In this essay, the literary scholar Charles White investigates light as a symbol and as an imagery in Hawthorne's My Kinsman, Major Molineux. Such include the expansive use of the moonlight background in the introduction and the successive artificial sources of light...
"My Kinsman, Major Molineux" is a short story written by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1831. It first appeared in the 1832 edition of The Token and Atlantic Souvenir, published by Samuel Goodrich
In about 1732, Robin, a youth, arrives by ferry in Boston seeking his kinsman, Major Molineux, an official in the British Colonial government, who has promised him work. Yet no one in town tells him where the major is. A rich man threatens the youth with prison, and an innkeeper calls him a runaway bond-servant. At the inn, he meets a man with a face described as looking like the devil - two protrusions emanating from his forehead (like horns), eyes burning like 'fire in a cave'- who seems at the center of many evil things.
"My Kinsman, Major Molineux" is a short story written by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1831. It first appeared in the 1832 edition of The Token and Atlantic Souvenir, published by Samuel Goodrich.
Choice collection of masterly short fiction. In addition to title story: "The Birthmark," "Rappaccini's Daughter," "Roger Malvin's Burial," "The Artist of the Beautiful," "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," and "My Kinsman, Major Molineux."
The short fiction of a writer who helped to shape the course of American literature. With a determined commitment to the history of his native land, Nathaniel Hawthorne revealed, more incisively than any writer of his generation, the nature of a distinctly American consciousness. The pieces collected here deal with essentially American matters: the Puritan past, the Indians, the Revolution. But Hawthorne was highly - often wickedly - unorthodox in his account of life in early America, and his precisely constructed plots quickly engage the reader's imagination. Written in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s, these works are informed by themes that reappear in Hawthorne's longer works: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance. And, as Michael J. Colacurcio points out in his excellent introduction, they are themes that are now deeply embedded in the American literary tradition.