Nathaniel Hawthorne's "My Kinsman Major Molineux" depicts the corruption of an innocent, Robin, by the acts (and horror) of city life. Robin is an absolute innocent of the wilderness who ignored, mocked, and finnaly overtaken by the strange disciplany ways of a town in which he aims to find his kinsman, Major Molineux. This is a reversal of the puritan idea that the unknown (devil) is in the wilderness, and that a town is a safehaven. Ultimately, the difference between the innocent and corrupted, in Hawthorne's story, is that innocence is unaware of depravity. Robin does not understand his surroundings, he is unaware of why the townspeople are laughing at him. Only when innocence comes to understand corruption is he taken over by it. Robin attempts to leave the town because he is uncomfortable with its proceedings, yet the town will not let him leave. He is told to stay a few days, to become corrupted, to become one of the townsmen. However, it does not take a few days. When Robin discovers what is being done to Major Molineux, the man whom he desperately seeked, he laughs louder that anyone else in the town. Robin is no longer innocent, because he nows understands the depravity occuring around him.
In Edgar Allen Poe's "The Black Cat," we find a similar case of corruption that is the result of a more personal fault of the narrator. The story's speaker, a man who admits t
o loving his wife and his many pets, is corrupted by alchohol and eventually loses his innocence. The narrator, like Robin, begins with a favorable (perhaps naive) outlook on life, before he is married and begins to drink. Through alchohol, the narrator loses his ability to love. He is slowly overtaken by the poison: the drinking virus which corrupts him. The cat's ability to love causes the narrator to act out viciously. The speaker has become an adult, therefore he has lost his innocence. He is now aware of the adult world around him, which leads to depravity. Even after he attempts to return to his innocent state, it fails because he falls back into the world of anger, alchohol, and marriage (adulthood).Through these peices the innocence of man can only remain innocent if he is unaware of the world around him, if he remains in the unknown. It is only when we introduce the realities of the world does innocence become corrupted. Ignorance may in fact be bliss.
Was the narrator of "the black cat" ever innocent?
ReplyDeleteRemember, he is telling the story, so he could be claiming that he was once a good man when he never actually was.