The resurrection of an old paper

On Gallow’s Hill
In “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” Nathaniel Hawthorne approaches the Salem Witch Trials by presenting us with three different stories woven together with several common threads. These stories, though they seem unrelated, have more in common than just their location with the “shadowy past” (206): Gallow’s Hill. The three tales - that of the narrator and his guests, Alice and Leonard Doane, and the recollection of the witch hunt - all serve to strengthen a common theme.
Hawthorne begins the story by introducing a narrator, who takes his two female guests to hear his grim tale out on Gallow’s Hill. Here the author uses this context to present and compare the truth of the past to the horrors of the narrator’s piece of fiction. The tale is that of brother and sister Alice and Leonard Doane, and an acquaintance named Walter Brome, who is very much like Leonard. Walter claims to have seduced Alice, which throws Leonard into a jealous rage that ends in Leonard killing Walter. He confesses all to the Wizard who, unknown by Leonard, had orchestrated this plot. Alice and Leonard go to the grave of Walter where every resident of the cemetery comes forth to hear the truth of Alice’s situation, whether she had been seduced or remained virtuous. She is innocent and the dead flee at her sinlessness.
When the narrator is finished speaking, his guests laugh at his false tale of horror. So he “detained them a while longer on the hill, and made a trial whether truth were more powerful than fiction” (215). He proceeds to describe the chilling scene of the falsely accused “witches”who had been “brought to death by wilder tales than these” (212) being led up to the gallows, which had once stood where they were presently standing. His guests react much more fearfully to this tale than to his first. The truth of history is often times more terrifying than fiction.
Here we may observe the parallels in the two tales told by the narrator, which have the same theme and moral. In the stories we see the trial of the innocent. Both of the accused have been brought to trial by the gossip and suspicion of friends and family. Alice is accused by her brother, and those accused of witch craft were accused by their families, friends, neighbors, and pastors.Those who had before been seen as friends, were now seen as enemies.
Leonard was consumed with a serious jealousy and raging hatred for Walter that often tainted his pure view of his sister. The accusers in Salem also tasted this growing bitterness. Their being consumed with searching out sin and punishing it led to the assigning of sin to those who had committed no crime. This same hatred that raged in both the hearts of Leonard and the townspeople is symbolized in the wood wax that covered the hill where this hate was bred. “Everything that should nourish man or beast, has been destroyed by this vile and ineradicable weed” (205). This hate and jealousy made these people miserable. Hawthorne calls the accusers “the afflicted, a guilty and miserable band” (216). Their evil doesn’t seem to have an end. They simply were not satisfied with destroying a few lives, but they wanted to drag as many down as they could. This is evidence of the rapidly growing nature of their violence. Even after Leonard had killed Walter, he felt as if a “fiend was whispering him to meditate vio-lence against the life of Alice” (211). The incomplete burial of Walter Brome may represent the way that the people tried to cover up the martyrdom of those innocent people, like Leonard chopping away at the ice. But like Leonard, they could not cover their own sins. Maybe when they looked back on their vile sins, they too saw the faces of their loved ones and felt the guilt of taking the lives of their very family members.
Nathaniel Hawthorne would have us to learn a great deal from this story. The truth of the past is indeed much more frightening than that the ghosts and apparitions of fiction. The narrator intends to discover “whether truth were more powerful than fiction” (215). No matter how much Hawthorne’s narrator tried to scare his guests with his ghost stories, they were ultimately scared by his retelling of the pasts terrors, the crimes committed by and against their very ancestors. “But here my companions seized an arm on each side; their nerves were trembling; . . . I had reached the seldom trodden places of their hearts, and found the wellspring of their tears. And now the past had done all it could” (216). They were more afraid of the evils of the human heart. We are not to be the judges of men’s motives and souls, but we are to learn from history’s mistakes. Hawthorne suggests that “We build the memorial column on the height which our fathers made sacred with their blood, poured out in holy cause. And here in dark, funereal stone, should rise another monument, sadly commemorative of the errors of an earlier race” (216). We need to be reminded of what we humans are capable of when left to our own devices. The evils of ghosts and fiends can not compare to the evils that lurk in the hearts of man. We should be forced to remember in a way that can not “be cast down, while the human heart has one infirmity that may result in crime” (216). Our striving should not be to jump to conclusions, but to offer forgiveness and acceptance to our brothers and sisters. We need not search out secret sin, but offer grace when it comes to light.
Work Cited
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Alice Doane’s Appeal.” Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches.
New York: Library of America, 1982. 205-216.