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Hawthorne's Ritual Typology of the American Revolution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
In the course of his career Nathaniel Hawthorne twice wrote the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England. He told the story for children in Grandfather's Chair (1841) and for adults in five related tales published between 1831 and 1838. These tales do not appear in chronological order among Hawthorne's collections, nor were they so written. But they are assigned prominent positions in the two volumes of Twice-Told Tales and in The Snow-Image and Other Tales. They contain a ritual history of protorevolutionary events in New England extending from the beginning of the settlement in Massachusetts Bay to the eve of the American Revolution. The key stories in this series and the events they deal with are “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” concerning Governor Endicott's destruction of Thomas Morton's maypole in 1629; “Endicott and the Red Cross,” on Endicott's desecration of the British flag in protest at the appointment of a royal governor in 1634; “The Gray Champion,” on the people's defiance of tyrannous Governor Andros on the eve of his expulsion in 1689; “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” introduced as an incident relating to mistreatment and expulsions of governors between 1689 and 1730; and “Howe's Masquerade,” on the expulsion of military governor General Howe, predicted at a masquerade ball given by him during the siege of Boston in 1775.
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References
NOTES
1. In his collections, according to Doubleday, Neal Frank, “Hawthorne considered the beginning and end positions the prominent ones,” Hawthorne's Early Tales, A Critical Study (Durham, N. C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1972), p. 78 n.Google Scholar References to Hawthorne's tales are from Lathrop, George Parsons, ed., The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1882).Google Scholar
2. To these might be added “Edward Randolph's Portrait,” the second of the “Tales of the Province House,” except that it lacks the ritual element discussed below. It concerns Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson's fateful decision in 1770 to comply with a king's order to garrison Castle William in Boston harbor with British troops. The tale recalls events stressed in the five that I discuss (the revolution of 1689, the Stamp Act crowds, the Boston Massacre), and connects the American Puritan commonwealth and its inhabitants with the American Revolution in the manner described below.
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10. On this point and for an extended discussion of ritual in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” see Shaw, Peter, “Fathers, Sons, and the Ambiguities of Revolution in ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux,’” NEQ, 49 (1976), 559–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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