Abstract
First published in the December 21, 1830 issue of the Salem Gazette, "An Old Woman's Tale" is framed by an ostensibly autobiographical sketch in which the author recalls paying rapt attention as a child to an elderly servant: Whether the vignette is authentically autobiographical is unknown, though Arlin Turner has speculated that Rachel Phelps Hathorne, Nathaniel's paternal grandmother, might have been the inspiration for the aged storyteller.14 According to Elizabeth Hawthorne, Nathaniel as a child spent his Sundays visiting Grandmother Hathorne's house, where he would read the family copy of Pilgrim's Progress; if Grandmother Hathorne also told stories herself, as Margaret B. Moore has suggested, or if her home was simply a refuge for reading, it seems likely that Hawthorne might have drawn associations between grandmothers and storytelling from an early age.15 In "An Old Woman's Tale," the child whose "fancy" is so "impressed" by the old storyteller's "great vividness" (11:24l) and whose hands clutch onto her apron resembles Jason in his bearing up Hera and then becoming absorbed in her gaze. [...]Hawthorne consistently undercuts such patriarchal representations through sometimes subtle satire that ironizes the supremacy of male narrators and vindicates the capacities for discernment and truth-telling in the older female figures. [...]Hawthorne's male characters often gather strength, as does Jason in "The Golden Fleece" or Holgrave in The House of the Seven Gables, by affiliating themselves with elderly females, literally and symbolically taking them up. (15) Hawthorne's "Crones" manifest the independence and vitality that Daly and Beauvoir acclaim in the older woman, whose "third sex" status liberates her from much of the "gender-role strain" that oppresses men and women alike in Hawthorne's world.24 Analysis of Hawthorne's crones reveals an author capable of recognizing himself in the figure of the elderly female, whose "business" is discernment and instruction, offered through story, vision, and ironic expression.