An Interpretation of "Ethan Brand," by Nathaniel Hawthorne

 The following is a piece I wrote seven years ago when the group read and discussed Hawthorne's story "Ethan Brand."  We reprised the selection this Monday, March 24th, 2025 at our monthly meeting at the Library. I consider it to remain a plausible interpretation of a tale Hawthorne dubbed "A Chapter from an Abortive Romance," by which he no doubt meant it was a chapter of an unfinished work.  The final chapter, maybe? --Tom

A reader who has even a passing familiarity with the 19^th-century American author Nathaniel Hawthorne understands he struggled with the theological concerns of his New England forebears. The title character of Hawthorne’s story “Ethan Brand” began his philosphical musings during long hours spent by his kiln on the slope of Mount Graylock. Ethan Brand represents a type of individual who wrestles with concepts like Unpardonable Sin. He says upon his return to the mountain after a 20-year quest for the Unpardonable Sin, that it was “the sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man, and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims!”

The character of old Humphrey fascinates me the most. He, like both Ethan and the Jew of Nuremberg who sells dioramic views to the local populace, is a wanderer.  Hawthorne tells us Humphrey’s wandering has a specific purpose: to inquire of people as to the whereabouts of his daughter, whom Hawthorne calls “the Esther of our tale.” When Humphrey sees Brand, he upbraids him for heisting his daughter away and pushing her into a life as a circus performer. She was, Hawthorne writes, “the very girl whom with such cold and remorseless purpose, Brand had had made the subject of a psychological experiment, and wasted, absorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process.”

Later, Brand sits by the kiln by himself, and reviews his spiritual metamorphosis.  He thinks about how the “Idea that possessed his life had operated as a means of education,” but concludes, “So much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That indeed, had withered – had contracted – had hardened – had perished!” It turned him into an unfeeling observer, “looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were demanded for his study.” Hawthorne again means to tell us his sin-obsessed character viewed others, on whom he sought to impose his beliefs, as unwitting experimental fodder.

The Wandering Jew of Nuremberg also knew Brand’s reputation, and earlier in the story says “I find it to be a heavy matter in my show box – this  Unpardonable Sin. By my faith, Captain, it has wearied my shoulders, this long day, to carry it over the mountain.”

Do we ever discover what the Unpardonable Sin was? Based on our examination of Hawthorne’s astonishing allegory, I can only conclude: IF Hawthorne believes in Unpardonable Sin at all, it would be the sin of imposing a heavy-handed belief system on other people whom you intimidate intellectually. That would be enough to make anyone want to join the circus!

Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand"

An important key to Hawthorne's tale "Ethan Brand," the subject of this Monday's discussion, is  Brand's relationship to the various people in his sleepy village in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. See the "concept map" below. It will serve as a step-off point when we get together for our discussion of Brand's quest to know the "Unpardonable Sin." 

A Concept Map of the story.  Ethan Brand has relationships with these characters (who seemingly have no relations with each other apart from their connection to the
 village "network," through Brand).

Great Books Reaches 20-Year Milestone

Kudos to the 12 people who came to the Village Library to talk about three of John Keats's most famous odes (the ones "To a Nightingale," "On a Grecian Urn," and "To Melancholy," with remote assistance from our current leader, Chris Lawrence.  

We had a party at the end to celebrate the group's 20th anniversary at Huntington Public Library.  Many thanks to everyone who has participated in this disciplined yet fun program of personal improvement.  We shared a dessert and coffee, and I requested of the sure-handed counter clerk at Buttercooky Bakery on New York Avenue in Huntington that she adorn this delicious mascarpone cake with some "purple prose," as composed by yours truly,

Descartes: Meditations 1 and 2

Below is an excellent commentary by Chris Lawrence, who has served as the facilitator of the group's discussions since I stepped down from that role last spring, about this past Monday's selection, Meditations 1 and 2 by the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes.  --Tom Cohn

"In “Meditations 1 and 2”, despite Descartes’ hyperbolic skepticism, he never questions the existence of God. As part of his exercise in logic, he tries to imagine that God could be an evil genius and might be deliberately trying to deceive him, but he never even once considers a world that lacks a divine creator. From a modern perspective, one has to ask: why? He begins his exercise by questioning EVERYTHING, including his own existence, in order to eliminate anything that could be an illusion and sets out to find the one, objective truth from which to deduce all other truths. That said, why wouldn’t he start with nothingness, at least as a concept? The answer as far as I can see seems to be that he has already found his foundational truth: God. His subsequent thoughts on the subject seem to constitute little more than a search for his own identity; i.e.; who he is as a 16th c. fideist. Descartes wrote at a time when the authority of the Catholic Church was being challenged on all sides by free-thinking men, men who were willing to use the human faculty of reason to question religious dogma. To his credit, Descartes participates in that search for truth, yet ironically, the way in which he “proves” his own existence- and that of God- demonstrates more than anything else not just the persistence of his own faith but the limitations of logic as well. Starting with the irrational, a priori assumption of a divine creator, he reasons that even if God intended to deceive him about his own existence, he still is thinking about his situation: therefore, he exists. “Cogito ergo sum”, arguably the 3 most famous words in the history of philosophy, were written long before psychology had developed as a social science. Accordingly, Descartes can be pardoned for not appreciating the inherent solipsism of his conclusion. On the one hand, he brilliantly places the individual as the ultimate arbiter of any system of truth, but regrettably, he doesn’t seem to appreciate the inherent illogic of basing his one “objective” truth on a subjective realization. This error is compounded in Meditation 3 when he “reasons” that the idea of a Perfect God could not have originated in his own, admittedly imperfect mind, but could have only come from a God who really exists! The obvious flaws in Descartes’ argument seem to stem from an unwillingness to transcend certain, long-held religious convictions, and also, from a misapplication of the principles of logic. His argument for the existence of God is virtually the same argument made by Anselm of Canterbury almost 500 years before; moreover, as a mathematician, he seems more than willing to decide a matter of faith by the logical process of deduction, a fool’s errand at best. Faith, as most of us realize from our lofty position of 21c. knowledge, is essentially the persistence of belief in the absence of proof; in fact, it could be argued that the absence of proof is precisely what gives faith any meaning. Projects like Descartes’, and Aquinas’ before him, that have ignored the inherent differences between faith and reason and that have attempted to subject one to the constraints of the other, have all too often resulted in the tangled arguments of religious scholasticism or worse, religious persecution. Rather than regarding them as competing systems of truth, as is the temptation even today, I think we as human beings would be far better served if instead, we look at them as complementary systems of belief, each providing a needed perspective for the other."

Portrait of Descartes (1596-1650) by Franz Hals

Ruskin and Friedan on Women's Roles

Self-portrait of John Ruskin (1819-1900) 

John Ruskin's essay "Of Queen's Gardens" is based on a lecture he delivered on December 14, 1864 at Manchester (England) Town Hall in aid of St. Andrew's School.  Its companion piece "Of King's Treasuries" was given a week earlier to support the book collection of the public library in Manchester.  Both lectures were written in support of books, reading, education, and right conduct, and they were published together in a book entitled Sesames and Lilies. Charles W. Eliot writes in his introduction to Sesames and Lilies in the American and English Essays volume of the Harvard Classics that Ruskin was "the greatest master of ornate prose in the English language." In the excerpted version of "Of Queen's Gardens" we are reading, Ruskin offers views of the proper role of women in society.

                                                                                      

Betty Friedan (1921-2006)

Betty Friedan was an American journalist who in 1963 published The Feminine Mystique based on extensive research she had conducted including questionnaires submitted to 200 members of her Smith College class and many other studies. Friedan created a concept she summarized as follows:

"There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image that I came to call the feminine mystique. I wondered if other women faced this schizophrenic split."

Friedan has been subsequently criticized for representing a middle-class suburban point of view, but her book stands as an important influence on the development of modern-day feminism.

Hawthorne and Bernard on Human Experimentation

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1813-1878)

This month's two selections are "Rappaccini's Daughter," by the great though, as most would agree, enigmatic American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, and "Vivisection," by French physiologist Claude Bernard. Both pieces concern the use of humans in medical experimentation, although the Hawthorne story is fictional and Bernard's piece is from his book An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. The New York Public Library Companion to Literature calls "Rappaccini's Daughter" one of Hawthorne's "greatest studies of monomania," defined as a single-minded pursuit of an end. A question for Monday: What is Dr. Rappaccini monomanical about?

George Eliot vs. Oscar Wilde on Art

Next Monday we will compare two pieces with distinct positions on what constitutes good art.  They are a chapter from George Eliot's novel Adam Bede (published in 1859, but set in 1799), "In Which the Story Pauses a Little," and Oscar Wilde's dialogue, "The Decay of Lying." (published in 1889).

Eliot interrupts

George Eliot (1819-1880)

Adam Bede with a reflection on aesthetics as spoken by the novel's narrator.  The reader of this chapter doesn't need to know the details of this novel about a humble young carpenter seeking to establish himself and find love in the English village of Hayslope in order to understand Eliot's arguments.  As she writes:

"All honor and reverence to the divine beauty of form!  Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children -- in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy." [Emphasis added]

"The Decay of Lying" takes the form of a dialogue between two men named for Wilde's sons, Cyril and Vivian. Vivian's position is summed up by its concluding paragraph:

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets."  A wonderful Wildean epigram.  Is it ironic?  To discuss on Monday.