Equivocal Endings in Classic American Novels (review)

Joyce A. Rowe. Equivocal Endings in Classic American Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1988. 161 pp. $29.95. Joyce A. Rowe has given us a new view of famUiar works for which we aU might weU be grateful. Rowe re-examines the problematical endings of several novels at the core of the American canon: The Scarlet Letter, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Ambassadors, and The Great Gatsby. Describing the relation between ending and narrative as "troubling," Rowe suggests that the endings of these four classics "are equivocal in a special thematic sense, as they simultaneously promote and deny a visionary ambition already defeated in the body of the work . . . they are . . . deliberately evasive, eluding those truths of experience, of both self and world, which the preceding narrative has been at pains to estabüsh" (1). Each of the four protagonists is a visionary, and each is "defeated, as much by his or her own limitations as by the society at hand" (2), yet in the end each refuses to face those limitations, choosing instead the classic American "pattern of Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown at the Devil's altar—at the moment of crisis they tum away" (7), asserting vision over reality. Rowe Ulustrates the pattern of equivocal endings with a reading of Hawthorne 's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," in which Hawthorne examines the "fundamental analogy between the forces that shape individual being and those that move history onward" (14). Like die young nation, which hopes to recreate society after sundering its ties to its own past, and which must deny the nature of revolution itself in order to enjoy the myth of "America," Robin must stiU, after seeing revolution as mob cruelty and after glimpsing his own disturbing wiUingness to join in the ridiculing of Major Molineux, heed tiie "friendly" voice in his ear, which Rowe identifies as the voice of Franklin insisting on beneficent self-reUance as an American model. The mob's violence and Robin's laughter establish reaUty, which Robin denies by gratefuUy accepting the Franklinian myth (soon to be transmuted into Emersonian myth). According to Rowe, this pattern repeats itself in The Scarlet Letter, in which each of the major characters, "engrossed in a self-preoccupation so acute that for seven years they are barely aware of one another's presence," exacerbates his or her suffering through a "mutual isolation which in Hawthorne's day could already be recognized as the dark twin of self-reliant individualism" (28). Hawdiorne's distrust of such isolation resulted in characters who, as their natures dictate, stray either inward or outward, Dimmesdale trying to force his own flesh and spirit into conformity with Puritan social ideology, and Hester dreaming of a day when that ideology might be changed. Rowe's view of Hester's hopes that relations between men and women might be redefined has some oddly sexist implications: "The dream that Hester clings to is tantamount to the transformation of humanity itself. It seeks to transcend the limitations, not only of Puritan Boston or of the society of Hawthorne's own day, but those which any social order must impose if it is to provide stability for human nature as it is, rather than as we may wish it to be" (28). The complete stifling of sexuality hardly seems essential to social stabüity. Yet Rowe makes the paradigm fit, pointing out that "what we have seen of human nature in this book would suggest that however conceptualized, the The Henry James Review 11 (1990): 149-51 © 1990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 150 The Henry James Review American dream of social perfection is defeated precisely by the 'faUen' nature of the dreamers" (44). After returning to Boston, Hester must discount the evidence of her own experience in order to cling to her vision. Huckleberry Finn must, as Rowe explains, do the same. Rowe's view of an ending which has traditionaUy been seen as problematic is indeed unequivocal: "It is as if Mark Twain were saying: Only in a society of wilting victims and fools could such a bogus ending be believed" (50). Huck's idyU on the river with Jim, interrupted by numerous landings...