Agnostic Tensions in Hawthorne's Short Stories

Herman Melville, in his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, remarks its “blackness, ten times black,” as well as Hawthorne’s tendency to tell the truth “covertly, and by snatches.”¹ For modern readers, this early appreciation has resonated. Throughout his fiction Hawthorne, we know, was preoccupied with the unconfessed sin in the minister’s breast, the selfishness underlying the philanthropist’s schemes, the haunted house encompassing the sweet shop. His generally pessimistic take on the world—never much offset by the breezier passages and sketches with which he leavened his oeuvre—is doubtless part of what Melville had in mind. In a much cited passage he holds that Hawthorne’s blackness “derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations . . . no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free” (“MM,” 243). The insight points up Hawthorne’s divergence from the more optative (Emerson) and sentimental (Longfellow) writers he lived among and neatly plumbs such tales as “Egotism; or, The Bosom-Serpent” and “Earth’s Holocaust,” the second of which explicitly suggests that the heart is the source of evil. But Melville’s elaboration doesn’t completely satisfy. For one thing, Hawthorne’s Calvinistic strain isn’t especially “covert.” He often tempers it with a wry humor (as in “Earth’s Holocaust”), but he doesn’t disguise it. Moreover, although Calvinism was a gloomy religion, it was not downright black. A just God, it presumed, was in his Heaven and had taken the trouble to redeem his chosen, even if one’s membership in that select company was moot. No, as the remainder of his review suggests, Melville was fascinated by something less conventional in the tales—and far less Calvinistic—than their chagrin over human fallibility.

Perhaps out of respect for Hawthorne’s discretion, Melville seems reluctant to be more explicit about the blackness he identifies, but eventually he associates what he admires in the tales with sentiments uttered by Shakespeare’s most nihilistic characters—Timon, Iago, Lear. He singles out “Young Goodman Brown” as the preeminent illustration of the blackness to which the stories he has already lauded contribute “the mere occasional shadow” (“MM,” 244). He cites this passage: “‘Faith!’ shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and desperation; and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying—‘Faith! Faith!’ as if bewildered wretches were seeking her all through the wilderness” (251). The writer of Moby-Dick, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, and The Confidence-Man surely saw in Hawthorne a fellow skeptic,² a “seeker, not a finder” (250), a writer of agnostic fictions that (as Melville wrote in a letter to Hawthorne) said “NO! in thunder” to more than the heady affirmations of Transcendentalist and Whig.³ “This black conceit,” says Melville, “pervades him, through and through. . . . [E]ven his bright gildings but fringe, and play upon the edges of thunder-clouds” (243). The image echoes the story Melville praises alongside “Young Goodman Brown,” “A Select Party,” which for all its fanciful charm—its setting is a mansion in the clouds—burlesques the Heaven of the Elect.⁴

Yet Hawthorne’s tales—with the major exception of “Young Goodman Brown,” which Marius Bewley has termed “one of the most deeply agnostic works of art in existence”—have not typically been seen to display so pervasive a vein of religious skepticism as Melville seems to have discerned.⁵ Yes, “Roger Malvin’s Burial” is understood to be a story of one generation’s sins visited remorselessly upon the next; yes, Father Hooper in “The Minister’s Black Veil” goes to his grave wearing a symbol of guilt and alienation that no gospel has been able to mitigate. The brooding New England tenor of many of the stories, in short, is well appreciated, much as their historical ironies are appreciated, as the mark of a writer whose genius lay in scrutinizing rather than celebrating nativist themes and cultural...