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The Instinct of Faith: Taking Hawthornes Sunday at Home and the Sabbath Question
Seriously1
As Nathaniel Hawthorne walked about the outlying areas of Boston on a cool Sunday
afternoon in June of 1835, he was struck by the manner in which his new community was
spending the day. Stopping at the Maverick House, a stylish hotel in East Boston, Hawthorne
took note of the scene before him: the room was thronged by men, fashionably dressed, sporting
handsome canes and boots, standing at the bar or sitting at the windows puffing cigars (some
with flushed faces), watching the tender prepare tumblers of punch. He found a similar busy
scene at the Mechanics, an equally crowded hotel opposite the Maverick, where mostly young,
well-dressed men were lounging and taking their leisure. Hawthorne suspected that most of the
men, although groomed for the day, were not so genteel during the week and that the dry-goods
clerks were probably the aristocracy among them; his suspicions were confirmed when he
noticed that the sole of one so-called gentlemans exquisitely polished boot was all worn out.
Wherever he went that afternoon, Hawthorne encountered similar scenes of leisure and
pretension. Taking the ferry across the Charles River back into Boston proper, he visited the city
-tavern where, he ironically noted, the bar-room presented a Sabbath scene of repose: stage
people were lounging in chairs, half asleep, smoking cigars, but again dressed in clean shirts to
mark the solemnity of the day. Even on his way home, Hawthorne could not escape examples of
Sunday indulgences, as he encountered a respectably dressed man and woman, whom he thought
Irish, stumbling on the busy road, drunk, supporting each other so as not to fall. (Except for her
unsteady gait, he noted, the woman had a queer air of decency and decorum in the midst of their
inebriety.). Having just moved to the Boston area from his longtime home of Salem,
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Hawthornes new community was full of imitators of Sunday propriety who spent the afternoon
in hotels and taverns, sleeping, drinking and smoking, or simply touring the city. Realizing that
he had spent his time in similar fashion, Hawthorne averred in his journal, May conscience
smote me for doing the like, tho if I had been at home, I should have been reading.
Nonetheless, he speculated that his observations may serve to make a sketch of the mode of
spending the Sabbath, by the majority of the unmarried young middling people in a great town,
and he concluded this unusually long journal entry with the factual declaration: Stages in
abundance were passing the road, burthened with passengers, inside and out; also chaises,
barouches &c; horsemen and footmen. We are a community of Sabbath-breakers (Hawthorne,
Lost Notebook, 7-9).
Hawthorne was more than just culturally accurate: like every other state in the nation,
Massachusetts prohibited activities on Sunday to the effect that No person shall keep open his
shop, warehouse, or workhouse, or shall do any manner of labor, business, or work (except only
works of necessity and charity) on the Lords day; moreover, No person shall travel on that
day, except from necessity or charity (qtd. in Kingsbury 15).2 Passed in a flurry of activity at
the end of the eighteenth -century, such laws re-authorized earlier legislation and codified
longstanding mores so that, for some foreign visitors, the day seemed the hallmark of American
identity.3 By the mid-1830s, though, Hawthornes fellow Bostonians were clearly not too
concerned with the legal enforcement of these statutes, or whether they spent Sunday afternoon
in recreation rather than spiritual reflection, or whether they went visiting rather than attending
(second) service, praying, and reading devotional material. If he could have just as easily
commented upon the pressing contemporary issue of temperance reform,4 his conclusion about
Sabbath breaking registers Hawthornes personal and fictional interest in Puritan Sunday and
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the influence of an ongoing national debate that had ignited in 1810 when the federal
government declared that post offices must open on Sundays. Indeed, this journal entry outlines
some of the central contradictions and tensions that Hawthorne would explore in Sunday at
Home (1837)a sketch that became standard issue in authorized editions ofTwice- Told Tales
(1837; 1842; 1851) as well as the titular piece of an 1853 English (and probably pirated) edition
of his shorter works called Sunday at Home and Other Tales.5
Although republished in nineteenth- and twentieth- century editions of Hawthornes shorter
works, Sunday at Home has elicited very little critical commentary.6 This is a curious state of
affairs, as if the text hovers on the edge of recognition just as its unnamed narrator lingers on the
perimeter of the circling shadow of a church steeple that he views from the privacy of his
home one sunny Sunday (Hawthorne, Sunday at Home 21). In part, Henry James is
responsible: his 1879 biography initiated the critical preference for the tales over the sketches
that Hawthorne and his contemporariesincluding Poeso obviously valued. Indeed, James
employs a rhetoric of diminution in his assessment of Hawthorne, his New England culture, and
his writing that lingers in regard to his sketches. Noting that Hawthorne was an inveterate
observer and that he found a field for fancy among the most trivial accidents, James suggests
that Night Sketches is a fair representation of his accomplishments in this line of work: This
small dissertation is about nothing at all, and to call attention to it is almost to overrate its
importance. This fact is equally true, indeed, of a great many of its companions, which give
even the most appreciative critic a singular feeling of his own indiscretionalmost his own
cruelty. They are so light, so slight, so tenderly trivial, that simply to mention them is to put
them in a false position. In this Seinfeldian appraisal, James characterizes Hawthornes sketches
as he elsewhere characterizes Hawthorne himself: the simple and homogenous product of
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the thin cultural soil of the New England of some forty years ago when there was a great
desire for culture, a great interest in knowledge, in art, in aesthetics, together with a very scanty
supply of the materials for such pursuits. Small things were made to do large service (38, 68).7
This last sentence is an acute insight into the symbiotic relation between Hawthornes cultural
and fictional worlds, but of course not all things are equally small, are small in the same manner,
nor, as Hawthornes journal entry suggests about the Sabbath, are they necessarily small at all.8
As if caught in the slipstream of James portrait of Hawthorne as a reclusive artificer of small
and delicate things like Owen Warland, recent critics have viewed Sunday at Home as an
evocation of the commonplace or as a preparatory exercise in romanticism.
9
Even Michael
Colacurcio, who has done more than anyone to recover the historical and theological nuances of
Hawthornes short fiction, finally views Sunday at Home as a rehearsal of the stock romantic
conceit of the alienated artist. Calling it an extraordinarily suggestive sketch. . .[that] proves far
more oblique than first appears, Colacurcio attributes Sunday at Home to its convention
ridden sourceCharles Lambs poem The Sabbath Bellsand concludes that the sketch
elaborates without really explaining anything (even as Colacurcio importantly also points to
some of the historicist questions that should be asked by any critic,pace James, malicious
enough to suppose that one minor sketch is trickier than anyone has yet imagined) (535; 493-
495).
This small sketch, I will propose, is best read as sophisticated example of Hawthornes
fictional methodology of reassessing Puritanism at watershed moments in American history.10 In
Sunday at Home, that is, Hawthorne dramatizes yet another conflicted conscience circa 1835
analogous to the earlier and more famous cases of Young Goodman Brown and Father Hooper,
and he does so to meditate upon a central tension of the Sabbath debate: the relation and relative
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authority of institutional and private forms of religious observance. For the narrators refusal to
attend Sunday church services is paradoxically both a quite public act of dissent and one that
allows him to participate vicariously in the church activities he sees and overhears. In fact, his
physical absence from church enables him to (re)create a private worship service at home that
celebrates even as it critiques the symbolism, formalism, and theological assumptions of Puritan
Sunday. In this way, the narrator refashions his domicile, and Hawthorne the sketch itself, into a
hybrid public/private spaceinto something very much like a confessionalthat expresses a
pluralist brand of piety that committed to exploring the fluctuating nature of faith.
As such parallel publications as the 1836 Presbyterian tract The Sabbath at Home suggest,
however, the domestic dramaturgy of Sunday at Home is also a kind of anti-allegorical
allegory that dramatizes the ideological contradictions and anxieties of the Sabbath debate
under which a certain brand of individual identity and conscience were conditioned and
performed.11 As historian Richard R. John has observed, For Sabbatarians and anti-
Sabbatarians alike, the Sabbath had a rich symbolic meaning that it has subsequently lost
(518).12 It is therefore not surprising that some of New Englands most vigorous intellects
Hawthorne, but also Sedgwick, Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinsonresponded to the Sabbath
debate and generally did so to question its longstanding identification with Puritanism and thus
with the nations root mythology. These writers contested homogenizing narratives of the
nations Puritan origins through a revisionist brand of historiography that was deeply theological
and yet pluralist, skeptical, ironic, and ultimately ambiguous in its historical claims. In these
intertwining literary and cultural contexts,13Hawthornes small sketch emerges not so much as
an apprenticeship effort in romanticism as a concerted (if elliptical) intervention into a national
debate that anticipates his later refashioning of the romance into a neutral territory in which
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literature and history, artistic representation and political action can meet and interpenetrate.14
~ ~ ~
The most direct reference we have to the Sunday mail debate in Hawthornes writing occurs
in the Canal-Boat section from Sketches from Memory (1835), a text from Hawthornes
aborted Story-Teller collection that draws upon his trip three years earlier on the Erie Canal to
Niagara Falls and points west as far as Detroit. Aboard the canal boat, an English traveler
scrutinizes and jots down notes about his American companionsnotes, Hawthornes narrator
speculates, that will likely be used to hold up an imaginary mirror, wherein our reflected faces
would appear ugly and ridiculous and with more sweeping malice, would make these
caricatures the representatives of great classes of my countrymen.15 In addition to such regional
types as a Virginia schoolmaster and an avaricious Detroit merchant, the Englishman spots a
Massachusetts farmer, who was delivering a dogmatic harangue on the iniquity of the Sunday
mails. Here was the far-famed yeoman of New-England; his religion, writes the Englishman, is
gloom on the Sabbath, long prayers every morning and eventide, and illiberality at all times; his
boasted information is merely an abstract and compound of newspaper paragraphs, Congress
debates, caucus harangues, and the argument and judges charge in his own lawsuits (Travel
Sketches 39).
This travel sketch, published in December 1835 some six months after Hawthornes journal
entry on Sabbath breaking, marks a transitional moment in his transformation of the Sunday mail
as a matter of reportage to a rich subject ripe for fictionalizing. There is a certain impatience on
display in The Canal-Boat, that is, with the mere political dimensions of the debate, and more
than a little anxiousness on the part of Hawthornes narrator that a foreigner traveler might
traduce a New Englander into a stereotype of the far-famed yeoman of New-England or,
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worse, reduce the regionsand Hawthornes owncomplex Puritan heritage with a caricature
of gloom on the Sabbath, long prayers every morning and eventide, and illiberality at all
times.16 As always, it is dangerous but tempting to try and measure the ironic distance between
Hawthorne and his narrator here, but the distance seems slim given that we know Hawthorne
himself possessed deep if ecumenical feelings for Puritan Sunday: as he once noted in a brief
journal entry he wrote just after marrying Sophia Peabody, My wife went to church in the
forenoon, but not so her husband. He loves the Sabbath, however, though he has no set way of
observing it; but it seldom comes and goes withoutbut here are some visitors; so this
disquisition must rest among the things that never will be written (qtd in Turner 146).
~ ~ ~
Within a year after the Canal-Boat sketch, Hawthorne published Sunday at Home and
created a sketch that could be read by sensitive New Englanders as a celebration of the joys of
Puritan Sunday even as he also insinuated a subtle analysis of the days coercive claims and
waning cultural authority. Originally published in The Token and Atlantic Souvenirunder the
auspices of the author ofThe Gentle Boy, the sketch was republished as the second text in
Twice-Told Tales (1837). As Hawthorne biographer, James R. Mellow, has observed, this
collection contained a good number of the pleasant and sometimes innocuous descriptive
sketches that were favored in gift-annuals like The Token and, therefore, excluded
Hawthornes more profound and troubling stories in an effort to curry favor with the public
(with the exceptions, Mellow suggests, of The Ministers Black Veil, The Prophetic
Pictures, and The Hollow of the Three Hills) (77).17 There is good reason to read Sunday at
Home in this kid glove context, as the sketch is one of Hawthornes most carefully constructed
and formally unified texts;: its spatial and temporal movements are chiastically plotted and
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thereby provide a strong sense of structure and balance that highlight the texts opening and
closing celebration of the Sabbath. The sketch begins with the narrators declaration that Every
Sabbath morning, in the summer time, I thrust back the curtain, to watch the sunrise stealing
down a steeple, which stands opposite my chamber window (Hawthorne, Sunday at Home
19). The emblem of the steeple, perhaps the singular architectural detail of Protestant churches,
symbolizes the transitory point at which the material and immaterial worlds meet, and
Hawthornes narrator is thereby able to seamlessly follow the descent of the Sabbath sun
earthward from Heaven, [as it] comes down the stone steps, one by one; and there stands the
steeple, glowing with fresh radiance . . . Methinks, though the same sun brightens it, every fair
morning, yet the steeple has a peculiar robe of brightness for the Sabbath (19).
This description of the suns progress from the churchs steeple, to its tower, and to its steps is
elegantly inverted in the sketchs penultimate paragraph where the narrator envisions (after the
secondSunday service that ends just after 4 PM) that the choristers he hears singing some final
fragmentary notes are angels, who came down from Heaven, this blessed morn [now] playing
and singing their farewell to earth (25-26). Even the narrators apologetic rewriting of this
flight of poetry does not restrain the texts upward movement: A few of the singing men and
singing women had lingered behind their fellows, and raised their voices fitfully, and blew a
careless note upon the organ[and] lifted my soul higher than all their former strains (26). The
sketch ends, as the setting sun ascends the steeple, with the narrators plea that the steeple still
point heavenward, and be decked with the hallowed sunshine of the Sabbath morn! (26).
This chiasmatic structure informs a second dramatic layer of the sketch: how the congregation
forms and subsequently disbands. This process begins, once again, with the narrator himself: I
am there, even before my friend, the sexton. At length he comesa man of kindly, but sombreer
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aspect, in dark gray clothes, and hair of the same mixturehe comes, and applies his key to the
wide portal (21). The narrator then notes how individuals drop in singly, and by twos and
threes until, As if there were magic in the sound [of the bell], the sidewalks of the street, both
up and down along, are immediately thronged with two long lines of people, all converging
hitherward, and streaming into the church (22). The narrators description of the departure of
the congregation reverses this convergence into a form of effluence: as if the pressure or
temperature in the church has grown too great, A commotion is heard. The seats are slammed
down, and the pew doors thrown backa multitude of feet are trampling along the unseen aisles
and the congregation bursts suddenly through the portal. The narrator then notices how a
rabble of boys, a phalanx of grown men and a crowd of females stream from the church;
lingers over the appearance of a third-rate coxcomb; notes how each matron takes her
husbands arm, and paces gravely homeward, while the girls also flutter away; describes how
the last of the singers and the sexton leave; and, finally, lingers upon the image of the Sabbath
sun on the steeple (25).
If its bookends celebrate a regional and indeed a national ritual, however, the sketchs
introspective center reveals the narrators unsteady doubts and rationalizations for staying home.
In this regard, we might recall David Reynolds important reading of Hawthornes fiction in the
context of American popular culture and the influence of a body of dark-reform writings
geared to the exposure of hidden corruption and the critique of moral platitudes and overweening
authority figures. As Reynolds describes it, these influences inform Hawthornes fiction in its
almost schizophrenic split between the Conventional and the Subversive and his persistent use
of a benign-subversive framing device designed to disguise his more caustic fictional moments
(121).18 Reynolds does not mention Sunday at Home, but his observations are operative here
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and point to how the frameworks of the sketch, in the words of Melville, but fringe, and play
upon the edges of thunder-clouds.19 In fact, even Hawthornes central metaphor of the Sabbath
was probably a gloss upon a vigorous exchange between the arch-Sabbatarian Lyman Beecher
and the Boston-based radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison that took place in midsummer
1836 just as Hawthorne was likely composing his sketch. With the Presbyterian elder Josiah
Bissell, Jr., Beecher had helped to found The General Union for the Promotion of the Christian
Sabbath in 1828, and he had given a widely reprinted sermon in 1829 entitled Pre-Eminent
Importance of the Christian Sabbath in which he proclaimed that the Sabbath is the sun of the
moral world. He repeated this metaphor in a widely reported address [in Pittsburgh at the
Presbyterian General Assembly in 1836] that upheld traditional authority by lauding the sanctity
of the Sabbath, the leadership of the ordained clergy as enforcers of the moral law, and the
silken ties among Christiansof the South and of the Norththat made the church a national
bulwark against Sabbath-breaking and abolitionist fanaticism (qtd. in Mayer 226-227).
Garrison was outraged at Beechers willingness to denounce Sabbath-breaking, on the one
hand, while tolerating slaveholding and the de facto disregard for the rest of the Decalogue, on
the other. He responded forcefully in the pages ofThe Liberatorand argued, following a well-
established line of Quaker reasoning, that the Sabbath was no holier than any other of Gods
days and to say otherwise was to make a fetish of form. As Garrisons early biographer
Archibald Grimke recounts, when Beecher trumpeted that the Sabbath is the great sun of the
moral world, Garrison retorted that the LORD GOD is the great sun of the moral world, not
the Sabbath. It is not one, but every day of the week which is His and which men should be
taught to observe as holy days. It is not regard for the forms of religion but for the spirit, which
is essential to righteousness (qtd. in Grimke 269-270).
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As the leader of the radical abolitionist movement, Garrisons abrupt entry into the Sabbath
debate exacerbated emerging divisions within the New England Anti-Slavery Society on the
mattes of colonization and the role of women as elected representatives and field agents. The
Beecher/Garrison exchange is significant, though, because it illustrates the return of the always
latent schism between the letter and the spirit that had marked moments of crisis in the history of
Congregationalism. Based upon a literal reading Bible and Old Testament passages such as
Exodus 20:.8-11 and Isaiah 18:.13-14 that offer instruction about the Sabbath, Sabbatarians like
Beecher viewed the Lords Day as a divinely ordained institution and as an earthly type of the
eternal rest to follow. Fellow travelers in antinomianism like Garrison, however, argued that the
Jewish Sabbath had no support in the New Testament and that such legalism and formalism
contradicted the message of the Gospels. They thereby challenged a longstanding identification
of the Sabbath and Puritanism that had developed, as Winton Solberg has shown, over a one
-hundred-year period in sixteenth-and -seventeenth- century England before being carried to
New England and spread with remarkable ideological consistency (if varying degrees of
enforcement) throughout the colonies. According to Solberg, Puritan Sunday grew out of four
intersecting socioeconomic forces: the impact of the vernacular Bible upon the English people;
the influence of covenant theology in shaping Puritan piety; a new attitude toward economic
action (the work ethic); and the condemnation of Sunday recreations (33). Even before it
became synonymous with the New England way, the Sabbath had become a cultural
synecdoche of Puritanism or, to put it another way, Puritan Sunday was became a symbolic
trigger that informed broader debates about such cultural binaries as work/idleness, duty/play,
order/disorder, mercy/judgment, and orthodoxy/heterodoxy (Hall 466-467).
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In The May-pole of Merry Mount (1835), Hawthorne had demonstrated his awareness of
the early seventeenth century turn from the multiple holidays of Merry Old England to the
austerities of the Puritan hegemony in New England.20 In Sunday at Home, he invokes these
cultural antecedents through a spiraling set of local binarieschurch versus town; illusion versus
truth; body versus soul; respect versus love, and mind versus heartas his narrator tries to strike
an uneven balance between the claims of community and conscience. Echoing Beecher, the
narrator at first celebrates the Sabbath for the physical and spiritual relief that the day brings to
townspeople who are otherwise so preoccupied with their worldly affairs and burdens. He
personifies the church steeple as a mind comprehensive and discriminating enough to care for
the great and small concerns of all the town, and its connection with human interest is quite
literally heard in the fluid symbolism of the bell that flings abroad the hurried and irregular
accents of general alarm just as easily as it sounds gladness and festivity or, alternatively,
offers appropriate accompaniment for a funeral. The church, too, is personified as calm,
meditative, melancholy, and comprehensive enough to encompass the cares of all (19-20).
Yet the narrator is also troubled because the steeple remains unheeded and the church
unattended during the week; what a moral loneliness, on week-days, he exclaims, broods
round about its [the steeples] stately height! The absent townspeople are representative of the
narrators belief of the moral state of humanity if left to its own devices: he variously describes
them as busy (200), individual (200), separate (200), secret, dead, sorrowful, irregular, hurried,
petty, and laden (19-22). This is obviously not a very promising view of humanityit echoes
concerns about creeping commercialism and self-indulgent individualism so often voiced in
Sabbatarian tractsbut it positions the Sabbath as a cultural and spiritual antidote. Although the
narrator acknowledges the vacant pews and empty galleries, the silent organ, [and] the voiceless
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pulpit that inhabit the church during the week and even speculates that the edifice might more
properly be sited in the outskirts of the town, he reverses the moral implications of this
situation when he asks, Timewhere man lives notwhat is it but eternity? And in the
church, we might suppose, are garnered up, throughout the week, all thoughts and feelings that
have reference to eternity, until the holy day comes round again, to let them forth (20). In this
sentiment, he tries to reconcile the opposing claims of Beecher and Garrison on the Sabbath and
conceives of the day as a spiritual storehouse that, by housing glimpses and reminders of
eternity, becomes a daily resource that speaks a moral to the few that think, [while] it reminds
thousands of busy individuals of their separate and most secret affairs (20).
~ ~ ~
At the outset of the sketch, then, Hawthornes narrator conceives of the Sabbath in a manner
of which even arch-Sabbatarians like Beecher would approve: the narrator sets off the holy day
from the commercial and secular activities of the week and thereby reinforces its distinction; I
watch the earliest sunshine, he avers, and fancy that a holier brightness marks the day, when
there shall be no buzz of voices on the Exchange, nor traffic in the shops, nor crowd, nor
business, anywhere but at the church. Many have fancied it so (20). Of course, Hawthornes
narrator claims too much too earnestly here. The verb fancy reinforces the double irony that
Puritan edicts now in no way entirely command or control actual observances and that the
narrator himself celebrates the Sabbath alone, at home, in a manner that relies as much upon his
private imagination and emotion as any public tradition. It is at this juncture that Hawthorne
turns the sketch inward, so to speak, and a certain antagonistic and self-defensive quality
emerges his narrators comments about community and worship. The narrator now says that he
loves to spend such pleasant Sabbaths, from morning till night, behindthe curtain of my open
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window through a small peep-hole, and he claims that he recognizes the Sabbath sun
whenever and wherever it appears, not only on the church and its steeple (21). Some illusions,
and this among them, he presses further, are the shadows of great truths. Doubts may flit
around me, or seem to close their evil wings, and settle down; but, so long as I imagine that the
earth is hollowed, and the light of heaven retains its sanctity, on the Sabbathwhile that blessed
sunshine lives within menever can my soul have lost the instinct of its faith (21).
Readers familiar with the narrative arc of much of Hawthornes short fiction may reasonably
expect that a familiar pattern will now unfold: a typical Hawthorne protagonist or reformer
begins with a measure of human solidarity or spiritual certitude (however naively) only to fall,
through pride, or self-love, or both, into cynicism, isolation, or solipsism. Instead, the symbolic
action in Sunday at Home takes a more unexpected if also more uncertain direction than in
Hawthornes famous tales of this period: the narrators invocation of the Sabbath sunshine
evolves into an allusion to the Quaker doctrine of Inner Light and thereby introduces into the
sketch a Garrisonian corrective to the sketchs Sabbatarian pressures. The phrase instinct of
faith, in particular, recalls the conflicted Puritan cum Quaker Tobias Pearson of The Gentle
Boy whose religious sensibility is strong as instinct in him.21Although there is no precise
historical or moral coordination between the cases of Tobias and the narrator of Sunday at
Home, as Frederick Crews and others have noted, Hawthornes examinations of conscience
almost always turn upon an opposition between Puritans and members of dissident groups. In
the case of Sunday at Home, this opposition is internalized in the narrators Sabbatarian-like
celebration of Puritan Sunday, on the one hand, and his Quaker-inflected critique of the days
formalism, on the other (63). It must suffice, the narrator asserts in what amounts to his most
explicit explanation for his absence, that, though my form be absent, my inner man goes
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constantly to church, while many, whose bodily presence fills the accustomed seats, have left
their souls at home (21). The word suffice marks the latent compulsion that the narrator feels
in regard to what he calls at one point the privileges and duties of the day, but this pressure is
more than offset by his contrapuntal assertion of an inner/outer binary that echoes the very
language of Quaker apologists like Robert Barclay. In his no doubt careful reading of Barclays
An Apology for the True Christian Divinity: being an Explanation and Vindication of the
Principles and Doctrines of the People called Quakers (1678), Hawthorne would likely have
taken special note of a chapter entitled Concerning Worship in which Barclay explains how
Quakers have no quarrel with other Protestants except insofar as the latter have not yet extended
the logic of the Reformation to the very root of their own religious practicenamely, to their
worship acted in and from mans will and spirit, and not by and from the Spirit of God. True
communion, that is to say, emerges only from the inward motions and operations of the Spirit
and not from fixed days, times, or places for worship or premeditated praises, prayers, or
preachings, which man sets about in his own will and at his own appointment (Barclay).22
In Sunday at Home, the narrator pursues this line of critique when he remains at home
behind his window throughout the day observing but also recreating the morning and afternoon
services of a Congregational church. Not just a romantic spectator, the narrators vantage point
within the ambit of the circling shadow of the steeple enables him to become a participant
observer and to imaginatively appropriate the services he overhears (21). Amplifying his
antinomian claims, the narrator compares his situation to that of Jesus in the Temple who
admonished the Pharisees that My house is the house of prayer: but ye have made it a den of
thieves, but he does so in a way that both asserts and questions his moral authority: With
stronger truth be it said, that a devout heart may consecrate a den of thieves, as an evil one may
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convert a temple to the same. My heart, perhaps, has not such holy, nor, I would fain trust, such
impious potency (21).23 On one level, therefore, the narrator invokes the power of individual
conscience as a corrective religious orthodoxies and formalismthe deadening affects of
rationalism, sectarianism, and ritualism that Emerson and many of his contemporaries found so
stifling.24 These issues come into sharp relief in the narrators description of the minister:
Here comes the clergyman, slow and solemn, in sever simplicity, needing no black silk
gown to denote his office. His aspect claims my reverence, but cannot win my love. Were
I to picture Saint Peter, keeping fast the gate of Heaven, and frowning, more stern than
pitiful, on the wretched applicants, that face should be my study. By middle age, or
sooner, the creed has generally wrought upon the heart, or been attempered by it. (23)
The narrators discontent extends to the parsons saw that the narrator suggests he can seldom
follow or fructify because his mind begins to wander with the first strong idea overheard.
At my open window, he says, I am as well situated as at the foot of the pulpit stairs. The
broken and scattered fragments of this one discourse will be the texts of many sermons, preached
by those colleague pastorscolleagues, but often disputantsmy Mind and Heart. . . .I, their
sole auditor, cannot always understand them (24).
At a time when Sabbatarians felt that Sabbath attendance was both a sacred and a patriotic
duty, and that the public should take their interpretive cues from ministers so that the clergy
could instill disciplined minds with a sense of obedience before a knowledge of God, the
narrators sentiments constitute a form of religious dissent and tacit civil disobedience (Isenberg
78). In anticipation of Emersons explanation of reading as provocation in The American
Scholar and his criticism of formalism in preaching in The Divinity School Address, the
narrator here isprovokedby parts of the service, and especially by the hymns, that he overhears
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but then imaginatively reconstructs from a safe distance. He begins to listen to the ministers
voice but does not stay with it long because his imagination recoils from the tendentious nature
of the sermon; instead, the broken and scattered fragments of the discourse become the spur to
his own train of thought.25 Similarly and quite literally because he isnt situated within the
church, where the full choir, and the massive melody of the organ, would fall with a weight
upon me, the narrator claims that At this distance, it [the hymn] thrills through my frame, and
plays upon my heart-strings, with a pleasure both of the sense and spirit. . . .The strain [ceases],
but prolongs itself in my mind, with fanciful echoes (24, emphasis mine). And thus, at the end
of the sketch the departing choristers lift the narrators soul higher than they had in any of their
former songs because their fitful voices and careless notes upon the organ are not rehearsed
or contrived but are simply heartfelt (25-26). Unlike the figure of the vain and ultimately
ineffective reformer or minister that populates much of Hawthornes fiction, the narrator here re-
forms his communitys religious observances in a way that epitomizes the Emersonian dictum
that forms should never be fixed but always flowing.26
~ ~ ~
On another level, however, the sketch undercuts the narrators antinomian authority and his
critique of public rituals and pieties. If things do not go quite as badly for the narrator as for
some of Hawthornes other reformers, the dramatic irony of the sketch repeatedly questions the
righteousness of his motives. In fact, he twice interrupts his so-called pious meditations to
meditate upon matters of the flesh: once just before the morning service (when he notices the
pretty girls whose muslin dresses heighten their mortal loveliness, as if to rival the blessed
angels, and keep out thoughts from heaven. Were I the minister himself, I must needs look, he
exclaims); and once just after the afternoon service (when he singles out a third-rate coxcomb
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whose tight pair of black silk pantaloons shine as if varnished and may have been made of the
same stuff as Christians garments, in the Pilgrims Progress. I have taken a great liking to
those black silk pantaloons, the narrator intones in a manner that betrays his blithe lack of
awareness of the spiritual strivings of Bunyans character (22-25)). In his fetish for all things
silky, the narrator recapitulates the formalism that he would critique in others. Furthermore, the
narrator obliquely but repeatedly suggests that the imagination is the seat of his ability to invest
spiritual feeling into the ritualistic forms of the day: he writes that so long as I imagine that the
earth is hallowed, and the light of heaven retains its sanctity, on the Sabbath---while the blessed
sunshine lives within me---never can my soul have lost the instinct of its faith; he "fanc[ies]
that a holier brightness marks" the Sabbath; he dreams "that the angels, who came down from
Heaven, this blessed morn, to blend themselves with the worship of the truly good, are playing
and singing a farewell to the earth; he imagines his inner man going forth into the church
amongst the dusty pews and ascending the pulpit without sacrilege; hefancies that an old woman
is better off than an old man because she lingers in the sunlight and he stays just within the line
of its [church towers] shadow, looking downward (20-22; 25-26, emphasis mine). And the list
goes on.
In this way, the narrators claim to be acting with a higher sense of devotion or purity may be
only a byproduct of his romantic imagination and an expression of his fallen nature rather than
any Christ-like potential; his private practices may be just as ritualistic and formalistic as those
he observes; he may have substituted his own impious potency for the more legitimate
authority that he critiques; he rather than the minister, finally, may in truth be the evil one who
converts the temple of his own home into a den of thieves. If public professions of faith are
coerced and thereby tainted and false, the sketch suggests, the private performance of public
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duties becomes the only sign of sincerity.27 And yet if the individual imagination overwrites all
then how does one accurately distinguish between a true influx of the spirit and a mere
expression of ones own willful, fallen emotions? In The Gentle Boy, Hawthorne had also
engaged these questions and had arguably created a stable moral center between the excesses
of Puritan rationalism and authoritarianism, on the one hand, and those of Quaker enthusiasm
and solipsism, on the other (Colacurcio 184-185). Sunday at Home offers no such center or
resting point. The narrators epitomizing gesture of thrusting back and yet hiding behind his
curtain invites the public gaze even as it thinly veils himself from scrutiny; his private devotions
enable him to create an alternative to ossified religious observances even as he remains somehow
dependent upon them. His home remains, physically and culturally, within the circling shadow
of a Congregational church in an oppositional but also enabling way.
And this may be precisely the point. To the degree that he is a representative New Englander
circa 1835, the narrator of Sunday at Home expresses not so much a declension as a cultural
extension of Puritanism into secular society. Like Young Goodman Brown but differently, the
sketchs narrator is a kind of everyman whose conflicted conscience is at once a strikingly
personal example of emotional energy and an epiphenomenon of the growing collusion of the
religious and the secular in America. As the religious historian Tracy Fessenden has recently
explained, neither the metanarrative of [the] ever-increasing tolerance of Protestantism in
American history nor the nominal opposition of the secular to forms of religious irrationality or
intolerance can account for how Protestantism subsumed alternative religions to the point that
Christian come[s] to stand in for the religious to the exclusion of non-Christian ways of
being religious. The historical outcome of this simultaneous declension and extension of
Puritanism, she suggests, is Christianity as an unmarked category that only rises to the surface
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at pivotal momentssuch as when Presidential candidates dutifully give an account of their
Christian beliefsand more often remains invisible as the organizing locus of American cultural
life (Fessenden 4-6). What is at stake in Sunday at Home is thus not just another dramatization
of the dangers of the romantic imaginationPuritan Sunday was too important a subject for
Hawthorne and the nation for thatbut an acute reading of the Christian watermarking of private
life that ironically takes Protestantisms most conspicuous public symbolthe steepleand its
most potent cultural pedagogythe Sabbathas both a subject of and tool for social critique.28
One therefore begins to get a sense of the intentional nature of Hawthornes cultural allusions,
the sophistication of his social criticism, and the sheer range of reading when even the title of his
sketch holds in suspension both the nomenclature of an 1836 Sabbatarian tract and the pagan
origins of the day (i.e. Sun-day). In The Sabbath at Home, the prominent Presbyterian minister
Silas M. Andrews tries to reassert the primacy of ecclesiastical authority given the rise of church
absenteeism and private worship practices by using the same metaphor of domesticity that
Hawthornes narrator employs for a very different purpose: It is in the house of God that we are
taught what we must do to be saved, Andrews writes, and how we are acceptably to serve our
Creator. And yet Andrews is forced to admit that Sabbath laws are a dead letter, that custom
now allows almost every kind of recreation on the holy day, and that each denomination has its
own views and claims the indulgence of their own practice in regard to Sabbath observances.
The force of public opinion, he acknowledges, is vitiated because every possible shade of mind
is given equal weight in democratic society. In the end, Andrews suddenly reverses his argument
and engages in a rear guard action when he rhetorically asks, But in what does the sanctification
of the Lord s Day chiefly consist? We have seen that it is in observing the day in our own
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dwellings. This secures the performance of all its public duties. In a pre-eminent sense, the
Sabbath which God approves, is the Sabbath at home (17; 10).
Engaging this same contested space of the home front, Hawthornes sketch questions
Andrews conflation of private and public forms of worship. Although the significance of the
words Sunday (in the title) and Sabbath (in the body of the sketch) may seem sleight, diction
is a form of definition and Hawthorne was far too deliberate a craftsman and too knowledgeable
of public affairs to offer his readers a careless title. While he may or may not have read yet
another 1836 publicationone that reviewed the perennial question of whether and how to
distinguish the First Day from the Seventh Day, the Christian Sabbath from the Jewish
Sabbath, and The Lords Day from mere SundayHawthorne would have known that his
title sounded the historical fact that early Christians and the first Christian emperors had used
the names Sunday andLords day interchangeably, according as it was their purpose to address
Pagans or Christians (Miller 66-67; 73).29 Thus, the sketchs complex layering of dramatic
structure, symbolism, allusion, and irony enabled a wide range of reader response without
overtly asking for anything specific. Indeed, Sunday at Home so subtly interweaves the
(anti)Sabbatarian positions that many of the sketchs contemporary reviewers mistook it for an
easy affirmation of spiritual contentment and public piety. In their reviews ofTwice-Told Tales,
Horatio Bridge, Longfellow, Caroline Gilman, and especially Elizabeth Palmer Peabody all
praised the sketch in these terms, as did Andrew Preston Peabody in The Christian Examiner
who attempted to reclaim it as a piece that could have been written only by one, who revelled
[sic] in the hushed calm and holy light of the Sabbath, whose soul was attuned to its harmonies,
but of so fastidious a taste and delicate a sensibility, as to be repelled and chilled by the
dissonances of the multitudes worship (Idol et. al 35).30 Given its contrapuntal voicing of
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liberal, antinomian, agnostic, and even pagan perspectives, though, The Christian Examiner
review neatly illustrates the degree to which cultural pundits were ready, like Henry James some
forty years later, to read past the sketchs darker rhetoric and conclude that it is so light, so
slight, so tenderly trivial, that simply to mention [it] is to put [it] in a false position.
~ ~ ~
For Hawthorne, then, the Sabbath was too rich a symbolic and cultural construct to be taken
at face value as a synecdoche of Puritanism or even Christianity more generally. (The term
religion, as Nina Baym eloquently reminds us, was one that Hawthorne viewed not as a body
of doctrine or a set of observances but as an emotion of faith (62).) Although scattered
references to the Sabbath can be found in his other worksincluding The Scarlet Letter
Hawthorne would return to Puritan Sunday in a concerted fashion only once, and he would do so
in a manner clearly indebted to the structure and tone of Sunday at Home. In The Arched
Window chapter from The House of the Seven Gables, the sensitive and prematurely aged
Clifford, at the behest of his young niece Phoebe, climbs the stairs of the house to a second-story
window from which he observes the activities of the street and yet keeps himself in comparative
obscurity by means of the [crimson] curtain (159). After recounting several of the insignificant
activities of everyday life in a quaint if increasingly modern town that Clifford witnesses, the
novels narrator describes the sights of a Sabbath morningone of those bright, calm Sabbaths,
with its own hallowed atmosphere, when Heaven seems to diffuse itself over the earths face in a
solemn smile, no less sweet than solemn (167).
As in Sunday at Home, this internal sketch begins with a paean to natural religion triggered
now not so much by the Sabbath sunshine as by the sound of the ringing church bells which are
identified with the hopeful prospect that were we pure enough to be its medium, we should be
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conscious of the earths natural worship ascending through our frames, on whatever spot of
ground we stood (167).31 And as in Sunday at Home, the narrators eye tracks like a camera
as the neighbors emerge from their homes in their Sunday best and ready themselves for church.
Initially, there is no rift between observer and observed, no tension between private and public
professions of faith, no holier than thou pretensions given how the neighbors, All of them,
however unspiritual on other days, were transfigured by the Sabbath influence, ; so that their
very garments . . . had somewhat of the quality of ascension-robes (167). This sense of
community and communion invokes the originating ideals of the Puritan theocratic experiment,
and the text materializes them not only in nature but also in the physical form of Phoebe: unlike
the vexed narrator of Sunday at Home, Phoebeseems like a prayer and her countenance has
a familiar gladness and a holiness that you could play with, and yet reverence it as much as
ever (168). Her attire, too, exudes something of a prelapsarian quality as her clothes seem never
to have been worn before or, if worn, were all the fresher for it. Phoebe is a Religion in
herself, warm, simple, true, with a substance that could walk on earth, and a spirit that was
capable of Heaven (168).
The sights and sounds of the Sabbath and Phoebes image inspire Clifford and Hepzibah, who
have not attended church for many years, to prepare for public worship where, Hepzibah
imagines, she will kneel down among the people, and be reconciled to God and man at once
(168). Again rendered as an earthly type of eternal rest and reconciliation, this Sabbath scene in
The House of the Seven Gables seems to offer the Pyncheons an opportunity to throw off the
imprisoning yoke of the past. And yet Hawthorne once again undercuts both the ameliorative
powers of the Sabbath and the self-absolving potentials of the human heart: Clifford and
Hepzibah prepare for church but dress, unlike Phoebe, in their faded bettermost and in clothes
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laid away so long that the dampness and mouldy smell of the past was on them (169). And
when they open the front door of the house, all hope fades; instead, they feel as if they were
standing in the presence of the whole world, and with mankinds great and terrible eye on them
alone. The eye of their Father seemed to be withdrawn, and gave them no encouragement. The
warm, sunny air of the street made them shiver. Their hearts quaked within them, at the idea of
taking one step further (169).32 Whereas the narrator of Sunday at Home forges a reciprocal if
tenuous balance between community and conscience on a sunny Sunday, here the very sun chills,
community becomes coercion, the past overwrites the present, and the public is displaced by the
private such that Clifford exclaims, We are ghosts! We have no right among human beings
no right anywhere, but in this old house, which has a curse on it, and which therefore we are
doomed to haunt (169).
In response, Hawthornes narrator moralizes too easily and too quickly, what other dungeon
is so dark as ones own heart! What jailor so inexorable as ones self! (169). In doing so, the
narrator constructs an implicit dialogue with Clifford that recalls the internal debate of the
narrator of Sunday at Home who also oscillates between celebration, social observation,
critique, and despair. These two fictional engagements with the Sabbath register Hawthornes
continued personal and fictional investments in the day even as they also underscore his darker
consideration that past actionssuch as Cliffords unjust imprisonmenthave inexorable
consequences in the present and, perhaps, the hereafter. The core of Hawthornes treatment of
the Sabbath finally centers upon the paradoxical certainty that uncertainty is an ineluctable part
of the human condition, that doubt is bred in the bone, and that any tallying of what the narrator
of Sunday at Home terms our instinct of faith must acknowledge its moorings in the human
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imagination or, to put it more positively, that the failure of orthodox religious forms call for
imaginative leaps of faith to meet our deep-seated need for communion.
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Notes
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Works Cited
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---. Sunday at Home, and Other Tales. Halifax: Milner and Sowerby, 1853. Print.
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Heath, William. Merry Old England and Hawthornes The May-Pole of Merry Mount.
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Lathrop, George Parsons. Introduction. Twice-Told Tales. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. J.
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1 My title acknowledges the importance of Richard R. Johns germinal account of the Sunday mail controversy and the
Sabbatarian movement in antebellum America. See his article, Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously: The Postal System, The
Sabbath, and the Transformation of American Political Culture. Thanks to Brent Simoneauxs for his contribution to earlydrafts of this essay. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers from theReview for their astute suggestions
and Sam Coale for his clarion comment that ambiguity is a legitimate point of view.2 As Robert Cox noted in his compendium ofThe Literature of the Sabbath Question, Down to 1853 it was unlawful in
Massachusetts to be present at any game, sport, play, or public diversion, except concerts of sacred music, on the evening of
Saturday as well as of Sunday (411).3 See, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville who, after citing at length from the late eighteenth-century Sabbath statutes ofMassachusetts and the revised 1827 and 1828 statutes of New York State, observes that The laws just quoted are recent
ones, but who would be able to understand them without going right back to the origin of the colonies? I do not doubt thatnowadays the penal part of that legislation is very seldom applied; laws remain rigid when mores have already bent with
changing times. Nevertheless, Sunday observance in America is even now one of the things that strike a stranger most.
Tocqueville toured the United States in 1831-1832, and this passage also offers his impression of the symbiotic relationship
between Sunday rest and the subsequent Feverish activity of the workday in one great American city (712-714).4 This detailed journal entry and (apparently) non-ironic conclusion become even more suggestive when we consider David
Reynolds observation that Hawthornes journals are otherwise very sparse in references to real social movements or
political events and Hyatt H. Waggoners comment about Hawthornes preferred mode of cognition (as summarized by
Michael Colacurcio): Adumbrating Julian Hawthornes authoritative observation that, as contrasted with Emerson,Hawthorne more and more questioned the expediency of stating truth in its disembodied form, Waggoner observes that
Hawthornes thinking outside his tales is much less impressive than his thinking in his tales. Thus hisNotebooks are
everywhere less impressive and revealing than theJournals of Emerson and Thoreau (Reynolds 115; qtd. in Colacurcio534).5Sunday at Home, and Other Tales (Halifax: Milner and Sowerby, 1853).6 Mark Van Doren, for example, republished the text in his The Best of Hawthorne as did Michael Colacurcio in his
instrumental Selected Tales and Sketches.7 In contrast, when informed that he would be receiving an advance copy ofTwice-Told Tales, Hawthornes former
Bowdoin classmate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote to the author that he had probably already read most of the
collections contents and that what most delighted me in them is the simple representation of what may be called small-life (qtd. in Pearson 129).8 In his introduction to a 1935 edition ofTwice-Told Tales, George Parsons Lathrop references a letter written to him by
Hawthornes sister Elizabeth on the origins of Sunday at Home: The paper entitled A Sunday at Home was based on a
meeting-house, near the birthplace in Union Street, concerning which Hawthornes surviving sister writes to the editor: It
never had a steeple, nor a clock, nor a bell, nor, of course, an organ. . . .But Hawthorne bestows all these incitements to
devotion to atone for his own personal withdrawal from such influences. It was from the house on Herbert Street that hesaw what he describes (12).9 Janice Milner Lasseter, for instance, describes Sunday at Home as a primarily lighthearted sketch, a candidate for thekind of writing that may have gotten Hawthorne the reputation as the man who means no meanings (172). Most critics,
however, have read the sketch as a study in romantic alienation. Hyatt H. Waggoner, Nina Baym, and Michael Colacurcio
all have done so and offer the best of what little commentary exists. To my knowledge, no sustained analysis of the sketch
exists on the order Waggoner once suggested was needed for The Celestial Railroad and Earths Holocaust (which, he
said, are substantial and explicit criticism of [Hawthornes] age, so that a complete comment on them would require a
good deal of historical scholarship exercised in a long essay. (17). See WaggonersHawthorne; A Critical Study . Also see
Baym, The Shape of Hawthornes Careerand Colacurcios The Province of Piety, 493-495.10 The list could easily be extended, but major tales that turn upon such precisely defined moments include The May-poleof Merry Mount (1628, set amidst the creation of Puritan hegemony in New England), The Gentle Boy (1659-1660, a
tale cast during the culminating months of the so-called Quaker invasion of New England), Young Goodman Brown (circa1692 and the Salem witchcraft hysteria), and The Ministers Black Veil (the late 1730s during the First Great
Awakening). Given this recent and concentrated fictional achievement, Hawthorne would have likely found the Second
Great Awakening and the Sunday mail crisis as provocations for yet another exploration of Puritan conscience.11 In this description of the anti-allegorical nature of Hawthornes allegorical sketch, I am drawing from Joel Pfisters
discussion of Michael Davitt Bell: Hawthornes self-reflexive emphasis on the figurative quality of identity is important in
many of his anti-allegorical allegories (an ingenious formulation I borrow from Michael Davitt Bell). . . .Where an
allegorist might represent a character whose characteristic of inner self seems palpable or natural, an anti-allegorist would
be more interested in showing how the social assignment of cultural figures and allegories to characters may result in theshaping of their inner selves in particular ways (Pfister 44-45).12 As John notes, Phrases like Sunday mails fail to convey this [rich symbolic] meaning (518). Subsequent historians
have generally accepted Johns outline of the Sunday mail controversy and resulting Sabbatarian movement: the first phrase
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of the protest began in 1809 when the Hugh Wylie, a Presbyterian elder and postmaster, was barred from communion for
distributing mail on Sunday, but closed in 1817 with a definitive Congressional report; and that the second phrase of the
protest had its roots in the conspicuous growth of postal routes and the opening of such commercial thoroughfares as theErie Canal in 1825 and closed, once again, with two prominent and highly debated Congressional reports issued in 1829 and
1830. More generally, John argues that Sabbatarianism, like so many antebellum reform movements, grew directly out of
the remarkable outburst of popular religiosity that has come to be known as the Second Great Awakening (518; 520).13 As Bill Christopherson has observed of Hawthornes agonistic short fiction, Any writer fixing a critical eye on
America circa 1830, much less its New England origins, would have been hard-pressed to do so from an exclusively social
or historical perspective, so intertwined had history and the Bible, secular culture and Christianity become. By the sametoken, with Christianity becoming culturally enshrined, small wonder if a fiction writer bent on criticizing or questioning its
assumptions were to choose a mode based on indirection, irony, and veiled suggestion (600).14 Peter J. Bellis, Writing Revolution: Aesthetics and Politics in Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau (Athens: U. of Georgia
Press, 2003), 12.15 Kristie Hamilton notes Hawthornes authorial complicity with the Englishman in this scene and how he ironically
fashions the Englishman himself into a traduced type (22).16 If an 1829 report in the Salem Gazette is at all representative, Hawthornes hometown was just as divided about Sunday
mails as many other small or isolated towns that struggled to balance the desire for economic development and
communication with longstanding religious and cultural mores. In Salem, a public committee ended up endorsing both
sides of the Sunday mail issue when in their opening resolution they reaffirmed that the observance of Sunday as a day ofreligious worship and instruction is eminently adapted to extend the knowledge and influence of truth and virtue, but
concluded That if Congress should prohibit the forwarding of mails and the delivery of letters on Sunday, individuals and
the Government will be obliged to resort to such temporary arrangements for transmitting intelligence as their respectiveexigencies may require; and such temporary arrangements, while they will be attended with increased expense, will be
productive of far greater inconvenience and disturbance to the religious public, than can justly be complained of under the
present system (Public Meetings). Even the Salem post office split the difference: the Gazette obliquely announced in
the same issue: The Office will not be opened on Sunday morning. But will be opened every evening from half past nine
to ten oclock (i.e. after both Sunday services and for a very limited time). DOCUMENTATION17 For an alternative analysis of the collections contents, see Baym, especially pp. 67-83, and Leland Pearson,
Hawthornes Early Tales, 128-129.18 Since about 1835 (the year he first showed clear signs of understanding the ironies behind popular reformers), Reynolds
writes, Hawthorne had made many variations upon the popular benign-subversive device of sugarcoating dark fiction with
conventional moral commentary. . . .Indeed, this strategy of tacking a benign moral conclusion onto a deeply disturbing tale
became a standard feature of Hawthornes fiction from the mid-1830s onward (121).19 For Melvilles famous description of Hawthornes power of blackness, see Melville 521-522.20
Hawthorne implies that the origin of the clash between the revelers of Merry Mount and the Puritans (led by JohnEndicott) was an interruption of Sabbath services: the Puritans affirmed, that, when a psalm was pealing from their place of
worship, the echo, which the forest sent them back, seemed often like the chorus of a jolly catch, closing with a roar of
laughter. Who but the fiend, and his bond-slaves, the crew of Merry Mount, had thus disturbed them! In due time, a feud
arose. . . (179). The critic who comes closest to addressing the Sabbatarian subtext of the tale is William Heath who notes
that The Book of Sports (1618) made merriment mandatory and tied it to royalist politics. James declared that harmlesseRecreation after Sunday services, such as having May-Games, Whitsun Ales, and Morrisdances, and the setting up of
Maypoles and other sports, was not only lawful but ought to be encouraged (52). See Heath 41-71.21 Hawthorne substantially revised The Gentle Boy for its republication in Twice-Told Tales and once again for its thrice-
told publication in 1839. The tales dramatic apex is a Sabbath service.22 Although an online edition, I refer to the most authoritative republication of Barclays important work which is based
upon the two earliest English language editions of his text originally published in 1678. My citations are taken from sections
I, III, and his epigraph, respectively. While purportedly side stepping a long digression concerning the debates among
Protestants concerning the first day of the week, Barclay does briefly comment upon the Sabbath question when he atteststhat if Quakers believe that there is no Biblical authority for the set time and observance of the Sabbath they nevertheless
believe it to be a good practice and therefore observe it without superstitiously straining the Scriptures for another reason(IV).23 Recounted in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, the fullest description of Christs encounter with the Pharisees occurs in the
latter gospel; the relevant passage reads, And he went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold therein, and
them that bought; Saying unto them, It is written, My house is the house of prayer: but ye have made it a den of thieves.
Luke 19:45-48. See Luke 20:1-8 for a further description of Jesus parrying of the Pharisees attempt to undercut his moral
authority.24 As Ralph Wardlaw, DD, neatly framed the problem, the Sabbath can become a day of outward habits, rather than of
inward experiencesof forms, rather than of feelings,--of conformity to parental counsels and traditionary practices, rather
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than to divine purposes and divine injunctions,--of bodily exercise, but not of spiritual delight (177). Such anti-institutional
sentiment was rife both in the Transcendentalist movement and beyond. Theodore Parker, to take one example, grew
increasingly unhappy with the compulsion by which religion is made to consist in belief of a certain creed, & not adispensation of the heart, which affect the whole [character] & becomes the mans life (qtd. in Grodzins 225).25 Compare the narrators discontent with Barclays own pointed critique in this regard: he [the minister] hath hammered
together in his closet, according to his own will, by his human wisdom and literature, and by stealing the words of Truth
from the letter of the Scriptures and patching together other mens writings and observations, so much as will hold him
speaking an hour while the glass runs, and without waiting or feeling the inward influence of the Spirit of God, declaims
that by haphazard, whether it be fit or seasonable for the peoples condition or no, and when he has ended his sermon, hesaith his prayer also in his own will, and so there is an end of the business (Barclay III).26 As Emerson remarks in his essay Art, Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of form. But true art isnever fixed, but always flowing. (Emerson 438).27 As the writer ofDiscourses on the Sabbath frames it, there is an inverse correlation between public and private
professions of faith in terms of sincerity: The power of general custom, of regard to reputation, and to the wishes and
expectations of others, may bring a man to the house of God, while there is little of conscientious principle, and still less of
spiritual affection, in exercise. That which is public, therefore, is the least to be depended upon of the indications of
godliness. It is one of those things, of which the neglect is a decisive proof of its absence, while the observance is no certain
evidence of its presence (Wardlaw 100).28 Although it is tempting to read the narrators invocation of the Sabbath sunshine as a contribution to an array of
prescriptive discourses implement[ing] liberal thought by sealing, regulating, and sanctifying private spaces, both domestic
and subjective, his liminal vantage point and ambivalent gesture complicate what Milette Shamir has described as a
masculinity closely linked to enclosed, interior, private spacesa link that we repeatedly find in the works of Hawthorne,Thoreau, Poe, and Melville . . . [in that] that these writers works often revolve around anxieties of intrusion, penetration,
and borderlessness (2; 15). For if the narrator furtively lurks behind his window, he also recreates a communal religious
service and arguably remains dependent upon the very public space and symbols he critiques. CLARIFY NOTE AND
TURN TO MARGOLIS29 Millers article is notable for its surprisingly lack of hyperbole. Although he acknowledges that the phrase the Sabbath
is scriptural, expressive, convenient, [and] the term [is] employed in a commandment which is weekly repeated by
millions, and so far familiar to all who live in Christian lands, that no consideration occurs why it may not becomeuniversal, he finally admits that his preferred title is the less ambivalent the Lords Day (73).30
Elizabeth Peabody goes so far as to claim Hawthorne as a fellow traveler in transcendentalism even as she also displaces
the sketchs anti-institutional rhetoric: The author does not go to church, he says; but no one would think he stayed at homefor a vulgar reason. What worship there is in his stay at home! How livingly he teaches others to go, if they do go! What a
hallowed feeling he sheds around the venerable institution of public worship! How gentle and yet effective are the touches
by which he rebukes all that is inconsistent with its beautiful ideal! His Sunday at Home came from a heart alive throughall its depths with a benignant Christian faith. . . . This is worth a thousand sermons on the duty of going to church (58).31 Michael Colacurcios short but suggestive analysis of Sunday at Home too quickly identifies the sketch with Charles
Lambs poem The Sabbath Bells (a poem that Hawthorne had reprinted in theAmerican Magazine of Useful and
Entertaining Knowledge , 2 (May 1836), 399 (Province of Piety 535)), but this poem does seem to inform Hawthornes
description of Clifford and the Sabbath: Chiefly when/Their piercing tones fallsudden on the ear/Of the contemplant,solitary man/Whom thought abstruse or high have chance to lure/Forth from the walks of men, revolving oft,/And oft again,
hard matter, which eludes/And baffles his pursuitthought-sick, and tired/Of controversy, where no end appears,/No clewto his research, the lonely man/Half wishes for society again (Lamb 399).32 Although the Sabbatarian subtext of this set-piece is more muted than in Sunday at Home, even here the stock tropes of
Sabbatarianism peep through Hawthornes prose. Compare and contrast, for example, Hawthornes depiction of the
hallowed atmosphere of the Sabbath and a benevolent but distant Father with Harmon Kingsburys depiction of the
same: Let us for a moment fancy ourselves awakened from the slumber of the night, and visited with the holy and sacred
stillness of the Sabbath. We gather together, the whole human family, good and bad, in one vast amphitheatre. The eye ofthe infinite Jehovah is fixed on every individual; there is no corner where any one can hide himself from the all-searching
eye (149).
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