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Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne. 1804-1864. Family History. Great-great-grandfather, William Hathorne, ordered the whipping of Anne Coleman and four others in the streets of Salem. Great-grandfather, John Hathorne, the magistrate presiding over the trial of the accused witches of Salem (1692).

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Nathaniel Hawthorne

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  1. NathanielHawthorne 1804-1864

  2. Family History • Great-great-grandfather, William Hathorne, ordered the whipping of Anne Coleman and four others in the streets of Salem. • Great-grandfather, John Hathorne, the magistrate presiding over the trial of the accused witches of Salem (1692). • Hawthorne preoccupied with family history.

  3. Childhood • Born July 4, 1804 in Salem, MA • Father died when Hawthorne was four years old • Had two sisters: one older, one younger • Mother pregnant at time of marriage • Went to live with mother’s relatives (wealthy Mannings) • Sent to Bowdoin College in Maine

  4. Reclusive Years in Salem • Anonymously published short stories and a novel, Fanshawe. • Later formally withdrew most of this early work, discounting it as the work of inexperienced youth. • Burned most of his works from these years.

  5. Back into Society • Editor for The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge in 1836 • Appointed to the Boston Custom House in 1839 • Invested in Brook Farm commune • Became engaged to Sophia Peabody, married in 1842

  6. Sophia Peabody • From influential Salem family • Sister Elizabeth Palmer Peabody • Educator and suffragette • Editor of The Dial • Illustrator and painter • Occasional invalid • Had three children with Hawthorne: • Una, Julian, Rose

  7. Governmental Offices • Took many government appointments to earn living • Between 1846 and 1849 served as a surveyor of the Salem Custom House. • Wrote campaign biography for Franklin Pierce • College classmate • Pierce appointed Hawthorne as the US Consul to Liverpool, England

  8. His End • Lived abroad in England and Italy for a number of years • Time away provided material for The Marble Faun • Became ill and underwent a loss of literary creativity • Died in Plymouth, NH on May 19, 1864 • Buried in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery in Concord

  9. Not all authors of the period as optimistic as the transcendentalists. Saw the universe as confusing and difficult. Evil and suffering had to be explained, accounted for. Puritan backdrop Life was ultimately mysterious. The Dark Side of Humanity

  10. Themes and Influence • Individualism • Society • Guilt • Alienation • Puritan Society in New England • Salem Witch Trials • Psychology

  11. Hawthorne’s work preoccupied with effects of Puritanism in New England, strong sense of inherited guilt Had connections to the Transcendentalists (was friends w/ Emerson and Thoreau), but had a very different philosophy: Instead of asserting freedom, he points out human limitations His fiction: Allegories of the heart Sense of hidden depravity Hawthorne’s Characteristics 11

  12. Hawthorne’s Dualities • Love for allegory and symbol • Dealt with tensions involving: • light versus dark; • warmth versus cold; • faith versus doubt; • heart versus mind; • internal versus external worlds.

  13. Setting Themes Idea Feature Technique Puritan New England Evil & sin “Black vision” toward humans Ambiguity Symbolism Features of His Works

  14. Themes The dreamlike The imaginary The supernatural The American past Techniques Allegorical abstraction Transcendence of material world Operates in intermediate zone of imagination and dreams The Romance

  15. Negative Romanticism “[I]t is that blackness in Hawthorne, of which I have spoken, that so fixes and fascinates me” (Herman Melville).

  16. Use of allegory A story with both a literal and symbolic meaning Use of symbolism Symbol – a concrete item that represents an abstract idea Also known for: Sense of structure Moral insight Hawthorne’s Style

  17. Literary Style • Hawthorne’s idea of romance versus novel • Not entirely faithful to reality • Does not portray real people, but does remain true to human emotion • At times, his allegories are difficult to identify • Used the voice of a storyteller to draw readers in and set the stage for his hidden meanings • The use of a storyteller also allows readers to consider the “truth” of such tales • Hawthorne’s argument was that readers’ imaginations could be manipulated through the mood and images of the text

  18. Public Symbols • Conventional or “public” symbol: symbols that mean the same thing to most people because they are so much a part of human experience. • journey=quest • rivers=time and eternity • apple/fruit=temptation • snake=evil • peacock=pride • garden=place where you can frolic (i.e. be sexual)

  19. Contextual Symbols • Contextual or “private” symbols: meaning generated by the work; different meaning in different context. • Pink Ribbons in “Young Goodman Brown”: innocence, girlishness; femininity; pink mixes innocence (white) with sexuality (red) • Staff in “YGB”: sin (devil’s staff); uncertainty of purpose (twisted); a journey (walking staff); judge’s pointer (Devil uses it to point at people and judge them) • Forest in “YGB”: uncertainty; wilderness; sin; confusion; nature as opposed to civilization; natural law vs. human law: good and bad connotations; compare to Puritan wilderness.

  20. Allegory • Story with second meaning beneath the surface • Even though the surface story may have its own interest, the author’s major interest is in the ulterior meaning. • Can be defined as an extended metaphor or a series of symbols, but really can be distinguished from both. • System of related comparisons, not one comparison drawn out like an extended metaphor • Usually a 1:1 correspondence b/t detail and meanings. • Differs from symbolism in that it emphasizes the meanings of the images, not the image itself.

  21. Works Romances Short Stories Tales

  22. Select Works • Fanshawe (1828) • Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) • The Scarlet Letter (1850) • The House of the Seven Gables (1851) • The Snow-Image (1851) • The Blithedale Romance (1852) • Life of Franklin Pierce (1852) • The Marble Faun (1860)

  23. Types of Stories: Science Fiction • “Celestial Railroad” (1843), strong allegorical quality • raised the question of the difficulty in dealing with doubt and sin in human life • “The Birthmark” (1843), “Rappaccini’s Daughter” • Explored the conflict between science and nature

  24. Types of Stories: Psychological • Secret guilt, problem, pride, envy, desire for revenge, problem of sin • “The Minister’s Black Veil,”“Wakefield,”“Lady Eleanore’s Mantle,”“Young Goodman Brown,”“Ethan Brand” • The Puritan Past –The Scarlet Letter (1850) – raises the question of whether Hester and her lover Dimmesdale were really sinful

  25. Harriet Beecher Stowe on Hawthorne I was lying back in my study-chair, with my heels luxuriously propped on an ottoman, reading for the two-hundredth time Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, or his Twice-Told Tales, I forget which,--I only know that these books constitute my cloud-land, where I love to sail away in dreamy quietude, forgetting the war, the price of coal and flour, the rates of exchange, and the rise and fall of gold.  What do all these things matter, as seen from those enchanted gardens in Padua where the weird Rappaccini tends his enchanted plants, and his gorgeous daughter fills us with the light and magic of her presence, and saddens us with the shadowy allegoric mystery of her preternatural destiny? From The Lady Who Does Her Own Work (1864)

  26. Intertextual References • Allusions in "Rappaccini‘s Daughter" • Bible: Garden of Eden • Dante‘s Beatrice from The Divine Comedy

  27. The Garden of Eden • Garden: perverted Eden, unnatural paradise • Dr. Rappaccini ~ God over a re-created Adam and Eve • Beatrice ~ the temptress Eve who leads Giovanni to his fall • Or, in a different reading: Giovanni: tempts Beatrice/ Eve with the antidote/apple

  28. Dante‘s Beatrice "Hawthorne‘s deliberate evocation of The Divine Comedy and his use of the name Beatrice, which is synonymous in Dante‘s writings with ideal feminine goodness and beauty, serve to foreshadow Beatrice Rappaccini‘s ultimate purity"(Bertan, 260).

  29. The Scarlet Letter • In a Puritan colony in 17th century New England, Hester Prynne scandalizes the community when she falls pregnant and refuses to name the father. • She is forced to wear a scarlet letter A as a permanent reminder of her shame.

  30. Hawthorne’s most famous novel Chief Characters: Hester Prynne: symbol of romantic individualism who remains in her heart the master of her free will The Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale: a negative character who can not face his “right for happiness” Roger Chillingworth: a cold intellectual devoid of warm human feelings Pearl: an illustration of the concept of natural human who emphasizes on being a natural being instead of being a moral duplication The Scarlet Letter 30

  31. Major Symbol: Letter A • Scarlet letter the central symbol. • Changes meaning for the characters as Hester’s character changes. • The A becomes a pathway to redemption

  32. Hester Chillingworth Dimmesdale Pearl Sin Evil The Scarlet Letter Adultery Ability Angel Atonement

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