At some point in my life I acquired, for $1.50 according to a penciled note on the flyleaf, a stained and yellowing Modern Library hardcover edition of The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne. I know what you're thinking, especially if you had to read The Scarlet Letter in high school: should have left it on the shelf of the used book store and bought a cup of coffee instead. I hear you. But this weekend, for whatever reason, I pulled it off the shelf by its loose spine and read a few of the "selected tales." Dark, very dark, and somewhat bewildering. If you can get past the language, the brocaded style sodden with words one encounters nowadays mainly in legal writing and church liturgies ("herein," "verily," "hitherto"), these stories may seem modern, "Kafkaesque."
My Modern Library volume closes with "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," pages 1209 to 1223. This happenstance seduced me into thinking it's from late in Hawthorne's career, though I see now that it was composed in 1832, the year he turned 28. The Scarlet Letter was eighteen years in the future. I wonder whether Hawthorne did not himself think very much of the story. In 1837, he published a book, Twice-Told Tales, so-called because it collected fictions that he had previously managed to place in various magazines: "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" qualified but was not included. My sense, however, is that, except for maybe "Young Goodman Brown," it is now Hawthorne's most frequently anthologized story.
That might be because it seems a representative work. When I say "dark," I mean, for one thing, it's night, like in all the scenes you remember from Macbeth. As in "Young Goodman Brown," a young man sets out after the sun has set and ends up peering intently into gloom, trying to make out things and succeeding mainly at becoming disoriented and perplexed. The effect of "straining to see" is duplicated in the reader. Why has Major Molineux's young kinsman traveled to Boston to seek him out? What is the back story? What's going on? This information is withheld. Instead of ordinary verisimilitude, which tends to have the effect of firming up the ground beneath your feet, there is darkness, encounters with churlish Bostonians, surreal faces, at last one kindly resident whose kindliness, it develops, is the come-on of a prostitute. At the beginning, when the adolescent enters Boston, his crossing into the city on the ferry in the dark is described with some elaboration, and I think the general situation of a young man crossing is meant to suggest that what follows is, for him, a new realm of experience: an initiation story, then.
Robin—that's the youth's name—moves through the city, inquiring of people whether they can direct him to the home of "my kinsman, Major Molineux." No one helps. Robin always has some benign explanation for being rebuffed, and the requisite ingenuity is repeatedly attributed to his "shrewdness." But his confidence slides toward anxiety as in his nocturnal wandering he meets only with vaguely hostile personages who supply only vaguely disquieting news of his kinsman. The reader is borne along by mysteries. Why is Robin seeking Major Molineux? Why do the people he meets not have the same high regard as he for his kinsman? What will happen when, or if, the title character appears onstage?
The resolution, when it comes, is swift but does not altogether dissolve the ambiguity. Robin is told by a grotesque stranger, with a face half red, half black, that if he keeps watch at the intersection where his long walk has delivered him he will within an hour see Major Molineux. While waiting, he falls into a reverie, or dream, and sees the family that he's left outside his boyhood home—his father, a minister, an older brother, his mother and younger sisters. When they turn to enter the house, Robin would enter behind them, but "the latch tinkled into its place, and he was excluded from his home."
The unhappy vision concluded, he comes to and is greeted by a generous-seeming man, although by this point at least the reader is suspicious of everyone. The back story is revealed as Robin pours it out to the man. His father and Major Molineux, a man of the world and of inherited wealth, are cousins. His older brother is to succeed to the farm that his father works when not performing his church duties. On a visit, the childless Major had once hinted that he'd help establish one of the boys, and the point of Robin's journey, since there's nothing for him at home, is to realize the promise of his kinsman's good intentions. No sooner is this revealed than a mob, in which Robin can see every demonical townsperson he has that night encountered, parades into sight. Hauled along in a cart, the object of the mob's abuse and derision, is the tarred and feathered Major Molineux. Then:
He [the Major] was an elderly man, of large and majestic person, and strong, square features, betokening a steady soul; but steady as it was, his enemies had found means to shake it. His face was pale as death, and far more ghastly; the broad forehead was contracted in his agony, so that his eyebrows formed one grizzled line; his eyes were red and wild, and the foam hung white upon his quivering lip. His whole frame was agitated by a quick and continual tremor, which his pride strove to quell, even in those circumstances of overwhelming humiliation. But perhaps the bitterest pang of all was when his eyes met those of Robin; for he evidently knew him on the instant, as the youth stood witnessing the foul disgrace of a head grown gray in honor. They stared at each other in silence, and Robin's knees shook, and his hair bristled, with a mixture of pity and terror.
I don't know whether we are to have forgotten that it's nighttime, or maybe are supposed to imagine a scene like in a light-and-dark painting, the hideous subject illuminated by an invisible source. Making connections, one recalls that the story's first paragraph, which casually established the historical context, had noted that a hundred years ago colonial governors appointed by the British crown were regarded with contempt by the American colonists. We are now clearly meant to conclude that Major Molineux was one of these hated governors. But that, and the fact that the hope of Robin's journey lies dashed, is about all that's clear. It would however be hard to miss Hawthorne's sympathetic description of a man whom patriotic lore encourages us to condemn. Are we to take the side of the gross mob? That is what Robin does at the very end of the story, by joining in the laughter directed at his humiliated kinsman from whose beneficence he had hoped to advance. The mob parades past and out of sight, Hawthorne writing:
On they went, in counterfeited pomp, in senseless uproar, in frenzied merriment, trampling all on an old man's heart.
That is the last sentence, but for a brief coda in which Robin asks his new companion, the older man to whom he'd told his story, to show him the way back to the ferry, and receives for a reply:
"Some few days hence, if you wish it, I will speed you on your journey. Or, if you prefer to remain with us, perhaps, as you are a shrewd youth, you may rise in the world without the help of your kinsman, Major Molineux."
This final occurrence of "shrewd," now weighted with something like the mockery heaped on the Major, is the last vaguely sinister note struck in a story that could be described as a phantasmagorical vision of evil.
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