[DOWNLOAD] "Merry Old England and Hawthorne's "the May-Pole of Merry Mount"." by Nathaniel Hawthorne Review # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Merry Old England and Hawthorne's "the May-Pole of Merry Mount".
- Author : Nathaniel Hawthorne Review
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 241 KB
Description
"The May-Pole of Merry Mount" is at once a meditation on the danger of "merriment" out of control, a lament for the loss of Merry Old England, and a prophecy of the triumph of Puritanic gloom. Although not as artistically accomplished as "The Minister's Black Veil" or "Young Goodman Brown," it rewards contextual research and analysis because it presents a fateful moment in New England history, foreshadows central themes in The Scarlet Letter, and offers a key to understanding Hawthorne's work as a whole. Unlike other Puritan tales that focus on the melancholy implications of depravity, "May-Pole" raises the possibility of happiness. Is there a proper balance between holidays and work days that could enrich communal life? Did the Puritans' rejection of the superb culture and festive occasions of Elizabethan and Jacobean England doom their etiolated descendants to lives of quiet desperation? The confrontation between a remnant of Thomas Morton's "silken colonists" and Endicott's "men of iron" juxtaposes polarized alternatives, of which the maypole and the whipping post are the most telling symbols. Was there a golden mean? Hawthorne, a student of how American character and culture evolved, wanted to understand himself and his times in terms of that evolution; he knew that "the future complexion of New England was involved in this important quarrel." (1) In his brief, characteristically tongue-in-cheek preface, Hawthorne claims that "the facts, recorded on the grave pages of our New England annalists, have wrought themselves, almost spontaneously, into a sort of allegory" and cites Joseph Strutt's Sports & Pastimes of the People of England as the "authority" for his description of "the manners of the age" (9:54). In addition, he calls the story a "philosophic romance" and a "slight sketch," later referring to these "true" (9:60) and "authentic passages from history" (9:62) as a "poet's tale" (9:60). Yet to anyone familiar with the sources available to Hawthorne, nothing is more striking than how much authentic history he has left out--most notably the figure of Thomas Morton himself, author of New English Canaan, whose version of what happened to his small fur-trading post constitutes indeed a tale told by a poet, albeit a minor one. Hawthorne, as a writer of fiction, sometimes plays with the facts of history, but why does he make no mention at all of the founder of Merry Mount? He certainly knew that it was Morton's maypole that Endicott chopped down, but had he read New English Canaan and did he know the anti-Puritan version of the story? Indeed, just what kind of genre-bending work are we reading? Is it an allegory, a true history, a slight sketch, a philosophic romance, or a poet's tale? Can it be a blend of all five or something else, something richer and stranger? Who were the "annalists" Hawthorne consulted and why did he cite Strutt's book? Before discussing a few important critics of the text and offering my own reading, I want to consider Hawthorne's use of sources.