Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England

by Michael Davitt Bell

Overview

Three major conventional figures dominated Hawthorne's romances: the noble Founding Father, the "narrow Puritan," and the rebellious daughter. Daniel Bell examines the ways in which Hawthorne used these and other conventional characters to formulate his own sense of New England history.

Originally published in 1971.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691647210
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1324
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.90(d)

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Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England

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By Michael Davitt Bell

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1971 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06136-8

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CHAPTER 1

THE FOUNDING FATHERS

I regard it as a great thing for a nation to be able ... to look to an authentic race of founders, and a historical principle of institution, in which it may rationally admire the realized idea of true heroism.

Rufus Choate, The Age of the Pilgrims the Heroic Period of Our History

AS FOUNDING FATHERS the Puritans were regarded L by Hawthorne's contemporaries as national heroes; as persecutors they were regarded as narrow tyrants. The tension between the patriotic impulse to praise and the liberal impulse to criticize was central to the romantic treatment of the Puritan founders of New England. This tension is evident, first of all, in the balanced phrasing of most early nineteenth-century generalizations about the character of the Puritans. "We love to contemplate," wrote the anonymous author in the introduction to The Salem Belle (1842), "the piety and simplicity, while we deplore the superstition of those times. ... Our fathers were not faultless, but as a community, a nobler race was never seen on the globe" [vii]. "In this enlightened and liberal age," Lydia Maria Child declared in Hobomok (1842), "it is perhaps too fashionable to look back upon those early sufferers in the cause of the Reformation, as a band of dark, discontented bigots. Without doubt, there were many broad, deep shadows in their characters, but there was likewise bold and powerful light" [6]. Many of the Puritans in the historical romances of New England are characterized by just such a balance or tension, as for example the "stern, sudden, choleric, but earnest, undaunted, untiring" Endicott, of John Lothrop Motley's Merry-Mount [II, 118]. Motley's Endicott is at once bigot and hero. He is authoritarian and intolerant. Yet we are told that "altogether, the whole appearance of the personage ... gave assurance of a man" [II, 108]. A figure like Endicott, then, was equally praised and criticized. He embodied both of the age's attitudes toward the Puritan founders.

It is even more characteristic of the historical romance of the period, however, to polarize the supposedly contradictory aspects of Puritanism in opposed characters or groups of characters. One character or group represents the manly heroism of Puritanism, the other the narrow bigotry. Again, Merry-Mount furnishes a ready example, in the opposition of the Massachusetts governor, John Winthrop, and his deputy, Thomas Dudley. Winthrop, we are told, was "a tall, erect figure in the prime of manhood," whose magisterial garments "harmonized entirely with the simple and natural dignity which distinguished his presence." Even the recalcitrant criminal "could not look upon him without respect." "The whole countenance expressed elevation of sentiment, earnestness and decision, tempered with great gentleness, and somewhat overshadowed with melancholy." A reader familiar with Winthrop's political career might be surprised, finally, to learn that "the whole expression of the brow and eye would have struck an imaginative person as that of a man, whose thoughts were habitually and steadfastly directed to things beyond this world" [n, 176]. Dudley is placed in clear opposition to Winthrop: Well contrasted with Winthrop was the erect, military figure, and stern, rugged features of the deputy Dudley. The low-country soldier, the bigoted and intolerant Calvinist, the iron-handed and close-fisted financier, the severe magistrate, but the unflinching and heroic champion of a holy cause, were all represented in that massive and grizzled head, that furrowed countenance, that attitude of stern command, [II, 176-77]

Here we have the same balance that characterized the description of Endicott, only now the heroic aspects are far outweighed and outnumbered by the repressive. As Dudley represents the bigotry and severity of Puritanism, Winthrop is freed (by the contrast) to represent the simplicity and noble piety of the founders.

The contrast between Dudley and Winthrop is not without historical justification. Its importance, however, lies quite outside questions of historical accuracy. Motley's stylization and exaggeration of this opposition are more essentially a product of nineteenth-century predisposition than of seventeenth-century record. These characters represent a tension, not so much within Puritanism itself as within the nineteenth century's view of Puritanism. And in the nineteenth century this tension led, finally, to two stock character-types that appear again and again in the historical romance of New England. On the one hand there is the "narrow" Puritan who is usually presented much more critically than is Dudley in Merry-Mount. He is fanatical, often hypocritical, repressive, and even villainous. On the other hand there is the noble "founding father." He is no less "Puritan" than his opposite number; at least he is in no sense opposed to the "stern" tenets of Puritanism. The difference is that his narrowness is played down while his nobility is stressed. In him, to borrow the phrase quoted from The Salem Belle, the "piety and simplicity" of the founders are developed while his opposite number, the fanatic, absorbs the faults, the "superstition," of our heroic age. Sometimes, as in the case of Winthrop and Dudley, these opposed character types are presented in pairs. More often, however, they appear separately, each living a life of his own within the convention. The "narrow" Puritan is discussed at the beginning of the next chapter. For the moment my remarks are confined to the patriotic hero — the noble, simple, and pious "founding father."

The Noble Patriarch and the Myth of Decline

The archetype of the founding father was John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Mrs. Harriet Vaughan Cheney, in her inauspiciously titled A Peep at the Pilgrims in Sixteen Hundred Thirty-Six (1824), praises Winthrop's "popularity, the prudence and moderation of his character." She sees his political career in terms of successful opposition to "the arts of the jealous, and the cabals of the disaffected" [p, 23]. In a later work, The Rivals of Acadia (1827), she praises the governor's "liberal temper, and impartial administration," assuring the reader that "the voice of censure or applause had no power to draw him from the path of duty" [48-49]. In Hope Leslie (1827), Catharine Maria Sedgwick writes that Winthrop's "public life" is "well known to have been illustrated by the rare virtue of disinterested patriotism, and by ... even and paternal goodness" [I, 212]. Furthermore, she writes earlier, "Mr. Winthrop is well known to have been a man of the most tender domestic affections and sympathies" [I, 9-10]. This figure, with his "disinterested patriotism" and especially his "paternal goodness," would seem to have more than a little in common with the popular idealization of George Washington, the Father of His Country. Winthrop's importance to the writers of the earlier nineteenth century stems in part from the fact that his Journal, published in part in 1790 and in full by James Savage in 1825, was an invaluable and often-consulted source of information on the early history of New England. Another important influence on these writers was the portrait of Winthrop as an embattled and disinterested leader in Thomas Hutchinson's History of Massachusetts, the first volume of which appeared in 1764. Hutchinson, in fact, concludes his portrait of the noble governor by calling him "the father of the country."

But the patriarchal Winthrop is simply one of a great number of examples of a conventional stereotype of the founding fathers. However "narrow and mistaken" their "conceptions of religious liberty," wrote Eliza Buckminster Lee in Naomi (1848), "Winthrop and his companions were as true, as pure, as heroic a company as ever set foot on our sterile and severe coast" [24-25]. Whatever their faults, the founders were men, and men of integrity. "These primitive statesmen ...," wrote another author two years after Mrs. Lee, "had fortitude and self-reliance, and, in time of difficulty or peril, stood up for the welfare of the state like a line of cliffs against a tempestuous tide. The traits of character here indicated were well represented in the square cast of countenance and large physical development of the colonial magistrates" [238]. This is Hawthorne, describing the procession before the last great scene in The Scarlet Letter.

Another part of this same description suggests that in the figure of the founding father is embodied a countermyth to the myth of historical progress discussed in my introduction. "It was an age," the narrator says of the seventeenth century, "when what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the massive materials which produce stability and dignity of character a great deal more" [237]. In some respects, apparently, the nineteenth-century present represented a decline from the standard of the founding fathers — particularly with respect to integrity and manhood. Hawthorne was hardly alone in sensing this decline. James McHenry, in The Spectre of the Forest (1823), declares that "the restless spirit of Yankyism which has since actuated the minds of, no doubt, many of his descendants, was unknown to the simple, unambitious mind of the patriarchal puritan" [I, 23]. The "patriarchal" spirit of the founding fathers had given way to a new "restless" spirit of ambition. The nineteenth-century present had lost its respect for manly integrity.

We should not be surprised to find these historical romancers expressing belief in both decline and progress, even when both views of history are expressed — as is often the case — by the same writer. The ideas of decline and progress are not as contradictory as they might at first seem; both affirm change to be linear. The difference between the two ideas is not a disagreement over the nature of history but only a value judgment about its direction, upward or downward. This difference is important to us here, however, since it lies behind the tension between the two attitudes toward the original Puritans. On the one hand, ancestor worship is clearly associated with a myth of decline — from those ancestors. On the other hand, the myth of progress just as clearly requires some sort of repudiation, however clandestine, of one's ancestors. The figure of the noble founding father is ultimately a dramatic representation of a feeling that America has declined since the seventeenth century. The figure of the narrow Puritan represents the progressive nineteenth century's criticism of an unenlightened earlier age. The nineteenth-century romancers' portraits of the founders are of little value to the student of seventeenth-century history. But they are of great value to the student of nineteenth-century literature. They tell us a great deal, not only about what the romancers thought of their own time, but also what they thought about time in general, about the direction of history. And among these thoughts about history was a myth of historical decline from the character of the founding fathers. Whatever the faults of these fathers, according to the Mrs. Cheney who so enthusiastically praised Winthrop, theirs was an age in which "ambition had not ... assumed the mask of patriotism, nor were the unprincipled and licentious, elevated to the 'high places' of the land" [Peep, I, 55]. Again and again the age of the founders is described as an age of heroic piety, of manly principle, a Golden Age after which the nineteenth-century present seems puny and insignificant.

Perhaps the fullest picture of this idealized age, and of the decline which regrettably succeeded it, is to be found in James Fenimore Cooper's 1829 romance, The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish. The first part of this book takes place in 1660 at the isolated settlement of Wish-Ton-Wish in Connecticut. This frontier society is dominated by the patriarchal Mark Heathcote, who is joined briefly by an old companion, one of the regicide judges of Charles I. The community is attacked by Indians and burned to the ground. But the few settlers have saved themselves by hiding in a well underneath the blockhouse. They emerge after the departure of the savages to raise a prayer of thanksgiving. Heathcote, true as always to his Christian principles, refuses to countenance any talk of vengeance on the Indians. The second part of the book takes place fifteen years later, during the Indian uprising known as King Philip's War. The Heathcote settlement is now a good-sized town, and its founder, who is very old and seldom seen, has passed his authority to his altogether less impressive son, Content Heathcote. Similarly, Mark's paternal religious authority has been passed on to a hypocritical minister, significantly named Meek Wolfe. During one of Wolfe's canting sermons the old regicide — associated, like Mark Heathcote, with the older, simpler world — appears to warn of an Indian attack. The Indians are beaten off, but the Heathcote family is captured by an Indian named Conanchet. They are released, because old Mark had treated Conanchet well years before. Yet after Conanchet departs, Meek Wolfe forsakes Mark's principle of forswearing vengeance and urges retaliation. Even Content, at last, abandons his father's principles. Conanchet is captured and turned over to the Mohicans, in full knowledge that they will execute him. Thus Content is directly responsible for the death of a man who had recently saved the entire Heathcote family. This is clearly no longer the world of the original Heathcote or of the stranger who had, as Conanchet has expressed it, "taken the scalp of a great chief" [395].

The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish is a stark portrayal of decline — decline from principle to expediency, from founding father to succeeding son. Mark Heathcote has the authority to maintain his principles. His successors have neither his authority nor his principles. The principle itself — the forswearing of unnecessary vengeance — is important, but it is finally less important, in the book's scheme of values, than the simple fact that one should hold to one's principles whatever they are. Perhaps the most important characteristic of the "principled" characters in The Wept — Mark and the regicide stranger — is the air of authority which surrounds these two men and most clearly distinguishes them from the next generation. When the stranger interrupts Meek Wolfe to warn of the Indian attack, we are struck, not by what he says or does, but rather by the tone of his "deep, authoritative voice" [324], which contrasts so clearly with the "ambiguous qualifications" [323] that characterize the minister's sermon. When the regicide first appears at Wish-Ton-Wish, he and Mark discuss matters of importance in secret, while the family is suffered to wait in an outer room. "That deep reverence," we are told, "which the years, paternity, and character of the grandfather had inspired, prevented all from approaching the quarter of the apartment nearest the room they had left" [48]. The ability to inspire such "reverence" is not passed on to Mark's son.

In spite of its elevating patriarchal past over democratic present this is not an anti-democratic book. Cooper's Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish portrays not a decline from feudalism to democracy but a decline from a noble liberty to a base liberty. The liberty by which Mark lives, and which he lives to defend, is the liberty to maintain his own principles by his own authority. Content's liberty, by contrast, is simply expedience — the liberty to ignore principle. A superannuated Mark lives on into the world of Content as a reminder to this newer world of what it has lost. And loss and collapse dominate the closing pages of the book. We are told that the settlement has prospered even down to the present, but a detailed description reveals decline — an "old and decaying" orchard, "the ruins of the blockhouse" [471]. A final grim effect is provided by couching the concluding remarks on the characters in the form of a survey of their graves, a device used 21 years later by Hawthorne. The mood of these concluding pages simply reinforces the point already made, that American history is the record of a declension from the integrity of the founding fathers, an integrity represented in Cooper's romance by the figures of Mark Heathcote and the unidentified regicide.

The Regicide

This regicide merits our more particular attention, for he is something of a staple legendary figure in the historical romance of Puritan New England. A regicide judge appears in eight of the two dozen or so romances written about Puritan New England between 1820 and 1850; in five of these he is a major character. Three of the men who signed the death warrant of Charles I fled to America following the restoration of his son to the English throne. They were John Dixwell, Edward Whalley, and William Goffe. Dixwell, whom the new king never knew to be in America, is not mentioned in the historical romances of New England. Whalley, a first cousin of Cromwell, and his son-in-law Goffe fled to Massachusetts in 1660. After a brief respite in Cambridge they fled to New Haven where they were protected by the minister John Davenport and the governor of New Haven (still distinct from Connecticut), William Leete. Pursued by the royal agents, Thomas Kirk and Thomas Kellond, they hid for a month in the "Judges' Cave" on West Rock in New Haven. Finally, in 1664, they fled to Hadley, a new settlement on the Connecticut frontier. Whalley probably died about 1674. The final regicide tradition, first recorded by Hutchinson, has to do with an Indian attack on Hadley during King Philip's War in 1675. The townspeople, taken completely by surprise, were falling back before the savages when suddenly they were rallied by the mysterious appearance of a stern old man who led them to victory. This old man, so the tradition goes, was William Goffe.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England by Michael Davitt Bell. Copyright © 1971 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• PREFACE, pg. vii
• CONTENTS, pg. xiii
• INTRODUCTION: The Treatment of the Past, pg. 1
• CHAPTER ONE. THE FOUNDING FATHERS, pg. 15
• CHAPTER TWO. TYRANTS AND REBELS CONVENTIONAL TREATMENTS OF INTOLERANCE, pg. 83
• CHAPTER THREE. A HOME IN THE WILDERNESS HAWTHORNE'S HISTORICAL THEMES, pg. 105
• CHAPTER FOUR. FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS, pg. 147
• EPILOGUE: PAST AND PRESENT, pg. 191
• BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PRIMARY SOURCES, pg. 243
• INDEX, pg. 249