Hawthorne's "Canterbury Pilgrims": Theme and Structure

Abstract

IF a group of the world's embittered failures on their way to renounce the world by entering the only form of monastic life afforded by nineteenth-century Protestant New England, a Shaker community, were to meet a young Shaker couple leaving the community to try life and love together, and if these disillusioned travelers were to tell the stories of their failures, what would the effect be? Would their revelations of the suffering, the sordidness, and the tragedy of the world confirm the ascetic and other-worldly Shaker doctrines? Would the young lovers, disillusioned of their youthful hopes, return to that sanctuary from the world's desires and pressures in which they had been reared? Is the world, in short, really such that we should either renounce it or adopt an attitude of tragic resignation? Hawthorne's Canterbury Pilgrims, which starts with this situation and implies these questions, is almost never mentioned and has only once been reprinted, yet it not only adds significantly to our understanding of Hawthorne's outlook and sensibility but is in its own right a successful, indeed very nearly a perfect story.' It is not, as the tales sometimes are and are even more often asserted to be, a thin and mechanical allegory; it does not employ a slight frame of narrative as an excuse for an expository substance; it is not confused in its symbolism as Mr. Yvor Winters accuses the later novels of being. It represents Hawthorne at something very like his bestand the fact that it is so little known may suggest that there is more of that best than we have suspected. Like Hawthorne's greatest work, The Scarlet Letter, it is more like a pageant than a drama. As the novel is built around