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The Logic of Compulsion in “Roger Malvin's Burial”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In the proliferation of Hawthorne criticism over the past decade every current literary-theory or methodology has had a say. A good deal of this criticism, nevertheless, has shared an assumption that the way to see to the bottom of Hawthorne is to analyze his symbolism or his recurrent motifs. Though there have been many careful studies of separate plots, and though some critics have preferred to approach Hawthorne by way of his biography or his explicit ideas, more usually he is revealed to us in terms of such symbolic categories as “the light and the dark,” “the power of blackness,” the Devil archetype, or the myth of man's fall. This kind of criticism can be fruitful, especially if, as in Hyatt Waggoner's case, a sense of Hawthorne's eclecticism and irony is allowed to temper the zealous pursuit of symbolic consistency. Yet there is other evidence to suggest that the exegesis of verbal patterns can subserve and disguise a critical hobbyhorse; some of the more dogmatic moral and theological readings have been couched as mere explications of Hawthorne's symbols. The rich suggestiveness of Hawthorne's language tempts the critic to ignore what is literally occurring in the plot, to iron out possible uncertainties of meaning or purpose, and to minimize the great distance separating Hawthorne from the tradition of pure didactic allegory. Such, I feel, are the shortcomings of Roy R. Male's Hawthorne's Tragic Vision, which, by analyzing only those symbols that can bear Biblical or sacramental glossing, succeeds in blending Hawthorne into a background of Christian moralism.
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- Copyright © 1964 by The Modern Language Association of America
References
1 On the latter point see especially Arlin Turner, Nathaniel Hawthorne; An Introduction and Interpretation (New York, 1961), Edward Wagenknecht, Nathaniel Hawthorne; Man and Writer (New York, 1961), and Hubert H. Hoeltje, Inward Sky; The Mind and Heart of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Durham, 1962).
2 The allusions are to Richard Harter Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction; The Light and the Dark (Norman, Okla., 1952), Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (New York, 1960), William Bysshe Stein, Hawthorne's Faust; A Study of the Devil Archetype (Gainesville, Fla., 1953), and Daniel G. Hoffman, Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York, 1961).
3 See Hyatt H. Waggoner, Hawthorne; A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1955; revised 1963).
4 I do not mean to slight the more obvious risks of criticism that purports to investigate the writer's systematic ideas on the basis of his fiction. The most dogmatic claims about Hawthorne's alleged philosophy have been made by critics whose interest has not been in symbolism. See Chester E. Eisinger, “Hawthorne as Champion of the Middle Way,” NEQ, xxvii (March 1954), 27–52, Henry G. Fairbanks, “Sin, Free Will, and ‘Pessimism’ in Hawthorne,” PMLA, lxxi (December 1956), 975–989, and Leonard J. Fick, The Light Beyond; A Study of Hawthorne's Theology (Westminster, Maryland, 1955).
5 Randall Stewart's endorsement of this book is significantly phrased: Male makes an important contribution to the “Golden Age of Hawthorne Criticism,” which, Stewart says, “is part of the modern ‘new orthodoxy’.” He continues: “The new symbolical approach to the reading of Hawthorne, as well as Melville, James, and Faulkner, has after a fashion allied itself with this same neo-orthodoxy, so that we have been witnessing a revolution not only in criticism but in religious thought.” Quoted on the dustjacket of Male, Hawthorne's Tragic Vision (Austin, Texas, 1957). Not all readers may agree that the retroactive Christianizing of the writers named constitutes a “Golden Age” in either criticism or theology.
6 The Power of Blackness, p. 46.
7 Ibid., pp. x, xi.
8 The argument of this paper is not altogether original. It is partly anticipated by Waggoner, Hawthorne (1955 edition), pp. 78–86; Richard P. Adams, “Hawthorne's Provincial Tales,” NEQ, xxx (March 1957), 39–57; Louis B. Salomon, “Hawthorne and His Father: A Conjecture,” Literature and Psychology, xiii (Winter 1963), 13–16; and Agnes McNeill Donohue, “‘From Whose Bourn No Traveller Returns’: A Reading of ‘Roger Malvin's Burial’,” NCF, xviii (June 1963), 1–19. The last of these articles, which appeared after the present one was submitted for publication, admirably characterizes the spirit of Hawthorne's plot. Miss Donohue rests her argument, however, on “the consistent symbolism of the tale” (p. 14) rather than on its psychology, and she thus leaves herself vulnerable to the objection that Hawthorne's symbolism can bear other readings than her own. In reality Miss Donohue is right about “Roger Malvin's Burial” because she has intuitively grasped Reuben Bourne's motivation. My purpose is to demonstrate that the evidence for a reading like Miss Donohue's is entirely contained within the literal plot of the tale.
9 Melvin W. Askew, “Hawthorne, the Fall, and the Psychology of Maturity,” AL, xxxiv (November 1962), 335–343.
10 The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. George Parsons Lathrop, Riverside ed., 13 vols. (Boston, 1882–83), ii, 406. Subsequent page references in the text imply this edition and this volume.
11 Levin, p. 55.
12 Mark Van Doren, Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York, 1949), p. 80.
13 Turner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, p. 31.
14 Van Doren, p. 80; Levin, p. 55.
15 Indeed, elsewhere in his book Turner makes the clearest possible formulation of the point upon which my argument will rest: “Most of Hawthorne's characters speak of sin, meaning sin against God or against divine law, but in the author's view the characters suffer the consequences of guilt because they believe they have sinned, though it may be that the guilt exists only in their own minds. Thus the effects of guilt are the more certainly inevitable because they are psychological. The possibility was unacceptable to Hawthorne that the consequences of guilt might be avoided through either human or divine intervention.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, p. 54.
16 I do not mean, however, that Reuben actively wills Roger's death at any point. The link between his prospective happiness and Roger's imminent, already inevitable death is originally a fortuitous irony of circumstance and nothing more. But Reuben's punctilious conscience turns this link into one of causality; he will no longer be able to contemplate his own welfare without imagining, quite falsely, that he has bought it with Roger Malvin's blood. As always in Hawthorne's works, guilt is suffered more through an excessive moral scrupulosity than through actual wrongdoing.
17 Hawthorne, p. 80.
18 We could even purport to find an incest theme here, for if Roger is to be taken seriously as Reuben's “father,” Dorcas becomes his sister. Again, real evidence is lacking, and my argument does not rest on such conjectures as this. It may be added in passing, however, that the nature of Dorcas' later feeling for her son—“my beautiful young hunter!” (p. 404)—does not dispel the pervasive atmosphere of over-intimacy in the tale.
19 Harry Levin provides a way of discounting the symbolic nature of Roger's “fatherhood” when he declares that Roger is already Reuben's father-in-law at the time of the desertion (The Power of Blackness, p. 55). The assertion is false, however.
20 “The Biblical Sources of Hawthorne's ‘Roger Malvin's Burial’,” PMLA, lxxvii (March 1962), 92–96.
21 The fourth, Roger Malvin, is evidently taken from the actual history of Lovewell's (or Lovell's) Fight in the Penobscot War. Two members of the surviving band, as Hawthorne knew, were Eleanor and David Melvin. See G. Harrison Orians, “The Source of Hawthorne's ‘Roger Malvin's Burial’,” AL, x (November 1938), 313–318. See also David S. Lovejoy, “Lovewell's Fight and Hawthorne's ‘Roger Malvin's Burial’,” A Casebook on the Hawthorne Question, ed. Agnes McNeill Donohue (New York, 1963), pp. 89–92.
22 Thompson, p. 94.
23 Thompson, p. 92.
24 The reader should note that although Reuben consciously thinks that his expiation will consist of burying Roger's bones, the actual release of his guilt-feeling comes about through the killing of Cyrus. There is no mention of burial at the end of the story, yet the “atonement” is indeed complete; it is atonement for the imagined murder of Roger, not for the broken vow to bury him.
25 Dorcas' reaction to the catastrophe is more in keeping with the plain horror of it: “With one wild shriek, that seemed to force its way from the sufferer's inmost soul, she sank insensible by the side of her dead boy” (p. 406).
26 Some of Thompson's further suggested parallels are interesting. The Biblical Reuben, he notes, declined in worldly fortune not because of his untruth about deserting Joseph, but because of incurring his father's wrath for lying with Bilhah, his father's concubine. Thompson regards this as irrelevant to Hawthorne, but its connection with the “Oedipal” side of “Roger Malvin's Burial” is rather striking. Again, Thompson associates Dorcas with the doomed “daughter of Babylon” against whom Isaiah fulminates. The identification is very tenuous, but in one respect possibly fruitful. A few minutes before the catastrophe Dorcas is occupied in poring over the Massachusetts Almanac; this, in fact, is what reminds her to tell Reuben that it is the twelfth of May. Isaiah says to the daughters of Babylon: “Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee” (Isaiah xlvii.13). This might conceivably be linked to the otherwise curious detail of Dorcas' reading her “monthly prognosticators” at such a moment. If Hawthorne did have the passage in mind, it merely underlines the anti-supernatural implications of his story. No outside force can save Reuben's family from a menace which is hidden in Reuben's own enthralled heart.