Feathertop

''Feathertop is also the name of a mountain in Victoria, Australia; see Mount Feathertop.

"Feathertop" is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in 1852.

Plot summary

In seventeenth century New England, the witch Mother Rigby builds a scarecrow to protect her garden. She is so taken with her own handiwork that she whimsically decides to bring the scarecrow to life and send it into town to woo Polly Gookin, the daughter of Judge Gookin, toward whom Mother Rigby bears an unspecified grudge. Once the stuffed man does come alive, Mother Rigby gives him the appearance of a normal human being - and a pipe, on which the Scarecrow must puff to keep himself alive.

Judge Gookin meets the Scarecrow, whom Mother Rigby has named Feathertop. Feathertop is introduced to Polly, and the two begin to fall in love. But when Polly and Feathertop gaze into a bewitched mirror, they see Feathertop reflected as a scarecrow, not as a man. Polly faints, and the now-terrified and anguished Scarecrow rushes back to Mother Rigby, where, knowing himself utterly rejected by Polly, he deliberately breaks his pipe and collapses in a lifeless heap. Mother Rigby reflects, "There are thousands upon thousands of coxcombs and charlatans in the world, made up of just such a jumble of wornout, forgotten, and good-for-nothing trash as he was! Yet they live in fair repute, and never see themselves for what they are," and decides that her "son" is better off as merely a scarecrow.

Publication history

"Feathertop: A Moralized Legend" was first published in two parts in The International Magazine, edited by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, in February and March 1852. It was later collected in 1854 as part of Mosses from an Old Manse.

In other media

The story, much embellished, was dramatized in 1908 as The Scarecrow, a full-length, four-act romantic melodrama by American poet-playwright Percy MacKaye. Most of the characters were re-named, Mother Rigby (renamed Goody Rickby) was given a definite reason to hate the Judge, Polly (now known as Rachel) was given a fianceé who is constantly jealous of the Scarecrow, and the story was given a more poignant and sentimental ending. And although Dickon never actually appears in "Feathertop", he is one of the major characters in The Scarecrow.

Warner Brothers made it into a much-altered animated children's movie also called The Scarecrow with a different story where Polly did not see Feathertop as a scarecrow.

"Feathertop" is mentioned in Bill Willingham's comic book series Fables. He makes a brief appearance in the prose story "A Wolf in the Fold" from the Fables trade paperback, where he accompanies Snow White on her trip to Carpathia to meet the Big Bad Wolf.

MacKaye's play has also been made into an opera, also called The Scarecrow, on two occasions - once in 1945, by Normand and Dorothy Lockwood, and again more recently, with music by Joseph Turrin and libretto by Bernard Stambler.

"False Young Man!" in the collection Dark Mondays is a variation on "Feathertop."