"The Hollow of the Three Hills" is a story published in 1830 by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is considered to be his first published short story.
The story is about a young woman who asks a fortune teller for information about the fate of her family. During their evening meeting in a hollow in the forest, the fortune teller (whether she is a witch remains unclear) conjures up three apparitions that reveal the young woman's sins and their consequences: She has abandoned her family, her parents are embittered, her husband is in an insane asylum, her child is dead. This early story already shows many of Hawthorne's typical stylistic characteristics and subjects - complex symbolism, enigmatic ambiguity, dark atmosphere, questions about the nature of sin, guilt, punishment and despair - which make him an outstanding representative of "dark" American Romanticism alongside Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville.
Plot summary An hour before sunset, a graceful but desperate young woman and an old hag meet at a previously agreed location: a dark, barren hollow surrounded by three wooded hills, in the middle of which there is a putrid pond in which some tree trunks are slowly rotting away. According to the narrator, this is where the Prince of Darkness used to meet with his lost souls to perform his "impious baptismal rite". The young woman hopes to get information from the Vettel about the welfare of her loved ones, whom she has left behind in another country, and promises to do whatever is asked of her ("though I die").
The old woman makes the young woman kneel down, spreads a cloak over her face and murmurs "prayers" that are "not meant to be acceptable in Heaven". Soon other voices can be heard, at first clearly, then again they seem to merge with the sound of the autumn wind. They are the voices of an old man and an old woman who speak sadly about a daughter "a wanderer they knew not where, bearing dishonor along with her, and leaving shame and affliction to bring their gray heads to the grave." After the voices have faded away, the old woman remarks with a grin that the old couple seem to be having a "weary and lonesome time". The young woman is shocked that the old woman has also heard the voices, but asks for more information. Again, the old woman mumbles monotonous words until screams, moans, sighs, rattling chains and the cracking of a whip can be heard. Then a familiar male voice is heard, telling of "a wife who had broken her holiest vows, of a home and heart made desolate." When this apparition has passed, the old woman grins again and asks "Couldst thou have thought there were such merry times in a Mad House?" The young woman asks to hear just one more voice that is dear to her. The old woman performs her ritual for a third time, and the young woman hears the sounds of a funeral service, and "revilings and anathemas" against "the mother who had sinned against natural affection, and left her child to die".
When the noises have faded, the hag nudges the kneeling young woman, but she doesn't move. Giggling, she says to herself, "Here has been a sweet hour's sport!"
Context of the work
"The Hollow of the Three Hills" is often referred to as Hawthorne's first short story. It first appeared anonymously in the Salem Gazette on November 12, 1830. Ten days earlier, on November 2 of the same year, the same newspaper had already published "The Battle-Omen", also anonymously, whose authorship is also attributed to Hawthorne by many literary scholars. After graduating from college, he lived with his family in relative poverty, seems to have avoided social contact and was disappointed in his writing ambitions. After the failure of his first novel Fanshawe (1828), he turned to the short story and remained faithful to this genre until 1850, when he finally mastered the novel form with The Scarlet Letter.
Around 1830, Hawthorne planned two collections of short prose texts, but was unable to find a publisher and eventually destroyed his manuscripts. It is likely, though not certain, that The Hollow of the Three Hills was intended at least for the first collection (Seven Tales of My Native Land), and perhaps also for the second (Provincial Tales). The original context of the work is thus lost, which may well have led to misconceptions in the reception of the story; G. R. Thompson, for example, assumes that the stories in Provincial Tales were in a dialogical structure.Thompson, Gary Richard. The Art of Authorial Presence. p. 60.
In 1837, Hawthorne included the story in his first published short story collection, the Twice-Told Tales. "The Hollow of the Three Hills" appeared here as the 15th of the 19 tales in the first of the two volumes. Poe praised the story as particularly successful in his review for Graham's Magazine (1842). He highlighted the economy and effectiveness of the narrative ("Every word tells, and there is not a word which does not tell"); apparently, they corresponded perfectly to his theory of the short story, which he formulated in a very similar way a few years later in his essay The Philosophy of Composition. The literary scholar Dan McCall believes to have identified direct borrowings from or allusions to "The Hollow of the Three Hills" in Emily Dickinson's poem "I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain".McCall, Dan (1969). "I Felt a Funeral in My Brain" and "The Hollow of the Three Hills". In: The New England Quarterly 42:3. pp. 432–435.
Interpretations
Narrative style "The Hollow of the Three Hills" is a story in which little happens; it is static, almost more of a draft than a story - for Marius Bewley, for example, it is a single "poetically evoked symbol."Bewley, Marius (1959). The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Novel. New York: Columbia University Press. p.143. Hans-Joachim Lang places it alongside the three early works "The Battle-Omen", "The Wives of the Dead" and "An Old Woman's Tale" in a series of Hawthorne's "experiments with radical brevity," all of which are characterized by a rather abrupt ending, some of which even appear incomplete. Their radicality also lies in "the author's resignation to explanation."Lang, Hans-Joachim. Poeten und Pointen. p. 89–90. If Hawthorne's characteristic brooding about responsibility and guilt, sin and atonement, forgiveness and damnation is undoubtedly present, and the story thus possesses qualities beyond the merely entertaining horror of ordinary horror literature, the narrator's peculiarly objective, almost impassive description of the events makes it difficult to make simple statements about their meaning.Downing, David. Beyond Convention. p.463. For Lang, as for Terence Martin, the fact that its "moral" is not expressed is what makes the story unique: the fragmentary "visions" of family chaos, social exclusion and personal isolation in the midst of a "moral wilderness" are so impressive precisely because they remain uncommented.Martin, Terence (1983). Nathaniel Hawthorne (Revised Edition). Boston: Twayne. pp. 44–45. (= Twayne's United States Authors Series (TUSAS) 75)
The narrative discipline makes the ambiguity for which Hawthorne is famous possible. Much remains mysterious in the course of the story. For example, it remains unclear whether the young woman is merely frozen or dead at the end of the story. Nor is it at all clear that occult powers are actually at work in the hollow, even as the introductory sentence emphasizes that at the time of the plot, the "fantastic dreams and madmen's reveries were realized among the actual circumstances of life".Thompson, Gary Richard. The Art of Authorial Presence. p. 61. A "realistic," psychological reading is thus not excluded, according to which the supposed witch only guesses and projects the supplicant's inner fears and anxieties.Colacurcio, Michael J. The Province of Piety. pp. 42–43. Of the inmates of the asylum in the second apparition, the narrator says that their "own burning thoughts had long since become their exclusive world" - another typically Hawthornian thought: the danger of solipsism, the self as a prison, as a "tomb of the heart."Easton, Alison (1996). The Making of the Hawthorne Subject. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. p. 16.
Poe already pointed out a narrative peculiarity in his review: Hawthorne's decision to convey the "visions" by means of the ear rather than the eye, which gives the story a peculiarly dreamlike, abstract character. In this respect, the narrative has a counterpart in "An Old Woman's Tale", in which a procession of ghosts proceeds entirely silently and is conveyed solely by the visible.
Genre The time and place of the plot remain extremely vague: it takes place in an unspecified location "in those strange old times, when fantastic dreams and madmen's reveries were realized among the actual circumstances of life Terence Martin sees this as a variation on the formula "Once upon a time ...": time is the place, a "neutral" setting in which the distinction between the real and the fantastical is abolished, as in a fairy tale. The opening sentence of this early short story thus already points to the Romantic understanding of art that Hawthorne formulated in his preface to the novel The House of the Seven Gables (1851): the author asks for artistic freedom beyond the strict imperatives of truthfulness or plausibility in order to fathom the deeper "truth of the heart".
Unlike many of his best-known short stories ("Young Goodman Brown", "The Minister's Black Veil") or his most famous novel The Scarlet Letter, "The Hollow of the Three Hills" is not explicitly set in the Puritan colonial era in Massachusetts. Although Michael J. Colacurcio points out the possibility that the setting of the story alludes to the topography of the city of Boston, which was built on three hills, he considers this too unspecific; Hawthorne had not yet found his purpose as a chronicler of the "moral history" of New England in this early story.Colacurcio, Michael J. The Province of Piety. p. 46. Carl H. Sederholm disagrees with this interpretation and believes that the narrator's references to "those strange times" and the "gray tradition" make it clear that Hawthorne was precisely interested in an examination of the past. He shows that the transmission and communication of the past, especially through the academic historiography of the 19th century with its rational view of the world, is inadequate - in order to understand history (especially that of New England), one must understand that "superstition", which is ridiculed today, once had a firm place as a category of understanding. History therefore had an irrational, "visionary" quality that had no place in positivist historiography, but could be portrayed in literature.Sederholm, Carl H. Hawthorne's Gray Tradition. pp. 45–46, 48–49.