Selected Tales and Sketches Read Free Page A

predictable, as the act of retelling is by no means an obvious or rule-ridden performance. Yet a common motive really does emerge: to insist that past experience is likely to have been far different from the image any present might wish, for whatever reason of identity or power, to project back upon it.
    In one sense, of course, the range encompassed by these three tales is perfectly predictable, as theorists of American literary culture had already decided, quite early in the nineteenth century, that the store of peculiarly “American” materials consisted of three essential “matters”: the matter of the Puritans, of the Indians, and of the Revolution. And at some level Hawthorne’s three indubitably “provincial” tales merely take up each of these definitive historical matters in turn. Yet those same theorists were clearly calling for something much different from what Hawthorne was prepared to give them in his own highly, often wickedly unorthodox account of the American provinces. The Puritans, for example, were widely understood to be “bigoted”—persecuting the Quakers as fiercely as they had suppressed (and banished) “heretics” such as Roger Williams and Ann Hutchinson earlier, or as they later hounded the accused witches. But they were also supposed to represent a wholesome and valuable strain of dedication and purpose inseparable from the national character; and it was further assumed, more often than not, that their institutions actually contained, beneath the limitations of their own personal will, the seeds of liberal democracy. A fine theory, as Hawthorne surely must have felt. Yet what “The Gentle Boy” dramatizes instead is simply the pain and moral confusion of persons who, though clearly on opposite sides of some dialectic of history, all appeal in vain to an apparently uniform God beyond.
    Nor are the other members of Hawthorne’s tidy little trinity any more forgiving. “Roger Malvin’s Burial” plainly announces that it has some reference to a 1725 episode of Indian warfare known as Lovewell’s Fight which, though obscure to most modern readers, was widely celebrated on its hundredth anniversary as not only a triumph of advancing white civilization but also as a signal instance of frontier virtue and moral stamina. Well aware that the actual incident had been altogether ragged and unlovely, Hawthorne’s response is clearly ironic and pointed, going straight to the express issue of courage and cowardice but also, with equal directness, to the suppressed one of lying about the logic (and even the events) of protective retaliation. And very few critics of “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” —including those who insist that its real interest is psychological or mythic—have been able to escape the impression that Hawthorne’s version of the Revolution lacks all trace of ordinary American piety.
    The psychoanalytic critics have a point, of course: “The Gentle Boy” does indeed suggest that persecuting sadists and suffering masochists have been let loose to play some terrible symbiotic game; and both “Malvin” and “Molineux” exhibit a deep structure it is hard to avoid calling Oedipal, in Freud’s own most precise and father-murdering sense. Yet some other point seems just as true and more persistently provoked by the carefully appointed historical surface of these three tales: Hawthorne’s provincial dramas are not set “nowhere,” or even just “anywhere” in some remote and tonally appropriate past, but in those precise moments of historical crisis which Americanist theory had somewhat innocently identified as the young nation’s most appropriate thematic space. The “Provincial Tales” clearly insist on their own historicity as the earlier “Seven” (as we know them) do not. Apparently something happened, between 1827 and 1829, to