These stories are not “sinister,” as the cover claims, except in a slight proportion; they are indeed fantastic, as they tend toward allegory. In more than one, we encounter that parade of stock characters in the style of Gracián’s Criticón. The sinister is present in “The Birth-Mark,” in the form of an unhealthy obsession; perhaps in “Feathertop,” the scarecrow who comes to life thanks to his maker, the witch, a kind of female Geppetto, although satire of vanities actually predominates. “The Artist of the Beautiful” has something unsettling about it, concerning the watchmaker who seeks to “spiritualize the machine”; and, of course, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is unsettling, the one who feeds on poison, with her poisonous breath, a devil disguised as a beautiful innocent. The allegory is clear, even from the title, in “Selfishness, or the Snake in the Heart”; and morality prevails in a title like “The Burial of Roger Malvin,” about a man who must atone for breaking his promise to bury his friend killed in the war.
Parade of types, we said: yes, and in reality, most of Hawthorne’s stories follow the “parade of monsters” scheme: monsters that may be the unfortunate beings in “The Christmas Banquet,” the products of the human soul in “Earth’s Holocaust” and “The New Adam and Eve,” the clients of the devil in “Young Goodman Brown,” or dead poets in “P.’s Correspondence.” Parades, often exhausting, that show us the “sinister” side of humanity, accumulating its miseries. Each could be a hell.