in a succession of crooked and narrow streets.’’ Above the rooftops ‘‘the masts of vessels pierced the moonlight’’ and Robin is able to read street signs and learn that he is near the business district. There is no reason to think that his efforts at reading street signs are misplaced. But soon he enters the brightly lit tavern, and again he misjudges. The tavern owner greets him courteously, with a low bow, and Robin concludes, ‘‘The man sees a family likeness!’’ When Robin mentions the Major’s name, ‘‘there was a sudden and general movement in the room, which Robin interpreted as expressing the eagerness of each individual to become his guide.’’ But things are not what they seem to be.

As Robin moves through town, he encounters more people in lighted places. By ‘‘the light of the moon, and the lamps from the numerous shop-windows’’ he sees well-dressed figures promenading on the streets. Turning down a side street, he comes to a row of houses, and ‘‘the moonlight fell upon no passenger along the whole extent,’’ but he sees a woman’s garment within a lighted entryway. When she steps ‘‘forth into the moonlight’’ Robin is able to see her for who she is. She would like to draw him into her lighted house, but Robin knows to avoid that temptation. Interestingly, Robin encounters a man with a painted face as he is passing through the shade of the church steeple. Neither in the light of the tavern nor in the shade of the steeple does Robin learn anything from this man, but when he steps ‘‘back into the moonlight’’ Robin learns that his relative will pass by in an hour.

Robin passes the next hour alone. First he examines the street, ‘‘and the moon, creating, like the imaginative power, a beautiful strangeness in familiar objects, gave something of romance to a scene that might not have possessed it in the light of day.’’ After a while, Robin climbs to a window frame and looks into the church, where ‘‘the moonbeams came trembling in, and fell down upon the deserted pews, and extended along the quiet aisles. A fainter yet more awful radiance was hovering around the pulpit, and one solitary ray had dared to rest upon the open page of the great Bible.’’ Hawthorne writes elsewhere of the imaginative powers of moonlight, as in the ‘‘Custom House’’ section of The Scarlet Letter. For Hawthorne, imagination is not the same thing as untruth. Instead, it can be the key to a greater truth. In Robin’s case, it takes him home.

Under the influence of the unadulterated moonlight, Robin dreams of his family back in the country. He imagines the great tree where his father conducts worship services ‘‘at the going down of the summer sun . . . holding the Scriptures in the golden light that fell from the western clouds.’’ Back home, God was worshiped in the open air, in natural light, but Robin can’t go home again.

Now he meets the last stranger, the one who will treat him kindly. Significantly, he first becomes aware of this man by ‘‘the sound of footsteps along the opposite pavement.’’ He cries out to the man, and the man responds ‘‘in a tone of real kindness.’’ The light is dim, the shadows are oblique, and Robin must trust his ears instead of his eyes. By doing so, he wins the only friend he will find this night.

Now the procession begins, and it brings its own light. ‘‘A redder light disturbed the moonbeams’’ as torches pass by, ‘‘concealing, by their glare, whatever object they illuminated.’’ As the painted man passes Robin and releases him from his gaze, there are more torches ‘‘close at hand; but the unsteady brightness of the latter formed a veil which he could not penetrate.’’ Soon, ‘‘traces of a human form appeared at intervals, and then melted into the vivid light.’’ Finally comes the sight Robin was meant to see: ‘‘There the torches blazed the brightest, there the moon shone out like day, and there, in tar-and-feathery dignity, sat his kinsman, Major Molineux!’’

Robin is at a crossroads. What will he see? The torches compete with the moonlight as both shine on Molineux; there is a wrong way and a right way to look at him. Under the influence of the torches and the torchbearers, Robin could join in the ‘‘bewildering excitement’’ and contribute his ‘‘shout of laughter’’ to the ‘‘senseless uproar.’’ Or he could see what the narrator sees, unaffected by the crowd: ‘‘an elderly man, of large and majestic person,’’ with ‘‘a head grown gray in honor.’’ He could see that he is part of a ‘‘frenzied merriment, trampling all on an old man’s heart.’’ We do not know what the kind gentleman sees, nor whether he joins in the laughter. But we know that Robin falls to the ‘‘contagion’’ of merriment.

What has Robin learned? If he has learned that his relative deserves pain and humiliation, he has learned a cruel untruth. Molineux has been nothing but kind to Robin, a relative whom he barely knows. Robin knows nothing of the political situation that brought Molineux to such a bad end. ‘‘I have at last met my kinsman,’’ Robin says, but in fact he knows nothing about the man. The vision of the prisoner on the cart amid the ‘‘unsteady brightness’’ of the torches is not a vision to be trusted.

Hawthorne was attracted to the idea that things seen by artificial light (and by twilight, another repeated theme of Hawthorne’s) are not to be trusted. In ‘‘The Birthmark,’’ Aylmer’s gaze is drawn to Georgiana’s birthmark under these conditions. ‘‘With the morning twilight Aylmer opened his eyes upon his wife’s face and recognized the symbol of imperfection; and when they sat together at the evening hearth his eyes wandered stealthily to her cheek, and beheld, flickering with the blaze of the wood fire, the spectral hand that wrote mortality where he would fain have worshipped.’’ Not until the end of the story, when he has administered the potion that will soon kill her, does Aylmer look at his wife in full light: ‘‘He drew aside the window curtain and suffered the light of natural day to fall into the room and rest upon her cheek.’’ Under artificial light the birthmark appears large and important; under natural light, Aylmer sees how foolish he has been, and what damage he has caused.

In ‘‘Young Goodman Brown,’’ the title character also sees strange things that trouble him. As he passes through the woods trying to escape the devil, he looks up to pray. Suddenly the available natural light is blotted out: ‘‘a cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried across the zenith and the brightening stars.’’ Soon the only light is that cast by ‘‘four blazing pines, their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting.’’ Goodman Brown is not sure he should trust his own eyes as he gazes around at the people before him: ‘‘Either the sudden gleams of light flashing over the obscure field bedazzled Goodman Brown, or he recognized a score of the church members.’’

Robin, like young Goodman Brown, has been ‘‘bedazzled’’ by what the firelight has shown him; like Brown, he makes the mistake of trusting what he has seen. When the procession has passed by, Robin is ready to return home. He knows, or thinks he does, what his uncle really is, and he is ‘‘weary of a town life.’’ The gentleman, however, knows that reality is more complicated than Robin thinks. He refuses to escort Robin back to the ferry, ‘‘not tonight at least,’’ and encourages him to stay a few more days, to see what he can learn in the light.

A research study conducted in 1999 seemed to demonstrate that schoolchildren score higher on standardized tests when they are sitting in natural rather than artificial light. While Hawthorne cannot have anticipated electricity and fluorescent lighting, he did have a sense that to learn the truth about something, people need to examine it in the light of day.

Source: Cynthia Bily, in an essay for Short Stories for Students, Gale Group, 2001. Bily has a master’s degree in English literature and has written for a variety of educational publishers.

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 to an American Imago article written by a psychiatrist. This specialist felt that Robin at the end of the story was about to regress—to return to his woods—and as Gross remarks, ‘‘The psychiatrist stands alone; in the dozen or so other interpretations of the story . . . all agree that some rite de passage has been effected.’’ This is a temperate way of disagreeing, and ought to be, for readers will remember that Hawthorne left the outcome debatable. Robin did express a wish to go home, but Hawthorne let the last words lie with the old gentleman who seemed to be acting as the boy’s mentor. ‘‘Some few days hence, if you wish it,’’ the man had said, ‘‘I will speed you on your journey. Or, if you prefer to remain with us, perhaps . . . you may rise in the world without the help of your kinsman, Major Molineux.’’ The ‘‘if’s’’ and ‘‘or’s’’ show that neither regression nor psychological growth can be proved.

Proof is not necessary to criticism, and it is certainly true that the figure of young Robin is tremendously arresting. But the unresolved ending and other features of the story make me feel that its elemental quality owes much more to Hawthorne’s art than to Robin’s depth, and that Pearce’s corrective is valid: the story ought to be looked at more intently as the illumination of an historical phenomenon.

Everyone agrees that the narrative, set firmly in pre-revolutionary days, has political relevance— that the rebellion which ousts Major Molineux is a ‘‘type’’ of the American Revolution—but vagueness over the allegory after that has actually preempted much psychological criticism of the tale. Gross felt, for instance, that ‘‘If the sole explanation for the action is made in terms of the historical incident . . . then the great bulk of the tale, Robin’s quest, remains sheer Gothic mystification.’’ Not, however, if the first paragraph is kept carefully in mind; and memorable as the opening is, it requires partial quotation because of some details in the middle:

After the kings of Great Britain had assumed the right of appointing the colonial governors, the measures of the latter seldom met with the ready and general approbation which had been paid to those of their predecessors, under the original charters. . . . The annals of Massachusetts Bay will inform us, that of six governors in the space of about forty years from the surrender of the old charter, under James II, two were imprisoned by a popular insurrection; a third, as Hutchinson inclines to believe, was driven from the province by the whizzing of a musket-ball; a fourth, in the opinion of the same historian, was hastened to his grave by continual bickerings with the House of Representatives; and the remaining two, as well as their successors, till the Revolution, were favored with few and brief intervals of peaceful sway. The inferior members of the court party, in times of high political excitement, led scarcely a more desirable life. These remarks may serve as a preface to the following adventures, which chanced upon a summer night, not far from a hundred years ago.

Why we should tend to ‘‘go vague,’’ after a start as precise as this, happens I think because we are Americans and, identifying ourselves with Robin as we do, and with our own national origins, we tend to start off by assuming that Robin represents young America. More than one critic has done this, and I would hazard a guess that tens or hundreds of students have done it when asked in classrooms what Robin represents. If the answer that comes, ‘‘Young America,’’ is not qualified, the fatal step will have been taken, and readers will have forced themselves into a psychological or mythic rather than historical interpretation of the allegory.

The easiest way to see why Robin cannot represent young America in general is to observe that all his antagonists perform this representation. Singly or in groups as they appear—and Hawthorne provides a great variety—they are a rough-and-ready lot, reeking of self-sufficiency and, though menial or of otherwise questionable breeding, obviously are not to be trifled with where their independence is concerned. The early description of the occupants of the tavern is one of the best places to catch overtones of the recent and muscular self-sufficiency of the colonies:

. . . the larger part . . . appeared to be mariners. . . . Three or four little groups were draining as many bowls of punch, which the West India trade had long since made a familiar drink in the colony. Others . . . had the appearance of men who lived by regular and laborious handicraft. . . . [Some] had gotten themselves into the darkest corner of the room, and heedless of the Nicotian atmosphere, were supping on the bread of their own ovens, and the bacon cured in their own chimney smoke.

The emphases here, on staples conspicuously ‘‘their own,’’ and on the rum and tobacco, seem unmistakably to point out a raw but capable America. And it is against these types that Robin brushes. He is clearly not of them and must signify something else—why this has not been emphasized seems to involve an elementary problem in reading allegory. For it is invariably concluded that because Robin is young, Hawthorne must be writing about youth in some definite respect. Yet it would take a rather infertile allegorist to devise a tale in which a young man represents youth. Almost in deference to Hawthorne, a reader ought not to stumble in haste and make a misidentification: I think it is made in fact because of the rush to bypass the historical nature of the story.

The question hanging now is, of course: What does Robin represent? The answer will be abrupt when it comes, yet there may be a way of gliding into it. This would involve deciding how readers actually feel toward the character Robin. Arresting as he is, I think readers are not essentially feeling with Robin and groping along as bewildered as he; rather, I feel they are like spectators at tragedy whose urgent question is not ‘‘What is going on here?’’ but rather, ‘‘Why don’t you see?’’ This I feel to be true even after the central transition, when, it will be remembered, Robin has asked for his kinsman Major Molineux and been rebuffed by a watchman and an elderly citizen, tricked by a courtesan, and turned out of doors by an innkeeper. ‘‘He now roamed desperately, and at random, through the town, almost ready to believe that a spell was on him. . . .’’ Even here, where commentators come down hard for a terrifying ‘‘dark night of the soul,’’ I believe the reader is not so much caught up in this and is still saying, ‘‘Why don’t you see that when you mention the Major’s name they are turning on you?’’

If this premise about the reader’s attitude is valid—if one tends to feel like a spectator wishing a fatal obtuseness would be dispelled for the poor benighted ‘‘shrewd youth’’—it becomes easier to say that in this allegory, specifically, Robin represents the six governors of Massachusetts Bay Colony between the years 1686 and 1729.

Perhaps, since the statement may seem startling or even high-handed in its limitation, I ought to say what indication in the text at least caused the first step to be taken toward this interpretation. It was the watchman saying to Robin, ‘‘‘Home, or we’ll set you in the stocks by peep of day!’’’ Earlier, the old citizen who made such a to-do about his ‘‘authority’’ had also threatened Robin with the stocks, and now Hawthorne underscored the point: ‘‘‘This is the second hint of the kind,’ thought Robin. ‘I wish they would end my difficulties, by setting me there tonight.’’’ Out of the opening paragraph about the governors came the echo—‘‘two were imprisoned’’— and a connection seemed intended.

Now it is interesting that this country youth, ‘‘one of whose names was Robin,’’ has six encounters during this telescoped evening, and asks of six people the haunting question as to the whereabouts of ‘‘my kinsman, Major Molineux.’’ And it does turn out that the six encounters correspond to the fates of those royal appointees, the governors Hawthorne read about in Thomas Hutchinson’s history. (Though none of them had a Robin to his name, Hutchinson does employ the phrase ‘‘round robin.’’) For instance, one, according to that author, ‘‘was driven from the province by the whizzing of a musket-ball.’’ Military violence lowers here—or the next thing to it. And so, when Robin accosts the muffled-up man with the red and black face, demanding to hear of his kinsman, the man comes back with, ‘‘Let me pass, I say, or I’ll strike you to the earth!’’ And then he reveals his features, which Hawthorne explains at the climax: ‘‘his fierce and variegated countenance, appeared like war personified; the red of one cheek was an emblem of fire and sword; the blackness of the other betokened the mourning that attends them.’’

The most insidious of Robin’s encounters are the two that correspond with the ‘‘brief intervals of peaceful sway’’ accorded two of the six governors. For the poignant problem of the loyalists as a whole—which, I suppose, may be what the story is finally describing—was that none could profit by the experience of others before them. Consistently we run across, in Thomas Hutchinson, the description of the reception given by the Massachusetts Bay colonists to each new governor after these colonists had hounded out the preceding one. The descriptions are all the same. The story’s widest application seems at last the sad one, showing that human beings, especially when persuaded they are in legitimate circumstances, cannot read the handwriting on the wall no matter how imposing and fresh it may be. ‘‘Mr. Dudley was received with ceremony and marks of respect. . . .’’ ‘‘Mr. Burnet was received with unusual pomp.’’ Twenty pages on: ‘‘The governor’s friends observed the effect the controversy [with the House of Representatives] had upon his spirits. In a few days, he fell sick of a fever and died at Boston. . . .’’ ‘‘The beginning of an administration in the colonies is generally calm and without ruffle.’’

Now consider Robin’s reception at the inn, and notice Hawthorne’s care with language in the allegory:

. . . he was accosted by the innkeeper, a little man in a stained apron, who had come to pay his professional welcome to the stranger. . . .

‘‘From the country, I presume, sir?’’ said he, with a profound bow. ‘‘Beg leave to congratulate you on your arrival, and trust you intend a long stay with us. Fine town here, sir, beautiful buildings, and much that may interest a stranger. May I hope for the honor of your commands in respect to supper?’’

Small wonder that Robin’s response is, ‘‘The man sees a family likeness! the rogue has guessed that I am related to the major!’’—shortly after which he is just about hurled out on his ear.

Of the other brief interval of peaceful sway, that with the prostitute, we may perhaps say that she also had profit in mind and let it go at that, for Hawthorne seems to have outdistanced his mentor Hutchinson here. That is, the historian gives only a few hints that the aristocratic governors or other members of the king’s party lived more loosely than the new world Puritanical stock. But a touch of culpability is brought in by Hawthorne in this way. One may ponder also the phenomenon that mistresses and courtesans so often prove comforting to leaders whose empires are tottering—from Mark Antony to Mussolini.

By this time other counters in the allegory may have already seemed to fall in place. Major Molineux himself remains the symbol of British rule, of the efficacy of the crown. Thinking of Robin as the composite Old Whig-Tory, we can think of Molineux’s name as the prerogative that ought to carry sway, from the newcomer’s point of view. (Hutchinson speaks frequently of ‘‘prerogative men’’ in the various governors’ entourages at Massachusetts Bay, and Robin has this sort of confidence in his uncle’s name.) It also should be seen that the ‘‘country’’ Robin is from—significantly separated by water from the New England town—is England, and that Robin is not symbolic of a Yankee bumpkin. The excellence of Hawthorne’s choice here is that the supposedly shrewd English gentry are found naïve in this crucial political respect. And so an assertive, sturdy, but finally dim juvenile is chosen to represent royalists; rather than youthfulness itself, it is the special youthful qualities—overconfidence, obstinacy, obtuseness—that go into the making of Robin. Think of the faith he has in his cudgel. Hutchinson describes the second governor, Sir William Phips, in a Robin-like action in this regard. Phips got cantankerous when a certain Captain Short seemed insubordinate: ‘‘and meeting Captain Short in the street, warm words passed, and at length the governor made use of his cane and broke Short’s head.’’

That the cudgel was ‘‘formed of an oak sapling’’ from his native woods shows why Robin has faith in it. Woods represent England in the allegory. They come into play several times, the most interesting being in connection with the last of Robin’s six encounters, at which point Hawthorne delivers his stroke of genius.

The allegory has not been diagrammatic; the fates of the governors have not been paraded in order. It does happen, though, that the last governor, Burnet the bishop’s son, was the one ‘‘hastened to his grave by continual bickerings with the House of Representatives.’’ Hawthorne allegorizes this controversy in a novel way by using in Robin’s last encounter a house instead of a man. The episode occurs during the nightmare sequence when Robin pauses by a church across the street from a great house with balcony and imposing pillars. ‘‘Perhaps this is the very house I have been seeking,’’ he thinks. He falls into a reverie now, in which the peaceful religious ways of his home are contrasted with the austere, grave-ringed New England church. ‘‘Am I here, or there?’’ he cries, coming out of the reverie and trying to fix his eyes on the house across the way:

But still his mind kept vibrating between fancy and reality; by turns, the pillars of the balcony lengthened into the tall, bare stems of pines, dwindled down to human figures, settled again into their true shape and size, and then commenced a new succession of changes. . . . A deeper sleep wrestled with and nearly overcame him, but fled at the sound of footsteps along the opposite pavement.

These are the footsteps of the kindly man who gives Robin a civil answer to his sixth and last enquiry about Major Molineux, and who then volunteers to wait with him for the Major’s expected ‘‘arrival.’’ He is the voice of reason and moderation, as opposed to that wild ringleader with the red and black face; he is also the one who reminds Robin, ‘‘You must not expect all the stillness of your native woods here in our streets,’’ and then asks him, ‘‘May not a man have several voices, Robin, as well as two complexions?’’

This ameliorating figure seems placed here to soften the jars, not only of insurrection madness, but even of the bickering of hot legislators—who make the house rock before Robin’s eyes between loyalty (‘‘the tall, bare stems of pines’’ indicate this) and the rights of man (the columns dwindle to human figures). As for the equation between the pines and loyalty, the native-forest symbolism would be enough to warrant it. It is worth adding, though—perhaps we have an insight here to Hawthorne’s working methods—that Hutchinson actually reported one governor’s fight with the house over the cutting of pine trees in Maine, the governor maintaining these were ‘‘his majesty’s’’ trees, ‘‘reserved by the royal charter . . . for the royal navy.’’

Robin’s mentor thus could foreshadow genuinely reasonable debate and the call for redress of grievances. Though Hawthorne’s sympathies in the story are for the sadly unrooted Tory mind, he is of course partial to the final revolution and evolution of America. As Daniel Hoffman maintains, writing of this late-found friend of Robin, ‘‘The implication is that the forces of Order and Stability do in the end prove stronger than those of Destruction and Misrule which dethrone them.’’

We are, however, left in this tale with the terrible impression of the foaming Major Molineux, tarred and feathered. Hawthorne’s famous ambiguity is much in evidence at the end. Even this, to my mind, becomes more richly appropriate when we look at the allegory of Robin as reflecting the predicament of the ‘‘composite’’ Tory. The young kinsman’s laugh, for example, coming when he is surrounded by the jeering acquaintances of the earlier evening, as all watch Molineux pass—is it a curing, sanative laugh or an hysterical, traumatic laugh capping full despair? Both, I would answer: for different people in the predicament, the climax might have cured and might have killed. Robin is a composite person. Hence in the logic of the allegory we are not permitted to know whether Robin will stay in the town he says he is weary of, or whether he will make his way back across the water. Both alternatives were taken by those involved who were loyalists during and after the upheavals of our revolutionary times.

The magnificent thing is that Hawthorne could have fleshed out what might have been purely diagrammatic, could have felt so strongly as to have kept his attention (and consequently ours) drilled to one character put through a composite ordeal before our eyes. His art and sympathy and his clarity, more than any irresolute or Kafkaish ambiguity on his part, earn him plaudits in this early story. What terrible shortsightedness on the part of those eminent men and their retainers, succeeding one another because the colonists would not abide them—and still, each of them so confident on arrival of being able to administer affairs for his ‘‘loyal’’ fellowmen. But after all, each would have seen the equivalent of what Robin saw—for example, ‘‘the broad countenance of a British hero swinging before the door of an inn.’’ Why shouldn’t they expect coöperation? All this evokes more legitimate pathos, perhaps, than the pathos which I for one have a time responding to: that of some everyman cutting away from one or more father figures, undergoing assault from the ‘‘powers of darkness,’’ emerging self-created, and all the rest.

In the Centenary Essays published in 1964 to commemorate Hawthorne’s death, Lionel Trilling’s essay, ‘‘Our Hawthorne,’’ spoke of the admiration writers like Henry James had for Hawthorne’s ‘‘surface aesthetic.’’ Trilling grew nostalgic over the fact that this kind of interest has lapsed. ‘‘Of this surface aesthetic,’’ he said, ‘‘the modern critics . . . say little. Their concern is with an aesthetic of depth. . . .’’ But honoring the surface of an allegory may be doing as much justice to Hawthorne’s work as pouring deep into its sub-basements all that we have come to suppose goes into our own predicament (breaking from adolescence, for instance)—ours, and by extension, everyman’s. Trilling’s nostalgia seems an appropriate way for one to remember the artist Hawthorne, rather than displacing him with oneself, just as Hawthorne would remember people of the past rather than displacing them with himself.

Source: John Russell, ‘‘Allegory and ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux,’’’ in The New England Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 3, September, 1967, pp. 432–40.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale of mid-eighteenth century Massachusetts, ‘‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux,’’ is woven around an ambiguous use of the term ‘‘shrewd.’’ Five sets of oppositions, or tensions, are established in the opening pages, developed throughout the narrative and contrasted in a climactic scene. Robin’s shrewdness, if proven beyond reasonable doubt, resolves these tensions in his shout of laughter and brings the story to a successful conclusion. Recent criticism has stressed sub-conscious factors when explaining Robin’s laugh. My analysis indicates that his motivation is primarily conscious, that his decision represents a complex historical development. As such the story assumes a new dimension, a biting commentary on a human nature too prone to choose the expedient.

The Colonial reaction against Royal officials and the court party in Massachusetts prior to the American Revolution is the tale’s first opposition. A boy like Robin Molineux, coming into so charged a political atmosphere, must ultimately choose between the rival factions. Contrasting the country and the town, a second tension, is politically significant. The story is laid in Boston, cradle of Massachusetts insurgency. Historically, leaders like Sam Adams had to overcome the loyalist sentiment of the back country before plunging the Bay State into a fight for independence. A third opposition, rough clothing compared with fashionable attire, follows from Robin’s country origin. His coarse coat, leather breeches, home knit stockings, cudgel and the wallet he carries on his back set him off from the townsmen. The ‘‘courteous’’ innkeeper sees that he is from the uncommitted back country before any words pass between them.

The theme of youth struggling against the world is quite evident in Robin’s situation. His parchment three-penny is not enough to buy a meal at the inn. Robin’s elder brother is to receive the family farm. The youth is seeking his affluent kinsman, Major Molineux, who has offered to aid one of his impoverished cousin’s two sons. Finally, illegal personal force is pitted against socio-legal repression. When Robin grabs the skirt of the old man’s coat, he is threatened with imprisonment in the stocks. The innkeeper sardonically reads descriptions of runaway bond servants and the reward for their recapture, before saying, ‘‘Better trudge, boy; better trudge.’’ The night watchman frightens Robin’s temptress, ‘‘the lady of the scarlet petticoat,’’ back into her quarters and commands him to go home or face the stocks. Robin’s cudgel becomes the recurring symbol for illegal, personal violence, just as the stocks represent social coercion. Robin wants to smash the old man’s nose and break the innkeeper’s head. He longs to wreak vengeance on the men who laugh at him. Robin considers forcing someone to direct him to the Major by brandishing his cudgel and, later, he tries to intimidate a pedestrian in that fashion. He feels ‘‘an instinctive antipathy towards the guardian of midnight order.’’ Growing desperate from fatigue and hunger, Robin thinks of personal retribution when faced with social repression. He is more analytic when confronted with illegal, personal force—perhaps because he embodies it and familiarity has brought a measure of understanding.

The temptress nearly succeeds in luring Robin into her rooms before the appearance of the night watchman. Despite this narrow escape, Robin distrusts her at once. He doubts whether ‘‘that sweet voice spoke Gospel truth,’’ and ultimately reads ‘‘in her eyes what he did not hear in her words.’’ There is no question that the temptress represents an illegal force after her flight from the watchman. (Later, when law and order breakdown completely, she ventures into the street with impunity.) Before this encounter, Robin invariably draws the wrong conclusions each time he tries to interpret his experiences. Previous references to his shrewdness, when he mistakes the old man for a country representative and when he infers that his light purse outweighs the name of Major Molineux, seem clearly ironic. Hawthorne tells us that Robin replied ‘‘cunningly’’ to the temptress after she said that the Major was inside her house. Robin says, ‘‘But I prithee trouble him to step to the door; I will deliver him a message . . . and then go back to my lodgings at the inn.’’ This reply is cunning. It contains a lie, for Robin has no lodgings; but it gives him a pretext for remaining outside and provides for the contingency that the Major is within. Robin is called ‘‘shrewd’’ when he flees from the temptress, after the watchman disappears. And this action is shrewd, since the ‘‘good youth’’ has already learned that he cannot resist the scarlet woman’s gentle persuasion. Robin’s conduct at this point is important; it foreshadows his climactic act.

In the middle of the story, between Robin’s flight from the temptress and the appearance of the lynching mob, certain tensions are reinforced while others become blurred. Robin’s loneliness and isolation from the rest of the world grow more intense before the appearance of the kindly gentleman, an urbane, detached observer who is never directly involved in the story. The contrast between town and rural life is heightened by the comparison of the town church with a country religious observance, as Robin remembers it. The gentleman, however, speaks to Robin ‘‘in a tone of real kindness,’’ a conspicuous departure from the townsmen’s previous practice. He also holds the skirt of Robin’s coat, an act which seemed boorish when Robin detained the old man in that way. Still, the tension between the town and the country remains. When an uproar is heard in the distance, the gentleman says ‘‘You must not expect all the stillness of your native woods here in our streets.’’ Robin predicts that the disturbers of the peace will be set in the stocks, thereby mentioning a symbol twice invoked against him. He seems, however grudgingly, to accept social repression as a necessity. The discrepancy between Robin’s clothing and the townsmen’s grows weak, partly because the gentleman’s clothes are not described. The youth also meets individuals ‘‘in outlandish attire’’ and the man with the twofold complexion ‘‘muffled in a cloak.’’ Just before the mob arrives, ‘‘Half-dressed men hurried towards the unknown commotion.’’ An examination of the climactic scene and the denouement explains why Hawthorne made several oppositions less rigid.

The mob sweeps by, and the cart carrying the Major, ‘‘in tar-and-feathery dignity,’’ stops directly in front of Robin. ‘‘The double-faced fellow’’ and the Major, presumably a Royal official, have both stared at him. (These stares are significant because Robin had been able to read the truth in the eyes of his temptress and correct ‘‘what he did not hear in her words.’’) Gripped by a feeling which Hawthorne describes as a ‘‘mixture of pity and terror,’’ Robin is compelled to make a crucial decision. He still represents the country vs. the town; youth vs. the world; and, at least symbolically, loyalty to England vs. rebellion. As foreshadowed in the middle of the tale, however, Robin’s position is now inverted with respect to the other oppositions. He now represents socio-legal repression opposing the personal violence of the townsmen. He could be a witness at their trial, for example. Also, his clothing is now relatively fashionable compared with that of certain townsmen. Some of the mob are described as ‘‘wild figures in the Indian dress, and many fantastic shapes without a model.’’ The innkeeper has an apron over his head, while the old man whose fashionable appearance was contrasted with Robin’s crudeness at the beginning of the story, has become a caricature. The old man is:

. . . wrapped in a wide gown, his gray periwig exchanged for a nightcap, which was thrust back from his forehead, and his silk stockings hanging about his legs. He supported himself on his polished cane in a fit of convulsive merriment, which manifested itself on his solemn old features like a funny inscription on a tombstone.

It is indisputable that Robin’s immediate problems are allayed by his laugh, although his motivation is not simple. Previous scholarship has attributed his shout of laughter, ‘‘the loudest there,’’ to many factors. Robin has been under a strain and needs an emotional outlet. As he says in the middle of the story, ‘‘I have laughed very little since I left home, sir, and should be sorry to lose an opportunity.’’ He laughs because the crowd’s laughter is contagious and because the scarlet woman’s touch provokes, we may guess, tingling sensations of a pleasant yet unfamiliar nature. But his laugh is also prompted by shrewdness, expediency, the desire for self-preservation. Robin has seen many of the lynch mob at close range and is related to its victim. He must side with the mob or, at least, seem to applaud its work. Otherwise he might well be thrown into the cart and, perhaps, put to death. (Death is a reality to Robin, as revealed in his thoughts inspired by the graves around the town church.) If the element of conscious shrewdness partially explains Robin’s laugh, the tensions are all resolved. Robin accepts the town, the ways of the world, and the spirit of colonial rebellion—with its illegal, personal force and the rough, outlandish clothing of its adherents. He has matured, or retrogressed—depending on the viewpoint—enormously. The critic must reject Mark Van Doren’s conception that Robin, at the end of the story, is ‘‘much as he had been, except that he knows he has no prospects.’’

Two important clues suggest that expediency is one stimulus to Robin’s climactic laugh. If Robin acts shrewdly when contending with the illegal force of the temptress, it is logical, in terms of his character development, that he will meet the overwhelming physical strength of the mob in the same way. Hawthorne refers back to the temptress when he plants the second clue. When Robin comments on the distant shouting, the gentleman says, ‘‘May not a man have several voices, Robin, as well as two complexions?’’ Then: ‘‘‘Perhaps a man may; but Heaven forbid that a woman should!’ responded the shrewd youth, thinking of the seductive tones of the Major’s housekeeper.’’ This exchange is apparently linked to Robin’s climactic laugh through similarity of language and metaphor. (One indication is that the gentleman’s question and Robin’s answer are provoked by shouts, and Hawthorne twice calls Robin’s laugh a shout. Another indication concerns the attitude of ‘‘Heaven’’ toward deception through the voice. Immediately after Robin’s laugh, Hawthorne depicts the indifference of the ‘‘cloud spirits’’ and the ‘‘Man in the Moon.’’ This animism reflects ironically upon an activity divorced from Christian ethics. The Heaven, which is called upon to prohibit two-voiced women, is ambivalent.) In any case, Robin’s admission that a man may have two voices is pertinent when discussing the reasons for his laugh. Like the mob’s shout, a laugh may be deceptive. Full recognition that the voice may deceive, plus a strong motive for siding with the mob, suggests that Robin laughed, in part, to save himself. The other emotional factors contributed to his successful shout, ‘‘the loudest there.’’

Oversubtle interpretation is an obvious danger here. The youth’s request to be shown the way back to the country implies that his future course is not fixed; but it should be noted that he does not protest when the gentleman orders him to remain in town for a few days. Robin goes so far as to call the mob and the onlookers ‘‘my other friends.’’ Shrewdness does not connote clairvoyance, sophistication, worldly wisdom, will power or higher spiritual values; it is a quality men share with lower animal forms. Robin’s bewilderment, false inferences, gaucheries and irresolution do not prevent him from acting shrewdly when the situation demands it. Hawthorne apparently provides sufficient clues to clarify the ambiguity surrounding the term. Formulating a final sentence which illuminates the meaning of an entire work is a recognized literary device. The last sentence of the story, in which the gentleman addresses Robin, reads:

Or, if you prefer to remain with us, perhaps, as you are a shrewd youth, you may rise in the world without the help of your kinsman, Major Molineux.

Earlier, when Robin said that he had a reputation for shrewdness, the kindly gentleman replied, ‘‘I doubt not that you deserve it.’’ In context, the gentleman is taking a wait-and-see position. Now, he has observed Robin in the great crisis of his life. The most satisfactory dramatic reading of the last sentence demands heavy emphasis on the ‘‘are.’’ This motivational pattern may be extended legitimately to rural Massachusetts, which finally chose a comparable solution to a dilemma like Robin’s. Through him we see the back country join the drive for independence.

Source: Bartlett C. Jones, ‘‘The Ambiguity of Shrewdness in ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux,’’’ in Midcontinent American Studies Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall, 1962, pp. 42–46.