Few critics have been as enthusiastic about the interpretative possibilities of Hawthorne's two “Allegories of the Heart” as Melville's famous review of “Hawthorne and His Mosses” suggested they ought to be. The assertion of a “mystical blackness” has become famous enough; so has the premise of a lurking sense of “Puritanic gloom.” Even the ascription of something like a “Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin” has generated its fair share of critical responses. But these suggestions have been easier to associate with “Young Goodman Brown,” which overwhelms the emphasis of the second installment of Melville's famous review, than with “Egotism; or the Bosom Serpent” and “The Christmas Banquet,” the curious pair of stories that actually inspired these famous remarks. “Egotism” has seemed prime evidence that the “historical” premises of Hawthorne's earlier tales generate more plausible fictions than those odd maxims floating free in his notebooks: “A man to swallow a small snake— and it to be a symbol of a cherished sin”; and the “Banquet” which follows, more sketch than tale, more list than either, seems chiefly to demonstrate that the earliest of Hawthorne's brief imaginings, in the 1820s and 30s, are uniformly more powerful than those produced in his “Old Manse Period.”

The first, more gothic and grotesque member of this deliberate pairing has compelled an energetic corps of source-hunters, who have discovered, among other things, that Roderick Elliston's curious disease is but one case in a veritable epidemic of snakes and worms in the bosom, breast, or stomach; and also, more surprisingly, that the plight of Hawthorne's victim owes more than a little to the real-life career of fellow Salemite, Jones Very; but neither these worldly facts nor the barely repressed hint of an available Spenserian moral has prompted its commentators to emphasize and sponsor its thematic teaching. Its companion piece, though intriguingly the narrative product of the man just cured of his snaky plague, and authorized somehow by that curious fact, has attracted very few professional readers of any sort.