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Studies in American Fiction257 have about the largest bill of death duties for personal property of anybody on the island. As she owns real estate in various parts of the United States, the Prince of Wales may say that his mother was actually a resident of Buffalo, N.Y., and that she was only in England on a visit. Notes ^Columbia Encyclopaedia, 19th printing (1946), p. 142. 2The Market-Place, serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, published posthumously by Frederick A. Stokes in New York, by Heinemann in London (1899). ^Gloria Mundi, serialized in the Cosmopolitan, published by Herbert Stone in Chicago, by Heinemann in London (1898). 4See my article, "The London Newsletters of Stephen and Cora Crane: A Collaboration," Studies in American Fiction, 4 (1976), 174-201. Cora's pre-publication announcement of Gloria Mundi is in Vol. VIII of Stephen Crane's Works, ed. Fredson Bowers (Univ. Press of Virginia, 1973), 711. 5Works, VIII, 720-21.«John William Mackay (1831-1902), born in Dublin, Ireland. In 1884, with James Gordon Bennett, Mackay formed the Commercial Cable Co. in competition with Jay Gould and Western Union. Later, he founded the Postal Telegraph Co., which, after his death, was headed by his son Clarence H. Mackay. See Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed., p. 585. IMAGINED REDEMPTION IN "ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL" Burton J. Fishman Yale Law School Of the many issues involved in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Roger Malvin's Burial," perhaps none remains more obscure than the nature of the "redemption" Reuben Bourne achieves, if any, at the end of the tale. The chief difficulty, implied if not mentioned in many readings of the story, is that the "redemption" must be based on Reuben's killing of his son, Cyrus.1 This ambivalence about the "redemption" found by 258Notes Reuben grows, perhaps, from a similar uncertainty concerning the guilt Reuben believes he is expiating. The precise roots of Reuben's guilt have long been at issue. The view most widely held is that which states that Reuben's guilt is the result of his concealing his abandonment of Roger Malvin and his subsequent failure to return to bury Malvin's bones. It seems, however, that this view begs the question. Randall Stewart, whose comments in 1932 set down the path that criticism of "Roger Malvin's Burial" has generally followed, noted that "concealment" imparted to a justifiable act much of the secret effect of guilt.2 Yet clearly, this point is undermined, for Reuben must already be suffering from some secret guilt that would cause him to conceal the truth from the start. The issue, of course, is not whether the reader, or for that matter, even Hawthorne, considers leaving Roger Malvin a "justifiable act," but rather how that act affects Reuben Bourne. Thathe conceals the truth of what happened in the woods is an indication of justhow Reuben is affected. It seems apparent that Reuben's will to conceal what occurred between him and Malvin is far more compelling than the mere expectations of friends or even the certain disappointment and grief of Dorcas, since those would, very likely, follow were Reuben to have revealed the truth and honored his vow to bury Malvin's remains. Thus, that which Reuben seeks to conceal and that which lies at the root of his guilt must be a "constant," something that occurred prior to his concealment of the truth and unaffected by that concealment: his desertion of Roger Malvin and the inevitable, albeit imagined, role Reuben believed he played in Malvin's death. This view that Reuben's "original sin" lies with the desertion of Roger Malvin earns support from the story. First, it creates a fine balance in the tale with the imagined "murder" of Roger Malvin being answered by the actual killing of Cyrus. Further, such a reading insures that the emphasis of the story remains wholly in therealm of the subjective imagination, with Reuben's self-created guilt based on an imagined murder being balanced by Reuben's self-ordained and self-validated "redemption." Questions dealing with guilt and with the validity of a final redemption, if any, have gone largely unasked in recent criticism. That this should be...

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