"Hawthorne's Revision of "The Gentle Boy

>a7'HEN HAWTHORNE selected Gentle Boy for inclusion in his I837 edition of Twice-Told Tales, he deemed it necessary to revise tale from the form in which it had first appeared in Samuel Griswold Goodrich's Token of I832. That this was a consciously artistic revision, rather than a mere worrying of material, can be seen in part from the fact the three other tales' which appeared in the same annual were unrevised when subsequently incorporated into his collections. The tale, however, continued to disturb Hawthorne artistically even after his revision. In his preface to a separate reprint of the tale in I839, he wrote, . . there are several among his TWICE TOLD TALES which on re-perusal, affect him less painfully with a sense of imperfect and ill-wrought conception, than THE GENTLE BOY.2 He took refuge, however, in the cliche of nature-over-art, by concluding that Nature here led him deeper into the Universal heart than Art has been able to follow.3 Some consideration of his changes in the tale should prove profitable, inasmuch as Gentle Boy is the only tale of Hawthorne's in which we have abundant evidence of artistic revision.4 These revisions are for the most part deletions. And when these deletions are viewed in their totality, they exhibit how Hawthorne has managed to give his piece a firmer point of view through the solidifying of a remarkably perilous balance between Puritan and Quaker. In short, he has clarified the terms of his tragedy. Hawthorne introduces his tale with an expository sketch of the

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• Agnostic Tensions in Hawthorne's Short Stories

  Bill Christophersen•American Literature•2000

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