Fire, Flutter, Fall, and Scatter: A Structure in the Epiphanies of Hawthorne's Tales

Abstract

����� ��� Lyrical epiphanies are typically the creative center, the imaginative climax, of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales. But although his imagery has been clarified in various ways, no one has yet attempted to define a pattern that can unite Hawthorne’s focal visionary moments and show its implications. 1 Hawthorne’s epiphany pattern shows a form and dynamism of experience deeply rooted in this prose poet’s psyche. 2 My method of analysis, a systematized, supplemented refashioning of Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of elemental reverie (to be explained shortly), focuses on the form of the epiphanic experience as given in the texts of the tales. That formal structure, though richly varied, can be summed up as a cluster of four image-motifs: fire, flutter, fall, and scatter. It is a “descendental” moment of passionate, though always ambivalent, 3 fullness yielding to sudden disintegration. With an inevitability suggesting unconscious origins, this vivid pattern of oneiric force repeatedly overwhelms, first with joy and then with disillusionment, Hawthorne’s habitual, conscious concern with subtle moral distinctions. A Hawthorne epiphany, involving a scenario of startling and rapid collapse, brings in the motif cluster with a dreamlike insistence; the image pattern can arise apropos of nearly anything, and it may be seen by anyone, regardless of supposed moral standing. The narrator-persona may experience it, or else a major or minor character or a group or crowd. Mad scientist or guileless merrymaker, devoted craftsman or Faustian criminal—ministering maiden, ambitious youth, royalist or rebel—any perceiver or imaginer may see, undergo, or precipitate the fall and scattering. Yet the “descendentalism” of Hawthorne’s epiphanic imagining does not show a merely dismissive response to our imaginative impulse to “transcend.” Hawthorne may at first appear simply to rebut Emerson’s Transcendentalist efforts to posit a trustworthy ideal or guiding principle (oversoul, spiritual laws, self-reliance): he certainly counters this uplifting tendency with a contrasting, downward-minded dualism. But without the initial creative-destructive or euphoric-ominous energy