The Threefold Destiny

The Threefold Destiny is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter pieces, originally published in 1838 and later collected in his Twice Told Tales collection. The story is one of his more directly allegorical shorter pieces, with the central premise involving a young man named Ralph Cranfield who has been told by various prophetic figures across his life that he is destined for three particular kinds of fortune. Great wealth from a buried treasure marked by a particular sign. Power and political authority arriving from an unexpected direction. And the perfect love of a particular woman whom he will recognize by certain marks.

Ralph spends his young adulthood traveling the world in pursuit of the three destinies, looking for the buried treasure, the political power, and the destined love that the prophecies had foretold. The story follows his slow recognition that the three destinies have actually been waiting for him at home all along, in forms different from but spiritually identical to what he had been seeking elsewhere. The buried treasure turns out to be the inheritance of his late uncle. The political authority turns out to be his appointment as the local schoolmaster, where his accumulated wisdom from his travels will serve the community. The destined love turns out to be the young woman he had grown up with and whose presence he had been failing to recognize for what it actually was.

Hawthorne uses the allegorical structure to develop the kind of moral material that distinguishes his best shorter fiction. The wider lesson about the relationship between far traveling and the rewards that have been waiting at home all along is one that Hawthorne returned to in various forms across his work, with the wandering hero who eventually finds his fulfillment in the place he originally left being a recurring figure in the wider American literature of the period.

For readers coming to Hawthorne through The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, The Threefold Destiny shows him in his more directly allegorical mode. For students of nineteenth century American literature or of Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, the story is worth knowing.