The Scarecrow: The Glass of Truth: A Tragedy of the Ludicrous
9781465655318
100 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
But for a fantasy of Nathaniel Hawthorne, this play, of course, would never have been written. In “Mosses from an Old Manse,” the Moralized Legend “Feathertop” relates, in some twenty pages of its author’s inimitable style, how Mother Rigby, a reputed witch of old New England days, converted a corn-patch scarecrow into the semblance of a fine gentleman of the period; how she despatched this semblance to “play its part in the great world, where not one man in a hundred, she affirmed, was gifted with more real substance than itself”; how there the scarecrow, while paying court to pretty Polly Gookin, the rosy, simpering daughter of Justice Gookin, discovered its own image in a looking-glass, returned to Mother Rigby’s cottage, and dissolved into its original elements. My indebtedness, therefore, to this source, in undertaking the present play, goes without saying. Yet it would not be true, either to Hawthorne’s work or my own, to classify “The Scarecrow” as a dramatization of “Feathertop.” Were it intended to be such, the many radical departures from the conception and the treatment of Hawthorne which are evident in the present work would have to be regarded as so many unwarrantable liberties taken with its original material; the function of the play itself would, in such case, become purely formal,—translative of a narrative to its appropriate dramatic form,—and as such, however interesting and commendable an effort, would have lost all raison d’être for the writer. But such, I may say, has not been my intention. My aim has been quite otherwise. Starting with the same basic theme, I have sought to elaborate it, by my own treatment, to a different and more inclusive issue. Without particularizing here the full substance of Hawthorne’s consummate sketch, which is available to every reader, the divergence I refer to may be summed up briefly. The scarecrow Feathertop of Hawthorne is the imaginative epitome or symbol of human charlatanism, with special emphasis upon the coxcombry of fashionable society. In his essential superficiality he is characterized as a fop, “strangely self-satisfied,” with “nobby little nose thrust into the air.” “And many a fine gentleman,” says Mother Rigby, “has a pumpkin-head as well as my scarecrow.” His hollow semblance is the shallowness of a “well-digested conventionalism, which had incorporated itself thoroughly with his substance and transformed him into a work of art.” “But the clothes in this case were to be the making of the man,” and so Mother Rigby, after fitting him out in a suit of embroidered finery, endows him as a finishing touch “with a great deal of brass, which she applied to his forehead, thus making it yellower than before. ‘With that brass alone,’ quoth she, ‘thou canst pay thy way all over the earth.’” Similarly, the other characters are sketched by Hawthorne in accord with this general conception. Pretty Polly Gookin, “tossing her head and managing her fan” before the mirror, views therein “an unsubstantial little maid that reflected every gesture and did all the foolish things that Polly did, but without making her ashamed of them. In short, it was the fault of pretty Polly’s ability, rather than her will, if she failed to be as complete an artifice as the illustrious Feathertop himself.”
