Revised Hawthorne Article for the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review

8/3/2019 Revised Hawthorne Article for the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review

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The Instinct of Faith: Taking Hawthornes Sunday at Home and the Sabbath Question

Seriously1

As Nathaniel Hawthorne walked about the outlying areas of Boston on a cool Sunday

afternoon in June of 1835, he was struck by the manner in which his new community was

spending the day. Stopping at the Maverick House, a stylish hotel in East Boston, Hawthorne

took note of the scene before him: the room was thronged by men, fashionably dressed, sporting

handsome canes and boots, standing at the bar or sitting at the windows puffing cigars (some

with flushed faces), watching the tender prepare tumblers of punch. He found a similar busy

scene at the Mechanics, an equally crowded hotel opposite the Maverick, where mostly young,

well-dressed men were lounging and taking their leisure. Hawthorne suspected that most of the

men, although groomed for the day, were not so genteel during the week and that the dry-goods

clerks were probably the aristocracy among them; his suspicions were confirmed when he

noticed that the sole of one so-called gentlemans exquisitely polished boot was all worn out.

Wherever he went that afternoon, Hawthorne encountered similar scenes of leisure and

pretension. Taking the ferry across the Charles River back into Boston proper, he visited the city

-tavern where, he ironically noted, the bar-room presented a Sabbath scene of repose: stage

people were lounging in chairs, half asleep, smoking cigars, but again dressed in clean shirts to

mark the solemnity of the day. Even on his way home, Hawthorne could not escape examples of

Sunday indulgences, as he encountered a respectably dressed man and woman, whom he thought

Irish, stumbling on the busy road, drunk, supporting each other so as not to fall. (Except for her

unsteady gait, he noted, the woman had a queer air of decency and decorum in the midst of their

inebriety.). Having just moved to the Boston area from his longtime home of Salem,


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Hawthornes new community was full of imitators of Sunday propriety who spent the afternoon

in hotels and taverns, sleeping, drinking and smoking, or simply touring the city. Realizing that

he had spent his time in similar fashion, Hawthorne averred in his journal, May conscience

smote me for doing the like, tho if I had been at home, I should have been reading.

Nonetheless, he speculated that his observations may serve to make a sketch of the mode of

spending the Sabbath, by the majority of the unmarried young middling people in a great town,

and he concluded this unusually long journal entry with the factual declaration: Stages in

abundance were passing the road, burthened with passengers, inside and out; also chaises,

barouches &c; horsemen and footmen. We are a community of Sabbath-breakers (Hawthorne,

Lost Notebook, 7-9).

Hawthorne was more than just culturally accurate: like every other state in the nation,

Massachusetts prohibited activities on Sunday to the effect that No person shall keep open his

shop, warehouse, or workhouse, or shall do any manner of labor, business, or work (except only

works of necessity and charity) on the Lords day; moreover, No person shall travel on that

day, except from necessity or charity (qtd. in Kingsbury 15).2 Passed in a flurry of activity at

the end of the eighteenth -century, such laws re-authorized earlier legislation and codified

longstanding mores so that, for some foreign visitors, the day seemed the hallmark of American

identity.3 By the mid-1830s, though, Hawthornes fellow Bostonians were clearly not too

concerned with the legal enforcement of these statutes, or whether they spent Sunday afternoon

in recreation rather than spiritual reflection, or whether they went visiting rather than attending

(second) service, praying, and reading devotional material. If he could have just as easily

commented upon the pressing contemporary issue of temperance reform,4 his conclusion about

Sabbath breaking registers Hawthornes personal and fictional interest in Puritan Sunday and

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the influence of an ongoing national debate that had ignited in 1810 when the federal

government declared that post offices must open on Sundays. Indeed, this journal entry outlines

some of the central contradictions and tensions that Hawthorne would explore in Sunday at

Home (1837)a sketch that became standard issue in authorized editions ofTwice- Told Tales

(1837; 1842; 1851) as well as the titular piece of an 1853 English (and probably pirated) edition

of his shorter works called Sunday at Home and Other Tales.5

Although republished in nineteenth- and twentieth- century editions of Hawthornes shorter

works, Sunday at Home has elicited very little critical commentary.6 This is a curious state of

affairs, as if the text hovers on the edge of recognition just as its unnamed narrator lingers on the

perimeter of the circling shadow of a church steeple that he views from the privacy of his

home one sunny Sunday (Hawthorne, Sunday at Home 21). In part, Henry James is

responsible: his 1879 biography initiated the critical preference for the tales over the sketches

that Hawthorne and his contemporariesincluding Poeso obviously valued. Indeed, James

employs a rhetoric of diminution in his assessment of Hawthorne, his New England culture, and

his writing that lingers in regard to his sketches. Noting that Hawthorne was an inveterate

observer and that he found a field for fancy among the most trivial accidents, James suggests

that Night Sketches is a fair representation of his accomplishments in this line of work: This

small dissertation is about nothing at all, and to call attention to it is almost to overrate its

importance. This fact is equally true, indeed, of a great many of its companions, which give

even the most appreciative critic a singular feeling of his own indiscretionalmost his own

cruelty. They are so light, so slight, so tenderly trivial, that simply to mention them is to put

them in a false position. In this Seinfeldian appraisal, James characterizes Hawthornes sketches

as he elsewhere characterizes Hawthorne himself: the simple and homogenous product of

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the thin cultural soil of the New England of some forty years ago when there was a great

desire for culture, a great interest in knowledge, in art, in aesthetics, together with a very scanty

supply of the materials for such pursuits. Small things were made to do large service (38, 68).7

This last sentence is an acute insight into the symbiotic relation between Hawthornes cultural

and fictional worlds, but of course not all things are equally small, are small in the same manner,

nor, as Hawthornes journal entry suggests about the Sabbath, are they necessarily small at all.8

As if caught in the slipstream of James portrait of Hawthorne as a reclusive artificer of small

and delicate things like Owen Warland, recent critics have viewed Sunday at Home as an

evocation of the commonplace or as a preparatory exercise in romanticism.

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Even Michael

Colacurcio, who has done more than anyone to recover the historical and theological nuances of

Hawthornes short fiction, finally views Sunday at Home as a rehearsal of the stock romantic

conceit of the alienated artist. Calling it an extraordinarily suggestive sketch. . .[that] proves far

more oblique than first appears, Colacurcio attributes Sunday at Home to its convention

ridden sourceCharles Lambs poem The Sabbath Bellsand concludes that the sketch

elaborates without really explaining anything (even as Colacurcio importantly also points to

some of the historicist questions that should be asked by any critic,pace James, malicious

enough to suppose that one minor sketch is trickier than anyone has yet imagined) (535; 493-

495).

This small sketch, I will propose, is best read as sophisticated example of Hawthornes

fictional methodology of reassessing Puritanism at watershed moments in American history.10 In

Sunday at Home, that is, Hawthorne dramatizes yet another conflicted conscience circa 1835

analogous to the earlier and more famous cases of Young Goodman Brown and Father Hooper,

and he does so to meditate upon a central tension of the Sabbath debate: the relation and relative

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authority of institutional and private forms of religious observance. For the narrators refusal to

attend Sunday church services is paradoxically both a quite public act of dissent and one that

allows him to participate vicariously in the church activities he sees and overhears. In fact, his

physical absence from church enables him to (re)create a private worship service at home that

celebrates even as it critiques the symbolism, formalism, and theological assumptions of Puritan

Sunday. In this way, the narrator refashions his domicile, and Hawthorne the sketch itself, into a

hybrid public/private spaceinto something very much like a confessionalthat expresses a

pluralist brand of piety that committed to exploring the fluctuating nature of faith.

As such parallel publications as the 1836 Presbyterian tract The Sabbath at Home suggest,

however, the domestic dramaturgy of Sunday at Home is also a kind of anti-allegorical

allegory that dramatizes the ideological contradictions and anxieties of the Sabbath debate

under which a certain brand of individual identity and conscience were conditioned and

performed.11 As historian Richard R. John has observed, For Sabbatarians and anti-

Sabbatarians alike, the Sabbath had a rich symbolic meaning that it has subsequently lost

(518).12 It is therefore not surprising that some of New Englands most vigorous intellects

Hawthorne, but also Sedgwick, Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinsonresponded to the Sabbath

debate and generally did so to question its longstanding identification with Puritanism and thus

with the nations root mythology. These writers contested homogenizing narratives of the

nations Puritan origins through a revisionist brand of historiography that was deeply theological

and yet pluralist, skeptical, ironic, and ultimately ambiguous in its historical claims. In these

intertwining literary and cultural contexts,13Hawthornes small sketch emerges not so much as

an apprenticeship effort in romanticism as a concerted (if elliptical) intervention into a national

debate that anticipates his later refashioning of the romance into a neutral territory in which

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literature and history, artistic representation and political action can meet and interpenetrate.14

~ ~ ~

The most direct reference we have to the Sunday mail debate in Hawthornes writing occurs

in the Canal-Boat section from Sketches from Memory (1835), a text from Hawthornes

aborted Story-Teller collection that draws upon his trip three years earlier on the Erie Canal to

Niagara Falls and points west as far as Detroit. Aboard the canal boat, an English traveler

scrutinizes and jots down notes about his American companionsnotes, Hawthornes narrator

speculates, that will likely be used to hold up an imaginary mirror, wherein our reflected faces

would appear ugly and ridiculous and with more sweeping malice, would make these

caricatures the representatives of great classes of my countrymen.15 In addition to such regional

types as a Virginia schoolmaster and an avaricious Detroit merchant, the Englishman spots a

Massachusetts farmer, who was delivering a dogmatic harangue on the iniquity of the Sunday

mails. Here was the far-famed yeoman of New-England; his religion, writes the Englishman, is

gloom on the Sabbath, long prayers every morning and eventide, and illiberality at all times; his

boasted information is merely an abstract and compound of newspaper paragraphs, Congress

debates, caucus harangues, and the argument and judges charge in his own lawsuits (Travel

Sketches 39).

This travel sketch, published in December 1835 some six months after Hawthornes journal

entry on Sabbath breaking, marks a transitional moment in his transformation of the Sunday mail

as a matter of reportage to a rich subject ripe for fictionalizing. There is a certain impatience on

display in The Canal-Boat, that is, with the mere political dimensions of the debate, and more

than a little anxiousness on the part of Hawthornes narrator that a foreigner traveler might

traduce a New Englander into a stereotype of the far-famed yeoman of New-England or,

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worse, reduce the regionsand Hawthornes owncomplex Puritan heritage with a caricature

of gloom on the Sabbath, long prayers every morning and eventide, and illiberality at all

times.16 As always, it is dangerous but tempting to try and measure the ironic distance between

Hawthorne and his narrator here, but the distance seems slim given that we know Hawthorne

himself possessed deep if ecumenical feelings for Puritan Sunday: as he once noted in a brief

journal entry he wrote just after marrying Sophia Peabody, My wife went to church in the

forenoon, but not so her husband. He loves the Sabbath, however, though he has no set way of

observing it; but it seldom comes and goes withoutbut here are some visitors; so this

disquisition must rest among the things that never will be written (qtd in Turner 146).

~ ~ ~

Within a year after the Canal-Boat sketch, Hawthorne published Sunday at Home and

created a sketch that could be read by sensitive New Englanders as a celebration of the joys of

Puritan Sunday even as he also insinuated a subtle analysis of the days coercive claims and

waning cultural authority. Originally published in The Token and Atlantic Souvenirunder the

auspices of the author ofThe Gentle Boy, the sketch was republished as the second text in

Twice-Told Tales (1837). As Hawthorne biographer, James R. Mellow, has observed, this

collection contained a good number of the pleasant and sometimes innocuous descriptive

sketches that were favored in gift-annuals like The Token and, therefore, excluded

Hawthornes more profound and troubling stories in an effort to curry favor with the public

(with the exceptions, Mellow suggests, of The Ministers Black Veil, The Prophetic

Pictures, and The Hollow of the Three Hills) (77).17 There is good reason to read Sunday at

Home in this kid glove context, as the sketch is one of Hawthornes most carefully constructed

and formally unified texts;: its spatial and temporal movements are chiastically plotted and

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thereby provide a strong sense of structure and balance that highlight the texts opening and

closing celebration of the Sabbath. The sketch begins with the narrators declaration that Every

Sabbath morning, in the summer time, I thrust back the curtain, to watch the sunrise stealing

down a steeple, which stands opposite my chamber window (Hawthorne, Sunday at Home

19). The emblem of the steeple, perhaps the singular architectural detail of Protestant churches,

symbolizes the transitory point at which the material and immaterial worlds meet, and

Hawthornes narrator is thereby able to seamlessly follow the descent of the Sabbath sun

earthward from Heaven, [as it] comes down the stone steps, one by one; and there stands the

steeple, glowing with fresh radiance . . . Methinks, though the same sun brightens it, every fair

morning, yet the steeple has a peculiar robe of brightness for the Sabbath (19).

This description of the suns progress from the churchs steeple, to its tower, and to its steps is

elegantly inverted in the sketchs penultimate paragraph where the narrator envisions (after the

secondSunday service that ends just after 4 PM) that the choristers he hears singing some final

fragmentary notes are angels, who came down from Heaven, this blessed morn [now] playing

and singing their farewell to earth (25-26). Even the narrators apologetic rewriting of this

flight of poetry does not restrain the texts upward movement: A few of the singing men and

singing women had lingered behind their fellows, and raised their voices fitfully, and blew a

careless note upon the organ[and] lifted my soul higher than all their former strains (26). The

sketch ends, as the setting sun ascends the steeple, with the narrators plea that the steeple still

point heavenward, and be decked with the hallowed sunshine of the Sabbath morn! (26).

This chiasmatic structure informs a second dramatic layer of the sketch: how the congregation

forms and subsequently disbands. This process begins, once again, with the narrator himself: I

am there, even before my friend, the sexton. At length he comesa man of kindly, but sombreer

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aspect, in dark gray clothes, and hair of the same mixturehe comes, and applies his key to the

wide portal (21). The narrator then notes how individuals drop in singly, and by twos and

threes until, As if there were magic in the sound [of the bell], the sidewalks of the street, both

up and down along, are immediately thronged with two long lines of people, all converging

hitherward, and streaming into the church (22). The narrators description of the departure of

the congregation reverses this convergence into a form of effluence: as if the pressure or

temperature in the church has grown too great, A commotion is heard. The seats are slammed

down, and the pew doors thrown backa multitude of feet are trampling along the unseen aisles

and the congregation bursts suddenly through the portal. The narrator then notices how a

rabble of boys, a phalanx of grown men and a crowd of females stream from the church;

lingers over the appearance of a third-rate coxcomb; notes how each matron takes her

husbands arm, and paces gravely homeward, while the girls also flutter away; describes how

the last of the singers and the sexton leave; and, finally, lingers upon the image of the Sabbath

sun on the steeple (25).

If its bookends celebrate a regional and indeed a national ritual, however, the sketchs

introspective center reveals the narrators unsteady doubts and rationalizations for staying home.

In this regard, we might recall David Reynolds important reading of Hawthornes fiction in the

context of American popular culture and the influence of a body of dark-reform writings

geared to the exposure of hidden corruption and the critique of moral platitudes and overweening

authority figures. As Reynolds describes it, these influences inform Hawthornes fiction in its

almost schizophrenic split between the Conventional and the Subversive and his persistent use

of a benign-subversive framing device designed to disguise his more caustic fictional moments

(121).18 Reynolds does not mention Sunday at Home, but his observations are operative here

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and point to how the frameworks of the sketch, in the words of Melville, but fringe, and play

upon the edges of thunder-clouds.19 In fact, even Hawthornes central metaphor of the Sabbath

was probably a gloss upon a vigorous exchange between the arch-Sabbatarian Lyman Beecher

and the Boston-based radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison that took place in midsummer

1836 just as Hawthorne was likely composing his sketch. With the Presbyterian elder Josiah

Bissell, Jr., Beecher had helped to found The General Union for the Promotion of the Christian

Sabbath in 1828, and he had given a widely reprinted sermon in 1829 entitled Pre-Eminent

Importance of the Christian Sabbath in which he proclaimed that the Sabbath is the sun of the

moral world. He repeated this metaphor in a widely reported address [in Pittsburgh at the

Presbyterian General Assembly in 1836] that upheld traditional authority by lauding the sanctity

of the Sabbath, the leadership of the ordained clergy as enforcers of the moral law, and the

silken ties among Christiansof the South and of the Norththat made the church a national

bulwark against Sabbath-breaking and abolitionist fanaticism (qtd. in Mayer 226-227).

Garrison was outraged at Beechers willingness to denounce Sabbath-breaking, on the one

hand, while tolerating slaveholding and the de facto disregard for the rest of the Decalogue, on

the other. He responded forcefully in the pages ofThe Liberatorand argued, following a well-

established line of Quaker reasoning, that the Sabbath was no holier than any other of Gods

days and to say otherwise was to make a fetish of form. As Garrisons early biographer

Archibald Grimke recounts, when Beecher trumpeted that the Sabbath is the great sun of the

moral world, Garrison retorted that the LORD GOD is the great sun of the moral world, not

the Sabbath. It is not one, but every day of the week which is His and which men should be

taught to observe as holy days. It is not regard for the forms of religion but for the spirit, which

is essential to righteousness (qtd. in Grimke 269-270).

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As the leader of the radical abolitionist movement, Garrisons abrupt entry into the Sabbath

debate exacerbated emerging divisions within the New England Anti-Slavery Society on the

mattes of colonization and the role of women as elected representatives and field agents. The

Beecher/Garrison exchange is significant, though, because it illustrates the return of the always

latent schism between the letter and the spirit that had marked moments of crisis in the history of

Congregationalism. Based upon a literal reading Bible and Old Testament passages such as

Exodus 20:.8-11 and Isaiah 18:.13-14 that offer instruction about the Sabbath, Sabbatarians like

Beecher viewed the Lords Day as a divinely ordained institution and as an earthly type of the

eternal rest to follow. Fellow travelers in antinomianism like Garrison, however, argued that the

Jewish Sabbath had no support in the New Testament and that such legalism and formalism

contradicted the message of the Gospels. They thereby challenged a longstanding identification

of the Sabbath and Puritanism that had developed, as Winton Solberg has shown, over a one

-hundred-year period in sixteenth-and -seventeenth- century England before being carried to

New England and spread with remarkable ideological consistency (if varying degrees of

enforcement) throughout the colonies. According to Solberg, Puritan Sunday grew out of four

intersecting socioeconomic forces: the impact of the vernacular Bible upon the English people;

the influence of covenant theology in shaping Puritan piety; a new attitude toward economic

action (the work ethic); and the condemnation of Sunday recreations (33). Even before it

became synonymous with the New England way, the Sabbath had become a cultural

synecdoche of Puritanism or, to put it another way, Puritan Sunday was became a symbolic

trigger that informed broader debates about such cultural binaries as work/idleness, duty/play,

order/disorder, mercy/judgment, and orthodoxy/heterodoxy (Hall 466-467).

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In The May-pole of Merry Mount (1835), Hawthorne had demonstrated his awareness of

the early seventeenth century turn from the multiple holidays of Merry Old England to the

austerities of the Puritan hegemony in New England.20 In Sunday at Home, he invokes these

cultural antecedents through a spiraling set of local binarieschurch versus town; illusion versus

truth; body versus soul; respect versus love, and mind versus heartas his narrator tries to strike

an uneven balance between the claims of community and conscience. Echoing Beecher, the

narrator at first celebrates the Sabbath for the physical and spiritual relief that the day brings to

townspeople who are otherwise so preoccupied with their worldly affairs and burdens. He

personifies the church steeple as a mind comprehensive and discriminating enough to care for

the great and small concerns of all the town, and its connection with human interest is quite

literally heard in the fluid symbolism of the bell that flings abroad the hurried and irregular

accents of general alarm just as easily as it sounds gladness and festivity or, alternatively,

offers appropriate accompaniment for a funeral. The church, too, is personified as calm,

meditative, melancholy, and comprehensive enough to encompass the cares of all (19-20).

Yet the narrator is also troubled because the steeple remains unheeded and the church

unattended during the week; what a moral loneliness, on week-days, he exclaims, broods

round about its [the steeples] stately height! The absent townspeople are representative of the

narrators belief of the moral state of humanity if left to its own devices: he variously describes

them as busy (200), individual (200), separate (200), secret, dead, sorrowful, irregular, hurried,

petty, and laden (19-22). This is obviously not a very promising view of humanityit echoes

concerns about creeping commercialism and self-indulgent individualism so often voiced in

Sabbatarian tractsbut it positions the Sabbath as a cultural and spiritual antidote. Although the

narrator acknowledges the vacant pews and empty galleries, the silent organ, [and] the voiceless

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pulpit that inhabit the church during the week and even speculates that the edifice might more

properly be sited in the outskirts of the town, he reverses the moral implications of this

situation when he asks, Timewhere man lives notwhat is it but eternity? And in the

church, we might suppose, are garnered up, throughout the week, all thoughts and feelings that

have reference to eternity, until the holy day comes round again, to let them forth (20). In this

sentiment, he tries to reconcile the opposing claims of Beecher and Garrison on the Sabbath and

conceives of the day as a spiritual storehouse that, by housing glimpses and reminders of

eternity, becomes a daily resource that speaks a moral to the few that think, [while] it reminds

thousands of busy individuals of their separate and most secret affairs (20).

~ ~ ~

At the outset of the sketch, then, Hawthornes narrator conceives of the Sabbath in a manner

of which even arch-Sabbatarians like Beecher would approve: the narrator sets off the holy day

from the commercial and secular activities of the week and thereby reinforces its distinction; I

watch the earliest sunshine, he avers, and fancy that a holier brightness marks the day, when

there shall be no buzz of voices on the Exchange, nor traffic in the shops, nor crowd, nor

business, anywhere but at the church. Many have fancied it so (20). Of course, Hawthornes

narrator claims too much too earnestly here. The verb fancy reinforces the double irony that

Puritan edicts now in no way entirely command or control actual observances and that the

narrator himself celebrates the Sabbath alone, at home, in a manner that relies as much upon his

private imagination and emotion as any public tradition. It is at this juncture that Hawthorne

turns the sketch inward, so to speak, and a certain antagonistic and self-defensive quality

emerges his narrators comments about community and worship. The narrator now says that he

loves to spend such pleasant Sabbaths, from morning till night, behindthe curtain of my open

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window through a small peep-hole, and he claims that he recognizes the Sabbath sun

whenever and wherever it appears, not only on the church and its steeple (21). Some illusions,

and this among them, he presses further, are the shadows of great truths. Doubts may flit

around me, or seem to close their evil wings, and settle down; but, so long as I imagine that the

earth is hollowed, and the light of heaven retains its sanctity, on the Sabbathwhile that blessed

sunshine lives within menever can my soul have lost the instinct of its faith (21).

Readers familiar with the narrative arc of much of Hawthornes short fiction may reasonably

expect that a familiar pattern will now unfold: a typical Hawthorne protagonist or reformer

begins with a measure of human solidarity or spiritual certitude (however naively) only to fall,

through pride, or self-love, or both, into cynicism, isolation, or solipsism. Instead, the symbolic

action in Sunday at Home takes a more unexpected if also more uncertain direction than in

Hawthornes famous tales of this period: the narrators invocation of the Sabbath sunshine

evolves into an allusion to the Quaker doctrine of Inner Light and thereby introduces into the

sketch a Garrisonian corrective to the sketchs Sabbatarian pressures. The phrase instinct of

faith, in particular, recalls the conflicted Puritan cum Quaker Tobias Pearson of The Gentle

Boy whose religious sensibility is strong as instinct in him.21Although there is no precise

historical or moral coordination between the cases of Tobias and the narrator of Sunday at

Home, as Frederick Crews and others have noted, Hawthornes examinations of conscience

almost always turn upon an opposition between Puritans and members of dissident groups. In

the case of Sunday at Home, this opposition is internalized in the narrators Sabbatarian-like

celebration of Puritan Sunday, on the one hand, and his Quaker-inflected critique of the days

formalism, on the other (63). It must suffice, the narrator asserts in what amounts to his most

explicit explanation for his absence, that, though my form be absent, my inner man goes

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constantly to church, while many, whose bodily presence fills the accustomed seats, have left

their souls at home (21). The word suffice marks the latent compulsion that the narrator feels

in regard to what he calls at one point the privileges and duties of the day, but this pressure is

more than offset by his contrapuntal assertion of an inner/outer binary that echoes the very

language of Quaker apologists like Robert Barclay. In his no doubt careful reading of Barclays

An Apology for the True Christian Divinity: being an Explanation and Vindication of the

Principles and Doctrines of the People called Quakers (1678), Hawthorne would likely have

taken special note of a chapter entitled Concerning Worship in which Barclay explains how

Quakers have no quarrel with other Protestants except insofar as the latter have not yet extended

the logic of the Reformation to the very root of their own religious practicenamely, to their

worship acted in and from mans will and spirit, and not by and from the Spirit of God. True

communion, that is to say, emerges only from the inward motions and operations of the Spirit

and not from fixed days, times, or places for worship or premeditated praises, prayers, or

preachings, which man sets about in his own will and at his own appointment (Barclay).22

In Sunday at Home, the narrator pursues this line of critique when he remains at home

behind his window throughout the day observing but also recreating the morning and afternoon

services of a Congregational church. Not just a romantic spectator, the narrators vantage point

within the ambit of the circling shadow of the steeple enables him to become a participant

observer and to imaginatively appropriate the services he overhears (21). Amplifying his

antinomian claims, the narrator compares his situation to that of Jesus in the Temple who

admonished the Pharisees that My house is the house of prayer: but ye have made it a den of

thieves, but he does so in a way that both asserts and questions his moral authority: With

stronger truth be it said, that a devout heart may consecrate a den of thieves, as an evil one may

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convert a temple to the same. My heart, perhaps, has not such holy, nor, I would fain trust, such

impious potency (21).23 On one level, therefore, the narrator invokes the power of individual

conscience as a corrective religious orthodoxies and formalismthe deadening affects of

rationalism, sectarianism, and ritualism that Emerson and many of his contemporaries found so

stifling.24 These issues come into sharp relief in the narrators description of the minister:

Here comes the clergyman, slow and solemn, in sever simplicity, needing no black silk

gown to denote his office. His aspect claims my reverence, but cannot win my love. Were

I to picture Saint Peter, keeping fast the gate of Heaven, and frowning, more stern than

pitiful, on the wretched applicants, that face should be my study. By middle age, or

sooner, the creed has generally wrought upon the heart, or been attempered by it. (23)

The narrators discontent extends to the parsons saw that the narrator suggests he can seldom

follow or fructify because his mind begins to wander with the first strong idea overheard.

At my open window, he says, I am as well situated as at the foot of the pulpit stairs. The

broken and scattered fragments of this one discourse will be the texts of many sermons, preached

by those colleague pastorscolleagues, but often disputantsmy Mind and Heart. . . .I, their

sole auditor, cannot always understand them (24).

At a time when Sabbatarians felt that Sabbath attendance was both a sacred and a patriotic

duty, and that the public should take their interpretive cues from ministers so that the clergy

could instill disciplined minds with a sense of obedience before a knowledge of God, the

narrators sentiments constitute a form of religious dissent and tacit civil disobedience (Isenberg

78). In anticipation of Emersons explanation of reading as provocation in The American

Scholar and his criticism of formalism in preaching in The Divinity School Address, the

narrator here isprovokedby parts of the service, and especially by the hymns, that he overhears

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but then imaginatively reconstructs from a safe distance. He begins to listen to the ministers

voice but does not stay with it long because his imagination recoils from the tendentious nature

of the sermon; instead, the broken and scattered fragments of the discourse become the spur to

his own train of thought.25 Similarly and quite literally because he isnt situated within the

church, where the full choir, and the massive melody of the organ, would fall with a weight

upon me, the narrator claims that At this distance, it [the hymn] thrills through my frame, and

plays upon my heart-strings, with a pleasure both of the sense and spirit. . . .The strain [ceases],

but prolongs itself in my mind, with fanciful echoes (24, emphasis mine). And thus, at the end

of the sketch the departing choristers lift the narrators soul higher than they had in any of their

former songs because their fitful voices and careless notes upon the organ are not rehearsed

or contrived but are simply heartfelt (25-26). Unlike the figure of the vain and ultimately

ineffective reformer or minister that populates much of Hawthornes fiction, the narrator here re-

forms his communitys religious observances in a way that epitomizes the Emersonian dictum

that forms should never be fixed but always flowing.26

~ ~ ~

On another level, however, the sketch undercuts the narrators antinomian authority and his

critique of public rituals and pieties. If things do not go quite as badly for the narrator as for

some of Hawthornes other reformers, the dramatic irony of the sketch repeatedly questions the

righteousness of his motives. In fact, he twice interrupts his so-called pious meditations to

meditate upon matters of the flesh: once just before the morning service (when he notices the

pretty girls whose muslin dresses heighten their mortal loveliness, as if to rival the blessed

angels, and keep out thoughts from heaven. Were I the minister himself, I must needs look, he

exclaims); and once just after the afternoon service (when he singles out a third-rate coxcomb

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whose tight pair of black silk pantaloons shine as if varnished and may have been made of the

same stuff as Christians garments, in the Pilgrims Progress. I have taken a great liking to

those black silk pantaloons, the narrator intones in a manner that betrays his blithe lack of

awareness of the spiritual strivings of Bunyans character (22-25)). In his fetish for all things

silky, the narrator recapitulates the formalism that he would critique in others. Furthermore, the

narrator obliquely but repeatedly suggests that the imagination is the seat of his ability to invest

spiritual feeling into the ritualistic forms of the day: he writes that so long as I imagine that the

earth is hallowed, and the light of heaven retains its sanctity, on the Sabbath---while the blessed

sunshine lives within me---never can my soul have lost the instinct of its faith; he "fanc[ies]

that a holier brightness marks" the Sabbath; he dreams "that the angels, who came down from

Heaven, this blessed morn, to blend themselves with the worship of the truly good, are playing

and singing a farewell to the earth; he imagines his inner man going forth into the church

amongst the dusty pews and ascending the pulpit without sacrilege; hefancies that an old woman

is better off than an old man because she lingers in the sunlight and he stays just within the line

of its [church towers] shadow, looking downward (20-22; 25-26, emphasis mine). And the list

goes on.

In this way, the narrators claim to be acting with a higher sense of devotion or purity may be

only a byproduct of his romantic imagination and an expression of his fallen nature rather than

any Christ-like potential; his private practices may be just as ritualistic and formalistic as those

he observes; he may have substituted his own impious potency for the more legitimate

authority that he critiques; he rather than the minister, finally, may in truth be the evil one who

converts the temple of his own home into a den of thieves. If public professions of faith are

coerced and thereby tainted and false, the sketch suggests, the private performance of public

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duties becomes the only sign of sincerity.27 And yet if the individual imagination overwrites all

then how does one accurately distinguish between a true influx of the spirit and a mere

expression of ones own willful, fallen emotions? In The Gentle Boy, Hawthorne had also

engaged these questions and had arguably created a stable moral center between the excesses

of Puritan rationalism and authoritarianism, on the one hand, and those of Quaker enthusiasm

and solipsism, on the other (Colacurcio 184-185). Sunday at Home offers no such center or

resting point. The narrators epitomizing gesture of thrusting back and yet hiding behind his

curtain invites the public gaze even as it thinly veils himself from scrutiny; his private devotions

enable him to create an alternative to ossified religious observances even as he remains somehow

dependent upon them. His home remains, physically and culturally, within the circling shadow

of a Congregational church in an oppositional but also enabling way.

And this may be precisely the point. To the degree that he is a representative New Englander

circa 1835, the narrator of Sunday at Home expresses not so much a declension as a cultural

extension of Puritanism into secular society. Like Young Goodman Brown but differently, the

sketchs narrator is a kind of everyman whose conflicted conscience is at once a strikingly

personal example of emotional energy and an epiphenomenon of the growing collusion of the

religious and the secular in America. As the religious historian Tracy Fessenden has recently

explained, neither the metanarrative of [the] ever-increasing tolerance of Protestantism in

American history nor the nominal opposition of the secular to forms of religious irrationality or

intolerance can account for how Protestantism subsumed alternative religions to the point that

Christian come[s] to stand in for the religious to the exclusion of non-Christian ways of

being religious. The historical outcome of this simultaneous declension and extension of

Puritanism, she suggests, is Christianity as an unmarked category that only rises to the surface

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at pivotal momentssuch as when Presidential candidates dutifully give an account of their

Christian beliefsand more often remains invisible as the organizing locus of American cultural

life (Fessenden 4-6). What is at stake in Sunday at Home is thus not just another dramatization

of the dangers of the romantic imaginationPuritan Sunday was too important a subject for

Hawthorne and the nation for thatbut an acute reading of the Christian watermarking of private

life that ironically takes Protestantisms most conspicuous public symbolthe steepleand its

most potent cultural pedagogythe Sabbathas both a subject of and tool for social critique.28

One therefore begins to get a sense of the intentional nature of Hawthornes cultural allusions,

the sophistication of his social criticism, and the sheer range of reading when even the title of his

sketch holds in suspension both the nomenclature of an 1836 Sabbatarian tract and the pagan

origins of the day (i.e. Sun-day). In The Sabbath at Home, the prominent Presbyterian minister

Silas M. Andrews tries to reassert the primacy of ecclesiastical authority given the rise of church

absenteeism and private worship practices by using the same metaphor of domesticity that

Hawthornes narrator employs for a very different purpose: It is in the house of God that we are

taught what we must do to be saved, Andrews writes, and how we are acceptably to serve our

Creator. And yet Andrews is forced to admit that Sabbath laws are a dead letter, that custom

now allows almost every kind of recreation on the holy day, and that each denomination has its

own views and claims the indulgence of their own practice in regard to Sabbath observances.

The force of public opinion, he acknowledges, is vitiated because every possible shade of mind

is given equal weight in democratic society. In the end, Andrews suddenly reverses his argument

and engages in a rear guard action when he rhetorically asks, But in what does the sanctification

of the Lord s Day chiefly consist? We have seen that it is in observing the day in our own

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dwellings. This secures the performance of all its public duties. In a pre-eminent sense, the

Sabbath which God approves, is the Sabbath at home (17; 10).

Engaging this same contested space of the home front, Hawthornes sketch questions

Andrews conflation of private and public forms of worship. Although the significance of the

words Sunday (in the title) and Sabbath (in the body of the sketch) may seem sleight, diction

is a form of definition and Hawthorne was far too deliberate a craftsman and too knowledgeable

of public affairs to offer his readers a careless title. While he may or may not have read yet

another 1836 publicationone that reviewed the perennial question of whether and how to

distinguish the First Day from the Seventh Day, the Christian Sabbath from the Jewish

Sabbath, and The Lords Day from mere SundayHawthorne would have known that his

title sounded the historical fact that early Christians and the first Christian emperors had used

the names Sunday andLords day interchangeably, according as it was their purpose to address

Pagans or Christians (Miller 66-67; 73).29 Thus, the sketchs complex layering of dramatic

structure, symbolism, allusion, and irony enabled a wide range of reader response without

overtly asking for anything specific. Indeed, Sunday at Home so subtly interweaves the

(anti)Sabbatarian positions that many of the sketchs contemporary reviewers mistook it for an

easy affirmation of spiritual contentment and public piety. In their reviews ofTwice-Told Tales,

Horatio Bridge, Longfellow, Caroline Gilman, and especially Elizabeth Palmer Peabody all

praised the sketch in these terms, as did Andrew Preston Peabody in The Christian Examiner

who attempted to reclaim it as a piece that could have been written only by one, who revelled

[sic] in the hushed calm and holy light of the Sabbath, whose soul was attuned to its harmonies,

but of so fastidious a taste and delicate a sensibility, as to be repelled and chilled by the

dissonances of the multitudes worship (Idol et. al 35).30 Given its contrapuntal voicing of

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liberal, antinomian, agnostic, and even pagan perspectives, though, The Christian Examiner

review neatly illustrates the degree to which cultural pundits were ready, like Henry James some

forty years later, to read past the sketchs darker rhetoric and conclude that it is so light, so

slight, so tenderly trivial, that simply to mention [it] is to put [it] in a false position.

~ ~ ~

For Hawthorne, then, the Sabbath was too rich a symbolic and cultural construct to be taken

at face value as a synecdoche of Puritanism or even Christianity more generally. (The term

religion, as Nina Baym eloquently reminds us, was one that Hawthorne viewed not as a body

of doctrine or a set of observances but as an emotion of faith (62).) Although scattered

references to the Sabbath can be found in his other worksincluding The Scarlet Letter

Hawthorne would return to Puritan Sunday in a concerted fashion only once, and he would do so

in a manner clearly indebted to the structure and tone of Sunday at Home. In The Arched

Window chapter from The House of the Seven Gables, the sensitive and prematurely aged

Clifford, at the behest of his young niece Phoebe, climbs the stairs of the house to a second-story

window from which he observes the activities of the street and yet keeps himself in comparative

obscurity by means of the [crimson] curtain (159). After recounting several of the insignificant

activities of everyday life in a quaint if increasingly modern town that Clifford witnesses, the

novels narrator describes the sights of a Sabbath morningone of those bright, calm Sabbaths,

with its own hallowed atmosphere, when Heaven seems to diffuse itself over the earths face in a

solemn smile, no less sweet than solemn (167).

As in Sunday at Home, this internal sketch begins with a paean to natural religion triggered

now not so much by the Sabbath sunshine as by the sound of the ringing church bells which are

identified with the hopeful prospect that were we pure enough to be its medium, we should be

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conscious of the earths natural worship ascending through our frames, on whatever spot of

ground we stood (167).31 And as in Sunday at Home, the narrators eye tracks like a camera

as the neighbors emerge from their homes in their Sunday best and ready themselves for church.

Initially, there is no rift between observer and observed, no tension between private and public

professions of faith, no holier than thou pretensions given how the neighbors, All of them,

however unspiritual on other days, were transfigured by the Sabbath influence, ; so that their

very garments . . . had somewhat of the quality of ascension-robes (167). This sense of

community and communion invokes the originating ideals of the Puritan theocratic experiment,

and the text materializes them not only in nature but also in the physical form of Phoebe: unlike

the vexed narrator of Sunday at Home, Phoebeseems like a prayer and her countenance has

a familiar gladness and a holiness that you could play with, and yet reverence it as much as

ever (168). Her attire, too, exudes something of a prelapsarian quality as her clothes seem never

to have been worn before or, if worn, were all the fresher for it. Phoebe is a Religion in

herself, warm, simple, true, with a substance that could walk on earth, and a spirit that was

capable of Heaven (168).

The sights and sounds of the Sabbath and Phoebes image inspire Clifford and Hepzibah, who

have not attended church for many years, to prepare for public worship where, Hepzibah

imagines, she will kneel down among the people, and be reconciled to God and man at once

(168). Again rendered as an earthly type of eternal rest and reconciliation, this Sabbath scene in

The House of the Seven Gables seems to offer the Pyncheons an opportunity to throw off the

imprisoning yoke of the past. And yet Hawthorne once again undercuts both the ameliorative

powers of the Sabbath and the self-absolving potentials of the human heart: Clifford and

Hepzibah prepare for church but dress, unlike Phoebe, in their faded bettermost and in clothes

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laid away so long that the dampness and mouldy smell of the past was on them (169). And

when they open the front door of the house, all hope fades; instead, they feel as if they were

standing in the presence of the whole world, and with mankinds great and terrible eye on them

alone. The eye of their Father seemed to be withdrawn, and gave them no encouragement. The

warm, sunny air of the street made them shiver. Their hearts quaked within them, at the idea of

taking one step further (169).32 Whereas the narrator of Sunday at Home forges a reciprocal if

tenuous balance between community and conscience on a sunny Sunday, here the very sun chills,

community becomes coercion, the past overwrites the present, and the public is displaced by the

private such that Clifford exclaims, We are ghosts! We have no right among human beings

no right anywhere, but in this old house, which has a curse on it, and which therefore we are

doomed to haunt (169).

In response, Hawthornes narrator moralizes too easily and too quickly, what other dungeon

is so dark as ones own heart! What jailor so inexorable as ones self! (169). In doing so, the

narrator constructs an implicit dialogue with Clifford that recalls the internal debate of the

narrator of Sunday at Home who also oscillates between celebration, social observation,

critique, and despair. These two fictional engagements with the Sabbath register Hawthornes

continued personal and fictional investments in the day even as they also underscore his darker

consideration that past actionssuch as Cliffords unjust imprisonmenthave inexorable

consequences in the present and, perhaps, the hereafter. The core of Hawthornes treatment of

the Sabbath finally centers upon the paradoxical certainty that uncertainty is an ineluctable part

of the human condition, that doubt is bred in the bone, and that any tallying of what the narrator

of Sunday at Home terms our instinct of faith must acknowledge its moorings in the human

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imagination or, to put it more positively, that the failure of orthodox religious forms call for

imaginative leaps of faith to meet our deep-seated need for communion.

25


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Notes

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Works Cited

Baird, Thomas H.An Essay on the Subject of the Transportation of the Mail on the Sabbath.

Pittsburgh: Office of the Christian Herald, n.d. Print.

Barclay, Robert. The Eleventh Proposition: Concerning Worship.An Apology for the True

Christian Divinity. Quaker Heritage Press. Web. 29 June 2009.

Baym, Nina. The Shape of Hawthornes Career. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1976. Print.

Beecher, Lyman. Address. The Christian Examnier and General Review 1 (1829) 226-241. Print.

Bellis, Peter J. Writing Revolution: Aesthetics and Politics in Hawthorne, Whitman, and

Thoreau. Athens: U. of Georgia Press, 2003. 12. Print.

Brand, Dana. The Panoramic Spectator in America: A Rereading of Some of Hawthornes

Sketches.American Transcendental Quarterly 59 (March 1986): 5-17.

Christopherson, Bill. Agnostic Tensions in Hawthornes Short Stories.American Literature

72.3 (Sept. 2000). Print.

Colacurcio, Michael, ed. Selected Tales and Sketches. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York:

Penguin, 1987. Print.

---. The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthornes Early Tales. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

Print.

Cox, Robert. The Literature of the Sabbath Question. Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, 1865.

Print.

Crews, Frederick. Sins of the Fathers: Hawthornes Psychological Themes. New York: Oxford

UP, 1966. Print.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo.Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1983. Print.


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Fessenden, Tracy. Culture and Redemption: Religion, The Secular, and American Literature.

Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Print.

Fuller, Wayne E. Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth Century America. Urbana: U. of Illinois

Press, 2003. Print.

Grimke, Archibald H. William Lloyd Garrison: The Abolitionist. New York: Funk and Wagnalls,

1891. Print.

Grodzins, Dean.American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism. Chapel Hill: U of

North Carolina Press, 2002. Print.

Hall, David D. Symbols and Society in Colonial New England,Reviews in American History

6.4 (December 1978): 465. Print.

Hamilton, Kristie.Americas Sketchbook: The Cultural Life of a Nineteenth-Century Literary

Genre. Athens: Ohio UP, 1998. 1-34. Print.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 1835.Hawthornes Lost Notebook 1835-1841. University Park: PA

State UP, 1978, 7-9. Print.

---. The Arched Window. The House of the Seven Gables. Ed. William Charvat, Roy Harvey

Pearce, and Claude M. Simpson. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1965. 159-172. Print.

Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne 2.

---.Hawthornes American Travel Sketches. Ed. Alfred Weber, Beth L. Lucek, and Dennis

Berthold. Hanover: UP of New England, 1989. Print.

---. Sunday at Home. Twice-Told Tales. Ed. William Charvat, Roy Harvey Pearce, and Claude

M. Simpson. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1974. Print. Centenary Edition of the Works of

Nathaniel Hawthorne 9.

---. Sunday at Home, and Other Tales. Halifax: Milner and Sowerby, 1853. Print.

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Heath, William. Merry Old England and Hawthornes The May-Pole of Merry Mount.

Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 33.1 (Spring 2007): 41-71. Print.

Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848.

New York: Oxford, 2007. Print.

Idol, John L., Idol, John L., Jr., and Jones, Buford, ed.Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Contemporary

Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print.

Isenberg, Nancy. Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina

Press, 1998. Print.

James, Henry, Jr.Hawthorne. New York: Harper Bros., 1901. Print.

John, Richard R. Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously: The Postal System, The Sabbath, and the

Transformation of American Political Culture.Journal of the Early Republic 10 (Winter

1990): 517-567. Print.

Kesselring, Marion.Hawthornes Reading: 1828-1850: A Transcription and Identification of

Titles Recorded in the Charge-Books of the Salem Athenaeum. New York: New York

Public Library, 1949. Print.

Kingsbury, Harmon. The Sabbath: A Brief History of Laws, Petitions, Remonstrances and

Reports, with Facts and Arguments, Relating to the Christian Sabbath. New York:

Robert Carter, 1840. Print.

Lamb, Charles. The Sabbath Bells.American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge

2 (May 1836): 399. Print.

Lasseter, Janice Milner. Hawthornes Legacy to Rebecca Harding Davis.Hawthorne and

Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition. Ed. John L. Idol, Jr. and

Melinda M. Ponder. Amherst: U. of Mass. Press, 1999. Print.

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Lathrop, George Parsons. Introduction. Twice-Told Tales. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. J.

Hubert Scott. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935. 12. Print.

Mayer, Henry.All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery. New York: St.

Martins Griffin, 1998. Print.

McCrossen, Alexis.Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000. Print.

Mellow, James R.Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. Print.

Melville, Herman. Hawthorne and His Mosses. Moby-Dick. Ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison

Hayford. New York: Norton, 2002. 521-522. Print.

Miller, Samuel. The Most Suitable Name for the Christian Sabbath. The Biblical Repository

(January 1836). Print.

N.a. Post Office. Salem Gazette 3.43 (9 January, 1829). Print.

---. Public Meetings. Salem Gazette 3.43 (6 January, 1829). Print.

Pearson, Leland. Hawthornes Early Tales.Hawthorne and the Real: Bicentennial Essays. Ed.

Millicent Bell. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2005. Print.

Reynolds, David.Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of

Emerson and Melville. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. Print.

Shamir, Milette.Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature.

Philadelphia: U of PA Press, 2006. Print.

Solberg, Winton U.Redeem the Time: The Puritan Sabbath in Early America. Cambridge:

Harvard UP, 1977. Print.

de Tocqueville, Alexis.Democracy in America. Ed. J.P. Mayer. Trans. George Lawrence. New

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Turner, Arlin.Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography. New York: Oxford UP, 1980. Print.

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Ulln, Magnus. Reading with The Eye of Faith: The Structural Principle of Hawthornes

Romances. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48.1 (Spring 2006). Print.

Van Doren, Mark, ed. The Best of Hawthorne. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Ronald,

1951. Print.

Waggoner, Hyatt H.Hawthorne: A Cricial Study. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP,

1955. Print.

Wardlaw, Ralph.Discourses on the Sabbath. Glasgow: Archibald Fullarton, 1832. Print.

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1 My title acknowledges the importance of Richard R. Johns germinal account of the Sunday mail controversy and the

Sabbatarian movement in antebellum America. See his article, Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously: The Postal System, The

Sabbath, and the Transformation of American Political Culture. Thanks to Brent Simoneauxs for his contribution to earlydrafts of this essay. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers from theReview for their astute suggestions

and Sam Coale for his clarion comment that ambiguity is a legitimate point of view.2 As Robert Cox noted in his compendium ofThe Literature of the Sabbath Question, Down to 1853 it was unlawful in

Massachusetts to be present at any game, sport, play, or public diversion, except concerts of sacred music, on the evening of

Saturday as well as of Sunday (411).3 See, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville who, after citing at length from the late eighteenth-century Sabbath statutes ofMassachusetts and the revised 1827 and 1828 statutes of New York State, observes that The laws just quoted are recent

ones, but who would be able to understand them without going right back to the origin of the colonies? I do not doubt thatnowadays the penal part of that legislation is very seldom applied; laws remain rigid when mores have already bent with

changing times. Nevertheless, Sunday observance in America is even now one of the things that strike a stranger most.

Tocqueville toured the United States in 1831-1832, and this passage also offers his impression of the symbiotic relationship

between Sunday rest and the subsequent Feverish activity of the workday in one great American city (712-714).4 This detailed journal entry and (apparently) non-ironic conclusion become even more suggestive when we consider David

Reynolds observation that Hawthornes journals are otherwise very sparse in references to real social movements or

political events and Hyatt H. Waggoners comment about Hawthornes preferred mode of cognition (as summarized by

Michael Colacurcio): Adumbrating Julian Hawthornes authoritative observation that, as contrasted with Emerson,Hawthorne more and more questioned the expediency of stating truth in its disembodied form, Waggoner observes that

Hawthornes thinking outside his tales is much less impressive than his thinking in his tales. Thus hisNotebooks are

everywhere less impressive and revealing than theJournals of Emerson and Thoreau (Reynolds 115; qtd. in Colacurcio534).5Sunday at Home, and Other Tales (Halifax: Milner and Sowerby, 1853).6 Mark Van Doren, for example, republished the text in his The Best of Hawthorne as did Michael Colacurcio in his

instrumental Selected Tales and Sketches.7 In contrast, when informed that he would be receiving an advance copy ofTwice-Told Tales, Hawthornes former

Bowdoin classmate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote to the author that he had probably already read most of the

collections contents and that what most delighted me in them is the simple representation of what may be called small-life (qtd. in Pearson 129).8 In his introduction to a 1935 edition ofTwice-Told Tales, George Parsons Lathrop references a letter written to him by

Hawthornes sister Elizabeth on the origins of Sunday at Home: The paper entitled A Sunday at Home was based on a

meeting-house, near the birthplace in Union Street, concerning which Hawthornes surviving sister writes to the editor: It

never had a steeple, nor a clock, nor a bell, nor, of course, an organ. . . .But Hawthorne bestows all these incitements to

devotion to atone for his own personal withdrawal from such influences. It was from the house on Herbert Street that hesaw what he describes (12).9 Janice Milner Lasseter, for instance, describes Sunday at Home as a primarily lighthearted sketch, a candidate for thekind of writing that may have gotten Hawthorne the reputation as the man who means no meanings (172). Most critics,

however, have read the sketch as a study in romantic alienation. Hyatt H. Waggoner, Nina Baym, and Michael Colacurcio

all have done so and offer the best of what little commentary exists. To my knowledge, no sustained analysis of the sketch

exists on the order Waggoner once suggested was needed for The Celestial Railroad and Earths Holocaust (which, he

said, are substantial and explicit criticism of [Hawthornes] age, so that a complete comment on them would require a

good deal of historical scholarship exercised in a long essay. (17). See WaggonersHawthorne; A Critical Study . Also see

Baym, The Shape of Hawthornes Careerand Colacurcios The Province of Piety, 493-495.10 The list could easily be extended, but major tales that turn upon such precisely defined moments include The May-poleof Merry Mount (1628, set amidst the creation of Puritan hegemony in New England), The Gentle Boy (1659-1660, a

tale cast during the culminating months of the so-called Quaker invasion of New England), Young Goodman Brown (circa1692 and the Salem witchcraft hysteria), and The Ministers Black Veil (the late 1730s during the First Great

Awakening). Given this recent and concentrated fictional achievement, Hawthorne would have likely found the Second

Great Awakening and the Sunday mail crisis as provocations for yet another exploration of Puritan conscience.11 In this description of the anti-allegorical nature of Hawthornes allegorical sketch, I am drawing from Joel Pfisters

discussion of Michael Davitt Bell: Hawthornes self-reflexive emphasis on the figurative quality of identity is important in

many of his anti-allegorical allegories (an ingenious formulation I borrow from Michael Davitt Bell). . . .Where an

allegorist might represent a character whose characteristic of inner self seems palpable or natural, an anti-allegorist would

be more interested in showing how the social assignment of cultural figures and allegories to characters may result in theshaping of their inner selves in particular ways (Pfister 44-45).12 As John notes, Phrases like Sunday mails fail to convey this [rich symbolic] meaning (518). Subsequent historians

have generally accepted Johns outline of the Sunday mail controversy and resulting Sabbatarian movement: the first phrase


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of the protest began in 1809 when the Hugh Wylie, a Presbyterian elder and postmaster, was barred from communion for

distributing mail on Sunday, but closed in 1817 with a definitive Congressional report; and that the second phrase of the

protest had its roots in the conspicuous growth of postal routes and the opening of such commercial thoroughfares as theErie Canal in 1825 and closed, once again, with two prominent and highly debated Congressional reports issued in 1829 and

1830. More generally, John argues that Sabbatarianism, like so many antebellum reform movements, grew directly out of

the remarkable outburst of popular religiosity that has come to be known as the Second Great Awakening (518; 520).13 As Bill Christopherson has observed of Hawthornes agonistic short fiction, Any writer fixing a critical eye on

America circa 1830, much less its New England origins, would have been hard-pressed to do so from an exclusively social

or historical perspective, so intertwined had history and the Bible, secular culture and Christianity become. By the sametoken, with Christianity becoming culturally enshrined, small wonder if a fiction writer bent on criticizing or questioning its

assumptions were to choose a mode based on indirection, irony, and veiled suggestion (600).14 Peter J. Bellis, Writing Revolution: Aesthetics and Politics in Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau (Athens: U. of Georgia

Press, 2003), 12.15 Kristie Hamilton notes Hawthornes authorial complicity with the Englishman in this scene and how he ironically

fashions the Englishman himself into a traduced type (22).16 If an 1829 report in the Salem Gazette is at all representative, Hawthornes hometown was just as divided about Sunday

mails as many other small or isolated towns that struggled to balance the desire for economic development and

communication with longstanding religious and cultural mores. In Salem, a public committee ended up endorsing both

sides of the Sunday mail issue when in their opening resolution they reaffirmed that the observance of Sunday as a day ofreligious worship and instruction is eminently adapted to extend the knowledge and influence of truth and virtue, but

concluded That if Congress should prohibit the forwarding of mails and the delivery of letters on Sunday, individuals and

the Government will be obliged to resort to such temporary arrangements for transmitting intelligence as their respectiveexigencies may require; and such temporary arrangements, while they will be attended with increased expense, will be

productive of far greater inconvenience and disturbance to the religious public, than can justly be complained of under the

present system (Public Meetings). Even the Salem post office split the difference: the Gazette obliquely announced in

the same issue: The Office will not be opened on Sunday morning. But will be opened every evening from half past nine

to ten oclock (i.e. after both Sunday services and for a very limited time). DOCUMENTATION17 For an alternative analysis of the collections contents, see Baym, especially pp. 67-83, and Leland Pearson,

Hawthornes Early Tales, 128-129.18 Since about 1835 (the year he first showed clear signs of understanding the ironies behind popular reformers), Reynolds

writes, Hawthorne had made many variations upon the popular benign-subversive device of sugarcoating dark fiction with

conventional moral commentary. . . .Indeed, this strategy of tacking a benign moral conclusion onto a deeply disturbing tale

became a standard feature of Hawthornes fiction from the mid-1830s onward (121).19 For Melvilles famous description of Hawthornes power of blackness, see Melville 521-522.20

Hawthorne implies that the origin of the clash between the revelers of Merry Mount and the Puritans (led by JohnEndicott) was an interruption of Sabbath services: the Puritans affirmed, that, when a psalm was pealing from their place of

worship, the echo, which the forest sent them back, seemed often like the chorus of a jolly catch, closing with a roar of

laughter. Who but the fiend, and his bond-slaves, the crew of Merry Mount, had thus disturbed them! In due time, a feud

arose. . . (179). The critic who comes closest to addressing the Sabbatarian subtext of the tale is William Heath who notes

that The Book of Sports (1618) made merriment mandatory and tied it to royalist politics. James declared that harmlesseRecreation after Sunday services, such as having May-Games, Whitsun Ales, and Morrisdances, and the setting up of

Maypoles and other sports, was not only lawful but ought to be encouraged (52). See Heath 41-71.21 Hawthorne substantially revised The Gentle Boy for its republication in Twice-Told Tales and once again for its thrice-

told publication in 1839. The tales dramatic apex is a Sabbath service.22 Although an online edition, I refer to the most authoritative republication of Barclays important work which is based

upon the two earliest English language editions of his text originally published in 1678. My citations are taken from sections

I, III, and his epigraph, respectively. While purportedly side stepping a long digression concerning the debates among

Protestants concerning the first day of the week, Barclay does briefly comment upon the Sabbath question when he atteststhat if Quakers believe that there is no Biblical authority for the set time and observance of the Sabbath they nevertheless

believe it to be a good practice and therefore observe it without superstitiously straining the Scriptures for another reason(IV).23 Recounted in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, the fullest description of Christs encounter with the Pharisees occurs in the

latter gospel; the relevant passage reads, And he went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold therein, and

them that bought; Saying unto them, It is written, My house is the house of prayer: but ye have made it a den of thieves.

Luke 19:45-48. See Luke 20:1-8 for a further description of Jesus parrying of the Pharisees attempt to undercut his moral

authority.24 As Ralph Wardlaw, DD, neatly framed the problem, the Sabbath can become a day of outward habits, rather than of

inward experiencesof forms, rather than of feelings,--of conformity to parental counsels and traditionary practices, rather


34/34

than to divine purposes and divine injunctions,--of bodily exercise, but not of spiritual delight (177). Such anti-institutional

sentiment was rife both in the Transcendentalist movement and beyond. Theodore Parker, to take one example, grew

increasingly unhappy with the compulsion by which religion is made to consist in belief of a certain creed, & not adispensation of the heart, which affect the whole [character] & becomes the mans life (qtd. in Grodzins 225).25 Compare the narrators discontent with Barclays own pointed critique in this regard: he [the minister] hath hammered

together in his closet, according to his own will, by his human wisdom and literature, and by stealing the words of Truth

from the letter of the Scriptures and patching together other mens writings and observations, so much as will hold him

speaking an hour while the glass runs, and without waiting or feeling the inward influence of the Spirit of God, declaims

that by haphazard, whether it be fit or seasonable for the peoples condition or no, and when he has ended his sermon, hesaith his prayer also in his own will, and so there is an end of the business (Barclay III).26 As Emerson remarks in his essay Art, Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of form. But true art isnever fixed, but always flowing. (Emerson 438).27 As the writer ofDiscourses on the Sabbath frames it, there is an inverse correlation between public and private

professions of faith in terms of sincerity: The power of general custom, of regard to reputation, and to the wishes and

expectations of others, may bring a man to the house of God, while there is little of conscientious principle, and still less of

spiritual affection, in exercise. That which is public, therefore, is the least to be depended upon of the indications of

godliness. It is one of those things, of which the neglect is a decisive proof of its absence, while the observance is no certain

evidence of its presence (Wardlaw 100).28 Although it is tempting to read the narrators invocation of the Sabbath sunshine as a contribution to an array of

prescriptive discourses implement[ing] liberal thought by sealing, regulating, and sanctifying private spaces, both domestic

and subjective, his liminal vantage point and ambivalent gesture complicate what Milette Shamir has described as a

masculinity closely linked to enclosed, interior, private spacesa link that we repeatedly find in the works of Hawthorne,Thoreau, Poe, and Melville . . . [in that] that these writers works often revolve around anxieties of intrusion, penetration,

and borderlessness (2; 15). For if the narrator furtively lurks behind his window, he also recreates a communal religious

service and arguably remains dependent upon the very public space and symbols he critiques. CLARIFY NOTE AND

TURN TO MARGOLIS29 Millers article is notable for its surprisingly lack of hyperbole. Although he acknowledges that the phrase the Sabbath

is scriptural, expressive, convenient, [and] the term [is] employed in a commandment which is weekly repeated by

millions, and so far familiar to all who live in Christian lands, that no consideration occurs why it may not becomeuniversal, he finally admits that his preferred title is the less ambivalent the Lords Day (73).30

Elizabeth Peabody goes so far as to claim Hawthorne as a fellow traveler in transcendentalism even as she also displaces

the sketchs anti-institutional rhetoric: The author does not go to church, he says; but no one would think he stayed at homefor a vulgar reason. What worship there is in his stay at home! How livingly he teaches others to go, if they do go! What a

hallowed feeling he sheds around the venerable institution of public worship! How gentle and yet effective are the touches

by which he rebukes all that is inconsistent with its beautiful ideal! His Sunday at Home came from a heart alive throughall its depths with a benignant Christian faith. . . . This is worth a thousand sermons on the duty of going to church (58).31 Michael Colacurcios short but suggestive analysis of Sunday at Home too quickly identifies the sketch with Charles

Lambs poem The Sabbath Bells (a poem that Hawthorne had reprinted in theAmerican Magazine of Useful and

Entertaining Knowledge , 2 (May 1836), 399 (Province of Piety 535)), but this poem does seem to inform Hawthornes

description of Clifford and the Sabbath: Chiefly when/Their piercing tones fallsudden on the ear/Of the contemplant,solitary man/Whom thought abstruse or high have chance to lure/Forth from the walks of men, revolving oft,/And oft again,

hard matter, which eludes/And baffles his pursuitthought-sick, and tired/Of controversy, where no end appears,/No clewto his research, the lonely man/Half wishes for society again (Lamb 399).32 Although the Sabbatarian subtext of this set-piece is more muted than in Sunday at Home, even here the stock tropes of

Sabbatarianism peep through Hawthornes prose. Compare and contrast, for example, Hawthornes depiction of the

hallowed atmosphere of the Sabbath and a benevolent but distant Father with Harmon Kingsburys depiction of the

same: Let us for a moment fancy ourselves awakened from the slumber of the night, and visited with the holy and sacred

stillness of the Sabbath. We gather together, the whole human family, good and bad, in one vast amphitheatre. The eye ofthe infinite Jehovah is fixed on every individual; there is no corner where any one can hide himself from the all-searching

eye (149).

Documents

Revised Hawthorne Article for the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review