I’m pretty sure it’s not cool to like nineteenth American art, but in my last two visits to the art museum, I wandered into those rooms and was taken by much of what I saw. More and more often in looking at history, I think, “These are my ancestors. What do we have in common?”
My sense of connection also arises partly because of Hawthorne’s story, “Ethan Brand,” which has popped up in conversation a couple of times lately; his unflattering portrait of New England villagers intrigues me.
Ethan Brand left his town eighteen years before the story begins. Now he’s back, and the town’s atwitter about his return. We learn that he left in order to discover “The Unpardonable Sin,” and, guess what, he found it. It’s the sin of pride that causes someone to set himself apart from, and therefore above, “the brotherhood of man.” By seeking the Unpardonable Sin, Ethan Brand commits it. He knows it, and says he would do it again.
Labeling the seeker, the rebel, the iconoclast an “unpardonable” sinner—that sounds like a pretty democratic and reasonable value system, right? But when we meet Ethan Brand’s fellow citizens, we’d consider lighting out for the territory too. They tend to be drunk, ugly, and uninteresting, except that they’re sort of weird, sort of a traveling circus that doesn’t travel.
So are we supposed to identify with the arrogant “intellectual” and title character, who says he's not repentant for his self-imposed exile, which amounts to self-exaltation? Are we up to it, that kind of defiance, solitude, and acceptance of responsibility? Or should we see ourselves as one of the tedious, unattractive Everymen of the village? At least the motley crew in the town square have each other—right? Is that what we’re supposed to say, out of a sense of modesty and a need for others, a sense of ourselves as herd animals? The townsfolk are the only alternatives to Ethan Brand in the world of the story; so to play fair, those are our choices.
“Ethan Brand” is my favorite Hawthorne story, along with “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux.” I think both pieces ask more complex and subtle questions than most of his work does.
So when I saw the paintings, which are roughly contemporary with Hawthorne, I couldn’t help but see the rag-tag bumpkins of those two stories, or the pious folks of Salem who render Young Goodman Brown an isolated cynic in one of Hawthorne’s other famous stories.
If the humans in these paintings are our norm, the best or only prospects for fellowship, how do we respond? To which male would you hand over your daughter? Which female looks like the best candidate for interesting talk over coffee? Or is coffee not the point? If these are our predecessors, who are we?
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