My Kinsman, Major Molineux | Allegory and "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"

In the following essay, Russell looks at Hawthorne’s use of allegory within ‘‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux.’’

At five-year intervals, beginning in 1954, Professor Roy Harvey Pearce has encouraged Hawthorne critics to descend with the writer into history rather than pull away and judge his tales in psychological contexts where history is not given first importance. He has brought ‘‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’’ forward as his chief example because of a recent, almost exclusive concentration on Robin, his dream-experience, and the initiation rites the boy apparently goes through. One of the contributors to that criticism, Seymour Gross, later summed it up rather interestingly by referring...

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