Short Story Month: 2015--Hawthorne, "Wakefield" and "Young Goodman Brown"

In the Preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Nathaniel Hawthorne notes that the romance form is governed by its own laws, not the laws of facts or external reality; like the gothic-bound tales of Poe, the stories of Hawthorne follow the laws of their own conventions; thus, their rhetoric gives rise to their events rather than the other way around.  However, Hawthorne lamented in the preface to The Blithdale Romance (1852) that in America there is no "Faery Land" with its own rules to govern it so that it can be placed alongside nature as an equal.  What Hawthorne wanted was a realm of reality so much like the real world in its truth and laws that in its "atmosphere of strange enchantment," the inhabitants have a "propriety of their own." 

Without such an atmosphere, Hawthorne complained, the characters of the imagination must "show themselves in the same category as actually living mortals."  Hawthorne's understanding of the tension created when unreal characters must reside in the world of everyday reality is but the flip side of Walpole's realization of the ambiguous effect created when real people are placed in unreal circumstances.

Hyatt Waggoner once said that we have no name for Hawthorne's type of story--not quite allegorical, not quite symbolic, but somewhere in between.  The reason for this undecideability is that Hawthorne's type of story is the result of the merging of the conventions of allegory with the conventions of realism.  Thus, his stories seem to be motivated both by the characters within them, as if they were real, and at the same time determined by the received conventions of the story, of which the characters are only functions.  This tension tends to make Hawthorne's stories, and thus many stories in the nineteenth century, more aware of their own artifice and illusion than the novel, therefore more aware of their own fictional processes. 

A particularly clear example of the self-consciousness created by the combination of generic conventions is Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil," a mixture of the conventions of parable and realism.  Although the minister has a psychological self and much of the story focuses on his suffering, his awareness transforms the veil into a symbolic object and his story into a parable in the root sense of the word, that is, a story that probes essential mystery, as Frank Kermode has suggested about the underlying secret of story and Northrop Frye has argued is the originating source of romance. 

The minister does not hide his face because of some secret past sin, as he might in a realistic story, but rather to objectify his metaphysical awareness that the meaning of sin is separation.  Hawthorne suggests that the moral implication of this awareness is that life must be lived with the realization of separation so that the individual will understand the need to project the self into the other, to penetrate the social veil that everyone wears.  The minster's veil is like Bartleby's wall, for the "madness" of both Bartleby and the minister is that they treat a simple object as if it were its metaphysical meaning.  Such a metaphoric "mistake" is the inevitable result of the combination of realistic conventions with allegorical ones, for significant objects must be, as Mircea Eliade says of the Sacred, both objects in the world and their significance at the same time.

Hawthorne's "Wakefield" is a classic example of how the nineteenth century short story moves from mysterious event motivated by folk-tale wish-fulfillment, as it was in "Rip Van Winkle," to mysterious event motivated by psychologically-inexplicable obsessive behavior.  "Wakefield" is presented as journalistic truth found in a newspaper article.  However, although such an incident is "news" in the Boccaccio sense, a striking and novel event worth telling, Hawthorne is not merely interested in the strangeness of the event, but rather in the puzzle of its motivation.   Typical of the essayistic rumination grafted onto the short story by Irving, Hawthorne's narrator says the story of Wakefield has always excited wonder to his contemplation, and then asks the reader to join him in meditating on the event, "trusting that there will be a pervading spirit and a moral, even should we fail to find them, done up neatly, and condensed into the final sentence."

The usual method for trying to understand the motivation for such an event as Wakefield's departure would be to examine the character of the perpetrator.  However, the character exists only in the brief newspaper report which provides no practical explanations for his behavior.  Although the narrator hypothesizes that someone who would commit such an act must be characterized by a certain sluggishness of intellect, a lack of imagination, and a quiet selfishness, he is no more interested in a practical explanation for Wakefield's escapade than Poe is in a practical explanation for his characters' perverse behavior in such stories as "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Imp of the Perverse."  Like the narrator of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," who ignores a practical explanation for Ichabod Crane's disappearance (his mysterious conversation with Katrina at the end of the party) when a fantastically ambiguous explanation is waiting in the fictional wings, the narrator of "Wakefield" is not interested in practical explanations.  He does not pursue the kind of practical explanations for which the narrator in Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" frantically searches to account for Bartleby's perverse preferences.

In the narrator's reverie, Wakefield is no more, and no less, real than Lamb's dream children.  Thus, practical explanations such as anger at his wife, desire for another woman, or financial problems are not relevant.  The only motivation that the narrator can safely assume is that of impulse, a inexplicable momentary caprice to do something for the perverse pleasure of doing it.  Just as the narrator of "Bartleby" says he would need a folio to write about the class known as scriveners, the narrator says he wishes he had a folio to write instead of a brief article, for then he might "exemplify how an influence beyond our control lays its strong hand on every deed which we do and weaves its consequences into an iron tissue of necessity.  Wakefield is spell-bound."  Indeed, in the fiction that the narrator weaves around the strange and striking "real" event he has read in the newspaper, an act unmotivated by practical or psychologically explicable reasons, Wakefield makes a gesture that freezes him in time much the way Rip's desire to escape freezes him and Ambrose Bierce's character Peyton Farquhar's desire to escape freezes him.

Although "Young Goodman Brown" derives from the allegorical tradition, the tale is not pure allegory, for the event that dominates it--Brown's journey into the forest--seems to be both realistically motivated and story motivated at once.  The discourse is thus a compromise between these two kinds of motivation.  Moreover, Brown himself seems to be both a character typical of allegory, that is, a psychologized archetype, as well as an "as if" character who has his own psychological make up.  The compromise is established when Brown says he must go into the forest this one night of all nights in the year. Since there is no realistic motivation for Brown's journey into the forest, no indication that it is a social custom for everyone to make this journey in his turn, the "cause" of the journey must be  ritual or legend; the journey must be motivated by the nature of the underlying allegorical "story" from which this particular discourse derives.          However, Brown does not act like an allegorical figure, for indeed he "has scruples" about his "present evil purpose" in the forest and even considers turning back  An allegorical figure cannot challenge the code-bound structure of the allegory itself; he can only follow its preestablished demands. Moreover, the fact that the devil resembles Brown and that his words seem to spring from Brown himself suggest Goodman Brown is a realistic figure able to create mental projections, not an allegorical projection himself.

The allegory/realism compromise primarily turns on the most emphatic allegorical reference in the story--the name of Faith.  Although the narrator tells us that she is "aptly named," which might suggest the quality of being faithful rather than an allegorical embodiment of Brown's own Faith, each time her name is invoked in the story, it is a crucial turning point in the story's status as either allegory or realism, or both.  When Brown cries out, "With heaven above and Faith below, I will stand firm against the devil," he hears Faith's voice in the forest. When he cries out, "Faith!" and the forest echoes him, the ribbon comes floating down.  When he cries, "My Faith is gone. . . . There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name," he begins his mad dash through the forest.  

Finally, however, when he speaks to Faith directly, telling her to look up to heaven and resist the wicked one, the allegorical realm of the story is terminated, and Brown is once more back in everyday reality--prompting the narrator to ask the self-reflexive  question, "Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?" Just as Ichabod Crane enters into a realm of story to become a fictional character, so too does Goodman Brown enter into an allegorical realm, which transforms him into the archetypal Puritan.

Is the Short Story an Obsessive, Unnatural Form?

The short story's dependence on tightly unified form rather than mimetic methods has been its central aesthetic characteristic since Poe’s assertion: 'In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency . . . is not to the pre-established design.'"  One of the reasons the short story has always been less respected by critics than the novel is the often tacit, sometimes explicit, suspicion that there is something psychologically or aesthetically "unhealthy" about the form, that it is "obsessed" with an abnormally artificial and intense unity that has a tendency to dissolve the referential material of the form.

The short story's dependence on form, however, is not simply a product of Edgar Allan Poe's obsessive imagination; it is a conventional characteristic deriving from the short story's ancestry in myth and folklore.  As Frederic Jameson reminded us in The Prison House of Language, short stories have a kind of "atemporal and object-like unity in the way they convert existence into a sudden coincidence between two systems:  a resolution of multiplicity into unity, or a fulfillment of a single wish."  Jameson says that for Poe the short story was a way of "surmounting time, of translating a formless temporal succession into a simultaneity which we can grasp and possess."

Poe has always been accused of being indifferent to living, flesh and blood subjects.  W. H. Auden has said there is no place in any of his stories for "the human individual as he actually exists in space and time," that is, as a natural creature and an historical person.  Richard Wilbur in his famous Library of Congress Lecture in 1959 concluded that Poe's aesthetic that "art should repudiate everything human and earthly," was insane.  However, the repudiation of "reality" as defined only as everyday human experience is precisely what myth and folklore--the primal forerunners of the short story--are based on. 

As Mircea Eliade has shown, when primitive human beings divided the world into the two realms of the profane (the world of everyday reality) and the sacred (the world of desire for immanent or transcendent meaning), they had no doubt that true reality lay within the realm of the sacred.  Poe's aesthetic, and thus the dominant aesthetic of the short story, has always been based on this same assumption that the artistic objectification of desire, not the stuff of everyday, is true reality.

Although Poe's immediate background for this perspective lay in the gothic romance popular in Germany and England, the late 18th- and early 19th-century romance with which Poe was familiar differed from its medieval prototype by being a hybrid form that combined the symbolic projective characters of the old romance with the increasingly realistic detail and social reality of the novel. 

The ambiguity and complexity of such early prototypes of the short story as "Young Goodman Brown, "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "Bartleby, the Scrivener" result from the fact that in these stories allegorical characters in a code-bound plot uneasily interrelate with realistic characters in the verisimilitude of a real world.  The sense we have that something "unnatural" motivates Goodman Brown, Roderick Usher, and Bartleby results from the fact that they are allegorical figures who have stepped into an "as-if-real" world created by the techniques of verisimilitude.

Angus Fletcher provides a suggestion about the effect created by such juxtaposition in his discussion of allegory.  He argues that because the allegorical figure is bound to its single role in the story in which it plays a part, if placed in the real world, the character would act like an obsessed person.  For example, a character named "Faith" in an allegory would act as if she were obsessed with faith, since she would be an embodiment of that characteristic and thus could not "think" of anything else.  And indeed, the characters in short fiction often seem motivated by something that they cannot articulate and that those around them cannot easily understand.

The most obvious early examples are those stories by Poe that focus on "the perverse," that obsessive-like behavior that compels someone to act in a way that may go against reason, common sense, even the best interests of the survival of the physical self.  In many of Poe's most important stories, the obsession is presented as behavior that can only be manifested in elliptical or symbolic ways.

Two of Hawthorne's best-known stories--"Wakefield" and "Young Goodman Brown"--also manifest this same mysterious sense of obsessive acts that have no obvious, commonsense motivation.  Goodman Brown alternately acts as if he were an allegorical figure who must make his journey into the forest as an inevitable working out of the preordained mythic story of which he is a part, and as a psychologically complex, realistic character who, although obsessed with his journey, is able to question its wisdom and morality.  In "Wakefield" Hawthorne is not interested in a man who is realistically motivated to leave his wife because he no longer cares for her, but rather a character who gets so entangled in an obsessive act that he can neither explain it nor escape it.

Melville's Bartleby cannot explain why he is compelled to behave as he does either.  He responds to the wall outside his window as if it were not merely a metaphor for the absurdity that confronts him, but rather the absurdity itself and thus, like Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, he responds to the map as if it were the territory, kicks himself loose from the earth, and becomes transformed into a character who no longer can be defined within social, historical, or cultural contexts.  As a result, the reader is caught in an ambivalent situation of not knowing whether to respond to Bartleby as if he is a character who is psychologically obsessed or an allegorical emblem of obsession.  It is typical of the short story that when an obsessed character makes the metaphoric mistake of perceiving a metaphor as real, he or she becomes transformed into a parabolic figure in a fable of his own her own creation.

What is it about the short story that demands this focus on unified form, and what does "obsession" have to do with it?  A brief summary of some of the characteristics of psychological obsession may point to some answers.  Freud says, and most analysts confirm, that obsessive acts are usually performed to escape feelings of dread or anxiety--most often defined as a vague fear of loss of identity.  Rollo May in The Meaning of Anxiety says that Franklin D. Roosevelt's line about "fear of fear itself" is what he means by anxiety, since anxiety results from no discernible cause.  As Roderick Usher says about his struggle with the grim fantasy FEAR, he has no abhorrence of danger, "except in its absolute effect--in terror."  Analysts suggest that since anxiety cannot be dealt with directly because its sources are usually unknown, the individual develops defenses against it, of which the obsessive defense is the most common.

Ritual is one of the most characteristic obsessive means by which one defends against anxiety, for the ritual act is a symbolic enactment to simulate command of that for which the personality feels it has no control.  Freud's famous "fort-da, described" in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which a baby repetitively throws a toy out of its crib to simulate its sense of control over the mother's departure is perhaps the most famous example.  If, as Georg Lukács has said, the short story is the most artistic form, it may be because, as Frederic Jameson has suggested, it is the most formal and ritualistic narrative form, for it recapitulates the most basic motivation of the artistic impulse--the "for-da"--the need to create a similitude of control. 

Randal Jarrell describes the same compulsion when he claims that our stories show that we take pleasure in "repeating over and over, until we can bear it, all that we found unbearable:  the child whose mother left her so often that she invented a game of throwing her doll out of her crib, exclaiming as it vanished 'Gone! gone!' was a true poet."  Bruno Bettleheim has suggested that fairy stories, one of the primary progenitors of the short story, are such ritualized defenses or outlets for childhood anxiety.  Bettleheim argues that the child is subject to fears of loneliness, isolation, and mortal anxiety--existential anxieties that fairy tales take seriously and deal with by objectifying in a highly formal structure, much the way that Sufi healing stories do.

As psychologist Leon Salzman reminds us, the obsessive impulse is not a defense against anxiety about everyday problems, but rather anxiety about the most basic problems that arise from our fundamental humanness.  Salzman says that realization of one's "humanness--with its inherent limitations--is often the basis for considerable anxiety and obsessive attempts at great control over one's living."  Freud noted that obsessed neurotics turn their thoughts "to those subjects upon which all mankind are uncertain and upon which our knowledge and judgments remain open to doubt.  The chief subjects of this kind are paternity, length of life, life after death, and memory....”

The entire line of development of the short story--from fairy tale to Poe, from Chekhov to Raymond Carver--has focused on such basic human anxieties and has dealt with them by the creation of a highly formalized, unified, and ritualized aesthetic object.  As a result the short story has often been accused of being cut off from everyday social reality and thus somehow unhealthy.

 However, this severance from social reality is simply part of the short story's generic heritage.  In the early 19th century, Friedrich Schlegel argued that the short narrative form is like a story "torn away from any cultural background"--a perception echoed by Frank O'Connor's famous claim that the short story focuses on characters that remain remote from the community--"romantic, individualistic, and intransigent." 

Richard Ford has said that short stories in particular do not have a clear relationship to the national character because they are often about things that are not clear but need clearing up:  "Making short stories into exponents for history certainly isn't the most interesting thing we can do with them....” Interesting or not, when critics are unable to find any semblance of social reality in fiction, they are apt to accuse the form of being "inhuman" and "unnatural."  When they encounter fiction that depends on poetic techniques of compression and highly unified form rather than mimetic techniques of expansion and verisimilitude, they are apt to call it "obsessive" and "mechanical."

Perhaps there is something about the essential nature of storytelling that naturally moves toward compression and form as opposed to expansion and explanation.  Walter Benjamin seems to think so in his well-known discussion of Nikolai Leskov, for he notes that one of the main reasons for the decline in storytelling is the increase in the dissemination of information: "Actually it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it . . ..  The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced upon the reader.  It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks." 

If Benjamin is right, then the common critical accusation that the short story is somehow unnatural and obsessed is merely the result of a common bias toward novelistic information and away from the pure storytelling of the short story.