No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
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.
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.
3. Malcomson, Robert W., Popular Recreations in English Society 1700–1850 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973), p. 7.Google Scholar
4. On Hawthorne's familiarity with Puritan objections to May poles and May games see Doubleday, , Early Tales, pp. 97–98.Google Scholar
5. Strutt, Joseph, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (London, Methuen, 1801, rpt. 1903), p. 344.Google Scholar
6. Orians, G. Harrison, “Hawthorne and ‘The Maypole of Merry-Mount,’” MLN, 53 (1938), 162 n.Google Scholar
7. See Auerbach, Erich, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), pp. 30, 54.Google Scholar
8. Bercovitch, Sacvan, “Endicott's Breastplate: Symbolism and Typology in ‘Endicott and the Red Cross,’” Studies in Short Fiction, 4 (1967), 291.Google Scholar See also Brumm, Ursula, American Thought and Religious Typology (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1970), especially pp. 42–43.Google Scholar See also Bell, Michael D., Hawthorne and the Historical Novel (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973).Google Scholar
9. Auerbach, , “Figura,”Google Scholar in Scenes from … European Literature, p. 58.Google Scholar
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
11. Gallgher, Edward J., “History in ‘Endicott and the Red Cross,’” Emerson Society Quarterly, 50 (1968), 64.Google Scholar
12. In “Old News” Hawthorne evidences his knowledge of Pope Day and of the brawls mentioned further on in this paragraph. For an even more indirect allusion to the date of a holiday, the Roman Lemuria, see Adams, Joseph D., “Initiation Ritual in the Early Short Fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Diss. Lehigh Univ. 1972, p. 71.Google Scholar
13. Bercovitch, Sacvan, “Diabolus in Salem,” English Language Notes, 6 (1969), 284.Google Scholar
14. Gallagher, , “History in ‘Endicott,’” pp. 63, 64.Google Scholar
15. Bercovitch, , “Diabolus in Salem,” pp. 281–82.Google Scholar
16. Bercovitch, Sacvan, “Horologicals to Chronometricals: The Rhetoric of the Jeremiad,” Literary Monographs ed., Rothstein, Eric (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin, 1970), III, p. 47.Google Scholar
17. For modern accounts see Walzer, Michael, Regicide and Revolution (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974)Google Scholar; and Fahre, Daniel, “La Fête Éclatée,” L'Arc, 65 (1974), 68–75.Google Scholar
18. See Orians, G. Harrison, “The Angel of Hadley in Fiction: A Study of the Sources of Hawthorne's ‘The Grey Champion,’” American Literature, 4 (1932), 257–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
19. While it is true that Hawthorne often uses the words “type,” “allegory,” and “symbol” interchangeably, his use of “type” here is particularly suggestive. See Brumm, , American Thought, pp. 118–19.Google Scholar
20. See Yates, Norris, “Ritual and Reality: Mask and Dance Motifs in Hawthorne's Fiction,” Philological Quarterly, 34 (1955), 56–70.Google Scholar
21. Bercovitch, , “Diabolus in Salem,” p. 284.Google Scholar
22. Adams, Joseph D., “Initiation Ritual,” identifies the use of initiation ritual throughout Hawthorne's work.Google Scholar
23. Leavis, Q. D., “Hawthorne as Poet,” Sewanee Review, 59 (1951), 199.Google Scholar
24. See Silverman, Kenneth, A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, Music, Literature, and the Theatre in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington, 1763–1789 (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1976), pp. 82–96.Google Scholar
25. For Hawthorne's treatment of the Puritans as democrats see Adkins, Nelson F., “Hawthorne's Democratic New England Puritans,” Emerson Society Quarterly, 44 (3rd quarter, 1966), 66–72.Google Scholar
26. Bercovitch, , “Horologicals to Chronometricals,” p. 15.Google Scholar