Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)• Writer; born in Salem, Mass. • A descendant of a judge in the

Salem witch trials, • he spent a solitary, bookish

childhood with his widowed and reclusive mother.

• After graduating from Bowdoin College, he returned to Salem and prepared for a writing career with 12 years of solitary study and writing interrupted by summer tours through the Northeast.

• After privately publishing a novel, Fanshawe (1828), he began publishing stories in the Token and New England Magazine.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (cont’d.)

• These original allegories of New England Puritanism, including such classic stories as "The Minister's Black Veil," were collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837).

• A brief period of paid employment, including the compilation of popular children's works and a stint at the Boston Custom House (1839-41)-thanks to his friend, Senator Franklin Pierce-was followed by a half-year's residence at the transcendentalist community, Brook Farm.

• In 1842 he married Sophia Amelia Peabody, also a transcendentalist, and they moved to Concord, Mass., where he began a friendship with Henry David Thoreau.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (cont’d.)• Financial pressures forced his return to Salem

(1845-49) where he secured another political appointment, this time as surveyor of the port of Salem (1845-49).

• During these years he continued to publish Puritan tales ("Young Goodman Brown," "The Birthmark"); collections of his stories included Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) and The Snow Image (1851).

• His dismissal from the surveyorship initiated the brief period of his greatest novels: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and The Blithdale Romance (1852).

Nathaniel Hawthorne (cont’d.)

• He also wrote two children's classics: A Wonder-Book (1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853).

• His campaign biography of Franklin Pierce (1852) was rewarded with the U.S. consulship at Liverpool (1853--58).

• He then went to live in Italy (1858--59) where he began The Marble Faun, which he published after returning to the U.S.A. in 1860.

• Back in Concord, he published his last major work, Our Old Home (1863), which drew on his experiences in England, but by then he was becoming ill and disillusioned.

The Custom House

• The Scarlet Letter opens with a long preamble about how the book came to be written.

• The nameless narrator (based on Hawthorne) was the surveyor of the Custom House in Salem, Massachusetts.

• In the Custom House's attic, he discovered a number of documents, among them a manuscript that was bundled with a scarlet, gold-embroidered patch of cloth in the shape of an "A."

• The manuscript, the work of a past surveyor, detailed events that occurred some two hundred years before the narrator's time. When the narrator lost his customs post, he decided to write a fictional account of the events recorded in the manuscript.

• The Scarlet Letter is the final product.

Purpose of the Custom House• Establishes point of view and

narrative framework• Suspends disbelief by creating

the illusion of historical account (in other words “credibility is established”)

• Connects narrator of the story with Hawthorne himself (don’t confuse narrator with author)

More on the Custom House

• It provides a reference to Hawthorne’s ancestors and a rationale for his interest in the Puritan period

• It provides a picture of Hawthorne as not just a ‘brooder over sin,’ but a citizen concerned with practical affairs and contemporary politics.

• It demonstrates Hawthorne’s emotional response to his fellow human beings through various character sketches (the Collector, the Inspector and the Surveyor)

Overview of the Story

• The Scarlet Letter reaches to our nation’s historical and moral roots for the material of great tragedy.

• Set in the early New England colony, the novel shows the terrible impact a single, passionate act has on the lives of three members of the community; the defiant strong Hester Prynne; the fiery, tortured Reverend Dimmesdale; and the obsessed, vengeful Chillingworth.

Overviews and Synopses

Visit:www.sparksnotes.com,www.novelguides.com,

orwww.pinkmonkey.comfor plot overviews andchapter-by-chaptersynopses

American Romanticism

• Values feeling and intuition over reason• Places faith in inner experience and the power of

the imagination• Shuns the artificiality of civilization and seeks

unspoiled nature• Prefers youthful innocence to educated

sophistication• Champions individual freedom and the worth of

the individual

Romanticism in The Scarlet Letter

• The internal conflicts resulting from individuals actions and emotions that drive the story

• Hawthorne connects characters’ feelings with their outward appearance

• There are many scenes that take place away from civilization. Public places take on a negative connotation.

Symbols & Symbolism

• A person, object, image, word, or event that evokes a range of additional meaning beyond and usually more abstract than its literal significance. Symbols are educational devices for evoking complex ideas without having to resort to painstaking explanations that would make a story more like an essay than an experience.

• A literary or contextual symbol can be a setting, character, action, object, name, or anything else in a work that maintains its literal significance while suggesting other meanings. Such symbols go beyond conventional symbols; they gain their symbolic meaning within the context of a specific story.

Symbols in The Scarlet Letter

• The Scarlet Letter• Pearl• The Scaffold• The Rose near the Prison

Door• The Meteor• Hester’s Clothing• The Forest• The Brook• Indians• Black (the color)

Some Themes, Motifs and Conflicts

• The consequences of sin• Individual identity versus

society’s perspective • The destructiveness of

hypocrisy and vengeance• Passion versus principle

(or ideas)• Relationship between

strength of character and morality

Sources

• “Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne.” 16 September 2002. <http://search.biography.com/print_record.pl?id=15678>

• Elements of Literature: Fifth Course Literature of the United States

• Chong, Jia-Rui. SparkNotes on The Scarlet Letter. 16 September 2002. <http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/scarlet>