BOOK #79
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Review
by Edward Tanguay January 6, 1997 |
Short stories are experimentations. They give you a chance to get into the author's studio and look at some of his attempts that he has made while experimenting with various elements. Perhaps you can even find a common characteristic which tells you more about the author. Newton Arvin writes:
The germ of a typical Hawthorne tale is not a "real" individual or an actual and firsthand story--his imagination needed a further withdrawal from things than that--but either some curious passage that had quickened his fancy in his reading or some abstractly phrased idea, moral or psychological, that he had arrived at in his endless speculative reveries.
If Hawthorne had lived a generation later, in Europe, he would have counted as a symbolist, though as it was he stopped short, at some point not easy to specify, of being a symboliste in the strictest sense: he trusts too litte, for that, the suggestiveness of his symbols themselves, when left without commentary, and he yeilds himself far too little to the dark drift of the irrational. The truth is he is neither quite an allegorist nor quite a symbolist, but a writer sui generis who occupies a beautiful terrain of his own between these two artistic modes; it is tempting to catch up another word he often used, and call him an "emblematist," with a certain reliance on the old meaning--the partly pictorial, partly edifying meaning--of the word "emblem." He had inherited, at any rate, the old Puritan love of emblems and tokens and allegories, and he gave it vent as only a poet of his own romantic generation could do.
To understand what it means to be in the wrong. That is the moral nucleus of most of his tales.
A sense of guilt: the essense of wrong is aloneness; you begin and you end with that.
The picture of human life that emerges from his work is naturally, as he himself would say, a "dusky" one, but it would be very shallow to label Hawthorne, in hackneyed language, a "pessimistic" or "misanthropic" writer: with all his limitations, he went too deep for sentimental pessimism or facile cynicism. He took a dark view but not a low one of human nature; he took a doubtful but not a despairing view of the human prospect.
"The Minister's Black Veil" screams out this loneliness to the reader. The feeling you get when the minister says at the end that everybody is wearing a viel is one of deep peering into the soul and seeing a very worrying and troubling thing, full of fear ("such was the effect of this simple piece of crape").
The "Maypole of Merry Mount" was not my favorite, but I liked the contrast of the pagans and the Puritans. There is a lot of power in that. The tale was mystic.
At the very least of these enormities, the men of iron shook their heads and frowned so darkly that the revellers looked up, imagining that a momentary cloud had overcast the sunshne, which was to be perpetual there.
"Wakefield" is based on a great story: a man who has lived years with his wife suddenly goes out, moves next door and never comes home. It is senseless, but Hawthorne uses this to point to our ultimate aloneness. The feeling which developed between this man and wife is representative of many relationships. We live together but are we really together? No, we really live alone with ourselves.
I liked the quest theme in "The Great Carbuncle." In the Prophetic Pictures you have the symoblism theme of pictures.
"There we stand," cried Walter, enthusiastically, "fixed in sunshine forever! No dark passions can gather on our faces!"
"No," said Elinor, more calmly; "no dreary change can sadden us."
The theme of pictures in literature would be a good topic to research: "portrait as representation or prophecy."
"The Ambitious Guest" was striking. Hawthorne sets up two extreme opposites, the man ("the secret of the young man's character was a high and abstracted ambition") and the family and girl ("it is better to sit here by this fire, and be comfortable and contented, though nobody thinks about us." The irony of all of them being packed away by an avalanche, "their bodies were never found," is powerful.
"Peter Goldthwait's treasure" was very symbolic, or not so much symbolic, but the story lingers your head like a strange dream (don't all Hawthorne's stories do this?). Peter burns up his house from the inside out, so that "the framework being so much weakened, and the inward props removed, it would have been no marvel if, in some stronger wrestle of the blast, the rotten walls of the edifice and all the peaked roofs, had come crushing down upon the owner's head." Nice.
"The Birthmark" was also powerful. This "visible mark of earthly imperfection." "Either remove this dreadful hand or take my wretched life!" And then, "Only one thing remians to be tried. If that fail us we are ruined." And of course, death to the beloved. "The fatal hand had grappled with the mystery of life, and was the bond by which an angelic spirit kept itself in union wih a mortal frame."
I didn't much like "Young Goodman Brown" as the Puritan theme is so heavy. But we get the classic dreamlike Hawthorne here. "Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?" Or did he peer into the souls of the town folk and into us?
"Rappaccini's Daughter" is a masterpiece. All these stories have the same type of Hawthorne, dreamlike magic.
This would be a nice story to study in detail. He mixes beauty and sinisterness, paradoxal opposites ("Beauty shall I call her, or inexpressibly terrible? It was not love, although her rich beauty was a madness to him; nor horror, even while he fancied her spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that seemed to pervade her physical frame; but a wild offspring of both love and horror that had each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered like the other." Awesome writing. The slow realization that she has slowly poisoned him so that even his breath kills flowers. It is a powerful, magical story. The characters names are significant, "Giovanni" and "Beatrice," dragging with them their connotations (ruin and corruption, and heavenly beauty and purity).
"The Celestial Railroad" I didn't understand. It was uncharacteristically melodramatic. It seemed that it referred to something which the readers of that time would recognize, some politcal incident perhaps. I wonder what.
"Feathertop" was a classic, the witch has an abrupt personality that you remember. Her confidence in bringing Feathertop to life and the way she throws him into existence and bullies him off I found interesting as a creation story, a nice twist on God, maybe a half-crazed God who spins out problem-filled creations just for kicks.
"Egotism; or, the Bosom Serpent" was disgusting (a snake in the belly that gnaws at you is disgusting). But this is just the kind of topic that Hawthorne is typical of hooking into and making a story out of. Your mind is left racing, "what could the serpent stand for, what is the symbolism?"
In "The Artist of the Beautiful," I liked the line, "So long as we love life for itself, we seldom dread the losing it. When we desire life for the attainment of an object, we recognize the frailty of its texture."
"The Great Stone Face" was too predictable and seemed to folksy to be classic Hawthorne. And the moral at the end is also a bit too loud.
In "The Wives of the Dead," Hawthorne highlights the feeling of hiding extreme happiness. The situation he put the two women in was unique. A psychological analysis of this story would be interesting. How much of our happiness do we really hide from others just so that we appear as they expect us to appear?
Half of these stories I want to read again. Having previously known Hawthorne only as "the guy who wrote The Scarlet Letter," I recognize him now as a unique voice in American literature: one who offers a unique blend of pyschology, morals, irony, subtle gloom, and subtle magic.
Edward Tanguay
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