My Kinsman Major Molineux
Book • 1996
My Kinsman, Major Molineux is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne in which a country youth, Robin, arrives in town seeking his relative but witnesses the kinsman’s public humiliation during revolutionary fervor.
The story stages independence as a violent, ritualized initiation that forces the protagonist to reckon with a new civic identity and moral complicity.
Hawthorne’s work frequently interrogates inherited guilt and the darker implications of national founding moments, making this tale emblematic of those concerns.
The panel analyzes how the story frames American independence through carnival, mob ritual, and the impossibility of returning to a pre-revolutionary home.
The story stages independence as a violent, ritualized initiation that forces the protagonist to reckon with a new civic identity and moral complicity.
Hawthorne’s work frequently interrogates inherited guilt and the darker implications of national founding moments, making this tale emblematic of those concerns.
The panel analyzes how the story frames American independence through carnival, mob ritual, and the impossibility of returning to a pre-revolutionary home.
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Max Jacobs
Brenda Wineapple
Imagining Independence; or, Why Does Rip Van Winkle Sleep Through the Revolution?
