"The Celestial Railroad" as Dream-Tale

Abstract

rizes religious modernism, in both its Transcendental and Unitarian forms, for lack of recognition of evil and for substitution of an easy way to salvation in place of the arduous journey envisioned by Bunyan.' It is commonly praised for the sharp-edged irony of its critique of the times, yet ranked among Hawthorne's less imaginative works. Celestial Railroad is considered not to require close examination, because the transparency of allegory renders such scrutiny unnecessary. Its faultsnotably the weakness of the dream ending-are held to be equally obvious. Franklin B. Newman has summed up prevailing critical opinion by citing Matthiessen's stricture as the fatal reservation about the tale's merit: However, as Matthiessen points out, Hawthorne's ending to the story does not succeed in transforming the whole into a vision, and I think that most critics would now agree that Celestial Railroad simply employs, rather crudely, the device of awaking from a dream to allow the author to escape from the urgency of the situation. 2 Read as allegory, the story is indeed finally self-defeating. But Hawthorne's decision not to follow allegory's convention of use of dream for an authentic vision invites consideration of a new reading of Celestial Railroad. The story is ironic as a dream-tale, not a latter-day Pilgrim's Progress, and its irony is internally consistent rather than selfdefeating. This use of dream is also consistent with Hawthorne's frequent employment of dream elsewhere in his fiction and his preoccupation with