The Maypole of Merry Vagabonds: Hawthorne’s “The Seven Vagabonds” and the Birth of Conservative Utopia

Abstract Hawthorne’s often-neglected tale, “The Seven Vagabonds” (1833), portrays one of the most significant instances of a vagabond’s way of life eventually materialized in literary pursuit. This paper examines the short story in light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‘carnival’, explicating how each vagabond arriving at the wagon offers some tantalizing glimpses of what a Bakhtinian carnival looks like. These carnivalesque features include the immediate familiarity between the characters, the suspension of moral and social rules, embodiment, and unfinalizabilty. Acting as the prelude to Stamford, the vagabonds’ merry gathering is ultimately canceled out. It is finally argued that the failure of the vagabonds’ utopia marks the narrator’s momentum of transformation, leading him to internalize the carnival spirit of vagabonds within his own imaginative mind and to change the role of carnival from an actual event to a literary pursuit, embodied in the creative and subjective art of storytelling. This transformation of carnivalization tallies well with Hawthorne’s modified political vision of utopianism in the aftermath of the Brook Farm experiment and Bakhtin’s configuration of carnival after its decline as a public event in the Renaissance.