“Roger Malvin’s Burial” (1832) is one of the Hawthorne’s earliest tales, combining actual history and imagination, in a style later termed Romance. Although based on “Lovewell’s Fight” in 1725, the battle between the colonial farmers of Massachusetts and Pigwacket Indians, Hawthorne eliminates the bloody battle scene itself, and instead traces Reuben Bourne’s subsequent life over eighteen years, focusing especially on his psychological aftermath of the Indian fight. Reuben’s mental downfall is caused by his failure to fulfill his promise to bury Roger Malvin, Reuben’s comrade as well as father-in-law-to-be. This paper explores a parallel relation between the function and the meaning of “burial” not only in the fictional/private sphere, but also the real public/national space in the early period of America’s history.
The 19th century was a time when leading personalities and major historical events became objects of commemorative veneration. Communities began to construct memorial monuments and rituals came to play in the public sphere in order to support their memory through a system of “group confirmation.” Confronting contemporary writers’ and community’s admiration of “Lovewell’s Fight,” Hawthorne’s narrative uses the imaginary survivor’s memory to function as the “counter-memory” of national discourse. Reuben’s story depicts what the community repressed and through this family romance, the relation of Roger and Rueben reflects the perspective that contemporary community conceive.
Reuben’s mental deterioration is explored here through reference to Philip Freneau’s poem “The Indian Burying Ground” (1787), and Freud’s psychoanalytic discussion “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917). Whereas critics of Freneau’s poem discussed the resemblance between Roger’s final bodily position and Native American burials, the focus here is on the typical western way of burial described in his poem, “the posture, that we give the dead,” that is for a living person to lay the dead down in the ground. By acting contrary to this tradition―raising the dying man up to lean against the rock―Reuben fails to accept Roger’s death, which his psychological fear later conjures up the uncanny Roger’s ghost and his voice. Furthermore, an examination of Freud’s theory of Mourning and Melancholia, the normal reactions to the loss of a loved one, can be used to account for Reuben’s downfall. His long-term depression illustrates the melancholia trait where the acceptance of loss is never achieved, and in particular where the patient desires to be cast out and punished. It might therefore be concluded that the collapse of Reuben’s family results from a lack of proper burial of the dead.
Consequently, this tragic family incident mirrors the theme of America’s national destiny. Gary Laderman suggests that burial was considered a public act to promote a national unity in the colonial period. By ensuring the dead had an appropriate burial, colonial communities negotiated the boundary between nature and culture, with attachment to the dead and location of their burial justifying the rational discourse for control over the land. In the text, however, the narrative of Roger’s unaccomplished burial, Hawthorne leaves this role to the contemporary reader outside of the text, who is still not reconciled with their collective guilt of their forefathers. Through this work it is suggested that just as Reuben lost his future generation through his son’s death, so too will America without a proper burial of its historical past.
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