English 576A
Literary Criticism
“Wakefield”: A Romantic Fable
The American Heritage Dictionary defines a fable as “a concise narrative making an edifying or cautionary point.” Hawthorne’s story can be considered on several levels. It is a parable, an allegory, a psychological study of a “feeble-minded” or “crafty” man. It is assuredly one of Hawthorne’s very personal visions. He is preoccupied always with that “neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary”¹ meet. In such a place, all kinds of truths and fancies may exist. It is this condition of freedom and flexibility coupled with a certain suspension of disbelief, a specific “structure(s) of expectation”² that is fulfilled, a “happy” ending, and a promised moral delivered, that cause this story to form itself into one of Hawthorne’s expressions of “the truth of the human heart”³; that is, a Romance and, particularly, a fable.
In a typically romantic opening, the narrator curries our favor and begs our indulgence while he tells a possibly “naughty or nonsensical” tale. He justifies at the outset what would otherwise be hard facts to follow, by tracing their source to “some old magazine or newspaper.” Hawthorne does the same thing in the introduction to his masterpiece of the American Romantic period, The Scarlet Letter.
Another characteristic of the romantic work is that “at the broadest level of reading, we don’t ask what will happen. . . but how it will happen.”⁴ The narrator gives us a summary at the very beginning of exactly what is to come. He tells us in the second paragraph that there is likely to be a “pervading spirit and a moral done up neatly, and condensed into the final sentence.” The authors of Form in Fiction would say that the story has created for itself a “structure(s) of expectation” or, as Kenneth Burke would put it, initiated a certain “psychology of form”⁵ that it will fulfill. Our hero will return to his home and become “a loving spouse till death,” and his adventure will present us with a lesson.
Wakefield is Hawthorne’s “hero,” but he is certainly not heroic in the conventional sense. In fact, he is rather ordinary, except for “a little strangeness.” Significantly, however, his personality traits are a catalogue so familiar and so broad that many, if not all, readers will identify with or at least recognize them, causing the story to have a wide personal effect. Besides the word “hero,” we read “his heart at rest,” “wandering heart,” and “the wife of his bosom”: all terms that would fit nicely, warmly, and would give comfort in a love story. We see Wakefield “bidding adieu” to his wife. “It is the dusk of an October evening.” How evocative, how romantic: In keeping with a certain romantic convention, Wakefield is off on a slightly mysterious journey. He “has no suspicion of what is before him.” But we do, though we will have to wait for the details. We are curious. The details spill out, sustaining the romantic tone: Wakefield holding out his hand, the matter-of-fact kiss, the closing door, and, above all, “a vision of her husband’s face, though the aperture, smiling on her, and gone in a moment.”
Wakefield’s wife will recall that smile for years, imagining her husband dead. But the “crafty smile” will also, happily, cause her to keep the hope that her husband is still alive. Within the framework of the story’s expectation and slight apprehension, there is some feeling, arising out of the author’s promise at the start, that all will be well.
The husband’s journey begins and ends, just like that. Wakefield has been roused out of a torpor. He has stepped out of “the matter-of-course way of a ten years’ matrimony,” but also out of his place in life. He hasn’t gone far, and the fact is he might just as easily (perhaps more) have done the same thing without withdrawing physically at all. Perhaps he did. Any of us can withdraw into himself at any time. The narrator urges Wakefield to “get. . . home to good Mrs. Wakefield” and “her chaste bosom.” Has our hero left God (good?) Has he abandoned purity for sin? Is he testing love? Hawthorne promises us a moral at the end, but he gives us a lesson to go right here: “It is perilous to make a chasm in human affections, not that they gape so long and wide—but so quickly close again:” It is the first warning note of the message that will round out the tale.
Characteristically, the protagonist in a romance seeks “experience for its own sake,” as Edmund Wilson puts it in Axel’s Castle.⁶ One kind of romantic hero rebels against social strictures (marriage, in this case) and egotistically tempts rejections, and may even invite condemnation. Wakefield leaves home on an impulse and returns just as spontaneously. His is the rash, impetuous, self-assertive identity that can defy not only a spouse, but life itself. Nevertheless, our hero never quite completes his separation.
The structure of expectation and the psychological (or emotional) form of the story are solid and persistent. Wakefield is “curious to know the progress of matters at home.” His concern comes out of “morbid vanity,” but that’s typical of the romantic hero and, specifically, consistent with the temperament that caused Wakefield to launch his great joke in the first place. At one point, he actually makes it to his old front door, but retreats in the nick of time. “Wonderful escape:” but is it?
We read that “a great moral change has been affected” in Wakefield, but not even he knows what it is. There is no simple answer for his behavior. For Hawthrone’s characters, there are never simple answers. His people reflect a broad spectrum of behavior that generally seems aberrated, often, but which is always related to loneliness, isolation, and poignant. Wakefield is a “crafty nincompoop” who has pushed his luck too far, and has about as much chance of returning home as the dead have of coming back to life. But we know better.
The night of Wakefield’s return is a perfect scene of Gothic romance. “It is a gusty night of autumn,” Wakefield passes his house and sees “the red glow and the shimmer. . . of a comfortable fire.” There is an “autumnal chill” in the air, and he sees a “grotesque shadow” of his wife cast by the flickering firelight, as he stands “wet and shivering,” trying to make up his mind. Hawthorne draws his story to a neat climax, fulfilling the expectation stated in the opening paragraph. “This happy event—supposing it to be such—could only have occurred at an unpremeditated moment.” The adventure began suddenly and has ended just as abruptly. The possibility of its being a happy conclusion, is enough.
And there is a moral, all right, but it is not preachment. It may or may not be edifying. It is certainly cautionary, which is consistent with Hawthorne’s tone in general and, structurally, realizes his other direct promise. It is a word to the wise for every man” “Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were, the Outcast of the Universe.” Hawthorne seldom (if ever) draws obvious conclusions. He has spun together filaments of fantasy, realistic facts, promises kept, and a warning lesson, into a romantic fable. Each man, he allows, may do with it what he will.
References
- Porte, Joel, The Romance in America (Wesleyan University Press, 1969) p. 95.
- Hayman, David and Rabkin, Eric S., Form in Fiction (St. Martin’s Press, 1974) p. 213.
- Porte, Joel, p. 95.
- Form in Fiction, p. 213.
- Kenneth Burke, Criticism: The Major Statements, ed. Charles Kaplan (St. Martin’s Press, 1975), p. 487.
- Wilson, Edmund, Axel’s Castle (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), p. 265.