Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Nathaniel Hawthorne

• The Scarlet Letter

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Puritanism/Scarlet Letter Timeline

• In the novel
• -Ch. 1-4 public scaffold scene Pearlbaby in
  mothers arms
• -Scene at Governor Bellinghams
• Pearl3 years old
• -Novels climax at scaffold
• Pearl7 years old
• -Last Chapter of novel (sort of)

• In History
• -Pilgrims/Puritans come
• to America
• -Harvard founded-religious higher education
• -Christmas Celebration outlawed by Puritans
• -Salem Witch Trials dissent, love triangles,
  landlustbreakdown of Puritan theocracy w/Judge
  John Hathorne

• 1620-1628
• 1638
• 1642
• 1645
• 1649
• 1655
• 1692
• 1850

Hawthorne publishes Scarlet Letter (200 years
later, during Romantic Era, so written in
romantic style, but with Puritan influences and
themes)
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Hawthorne Bio Info

• 1804-Childhood
• College 1821-1825
• Isolation 1825-1837
• 1837
• 1839
• 1842
• 1846-1849
• 1850
• 1851
• 1852
• 1853-1860
• 1860
• 1863
• 1864

• Salem born, father dies, family poor, single
  mom, adds w
• Bowdoin, Maine w/F. Pierce, goofed off, mediocre
  student
• dismal chamber to learn how to write well
• Twice Told Tales, about secrets of violence in
  heart
• Engaged utopian farm-Brook Farm
  w/Transcendentalists
• Marries Sophia, moves to Concord where famous
  writers
• job at Custom House mom dies, loses job
• Scarlet Letter and success hellfire story
• House of Seven Gables and Snow Image
• Blithedale Romance
• U.S. Counsel at Liverpool, Marble Fauntravel
  log
• Pierce defeated LincolnCivil War, H. out of
  place
• journals Our Old Home
• dies (of solitude, according to Emerson)

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT

• To what period of American
• Literature does Hawthorne belong??
• Lets take a look at the history of American
  Literature..

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT

• English Heritage (Elizabethan Age)
• 1570-1650 Early Colonial period- Puritan
  writings, no distinctive American literature
• 1750-1800 Later Colonial period- Age of
  Reason/Enlightenment (Neoclassicism, Rationalism)

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT

• 1800-1850 American Renaissance/ Romanticism-
  slave narratives, inner feelings, the burden of a
  Puritan past, the rejection of Neoclassicism
• Transcendentalism was a part of this

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American Romanticism

• Authors Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe
  (more Gothic/Dark Romantic), Hawthorne
• Contemporary with Transcendentalists
• Emerson and Thoreau
• Valued feelings and intuition over reason
• Reaction against classicism (rationalism)
• Valued individual freedom and worth of individual
  
• Explore subconscious pre-Freudian psychology,
  faith in inner experience
• More individualistic, less societal about
  finding yourself
• Seems ancient, traditional, gothic, pastoral
• Role of Frontier, critical of societyescape to
  nature to gain moral and spiritual development
• Gothic elements (darkness, considers conflicts
  between good and evil, sin, insanity,
  psychological effects, etc.)
• Power of imagination
• Beauty in exotic, supernatural,
  myth/legend/folklore

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT

• TRANSCENDENTALISM
• Boston-centered movement, led by Emerson, was an
  important force in New England circles
• Human existence transcends the sensory realm
• Formalism in favor of individual responsibility
• Belief in individual choice and consequence
• Focus on the positive

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT

• SUBDIVISION OF ROMANTICISM GOTHIC LITERATURE,
  the dark romantics(1800-1850)
• -use of supernatural
• -motif of double (both good and evil in
• characters sin and evil does exist)
• -depression, dark forests
• -Poe, Hawthorne, Melville
• -emphasis on symbolism (which we will
  discuss later)

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NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

• The Scarlet Letter is powerfully written but my
  writings do not, nor ever will, appeal to the
  broadest class of sympathies, and therefore will
  not obtain a very wide popularity.
• -Hawthorne, after
  finishing the novel

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NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

• As a literary artist
• First American pro writer college educated,
  familiar with the great European writers
• 4,000 copies of The Scarlet Letter sold in the
  first 10 days

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LITERARY ELEMENTS

• Characters
• Mood
• Setting
• Plot
• Symbolism
• Themes

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LITERARY ELEMENTS MOOD

• The SOMBER, DARK mood is well-defined from the
  beginning
• sad-colored garments of spectators, the prison
  door which is heavily timbered and studded with
  iron spikes

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LITERARY ELEMENTS SETTING

• 17th century Puritanical New England (Mass.)
• What was America like then?

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LITERARY ELEMENTS SETTING

• Life in the Mid 1600s
• Boston was founded just 2 decades earlier
• 1st governor was John Winthrop, who governed
  based on religious and civic ideals
• People were hardworking and devoted
• 1630s- Puritans established a number of
  settlements in Massachusetts
• PURITANISM involved belief that the church of
  England was too much influenced by the Catholic
  church
• Strict code, on which people were expected to act
  and judged upon
• Rejected belief that divine authority is
  channeled through any one single person (i.e. the
  pope)
• THEOCRACY- state governed by the church

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LITERARY ELEMENTS SETTING

• What aspects of this type of religious society
  can be seen in The Scarlet Letter?
• How do you think Hawthorne views this type of
  society?

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How did his life affect the writing of the novel?

• John Hathorne presided over
• the Salem Witch Trials of 1692
• Major William Hathorne (1608-1681) persecuted
  quakers

1. Influences on Hawthorne Puritan background
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MAJOR THEMES

• PURITAN MORALITY v. PASSION AND INDIVIDUALISM
  /Adultery
• Individual Rights/Self-trust v. accommodation to
  authority
• Conventional v. unconventional gender roles
• Guilt sense of guilt forced by puritanical
  heritage/society
• Hypocrisy v. Integrity
• Moral Pride v. Intellect
• The penalties of isolation/ isolation because of
  self-cause and societal cause
• Patriarchal power
• Belief in fate/free will
• Impossibility of earthly perfection

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MAJOR THEMESPerhaps his greatest interest was
the human capacity on how sin operates on the
inner workings of minds

• With the superstition common to his
  brotherhood, he fancied himself given over to a
  fiend, to be tortured with frightful dreams, and
  desperate thoughts, the sting of remorse, and
  despair of pardon as a foretaste of what awaits
  him beyond the grave. But it was the constant
  shadow of my presence!--the closest propinquity
  of the man whom he had most vilely wronged!--and
  who had grown to exist only by this perpetual
  poison of the direst revenge! Yea, indeed!--he
  did not err!--there was a fiend at his elbow! A
  mortal man, with once a human heart, has become a
  fiend for his especial torment!" The unfortunate
  physician, while uttering these words, lifted his
  hands with a look of horror, as if he had beheld
  some frightful shape, which he could not
  recognize, usurping the place of his own image in
  a glass.

smile with a sinister meaning
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How did his life affect the writing of the novel?

• 2) Salem- childhood, later work at the Custom
  House, as Surveyor of the Port
• The Custom House introduction creates a FRAME
  STORY
• This introduction gives an account of his
  experience as surveyor he attacks the officials
  who connived in his dismissal Like his heroine
  Hester, Hawthorne emerges from confrontation with
  a self-righteous society as an individual of
  integrity,passion, and moral superiority.

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SYMBOLISM

• Symbolism is evident in the following objects in
  The Scarlet Letter.
• What implications are made through the use of
  these symbols?

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Symbols

• Rose/rosebush
• Letter A
• Light/Dark
• Pearl
• The Leech
• Others

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LITERARY ELEMENT SYMBOLISM IN THE NOVEL
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SYMBOLISM

• The A!
• It was so artistically done, and with so much
  fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that
  it had all the effect of a last and fitting
  decoration to the apparel which she wore and
  which was of a splendor in accordance with the
  taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was
  allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the
  colony.
• Not a stitch in that embroidered letter, but
  she has felt it in her heart.

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(No Transcript)
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SYMBOLISM

• Hesters and Pearls Clothing
• Her own dress was of the coarsest materials and
  the most sombre hue with only that one
  ornamentthe scarlet letterwhich it was her doom
  to wear.
• The childs attire, on the other hand, was
  distinguished by a fanciful, or, we might rather
  say, a fantastic ingenuity, which served, indeed,
  to heighten the airy charm that early began to
  develop itself in the little girl

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SYMBOLISM

• PEARL (the name)
• Her Pearl!For so had Hester called her not as
  a name expressive of her aspect, which had
  nothing of the calm, white, unimpassioned lustre
  that would be indicated by the comparison. But
  she named the infant Pearl, as being of great
  pricepurchased with all she hadher mothers
  only treasure!

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SYMBOLISM

• The Leech

He gathered herbs here and there
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SYMBOLISM

• Can you think of any more?

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The Custom House General Info.

• Custom House Government building where customs
  are collected and where ships are cleared to
  enter or leave county (by water)
• Hawthorne worked there for 27 months 1847-49 as
  surveyor (pretty much everyone elses boss)
• The Custom House is both factual and
  fictionalhe did work at one and tells stories of
  real people, but made up some of the stories,
  esp. the Letter A and Hester Prynne
• The Custom House is intro. to Scarlet
  Letterincluded for and more text, but also to
  set up explanation why he wrote it (fictional)
  and themes of isolation, alienation, etc.

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Custom House Picture
From first page of "The Custom-House" chapter in
the 1878 edition of The Scarlet Letter published
in 1878 by James R. Osgood and Co. in Boston.
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THE END