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CHRISTOPHER F. PACKARD Who's Laughing Now? Sentimental Readers and Authorial Revenge in "Alice Doane's Appeal" Strange laughter h au NTs Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction from his earliest works to his last, accounting for some of the most macabre scenes in American literature. There is something at once hotrifying and recognizable about Robin Molineux's "shout of laughter ," fot example, when he finally hails his esteemed kinsman "in tarand -feathery dignity" being run out of town by a riotous mob.1 Mirth mixed with horror, the predatory chuckle of tavern toughs, the saucy merriment in a prostitute's eye, distant peals of "wild and confused laughter"—"My Kinsman, Major Molineux" presents a veritable symphony of hoots, howls, tittets and jeers.2 Few readers easily forget Pearl's strangely derisive, mocking laughter —half-impish, half-innocent—and the discomfort it causes Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter. If there is a coded message in these ambiguous outbursts of laughter, it reaches into the core of Hawthorne's complexity. Ever since Melville identified the "blackness" behind the "Indian-summer sunlight" of Hawthorne's tales, readers have been intrigued by their quiet mixture ofgeniality and perversity.3 This fascination , too, deserves attention because it says something about why, as Lauren Berlant put it, we revere Hawthorne as a national symbol of the past (33). Readers of "Alice Doane's Appeal" find two tales, one enclosing the Arizona Quarter^ Volume 52, Number 2, Summer 1996 Copyright © 1996 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 Christopher F. Packard other in a deliberately linked framework of simultaneous narratives. The two tales are connected, I argue, by a network of natural and supernatural laughter. The "inner" tale of Puritans and wizards, set in 1692, is a lurid moral set-piece of the kind familiar to magazine readers of the 1830s. Alice Doane's appeal is her purity, and it is threatened by a rogue; her brothet murders the villain (his evil twin); a mysterious wizard haunts a midnight graveyard where Alice's "stain" is magically removed through supernatural means. These are standard conventions of the Gothic genre, a favorite of Hawthorne's in his youth and a staple ofcertain English and American periodicals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.4 The "outer" story frames the "inner" tale of Alice's fall from purity and het supernatural redemption. A jaded writer (clearly an autobiographical figure) reads the "inner" tale aloud as his two young companions , both Salem citizens and avid magazine readers, listen and respond . Their uncertain laughter, evoked when they recognize the dark themes ofthe "inner" tale, reveals the relationship between the two audience members and the storyteller who reads to them. The "outer" tale is an account of Hawthorne's imagined relation to his real readers. In other words, the audience's response, captured on the page, is Hawthorne 's attempt to instruct us how to read his fiction. Ifwe laugh at the horror in the story, as do the two young women in "Alice Doane's Appeal ," then the author will force us to admit the pain that accompanies our mirth. "Alice Doane's Appeal" was one of the few tales Hawthorne left out of Twice-Toid Tales, Mosses from an Old Manse, and The Snow-Image, his three collections of previously-published magazine pieces. After its anonymous appearance in the 1835 Token, "Alice Doane's Appeal" was presumably never read until George Lathrop included it in the 1883 collection of his father-in-law's works. If omitting "Alice Doane's Appeal " from his collections suggests that Hawthorne considered it a failure , then twentieth-century critics have followed his example.5 The stotyteller in the tale, however, boasts that the story he is about to read aloud is an example ofhis most passionate writing. He says it is "one of a series written years ago, when my pen, now sluggish and perhaps feeble , because I have not much to hope or fear, was driven by a more passionate impulse within, than I am fated to feel again" (207). Other tales from this "passionate" series, he explains, were published in the Token, "Aíice Doane's Appeal" but he was unable...

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