"Roger Malvin's Burial" is one of the lesser known short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, included in the collection Mosses from an Old Manse. It concerns two colonial survivors returning home after the battle known as Lovell's Fight.
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Plot summary
The story begins in the year 1725, after Lovewell's Fight (Hawthorne uses the name Lovell's Fight), a battle in the French and Indian Wars. An elderly soldier, Roger Malvin and a young one, Reuben Bourne - survivors of the battle - try to get to a human settlement through the forest. However, since they are both wounded and weak, there is little hope that they will survive. They make a rest near a rock that looks like an enormous tombstone.
The older man asks Reuben, whom he treats as a son, to leave him to die alone, since his wounds are mortal. He is unable to go any further and, although Reuben insists that he will drag Malvin further, the old man knows that this would mean death for both of them. Malvin manages to convince Reuben finally, and the young man leaves Malvin surely to die.
Reuben survives, but he cannot feel at peace because he has not buried the old man as he had promised. Moreover, when he recovered, he did not have the courage to tell Dorcas, Roger Malvin's daughter and Reuben's fiancée, that he had left her father to die, even though it was Malvin's wish. Reuben is considered a brave man, but inside he feels that he has failed.
Dorcas and Reuben get married, but Reuben cannot fit into the society. Many years later, when Reuben and Dorcas' son is already a grown boy, Reuben decided that they will move out from the town they lived in and that they will look for a free piece of land for themselves. They travel through wilderness. At a rest, Reuben and his son wander into the forest separately while Dorcas prepares a meal. At a certain moment, Reuben hears something in the bushes and shoots, thinking it might be a deer, but it turns out that he has killed his own son. As he observes the terrain, it is obvious that this is the same place where he had left Roger Malvin.
Analysis
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As in are "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" and "The May-Pole of Merry Mount", Hawthorne combines history and allegory. The background for "Roger Malvin's Burial" are historic events, but the story itself turns out to contain highly symbolic elements.
The central theme of the story is guilt, a psychological state Hawthorne explores very frequently. Reuben is driven to the verge of insanity because of the unrelenting state of guilt. One of the questions that might be asked is whether Reuben has a reason at all to feel guilty. On the one hand, he left his companion to die. On the other, the old man has asked and urged Reuben himself to abandon him. The situation is very ambivalent. There is even a possibility that what haunts Reuben is not the very act of leaving Roger to die, but the fact that he did not fulfill the promise to bury Malvin, even though it seems that the old man forced Reuben to promise that in order to convince him to leave. Although "Roger Malvin's Burial" is a tale of guilt and ultimate retribution, it does not draw upon the Puritan heritage, as is the case with most of Hawthorne's treatments of the subject. Rather out of character for Hawthorne, "Roger Malvin's Burial" explores the role of the frontier wilderness in New England history.
In the story we can observe how certain motives and events repeat in a paradigm of repetition. Reuben re-enacts his personal drama. The death of Roger Malvin is reflected in the death of Dorcas Reuben's son. At the end of the story, we read:
"At that moment, the withered topmost bough of the oak loosened itself, in the stilly air, and fell in soft, light fragments upon the rock, upon the leaves, upon Reuben, upon his wife and child, and upon Roger Malvin's bones"
The symbolism is complete as the story makes a full circle and returns to its beginning.
There are certain biblical allusions in the text as well. The death of the boy reminds of the stories of Abraham and Isaac. The moving of the family into the wilderness brings to mind the biblical theme of the expulsion from paradise. Reuben and Dorcas seem to be the first people there.
Publication history
"Roger Malvin's Burial" was first published separately in 1832 and was later included in the collection Mosses from an Old Manse (1846).
Adaptations to Other Media
In 1949 the story was adapted to the syndicated radio program The Weird Circle as "The Burial of Roger Malvin."
External links
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Wikisource has original text related to this article: |
- Lovejoy, David S. 1954. Lovewell's Fight and Hawthorne's "Roger Malvin's Burial". In: The New England Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Dec., 1954), pp. 527-531. The New England Quarterly, Inc.
- Mackenzie, Manfred. Hawthorne's Roger Malvin's Burial: A Postcolonial Reading New. In: Literary History, Volume 27, Number 3, Summer 1996, pp. 459-472.
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