oversaw several of the Salem witch trials (and the reason Nathaniel added a “w” to his name). After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1825, where his classmates included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future president Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne spent several years struggling to master the craft of short story writing. He finally secured some small measure of success with the publication of Twice-Told Tales (1837). Later, The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851) brought him public and critical acclaim. He died in 1864 while on a trip to Plymouth, New Hampshire.

  NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

  THE CELESTIAL

  RAILOAD

  and

  Other Stories

  A SIGNET CLASSIC from

  NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

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  The new English Library Limited, London

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  Published by Signet Classics, an imprint of New American Library,

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  First Signet Classics Printing, February 1963

  First Signet Classics Printing (Murfin Introduction), August 2006

  Introduction copyright © Ross C Murfin, 2006

  eISBN : 978-1-101-09988-9

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  INTRODUCTION

  IN 1837, Nathaniel Hawthorne published Twice-Told Tales, a collection of short stories, six of which are included in this volume. In a sense, many, if not most, of Hawthorne’s stories are—or are purported to be—“twice-told tales” of one sort or another.

  Sometimes Hawthorne’s stories claim to retell oral or written history. “The Wives of the Dead” is represented as a published version of an orally transmitted story that was “of interest, a hundred years ago, in a principal seaport” in Massachusetts (p. 48). In a footnote to “The Great Carbuncle,” Hawthorne informs us that his “somewhat extravagant tale” about a group of adventurers competing to find a “wondrous gem” in the mountains of Maine is “founded” in “Indian tradition” and later alluded to by “Sullivan, in his History of Maine” (p. 133).

  “The Gray Champion” recounts a confrontation between British Redcoats and an elderly Colonist that is specifically referenced by the eighteenth-century historian Thomas Hutchinson in his History of the Province of Massachussets Bay. “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” is set in the same era of American history—when “the kings of Great Britain had assumed the right of appointing colonial governors” (p. 25)—and tells of the tarring and feathering of one of the “inferior members of the court party” (p. 25). There are no known chronicles of this particular action, but in the story’s first paragraph Hawthorne cites “Hutchinson” and the “annals of Massachusetts Bay” (p. 25) His ostensible purpose is to establish the story’s general historical contexts, but as a result of these references, readers are allowed to believe the fiction that follows to be substantially factual.

  Hawthorne does not merely rehash history; his twice-told tales contain plenty of imaginative license. The narrator of “Lady Eleanore’s Mantle” may describe himself as a “humble note-taker” (p. 163), but he traces his account of how smallpox reached New England to one Mr. Tiffany, an “ingenious tale-teller” (p. 163) with a “storehouse” of “the oddest legends” (p. 165). “Wakefield” begins with the following disclaimer: “In some old magazine or newspaper I recollect a story, told as truth, of a man—let us call him Wakefield—who absented himself for a long time from his wife” (p. 66). In “The Minister’s Black Veil,” a “parable” in which a clergyman inexplicably begins hiding his face from everyone, Hawthorne similarly makes a limited claim for his story’s authenticity. While a footnote informs us that a “Mr. Joseph Moody, of York, Maine, who died about eighty years since, made himself remarkable by the same eccentricity,” it also states that “in his case . . . the symbol had a different import” (p. 103).

  Some of Hawthorne’s twice-told tales stem from fictional rather than historical or pseudohistorical narratives. “The Celestial Railroad,” which satirizes the convenient journeys many modern people take in the quest for salvation, might be called a “twice-told allegory,” for it parallels and is explicitly based on Pilgrim’s Progress, the seventeenth-century allegorical romance by John Bunyan. “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” ostensibly a translation of a story written by one M. de l’Aubépine, a man with “an inveterate love of allegory” whose “fictions” had “little or no reference to either time or space” (pp. 239-40), is another twice-told allegory. Indeed, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” might more accurately be called a pseudo-twice-told allegory, since in French aubépine means “hawthorn”!

  Hawthorne’s application of terms like “legend,” “allegory,” and “parable” to his stories is telling. His admittedly “extravagant tale[s]” are not—and are not meant to be—realistic short stories. The people—even the historically based people—we encounter in them are more properly seen as human figures; many bear names notable for their suggestive significance. For instance, “The Gray Champion” effectively becomes the name of the “venerable brother” who stood down “a party of mounted gentlemen” and British Redcoats (p. 59) in 1689 on the same spot in Boston that “was destined to be the scene, nearly a century afterwards, of another encounter between the troops of Britain and a people struggling against her tyranny” (p. 57). Hawthorne deliberately makes the stranger a messianic “figure of an ancient man” (p. 61), “the type of New England’s hereditary spirit” (p. 65). The protagonist of “Ethan Brand,” a man in search of the Unpardonable Sin, is equally a type, as is Young Goodman Brown, the aptly named Puritan Everyman in the story of the same name. Similarly, in “The Ambitious Guest,” a story in which a family takes in a mysterious stranger, Hawthorne’s description of the eldest daughter as “the image of Happiness at seventeen” (p. 77) gives her an allegorical dimension.

  Sometimes Hawthorne expressly interprets allegorical characters through comments by his narrators or the characters themselves. In describing Lady Eleanore, the haughty aristocrat who unwittingly carries smallpox from England to Boston in an embroidered mantle, the narrator says “never, surely, was there an apter emblem of aristocracy and hereditary pride trampling on human sympathies” (p. 168). Later, just before dying, Lady Eleanore herself proclaims that the “curse of Heaven hath stricken me, because I would not call man my brother, nor woman my sister. I wrapped myself in pride as in a mantle” (p. 179). Parson Hooper, in “The Minister’s Black Veil,” tells his fiancée that the veil he wears is “a type and symbol” that he “is bound to wear . . . ever, ever, both in light and darkness” but offers no explanation why, leading her to warn him that “there may be whispers that you hid your face under the consciousness of secret sin” (p. 112).

  At times Hawthorne’s extensive use of symbols, emblems, and allegories becomes heavy-handed. For instance, in “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” which concerns Reuben Bourne’s failure to make good on a promise to bury his fatally wounded friend, the sapling to which Reuben had tied a handkerchief as “the bloodstained symbol of his vow” is eventually “strick
en” by a “blight” that renders “the very topmost bough” of the tree “withered, sapless, and utterly dead” (p. 21).

  Some such uncomplicated symbols are repeated from story to story with little variation. References to snakes, imaginary snakes, and objects that look like snakes are reliably ominous in stories such as “Egotism, or, The Bosom Serpent,” and “Young Goodman Brown,” where the “likeness of a great black snake” (p. 89) is carved on the walking stick of the suspiciously satanic gentleman whom the young protagonist meets up with in the forest. Dark results predictably ensue when Goodman Brown walks under the “thick boughs” of “the gloomiest trees in the forest” (p. 88) and when Reuben Bourne and his family find themselves in a “tangled and gloomy forest” (p. 16). Likewise, ominous events are forecast when Hawthorne’s characters walk down dark, “crooked and narrow” streets like the ones Robin, the young protagonist of “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” wanders while searching for his despised relative (p. 28). Light, by contrast, predictably symbolizes goodness or beauty—though sometimes unearthly, unattainable beauty, as in “The Great Carbuncle,” whose narrator tells us that the two young people who abandoned the search for the wondrously bright gem were “wise as to reject a jewel which would have dimmed all earthly things” (p. 149).

  While many of Hawthorne’s symbols are transparent, others are more stubbornly resistant to reductive reading. At the end of “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” as Reuben approaches the blighted tree that so obviously symbolizes his unkept promise, he fires his gun toward a rustling object in the under-growth, killing his son, Cyrus, who is in a “thicket clustered . . . around the base of [the] rock,” a thicket that “would have hidden Roger Malvin had he still been sitting there” (p. 20). What does it mean that the rock marking the spot where Reuben left his friend to die, the spot where his friend should have been properly buried, becomes the grave of his son? Hawthorne does not tell us, so we as readers must take an active role in the production of meaning.

  In “The Birthmark,” which tells of a husband’s obsessive desire to remove a small spot from the cheek of his “beautiful . . . wife” (p. 218), the narrator tells us that Georgiana’s birthmark represents “the fatal flaw of humanity which Nature . . . stamps . . . on all” (p. 220). In spite of this explanation, the symbolic birthmark remains suggestively ambiguous. What, after all, is humanity’s fatal flaw? The stamp of Nature itself? And why is the birthmark said to resemble both a tiny “human hand” and a “delicate bloom,” the color of which is “crimson” amid a “surrounding rosiness” (pp. 219-20)? Feminist critics have suggested that the mark symbolizes Georgiana’s feminine nature, which a man—her husband (and possibly also Hawthorne, her creator)—subconsciously sees as a mark of human imperfection. Other critics have offered different interpretations of this symbolic flaw, ranging Original Sin from our mortality to our inability to accept our imperfection. Again we, as readers, must arrive at our own conclusion.

  In his stories, Hawthorne repeatedly explores the gap between appearance—or even illusion—and reality. In “The Gray Champion,” differing eyewitness accounts lead us to question whether the brave stranger who confronted the Redcoats was a real, living person. Similarly, in “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” four elderly friends who think they have returned to “the happy prime of youth” (p. 158) after taking an elixir are left to wonder whether their drug-induced experience was an “illusion” after the vase containing the elixir is overturned and all the marks and feelings of age reappear. While the story never decisively answers the question, two things are clear: their true status is that of old age, and the idea of recapturing youth a foolish chimera.

  Other stories raise questions about the line between reality and dreams. In “Young Goodman Brown,” the narrator questions whether the protagonist’s experiences in the forest were real: “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch meeting?” (p. 102). Much the same occurs in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” at the end of which Robin wakes up and a gentleman asks, “are you dreaming?” (p. 47). “The Wives of the Dead,” a story involving two sisters widowed on successive days, also leaves readers wondering whether apparent reality is really a dream. Have the sisters each just learned—during the middle of the same night—that their husbands are actually alive, or is this incredible coincidence literally the stuff of dreams? The last sentence of the story leaves us hanging: Mary’s “hand trembled against Margaret’s neck, a tear also fell upon her cheek, and she suddenly awoke” (p. 55).

  Many of Hawthorne’s stories explore the gap between appearance and reality by raising questions about the difference between how people look and act and who they are at the core under all the literal and figurative veils they wear. When Goodman Brown spots Goody Cloyse “mumbling some indistinct words” as she heads down “the path” leading to the heart of the forest, he assumes she is saying “a prayer, doubtless,” because that is the kind of person she seems to him in the village by daylight: “a very pious and exemplary dame” (p. 91). But by the end of the evening, whereas he and his wife formerly “had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream,” they are “now . . . undeceived” (p. 100). In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” the beloved Beatrice’s “expression of . . . sweetness” (p. 250) masks a nature so poisonous that her suitor “fancied that, while Beatrice was gazing” at a “beautiful insect . . . flutter[ing] about her head,” it “grew faint” and fell “dead” at her feet (p. 251).

  At the extreme, the duplicitous people in Hawthorne’s stories seem to be possessed, if only temporarily, by Satan or some other demonic force. A character in “Egotism, or, The Bosom Serpent” is tormented by the feeling that a snake lives within him, that he is in “possession of a double nature” (p. 187). In “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” innocent Robin meets up with a grotesque individual whose “forehead bulged out into a double prominence” (p. 30), one side of which “blazed an intense red, while the other was black as midnight,” giving the impression that “two individual devils, a fiend of fire and a fiend of darkness, had united themselves to form this infernal visage” (p. 37). As the narrator of “Young Goodman Brown” comments, “The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man” (pp. 96-97).

  Sometimes Hawthorne pairs characters or groups of characters to suggest oppositions or dualities within the human self, and though these human doubles are demonstrably different, it is often the case that neither is perfectly good nor demonically evil. In “The Maypole of Merry Mount,” where a “party” of “grim Puritans” (p. 126) disrupts wildly costumed revelers celebrating a wedding, the Puritans and Merry Mount revelers represent opposite extremes of human behavior, each having commendable and deplorable aspects. Indeed, Hawthorne’s introduction of the Merry Mount colony and the neighboring Puritans as “[j]ollity and gloom . . . contending for an empire” (p. 119) seems to reflect an inner struggle, perhaps within Hawthorne himself, between the claims of seriousness and mirth, piety and pleasure. Similarly, in “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” Cyrus Bourne is presented as his father’s opposite; “beautiful in youth,” he is expected to be “a future leader” (p. 15), unlike Reuben, a “neglectful husbandman” whose “frequent quarrels” with “neighboring settlers” result in “innumerable lawsuits” (p. 14). And yet we somehow sense that Cyrus is like Reuben—before lies and guilt took their toll.

  In other stories, rather than pairing opposite characters, Hawthorne explores oppositions of intention and results. In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Beatrice is poisoned by a “medicine” made from “blessed herbs” (p. 273) intended to save her from the poisonous nature she developed growing up amid her father’s garden of toxic plants: “as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death” (p. 275). In “The Snow Image,” the warmth of a furnace proves as deadly to a snowchild as it is “proper enough for children of flesh and blood” (p. 294).