An Old Woman’s Tale

An Old Woman’s Tale is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter pieces, originally published in his 1837 collection Twice Told Tales. The piece is a sketch in the framed narrative tradition that Hawthorne used in many of his shorter works, with the central story being told by an elderly woman to a younger audience. The format gave Hawthorne room to play with the kind of slightly archaic voice that suited his historical and folkloric materials, and the old woman narrator becomes a kind of stand in for the long memory of New England regional culture that Hawthorne’s fiction was so often working with.

The content of the tale itself involves the kind of folk material that Hawthorne loved to work with. A young couple in love. A strange visitation or supernatural occurrence. The slow unfolding of meaning across the patient telling that the framed narrative format encourages. Hawthorne used these kinds of materials repeatedly across his shorter pieces, with the sketches and tales building up the kind of folkloric atmosphere that the major novels would later draw on for their fully developed moral allegories.

What makes An Old Woman’s Tale interesting beyond its specific content is what it reveals about Hawthorne as a writer of the New England folk tradition. The elderly woman narrator suggests the wider oral tradition that nineteenth century New England rural communities had preserved alongside the literate culture that produced writers like Hawthorne, and the sketch itself gestures toward the ways that oral storytelling and written literature could feed each other in productive directions. Hawthorne was a great reader of New England folk material, including witch trial documents, sermons, popular religious tracts, and the wider body of regional storytelling that his fiction drew on.

Readers coming to Hawthorne through The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables may find the sketch slighter than they expect, but the framed narrative mode is one Hawthorne worked in throughout his career. The reflective voice, the moral attention to small details, the willingness to let an essay tip into a tale and back again, are all on display here in compressed form. For students of nineteenth century American literature, of New England regional writing, or of the development of the American short story, Hawthorne’s shorter pieces are essential reading.

The sketch is brief and well suited to a single sitting. Anyone reading their way through Hawthorne’s collected works will encounter An Old Woman’s Tale as one of many similar pieces in the Twice Told Tales collection, each working some small corner of the New England folk tradition Hawthorne knew so well.