Unifying Structures in Mosses from an Old Manse

UNIFYING STRUCTURES IN MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE Stephen Adams* Discussing coherence and order in Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, J. Donald Crowley points out that "almost every other collection he even thought about he cast in terms of some principle of unity."1 Hawthorne suggests that he conceived of Mossesfrom an Old Manse as a unified whole in the preface or "frame-work" to it, "The Old Manse." He does not, however, state overtly the principle of unity or the logic behind the order of the various stories and sketches. Instead, he juxtaposes his materials without comment, involving the reader in the process of discovering and perhaps even creating order in them. Mosses thus resembles the fountain in the Hall of Fantasy "in which the imaginative beholder may discern what form he will."2 Recurrent images and themes related to the myth of Eden provide one source of structure for Mosses. References to Adam and Eve, paradise, gardens, Original Sin, apples, snakes appear regularly throughout the book. Together, these references suggest an underlying, controlling quest for a new Eden, which Hawthorne envisions not as a place or state of being but as acts of sympathetic, imaginative perception which free man from the burden of the past and reconcile him to complex earthly life. In addition to the temporal structure provided by recurrent images and the quest motif, a symmetrical spatial pattern can be observed in the preface and twenty-five sketches and tales that constitute Mosses.3 The work is divided into two volumes. "The New Adam and Eve" is physically and thematically the central piece, and it serves as a preface to the second volume. Figure 1 presents one way of dividing the contents of Mosses into segments. Connecting lines indicate parallels and contrasts that unite the pieces in a network of relationships; the tales and sketches shed light on each other and confront the reader with multiple points of view. In the first group, for example, both "The Birth-mark" and "Mrs. Bullfrog" concern the perception of imperfection in women, but the theme is treated as tragedy in the former and as comedy or farce in the latter. At the center of the section framed by "Stephen Adams is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. 148Stephen Adams these tales is "Young Goodman Brown," which also concerns a man's encounter with apparent corruption in his wife and which explores the related themes of a loss of Eden and a failure to mature—themes which unify the first set of five stories. Between the two groups of five pieces in each volume, Hawthorne places sketches that might at first seem unsuited for this emphatic central position. "Fire-Worship" and "Buds and Bird-Voices," for example, may not represent Hawthorne's most powerful writing, but they do summarize crucial themes in Volume I and provide a transition between the two larger groups. Mosses begins with a long introductory sketch, "The Old Manse." In a letter to Evert Duyckinck about his progress on the piece, Hawthorne wrote, "it was my purpose to construct a sort of framework , in this new story, for the series of stories already published."4 As a frame constructed only after all else had been finished, "The Old Manse" introduces and links the major images and themes of Mosses. It also helps unify the work through its references to many of the stories that follow. Thus, the discussion of the "abomination of the air-tight stove" (p. 28) looks forward to "Fire-Worship," and the "Enchanted Ground through which the pilgrim traveled on his way to the Celestial City" (p. 28) anticipates "The Celestial Rail-road." More often the connection between the preface and the subsequent stories is less direct, as with the glimpse of the Indian village (p. 11), which anticipates the genocidal war in the background of "Roger Malvin's Burial," and the sketch of the remorseful youth (p. 10) who resembles Reuben Bourne. Also, the "huge garret stored . . . with lumber that each generation has left behind it" (p. 16) forms one side of the frame that is completed at the end of Mosses with the upstairs assemblage...