To Old Woman's Tale

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An Old Woman's Tale , German story of an old woman , is the title of a 1830 first published short story by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne . It is about a young couple in love who witness a ghost procession. This external, fairytale-like plot is embedded in a frame narrative about an old woman, from whom the narrator claims to have heard this story. The Tale of an Old Woman is Hawthorne's first framed short story and of particular interest to literary history as one of his earliest exercises in romantic irony .

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The narrator reports that he learned of the following stories from the mouth of an old woman who, as a child, always sat in front of the hearth of the house where he was born, knitting and telling stories from morning to evening about her home village in the Connecticut Valley, who: seldom enough moved within the bounds of probability ”.

All the inhabitants of this village, the old woman assures us, fell into a deep, hour-long sleep at certain intervals - every 25, 50 or 100 years. “On a moonlit summer night” a young couple once sat at a spring near the village: David and Esther, distant relatives, offspring of a formerly rich but now impoverished family. They hadn't talked for a while, the wind subsided, everything seemed “so still and motionless, as if nature was preparing itself to sleep,” and they themselves “maybe” fell asleep together. A crowd suddenly appeared on the village street, but "where the hell" they suddenly came from could not be made out. There were men, women and children among them, a hunter, a miller, a preacher, and also a justice of the peace, all dressed strangely old-fashioned, and they all yawned and stretched their limbs, "as if they had only half awakened from a deep slumber." The crowd soon split up into smaller groups, families, it seemed, and surveyed the village. Wherever an old house was well preserved, the viewer could see a certain joy, but in front of collapsed houses one saw men cross their arms "in speechless sadness". Finally, an old, splendidly dressed, but "tight" looking woman appeared. With a shovel she began to dig for something in a certain place between the spring and a walnut tree, but the lawn resisted her efforts like the hardest granite; one saw "the moonlight shimmering through the old lady and dancing in the spring behind her." After a while a squire (justice of the peace) finally appeared, took a watch from his vest and pointed to the hands, whereupon the crowd moved away just as quickly as she had appeared, also the old lady, who however stopped again and looked back at the source.

David and Esther initially believed they had dreamed, but discovered that they had seen - or dreamed - the same thing. So they decided to dig themselves in the place where the old lady had struggled in vain. The story ends with David dropping his head into the pit and calling out, “Oho! - What have we here?"

Work context

The story of an old woman first appeared in the Salem Gazette on December 18, 1830 and, like all of Hawthorne's works, anonymously before 1837.

Unlike The Hollow of the Three Hills , a short story that appeared in the same newspaper a month earlier, Hawthorne did not include it in any of his later short story collections. There is disagreement over the question of whether the story was originally part of one of the early collections of short stories that Hawthorne planned around 1830, but for which he could not find a publisher, so he finally destroyed his manuscripts. This question is particularly relevant because the various narratives of these projected collections were certainly thematically related and possibly also referred to one another or were embedded in a common framework. It is possible that an old woman's tale was intended for the Seven Tales of My Native Land collection , for which Hawthorne sought a publisher in vain around 1828; or for his Provincial Tales project , which he pursued around 1830, but also had to give up in the end.

Alfred Weber believes it is more likely that Hawthorne wrote the story of an old woman only in 1830, shortly before it was published, since the narrator states that he himself visited her scene "two summers ago"; Hawthorne had made a trip to the Connecticut Valley in 1828. James W. Mathews believes that the story , like The Hollow of the Three Hills , is tailored to a publication in a magazine in terms of length, structure and subject matter, so it does not suggest any reference to a framework plot or neighboring texts. He leaves it open whether it was designed in this way from the outset or whether it was edited again by Hawthorne in order to meet the expectations and requirements of the magazine market.

Interpretations

To the frame story

So far, only a few literary works have dealt with the story of an old woman . The performers showed little interest in the actual, external plot of the internal narrative, probably because they hardly touched on any of the dark, typically "Hawthornesque" themes - sin, guilt, atonement, despair and isolation. In the case of this narrative, the critical interest is more focused on its metafictional aspects, some of which are explicitly addressed by the narrator, but also result implicitly from their structure as a framed narrative with several, sometimes overlapping narrative instances. The story of an old woman can thus be interpreted as an early testimony to Hawthorne's understanding of fiction, which he elaborated in later years, especially in the famous prefaces to his novels The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

Alfred Weber suspects that even in the Seven Tales of My Native Land, storytelling at the local hearth provided the narrative framework for the individual stories and that the story of an old woman continues this motif. He suspects an autobiographical reference to this. He thinks it is conceivable that Hawthorne's grandmother Rachel was the model for the old woman of the story ; In any case, the tales of old people around the winter fireplace were an important part of social life in New England. This narrative ties in with the oral tradition and expressly emphasizes the collective, popular origin of the stories, of which the ghost procession described is only one; so it is said of the old woman:

Her personal memory included the better part of a hundred years, and she had strangely jumbled her own experience and observation with those of many old people who died in her young days [...]

"Her own memories spanned nearly a full century, and the memories of many old people who died when she was young had inextricably mingled with hers in her mind."

Weber accordingly classifies the internal narrative as a fairy tale , thus assigning it to a simple genre based on orality; the ironic insertions of the narrator and the frame structure, however, underline the artificial, literary character of the narrative. Weber classifies it as an arabesque in the sense that Friedrich Schlegel defined it around 1800 (for example in a conversation about poetry ). The playful handling of supernatural, folk-fairytale-like elements becomes clear in the slightly mocking description of the “toothless old woman” in the frame narrative:

Her ground-plots, seldom within the widest scope of probability, were filled up with homely and natural incidents, the gradual accretions of a long course of years, and fiction hid its grotesque extravagance in this garb of truth, like the Devil (an appropriate simile, for the old woman supplies it) disguising himself, cloven-foot and all, in mortal attire.

“The plot of their stories, which were seldom enough within the broadest limits of probability, was filled with well-known, natural incidents that had slowly accumulated over many years, so that the invention wrapped its grotesque exaggeration in the garb of truth, such as the devil (a fitting comparison, because he is supplied by the old woman herself), who dresses himself in the robe of a mortal, including a horse's foot and all accessories. "

Hawthorne picks up on a formative motif of the New England folk legend with his belief in the devil, but ironically turns it against his own narrative. In this context, the description of the old woman by the narrator in the opening sentence reminds one of traditional depictions of the devil: She always crouched in front of the hearth fire, "her elbows on her knees, her feet in the ashes" - in many legends the devil hides his Hooves when walking among people. The storytelling, the literary act of creation, the blurring of the lines between truth and fiction, appears so ostensibly as the work of the devil; in fact, Hawthorne uses the puritan hostility to fiction here as an occasion for his own exercises in romantic irony and thus turns them into their opposite.

Questions of a metafictional nature are also raised by the abrupt ending - of the internal narrative as well as the narrative as a whole - which obviously deliberately violates familiar narrative conventions and reader expectations. She shares this feature with other early works such as The Hollow of the Three Hills and The Wives of the Dead , with which Hans-Joachim Lang, for example, puts the story of an old woman in a series of Hawthorn's “experiments with radical brevity”. According to Lang, these experiments are "an embarrassment for interpreters who do not respond to the author's offer to think along, even to accept a puzzling structure of the narrative, but instead try to read it in a more naive way." Such an embarrassment can be found with Michael J , for example Find out Colacurcio , who ascribes the sudden end of the story to the failure of the author, who himself no longer really knows what to do next. In contrast, GR Thompson makes the refusal of a denouement the focus of his interpretation of Hawthorne's experimental early works: he describes them with the term "negative epiphany ."

For internal narration

In the internal narrative, the narrator almost completely takes a back seat, at most he occasionally makes himself noticeable through insertions such as “maybe”, otherwise it is - apart from its abrupt ending - told in a rather conventional manner. It clearly shows in style and subject the influence of Washington Irving , the “inventor” of the American short story, for example in the detailed description of the village, the motif of the treasure hunt and especially in the ghostly return of the ancestors; Thus the protagonist of Irving's story Rip Van Winkle (1819) encounters the ghosts of Henry Hudson and his team in the valley of the Hudson River , who appear there every twenty years to examine the progress of the valley named after him.

Colacurcio, who, in his extensive monograph on Hawthorne's early works, is particularly interested in connections with actual events and developments in the history of New England, is disappointed by the story of an old woman , because despite the ominous return of the Puritan forefathers described in it, she hardly has a concrete one Recognize historical reference. Nothing in the story suggests that David and Esther end up stumbling across a proverbial “corpse in the cellar” or uncovering some kind of “crime” of their Puritan ancestors. Hans-Joachim Lang and Thompson criticize this interpretation for saying more about Colacurcio's expectations than about the story itself. In fact, all the other performers agree on what David and Esther find at the end of the story - treasure . As Lang shows, Hawthorne gives the reader several clear hints for solving the “Oho! - What do we have there? ”At the beginning it is said that David was so poor that he“ couldn't even pay the wedding fee if Esther wanted to marry him after all ”; the old lady is clearly characterized as rich but stingy and suspicious. After all, the spirits of the Puritan ancestors are primarily interested in the continuation of their own houses and thus their families, i.e. their descendants , when they meet on site ; in front of dilapidated houses, on the other hand, they express grief and pain, and “the little children slipped on their knees away from this open grave of domestic love.” In short, the solution to the riddle is that David and Esther will soon get rich with the treasure they have found, marry and will continue the family line.

To the dream motif

An important aspect of the narrative, which affects frame and internal narration equally and further complicates it, is the dominant theme of the dream , with which Hawthorne experimented around 1830 in texts such as The Wives of the Dead . In this respect, an old woman's tale has a counterpart in The Hollow of the Three Hills ; While in this early work an "old hag" conjures up phenomena that are described exclusively through the audible, i.e. acoustically, the ghosts of the present narrative are mute and speechless, are thus conveyed exclusively visually. In all of these “dream stories”, it ultimately remains open whether what is described - within the premises of fiction - actually occurs or only in a dream. Shakespeare's Midsummer Night 's Dream is the model - Hawthorne's internal story also plays "On a moonlit summer night," and Hawthorne's narrator leaves open whether Esther and David are awake or dreaming:

Perhaps they fell asleep together, and, united as their spirits were by close and tender sympathies, the same strange dream might have wrapped them in its shadowy arms. But they conceived, at the time, that they still remained wakeful by the spring of bubbling water, looking down through the village [...]

“Perhaps they fell asleep together, and perhaps, since their souls were united by a delicate and tight bond, the same strange dream also took them both in its shadowy arms. In any case, they thought they were sitting awake by the murmuring spring and looking down at the village [...] "

Towards the end of the story, the two of them who think they are still awake believe that they have awakened from a dream. The ghostly squire (justice of the peace), who at the end of the ghost procession, points to the hands of his huge clock, which may therefore represent an alarm clock , may indicate that the two were asleep ; but this simple solution is opposed to the fact that the two dreamed the same dream. Rita K. Gollin, who indulges in psychoanalytically shaped dream interpretation in her monograph , is at the end of her Latin: The idea of ​​a common dream lacks “psychological probability.” In contrast, GR Thompson points out that Hawthorne does not state a truthful reproduction of a certain dream - Esther and David are rather only figures of a dream, the end of which, i.e. the awakening, marks the abrupt end of the narrative itself. The narrator of the frame narration himself relates storytelling to sleeping and dreaming when he comments on the legend of magical sleep:

To speak emphatically, there was a soporific influence throughout the village, stronger than if every mother's son and daughter were reading a dull story; notwithstanding which the old woman professed to hold the substance of the ensuing account from one of those principally concerned in it.

“To express myself empathically: a drowsy atmosphere settled over the whole village, which seemed stronger, as if every mother-son and mother-daughter was reading a boring story; nonetheless, the old woman claimed to have the content of the following story of people, and in the foreground, had played a part in it. "

This motif is spun further by the fact that the spirits seem to have awakened from a deep sleep even when they appear; they are therefore characters in a dream in a dream in a dream, or characters in a dream that follows another dream - all narrative levels finally evaporate in an infinite regress .

literature

expenditure

The standard edition of Hawthorne's works is still The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne , published by Ohio State University Press (Columbus, Ohio 1963ff.). An Old Woman's Tale can be found in Volume XI ( The Snow-Image and Uncollected Tales , 1974). Some of the numerous anthologies of Hawthorne's short stories include An Old Woman's Tale , which is about reliable

There are two translations into German:

  • An old woman's story . German by Hannelore Neves.
    • in: Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Heavenly Railway. Stories, sketches, forewords, reviews . With an afterword and comments by Hans-Joachim Lang . Winkler, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-538-06068-1 .
    • in: Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Pastor's Black Veil: Eerie Tales . Winkler, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-538-06584-5 .
  • An old woman's story . German by Lore Krüger . In: Nathaniel Hawthorne: Mr. Higginbotham's Doom. Selected stories . Edited by Heinz Förster. Insel-Verlag, Leipzig 1979.

Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ All quotations below based on the translation by Hannelore Neves.
  2. ^ Alfred Weber: The development of the framework narratives Nathaniel Hawthorne . P. 38, P. 66.
  3. ^ Alfred Weber: The development of the framework narratives Nathaniel Hawthorne . Pp. 107-108.
  4. ↑ James W. Mathews: Hawthorne and the Periodical Tale: From Popular Lore to Art . In: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 68: 2. 1974, pp. 149-62.
  5. ^ GR Thompson: The Art of Authorial Presence . P. 79.
  6. ↑ A comprehensive German-language account of the romantic irony in Hawthorne is offered by Helmut Schwarztraub: Fiktion der Fiktion. Justification and preservation of narration through theoretical self-reflection in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe. University Press C. Winter, Heidelberg 2000, ISBN 3-8253-1042-6 . However, Schwarztraub takes no notice of Old Woman's Tale .
  7. ^ Alfred Weber: The development of the framework narratives Nathaniel Hawthorne . Pp. 108-109.
  8. ^ Alfred Weber: The development of the framework narratives Nathaniel Hawthorne . Pp. 109-110.
  9. ^ GR Thompson: The Art of Authorial Presence . Pp. 81-82.
  10. ^ GR Thompson: The Art of Authorial Presence , p. 13.
  11. ↑ Hans-Joachim Lang: Poets and punchlines . P. 90.
  12. ↑ Michael J. Colacurcio: The Province of Piety . P. 47.
  13. ^ GR Thompson: The Art of Authorial Presence . P. 56ff. and passim.
  14. ↑ This was already noted by Malcolm Cowley in his short introduction to the story in: The Portable Hawthorne . Viking, New York 1948, p. 48.
  15. ↑ Hans-Joachim Lang: Poets and punchlines . P. 103, p. 119.
  16. ↑ Michael J. Colacurcio: The Province of Piety . P. 48.
  17. ↑ Hans-Joachim Lang: Poets and punchlines . Pp. 99-100.
  18. ^ GR Thompson: The Art of Authorial Presence . P. 77.
  19. ^ Rita K. Gollin: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Truth of Dreams . P. 103.
  20. ^ GR Thompson: The Art of Authorial Presence . Pp. 80-81.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on January 13, 2012 .