My Kinsman, Major Molineux Study Guide

Born in Salem as Nathaniel Hawthorne, the future author of The Scarlet Letter and more than 100 short stories was descended from members of the original Massachusetts Bay Colony. His great-great-grandfather was the notorious John Hawthorne, the so-called “hanging judge” who oversaw the Salem witch trials. Largely raised in Raymond, Maine, Hawthorne returned to Salem after graduating from Bowdoin College in 1821, where he became acquainted with poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future President Franklin Pierce. In Salem, Hawthorne embarked on his career as a writer in almost suffocating solitude. Other than his two sisters, he saw few people and was shy to a fault. But his inner musings never ceased, and he filled notebooks with ideas for stories. Other than the youthful and anonymous novel Fanshawe, Hawthorne’s rise as one of the greatest of American authors began with the short story collection Twice-Told Tales, of which Longfellow wrote a glowing review. Married to Sophia Peabody in 1838, Hawthorne labored in relative obscurity until the publication of The Scarlet Letter in 1850 made him an international celebrity. That same year, he met Herman Melville, who dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne. The next four years were an especially productive period, during which he wrote The House of the Seven Gables, The Snow-Image, The Blithesdale Romance, and Tanglewood Tales, as well as the campaign biography of his old friend Franklin Pierce. Hawthorne spent his later years serving as a consul in Liverpool and traveled through England, France, and Italy, a journey that produced a great deal of travel writing, as well as inspiring his last published novel The Marble Faun. Hawthorne died in his sleep in 1864 while touring the White Mountains. One of the pallbearers was Hawthorne’s former neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, who remarked “I thought there was a tragic element in the event, that might be more fully rendered—in the painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, could no longer be endured, and he died of it.” Hawthorne’s own assessment was even bleaker, writing that “I have not lived, but only dreamed about living.”

“My Kinsman Major Molineux” is set during the run-up to the Revolutionary War, as the colonists are growing impatient with the British authorities and routinely run their representatives out of town. Hawthorne claims that study of the annals of Massachusetts Bay reveals that “of six governors in the space of forty years […] two were imprisoned by a popular insurrection; a third […] was driven from the province by the whizzing of a musket-ball; a fourth […] was hastened to his grave by continual bickerings with the House of Representatives; and the remaining two, as well as their successors, till the Revolution, were favored with few and brief intervals of peaceful sway.” The stage is thus set for the coming war, and the atmosphere that young Robin unknowingly steps into is one of barely-concealed violence and popular discontent. By the end of the story, Robin finds that his kinsman has himself run afoul of the colonists, having been tarred and feathered. This was a common practice in the late-18th century, such as in 1766, when Captain William Smith (a suspected informer to British customs agents) was tarred, feathered, and dropped into the Norfolk, Virginia harbor. Tarring and feathering was a reliable brand of mob violence that also appeared in Salem the following year, when employees of the customs service and tax agents were routinely so attacked. Ironically, Hawthorne himself would enter politics in 1853 after his lifelong friend Franklin Pierce had him appointed American consul to Liverpool. Back in the states, he would make the acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln and witness firsthand the rumblings of the Civil War and the end of slavery, which Hawthorne had echoed Pierce in proclaiming would not “be remedied by human contrivances,” but would, over time, “vanish like a dream.”

Hawthorne infused his tales of New England with mythical and gothic trappings, popularizing the dark fabulism practiced by Edgar Allan Poe, later by Ambrose Bierce ( “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”), and originated by Washington Irving in stories like “Rip Van Winkle.” Hawthorne considered himself a provincial and seems never to have encountered Balzac, Stendahl, or the strain of German romanticism that influenced Poe—instead, Hawthorne prized Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s Christian allegory. Among Hawthorne’s early champions was Ralph Waldo Emerson, author of the influential essay “The American Scholar,” though Hawthorne himself grew disenchanted with Emerson’s brand of Transcendentalism after living at the utopian Brook Farm community, which he gently satirized in his 1852 novel The Blithesdale Romance. Hawthorne also made an impression on Henry James, who wrote a short book on him in 1879 and was still under his influence when he published Washington Square the following year. Though Henry Wadsworth Longfellow praised Hawthorne throughout his career, his greatest literary friendship was inarguably Herman Melville, who called Hawthorne’s work “shrouded in blackness, ten times black.” Hawthorne’s influence on literature is incredibly broad, and critic Harold Bloom has placed him beside William Faulkner and Henry James as one of the three greatest American writers. Along with Hawthorne’s “Endecott and the Red Cross” and Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” American poet Robert Lowell adapted “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” into the stage play The Old Glory. Most recently, Hawthorne’s story “The Minister’s Black Veil” inspired Rick Moody’s memoir The Black Veil, while Stephen King cites “Young Goodman Brown” as the genesis of his O. Henry Award-winning “The Man in the Black Suit.” and Hawthorne’s story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” even influenced the creation of Batman villain Poison Ivy.