I’ve been thinking lately about how little I know about the literature of my own country. Of course I read Huckleberry Finn, Billy Budd, and a few others in high school, and I took a seminar on Faulkner in college, but in recent years I have focused almost exclusively on Brit lit. So I’ve decided to spend some time with American literature this year. With the help of a colleague who specialized in that area, I compiled a (no doubt over-ambitious) reading list.
Starting rather randomly, I picked Nathaniel Hawthorne and checked out a copy of his Mosses from an Old Manse. I read The Scarlet Letter in 8th or 9th grade and I remember enjoying it, so I thought I’d explore his short stories, which I understand are often considered superior to his few novels.
Mosses is a very strange book. It is not just a short story collection, but is a collection of writings whose chief commonality is that most were composed while Hawthorne lived at The Old Manse, a stern-looking 18th century house in Concord, Massachusetts. Although Hawthorne, oddly, doesn’t mention it, the house was built by the grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Hawthorne does mention that he is the first lay resident of the Manse and reflects that “it is awful to reflect how many sermons must have been written there.” The collection opens with a sketch describing the Manse and reflecting on its clerical history, its natural surroundings, and the nearby Revolutionary War battle-ground.
I found the material in this book to be of very uneven quality. Hawthorne is a superb story teller and when he actually has one to tell, the results are spectacular and every bit as memorable as the timeless myths that he recounted in his collections for children. Cut loose from the strictures of a plot, he indulges in florid description for its own sake (e.g., “The Hall of Fantasy”) or, worse, heavy handed moral allegory (e.g., “Egotism; or, the Bosom-Serpent” and “The Christmas Banquet”). Frankly, I found these pieces unreadable, so I will focus on a few of the actual stories.
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” was probably my favorite story, perhaps due to my fondness for things botanical. It also illustrates a number of themes that are dealt with in other pieces in the collection. The protagonist is Giovanni Guasconti, a hypersensitive young aesthete of the sort common in the stories of Poe. He takes a room in Padua overlooking a weirdly beautiful garden, the possession of a physician named Rappaccini. Rappaccini has a beautiful daughter named Beatrice. Giovanni falls in love with Beatrice, despite the cautions of a family friend and the fact that she shows an eerie affinity with the poison plants of the garden. Beatrice returns his feelings and all seems well until Giovanni realizes that the poison which seems to be part of Beatrice’s being is contagious and that flowers wither and insects die in his presence as in hers. He angrily confronts Beatrice, who kills herself by drinking an anti-venom.
It’s an engaging tale and contains a number of factors that we expect in romantic fables. Perhaps the most important theme is stated rather baldly at the tale’s end: “And thus the poor victim of man’s ingenuity and of thwarted nature and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted wisdom perished there at the feet of her father and Giovanni.” This Frankenstein theme (nature = good; man = bad; man + nature = really bad) is echoed throughout the collection. If only Rappaccini hadn’t meddled with nature, his daughter and Giovanni could have been happy together. If only the scientist cum sorcerer of “The Birthmark” could have appreciated his wife as nature made her, he wouldn’t have killed her through his attempt to improve on nature. If only man hadn’t developed that nasty old iron stove, we’d all be sitting around a big fire singing “kumbaya” (“Fire Worship”). An interesting side note on this theme is that Hawthorne’s “scientists” are indistinguishable from magicians. This hardly seems like a stance to be taken by an educated gentleman of the mid-nineteenth century.
“Feathertop” is also a fun story. Mother Rigby is a New England witch who sets about one day to make a scarecrow. She is so impressed with her work that she decides to give the creation life and send it forth to woo the daughter of an old acquaintance. Here the target of Hawthorne’s moralizing is not science, but human manners. The witch cynically observes that “not one man in a hundred … was gifted with more real substance” than her creation. Concealed by a fair enchanted exterior and armed with a vocabulary of “a hundred … set phrases, and five hundred to the boot of them,” Feathertop arrives at his destination and finds himself in the company of young Polly. All goes according to plan, despite the suspicions of Polly’s father, until Polly sees Feathertop’s reflection in a mirror. She cries out, causing Feathertop to look at the mirror, where he sees himself for what he truly is. “For perchance the only time since this so often empty and deceptive life of mortals began its course, an illusion had seen and fully recognized itself.” Dismayed by the sordid truth of his own nature, Feathertop throws away the magical pipe that gives him life.
As in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” a seemingly beautiful being is revealed to be morally empty, but in this case it is not a third person who makes the observation–it is the illusion itself. The idea of such a horrific self-discovery gives this tale a greater psychological depth than “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” despite its simple, folksy nature. Similarly, while the perverting force of the earlier tale is science (of a sort), here the illusion is perpetrated, at least in part, by the art of words, the very art in which the writer is engaged as he tells the tale. Hawthorne makes the self-deprecating observation that the half-vivified scarecrow reminds him of “the lukewarm and abortive characters … with which romance writers (and myself, no doubt, among the rest) have so over-peopled the world of fiction.”
Feathertop’s self-assessment is at least accurate, if not particularly productive. In the much anthologized tale “Young Goodman Brown,” it is the observer as much as the observed that is called into question. In this short but horrific story, the title character leaves his wife Faith to take an evening walk with the Devil. Brown knows that he is on a dangerous course and resolves several times to turn back, but as the journey progresses, he becomes aware that many of the morally upstanding citizens of his town are in fact disciples of the Devil. He and the Devil eventually arrive at a huge meeting of witches and wizards where he sees not only most of the town, but his own Faith. He cries out to her to “Look up to Heaven and resist the wicked one!” He then finds himself alone in the woods, unsure if what he had seen was a dream or reality. With this question unresolved, he lives out his life as “a stern, a darkly-meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate, man.” Is he the only pure man in a town possessed by evil, a witless dupe of the Devil, or a victim of his own madness? Why was he out on the road with the Devil to begin with? How did Faith get to the gathering before him and why was she there? And, the real question, is the Devil an external force, or synonymous with human weakness and fear? No doubt these were interesting questions to ponder on cold nights in an old New England parsonage.