THE "DISMAL MERRY-MAKING"
IN HAWTHORNE’S COMIC VISION

James G. Janssen

Although the appearance of several recent studies has modified Professor Turner’s observation that "humor in Hawthorne’s works is not often singled out for comment" despite its appearance "on virtually every page he wrote,"¹ Hawthorne’s sense of the comic remains more often observed in passing than treated extensively in itself.² Hawthorne seems himself to have been concerned that his earlier works might not show clearly enough what the narrator of "Main Street" calls a "tropic-love of sunshine."³ "Cheerfulness," he writes in The American Notebooks, "is the real truth,"⁴ and in "Doctor Bullivant" he compares the essentially humorless New England colonists with Bullivant, a resident comic spirit able to see "the mirth which lies hidden like latent caloric in almost everything" (XII, 79).

This suggestion, that within the tissue of experience the comic and the serious are parts of the same design, is recurrent in Hawthorne’s work. In "The Old Manse" he speaks of a favorite place as "the very spot in which to utter the extremest nonsense or the profoundest wisdom, or that ethereal product of the mind which partakes of both, and may become one or the other, in correspondence with the faith and insight of the auditor" (II, 35). More specifically, Hawthorne seems to have been intrigued to a special degree by the comic element inherent in life’s disturbing and tragic realities, the "latent caloric" that is the comic spirit vitalizing and shaping the profounder meanings of "the dark problem of this life." Hawthorne’s juxtaposition of the comic and the dark, his interlacing of these moods into a form of the grotesque in his short works, can be best seen in his own phrasing of it in The American Notebooks: "When the reformation of the world is complete, a fire shall be made of the gallows; and the Hangman shall come and sit down by it, in solitude and despair. To him shall come the Last Thief, the Last Prostitute, the Last Drunkard, and other representatives of past crime and vice; and they shall hold a dismal merry-making, quaffing the contents of the Drunkard’s last Brandy Bottle" (AN, p. 237).

Phrases similar in tone to "dismal merry-making" are abundant in the tales and sketches. Attempting to characterize Puritan humor (or lack of it) in "Old News," Hawthorne describes it as "laboriously light and lamentably mirthful, as if some very sober person, in his zeal to be merry, were dancing a jig to the tune of a funeral-psalm" (III, 533); and in "Main Street," he comments on "an outbreak of grisly jollity" which takes place

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during the funeral of Governor Bradstreet (III,472). Although Hawthorne seems here to be ridiculing the humorlessness of his Puritan ancestors, in view of his own partiality toward the grotesque, we may assume that this is another area where "strong traits of their nature have intertwined" with his own, and that, at least as a fictional technique, images of "grotesque merriment" (his own phrase in "The Toll-Gatherer’s Day" [I, 238]) abound.

Sometimes these phrases appear as little more than images that function by yoking disparate moods, oxymorons calling forth a new and complex emotional response appropriate to the tale or sketch in which they appear. In "The Hollow of the Three Hills," for example, one of the aural fantasies summoned forth for the benefit of the searching wife is of "merry times in a mad-house," an asylum presently occupied by the husband she had earlier abandoned. Hawthorne’s description of this world of madness is given in terms of a "fearful merriment" where "unbound passions jostled each other in a drunken career" (I, 232). It is, of course, particularly appropriate imagery in a tale of wayward soul permitted a backward glance at the psychological chaos into which she has transformed her world, and it is another example of Hawthorne’s fascination with "the playfulness that comes in moments of despair" (XII, 55).⁵ Images of the comic and death are employed in such scenes as that of the playfully resurrected dead in "An Old Woman’s Tale" (XII, 116) and in a sketch of a village uncle who combines playfulness and dark profundity in a way "peculiar to one who has lived long and is soon to die" (I, 360). In The American Notebooks we find a memorable reference in which a "laughing, handsome youth, or young lady, all at once in a natural unconcerned way, takes off its face like a mask, and shows the grinning skeleton beneath" (p. 570).

There is a temptation to pass off these dismal images as nothing more than an often recognized interest in the gothic on Hawthorne’s part, and such an interest there surely is. But Hawthorne is a writer who rests uncomfortably in the literary compartments into which we would force him. Categories like "the gothic," "the grotesque," and even the contemporary "black humor" which come to mind are helpful in understanding this aspect of Hawthorne’s art, but are ultimately unable to account for it fully. With regard to the image of youthful laughter unmasked into a grinning skeleton, noted above, one thinks of Wolfgang Kayser’s "motifs of the grotesque," and especially his inclusion of just such an image in his examples of the technique.⁶ And there are other aspects of the grotesque, even as understood and defined in Kayser’s formal sense of term, that seem to fit Hawthorne’s luridly playful: the estranged world of psychologically disturbing images and juxtapositions;

the sense in which such a world challenges our comfortable categories of knowledge; the intrusion of laughter into this frightening world. Even Kayser’s suggestion that the grotesque may afford an artist the means "to invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of the world" may’ not be without some relevance for Hawthorne’s configurations of dancing mourners.

But just as surely as he seems to be our distant cousin in the tradition of the grotesque and the more contemporary mode or perspective called "black humor," much of Hawthorne’s darkly comic vision is unlike those movements. As the most obvious point of difference, their stress on the nihilistic or meaningless, their unwillingness to make affirmations, their preoccupations with the absurd—in none of these is Hawthorne kinsman to the artist of the grotesque or the author of black humor.⁸ In point of fact, some of Hawthorne’s most morally assertive tales and sketches are also those in which there is the most persistent combination of the "dismal" and "merry-making."

"Chippings With A Chisel" is a notable example of the numerous pieces Hawthorne wrote in which that tone is dominant throughout the work. Its ongoing tension is between a skeptical narrator and the carver of gravestones he meets, a comic philosopher named Wigglesworth. The narrator questions what is to him the "triteness of monumental verses" (I, 462) memorializing the grave, when "our thoughts should soar upward with the butterfly" (I, 467). Wigglesworth indignantly shouts down such disrespect for his necessary art. The narrator is shaken in his criticism, and although lie is not certain that he agrees with Wigglesworth. by the end of the sketch he has gained wisdom from their companionship—a wisdom which contrasts with his earlier stock responses; "for there was [now] a strange doubt in my mind, whether the dark shadowing of this life, the sorrows and regrets, have not as much real comfort in them—leaving religious influences out of the question—as what we term life’s joys" (I, 468).

One is tempted to see something Poesque in the narrator’s remark that there may be as much comfort in the "dark shadowing of this life" as there is in what are called life’s joys. The similarity would be even more irresistible if one were to substitute "beauty" for "comfort," for apparently the narrator declares that many of the scenes he has witnessed in the sculptor’s place of business have about them a quality of moral beauty. Looked at superficially, the tombstone inscriptions are leaden with cliches, sentimentality, amid lugubriousness; viewed more profoundly, however, the sentimentality becomes less significant than the beauty of the simple love that, without the supplied words and designs, would be unexpressed. As is the case throughout the sketch, Wigglesworth’s is the profounder vision here: "But when we ridicule the triteness of

monumental verses, we forget that Sorrow reads far deeper in them than we can, and finds a profounder and individual purport in what seems so vague and inexpressive, unless interpreted by her. She makes the epitaph anew, though the selfsame words may have served for a thousand graves" (1, 462-63). By the end of the sketch, the narrator is not certain he can resolve his doubt; that is, he is no longer certain he can refute Wigglesworth’s claims.

His doubt has come upon him, primarily, from the contagious, macabre humor of Wigglesworth. At one point the narrator himself fantasizes that Wigglesworth is quite literally sustained by his morbid craft, "sitting down to dinner at a broad, flat tombstone, carving one of his own plump little cherubs, gnawing a pair of cross-bones, drinking out of a hollow death’s-head, or perhaps a lachrymatory vase, or sepulchral urn, while his hostess’s dead children waited on him at the ghastly banquet" (I,463). His recounting of this grotesque fantasy provokes Wigglesworth’s hearty laughter and a compliment that the narrator’s humor is now "of the right sort" (I, 463).

The ludicrous images of Wigglesworth’s dealings with his customers have educated him in his role as judge of dark humor: one of his clients is a man buying gravestones for his three previous wives and hooking anxiously at his fourth to determine if an even better bargain can be struck (I, 460); another is a woman whose husband appears, alive, in the midst of a discussion about his epitaph, thereby wasting a good piece of marble and Wigglesworth’s considerable effort (I, 461–62); a man orders a memorial for his worst enemy, having shared with the man a love-hate relationship similar to that of Dimmesdale and Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter.

Wigglesworth’s response to these business visitations, his commentary upon them, and his realistic appraisal of life, death, and the follies of mankind—all within the general context of dismal mirth—earn the narrator’s admiration: "The quaintness of his remarks, and their not infrequent truth—a truth condensed and painted by the limited sphere of his view—gave a raciness to his talk, which mere worldliness and general cultivation would at once have destroyed" (I, 457). The role of the grimly comic in a sketch involving the merry mind of a sculptor of tombstones reminiscent of Shakespeare’s gravediggers is to allow us to stand back slightly, to approach with greater objectivity the serious theme of the piece (the beauty of a sorrow expressed even in well-worn phrases and images, and by extension, the way in which the artist-narrator is bested by the man of feeling). And although Hawthorne was seen some pages back apparently scoffing at his Puritan ancestors jigging to the tune of a funeral psalm, in "Chippings With A Chisel" he has orchestrated, to the tune of a man’s whistling as he engraves his tombstones, a serious yet comic study of

a paradoxical comfort that conies in the contemplation of one of the darker realities of each man’s destiny. Philosopher and historian of those who have confronted grief, Wigglesworth is neither cynical nor sentimental; he is merely a man for whom the light and dark threads, the tragic and the comic dimensions are real and inseparably woven into life’s experiences. Because he Is himself so free of easy sentimentality, he is able to justify the sentiment of his grieving clients; and because he himself has the "right sort of humor," he is able to put that sentiment into an acceptable context for the narrator-artist.

Like the rougher artist Wigglesworth, Hawthorne could appreciate the wisdom inherent in the "ludicrous images" and ironic contrasts of the grotesque. More than just an aspect of his vision of life, however, the mingling of the grotesque and the comic become part of Hawthorne’s fictional technique, allowing him to suggest and yet pull back from specific meaning. When used in this way, the mood of grotesque merriment resembles other fictional techniques employed by Hawthorne—what F. O. Matthiessen called "the device of multiple choice," for example’—and allows him to suggest various dimensions of meaning without validating them. This effect of softening and ventilating an otherwise pat moral through the combination of the comic and the serious is seen in such a tale as "The Wedding Knell," a work whose humor is "characteristic of Hawthorne’s mind,"¹⁰ especially that aspect of it which is the subject of this study.

The "very singular circumstance" (I, 41) of this tale involves the fortunes of the twice married, twice widowed, and aging Mrs. Dabney to a similarly aging husband with forty years of celibacy and a capricious nature as his only recommendations. Mrs. Dabney arrives at the church "with the sudden and gladsome effect of a burst of sunshine" (I, 44) only to be met with the sound of the church bell tolling as if for a funeral. When he arrives in a hearse and wearing a shroud, Mr. Ellenwood, her groom, offers the suggestion that they retire to their coffins after the ceremony. Pleading that he wanted merely to remind her of the lateness of their years and her spurning of his affections forty years earlier in life, Ellenwood later admits to having staged the bizarre ceremony. The "stern lesson of the day" (I, 50) works its effect on the bride as she recognizes the destructive force of vanity, puts off worldliness and her foolish concern with growing old, and declares that she will now wed for eternity. Ellenwood repeats the vow, first begging forgiveness for his own cruel revenge in arranging the ceremony. Wedded now in understanding and sympathy—timeless possessions—the couple go forth as "the organ’s peal of solemn triumph drowned the wedding knell" (I, 51).

Summarized so neatly, the tale reminds us of nothing so much as it does

Hawthorne’s occasional preference for moralistic directness. And yet, the impression one has in encountering the story is of greater subtlety than a mere paraphrase of the plot suggests, in part because of the violently juxtaposed images of the bridal chamber and the tomb, the wedding garment and the shroud, the giggle that turns into a death-like faint—images which promote the picture of a mad world where "ill-natured merriment" reigns.

In his creation of Mrs. Dabney, Hawthorne details a portrait of what is almost a stock comic character: an aging and vain woman with a history of aggressive and unfortunate marital contracting, first to a man twice her age, and then, as if to remove the chill, to one much younger than herself. Widowed twice, she has now betrothed herself to Mr. Ellenwood in an arrangement in which Hawthorne says (with characteristic humor) she "must have borne no inactive part" (I, 43). But she is not just one of Hawthorne’s stock characters. As she stands in her bridal gown, in fact, Mrs. Dabney embodies the ironic texture of the tale: a foolish vanity that seeks to deny age and the grave by masking itself in the inappropriate gaiety and splendor of youth. "But by what perversity of taste had the artist represented his principal figure as so wrinkled and decayed, while yet he had decked her out in the brightest splendor of attire, as if the loveliest maiden had suddenly withered into age, and become a moral to the beautiful around her" (I, 45).

Shocked by the wedding knell that greets her appearance in church, Mrs. Dabney is consoled by the officiating rector who attempts to draw from the freakish occurrence the moral that man should incorporate something of mortality and sorrow into his most ecstatic moments. But the tone has been set: Mrs. Dabney’s mind fantasizes first that her two dead husbands are calling her to lie down beside them in their graves, and next that Ellenwood is going to appear with them as groomsmen. her imagination is wrong only in detail, not in its grotesque character, for her groom shortly arrives with his funeral cortege. Hawthorne sums up Mrs. Dabney’s response to the entry of Ellenwood’s mourning groomsmen in images of dismal merriment: "Amid now, in joyless age, she felt that some withered partner [from the group of mourners] should request her hand, and all unite, in a dance of death, to the music of the funeral bell" (I, 48).

If in her incongruous appearance Mrs. Dabney symbolizes the moral of the tale, Mr. Ellenwood appears at first glance to be merely the well-meaning minister of that lesson. A closer look at his character, however, will suggest that Ellenwood may be more a kinsman to two other of Hawthorne’s comically grim characters, Wakefield and Reverend Hooper (of "The Minister’s Black Veil") and less a disinterested moralist. Like Wakefield in that more familiar tale, Ellenwood has become a comic

"doer of eccentric deeds," though unlike Wakefield whose otherwise predictable behavior makes his marital absenteeism the more remarkable, Ellenwood’s "aimless and abortive life" has led him to a career of eccentricity in which the gothic wedding ceremony he prepares for his bride is surely the apex. Hawthorne draws his character in terms of its anomalous nature: "shy but not . . . secluded"; "selfish . . . yet manifesting generous sentiment"; a "scholar . . . though an indolent one"; a "gentleman . . . yet sometimes requiring a considerable relaxation . . . of the common rules of society" (I, 41–42). Hawthorne has carefully established the comic dimension of the story in his presentation of a woman of the world returned from her marital wars to her native city where she has manipulated a proposal from such a capricious and unworldly man. "All the wonder was, how the gentleman, with his lack of worldly wisdom and agonizing consciousness of ridicule, could have been induced to take a measure at once so prudent and so laughable" (1,43).

But the grisly ceremony Ellenwood stages is no mighty sermon against vanity, for he now goes on to reveal that his primary purpose has been revenge for the rejection of his love for Mrs. Dabney forty years ago. "But after forty years, when I have built my tomb, and would not give up the thought of resting there—no, not for such a life as we once pictured—you call me to the altar. At your summons I am here. But other husbands have enjoyed your youth, your beauty, your warmth of heart, and all that could be termed your life. What is there for me but your decay and death?" (h, 50).

The "terrible strength of the moral" comes out in spite of Ellenwood’s own selfishness in staging It. Mrs. Dabney admits her life’s vanity and emptiness and,, time being seen as now irrelevant to both of them, offers to wed Ellenwood for eternity. His own frenzy abated, Ellenwood asks forgiveness for his cruelty, and the two aged partners, now married in understanding and sympathy, look triumphantly toward eternity. Earthly willfulness and pride having been conquered, the wedding knell is now drowned out by the organ’s peal of eternal promise.

Some mention has been made previously of the similarities in "The Wedding Knell," "The Minister’s Black Veil," and "Wakefield," and while no claim is. being advanced that Hawthorne meant these tales to be companion pieces in grim humor, they do furnish material for some general observations on the note of "dismal merry-making" as it is found in each work. Reverend Hooper dons his veil as a means of exemplifying secret sin—and ironically ends by demonstrating the destructive effects of his obsession with the symbol he has chosen. But even in the unraveling of that situation, far more tragic than is found in either of the other two tales, we nevertheless observe the veiled Hooper’s bizarre conduct with, if

not a smile, at least a lightness that undercuts the dark and foreboding theme the veil symbolizes. Likewise, Wakefield’s childish determination to cause anguish in his wife by absenting himself from her has about it an element of tragic miscalculation. But Hawthorne has been careful to keep Wakefield’s eccentric behavior within the comic perspective by treating him as only a "crafty nincompoop" (I, 159) whose "marital delinquency" (I, I 53) is taken not quite seriously, even when we see the terrible destruction it is causing.

In each case, including that observed in greater detail in "The Wedding Knell," our minds go forward to the ludicrous dimensions of the situation—a weirdly veiled presence, a delinquent husband peeping around the corner, and an unlikely marriage celebrated as a funeral—at the same time we are made aware of the tragic implications of each. The effect is not merely to make "tolerable" the serious situation; nor is it merely "comic relief," though each is clearly involved. Rather, it is characteristic of that part of Hawthorne’s vision which remains fascinated by the darkly inexplicable to a degree which, while it stops short of pessimism, or emphasis on the absurd, nevertheless rests often in the sense of ironic tension between what man knows and controls and what he cannot know, or knows only imperfectly, and is therefore mastered by. Seen in this light, the comic dimension is related to the terrible in the same way as, for example, Mistress Hibbins’ talk of witches in The Scarlet Letter contains an element of the comically unbelievable at the same time that it asserts the existence of something like dark powers. One might say that for Hawthorne as for others whose works move toward the grotesque, "humor and terror are twin children of their mother imagination,"¹¹ and that the combination is often employed in an effort to represent artistically those aspects of reality before which man is both fearful in his ignorance amid amused in his helplessness. Like his "device of multiple choice," then, the comic affords Hawthorne a means of presenting the complexities and ambiguities of human existence.

There is a final sense in which the dismally merry is important in Hawthorne’s tales and sketches: that is, as a subject matter explored in its own right. For although the point was made earlier that Hawthorne would not be sympathetic with the pessimistic outlook of today’s dark humorists, it is in his observations of the undeniably ludicrous conditions inherent in human existence that he comes closest to them. In "The Procession of Life," for example, he presents a segment of the procession made up of "melancholy laughing-stocks" (II, 249), a group whose common fate it is that their talents and interests are frustrated by the actualities and occupations of life in which they find themselves trapped:

the learned who yearn to follow the plough march beside their opposite

number, laborers who desire the intellectual life; Quakers with hostile instincts march with their pathetic counterparts, soldiers whose instincts are wholly pacifistic; men frustratingly aware of their lack of talent and spirit for a high calling are paired with revolutionaries whose spirit burns out in an age of lethargy.

In "The Christmas Banquet" Hawthorne was to elaborate on this theme by creating a tale which, building from a premise of "dismal hospitality" (II, 324), Involves a series of banquets given each Christmas day for the purpose of preserving the unhappiness of the ten most miserable people to be found that year. Hawthorne structures this tale by means of one of his favorite devices, the procession or catalog of characters, this time an assemblage of guests through the years, each eager to be shown "most excellent in anguish" (II, 330), and each distrustful of the credentials in misery of the other guests.

"The Christmas Banquet," in fact, gives Hawthorne perhaps his best opportunity to create a mood combining the comic and the gothic, and that mood is reflected in the numerous compound phrases yoking the dismal and the merry found in the tale. The "dismal hospitality" of the setting has been arranged by "sombre humorists" who administer the fund set aside for the banquets. "The hall, illuminated by torches, was hung round with curtains of deep and dusky purple, and adorned with branches of cypress and wreaths of artificial flowers, Imitative of such as used to be strown over the dead" (II, 324). In this setting worthy of Poe, the "ill-starred banqueters" (II, 328) drink wine poured from a "sepulchral urn" into vases copied from ancient ones used to hold mourners’ tears. "Neither had the stewards . . . forgotten the fantasy of the old Egyptians, who seated a skeleton at every festive board, and mocked their own merriment with the imperturbable grin of a death’s head" (II, 324-25). Looking at themselves, the guests make their own suffering the subject matter of "scornful merriment" (II, 342).

The characters who share in the banquets through the years range from hypochondriac to starving poet, murderer, aging gallant, the sick and the palsied—in Hawthorne’s words, an "aristocracy of wretchedness" (II, 332). Included is one Mr. Smith, surely one of Hawthorne’s most memorable characters, a man provoked into precisely the burst of laughter his physicians had warned him would be fatal to his heart. A clergyman who has gone too far into speculation to return, and who remains too conservative to go forward into the misty regions beyond (II, 34142); a theorist who is frustrated in his plan for the elimination of all the wretchedness upon earth; a philanthropist who, because he cannot help the suffering millions, no longer has the heart to help any one man; a politician who has lost his party as its Ideology becomes more and more like that of the opposition; an orator who has lost his voice; a woman who broods over

the wrongs done her sex—these are among the guests Hawthorne catalogs. It is a processional in which he assembles men and women who are comic victims, not of a cruelly absurd world, but of perceptions of life which, in their willfulness and incompleteness of vision, cause them to become enthusiasts of wretchedness (II, 329). Once again the fusion of the comic with life’s darkest and grimmest realities allows Hawthorne time opportunity to present man besieged by reversals of fortune, doomed, if he confuses "man’s accidents" and "God’s purposes," to the role of suffering clown.

Mention has been made earlier in this study of Hawthorne’s comment that upon the reformation of the world, representatives of crime would gather for a final, sad celebration. But a reading of Hawthorne’s work leads one to the conclusion that, for him, all mankind is involved in something like a "dismal merry-making" most of the time and that it is, in fact, a condition of existence. Some men, like the tombstone sculptor of "Chippings With A Chisel," are able to understand this condition without intellectually worrying over it; life for them is obviously composed of serious and comic threads commingled in ludicrous juxtaposition, an appreciation of which is their sanity. Others, artists like Hawthorne himself in works like "The Wedding Knell," "Wakefield," and "The Minister’s Black Veil," are able to employ this mood of gloomy humor in a way that shapes and outlines the moral boundaries of their works, allowing them to depict moral crisis within a comic perspective.

At other times, the dismally merry is not merely a mood, a fictional technique, or a tone, but becomes in fact the subject matter of a work, such as it is in "The Christmas Banquet." When it does, it reveals an interesting aspect of Hawthorne’s darkly comic vision: that he sees the world, not as absurd or meaningless, but as occupied by men and women of imperfect natures and imperfect knowledge, involved in. lives of momentous circumstances, only portions of which they are able to control.

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY