“The Minister’s Black Veil” (1832)

This story by Nathaniel Hawthorne is more of a literary affair than horror, as the Wikipedia article I looked up can attest. “Hawthorne writes the story in an allegorical format, using a didactic tone,” etc. I should note the subtitle, “A Parable,” but it’s not an easy parable (or allegory) to understand. I think that’s what I like about it. One day the New England town Puritan minister shows up wearing a veil, two pieces of semitranslucent black cloth “[s]wathed about his forehead and hanging down over his face.” That’s it, basically, the whole story. He wears the veil for the rest of his life and never explains. Not even his fiancée can get a word out of him about it, and she’s the only person who can approach him. She breaks off the engagement. There are certain tantalizing clues. On the day he first appears wearing it, he conducts a funeral for a “young lady” in town. We don’t learn very much about her either. The minister is 30 when he begins wearing the veil, and he gets the usual threescore and 10 or so. It does seem profoundly symbolic, practically obliterating his face for others and occluding his own vision as well. Hawthorne notes more than once how it moves like curtains with his breath. The minister’s stoic absurd stubbornness is reminiscent of the scrivener Bartleby’s perverse refusal to work, in the story by Herman Melville, never explaining himself beyond that wonderful “I prefer not to.” Here the minister responds to queries much the same, though they are more simple demurrals. The story says he gets better at his job over the years, but that could also be just growing into it. So I guess I like this story the way I like “Bartleby.” There’s something powerful about the secrets these timid men keep—why they do what they do. What’s asked of them is not greatly inconveniencing in either case, the responses more like exasperating little character traits, which grow into more. I take the death of the young woman as significant, some kind of warmup for, or variation on, The Scarlet Letter. In that light, the black veil is cowardly in a way reminiscent of our old friend Arthur Dimmesdale but at the same time more forthright, if cryptic, in declaring his status as a sinner, if that’s what he’s doing. Of course, there may not be enough about the young woman to build even that much out of it. You could sit in a hundred classroom discussions or reading groups and probably still never get to the bottom of it. If horror is a grasp of the empty abyss, then maybe this is horror.

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“Young Goodman Brown” (1835)

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Very Important American horror story gets my goat in a way. The language can be deadly stultifying—well, I always seem to have that problem with Hawthorne, as with Dickens—and the plot points are more like blunt force objects having an allegorical go at your skull. In the end, it was all a dream but was it. With the publication date you have to wonder if it isn’t among the first to use this it-was-all-a-dream-but-was-it stunt (acknowledging I know squat about ancient literature). Obviously, first, “Young Goodman Brown” is a take on the hypocrisies of puritanism and a forthright one too. It sets up as no less than the titanic battle between Calvinism and Satanism (otherwise known as human appetite). But for all the window dressing—and, yes, it’s nice window dressing, in the American style, with macabre bonfire scenes in the autumn night of a deep New England woods. But for all that, ultimately it’s more on the order of an allegory to be ciphered than a horror story as such. All these devilish doings, the serpentine staffs and disappearing acts, etc., are just production design for a community theater story about American hypocrisy. A lot of the horror anthologies snapping it up are maybe more trying to class up their joints with a Great Author. I mean it’s a pure staple of American literature just sitting there. That’s the only way to understand it. The special effects can be delightful but also thuddingly obvious and they are patently not to be believed. That would be superstitious, the story somehow implies. Hawthorne’s wilderness is not as cool and fascinating as Algernon Blackwood’s, say, but has its own tang. There are witches with broomsticks, for example. And these names: Brown, the young good man, is married to Faith. Then there’s Satan himself, done nicely as a shape-shifter but it always feels stagy. And then, I’m cynical, but I had a hard time believing the whole blinking town including most notably church leaders would turn out to be part of a nighttime carousing mob. Beyond the credibility problem (I KNOW IT'S AN ALLEGORY) it seems to be turning cynicism unpleasantly into bitterness, next stop nihilism. If it is all a dream, Young Goodman Brown is scarred for life by it. “Often, awaking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.” That’s how the story ends and it always annoys me and then haunts me.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin H. Greenberg (out of print)
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"Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" (1837)

Read story by Nathaniel Hawthorne online.

I usually come around to liking anything I read by Nathaniel Hawthorne, but I have to admit he can be a terrible chore sometimes. This short story is typical, taking off on the Fountain of Youth myth for a kind of parable, or fable. The scientist in the title is presented as something closer to an alchemist or magician in the very long paragraph describing his "chamber." Well, that's fine for atmosphere. Dr. Heidegger has acquired a quantity of a rejuvenating liquid and gathered up four old specimens: three aging gentlemen and the bird they used to fight over. What could possibly go wrong? For their elucidation, Dr. Heidegger demonstrates the effects of the liquid on a rosebud more than 50 years old ("rosebud"). Sure enough, right back to blooming. The guests decide they'd like to sample this beverage. And again. In a matter of minutes they have returned to middle age. Then it's all the way back to youth, sweet youth—meaning, approximately, age 21 or 22. Naturally, the men begin fighting over the woman again. Dr. Heidegger breaks it up by calling their attention to the rose. It is aging, shriveling, and dying. In the fight, the four spilled the remainder of the precious fluid. Now they regret that deeply. Some subtleties occur to me. What is the nature of this experiment? Dr. Heidegger does not drink. Is that because he knows from previous experience that the results don't last long? He seems to deny foreknowledge. The experiment appears to be more than just looking at the effects of the elixir on humans. Did he gather these four particular humans deliberately? There is also a chance they are simply the people he happens to know. But he demands a commitment from them before they get their drink—that they remember their hard-won lessons from life. Of course they assent, eagerly. We all know we are wise now. Look how old we are. But as the sap of youth rises, they throw all that out, and the beverage too. "Youth is wasted on the young," Hawthorne seems to be affirming, with the surprising proviso that it's wasted even with the experience of age. Whatever the mysterious Dr. Heidegger intended to investigate with his experiment, the result for us is another comically bleak examination of the human spirit.

Library of America Story of the Week (Library of America)