Nathaniel Hawthorne and the scarlet letter

Honors/Pre-IB English II

Mr. Moccia

Basics of the man

• Born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts

• William Hathorne, the author's great-great-great-grandfather, a Puritan, was the first of the family to emigrate from England

• Hawthorne added the “w”

Ambivalence toward ancestry

• He disagreed with the Puritan religion’s “hypocritical” overzealousness, its over involvement in personal lives, and theocracy

• But he felt connected in the sense that he felt “influenced” by them: their “blood” ran in him; he also respected their strength and will power

College, in his own words

• “I was educated (as the phrase is) at Bowdoin College. I was an idle student, negligent of college rules and the Procrustean details of academic life, rather choosing to nurse my own fancies than to dig into Greek roots and be numbered among the learned Thebans.”

Sophia Peabody

• After three years of engagement, Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody on July 9, 1842

• Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne had three children

Publishing the novel

• Hawthorne returned to writing and published The Scarlet Letter in mid-March 1850

• The book became an immediate best-seller and initiated his most lucrative period as a writer

death

• Hawthorne died in his sleep on May 19, 1864, in Plymouth, New Hampshire

Literary movements

• Hawthorne's works belong to romanticism• Romanticism rejects the

Reason, Progress, and Science of the Enlightenment, choosing instead Nature and the Emotions

• Hawthorne was more of a “dark romantic”• Cautionary tales that suggest

that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent (or pronounced) natural qualities of humanity

Themes

• Sin / Adam and Eve• Positive and negatives of

eating the apple

• Ambivalence toward Puritanism

• Personal Identity: socially or individually created?

• Isolation

• Guilt and Blame

• Hypocrisy

• Compassion and Forgiveness

• Revenge