Major Molineux Research Articles

Missing the Boat: Narrative Artistry in Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and James’s The Ambassadors

Might the pre-revolutionary setting of Boston, as depicted in Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” relate to high-society Paris in James’s The Ambassadors? What do the nepotistic outlooks of Robin Molineux and Lambert Strether have in common? How does the narrative technique of Hawthorne’s tale anticipate the artistry of one of James’s most complex narratives, and in what manner does James go beyond his predecessor in refining the reflector-narrator technique? The magnitude and significance of such concerns—although in Hawthorne’s tale, historically momentous; in James’s narrative, highly personal—stand to enhance understanding of how James enhanced the narrative technique of “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” in dramatic renderings of apperceptive consciousness and post-factum narrative speculation.

Hawthorne’s Histories, Hawthorne’s World: From Salem to Somewhere Else

Hawthorne’s Histories, Hawthorne’s World: From Salem to Somewhere Else

Along the Wayside, Fall 2022

Along the Wayside, Fall 2022

In Memoriam: Tribute to Rita K. Gollin (1928–2022)

In Memoriam: Tribute to Rita K. Gollin (1928–2022)

William Molyneux’s Problem and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” in relation to a thought experiment proposed by William Molyneux, who questioned whether a blind man, if given the ability to see, could identify an object by sight that he had known by touch. Molyneux asserted that the man would not recognize the item because nothing in his past had equipped him for the task, and this position reflects the contours of Hawthorne’s narrative. The protagonist, Robin, cannot accurately process events due to the fact that the knowledge gleaned from earlier experiences does not correlate to his present circumstances. This article connects the limitations of Robin’s perceptions to political tensions as his worldview centers on the prominence of Major Molineux, a colonial administrator, and the youth cannot grasp the implications of sensory evidence that does not conform to these suppositions. Through his experiences in his new environment, however, Robin develops the empirical foundation necessary to progress from merely perceiving phenomenon to understanding their broader implications. This development highlights the need to transcend prescriptive categories of thought to gain a clearer conception of reality.

From Aeneas to the Shaman: My Kinsman, Major Molineux and the Descent into the Underworld of the American Dream

The article focuses on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story My Kinsman, Major Molineux (1832) and aims at demonstrating how the journey undertaken by his young character Robin constitutes a re-elaboration of the classic theme of the catabasis within the mid-nineteenth century American cultural context. Robin, the protagonist of a tale on the foundation of the United States, is engaged in an epic quest which drives him into the underworld of a society where the values of freedom, equality, and happiness are inter-mingled with corruption, violence and wicked patriotism. At the end of his adventure, Hawthorne’s hero joins a violent masquerade that seems to anticipate the ‘patriots’ attack on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021.

A Lucid Portrayal of Ambiguity: Locating Meaning in Hawthorne's 'My Kinsman, Major Molineux'

A Lucid Portrayal of Ambiguity: Locating Meaning in Hawthorne's 'My Kinsman, Major Molineux'

Outlandish Apocalyptics and Creaturely Life in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’

This article offers an analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story ‘My kinsman, Major Molineux’ in terms of Frank Kermode’s characterization of modern apocalypse. In Kermode’s optic, the transformation of apocalyptic narratives in modernity reflects a generalized move towards immanence, making them inherently self-falsificatory. The analysis highlights this double logic (immanence and self-falsification) in Hawthorne’s tale by indicating how it, on the one hand, sets up a series of contrasts between the protagonist Robin and the townspeople he meets during his search for his kinsman Molineux, and, on the other, highlights the self-falsificatory nature of the post-revolutionary social order by showing how it copies the legitimating rituals of the old regime. By drawing attention to this twofold dynamic of separation and self-alienation, the article complicates an established perspective in Hawthorne scholarship that approaches the tale as a parable of the young America. Rather than merely highlighting the transition from a monarchical system of entitlement to a voluntaristic republican order, Hawthorne’s ‘Molineux’ offers an astute reflection on how the symbolism of the former – what Eric Santner refers to as the ‘royal remains’ – survives in the latter.

Hawthorne's Kantian Turn in “My Visit to Niagara” and Captain Hall'sTravels in North America

During the summer of 1832, while preparing for a sightseeing tour through New England and northern New York, Nathaniel Hawthorne revealed his motivation in a letter to Franklin Pierce: "I am very desirous of making this journey on account of a book by which I intend to acquire an (undoubtedly) immense literary reputation" (15:224). Hawthorne's ironically inflated expression of ambition underscores his limited success to that point, particularly when compared to the early political victories of Pierce, his college friend. The young Hawthorne's first short story collection, Twice-Told Tales, would not appear for another five years, and his first novel, Fanshawe (1828), had been issued anonymously and would remain unacknowledged. Two other early projects, "Seven Tales of My Native Land" and "Provincial Tales," yielded only excerpts placed in periodicals. (1) But those excerpts, along with other early pieces, display features Hawthorne's readers would find appealing throughout his career, such as gothic stylistic qualities and the use of historical topics. Thus, for example, "The Wives of the Dead," "Roger Malvin's Burial," and "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," which are among the dozen or so short stories predating his 1832 travels, offer foreboding treatments of colonial-era events, subject matter an obscure fiction writer might have hoped would generate a broader readership and the attention of literary nationalists. If, as Nina Baym has maintained, early nineteenth-century literary nationalists understood their mission to be the expression of "the special virtues of the American mind in literary form" (18), then Hawthorne's attempt in 1832 to expand his range with domestic travel narratives makes sense in light of his ambition. Evidence of Hawthorne's journey is scant: aside from the anticipatory letter to Pierce, there is one to his mother from Vermont as well as a certificate attesting to his having "passed behind the Great Falling Sheet of Water to Termination Rock" at Niagara Falls on September 28, 1832 (Mellow 51). Although the fear of cholera likely delayed his departure and altered his itinerary--1832 was an epidemic year--Hawthorne traveled more or less as planned. He wrote sketches based on these travels, and he composed a manuscript that interspersed the sketches with tales. This manuscript, which he called "The Story Teller," was never published intact and has not survived. Readers therefore can only speculate regarding the sequence of the works comprising the intended volume as well as its precise contents. (2) Nevertheless, we know that the travel sketches culminate with "My Visit to Niagara," which appeared in the February 1835 issue of New-England Magazine and was never republished while Hawthorne was alive. The sketch warrants scholarly attention for two interrelated reasons. The first is its representation of the sublime: it marks a departure from earlier responses to nature in "The Story Teller," and, in terms of Hawthorne's development, it dramatizes the encounter with the sublime as a basis for pervasive uncertainty. Until this time, intellectual or perceptual uncertainty accompanied by emotional anxiety had appeared only as a stylistic device in some of his more gothic tales. Uncertainty would evolve, however, into a key component of Hawthorne's aesthetics, psychology, and ethics. The second noteworthy feature is the textual source of Hawthorne's approach to the sublime in "My Visit to Niagara," for the sketch derives language, imagery, dramatic structure, and ideas from Basil Hall's Travels in North America, a three-volume narrative by the former British sea captain first published in 1829. Hawthorne could have forgotten to include "My Visit to Niagara" in collections of tales and sketches published during his lifetime, but his indebtedness to Hall's Travels may well have mattered to him. Given Hawthorne's willingness to suppress knowledge of his authorship of Fanshawe, one cannot assume he simply did not recall that the sketch existed. …

The Founders: Can Times Past Meet Times Present?

The Founders: Can Times Past Meet Times Present? Cushing Strout (bio) The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History by Jill Lepore (Princeton University Press, 2010. 224 pages. $19.95) Jill Lepore is a staff writer for the New Yorker and a Harvard professor of American history. Her combination of scholarship and lively wit is on view in The Whites of Their Eyes. It is an odd title, however, as it derives from Israel Putnam’s alleged command to his troops in the Battle of Bunker Hill. It has nothing to do with the tea-dumping action of 1773. It is even odder that her keenest historical look is not at the tea-party action of 1773 but rather at the current political tea party, “which had very little to do with anything that happened in the 1770s.” For her the actual tea party “wasn’t such a big deal” after all, and was not even called the tea party in print until 1834. In her book the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Boston Massacre are much more influential, going by her measure of how soon and how often the events were commemorated. [End Page xxx] To give up the tea-party movement of 1773, however, to the current right-wing polemicists would be a strategic and historical error. She is not only writing her own historian’s version of the colonial struggle for independence but also is writing a history of the modern use of the tea-party image on behalf of “originalism, evangelicalism, and heritage tourism,” all of which amount to “a variety of fundamentalism.” Structurally this complexity requires her to shuttle back and forth between the eighteenth century and modern times, especially since the bicentennial, when it was clear there was no consensus on how to celebrate it. Lepore sees the writing of history as intrinsically controversial and contentious: “It advances by debate.” But, in a time dominated by what Richard Hofstadter rightly calls a conspiratorial and paranoid style of political rhetoric, there is not the mutual respect and common ground that could make debate either possible or useful. Lepore is more sensitive to literary history than most social historians, but even she does not mention Hawthorne’s great short story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832), published two years before George R. T. Hewes’s A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party, the first time that name was mentioned in print. Hawthorne’s story exemplifies his artistic method of creating a “neutral territory” in which the actual and the imaginary meet and are influenced by each other. Young Robin is swept up in the tea-party action and finds a path to independence, no longer dependent on his Tory uncle, who is tarred and feathered by a mob. Hawthorne’s surreal mode of narration, mixing fact and fiction, has allowed his story to transcend its time and attract much attention from modern critics. The experience of marriage is common to our time and the American Revolution, though the frequency of the divorce rate is not. William Gibson’s docudrama, American Primitive (1972), which stages a public reading of the wartime letters between John and Abigail Adams, marks both the difference and the connection. It is a drama of enforced separation, celebrating their sober civic fidelity to the Revolution and their sustained tender love for each other under stressful circumstances. Lepore is wise to see that history is not just a matter of scholarly analysis: “it has a civic role to play.” Our nation born out of revolution looks for something stable and has a constitution that is meant to hold us together at a more profound level than baseball and Coca-Cola. “No history can easily or always bear that weight,” as she says, feeling it on herself. Historians “mocked the Bicentennial as schlock” but didn’t “offer a story to a nation that needed one.” My colleague Michael Kammen in A Season of Youth (1978) writes extensively about uses of the Revolution by Americans. He demystifies much that has been made out of the Revolution, particularly the common metaphor of a national growing up, yet in the...

“More Than a Parchment Three-Pence”: Crises of Value in Hawthorne's “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”

In “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” Robin enters Boston after negotiating the cost of a ferry ride across the Charles River, a negotiation complicated by the precipitous depreciation of the provincial bill he carries. His night in Boston therefore unfolds under the volatile sign of paper money. The story is one of several Hawthorne works to join the paper-gold debate of the nineteenth century, and it historicizes that debate with persistent allusions to related eighteenth-century currency disputes. The story's famous ambivalence springs in part from Hawthorne's cognizance of a historical irony: in the nineteenth century, Jacksonian Democrats attacked paper money as the instrument of a neoaristocratic moneyed power; in the eighteenth century, royalists stigmatized it as the instrument of the “Popular orDemocratickPart of the Constitution.” The story is informed by the discomfiting fact that the eighteenth-century Tory and the nineteenth-century Democrat equally privileged gold over paper.

The Hawthorne Aspect of T. S. Eliot's Coriolan

Allusion is generally understood as a textual maneuver that calls into play remembered fragments and transfigured motifs in literature. While pursuing an allusive trail, readers sometimes neglect to consider the detours, certain errant trips a narrative prompts them to make in memory. This essay reads T. S. Eliot's Coriolan fragments alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne's ‘‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux,’’ both texts featuring young men's errancy and rebellion leading to their respective realities of life. On an allusive trail a reader is a quester; allegory aligns readers and characters in fiction in their common pursuit for the meanings they seek. While parallels, correspondences, and repetitions are remarkable, readers are not always obliged to seek the arresting ground of an empirical ‘‘source.’’ The reading here shows how Eliot appears to have reworked a large Hawthornian paradigm involving American colonial history and an individual American's progress in life. It illustrates further how allusion is both a tribute to tradition and a repudiation of its authority, a detail we remark both in Robin and the ‘‘hero’’ of Coriolan fragments. Both Eliot and Hawthorne before him have been, therefore, sensitive to the burden of paternal inheritance, an aspect Eliot's allusive practice in particular makes clear when he draws upon Hawthorne. Eliot's ‘‘Hawthorne aspect’’ thus enables us to see for once the advantage of looking away from a professed allusive lead in the title (Shakespeare's Coriolanus) but towards another paternal link the poet appears to have suppressed (Hawthorne's American tale).

Democratic Terror in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and “The Man of the Crowd”

Democratic Terror in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and “The Man of the Crowd”

Humor's Role in Imagining America: Ebenezer Cook's The Sot-Weed Factor

In stark contrast to the serious religious writings of the New England Puritans, Ebenezer Cook's poem The Sot-Weed Factor; or, a Voyage to Maryland portrays a colonial America full of con artists, rambunctious lawyers, and drunken planters. The narrator is an English tobacco factor who is swindled by these unscrupulous colonists. The poem becomes a form of revenge he hurls insults and curses, but, several critics have argued, the humor in the poem is two-fold. While the factor points out the shortcomings of the colonists, he reveals himself to be a buffoon unable to negotiate life in the New World. Both audiences for the poem, English citizens and colonists, would then find it humorous, J. A. Leo Lemay has pointed out, the English citizens laughing at the portrayal of colonists uncivilized and the colonists laughing at the British factor's ineptitude. The dual satire, however, does more than shrewdly appeal to two audiences. In this essay I will investigate humor's role in the process of imagining America a community separate from the motherland of Britain. Humorous writings in general and Cook's poem in particular have received little attention related to their role in the process of nationalism. (1) Their move is not admittedly the bold declaration of a on a hill set apart from England, but the humor works by subtly separating British from colonists, outsiders from insiders. As the factor insults the colonists, he distances himself from them, thus taking on the role of the outsider. In the dual satire, the colonists become insiders who perceive the humor in the factor's inability to adapt to life in America. The humor of the poem forms an imagined American community by uniting colonists who get the New World jokes. The factor describes his entrance into the New World unwanted and treacherous. He claims that he was Condemn'd by Fate to way-ward Curse (1) and was forced my Native Soil to fly, / And the Old World must bid good-buy (6-7). In describing his unwelcome journey from England to America, the factor establishes at the very beginning of the poem the important distinction between the Old World he left with heavy heart and the New World he enters unwillingly. He immediately takes on the role of the outsider he betrays his ignorance of the colonial experience. This entrance into the New World is paralleled in literary history by the character of Robin in Hawthorne's short story, My Kinsman, Major Molineux. Hawthorne's story is set later in colonial history and is more overtly concerned the distinction between Old World and New, but the positions of the factor and Robin are similar. (2) Both are unable to read the culture around them and so unwittingly become the objects of humor. Robin has come to the a young man expecting to get ahead in life through his wealthy uncle. We are told he enters the as if he were entering London city but instead finds the turbulence of colonial rebellion. Unaware of the events taking place, he tries to get directions to his uncle's house by asking the various citizens he meets, Whereabouts is the dwelling of my kinsman, Major Molineux? Instead of receiving a direct answer to his seemingly innocent question, he is repeatedly laughed at and even accused of being a runaway. The sot-weed factor of Cook's poem likewise is accused of being a runaway when the locals do not recognize him. He also betrays confusion about his surroundings when he, for example, mistakes the sound of cows for the howling of wolves and panics. Although he maintains a superior attitude, he is lost Robin entering the New World. Our factor, however, differs from the later outsider of Hawthorne's story in one dramatic aspect: while Robin expects the people he meets to treat him an equal and is shocked by being targeted an outsider, the factor does not recognize the colonists equals. In fact, the factor goes to great lengths in his satire to portray the colonists the Other because in his eyes they have deviated so drastically from their English cultural roots that they are no longer even remotely related to him. …

Hawthorne's my Kinsman, Major Molineux

This essay provides an interpretation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story 'My Kinsman, Major Molineux.' It argues that in this story Hawthorne is presenting a tale of social transformation from the pre-modern to the modern society in the form of the protagonist Robin's experiences on coming from the backwoods to the city. Here Robin sees things he has never seen before and is transformed in terms of his religious attitudes as well as in terms of his simple individual,rural independence. Robin ends up joining the urban mob in its humiliation of the gentleman figure of Major Molineux. The new urban world of the 19th Century is sympathetic neither to rural simplicty nor to gentlemanly dignity.

Narratives of Socialization: Literacy in the Short Story

The particularity that James Boyd White posits for law and rhetoric holds true in amended fashion for fiction as well: fiction revels in specificity, in particular places and characters that are constructed out of the language of a given place and time. All fiction historicizes problems of socialization, including literacy; it dramatizes conflicts between characters from specific language communities and highlights differences between dialects and usage. With its compact form, the short story tells a particular kind of narrative, a of arrested that ends with characters who, having glimpsed new language and cultural possibilities, find their own speech inadequate and the new speech problematic. In the end, these characters remain suspended between languages; in such endings, short fiction freezes or crystallizes the problem of literacy. By studying these stories, we can learn much, for they tell us much about historical attitudes toward and, by comparison, much about our own. Thus, literary texts, particularly short stories, can provide forums for studies of literacy, and just as importantly, the study of can inform our readings of literary texts. Nathaniel Hawthorne's My Kinsman, Major Molineux tells of a young man's moral and psychological initiation into the adult world of sexuality and violence. It also recounts the conflicts between the American colonists and the British government and records the shift from a rural to an urban center (see Bremer; Cohen; Duban; Gross; Smith; Stott). But for this study, I want to focus on My Kinsman as a story that defines Robin's through the subject of language. As such it is what I would call a narrative of socialization or literacy narrative: a fiction that dramatizes the collision between competing discourse communities, their language conventions, and their inherent social logics, a fiction that invites us to analyze constructed characters as they negotiate and appropriate various discourses and world views. Throughout My Kinsman, Major Molineux, the protagonist Robin misinterprets the voices and values around him and articulates his experiences in the

Equivocal Endings in Classic American Novels (review)

Joyce A. Rowe. Equivocal Endings in Classic American Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1988. 161 pp. $29.95. Joyce A. Rowe has given us a new view of famUiar works for which we aU might weU be grateful. Rowe re-examines the problematical endings of several novels at the core of the American canon: The Scarlet Letter, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Ambassadors, and The Great Gatsby. Describing the relation between ending and narrative as "troubling," Rowe suggests that the endings of these four classics "are equivocal in a special thematic sense, as they simultaneously promote and deny a visionary ambition already defeated in the body of the work . . . they are . . . deliberately evasive, eluding those truths of experience, of both self and world, which the preceding narrative has been at pains to estabüsh" (1). Each of the four protagonists is a visionary, and each is "defeated, as much by his or her own limitations as by the society at hand" (2), yet in the end each refuses to face those limitations, choosing instead the classic American "pattern of Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown at the Devil's altar—at the moment of crisis they tum away" (7), asserting vision over reality. Rowe Ulustrates the pattern of equivocal endings with a reading of Hawthorne 's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," in which Hawthorne examines the "fundamental analogy between the forces that shape individual being and those that move history onward" (14). Like die young nation, which hopes to recreate society after sundering its ties to its own past, and which must deny the nature of revolution itself in order to enjoy the myth of "America," Robin must stiU, after seeing revolution as mob cruelty and after glimpsing his own disturbing wiUingness to join in the ridiculing of Major Molineux, heed tiie "friendly" voice in his ear, which Rowe identifies as the voice of Franklin insisting on beneficent self-reUance as an American model. The mob's violence and Robin's laughter establish reaUty, which Robin denies by gratefuUy accepting the Franklinian myth (soon to be transmuted into Emersonian myth). According to Rowe, this pattern repeats itself in The Scarlet Letter, in which each of the major characters, "engrossed in a self-preoccupation so acute that for seven years they are barely aware of one another's presence," exacerbates his or her suffering through a "mutual isolation which in Hawthorne's day could already be recognized as the dark twin of self-reliant individualism" (28). Hawdiorne's distrust of such isolation resulted in characters who, as their natures dictate, stray either inward or outward, Dimmesdale trying to force his own flesh and spirit into conformity with Puritan social ideology, and Hester dreaming of a day when that ideology might be changed. Rowe's view of Hester's hopes that relations between men and women might be redefined has some oddly sexist implications: "The dream that Hester clings to is tantamount to the transformation of humanity itself. It seeks to transcend the limitations, not only of Puritan Boston or of the society of Hawthorne's own day, but those which any social order must impose if it is to provide stability for human nature as it is, rather than as we may wish it to be" (28). The complete stifling of sexuality hardly seems essential to social stabüity. Yet Rowe makes the paradigm fit, pointing out that "what we have seen of human nature in this book would suggest that however conceptualized, the The Henry James Review 11 (1990): 149-51 © 1990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 150 The Henry James Review American dream of social perfection is defeated precisely by the 'faUen' nature of the dreamers" (44). After returning to Boston, Hester must discount the evidence of her own experience in order to cling to her vision. Huckleberry Finn must, as Rowe explains, do the same. Rowe's view of an ending which has traditionaUy been seen as problematic is indeed unequivocal: "It is as if Mark Twain were saying: Only in a society of wilting victims and fools could such a bogus ending be believed" (50). Huck's idyU on the river with Jim, interrupted by numerous landings...

The Pageantry of Revolt in "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"

The Pageantry of Revolt in "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"

Equivocal endings in classic American novels: The scarlet letter, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The ambassadors, The great Gatsby

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Nathaniel Hawthorne: 'My Kinsman, Major Molineux': the several voices of independence 2. Bleak dreams: restriction and aspiration in The Scarlet Letter 3. Mark Twain's great evasion: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 4. Strether unbounded: the selective vision of Henry James's Ambassador 5. Closing the circle: The Great Gatsby Conclusion: Moby-Dick and our problem with history Notes Index.

Robins and Robinarchs in "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"

Robins and Robinarchs in "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"