Jenny Holt

Hawthorne Seminar Fall 2001

December 13, 2001

Roger Malvin’s Burial:  A Cautionary Tale

During the span of his writing career, Hawthorne wrote a variety of strange and compelling tales.  His characters range in strangeness from sadomasochistic preachers whose sin burns a literal emblem of his transgression into his bosom like Dimesdale, to voyeuristic psychopaths who venture into self-imprisonment in order to spy on their loved ones like Wakefield, to curious sexually repressed artists like Hollingsworth looking for meaning and fulfillment in his world. However, no one would object, to the inclusion of tale of “Roger Malvin’s Burial” to the list of Hawthorne’s strangest tales.  The story of a man who abandons his surrogate father in the wilderness and eventually slays his own son would prove challenging even to an Oedipal obsessed mind like Freud.  Hawthorne’s “Roger Malvin’s Burial” presents a variety of complex ideas and issues, presented under a pretense of history.  The short story symbolizes the sacrifices and changes the people of the frontier had to make in order to survive and build a home in the “savage wilderness,” leaving victims and violence in their wake.  This is a tale of a people who do one thing and say another.  “Roger Malvin’s Burial” allegorically reflects the experience of the early colonizers of the frontier and the changes that manifested as a result of the demands of the wilderness upon them and the death of their idealistic frontier dreams.

The Puritans dreamed of a theocratic retreat from lands of persecution, especially England. William Bradford, an early colonist and Puritan patriarch, as well as many others with the same intentions, and others came with the hopes of establishing a great “New Israel” or “New Eden” in America, free from taxing persecution. John Winthrop articulated the puritan dream in his sermon, A Model of Christian Charity where he calls the Puritan colony “city on a hill,” a term he derived from the biblical books of Micah and Mathew.  Winthrop saw the Puritans as shining city on a hill—the patriarchs of a great new tribe of Christ followers.  The Puritans also associated with the ideas of John Bunyan. The Puritans saw themselves like Bunyan’s character Christian from Pilgrim’s Progress. Slotkin concurs with this ideas by saying, “Like Christian, the Puritans saw their voyage to the New World as a spiritual journey, and the landscape of their New World” (Slotkin 39).  Interestingly, Hawthorne also wrote a short story called “The Celestial City” satirizing Bunyan’s book, included in the same collection as “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” further allowing for comparison. As Bradford phrased it, the Pilgrims were making their “errand into the wilderness.”  Here, in their American wilderness, like the Israelites’ wandering in the desert, the Puritans would purify themselves and, in the process, found a shinning “city on a hill” as an example for all of Europe to witness.

            Also important to the development of the frontier was the Puritans’ attitude toward the wilderness and the natives that occupied it.  The initial impression of the wilderness on the early puritan colonists differed from the attitudes expressed by the more experienced later frontier settlers. The puritans envisioned the wilderness as a hostile and dangerous place—dangerous to both body and soul.   The Puritans connected the wilderness to immorality and witchcraft because of its mysterious qualities.  No good could come from the wilderness.  Not long after his making his first steps on the sands of the New World, anxiety about the natives already consumed William Bradford.  To Bradford, the natives were so savage that they had very little claim to humanity.  Although he mentions fears about disease and famine in the New World, Bradford focused his concerns on the threats the Indians posed to establishing a “New Israel.”  Both Endicott and Bradford looked out into the vast, desolate wilderness and called it the “howling wilderness,” associating it with ghostly sounds of evil, not hours after encountering dry land (McIntosh 197).  Bradford says, “What could they see but a hideous and desolate Wilderness full of wilde Beasts and wilde Men” (McIntosh 193). To the Puritans, “The Indians were emblems of external temptation to sin or the mind’s dark impulses to sin” (Slotkin 40).  The wilderness and its inhabitants were the antithesis of everything the Puritans wanted and came to the New World to establish.  However, the longer the Puritans remained in the wilderness the more necessary it was for them to become accustomed to it. Slotkin in his book, Regeneration through Violence, he says “The longer they stayed in the Indian’s world, the more they felt themselves succumbing to the Indian mind, the wilderness mind” (143).  The wilderness was infiltrating the Puritans, becoming a part of who they were.

“Roger Malvin’s Burial,” a tale about the early frontier, tells of this kind of transformation of the frontier settlers.  A peculiar savageness grew in them in order to acclimate themselves to the land.  The early frontier settlers were neither puritan pilgrims nor were they like the Natives; they had transformed into their own breed whose instincts and practices looked more and more like those of the “savage” Indian.  Early in the text, Hawthorne presents colonists equal in morality and violence to the “savages,” showing that the differences between the frontier settlers and Native Americans were minimal. Hawthorne acknowledges their similitude:

Imagine, by casting certain circumstances judicially into the shade, may see much to admire in the heroism of a little band who gave battle to twice their number in the heart of the enemy’s country.  The open bravery displayed by both parties was in accordance with civilized ideas of valor; and chivalry itself might not blush to the record of deeds of one or two individuals (1).

 The depiction of Lovell’s fight here sheds a positive light on both the Indians and the settlers.  Both parties battled with a courage and “bravery” that Hawthorne compares to “chivalry.”[1]  Hawthorne’s account even boldly claims that the battle initiated peace in the colonies for many years. Critic McIntosh agrees that the frontiersmen are like the savages but disagrees with Hawthorne’s attributing of honor to either party.  He says, “rather than following ‘civilized ideals,’ whites and Indians alike behaved like savages, first in their cruelly and then in their bravery” (McIntosh 192). Neither the Native Americans nor the frontiersmen executed a battle with gentlemanly conduct.  The frontiersmen acted like “savages” in and out of battle.  Also, The dying Roger Malvin even associates himself “an old hunter” and, later on the same page, a  “hunter and a warrior” (2).  Even Roger can see how much he is like the Indians. According to McIntosh, the Indian-likeness is imperative for survival in the wilderness.  He says, “[the puritan/pilgrim] is at war to the death with the Indian, yet has to make himself akin to him in order to survive.” (McIntosh 192).  The only way for the frontiersmen to exist in the wild was to understand and work with it.  “When Reuben, Dorcas, and Cyrus take their leave of the settlements they become “pilgrims” venturing into “the untrodden forest” (McIntosh 193). The puritans and the settlers both see themselves as Christian pilgrims, but the pilgrimage had changed.  “Yet these eighteenth-century frontiers-men differ from the Plymouth brethren in a way that brings them closer to the Indian they oppose.”  As McIntosh purposes, the vision has changed from that of the early Puritan Pilgrims, because the wilderness has forced the frontiersmen to adapt.

Hawthorne gives further evidence for the “changing” of the frontiersmen by showing the characters’, in “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” knowledge of the wilderness.  Reuben knows the wilderness.  The text reveals, that the two wounded men have already journeyed and survived in the wilderness for two days.  They have maintained their existence by gathering sustenance from forest, so either Rueben or Roger or both possess at the very least competent knowledge of the wilderness and its bounty.  Later the text reads, that Reuben goes to gather enough meager berries and roots to sustain Roger for a few days, further proving Reuben’s knowledge of the fruits nature makes available in the forest and how to obtain them. Reuben, Roger, and later Cyrus all know how to hunt the wilderness prey. Reuben also possess knowledge of the superstitions of the wilderness, so Reuben would know that he is leaving Roger in the upright death burial position of a savage. McIntosh says, “Reuben leaves Roger sitting upright in the posture of Freneau’s[2] Indian hunter and warrior dressed for burial” (194). Hawthorne was familiar with Freneau’s work and, no doubt, the superstitious frontiersmen would recognize the posture.  McIntosh, furthermore, implies that Reuben, like the other frontiers-men, would be familiar with this idea as a savage Indian practice, proving that the customs and superstitions would be second nature to the frontiersmen.  Even in the posture of death, Roger is like an Indian.  The wilderness had already begun to change the settlers forever.

The more like the native the frontiersmen become, the further they move away from strict puritan ideologies.  Their progressive transformation causes a shift in paradigms of the early frontier settlers resulting in great anguish and internal conflict.  The very wording of the text reflects the conflicting of paradigms.  In the same sentence as Roger calls himself “old hunter,” the narrator refers to the forest as the puritan forefather, Bradford, did, as the “howling wilderness.”  Nature here is bifurcated.  It is perceived in two drastically contrasting ways:  as a bountiful provider and then as a dangerous abyss.  On one hand, Roger’s words positively effect the wilderness; the text says, “the energy of his concluding words seemed to fill the wild and lonely forest with a vision of happiness...”  (3) On the other hand, in the very same paragraph, the narrator explains, it is  “a ghastly fate [for Roger] to be left expiring in the wilderness” (4).  Then, again the attitude towards the wilderness changes when Roger says,  “[in the wilderness] wherefore should I not rest beneath the open sky, covered only by the oak leaves when autumn winds shall strew them?” (2).  With these words, Rogers expresses an almost joyful attitude toward a final resting place surrounded by so much natural beauty.  All of a sudden, dying out in the forest does not equate to a “ghastly” fate but a fortunate one.  The frontiersmen of Roger and Reuben’s day would identify with the hunter instincts of the “savages” and their knowledge of the wilderness, but also they held strong moral and communal ties to the Puritans.[3]  In reference to the wilderness setting of “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” McIntosh says,

This is the home of the Indian, yet the frontiersman has begun unconsciously to make it his home as well. He is intermittently attracted to it, while at the same time as a Puritan he finds it inscrutable and desolate and wishes to protect himself from it.  His ambivalence toward the landscape mirrors the division in his cultural and psychological make-up (192).

Simplifying, the frontiersmen were conflicted.  In other words, Hawthorne, recognizing this dichotomy, intentionally presents the wilderness in conflicting terms in order to reflect the growing chasm between the conflicting ideologies of the frontiersmen.

Reuben is the symbolic manifestation of the dichotomy caused by the conflicting ideologies.  Critic James McIntosh calls “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” “a tale of an Indian-fighter who begins by defending the frontier against the savage but ends by carrying on a war within himself,” (188) and Reuben surely wages an internal war within himself.  The conflict is initiated when Roger convinces Reuben that leaving him in the wilderness is the “right” thing to do, and, then, the conflict does not cease until he slaughters his own son.  Reuben, no doubt, was raised on the frontier, evident by his knowledge and understanding of the wilderness.  The wilderness is a part of him; it lives inside of him.  Reuben is young and “the desire of existence and the hope of happiness had strengthened in his ear, and he was unable to resist them.” (5).  The instinct to survive prevails in Reuben as a result of growing up and living in the wilderness, but he cannot help but look back.  Reuben must steal one last voyeuristic glance at the dying Roger, a brother in battle and father in spirit to him.  The puritan ideals that live strong within him call him back to take one last conscience-wrenching glance at the dying man.  He is conflicted--Do the “right” thing according to the puritan law or the “right” thing according to the law of nature:  survive.  Both of these options seem viable to Reuben because of the transitory world he lives in—a world still clinging to the Puritan ideals, yet changed by the code and necessity of the wilderness.  Reuben does what it takes to conquer the frontier but feels conflicted about the means in which he takes to conquer it.

Dorcas further complicates Reuben’s internal conflict.  Dorcas allegorically represents the Puritan ideas of colonization and initiating a civilized community. Dorcus’ song and table setting actually help glue the tale together as an allegory. Dorcas’ familial desires to found a home in the wild, bringing.  She has come to civilize the wilderness. She brings all the comforts of the community with her.  Hopeful, she wants to begin her own little colony of her and her family.  She experiences sadness when leaving the settlement and the colonists behind, but gladly follows her men toward the expansionist dream.  The text says,

“Dorcas, while she wept abundantly over the broken ties by which her simple and affectionate nature had bound itself to everything, felt that the inhabitants of her inmost heart moved on with her, and that all else would be supplied wherever she might go” (9). 

Dorcus believes God would “supply” anything and anyone she needed, no matter where she wen.  She also never worried about loneliness because she had the “inhabitants” in her “inmost heart” wherever she went.  Her idea of the perfect community out in the wilderness represents the puritan pilgrim idea of Christian pilgrims establishing an glorious theocracy where God comes first, family second, and then followed by community.  Dorcas is community; it goes everywhere with her.  Dorcas is the colonizer spirit that eventually wins out over any concern for the natives or the environment. Critic of “Roger Malvin’s Burial” discusses this:

When the image of the uprooted tree, the ‘moss-grown and mouldering truck,’ appears again, it is as a makeshift table for Dorcas’ ‘snow-white cloth’ and pewter vessels and illustrates the combination of innocence and Old World traditions in the new life begun in the wilderness.  Her contact with the forest transforms it from an area for battle with savages (the first stage of the frontier movement) into a land for new households (the second stage)  (Naples 47).

Dorcus totes with her all the comforts of the Old World in order to establish a civilized society in the New World.  Once the battling over the land has concluded, Dorcas comes in and sets up house, like the colonists and early settlers did.  The violence makes room for domesticity.

Roger Malvin represents the sins of the American past, which haunt us and follow us throughout the building of the country and into its future life.  Directly after waking, Roger’s haunting of Reuben already begins.  He says to Dorcas, “and I would to Heaven I slept as soundly as he!”  Reuben recognizes that his decision to leave her father, Roger, and the current lies he allows will furthermore plague him.  Words like “fear,” “miserable,” “humiliating,” “torture,” are ubiquitously assigned to Reuben's state of mind throughout the short story.  The text says he was “haunted” and “tortured” by metaphorical dying corpse of Roger Malvin.  Reuben’s conscience continued to send him back to the horrible decision he executed that day out in the wilderness. The haunting of Reuben by Roger symbolizes the brutality and violence in which America build its country. His death and the haunting of his corpse’s image on Reuben symbolizes the sins of violence of the Puritans and colonizers.   Wherever Reuben goes, so does the guilt of his transgression.  In the same way, wherever the country proceeds, it carries with it the violence used to transform the wilderness in a “civilized society.”  Critic G.H. Orians even likens Roger Malvin to Satan by taking apart his name.  He purposes that Malvin’s is associated with mal vin in French, which means, “came to evil.” And, as I stated earlier, the Puritans considered the wilderness Satan’s playground, a place where Satan held complete control. However, as Daly objected, “Roger Malvin is obviously not Satan.” (Daly 103)  Along the lines with what Manfred Mackenzie purposed in his essay, “Hawthorne’s ‘Roger Malvin’s Burial:”  A Postcolonial Reading,” Roger Malvin represents the past’s transgressions.  However,  Mackenzie says that Malvin is the representation of European colonial violence, but I see Malvin’s haunting as a symbol of colonial and early United States of America violence up to and running concurrently with Hawthorne’s day and into the future.  Proof for my theory lies in the textual associations between Roger and the frontier. Textual evidence for this lies in the many times Roger Malvin is likened to the Indians.   As I stated earlier in the essay, Roger is often compared to the Native Americans and possess an intimate knowledge of the wilderness.  He also fights and eventually dies on behalf of protecting the frontier, further providing proof for his associations with American and not Europe. Because Roger is so often associated with the Native American, common sense allows for his to be equated to the violence and ambivalence the colonists exhibited toward them.  The same way Reuben breaks all the codes and rules of the Puritans and warfare by leaving Roger to die alone in the wilderness, the Puritans and eventually all the white European settlers broke their own rules in order to greedily obtain coveted land.  Commandments like “Thou Shalt Not Kill” and “Go into all the world and make disciples of men” were no longer relevant, when it came to getting what they wanted.

The inclusion of the seemingly un-unified dream segment in the text actually binds the story together, allegorically.  Reuben daydreams about a paradise in the New World.  He incorporates the Puritan idea with the changing frontiersmen views of nature as a beautiful and useful place.

 Oh, who, in the enthusiasm of a daydream, has not wished that he were a wanderer in a world of summer wilderness, with one fair and gentle being hanging lightly on his arm?  In youth his free and exulting step would know no barrier but the rolling ocean or the snow-topped mountains; calmer manhood would choose a home where Nature had strewn a double wealth in the vale of some transparent stream; and when hoary age, after long, long years of that pure life, stole on and found him there, it would find him the father of a race, the patriarch of a people, the founder of a mighty nation yet to be...Men of future generations would call him godlike; and remote posterity would see him standing, dimly glorious, far up the valley of a hundred centuries (9). 

Presented here is the dream of the pilgrim mixed with the dream of the frontiersman.  Reuben and presumably the other frontiersmen share this dream.  The wild, untamed frontier is open to the possibilities of expansion and escape from society into the wilderness.  No restraints or “boundaries,” either man-made or social constructs, to hold a pioneer back.  They all have the opportunity establish themselves in the books of antiquity and become glorious and posthumously honored, god-like patriarchs, building their very own shining city on a hill. However, Reuben does not obtain this dream.  Reuben, in fact, by stories end, is completely sterile in every area of his life. The story, the dream, is an unattainable myth.  The most obvious form of sterility occurs when Reuben kills his son and, therefore, sterilizes his family line.  Reuben kills all opportunity to foster a long line of American frontiersmen. He will never be the memorial patriarch he wishes to be. Since eighteen years have passed with out production of further progeny, the reader can assume, Reuben and Dorcas will not have more children.  Hence, the line is furthermore extinguished. Reuben’s land is also sterile.   To colonize and construct a community, the setters must endure hard and dedicated work.  Reuben allows his mental anguish to keep him and his land from flourishing.  And, lastly, the crumbling of the sturdy but damaged apex of the phallic oak symbolizes the destruction of the family line. The tall strait phallus is damaged and unsteady; it can no longer function, so the familial line and all hopes for establishing a lasting patriarchy have perished. The sacrifices and violence have forever scarred the perfect vision.  Like Reuben’s dream, the Puritan myth is a sterile fantasy.  Obtaining the kind of life depicted in the daydream, requires hideous violence, devastating sacrifice, and apathetic views toward anyone remotely different.

Reuben cannot simply pick up and move to another place and all the sins of the past are forgotten.  No place exists where one can truly retreat from his past or sins.  In order to be right with himself again, Reuben must sacrifice the best part of himself.  In killing Cyrus, Reuben does just that, kills the best part of himself.  The narrator reveals, “in Cyrus [Reuben] recognized what he had himself been in other days; and at intervals he seemed to partake of the boy’s spirit, and to be revived with a fresh and happy life” (9).  Cyrus is all that is good about the wilderness and the Puritan dream.  All that is left when he dies is violence and oppression.  The text describes Cyrus as “Peculiarly qualified for, and already began to excel in, the wild accomplishments of frontier life” (8).  Reuben and the colonists of his town dream of Cyrus being a great leader in colonies; hence, the text reads, “All who anticipated the return of Indian war spoke of Cyrus Bourne as a future leader in the land” (8).  Cyrus lived in peace with the community and the wilderness, it was the colonists who wanted him to be “leader” and “Indian-killing warrior.”  Most colonists, by the time of Lovell’s fight, had set aside all ideas of Indians as civil human beings.  Most Puritans, but the time of Roger and Reuben, had lost the vision of converting the Native Americans, making the natives simply obstacles to acquiring the land they wanted. As Slotkin reminds his readers, the Puritans had ties with the rising bourgeoisie middle class in Europe.  The acquisition of private property was very important to them.  So, when the theocratic dream started to transition, a large part of the Puritans’ greedy self-serving motives remained (146-179).  Additionally, “Ruben is impelled to his final act both by the trust of a pilgrim and the ‘instinct of a hunter.’ In his final misery his is a savage as well as a Puritan.  The tale shows that Hawthorne is well aware of the moral confusion implicit in this combination” (McIntosh 194).  Reuben still has the Puritan spirit but now holds the expansion ideals of a frontiersmen; however, Reuben cannot escape the past and, in order to be “right” within himself, to “expiate” his sin, he must sacrifice something. McIntosh surmises that the killing of Cyrus represents the wilderness confusion, with nature as a kind of powerful and mysterious “surrogate fate”, but I only partially agree. In a way, Cyrus is “the American Adam,” as Donohue calls, because he represents the best possible scenario of the Settler’s journey into the New World.  So, in one sense, the killing Cyrus is the  death of the paradise of a nonviolent Puritan dream where all the natives are converted and civilized, Puritan and Indian living in symbiotic peace.  However, Cyrus’ death also represents the sacrifice and violence employed to colonize the wilderness.  In order to escape the town and start over, Reuben had to sacrifice something, that something is Cyrus.  The frontiersmen adopted the self-serving violence and customs necessary from the Indians for survival but ignored their ideas of community and communal land. The establishment of domesticity and its preservation is accomplished by violence, says McIntosh (193).

Hawthorne opened the door for this kind of metaphorical reading of the text by including the expository historical information at the beginning of the story.  The historical information initially presented contextualizes the rest of the story.  Many critics have discussed the relevance of the historical sources of “Roger Malvin’s Burial.”[4]  By including the historical information, the tone of the story is impacted.  Celebrations of the centennial anniversary of Lovewell’s fight began while Hawthorne was in college, so Hawthorne was surrounded by re-tellings of the frontier myth.  Even days after the initial confrontation, the mythology had started to emerge.  Historists and critics have discussed the formation of the American Frontier hero in the Lovewell story. The battle began with a brutal murder and scalping of a lone Native American duck hunter and ended in a bloody massacre of both the Native Americans and Frontiersmen. To make a long story short and reduce over a hundred years of myth formation into a paragraph, a series of false accounts and fact embellishments by participants in the battle lead to the glorification of Lovewell’s battle. Years of re-telling created verisimilitude in the tales.  Perhaps the most crucial information to the construction of Hawthorne’s tale is the many emerging elegies to the battle during his own time.  While at Bodowin University, colleagues and contemporaries from Longfellow to Thomas C. Upham, composed texts glorifying the less than morally pristine event.  More-than-likely troubled by the continually mythologized event, Hawthorne presented his own take on the tale with obvious ties to the historical Lovewell event.  Diane C. Naples articulates this best by saying,

A comparison of “Roger Malvin’s Burial” with the Lovell legend suggest that Hawthorne intended for the story to be not only an example of an individual’s psychological compulsion [reference to Crews], but also an ironic allegory for a nation’s repression of guilt.  Rather than fully developed characters, Reuben and Malvin are personifications of the frontier spirit in unheroic terms (46).

By opening the tale with the glorified, mythic account of colonists’ heroic brutality toward the Indians, Hawthorne spreads irony over the entire text.  Lovewell’s battle was not a shinning chivalric moment, but a hideous massacre, like many more that proceeded and would follow, that haunted Americans like Roger Malvin haunted Reuben.

The story of “Roger Malvin’s Burial” goes beyond the biblical allegories of G. Harrison Orians claimed it to be or the simple Freudian compulsion of guilt as Fredrick Crews interpreted the piece.  The tale Hawthorne tells in “Roger Malvin’s Burial” is more complicated and extensive.  The story examines the construction of the American myths and the development of the Puritans as the oppressors.

“Roger Malvin’s Burial” represents burying of the sins of the past and the serving up of nostalgia to erase the scent.  The historical information presented in the text furthers this theory. If one sees the spatial and temporal setting as functional rather than adventitious, he may read the tale not only as a particular historical incident (as G. Harrison Orian and Ely Stock have read it), but also as an examination of the writing of history, its transformation into myth, and the ways in which belief in that myth structures human experience  (Daly 99). 

Hawthorne’s tale presents the historical information as a tone for the critic of it.  Reuben kills his son to make himself “feel better,” the same way that the colonists constructed history to glorify themselves.  Reuben, representing the dichotomy, is both the Puritans and the frontier expansion-ers who leave death and destruction in their wake, acting solely on his own behalf. Also, early in the short story Reuben allows for the creation of the mythology by not discounting Dorcas’ assumptions about her father’s death and burial, creating a myth about himself as the Puritans had done. Although this quote refers specifically to the editing of captivity narratives by the Puritan forefathers, the ideas extend to the creation of god-like heroes like many tried to make the participants of Lovewell’s Fight.

Cotton Mather and other Puritans of his mind employed the years between 1693 and 1740 in creating a vision of history and deity in which the roles of captive, tormenter, and avenger defined the New Englanders’ relationships with one another, with the Indians, and with Jehovah (Slotkin 144).

The history as Slotkin presents it above, further exemplifies the Puritans’ creation of history in order to further their own vision of themselves.  The history provides evidence for Hawthorne’s allegorical examination and the oppression implemented by the self-ordained new rulers of the frontier. 

In essence, Hawthorne composes a tale about the formerly oppressed becoming the new oppressors.  The Puritans embody the ideas of the European colonialists, the same oppressors from which they fight a bloody war to liberate themselves from.  The Puritans oppress the “others” just as well as their oppressors oppressed them.  The colonists and later the patriots denied liberty and freedom, ideas they dearly valued and fought a for, to anyone who was unlike them.  Slotkin articulates this point very well:

“In many ways our Puritan ancestors seem to have shown in exaggerated form, almost in caricature, the patterns of thought and behavior, the religious and literary tendencies, and the sociopolitical and psychological preoccupations of all the Europeans who colonized the island and forests of the primitive New World.  The Puritans were perhaps the archetypal colonizers/ they were certainly the most extremely antipathetic to the culture and institutions native to the aboriginal population of America” (42).

According to Slotkin, the Puritan’s attitudes were so much like the European imperialistic oppressors that they could be archetypes for colonialists.  In “Roger Malvin’s Burial” lies the caution of building a society on lies, abandonment, and deception—building a society on the backs of others. The tale relates an extreme example of the sacrifices and brutal violence executed in the colonization of the frontier. “’Roger Malvin’s Burial,’...conceives the colonial encounter as giving rise to a sacrifice society, a society founding itself on victimization.” (Mackenzie 469)  Reuben’s “new” life cost him the life of his son, just as the colonists’ expansion costs the lives of many natives and the enslavement of African Americans.  The American society was built upon unnecessary violence.  “Roger Malvin’s Burial” is the tale of the “new” colonizer.  “To put it more accurately, Hawthorne writes a fiction of neo colonization” (Mackenzie 470). The prevailing idea of manifest-destiny that is so prominent during Hawthorne’s time is an extension and further transformation of the Puritan ideas fostered so long ago; the wide-spread American idea that coast-to-coast expansion was the “right” of the Puritans and the individuals of Hawthorne’s day no matter the cost of that expansion.  So in a sense, the Puritan myth lived on in the idea of manifest destiny, and even into the twentieth century with ideas of colonizing and “big stick” policies, but all of it was only a myth.  The dream can only come to fruition through stealing and killing of others:

In the dying Roger Malvin, a colonialist regime seems scarcely to be differentiated from a native Other, colonial space conceived as an abysmal and maleficent field of violence, as “the depths of the wilderness,” or “the sword of the wilderness”  (Mackenzie 461).

In other words, the Puritans pilgrims, then the frontiersmen, and then the pioneers of Hawthorne’s time are no different than the qualities they loath in the Natives, and the horrific violence they left in the wake of their expansion will forever haunt them.  They are everything they claim to hate.

Hawthorne speaks to his contemporary readers of the prices they and their ancestors paid to create the American in which they live.  Hawthorne is addressing the continual myth building, glorification of an “untrue” history.  America has become a neo-colonial state, with ideologies similar to those of the imperialistic colonizer England.  The tale confronts the many indiscretions implemented in order to achieve a new strictly American ideological, colonization mentality.  The short story serves as warning to Hawthorne’s contemporary America that the dream has died and further destruction is eminent if attitudes do not change.  I am not sure if even now, we in America have begun to recognize the extent of the damage caused by the violence and destruction of the frontiersmen, or if we will ever change.