Identifying Intergenerational co-construction of narrative identities
recovering late-adolescent Longfellow and Hawthorne from "traditions"
“[S]tories guide action,” writes Margaret R. Somers in her unjustly ignored (by literary types, anyway) essay “The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Netwrok Approach” (614). Somers insists, “people construct identities (however multiple and changing) by locating themselves, or being located within a repertoire of emplotted stories” (614). Dan P. McAdams and Kate C. McLean add, “different cultures offer different menus of images, themes, and plots for the construction of narrative identity, and individuals within these cultures appropriate, sustain, and modify these narrative forms as they tell their own stories” (237).
Recent neurobiological research supports Somers’s contention that “narrative is an ontological condition of social life” (614). “[N]arratives,” writes Paul B. Armstrong in Stories and the Brain, “configure lived experience by invoking brain-based processes of pattern-formation that are fundamental to the neurobiology of mental functioning” (13). These concepts change how we think about narratives work for individuals and larger human groups.
Patronage Discourse (there have been many manifestations of this) tries to exert cultural control by limiting the “repertoire of available social, public, and cultural narratives” that form the “menu” available for co-constructing individual narrative identities (Somers 614). “The seventeenth-century founders of New England” tried to achieve this, Harry S. Stout suggests, by creating “a unique and self-perpetuating ‘people of the word’” (3). Stout argues the maximal claim that “by extending the sermon to all significant facets of life—social and political, as well as religious—they achieved exactly that” (3). Reducing the repertoire for forming narrative identities to a discursive and argumentative template might have worked for those sufficiently exposed to and reinforced within those discursive processes.
New England Congregationalism’s most distinctive literary product, the Jeremiad, actually contradicts this claim. Its litany of repeated harangues against the widespread adoption of fashion, pleasurable behaviors, and always decreasing ‘godliness’ argues that the Standing Order failed to control the intergenerational co-construction that formed individual identities or social narratives. (This is one way to read “Young Goodman Brown.”) This failure has been apparent since 1750, when Benjamin Franklin concluded “Father Abraham”’s secular sermon in “The Way to Wealth:” “The People heard it, and approved the Doctrine, and immediately practiced the contrary, just as if it had been a common Sermon” (202).
Lyman Beecher, recounting the collapse of the Standing Order, says “For years we of the standing order had been the scoff and by-word of politicians, sectarians, and infidels” (401). Diminishing cultural power opened possibilities for other types of influencer to emerge. Longfellow’s “The Poor Student” (1824), Hawthorne’s Fanshawe (1828), the fascination with Chatterton more generally, and the declining pursuit of ministerial training in colleges that David Allmendinger studied are all data-points for changing realities in the formation of adolescent identities in the first half of the 1800s. “The Poor Student” and Fanshawe show weaknesses in the construction and transmission of Standing Order masculinity in at least one 1820s New England college.
In Fanshawe, Hawthorne turns to feminized narrative identities to suggest an alternative. We have lost sight of these concerns, though, because (a), we have thoroughly silenced the women’s communications networks that Carrol Smith-Rosenberg documents and (b) literary studies have been complicit in maintaining the Theological-Philosophical Value-Matrix which grounded the Standing Order. And this maintenance has been in practice since before the development of American literature as a discipline. With Fanshawe Hawthorne begins a career-long challenge to the discursive strait-jacketing of imaginative possibilities for narrative and sexual identities which produced the Standing Order narrative identity.
Narrative helps maintain the “complex of contingent cultural and institutional relationships” that result in “a social order” (Somers 626). Its formed connections appear to render “understanding” because they connect, writes Somers, potentially disparate elements”to a constructed configuration of a social network of relationships . . . composed of symbolic, institutional, and material practices” (616). But, as Armstrong observes, "fictional renderings of social worlds do not cause a univocal, linear transfer of social cognition, but instead set in motion complex multivalent, heterogenous processes of doubling, recursion, and, inferential pattern formation” that can introduce change (165).
Longfellow’s and Hawthorne’s involvement with changing the narrative identity developed in New England Colleges has been obscured by “Traditions” made up by members of the Packard family in the 1870s. Although it’s a big leap, these invented traditions and their unvetted acceptance as biographical truths about each writer have done a lot to confine each writer’s work within shiny happy little boxes (or a dark gloomy puritan one) that insulate the works from enabling the kind of meaningful change that, to leap to The Scarlet Letter for a second, Hester Prynne’s actual career stood for.
“Traditions” invented, or at least, retailed by Alpheus Spring Packard and his son George distort the college experiences of the “two . . . writers . . . [for whom] the class of 1825 will be remembered” (Bridge 24). The “college tradition” that the Trustees magically decided to award Henry a professorship, on the one hand, and of Hawthorne’s “girlish diffidence” obscure anomalies involved with the college careers of Bowdoin’s two most famous graduates. These “traditions” silence Bowdoin’s Standing Order past and sacrifice the Romantic commitments that Longfellow and Hawthorne used to diagnose failures of Standing Order identities and cultural practices. Scholars have ignored Longfellow’s negotiation of his professorship and Hawthorne’s withering deconstruction of Standing Order masculinity and matrimony in Fanshawe.
In Young Longfellow, Lawrance Thompson makes Longfellow an incompetent teen-ager incapable of productive thinking. Philip Greven, writing in the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, assumes that Hawthorne did not accomplish anything significant writing Fanshawe, so he reads it as 1820s Hawthorne exploring his feminine beauty in the context of an 1830s crisis of masculinity. Apart from this basic anachronism (such a small matter for a post-structuralist, after all), Greven does not seem to care that this “feminine beauty” was imposed on Hawthorne culturally and discursively by the “tradition” and not something he would necessarily have experienced. (And, even if he did perceive that others gendered his behavior, the relevant questions involve how his narrrative identity responded.)
Traditions formed to “write out” resistance to and rejection of William Allen’s extreme Calvinism and Bowdoin’s cozy Patronage attitudes, have kept us from seeing that Longfellow and Hawthorne developed attitudes about literature and culture—probably in collaboration with Samuel P. Newman—that began their renegotiation of the role and purposes of imaginative writers in America. In agreement on their rejection of Allen’s Calvinism, but disagreeing on their attitudes towards Standing Order patronage, and above all, about marrying for money, they followed career paths which differed for twelve years after their graduation. Differing processes of Inter-Generational Co-Construction produced the attitudes that made these paths.
Intergenerational Co-Construction and Narrative Identity
Intergenerational Co-Construction occurs when adults, or “more competent societal members,” share narratives, and often interactions, with younger or less-experienced learners as part of the learning process for acquiring a wide range of skills and competencies (Fivush 60). Part of “the legacy of Vygotsky’s . . . insight that historical, cultural, and institutional contexts condition learning by identifying and extending the child’s capacities” (Palmer 151), Inter-generational co-construction makes it possible to describe particular processes of the group identification that enables individuation.
Robyn Fivush summarizes the general concept: “skills develop first in social interaction and are later internalized by the individual” (60). Fivush (and many others) showed how “an individual’s personal narratives may be influenced through social interaction” (59). In 1994 Margaret Somers argued that “it is through narratives and narrativity that we constitute our social identities” (606). Subsequently, the “ontological” dimension of narrative has enabled social psychologists to study the “long and dramatic development” through which stories and story-telling help “the child transfor[m] the interpsychological activity of the mother into his or her own intrapsychical process of self-regulation” (Palmer FM 149). Maternal presence is not required for the kinds of emotional attachment and trust required for positive outcomes to result from these types of socio-cultural internalization. Fivush uses neutral terms to sketch out “scaffolding”—“skills [that] develop first in social interaction . . . [and] are later internalized by the individual. Essentially, the adult, (or any more competent societal member) engages the child (or less competent societal member) in a task and supports the child’s performance by providing the necessary structure for accomplishing the task goal” (60).
Inter-generational co-construction aids in studying individuals who developed in circumstances which differ from the nuclear family structure normalized in Freudian and individualistic western European psychologies from the Victorian era through the late twentieth century. Presuming or imposing normative patriarchalist concepts on Hawthorne’s individuation has resulted in significant misunderstanding.
The power of magical thinking about parents is not confined to Hawthorne scholars or the Harry Potter series. In “Parental Co-construction of Self-Esteem” (2017) Harris and Donnellan write, “despite the lack of empirical research on the early origins of self-esteem, many theories converge on the same prediction: self-esteem is influenced by social interactions, particularly with parents during childhood” (1810). Since “[o]ther approaches suggest that self-esteem stems primarily from the affective quality of significant relationships” (1811), they tested whether or not how “parents reminisce . . . with their child” teaches “the cognitive skills necessary for developing healthy self-esteem” (1812). Had these theoretical presumptions been correct, Hawthorne should have been a psychological disaster since he never knew his father and his mother withdrew from any significant affective relationship during his adolecence.
The results of Harris and Donnelan’s study show that the type of support matters more than the type of person providing it. Harris and Donnellan “failed to find support for the hypothesis that parent reminiscence style would be related to child self-esteem. Instead, parenting behaviors (support) were more important for the development of healthy self-esteem” (1818). At crucial moments in Hawthorne’s life Mary Manning provided this support for Hawthorne—even if he resisted it and later marginalized her importance.
7 September, 1825: ‘the Chatterton Scenario,’ & Longfellow’s Career Negotiation
On 7 September 1825 Hawthorne, convinced “that he could never bring himself into accord with the general reading public” (Bridge 15) heard his fellow-graduate, the much-published and praised Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, deliver a twice-changed Commencement Address. That address at Bowdoin College, changed from “On Native Writers” to “The Life and Writings of Chatterton” and back to “Native Writers,” sealed the eighteen-year-old’s (provisional) appointment to a professorship at Bowdoin.
Chatterton’s example haunts Longfellow’s letters to his father and other writing during his final semester in 1825 as he argued his way into the position that would begin his creation of the Victorian poet out of late Romanticism’s acquiescence to power. Adapting ideas he would have read and heard from Samuel P. Newman, Longfellow moved his father by juxtaposing Chatterton’s world-changing notions of artistry and Sir William Jones’s linguistics against the routine work of a small-town legislator and law-maker. In Hawthorne’s case, Fanshawe shows what happens in a culture so devoid of imaginative possibilities that a born poet forces himself to be a “student” and refuses the path to adulthood which requires the expropriation of women’s wealth and talents.
In December 1824, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow began negotiating with his father about what he would do after graduation. The results changed American culture. Afraid that his genious 18 year-old could wind up dead like Chatterton, Stephen, as Charles C. Calhoun writes, began “a sort of speculation” in his second son’s and Bowdoin’s future (41). Calhoun writes, “Nothing has survived to indicate that anything was promised in writing” (41-42). Circumstantial evidence suggests Stephen “and his family friends” who happened to also be Bowdoin Trustees arranged to award a proposed, but not fully funded Bowdoin Professorship in Modern Languages to his eighteen-year-old son who barely spoke French (Calhoun 41).1
The specter of Thomas Chatterton haunts Henry’s commitment to the emerging romantic concepts of poetic art which drove his negotiations with his father. In a series of letters, and in three lost essays about Chatterton (one of which he planned to deliver as his Commencement address), rhetorical abilities Longfellow developed in dialogue and debate with his father and his circle of lawyers, liberal ministers, and Bowdoin faculty allow Hnery to argue his position and set the agenda and criteria. At each step in this negotiation, his father responds by proposing innovative means for Henry to pursue his calling. The Bowdoin professorship and European travel required to prepare Henry for it ended the process. Henry’s rhetorical abilities, his willingness to advocate for himself against his father, and his father’s persuasion hint at the adapted version of the Standing Order narrative identity which would ground the emergence of professionalism.
For seven minutes eighteen-year-old Henry distilled the basic argument of months of letters into the general claim that “if we would ever have a national literature, our native writers must be patronized” (qtd. in Higginson 32). Thanks to a newspaper piece from May, and the scratched out title “The Life and Writings of Chatterton” printed in the Commencement programs, he could be sure that Chatterton lurked in his father’s mind. Henry then rejected the pre-romantic concept of ornamental literary dilletantism: “Whatever there may be in letters over which time shall have no power, must be ‘born of great endeavors,’ and those endeavors are the offspring of liberal patronage” because, Longfellow says, “eminence in any profession so imperiously demands . . . exclusive attention” (qtd. in Higginson 32).
This oration—and the months of negotiation that led to it—is an overlooked moment in Berlin’s romantic revolution. Its result “undoubtedly determined the literary tendencies” of “the most widely read poet in the English language” (Higginson 45; Calhoun 1). Yet Longfellow scholars and others like Grantland S. Rice in The Transformation of Authorship in America overlook how Henry’s exigency, rhetorical skill, and artistic vision began a transformation of American poetry in his 1824-1825 negotiations with his father.
This prolonged negotiation also affected Hawthorne. Whether or not he knew details about the extended negotiation, he interpolated elements of Longfellow’s “The Poor Student” and his appointment as “Professor of Poetry” into Fanshawe. Longfellow’s negotiation shows that even though he assimilated Romantic ideas within that achieved narrative identity, in particular, those epitomized in Chatterton’s “romantic life” (EQR 217), to advocate for an emerging literary-professionalism, he still did so within the normative forms of formal and informal discussions, writing, academic instruction and professional interaction that proved that he had developed a male Standing Order narrative identity. When we turn to Hawthorne, it will be easier to see the very different processes of Inter-generational co-construction that enabled his atypical narrative identities and abilities.
Longfellow and Hawthorne biographers (and Bowdoin historians) usually merely note that both graduates were at this ceremony. Recent Hawthorne biographer Brenda Wineapple, for instance, imagines “Nat Hathorne must have listened carefully as Longfellow spoke of the secret ambition lodged like a thorn in his own heart” (57). This punning chapter conclusion owes more to Lawrance Thompson describing Stephen Longfellow Sr.’s insistence that Henry “would become a lawyer” as “this thorn in [Longfellow’s] side” (YL 69) than it does to what Nathaniel’s thoughts might have been. Ignoring Standing Order expectations and Patronage opportunities, Wineapple equates Hawthorne’s ambition with the pursuit of patronage Longfellow thought was necessary to support literary excellence.
Glancing down at the scratched through title “The Life and Writings of Chatterton” to its penned-in replacement “On Native Writers” on his Commencement “Order of Exercises” (Basbanes 26), though, and, possibly, looking over to Longfellow’s father with the Trustees and marking the absence of any Manning or Hathorne in the audience, Nathaniel could forcefully contrast Henry’s prospects with his own lack of opportunities or abilities to establish connections with Portland and Boston publishers, much less convince anyone in the Manning or Hathorne families to fund years of overseas travel. Conversely, the Mannings, especially Aunt Mary, did provide a supportive environment in which Hawthorne could develop his “moral and intellectual exercises” (10, 10) and provided access, through Mary again, to the research materials of the Salem Atheneum.
Hawthorne’s “distrust of being rightfully appreciated” developed long before he listened to Longfellow’s seven-minute plea for literary patronage in September, 1825 (Bridge 15). The “reading public” that Hawthorne doubted did not coincide with contemporary estimations of the “public” or “literary marketplace” (Bridge 15). The emergence of general readers with different expectations and preferences and challenges to Federalist control prompted the Federalist/Whigs who controlled the North American Review, the Monthly Anthology, and The Boston Atheneum to model a “reading public” that converted the Standing Order into assertions of literary taste and distinction (Field 126).
Hawthorne’s rejection of these standards first appears in Fanshawe and continues through his career. Until House of the Seven Gables his writing poses these standards as the means by which the Standing Order “undermine[s], possibly even destroy[s], our sense of human possibility” (Graeber & Wengrow 21).
the Intergenerational Co-Construction of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Writing to commemorate Longfellow, Annie Fields recounts Hawthorne “speaking of his own early life and the days at Bowdoin College, where he and Longfellow where in the same class” (“Glimpses” 884). “No two young men could have been more unlike,” Fields remembers Hawthorne saying (884). Indeed, Jane Tompkins is spectacularly prejudiced in asserting that Longfellow and Hawthorne shared “a common background and a common vocation” (9).
A first-generation fatherless college student, Hawthorne’s mother was minimally involved in his development from adolescence on, and, due to injuries and moving between Raymond and Salem, he had less institutionalized peer-group socialization than most of the Bowdoin Class of 1825. The inter-generational processes involved with the constitution of his narrative identities and abilities set him apart from male aspirants for Standing Order patronage.
Hawthorne rejected patronage and suffered writer’s block while in office because of this atypical inter-generational co-construction. The processes of identity-formation in the Longfellow and the Manning-Hathorne families are almost incommensurable. Hawthorne probably had no memory of his sea-captain father, who died in Surinam when his son was three-and-a-half; his mother was inconstant and increasingly distant, if emotionally important.
Nineteenth-century observers remarked that after her husband’s death, Betsy “remained a strict hermit to the end of her long life, or for more than forty years after Captain Hathorne’s death” (Woodson 16). At 17 Hawthorne reminded her in 1821 “It is now going on two years since I saw you” (15, 137). Sophia relayed to her family in December 1844 that “For the first time since my husband can remember, he dined with his mother!” (16, 69).
Thomas Woodson, referring to “letters by her published in the last few decades,” tries to refute this in order to make Betsy seem more like a ‘traditional’ mother figure (16). Those letters show that religious convictions motivated Betsy more than the rest of the Mannings except Mary. She moved to Raymond, Maine to found a “Sunday School” in hopes of settling a church there, which, presumably would provide more doctrinal consistency for her wayward children (Woodson 16). After that project failed, Betsy Hathorne retreated from supporting her children. Well before that, Elizabeth, Nathaniel, and Louisa turned to other sources to support their emotional and intellectual development. The roles that others in the Manning extended family—especially Betsy’s sister Aunt Mary—played, albeit often unwillingly, in developing Nathaniel’s and Elizabeth’s reading habits also enabled them to develop an atypical repertoire of narrative identities and abilities. Efforts like Woodson’s to fit Hawthorne’s experiences within “normal” parameters of “the socialization of children” obscure evidence that, even as his mother retreated from maternity, he was raised within a family which preserved substantial traces of a “symbolical cultural pattern of matriarchy” (Zipes 28, 34).
The type (literally, in the case of his childhood obstinate persistence in reading Rousseau and the Newgate Calendar “in spite of serious remonstrances” (HHT 6-7) and the less authoritarian quality of his interactions with more experienced community members differentiates the constitution of Hawthorne’s narrative identity from the typical range of Standing Order experiences. His fundamental readings were neither scriptural nor shaped by the interpretive norms which made the “family,” as Harry S. Stout writes, “next to the church, the most important . . . of New England institutions” (22). I mean. let’s repeat, dude read Rousseau’s Confessions, Autobiograpjy, and Heloise as. a. kid. (& I thought I was weird for memorizing Carlin’s “7 Words” in elementary school).
Inter-generational co-construction affords a conceptual frame for unpacking Elizabeth M. Hawthorne’s (Ebe) memories of how her brother’s “mind developed itself” (HHT 5). This development occurred through a combination of choice and inattention. Had he experienced the sermon-driven indoctrination or “intentional cultivation” that should have occurred in one of Stout’s well-ordered families, Ebe insists it would “have spoiled [his mind]” (HHT 5). In contrast, Ebe details an implied connection between his childhood reading and narrative development:
Pilgrim’s Progress was a favorite book of his at six years old. When he went to see his Grandmother Hawthorne he used to sit in a large chair in the corner of the room, near a window, and read it, half the afternoon, without speaking. No one ever thought of asking how much of it he understood. I think it one of the happiest circumstances of his training that nothing was ever explained to him, and that there was no professedly intellectual person in the family to usurp the place of Providence, and supp[l]ement its shortcomings, in order to make him what he was never intended to be. His mind developed itself. Intentional cultivation would have spoiled it. He used to invent long stories, wild and fanciful, and to tell us where he was going, and of wonderful adventures he was to meet with, always ending with ‘and I’m never coming back again.’ That, perhaps, he said that we might value him the more while he stayed with us. (HHT 5).
Ebe’s “intentional cultivation” by a “professedly intellectual person in the family” corresponds, negatively, in her assessment, to how adults “provide [or, Ebe would counter, impose] an evaluative framework for understanding [a] story” (Fivush 61). Thus, “Providence”—here played by his Grandmother—directed how Nathaniel internalized features of Pilgrim’s Progress into an emerging evaluative framework based on his needs.
His “long stories” reframe Bunyan’s religious narrative as secular quest, adventure, and travel narratives. Six-year-old Nathaniel makes Bunyan’s story a template for stories of escape and adventure (even as Ebe identified the counterpart desires for recognition and inclusion). Her attention directed to detailing how authority did not impose the Standing Order narrative identity on her brother, Ebe does not credit the benevolent neglect in which Nathaniel found himself left to a book as a fundamental component of how his mind developed its narrative capacities.
Crucially, his foot injury “when he was . . . about nine years old . . . playing bat and ball at school” made him “lame for more than a year” provided Hawthorne with atypical developmental experiences involving supposed elders deferring to him (HHT 4).2 A conviction that the the injury was psychosomatic, or faked, has led to unfortunate consequences, especially given that Lisfranc mid-foot injuries, even now take as long to heal as Hawthorne was disabled. Wineapple uses it to infantilize the mature Hawthorne so that his stories of failed masculine identities become, for her, largely unconscious reenactments of childhood trauma.
Using sloppy Freudian tenets to presume that an innate longing for a father leads Hawthorne to detest potential surrogate fathers, Wineapple finds that his lameness anticipates the “Paternal persecutors [who] invariably crop up in Hawthorne’s work” because his injury was an “early rebellion, self-punitive and vindictive, in protest against the loss of his male guardians” (26). Of course.
Even if the lameness, of which the oddest part must be Ebe’s assertion that “in a little while his foot ceased to grow like the other” (HHT 3), were psychosomatic, it would more logically be a rebellion against being forced to associate with the other boys who caused the injury. A male guardian appears, and the injury ensures his return: “Mr. Worcester,” Hawthorne’s teacher, “was extremely kind, offering every day to hear his lessons, so that my brother lost nothing in his studies,” recalled Ebe (HHT 3). And rather than indulge in early adolescent pranks and games with his peers, aside from lying upon “the carpet and read[ing],” “his chief amusement was playing with kittens, of whom he had always been very fond. He would build houses and covered avenues with books, for the kittens to run through” (HHT 3).
Considered as an episode in the inter-generational co-construction of a narrative identity, the special effort that “Mr. Worcester, the author of the Dictionary” took with Nathaniel as “an adult, (or more competent societal member)” (Fivush 60), combined with the time spent in reading and building with books is an important relationship in the constitution of Hawthorne’s narrative identity. Indulging in semi-magical thinking about the “influence" of surrogate fathers and other Freudian patriarchal nonsense has meant ignoring how Worcester reinforced Hawthorne’s identities as a special reader and writer.
As Elizabeth and Nathaniel entered adolescence, the Mannings, especially Aunt Mary, worked to return him to Salem. Once Betsy’s religious arousal of Raymond failed, they prevailed upon her to make her son return to be fitted for adulthood. The siblings were separated so long, communicating solely by letters, that in June of 1821 Louisa wrote to Betsy: “Nathaniel did not know Ebe at first till he saw Uncle Robert and then he stood transfixed with astonishment” (15, 148). Around age fourteen he wrote her “a list of the books he had been reading” that ventured way beyond Bunyan (HHT 6): Scott’s “Waverl[e]y novels . . . as were then published, and Rousseau’s Heloise and his Confessions (which were thought by his friends extremely improper) and the Newgate Calendar, which he persisted in going through to the end . . . in spite of serious remonstrances” (HHT 6-7).
In addition to highlighting her brother’s dismissal of classical and biblical texts (“he did not care much for the world before the fourteenth century” (HHT 7)), Ebe’s reminiscences reveal a tolerant resistance to the siblings’ use of print and textuality as a surrogate adult in the constitution of narrative identities: “I do not think he ever opened [a book], except in the course of his education, because it was recommended as useful, and to be true was sometimes an objection in his eyes” (HHT 7). Hawthorne’s chosen reading would have provoked condemnation, not just remonstrance, from “professed intellectuals” (HHT 5). He developed an alternative, heteroglossic repertoire of narrative abilities and identities because of his sustained lack of “intentional cultivation” by “professed intellectuals” (HHT 5). Reconstructing this process of intergenerational co-construction shows how alternatives to a dominance and status aligned cultural formation can emerge.
So, in the next installment, we’ll try to peak beyond the Chattertonesque Gothic origin story of “the Castle Dismal” that Hawthorne told about his time just before and after “Colleg,” as his biggest benefactor, Aunt Mary Manning, referred to Bowdoin.
I have written a detailed examination of how Henry guides his father through the process. It’s long.
As Nathaniel spent 1814 and 1815 enduring ever more absurd treatments, hobbling around on crutches, and using books to build worlds for kittens, in Belgium Jacques Lisfranc de St. Martin noticed a peculiar type of injury to the mid-feet and ankles of “cavalrymen . . . after the war of the sixth coalition” (Lisfranc). “A study examining the injury in NFL players” found that even with advanced diagnostic tools and techniques and with specialized treatment protocols, afflicted NFL athletes still took an average of “11.1 months” to return to play throughout the 2010s (instreetclothes). A conclusive diagnosis is impossible, but Ebe insists that his family’s fear “that he would always be lame” was what enabled him to “acquir[e] the habit of constant reading. A Lisfranc injury fits with how Hawthorne’s injury occurred, has a healing time which accords with the length of his lameness, and would have eluded medical explanation and possibly have been re-injured through the various attempts at treatment.