"I Felt a Funeral in My Brain" and "The Hollow of the Three Hills" Author(s): Dan McCall Source: The New England Quarterly , Sep., 1969, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Sep., 1969), pp. 432-435 Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/363619 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/363619?seq=1&cid=pdfreference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The New England Quarterly, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The New England Quarterly This content downloaded from 110.175.13.66 on Sat, 05 Aug 2023 01:12:08 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 432 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY pleasure when, during his stay in England, he encounters an I family that leads an exemplary family life in the midst of horrib poverty.25 Finally, in the same sections of the American Notebook where Hawthorne discusses the Irish, he praises the French C dian immigrants for their restraint and self-control. What H thorne admires about the latter group is that they are "much mo peaceable, never quarreling among themselves and seldom wi their neighbors. They are frugal and thrifty and often go bac Canada with considerable sums of money."26 The French Can dians, in other words, unlike the Irish, show the same attachment to the Protestant ethic as any New England Yankee. An examination of Hawthorne's response to the Irish is significant for the study of his scale of values in that it helps to define the limits of his commitment to compassionate understanding. While in theory Hawthorne is consistent in his affirmation of an ethical ideal envisioning a chain of sympathy embracing humanity, in practice the force of this ideal is at times blunted by competitive values. In the case of the Irish, it is Hawthorne's concern for dis- cipline and inner restraint which apparently leads him to withhold his compassion. Allen Flint's recent study of Hawthorne's negative attitude toward the Negro, however, suggests that there may well have been other values in the New England writer's ethos which likewise worked at cross purposes with his idealization of a chain of humanity.27 In general, a study of Hawthorne's response to various social situations might do much to clarify his hierarchy of values. "I FELT A FUNERAL IN MY BRAIN" AND "THE HOLLOW OF THE THREE HILLS" DAN MC CALL EMILY Dickinson's poem "I felt a Funeral in closely related to Nathaniel Hawthorne's sho Hollow of the Three Hills." Story and poem sh theme and several key images. In a recent article on s tween Miss Dickinson's poem "Further in Summer 25 Hawthorne, The English Notebooks, 34-35. 26 Hawthorne, The American Notebooks, 7. 27 Allen Flint, "Hawthorne and the Slavery Crises," NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY, XLI, 393-408 (Sept., 1968). Unfortunately, Flint makes no effort to get at the root of Hawthorne's negative response to the Negro. This content downloaded from 110.175.13.66 on Sat, 05 Aug 2023 01:12:08 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MEMORANDA AND DOCUMENTS 433 and Hawthorne's essay on "The Old Manse," Sidney E. L "Is Hawthorne's text merely parallel, only a remarkabl dence? Or did Emily Dickinson read Hawthorne's passag Old Manse' and transform it to her poetic purpose?" answers that "if we do have a coincidence, then it strains th probability to the breaking point."1 Similarly, there are close parallels between "I felt a Funeral in my Brain" a Hollow of the Three Hills" for us reasonably to doubt Dickinson used the Hawthorne story for her poem. "The Hollow of the Three Hills" first appeared in t Gazette on November 12, 1830. It is the only one of Ha early stories in the Gazette that he included in Twice T Very brief indeed, "The Hollow of the Three Hills" see like a prose-poem, a terrifying vision of guilt and dre story. In "those strange old times," a "lady" lays her fo the knees of an "aged crone"; cloaked "in darkness" by of the old woman, the lady hears "the muttered words o and then hushes herself "still as death." In a wilderness o murmurings increasing" and "shrieks" and "singing" an ings and sobs," "a ghastly confusion of terror and mour mirth," three central sounds come out to locate her burdens of guilt as "the daughter who had wrung the aged hearts of her parents,-the wife who had betrayed the trusting fondness of her husband,-the mother who had sinned against natural affection, and left her child to die." The accumulation of guilt, fear, and riotous sound is overpowering; the voices fade away "like a thin vapor," and "when the old woman stirred the kneeling lady, she lifted not her head." She has been frightened to death. We cannot be sure if the guilt is real or imagined, if the delinquencies are actual events in her past or if they are anxious projections, the "fantastic dreams and madmen's reveries" Hawthorne speaks of in his opening lines. Emily Dickinson's poem, written about 1861 and first published in 1896, reads: I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro Kept treading-treading-till it seemed That Sense was breaking through1 "Emily Dickinson's 'Further in Summer than the Birds' and Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Old Manse,' " American Literature, xxxix, 163-169, 169 (May 1967). This content downloaded from 110.175.13.66 on Sat, 05 Aug 2023 01:12:08 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 434 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY And when they all were seated, A Service, like a Drum- Kept beating-beating-till I thought My Mind was going numbAnd then I heard them lift a Box And creak across my Soul With those same Boots of Lead, again Then Space-began to toll, As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race Wrecked, solitary, hereAnd then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down- And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing-then- The ambiguity of the final line persists in Miss Dickinson's alternative choice of "Got Through" for "Finished."2 The stage for the action, in both poem and story, is the mind of a lady; Miss Dickinson feels the funeral in her "brain," and the "three hills" in the Hawthorne story, as we have seen, are exterior symbols of the lady's inner feelings of guilt as daughter, mother, and wife. In both poem and story the central character is driven to loss of consciousness-and, in both, perhaps to loss of life-by a series of crushing sounds. In the poem there is the suggestion of a pagan rite (and a violent headache) in the "Service, like a Drum" that keeps "beating-beating-." In the story, the old Hag behaves like a false Priest who hears the confession of the sinner, leads her on, pours forth "the monotonous words of a prayer that was not meant to be acceptable in heaven." The drone cannot offer absolution; at the end she can only chuckle to herself about the "sweet hour's sport!" And the speaker in the poem cannot drop safely, six feet into the earth; instead, she plummets "down, and down- I And hit a World, at every plunge." In both story and poem, the death agony is utter: a dreadful outburst expressing, in Hawthorne's words, "a sense of intolerable humiliation." Not only do Hawthorne's "lady" and the speaker in Miss Dickinson's poem hear terrible sounds; they hear the same terrible sounds. In "The Hollow of the Three Hills," the lady catches the 2 Thomas H. Johnson, editor, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, 1955), I, Poem No. 280, 199-200. This content downloaded from 110.175.13.66 on Sat, 05 Aug 2023 01:12:08 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms MEMORANDA AND DOCUMENTS 435 voice of a man who "went to and fro continually, and sounded upon the floor." In the final paragraph: "Then measured tread, passing slowly, slowly on, as of mourn coffin." The "mourners" and the "tread" and the "coffin all re-appear in Miss Dickinson's poem. Hawthorne's lad "the knolling of a bell," "a death bell," just as the spea poem hears that "Space-began to toll, I As all the Heave Bell." Miss Dickinson's horrifying image of "Being, but has its roots in Hawthorne's phrases: "voices strengthen ear," and "all these noises deepened and became substant listener's ear," and "the ear could measure the lengt melancholy array." And Miss Dickinson's "strange R "Wrecked" and "solitary" pair can be traced back into low of the Three Hills" where the solitary pair of w stranded in the "deep shades" that threaten "to oversp world." In sum, the correspondences between poem and story are clear and several; Miss Dickinson undoubtedly used the Hawthorne piece. Both works are remarkable chapters in the story of what Hawthorne called "the anxiety that had long been kindling" in the New England mind. This content downloaded from 110.175.13.66 on Sat, 05 Aug 2023 01:12:08 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
