Feathertop

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

Feathertop is an 1854 short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in his book Mosses from an Old Manse.

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

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Feathertop

In seventeenth century New England, the witch Mother Rigby has been conspiring with Dickon, the devil, to bring a scarecrow to life. The plan is for the scarecrow 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.

[edit] In Other Media

The story, much embellished, was dramatized in 1908 as The Scarecrow (play), 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 an animated movie also called "The 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 comic book, where he accompanies Snow White on her trip to Carpathia to meet 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.

Kage Baker's short story "Oh, False Young Man!" in the collection Dark Mondays is a variation on "Feathertop."