He is best remembered, if he's known for anything at all, as one of the main architects of the modern Horror genre. This seems to have been the ultimate fate of the reputation of the early 19th century American writer known as Nathaniel Hawthorne. Arriving in this world in the year 1804, he was a natural born son of New England. Not only is that a relevant real-life plot detail, it also turned out to be the main shaping factor in the life and growth of the artist's mind. His birthplace was none other than Salem, Massachusetts, home of the infamous Witch Trials. To give an impression of just how much of a long shadow this event and its entire social milieu have managed to cast over American history, it is possible to argue that while there were other atrocities committed by the Puritans in their chequered and problematic history of settling on these Shores, there appears to have been something iconic about the Trials which has allowed it to standout as the guiding symbol of America's original sin. The historical image and notion of Puritans turning their own moral decay and bigotry at last against their own kind, like a snake eating its tail, seems to act as the best summation of what happens when a society begins to go wrong. It suggests that if the ideology of the original Plymouth Settlers can be spoken of as serving any kind of purposes, then its utility was of the most ironic kind. The purpose of Puritanism, it seems, is to cancel itself out.
As a result, what makes the very fact of the Witch Trials so natural as a symbol is that it is somehow able to encompass a multitude of ethical failures, both personal and social, that have since been recognized as a catalogue of all of the major faults and transgressions for which the early European settlers to America were guilty of. It includes the usual list of suspects, the chiefest of which is the allowance and legal sanctioning of slavery, prejudice, and persecution of others into the law of the land. The others, in this case, were and are, of course, Africans, Jamaicans, and Native Americans as the most prominent victims of Puritanism. It's this ironic accomplishment which has allowed the Plymouth colonizers and their immediate descendants the dubious honor of two further achievements, both of which have served to preserve and hold an awareness of their toxicity and depravity as a kind of memorial enshrined forever in our popular culture. On the one hand, it was the Puritans who have given to, and cemented for American history its first and longest lasting notion of national evil. The second, artistic correlate of this ironic accomplishment is that it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it was the legacy of fanatics like Cotton Mather and the Witch Trial persecutors who have been able to shape a lot of the contours and iconography of what we now know as Halloween. It's of course true enough that a lot of the trappings of our Nation's most popular Autumn Festival have their roots in Ancient Celtic Traditions. However, it seems as if the sins of the Puritans gave us an updated set of props and icons that have allowed this fundamentally antiquarian celebration to find its proper American voice.
This can best be demonstrated by recalling how everything that we know about Halloween always comes down to, or else includes the same set of images. These being the time honored picture of witches and black cats on broomsticks, along with the idea of the haunted house with plenty of skeletons in all the closets. These are all concepts that have come to define what the holiday means for us every time Autumn roles around. However, there's one other element to this shared iconography that I don't think most of us have given enough attention to. Part of that is down to the way familiarity makes the heart grow, not so much cold, as inattentive, and hence unobservant. We remember the witches and haunted houses well enough. Have you ever stopped to notice or pay attention to the kind of imaginative landscape in which all of these icons have their place, though? The answer, of course, is yes and no. Yeah, it's true, some of us might have spared a glance at the kind of topographic atmosphere in which the primary symbols of Halloween take place. However, I wonder how many of us have ever stopped to ponder just what the prototypical
setting of All Hallow's means, or amounts to. In terms of set dressing, the typical All Saint's Eve backdrop has remained more or less the same ever since the Holiday was cemented into a part of the Nation's identity. You've got these wide open, creepy looking fields that are either barren roads, or else its a stretch of rural farmland with either a hollowed out cornfield, or else a glowing pumpkin patch to provide a few background details. This is about as far as most of us can get when it comes to conjuring up the stage setting for a Halloween atmosphere.
The one final detail that's needed to complete this picture is just one, simple observation. Most of it tends to have this New England flavor to it. Have you ever noticed that? Think about it. The basic backdrop of the typical American Halloween just tends to have that specific, regional kind of
feel about the place. It's like something you can tell just by looking. It's a pervasive sense of atmosphere that you can't quite get anywhere else. It just doesn't have quite the same vibe if you were to try and translate it into a setting such as the Louisiana bayou territory. Places like that are more than capable of having an October atmosphere all its own,
and that's just the point. A sense of place that's steeped in, say, the carry-overs from old African, Creole, or Cajun traditions might have an appropriate flavor. It even forms an essential part of Halloween. It's just not the kind of vibe you get from that Autumn cornfield or Pumpkin patch which looks like it could be anywhere from the Midwest to the Nor-East. That's because out most typical image of the Hallows stage setting was born and raised in the old Yankee country. It was in the same New England territory that held the Witch Trials, and in which Hawthorne grew up that created the first initial iconography for America's Premier Autumn Festival. In that sense, it's almost possible to say that Hawthorne grew up amidst the symbols and imagery of Halloween.
It was always just a part of the natural atmosphere that he breathed, both as a man, and an artist. It explains why even his lightest stories tend to have this sense of soft, faded colors to them, like when the leaves start to turn into rich hues of red, yellow, and brown. It seems a more or less inescapable fact that Hawthorne is a natural, Autumnal writer. Born and raised in the Nation's pumpkin patch, he emerged as an Autumn voice. Someone who is in the way of being a spokesmen for that time of year, born and bred. It even makes a certain amount of sense when you stop and consider that with short stories like "Young Goodmen Brown", and "The Minister's Black Veil", or novels like House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne also has to stand as one of the key builders of the Holiday as we now celebrate it. Heck, he's even the first artist to make mention of, and put the image of the Jack O' Lantern to good use in his writings. So in that light, among other reasons, it makes sense to peg him one of the Nation's first great Horror writers. I don't think this is a reputation that can ever be challenged, nor do I think it should be. I just find it interesting that the same creative mind that helped pioneer the American Gothic (the kind of artist who could be described as Stephen King's metaphorical grandfather, in other words) was also capable of being something in the way of a writer for kids. Here's the part I'm sure most folks aren't aware of. Entertain conjecture that one of America' foremost tellers in Tales of Terror was also the author of collections with titles like A Wonder Book for Boys and Girls. It's not the kind of thing you might expect. It's like learning that someone like Lovecraft was fond of nursery rhymes.
Such a picture just creates too much cognitive dissonance to take seriously. Hawthorne presents a milder, and hopefully therefore graspable version of the same conundrum. How does someone with a reputation for telling scary stories come to write not just a children's story, but a whole book full of them? When you put it like that, I'll have to admit the very idea sounds like an anomaly. I can count the number of times its happened on the fingers of one hand. It's a list that includes the likes of Steve King, Edith Nesbit, Dean Koontz, and Hawthorne. Put that all together and you've got the a publishing phenomenon that still counts as enough of a rarity to be almost unheard of. I'm also not sure its fair to include authors like Alvin Schwartz, R.L. Stine, Bruce Coville, or the Brothers Grimm in that catalogue. That's because these are all examples of artists who went out of their way to write for a Young Adult market, in one case even before the market could be said to exist. Instead, what I'm focused on here is writers of certifiable adult Gothic fiction, who have then turned around and graced us with a family friendly offering for the kiddies. Like I've said, it's happen so few times in the past that there's still this air of novelty about, except in Hawthorne's case it's perhaps as weird as, say, discovering that a tome like
The Secret Garden was Lovecraft's favorite book (which it isn't, so far as I know).
Instead, it's more the sort of left field novelty that you might not expect, yet there's still enough of a sense of intriguing about such an enterprise that you're willing to offer a cautious "Go On?" sort of encouragement. I'll be the first to admit that I've never really looked into the children's entertainment side of Hawthorne's writings before. So in a sense I'm going in just as blind as the rest of you as we take a look at what appears to be a retelling of Classical Mythology known as "The Chimaera".
