The lonely grief of the dishonored father and mother, the madness of the deserted husband (complete with the insane laughter and rattling chains of his madhouse), and the most untimely death of the abandoned child all suggest that Hawthorne’s loyalty to gothic and sentimental precedent is stronger than his fidelity to the motives and morphology of “Witchcraft in Salem.” Even the witchery of the tale seems a bit more literary than the seventeenth-century record would justify: the old witch-woman who recreates the events of the tale is “diabolic” chiefly in her lurid enjoyment of domestic tragedy; and her supernatural powers, even if spurious, are largely those of some spiritualistic medium. The whole thing seems a little too pat, too trimly tailored to the taste of a nineteenth-century audience.

In general, then, it is no surprise that historical scholarship has had little to say about the “outré” events of this very early tale; or that existing criticism has analyzed its rhetorical and structural effects rather than elaborated its moral themes. It is as if Hawthorne were making trial of a tone rather than propounding an explanation; as if, in a way we have yet to consider, full seriousness entered a Hawthorne work only with an opening of some significant historical issue.

Nor do we have to wait very long for that implied event, as the tales Hawthorne intended for his second projected (but again unpublished) collection take us at once into matters which only a determined commitment to history can adequately follow. Again there is some uncertainty about the complete table of proposed contents. Possibly the tales which survived the fiery failure of the “Seven Tales” were to be included. And scholars have speculated that a number of historical tales published in the mid-1830s were originally written for this collection—the “Provincial Tales,” which Hawthorne’s letters clearly show him trying to publish in 1829. But here the ambiguities hardly matter, for a stable center quite plainly emerges. And with it a firm sense of the subtle direction Hawthorne’s interest in American materials would take: not democratic patriotism or romantic nostalgia or even a moralized gothicism propels Hawthorne’s literary fascination with “provincial” America but instead, and much more soberly, some fairly deep commitment to the project of culture criticism. The facts are the facts of history, and the spirit is that of irony.

At this stable center, then, lie three very significant tales, all of which were published eventually in an 1832 Christmas “gift-book,” The Token. All are very pointedly historical and yet, significantly, each is immersed in materials quite specific to itself; and none deals with the ancestral (and also gothic) matter of the witchcraft. “The Gentle Boy” (omitted from this collection because of its length) takes up the issues of doctrine and religious psychology (piety) that appear to have divided, but also to have joined in mortal combat, the dominant sect of Puritans and their recessive but by no means quietistic antagonists, the Quakers. “Roger Malvin’s Burial” leads us at once beyond the supposedly congenial confines of the original Puritan century and propounds a story of true and false heroism in the midst of a bloody but also representative or mythic “fight” for territory disputed by the French and the Indians, in the War which famously bears their allied name. And “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” appears to explore in advance the psychological and rhetorical conditions of the American Revolution, outrageously but deliberately reducing the one truly “majestic” event of American destiny to the contour and proportion of a rum riot, awkwardly occurring somewhere in the 1730s.

The range is surprisingly wide, as the past turns out to be more than a tonal alternative to the rational and recalcitrant conditions of the present; and the literary effects are anything but predictable, as the act of retelling is by no means an obvious or rule-ridden performance. Yet a common motive really does emerge: to insist that past experience is likely to have been far different from the image any present might wish, for whatever reason of identity or power, to project back upon it.

In one sense, of course, the range encompassed by these three tales is perfectly predictable, as theorists of American literary culture had already decided, quite early in the nineteenth century, that the store of peculiarly “American” materials consisted of three essential “matters”: the matter of the Puritans, of the Indians, and of the Revolution. And at some level Hawthorne’s three indubitably “provincial” tales merely take up each of these definitive historical matters in turn. Yet those same theorists were clearly calling for something much different from what Hawthorne was prepared to give them in his own highly, often wickedly unorthodox account of the American provinces. The Puritans, for example, were widely understood to be “bigoted”—persecuting the Quakers as fiercely as they had suppressed (and banished) “heretics” such as Roger Williams and Ann Hutchinson earlier, or as they later hounded the accused witches. But they were also supposed to represent a wholesome and valuable strain of dedication and purpose inseparable from the national character; and it was further assumed, more often than not, that their institutions actually contained, beneath the limitations of their own personal will, the seeds of liberal democracy. A fine theory, as Hawthorne surely must have felt. Yet what “The Gentle Boy” dramatizes instead is simply the pain and moral confusion of persons who, though clearly on opposite sides of some dialectic of history, all appeal in vain to an apparently uniform God beyond.

Nor are the other members of Hawthorne’s tidy little trinity any more forgiving. “Roger Malvin’s Burial” plainly announces that it has some reference to a 1725 episode of Indian warfare known as Lovewell’s Fight which, though obscure to most modern readers, was widely celebrated on its hundredth anniversary as not only a triumph of advancing white civilization but also as a signal instance of frontier virtue and moral stamina. Well aware that the actual incident had been altogether ragged and unlovely, Hawthorne’s response is clearly ironic and pointed, going straight to the express issue of courage and cowardice but also, with equal directness, to the suppressed one of lying about the logic (and even the events) of protective retaliation. And very few critics of “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” —including those who insist that its real interest is psychological or mythic—have been able to escape the impression that Hawthorne’s version of the Revolution lacks all trace of ordinary American piety.

The psychoanalytic critics have a point, of course: “The Gentle Boy” does indeed suggest that persecuting sadists and suffering masochists have been let loose to play some terrible symbiotic game; and both “Malvin” and “Molineux” exhibit a deep structure it is hard to avoid calling Oedipal, in Freud’s own most precise and father-murdering sense. Yet some other point seems just as true and more persistently provoked by the carefully appointed historical surface of these three tales: Hawthorne’s provincial dramas are not set “nowhere,” or even just “anywhere” in some remote and tonally appropriate past, but in those precise moments of historical crisis which Americanist theory had somewhat innocently identified as the young nation’s most appropriate thematic space. The “Provincial Tales” clearly insist on their own historicity as the earlier “Seven” (as we know them) do not. Apparently something happened, between 1827 and 1829, to Hawthorne’s sense of the project of American literature.

 

Literary maturity, we might safely suppose, is no less remarkably mysterious than any other kind: it comes, if at all, whenever it does; its forms may be structural, and therefore predictable, but hardly its causes. Yet it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the most important thing Hawthorne ever did for the maturing of his own literary career was to undertake, beginning in 1827, an exhaustive and fairly systematic study of American history in its colonial, provincial, and revolutionary periods. The early results of this program of purposive reading and imaginative “re-cognition” bear sharply on the historical density and difference of the “Provincial Tales.”

The leading facts of “Hawthorne’s Reading” have long been clear, for the surviving records of his borrowings from his local subscription library, the Salem Athenaeum, were published in 1949. This well-thumbed list, itself but a minimum suggestion of Hawthorne’s voracious habits as a reader, clearly suggests that one of Hawthorne’s principal and vital interests swiftly became something we might almost risk calling by the name of “American Studies.” In an age when Everyman was, famously, “his own historian,” Hawthorne merely fulfilled the role more faithfully than almost anyone else. In an age when many local institutions like the Salem Athenaeum were anxiously trying to preserve and collect everything that might shed light on the prerevolutionary identity of the nation’s colonial experience, Hawthorne simply tried to read it all.