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Hawthorne's my Kinsman,
Major Molineux
a
Colin D. Pearce
a
Universit y of Guelph
Published online: 30 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Colin D. Pearce (2001) Hawt horne's my Kinsman, Maj or Molineux,
The Explicat or, 60:1, 19-22, DOI: 10.1080/ 00144940109597156

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 Nixon, Cheryl. “Balancing the Courtship Hero: Masculine Emotional Display in Film Adapta-
tions of Austen’s Novels.” June Ausren in Hollywood. Ed.Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield.
Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1998.
Ruoff. Gene W. June Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992.
Sprague, Elmer. “Shaftesbury.” The Encyclopediu ofPhilosophy. Ed. Paul Edwards. 8 vols. 1967.
New York: Macmillan, 1972.
Sutherland, Eileen. ‘ T h e Infamous Flannel Waistcoat.” Persunsions 18 (1996): 58.
Tanner, Tony. June Ausren. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986.

Hawthorne’s MY KINSMAN, MAJOR MOLINEUX

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Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” is the story of a

backwoods lad’s “rites of passage” from rural boyhood to urban maturity. In
the discussion that follows I shall treat the story as allegorical of the cultural
and civilizational shift that had overtaken American life in Hawthorne’s life-
time. The protagonist Robin’s’ moving from a rural environment to an urban
one is not a simple advance to the good, as the unappealing description of the
mob leader and the cruelty of Major Molineux’s treatment suggest. The old
gentleman’s humiliation is repellent, and yet the hero of the story, the inno-
cent young lad from the frontier, finds himself joining heartily in the specta-
cle of his would-be benefactor’s humiliation. Such a transformation reflects
the fact that the world is not the idyll of innocence Robin left in the back-
woods. He has to adjust to life in the big city.
In this new urban, “progressive” world, Robin observes “gay and gallant
figures” who sport “[elmbroidered garments of showy colors, enormous peri-
wigs, gold-laced hats, and silver-hilted swords.” He sees “[tlravelled youths,
imitators of the European fine gentleman of the period, (treading) jauntily
along, half dancing to the fashionable tunes which they hummed, and making
Robin ashamed of his quiet and natural gait.” Robin is so fascinated by “the
gorgeous display of goods in the shop-windows” that he has to take “many
pauses” to examine them (Hawthorne 429). Robin is visiting “the little
Metropolis of a New England colony” but he has “an eager eye as if he were
visiting London city” (426). And as we might expect in the case of a boy from
the village wandering into Hogarth’s London, he is obliged to resist the
entreaties of a lady of the evening (43 1).
In short, New England is “modernizing” and becoming part of the big,
wide, urbanized world. But Robin has his roots in the older culture of the fron-
tier. Indeed, he is “of the household of a New England Clergyman” (43 1). And
when, after his long and trying first evening in the city seeking to track down
his kinsman, he slips into a homesick reverie, we learn about those roots. His
mind drifts back to his rural home, where it was “his father’s custom to per-

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 form domestic worship” for neighbors and passersby. Robin envisions “the
good man in the midst, holding the Scriptures in the golden light that fell from
Western clouds.” He recalls his father “clos[ing] the book and all ris[ing] up
to pray.” He remembers the “old thanksgivings for daily mercies, the old sup-
plications for their continuance, to which he had so often listened in weari-
ness, but which were now among his dear remembrances” (433).
Thus Hawthorne supplies us with a vision of the old and the new ways of life
in New England, and they are very different.2And such a difference or change
over time is impossible without a change in religious values. New England has
become this-worldly or “secularized” as compared to the old “Scriptural” cul-
ture in which Robin was brought up. In bidding farewell to his family home
Robin is bidding farewell to the old New England Pr~testantism.~ This is made
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most clear in the scene where he looks through the window of the empty church
to see what could only be called a new face of the Old God.Moreover, Robin
looks in on the church at a time when all the parishioners are absent, even as he
is absent from his family home. There is no human presence in the church, but
there most manifestly is a divine one? The description is as follows:
There the moonbeams came trembling in, and fell upon the deserted pews,
and extended along the quiet aisles. A fainter yet more awful radiance was
hovering around the pulpit, and one solitary ray had dared to rest upon the
open page of the Bible. Had nature, in that deep hour, become a worship-
per in the house which man had builded? Or was that heavenly light the vis-
ible sanctity of the place,-visible because no earthly and impure feet were
within its walls? The scene made Robin’s heart shiver with the sensation of
loneliness stronger than he had ever felt in the remotest depths of his native
woods; so he turned away and sat down again before the door. (433)
What does this glance into the New England church mean in the context of
Robin’s story? “Had nature, in that deep hour, become a worshipper in the house
which man had builded?” It seems as though Nature has intruded into or has at
least “shed light” on the meaning of the old revealed Word. The old master or
force in the church-Jehovah or the God of the Bible-will have to present a
new face or provide new meaning to the flock when they return. Robin feels “a
sensation of loneliness stonger than he had ever felt in the remotest depths of his
native woods.” But was he not brought up as the dutiful son of a New England
clergyman who loved and placed his trust in God Almighty? Should not the
church have been a source of comfort to him? But no, he experiences the “sub-
lime,” or the terror at the majesty of nature-the light from a distant “Heavenly
Body.” His new religious experience is parallel to his new social experience. He
is losing his religion even as he is losing his old self-confidence as a smng
young lad from the woods.Back home he had “listened in weariness” to “the
old thanksgivings for daily mercies (and) the old supplications for their contin-
uance.” He is already tired of the old tradition. The new America that empow-
ers the mob and throws out the gentlemanly class, in the form of Major

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 Molineux, also involves a new religious sensibility.The Scriptures will perhaps
not be replaced, but they will be complemented by a religion of Nature, a reli-
gion of the “starry Heavens” rather than of the “Book” and the “Word.”s
The sheer transcendence of Robin’s experience on looking into the church
contrasts radically with the hubbub, chaos, and even violence of the mob
scene soon to follow. Hawthorne does not want us to forget that, whatever the
“light” from above that we receive, there are always cruelty and injustice in
human affairs.6 Robin is capable of feeling sublime awe and wonder in look-
ing in the church, but he also capable of shouting with joy at the misery and
even agony of the kind old gentleman whose assistance in “finding his for-
tune” he had originally intended to seek. For Hawthorne, mankind is capable
of moments of sublime transcendence as well as the most cruel and indiffer-
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ent conduct imaginable.

-COLIN D. PEARCE, Universifyof Guelph

NOTES
1. The robin is traditionally the herald of spring in North America. In her poem ‘The Robin,”
Emily Dickinson says that “The robin is the one I That interrupts the morn I With hurried, few,
express reports I When March is scarcely on.” The experience of Hawthorne’s Robin then may
fairly be taken to symbolize the springtime of a colonial America emerging into a new young
nation.
2. The story is obviously very reminiscent of Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” wherein an old colo-
nial awakens to find that he must adapt himself to life in the new democratic republic. Robin is
from the old New England, even as Rip was from the old province of New York, with its Dutch
heritage. For a full discussion of Irving’s story see Pearce.
3. “In New England. where the dissolving effect of science, secular thought, and the machine
process upon inherited customs was the most acute, it was only natural that religious ideas and
above all Puritan obsessions should be subject to merciless analysis. That was the psychological
operation that absorbed the highest talents of Hawthorne. [. . .] Under the impact of new forces
[. . .I the intellectual climate of the American republic presented to the rising generation features
essentially different from those of high significance in the colonial era. By the secularizing polit-
ical process and the march of scientific skepticism, still deeper inroads were made into the sov-
ereignty of theology and mysticism, especially among the educated classes” (Beard and Beard).
4. Peny Miller says that Puritan theology “smoldered in the recesses of Hawthorne’s intu-
i tions.”
5. “[Mlen of science (and) laymen [. . .] were drifting steadily in the direction of [. . .] dis-
card[ing] from their thought the God of the Old Testament and the cosmogony described in the
book of Genesis and elaborated by John Milton” (Beard and Beard).
6. ‘”ho things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and
more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me”
(Kant 166).

WORKS CITED
Beard, Charles A., and Mary R. Beard. The Rise ofAmerican Civilizution. Vol. 1. New York:
Macmillan, 1966. 787,447,448.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” The Experience of Literature. Ed.
Lionel Trilling. Garden City: Doubleday, 1967.425-38.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. Lewis White Beck. Indianapolis: Bobbs-

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 Merrill, 1956.
Miller, Perry. The New England Mind in the Sevenreerh Century. Cambridge: Belknap P of Har-
vard U, 1982.5, 162,213.
Pearce. Colin. “Changing Regimes: The Case of Rip Van Winkle.” Clio: A Journal ofliterature.
History and Philosophy of History 22 (1993): 115-28.

Lincoln’s GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

[. . .] we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-
that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish
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from the earth. (Gettysburg Address, Bliss copy)

[. . .] that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and
that, government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not per-
ish from the earth. (GettysburgAddress, Everett copy)
Although the five extant manuscripts of the Gettysburg Address are gener-
ally similar in wording, capitalization, and punctuation, no two are identical.
And despite the best efforts of textual scholars, no precise chronology of those
handwritten copies is verifiable. As Meams and Dunlap point out, “The defin-
itive story of the writing of the address has not been told, nor is it likely that
it ever can be” (i). If this is true, we are left not only with uncertainty as to
what Lincoln actually said at Gettysburg, since reporters’ transcripts made
during the speech vary as well, but also with the problem of explicating the
variants among the extant manuscripts. My concern here is with a single
comma, found only in the Everett copy, which dramatically alters the way that
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is usually read.
In all handwritten copies except the Everett, the final three clauses of the
address serve as direct objects of the verb “resolve”; and in all three the word
“that” acts not as a relative pronoun but as a connective expletive introducing
an objective noun clause. If we focus on just the last two clauses as punctuat-
ed in the Bliss copy (now widely accepted as the standard text), we find no
definitive relation, aside from parallelism, between “new birth of freedom”
and “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” As Carl Sand-
burg once commented, “How he [Lincoln] would have defined ‘a new birth of
freedom,’ at length, must be sought elsewhere in the body of his utterance”
(Spiller et al. 779).
In the Everett copy, however, an added comma (“and that, government [. . .I)
makes “that” a relative pronoun and places “government of the people, by the
people, for the people” in nonrestrictive apposition to both the relative pro-
noun and its antecedent, “a new birth of freedom.” The Everett comma, as I
shall call it, is thus a significant variant. It transforms the syntax of Lincoln’s

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