Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales Read online

  ‘Young Goodman Brown’ is now undoubtedly among the best known of Hawthorne’s tales. It is included in all selections from his short stories and in the major anthologies of nineteenth-century American literature. By common consent, it is one of Hawthorne’s most powerful tales, perhaps even the most impressive of his short works. Yet when he came to make his own selection from his already-published pieces for the first collection of his writings—the Twice-told Tales of 1837—Hawthorne passed over this story. Even more surprising is the fact that he again rejected the tale when he was invited to prepare a new collection in 1845, even though Evert Duyckinck, who had suggested the idea of a new volume, had listed ‘Young Goodman Brown’ among the stories he thought suitable.14 Only when it became clear that Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) would run to two volumes did Hawthorne allow the story to be included. When we consider that he selected such lightweight pieces as ‘Little Annie’s Ramble’ and ‘The Vision of the Fountain’ for the first edition of Twice-told Tales, and further that he told Longfellow (to whom he sent a copy) that the volume contained ‘such articles as seemed best worth offering to the public a second time’,15 we may well draw the conclusion that Hawthorne’s notion of his achievement as a writer and his valuation of his own works were very different from that which is now current.

  An alternative explanation is that when he made his début as an author (his magazine pieces had regularly been published anonymously or pseudonymously) Hawthorne wanted above all to avoid the possibility of alienating his readers by presenting them with puzzling or difficult stories. In the view of one eminent Hawthorne scholar, Twice-told Tales was intended to provide a variety of theme and mood and, thus, to offer something for everyone. Hawthorne, so J. Donald Crowley believes,16 wanted to become a genuinely popular writer in an age that had inherited (from the eighteenth-century Scottish Common Sense philosophers) a widespread suspicion of the imagination and (from the seventeenth-century Puritans) a hostility towards the arts. If Hawthorne’s preface to the 1851 edition of Twice-told Tales can be believed, in 1837 he felt that he had no public to address. When, in that preface, he spoke of opening an intercourse with the world, he can be taken to have meant establishing a bond of sympathy between himself and his readers. If—as Professor Crowley believes—the need to create an audience for his works was a matter of urgency throughout Hawthorne’s career, then the autobiographical essays and personal introductions to his volumes, from ‘The Old Manse’ on, can be seen as devices by means of which he ‘sought to guarantee the reliability of his fiction through the presentation of a reliable narrator—himself. It follows, in this interpretation, that a leading characteristic of Hawthorne’s fiction is a ‘consistent narrative voice or presence’, since the narrator ‘mediates’ between the author and his audience.17 Certainly, the persona Hawthorne created or developed in his prefaces performs such a mediatory role in the sense that he addresses the reader as a friend and assumes (within strict limits) a sort of intimacy with that reader. But the narrative presence in the tales—and the narrative voice-may be more elusive than this formula suggests.

  Had the early tales been published in collections, as Hawthorne planned, rather than separately, as the harsh realities of the market determined, the narrative presence would have been easier to establish. Before Horatio Bridge’s financial guarantee to the publishers made the publication of Twice-told Tales possible in 1837, Hawthorne had planned two collections of his short stories to follow the abortive ‘Seven Tales of My Native Land’. The first of these projected volumes was to have been called ‘Provincial Tales’. Though the full list of contents is now a matter for speculation, it seems certain that ‘The Gentle Boy’, ‘Roger Malvin’s Burial’, and ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’ were to have been included, for each was mentioned in the acknowledgement that Samuel Goodrich, the intended publisher, sent to Hawthorne when he received the material for the volume in December 1829. When it became clear that the project would not come to fruition, Goodrich used each of these tales in The Token, an annual published in Boston, an appropriate place for New England tales.18

  Since three of the stories that were clearly intended for the collection began with an historical introduction, this may have been a characteristic of all the ‘Provincial Tales’. In ‘The Gentle Boy’, before the story of Ilbrahim begins ‘on the evening of the autumn day’ in 1659 on which the first executions of the Quakers took place in Massachusetts, the narrator outlines the history of the Quaker attempt to preach their faith in Puritan New England. A reference to ‘our pious forefathers’ in the second paragraph of the tale obviously assumes that narrator and reader share a New England heritage, but since the piety of the forefathers manifested itself in the ‘fines, imprisonments, and stripes, liberally distributed’ among the Quakers, any sense of a common heritage that might be felt by story-teller and his audience must be troubled. In the first published version of the tale, the narrator follows his mention of the martyrdom of the Quakers with a paragraph extenuating the bigotry of his (and his readers’) forefathers. Though conceding that ‘an indelible stain of blood’ was on the hands of all those who were responsible for the executions, the narrator explains that the Puritans who settled in New England had left their homes, and the relative comfort and safety of England, in order to establish a community where they would be free to exercise their own mode of worship. They had no intention of encouraging universal liberty of conscience and, moreover, the threat to their religion was conceived by them as a threat to the very survival of their government. Assuming the role of an unbiased, equitable commentator who nevertheless understands the Puritans, the narrator decides that ‘it would be hard to say whether justice did not authorize’ their determination to keep their refuge in the New World safe from those who lacked ‘the prescribed title to admittance’.

  When Hawthorne revised this story for inclusion in Twice-told Tales he omitted his second paragraph with its lengthy extenuation of Puritan bigotry. He also omitted the concluding sentence of the tale in which the narrator pronounced himself glad of the triumph of the Puritans’ better nature in their tolerance and indulgence of the Quaker woman Catharine—years after the events that brought about the death of her son Ilbrahim. In its first version, the tale closed with the narrator’s ‘kindlier feeling for the fathers’ of his ‘native land’; yet since he had just stated that the Puritan kindness gave cheaply bought self-esteem, even this affirmation was not without irony. Earlier in the tale, when telling of Catharine’s intrusion into the Puritan meeting house and her trespass into the pulpit, the narrator accuses her—in the 1832 version of the text—of usurping ‘a station to which she had no title’. Here, as in the earlier allusion to the Quakers’ lack of ‘title’, the narrator seems to speak for the Puritan forefathers and to voice their legalistic conception of religious rights, as well as their sexual prejudices. Even more striking is his opening reference to the ‘mystic and pernicious principles’ of the Quakers, for the word ‘pernicious’19 is exactly the term used by the Puritan leaders. If the narrator is merely reporting the reputation of the Quakers, he nevertheless seems to stand close indeed to his forefathers, but the teller is elusive in this tale. In the first version he offers extenuation of the forefathers’ bigotry, yet tells a story which clearly shows that both Puritan bigots and Quaker fanatics are incapable of responding to the divine in man—to Ilbrahim, ‘sweet infant of the skies’. Even when the narrative seems neutral, there are ambiguities that bring alive the problem of the narrator’s stance. Preaching on the subject of the Quakers, the Puritan minister ‘gave a history of that sect, and a description of their tenets, in which error predominated, and prejudice distorted the aspect of what was true’. The syntactical ambiguity is entirely appropriate for a narrative that finds error and prejudice both in the Quakers and in the Puritan view of their behaviour.

  Hawthorne’s revision of ‘The Gentle Boy’ has been interpreted as a clarification of the terms of the tragedy. To Seymour Gross, the changes m
ade in the Twice-told Tales version seem to achieve a firmer point of view and a better balance between Puritan and Quaker.20 Certainly the revised tale is more balanced, but the omissions have the apparent effect of disengaging the narrator from the tale, since the openly evaluative and judgemental statements are removed, to be replaced by implication, and this hardly produces a ‘firmer’ point of view. ‘The Gentle Boy’ is the story of a Quaker mother, Catharine, who sacrifices her love for her own son, Ilbrahim, to her sense of her divine calling. When he doubled the examples of such fanaticism, introducing the figure of an elderly Quaker who leaves his daughter on her death-bed to answer the call of the voice of his Lord, Hawthorne put in the foreground of his tale the question of the authority of those voices by which men feel themselves inspired. To balance the Quaker triumph over humanity (or over the divine in man) we are shown the diabolic cruelty of the Puritan infants whose Devil is that of their authoritarian fathers. A story about voices and authority is told by a narrator who sometimes speaks in voices not his own, and who speaks in an implied context of histories (Sewel’s Quaker and Mather’s Puritan stories)21 that are—in their contrasting biases—as prejudiced as the sermon of the Puritan minister within the tale. In inviting his readers to ponder all authorities, the implied author is also compelling his audience to ponder the status of all stories (histories, scriptures, fictions). Yet when Hawthorne added a preface to the 1851 edition of Twice-told Tales, he claimed that his stories and sketches had ‘none of the abstruseness of idea, or obscurity of expression, which mark the communication of a solitary mind with itself. In arguing that the style of the volume was that of ‘man of society’, he went so far as to state that ‘Every sentence, so far as it embodies thought or sensibility, may be understood and felt by anybody, who will give himself the trouble to read it, and will take up the book in a proper mood’.22 Since the collection included ‘The Gentle Boy’ as well as ‘Little Annie’s Ramble’, Hawthorne’s retrospective comment can hardly have been ingenuous.

  ‘Roger Malvin’s Burial’ was not collected in 1837; like ‘Young Goodman Brown’ it was passed over until the 1846 Mosses from an Old Manse, though it was reprinted in the Democratic Review in 1843. The other undoubted ‘Provincial Tales’ story, ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’, had to wait until The Snow-Image (1852) before it took its place in a collection of tales. Both stories begin with brief sketches in New England history and both have an obvious appropriateness for a New England audience. To establish the ‘proper mood’ in which either story can be understood by anybody who takes the trouble to read it is, however, difficult. The narrator in the former tale begins by explaining that ‘certain circumstances’ concerning the frontier story of Lovewell’s Fight must be cast ‘judicially’ into the shade23 if the imagination is to see much to admire in ‘the heroism of a little band’ of New Englanders who helped drive back the Indians from the frontier. In the latter story, the narrator asks the reader to ‘dispense with’ the account of the train of circumstances that produced the events (intrigue and riot) with which the tale will deal. Both stories begin, then, with the suppression of relevant information, yet both allow themselves to be read as patriotic tales of development towards nationhood, in extending the frontier and in resisting the tyranny of British rule. Yet if Robin Molineux’s bewilderment in moonlit Boston can be taken as a stage in his growth towards an independence emblematic of that about to be achieved by his country, ‘Roger Malvin’s Burial’ is a story about the disastrous personal consequences of casting certain circumstances in the shade, for that is precisely what Reuben Bourne does when he tells his story of the burial of Dorcas’s father.

  Another New England story that may have been intended for ‘Provincial Tales’ is ‘The Grey Champion’, which was first published in the New-England Magazine in 1835. This story, too, begins with a historical sketch. In it, the narrator discusses the threat posed by James II to ‘our liberties’ and ‘our religion’. In the opinion of one critic, the repeated use of ‘our’ suggests that Hawthorne was desperate to establish a bond with his readers.24 In writing of ‘our free soil’ under threat from invading mercenaries, Hawthorne—in this view-was assuming the role of the public poet who celebrated the traditional liberties of New England. Other commentators have noted that the tale’s peroration, in which the revolt in 1689 against Governor Andros and the ‘Popish Monarch’ is linked to Lexington and Bunker Hill, is in the mode of celebratory oratory that derived the eighteenth-century spirit of political independence from the seventeenth-century Puritan spirit of religious freedom.25 Yet though Hawthorne’s narrator sees the New England patriots of Revolutionary times as the inheritors of the ‘strong and sombre features’ of their Puritan forefathers, and though the reader is clearly supposed to have descended from the Puritan fathers who settled in Massachusetts, the tale is not an unambiguous celebration of the great tradition of American liberty. Here, as in ‘The Gentle Boy’, the ‘pious fierceness’ of the first generations of New England Puritans is remembered. The narrator alludes to the slaughter of the Narragansett Indians in King Philip’s War, though that reference can hardly flatter the reader’s sense of his ancestral past. What is more, there is a marked discrepancy between the rhetoric of the concluding paragraph and the discourse of the tale, for the invocation of the legend of the ‘Angel of Hadley’ is not only a ‘lapse in historical logic’,26 but also a clear indication that the ‘Champion’—and the spirit—of New England will not stop short of killing. The Champion’s words in the tale—‘I have stayed the march of a king’—and the narrator’s allusion to the Court’s sentence—‘too mighty for the age, but glorious in all after times’—are euphemisms for an act which, if justified by the beliefs of the judges, was nevertheless bloody. Here, as in the later but no less ambiguous ‘Endicott and the Red Cross’, it is clear that the narrator speaks in more than one voice. In both of these ‘celebrations’ of New England heroes, the complexity of the story is at odds with the narrator’s interpretation of it. If there is a consistent narrative presence in these early tales, it is consistently problematic.

  Had the projected ‘Provincial Tales’ volume materialized, the New England past would surely have provided thematic coherence for the collection. The individual tales would have reinforced each other in what Michael Colacurcio has called the ‘significant temporality of their own local settings’.27 It is even possible that Hawthorne intended to present the tales in chronological order so that, if ‘The Maypole of Merry Mount’ was intended for the volume, they would have moved from 1628, the date of the Mount Wollaston incident, to 1765, the date of the Boston Stamp Act riots which feature in ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’. But Hawthorne’s ‘intractably historical’28 stories are—some of them—also intractably resistant to holistic interpretation; they are, in Barthes’ sense of the term, ‘writerly’29, which is to say that they oblige the reader to become a co-producer rather than a consumer of the text. Indeed, in one of the tales intended for ‘The Story Teller’ (Hawthorne’s next projected volume), the reader is invited to accompany the writer through the life of the protagonist while ‘we … shape out our idea’ of the character and thus of the fiction, for in ‘Wakefield’ story and character are one. The ‘we’ may, of course, merely be an example of the authorial plural, but the implication surely is that the process of creation is collaborative. If the reader goes to ‘Wakefield’ expecting what Thomas Walsh Jr. has called a ‘tale to enjoy’,30 then he will have to agree that this piece fits into the category of the ‘illustrated idea’ rather than the story, for—as Walsh says—the element of suspense has been sacrificed to the moral question. Such categories are, however, hardly appropriate to Hawthorne’s fictions, which clearly do not offer the readers the pleasures of the text subsumed in the class of ‘tales to enjoy’. As Emerson noted in 1846, it was characteristic of Hawthorne’s art that he invited his readers into his study and then opened the process of invention before them. Emerson disapproved, believing—presumably—that suc
h self-reflexiveness robbed the reader of enjoyment, but his comment was astute. It was, he said, ‘as if the confectioner should say to his customers, “Now let us make the cake.”’31 When he made this observation, Emerson was probably responding to Mosses from an Old Manse, but the remark would apply with equal fitness to Twice-told Tales, for that contained, in addition to ‘Wakefield’, the ‘Morality’ called ‘Fancy’s Show Box’ in which Fancy visits a certain Mr Smith to provide an imaginary example of guilt. ‘Alice Doane’s Appeal’ was not collected in any of the short-story volumes in Hawthorne’s lifetime. Had it been, it would have offered one of the most fascinating examples of his metafictional techniques, for in it the narrator discusses with his reader the responses of his listeners to a Gothic story of witchcraft he has told, making his narrative strategies and his success (or lack of it) the subject of the frame narrative. Thus ‘Alice Doane’s Appeal’ brings together Hawthorne’s concern with witchcraft and his concern with the status of fictions in a story about two stories (one the Gothic story of the Doanes; the other the story of the historic executions of the Salem witches) and about the listener-reader’s response.