My Kinsman, Major Molineaux

I’ve only read a few stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and none of his novels. “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux” is the first story in Lionel Trilling’s anthology The Experience of Literature and it’s quite fascinating. The key to my interpretation of the story comes right from the title itself. While written in third person it is from a limited point of view, and the way Hawthorne frames his narrative gives it the feel of a first person story. This is perfectly reflected in the title, which also has the effect of putting the reader in the place of identifying with the protagonist, a young country boy named Robin. The boy is eighteen and has come from the country in his father’s old clothes. The story is set during the colonial period in America, well before the Revolution, and yet the independent mindedness of the colonists is already firmly in place. Hawthorne writes a prologue to this effect, that the governors of Massachusetts were an unfortunate lot, disrespected by the people of the colony for their royal affiliation, and disdain of the British government for being weak with their subjects. They were stuck between two ways of thinking and neither was going to give in.

The plot itself is nothing, a simple story of a young man looking for a relative in a small New England village. It’s to Hawthorne’s credit that the prologue doesn’t give away the ending. At least to me it didn’t. I don’t envy those people who are so clever that they always figure out what’s going to happen next, completely destroying their suspension of disbelief. I’ve always been fortunate enough to allow the writer to manipulate me in any way he sees fit, and it makes for a wonderful reading experience. What the story lacks in plot, however, it makes up for in atmosphere, and it’s here that I think Hawthorne is at his best. His descriptions, especially of the night in an era without electric lights, are exhilarating. There is something haunting about characters who seem to be swimming out of the void. “. . . torches were close at hand; but the unsteady brightness of the latter formed a veil which he could not penetrate. The rattling of wheels over the stones sometimes found its way to his ear, and confused traces of a human form appeared at intervals, and then melted into the vivid light.” He also does this with inanimate forms as well, bringing them to eerie life. “Next he endeavored to define the forms of distant objects, starting away with almost ghostly indistinctness, just as his eye appeared to grasp them.”

Trilling views this humble tale as something of a hero’s journey, but to my way of thinking over exaggerates this when he says it “suggests those trials or tests that regularly form part of the initiation rites by which primitive peoples induct the youths of the community into the status of manhood.” That’s a little bit much. The association of this idea with Robin’s immaturity, however, is definitely made clear in the story where he overestimates his own importance. In one instance, having been rebuffed when inquiring about his relative, he thinks, “This is some country representative who has never seen the inside of my kinsman’s door, and lacks the breeding to answer a stranger civilly.” He also dismisses out of hand the idea that some of the lesser homes might be the abode of his rich relative. “. . . he paused, and looked up and down the narrow street, scrutinizing the small and mean wooden buildings, that were scattered on either side. ‘This low hovel cannot be my kinsman’s dwelling,’ thought he, ‘nor yonder old house . . . and truly I see none hereabouts that might be worthy of him.’” What’s interesting is that this leads Trilling to an analytical ambiguity about Hawthorne’s intention in terms of the boy’s transformation, especially about what the audience is supposed to feel when, his innocence lost, Robin decides to return home.

This ambiguity is reflective of a far more important one for the reader, namely, what feeling is supposed to accompany the climax of the story where Robin discovers that Major Molineaux has been tarred and feathered. American readers, Trilling rightly points out, are likely to be on the side of the insurrectionists. At the same time, those meeting out the punishment are not portrayed in a flattering light. “In this train, were wild figures in the Indian dress, and many fantastic shapes without a model, giving the whole march a visionary air, as if a dream had broken forth from some feverish brain . . .” And when meeting the man in charge of the insurrection, he is described as the devil. “One side of the face blazed of an intense red, while the other was black as midnight . . . as if two individual devils, a fiend of fire and a fiend of darkness, had united themselves to form this infernal visage.” All of this calls into question how Hawthorne intended his audience to feel about the treatment of this royal appointee. Trilling says we can never know, but that really seems to be the point. With the author not taking a side it allows readers to form their own opinion.

What is strange is that Trilling says Hawthorne turns Robin against his kinsman by, “being warmly associated with the Major’s tormenters, eventually joining in the hideous laughter of the mob at its victim’s plight.” But nothing of the kind ever happens. Watching the throng as it passes by, with the Major in the wagon, a man from across the street in a window laughs loudly and it becomes infectious as the crowd picks it up and it finally takes hold of Robin himself with his voice becoming the loudest. In the context of the story, however, it is decidedly not the Major that he is laughing at, but at himself and the realization of his own innocence. This is made perfectly clear after the mob moves on and Hawthorne describes him thusly: “Robin started, and withdrew his arm from the stone post, to which he had instinctively clung, while the living stream rolled by him. His cheek was somewhat pale, and his eye not quite so lively as in the earlier part of the evening.” Robin’s horror at witnessing the scene is clear. It’s only when his companion makes a joke after he asks the way back to the ferry that Robin says, “Thanks to you, and to my other friends, I have at last met my kinsman.” And lest there be any mistake as to the sarcasm of that statement, Hawthorne says that he made this statement “rather dryly.” As a result of this misinterpretation, Trilling oversteps again in connecting this behavior with ancient blood rituals.

This mistake also leads Trilling to ask if Robin has gone over to the side of the devil. And this is absolutely not the intent of the story. Nevertheless, it does put Trilling back on the right track when he begins looking at the description of the “devil” that Robin gives to his companion, and his inquiry about the many voices he hears coming down the street. “May not one man have several voices,” his companion inquires, “as well as two complexions?” But this does not speak to any duplicity in Robin as much as it does the duplicitous nature of the act of the mob itself, which I pointed out earlier, seems to be Hawthorne’s purpose. Trilling notes that the leader of the mob “is clad in military dress and bears a drawn sword” and interestingly juxtaposes that with the Major who was also a soldier and “derives his dignity from his military character” but then goes nowhere with it. Instead he moves on to Robin’s companion, suggesting at first that he might be evil as well. Fortunately, he dismisses this and more cogently interprets his suggestion that Robin stay in the village by saying that “he is the better for no longer depending on his [kinsman’s] help.” And yet Trilling can’t help devolving back into his mistaken interpretation that “Robin’s cruel deed of turning upon his kinsman in ridicule was a necessary step in his coming of age.” No, it was Robin’s revelation about his own innocence that accomplished this.

The thing is, this notion doesn’t even make sense to Trilling himself as he remarks offhandedly, “It is a strange idea to contemplate.” Nevertheless, this is an interpretation that he is unable to let go of. So he invokes Freud and heads down a well-trodden path to look at Robin’s laughter as something of an Oedipal act, repudiating his family’s teaching and training in seeing the world for himself, as it really is. But where Trilling sees Robin’s description of leaving home in the first place as turning his back on his upbringing even before he sets out on his trip, that’s not the impression I had. When Hawthorne writes of Robin, “Then he saw them go in at the door; and when Robin would have entered also, the latch tinkled into its place, and he was excluded from his home.” To me this at first seemed like an expulsion, and Trilling takes the Freudian view of Robin’s laughter at the Major as being done to his father in surrogacy. But by the end of the story I became convinced that this was just the opposite. Trilling labels Robin’s leaving as a “virtual expulsion from the family.” After reading the reminiscence again carefully, the reactions of the individual family members take on an entirely different meaning in view of the ending. Robin’s immediate request to return to the ferry at the end of the story implies a return home rather than a rootless exodus into the wilderness and that, once presented with the facts, they would naturally allowed him to remain “home in the bosom of the family.”

Finally Trilling’s reading of the story leads, quite expectedly, to a series of unanswerable questions and an equally unsatisfying conclusion that they “cannot be answered with any assurance that we are responding with precise understanding to what the author means.” To my mind this means that Trilling should undertake a different interpretation so as to be able to answer those questions. I would look at another Hawthorne story, “Young Goodman Brown,” to shore up my analysis. In that story the title character also experiences a loss of innocence when he realizes his Puritan religion is all a lie, and that people can’t be perfect. At this moment of revelation he also experiences a similar laughter at his own naïveté. “Maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did Goodman Brown grasp his staff and set forth again . . . ‘Ha! ha! ha!’ roared Goodman Brown when the wind laughed at him . . . Think not to frighten me with your devilry . . . Here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he fear you.’” And to Trilling’s question as to whether Robin becomes evil himself, that is answered in this story as well. One his innocence is lost, Goodman Brown no longer lives in fear of sin and has become, not a figure of evil, but a man whose eyes are now open to the truth. Hawthorne describes him this way: “In truth, all through the haunted forest there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown.” Thus, by using another Hawthorne story, it seems that we really can understand Hawthorne’s intent in “Major Molineaux.”

Robin’s journey is one of self-discovery, a loss of innocence, of going from childhood to manhood. In his immature state he imagines himself to be something much grander than he really is. The visit of his father’s cousin, the impressive Major Molinaeux, with his “generous intentions, especially as [Robin] had seemed to be rather the favorite,” imbued the young man with a stature far beyond what he actually possessed. The association in his own mind with his father’s cousin, a man who had “inherited riches, and acquired civil and military rank,” once shattered, has now prepared Robin for the real world, his own manhood, and the task of rising “in the world without the help of your kinsman, Major Molineaux.” Thus the “two complexions,” the “several voices” that a person has are those that experience brings out over time, reflecting the Emersonian imperative to “Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.” Is one of those bad and one of them good? Absolutely not, and this is reflected in the apparent ambivalence of Hawthorne himself toward the insurrection, the absolutely neutral prologue contrasted with the shock of seeing Molineaux tarred and feathered. When looked at in this way it all fits together and makes Hawthorne’s intentions very clear.