Twice-Told Tales – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1837 & 1842 ★★★

The Iron Tissue of Allegory

Allegory in stories is unpopular for many reasons.

They are moralistic. They present cardboard characters and a restricted point-of-view. Critical aspects of fiction-writing like tone and voice are lost when it all boils down to imparting a lesson.

So in noting that Twice-Told Tales presents Nathaniel Hawthorne as master of allegory, I realize this is like praising with faint damns.

Hawthorne is a great writer, but not everything he wrote was great. A true American original, he blazed his own path and influenced many fantastic writers in his own time and later, yet he was beholden to some European models of already-faded luster, like John Bunyan, whose puritanical Pilgrim’s Progress is an obvious touchstone for most everything in Twice-Told Tales.

Bunyan used a lot of capitalization to punch up his allegorical lessons. Hawthorne too does this in Twice Told Tales.

In “Lady Eleanore’s Mantle,” the title character – a beautiful, haughty aristocrat – pauses from her agonies to explain to readers just why she is dying of plague:

“The curse of Heaven hath stricken me, because I would not call man my brother, nor woman sister. I wrapt myself in PRIDE, as in a MANTLE, and scorned the sympathies of nature; and therefore has nature made this wretched body the medium of a dreadful sympathy.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne as a young man, as painted by Charles Osgood in 1841, a year before the second volume of Twice-Told Tales was published. In its preface, Hawthorne explains an aim to be accessible: "Every sentence, so far as it embodies thought or sensibility, may be understood and felt by anybody, who will give himself the trouble to read it, and will take up the book in a proper mood." Image from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Hawthorne.

Yet Hawthorne’s abilities to take up the conventions of his time, and even a much older time, in a way that still informs and entertains readers today are everywhere in Twice-Told Tales, a work which typifies the adage of the whole being more than the sum of its parts.

If you seek Hawthorne’s most famous short-fiction titles, almost none are here. “Young Goodman Brown,” “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “The Birth-Mark,” “Ethan Brand,” and many others are conspicuous by their absence from Twice-Told Tales. What you get instead are a few of his more anthologized stories, and many others you will likely find unfamiliar.

“The Great Carbuncle” introduces us to a motley band of people on a quest to find a valuable stone. All fall short of their desire except a couple who realize no stone can outshine their love. “The Gentle Boy” alerts us to the peril of intolerance, while “The Threefold Destiny” shows how there is no place like home.

Even some of the more notable titles in this collection come off trite. “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” tells the story of a scientist who shares his elixir of youth with four aged friends who revert to their worst past selves as soon as the tonic takes effect. Once the tonic wears off, the doctor tells them he would never partake of the formula himself, after seeing how it affected them. “Such is the lesson ye have taught me!”

Like his contemporary and sometime rival Edgar Allen Poe, Hawthorne provided grist for Vincent Price movies. While this 1963 film is an anthology of Hawthorne adaptations, only "Doctor Heidegger's Experiment" is actually from the title book, and gets a macabre makeover. Image from https://www.thefilmposterstore.com/psycho-linen-backed-us-one-sheet-1960-original-film-poster-3155-p.asp.

Not exactly a brilliant allegory. Or subtle.

Yet while crafting these and other limited narratives, Hawthorne was simultaneously enlarging and expanding upon his artistic vision, which is what makes Twice-Told Tales so powerful. However basic the fictive device, his expressive voice and depth of thought imparts worth on even the most slender tales.

For example, in “The Wedding Knell,” a labored allegory about the peril of a wasted life, we get this wonderful capsule summary about a middle-aged man whose bachelorhood has turned him a trifle odd:

His caprices had their origin in a mind that lacked the support of an engrossing purpose, and in feelings that preyed upon themselves, for want of other food. If he were mad, it was the consequence, and not the cause, of an aimless and abortive life.

Some of the Twice-Told Tales aren’t tales at all, but sketches of life as witnessed firsthand by the narrator, presumably Hawthorne. These run the gamut from a mildly amusing piece about a town pump which becomes a sardonic temperance plea to a very cloying item about accompanying a young girl on a stroll through Boston.

But even in this latter sketch, “Little Annie’s Ramble,” there is a striking moment where the little moppet pauses to consider someone’s pet monkey, and Hawthorne writes how this “makes her mind unquiet, because it bears a wild and dark resemblance to humanity.”

In “Sunday At Home,” Hawthorne explains his affection for a nearby church, and describes the scene on a typical Sunday, from dawn until the end of the morning services. While Hawthorne (rather boldly for his time) makes clear he himself is no churchgoer, he describes his pleasure in the scene, and in the process lays out his vision of artist as detached but sympathetic observer:

Doubts may flit around me, or seem to close their evil wings, and settle down, but, so long as I imagine that the earth is hallowed, and the light of heaven retains its sanctity, on the Sabbath – while that blessed sunshine lives within me – never can my soul have lost the instinct of faith. If it has gone astray, it will return again.

Boston's Province House, a home of royal governors prior to 1776, is the setting of four of the Twice-Told Tales. In "Old Esther Dudley," Hawthorne writes of "that pensive influence over the mind" the building's shadow cast. Already in disrepair by the time of Twice-Told Tales, it was demolished in 1922. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_House_(Boston,_Massachusetts). 

Hawthorne’s concern with the role of an artist is a theme running throughout Twice-Told Tales. In “The Prophetic Pictures,” a painter captures the inner selves of a couple to disturbing effect. “The artist – the true artist – must look beneath the exterior,” he explains.

In “The Seven Vagabonds,” detailing a coming-together of a diverse set of wanderers (a situation Hawthorne uses more than once), we get a hint of autobiography from the unnamed narrator:

My design, in short, was to imitate the story tellers of whom Oriental travellers have told us, and become an itinerant novelist, reciting my own extemporaneous fictions to such audiences as I could collect.

While these stories capture Hawthorne in an early phase of his career, you see how he was already charged with moral and aesthetic purpose. Allegory may be a simple form of fiction, yet Hawthorne’s approach is usually quite complex, plumbing deep into the human soul and asking unquiet questions, not always revealing pat answers.

A church is the setting of the best-known tale in this collection, “The Minister’s Black Veil.” It is in one sense a very stark allegory. A beloved minister shocks and challenges his congregation by draping his face at all times with a black fabric, until even his wife breaks from him. Yet the moral of the story isn’t clear; is Mr. Hooper doing this as self-penance, or admonishing his flock for being stuck on appearances?

Even the parson doesn’t seem to know: “If I hide my face for sorrow, there is cause enough, and if I cover it for secret sin, what mortal might not do the same?”

Mr. Hooper enters his church. "Such was the effect of this simple piece of crape, that more than one woman of delicate nerves was forced to leave the meeting-house. Yet perhaps the pale-faced congregation was almost as fearful a sight to the minister, as his black veil to them." Image from https://chrisgsevern.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/the-ministers-black-veil-by-nathaniel-hawthorne/. 

The story doesn’t resolve with a lesson, but instead ends ambiguously with Mr. Hooper on his deathbed, still resisting the removal of his veil. Final answers, if any, are elusive and perhaps unknowable.

The other great story here, “Wakefield,” is even richer in its disquietude. Here Hawthorne frames his story in an interesting way, explaining that it is an imaginative reconstruction of an actual article he came across about a middle-aged Englishman who left his wife and family for a period of many years and took up residence in a nearby apartment.

What begins as straightforward allegory of familial alienation (“Would you go to the sole home that is left you? Then step into your grave!”) becomes by its end an unsettling examination of how fate exists in the form of small decisions we make without much notice:

Would that I had a folio to write, instead of an article of a dozen pages! Then might I exemplify how an influence, beyond our control, lays its strong hand on every deed which we do, and weaves its consequences into an iron tissue of necessity.

Ambiguously, we close on an image of Wakefield returning home, not at all sorry for what he had done but rather silently amused by the way he left things. More than with “The Minister’s Black Veil,” with the tortured Hooper, you can see Hawthorne moving beyond allegory here, channeling the darkness that lies sleeping in all of us.

In "The Maypole Of Merry Mount," Hawthorne depicts the Puritans of Massachusetts laying waste to a pole used to bring together a band of less pious settlers, and basically paints them as killjoys. Yet elsewhere in this collection, he writes more admiringly of their courage and spirit. Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16132387-the-maypole-of-merry-mount. 

Published in two parts, in 1837 and 1842, Twice-Told Tales was a collection of pieces Hawthorne wrote for annuals and periodicals. The title, maybe the most famous thing about this book, is a nod to that.

However allegorical, I do enjoy several stories on their own merits. In “Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure,” the title character is presented as a man ruined by his own fancies of hidden wealth, but this lesson is made more entertaining by the way Hawthorne describes him ripping through the floors and walls of his own home, leaving only a shell likened to “ the perfect rind of a great cheese, in which a mouse had dwelt and nibbled, till it was a cheese no more. And Peter was the mouse.”

Other items here work as connective pieces, not so much as self-contained stories but as conceptual building blocks toward a larger moral conception of humankind and our place in the cosmos. Much of Hawthorne’s greatness lies elsewhere, but its blueprint is here.