The Gray Champion
Short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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"The Gray Champion" is a short story published in 1835 by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne
The action takes place in Boston in 1689: As the hated royal governor Edmund Andros parades through the city to intimidate the people, a mysterious old man in old Puritan garb suddenly stands in his way and prophesies the end of his rule. Unsettled, Andros orders his soldiers to retreat, and the next day he is indeed overthrown by a popular uprising. The "gray champion" disappears as abruptly as he came, but it is said that he reappeared during the American Revolution and always returns when danger threatens New England. Hawthorne combined various historical events in "The Gray Champion", on the one hand the Boston Uprising of 1689, and on the other the legend of the "Angel of Hadley", according to which the regicide William Goffe is said to have saved the settlers of the town of Hadley from extreme distress during an Indian attack in 1675.
In literary studies, two opposing interpretations of the story compete. According to the conventional interpretation, the story, told with much patriotic pathos, is entirely in the service of a nationalist interpretation of American history, which portrays the Puritans of the 17th century and the revolutionaries of the 18th century equally as heroic freedom fighters. In contrast, since the 1960s a growing number of critics have claimed that Hawthorne's intention was ironic; "The Gray Champion" is therefore more a critique of Puritanism and the uncritical ancestor devotion of American historiography.