The Scarlet Letter

1. The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne Advanced Composition & Novel Mrs. Lutes

2. Nathaniel Hawthorne • One of the most famous and respected authors of the Romantic Movement, Nathaniel Hawthorne was among the first writers who explored and wrote about the hidden motivations and psychology of his characters. • While he did use some aspects of his own life in his novels and short stories, most of his work is remembered as a revealing look at early American history. The portrayal of Puritan and early American society in Hawthorne’s novels forever changed the legacy of American literature.

3. Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Hathorne) was born in Salem, Massachusetts July 4, 1804. His father, Nathaniel Sr., a Captain for the U.S. Navy, died when Hawthorne was only four years old. • Hawthorne’s ancestors were some of the first people to settle in “The New World.” John Hathorne, Hawthorne’s great-grandfather, was a judge in Salem in 1692 during the Salem Witch Trials. Many scholars speculate that after having learned of his dark and scandalous family history, Hawthorne changed the spelling of his last name to include a “w.”

4. Farmland near Brook Farm ↓ Salem Custom House ↓ • Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College from 1821 to 1824, were he met contemporaries such as writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future president Franklin Pierce. • After graduating, Hawthorne became somewhat of a recluse, hiding away in his home while writing Fanshawe (1828) and Twice-Told Tales (1837). • After spending many years of his life perfecting his writing, Hawthorne found a job at the Salem Custom House as port surveyor, to make ends meet. • He also temporarily joined the Transcendentalist movement in 1841, and lived at Brook Farm, a utopian farming community. After less than a year of farming, Hawthorne grew tired of Brook Farm and left. His time at Brook Farm was the inspiration for his novel, The Blithedale Romance (1852).

5. ← The Old Manse • On July 9, 1842, Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody, a painter and fellow Transcendentalist. The new couple looked for a home in Concord, Massachusetts and eventually moved into The Old Manse, one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s family homes. • However, due to mounting debt and other financial difficulties, the family was forced to move back to Salem, where Hawthorne once again worked at the Custom House to support his writing and growing family. • Over the years, Hawthorne and Sophia had three children, Una (1844), Julian (1846), and Rose (1851). Una, who died at a young age, was the inspiration for Pearl in The Scarlet Letter (1850).

6. Herman Melville ↓ The Wayside ↓ • After publishing The Scarlet Letter (1850), Hawthorne and his family moved to Lenox, Massachusetts, where he became friends with Herman Melville. • Melville saw the value and quality of Hawthorne’s writing, and later dedicated his masterpiece, Moby Dick, to the “genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne.” • Hawthorne then returned to Concord, where he bought The Hillside, the former home of Louisa May Alcott’s family, and renamed it The Wayside. • The comfort and tranquility of this home would not last long, however, after newly-elected president Franklin Pierce appointed Hawthorne as U.S. Consul to Liverpool, England and the family left their home to head to Europe in 1853.

7. Finally, in 1859, Hawthorne and his family moved back to The Wayside, after traveling throughout France and Italy and collecting materials for his last novel, The Marble Faun (1860). • Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, while visiting the White Mountains with Pierce. He is buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. • Sophia Hawthorne dedicated the rest of her life to editing and publishing the rest of her husband’s notebooks until she died in 1871.

8. The Gothic and Romantic Novel • The Scarlet Letter falls somewhere between two styles of novel writing, gothic and romantic, because Hawthorne used elements of both styles in his novel. • A traditional gothic novel, also known as the European Romantic novel, was expected to include dark and tempestuous settings full of ghosts, superstition, revenge, and madness. The gothic novel was often set in primitive medieval buildings with hidden passages and an underlying tone of terror and mystery.

9. On the other hand, Romanticism was a reaction to the Neoclassical Age of the colonial years—an age in which taste, polish, common sense, and reason were more important than emotion and imagination and resulted in a literature that was realistic, satirical, moral, correct, and affected strongly by politics. • Romanticism designates a literary and philosophical theory that tends to see the individual at the center of all life, and it places the individual, therefore, at the center of art, making literature valuable as an expression of unique feelings and particular attitudes and valuing its fidelity in portraying experiences. • Although it too evolved over time, the major components of a romantic novel include a focus on the beauty of nature (nature as a revelation of truth), the growth of an individual’s physical and emotional strength, elements of relationships and love, and the idea that insight and experience are more important than logic and science. • Romanticism seeks to find the Absolute, the Ideal, by transcending the actual, whereas Realism finds its values in the actual and Naturalism in the scientific laws that undergird the actual. • Hawthorne preferred allegory and psychological exploration rather than realistic social observation.

10. Literary Timeline • Neoclassical Age: Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin • Romanticism: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Harrriet Beecher Stowe • Realism: Emily Dickenson, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman • Naturalism: Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Jack London, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Edith Wharton, William Carlos Williams, Eugene O’Neill