Book I

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Title: Book I

1
American Literature

Book I

2
Table of Contents

Introduction
Brief Outline of American Literature
Chapter I Colonial Period
Chapter II Revolutionary PeriodBenjamin
FranklinPhilip Freneau
Chapter III American RomanticismWashington
IrvingJames Fenimore CooperWilliam Cullen
BryantEdgar Allan PoeNathaniel Hawthorne

3
Introduction

What is literature?Writings that are valued as
works of art, esp. fiction, drama and poetry.
Forms (genres) of literature?Poetry, novel
(fiction), drama, prose, essay, epic, elegy,
short story, journalism, sermon, (auto)
biography, travel accounts, novelette, etc.

4
Puritanism in America

They follow the ideas of the Swiss reformer John
Calvin.
Doctrines- Predestination- Original sin and
total depravity (human beings are basically
evil.)- Limited atonement (or the Salvation of a
selected few)
Puritan values (creeds)Hard work, thrift,
piety, sobriety, simple tastes.Puritans are more
practical, tougher, and to be ever ready for any
misfortune and tragic failure.They are
optimistic.

5
Puritanism in America

Why did Puritans come to America?- to reform the
Church of England- to have an entirely new
church- to escape religious persecution Gods
chosen people To seek a new Garden of Eden To
build City of God on earth

6
Puritanism in America

Influence - American Puritanism was one of the
most enduring shaping influences in American
thought and American literature.- American
literature is based on a myth, i.e. the Biblical
myth of the Garden of Eden.- Puritanism can be
compared with Chinese Confucianism.

7
Brief Outline of American literature

Colonial period (1607-1775)Anne
BradstreetEdward Taylor
Revolutionary period (1775-1783)Benjamin
FranklinPhilip Freneau
Democratic Period (1783-1802)
Romanticism (1820-1861)Washington IrvingEdgar
Allan PoeNathaniel Howthorne William Whitman
Transcendentalism (New England
Renaissance)Ralph Waldo EmersonFillip Thoreau

Realism (1861-1914)Mark TwainHenry
JamesNaturalism Stephen CraneTheodore
Dreiser
The 1920sT.S. EliotWilliam FaulknerErnest
Hemingway (Lost Generation)Imagism Ezra Pound

8
Brief Outline of American literature

The 1930sSteinbeckHarlem Renaissance(Black
American literature)HughesWrightEllison
American DramaEugene ONeill

The Post-war SceneSaul BellowSalingerPoetryC
onfessional PoetryBlack Mountain PoetsSan
Francisco RenaissanceThe Beat GenerationThe New
York Poets

9
Chapter One

Colonial Period (1607-1775)

10
Three major poets in colonial period

Anne Bradstreet
Michael Wigglesworth
Edward Taylor

11
1. Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)
the first collection published by English
colonists living in America
the first noted poetess in colonial period

Anne Bradstreets WorksSome verses on the
Burning of Our HouseThe Spirit and the
FleshThe Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America
Anne Bradstreets Life She was born and
educated in England. At the age of 18, she came
to America in 1630 with her father and husband.
She had 8 children. She became known as the
Tenth Muse who appeared in America.

12
2. Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705)

the most popular poet in American Colonial Period
Work The Day of Doom (1662)

3. Edward Taylor (1642?-1729)
the finest poet in colonial period Work
Preparatory Meditation
13
Features of Colonial Poets
Puritan poets

They were servants of God.
They faithfully imitated and transplanted English
literary traditions.

In English style
14
Chapter Two

Revolutionary Period (1775-1783)

The Age of Reason American Enlightenment
15

In the 18th century, people believed in mans own
nature and the power of human reason. With
Franklin as its spokesman, the 18th century
America experienced an age of reason.
Words had never been so useful and so important
in human history. People wrote a lot of political
writings. Numerous pamphlets and printings were
published. These works agitated revolutionary
people not only in America but also around the
world.

The 18th-century American Enlightenment was a
movement marked by an emphasis on rationality
rather than tradition, scientific inquiry instead
of unquestioning religious dogma, and
representative government in place of monarchy.
Enlightenment thinkers and writers were devoted
to the ideals of justice, liberty, and equality
as the natural rights of man.
The colonists who would form a new nation were
firm believers in the power of reason they were
ambitious, inquisitive, optimistic, practical,
politically astute, and self-reliant.

17
Leading writers and their works

Thomas Jefferson(1743-1826)
The Declaration of Independence (1776)
Thomas Paine(1737-1809)
Common Sense (1776)
Benjamin Franklin
Autobiography
Philip Freneau
The Wild Honey Suckle

18
1. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
19
??
1. Works
????

The Autobiography
Poor Richards Almanack

2. Life

Benjamin Franklin came from a Calvinist
background.
He was born into a poor candle-makers family. He
had very little education. He learned in school
only for two years, but he was a voracious
reader.
At 12, he was apprenticed to his elder
half-brother, a printer.
At 16, he began to publish essays under the
pseudonym Silence Do good .
At 17, he ran away to Philadelphia to make his
own fortune.
He set himself up as an independent printer and
publisher. In 1727 he founded the Junto club.

Franklins Contributions to Society

He helped found the Pennsylvania Hospital.
He founded an academy which led to the University
of Pennsylvania.
And he helped found the American Philosophical
Society.

Franklins Contributions to Science

He was also remembered for volunteer fire
departments, effective street lighting, the
Franklin stove, bifocal glasses and efficient
heating devices.
And for his lightning-rod, he was called the new
Prometheus who had stolen fire from heaven.

Franklins Contributions to the U.S.

He was the only American to sign the four
documents that created the United States
The Declaration of Independence,
The Treaty of Alliance with France,
The Treaty of Peace with England,
The Constitution

21
3. Evaluation

The Autobiography is a record of self-examination
and self-improvement.
Benjamin Franklin was a spokesman for the new
order of the 18th century enlightenment
The Autobiography is a how-to-do-it book, a book
on the art of self-improvement. (for example,
Franklins 13 virtues)
Through telling a success story of self-reliance,
the book celebrates, in fact, the fulfillment of
the American dream.
The Autobiography is in the pattern of Puritan
simplicity, directness, and concision.

22
2. Philip Freneau (1752-1832)

Poet of the American Revolution
Father of American Poetry
Pioneer of the New Romanticism
A gifted and versatile lyric poet

23
???????
1. Works

The Rising Glory of America (1772)
The House of Night (1779, 1786)
The British Prison Ship (1781)
To the Memory of the Brave Americans (1781)
The Wild Honey Suckle (1786)
The Indian Burying Ground (1788)
The Dying Indian Tomo Chequi

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24
2. Life

He was born in New York.
At 16, he entered the College of New Jersey (now
Princeton University).
While still an undergraduate, he wrote in
collaboration with one of his friends (H. H.
Brackenridge) a poem entitled The Rising Glory
of America.

The wild honeysuckle

( It pronounced the virtues of a new nation
progressing towards its freedom America would be
a land blessed with sweet liberty!/Without whose
aid the nobles genius fails,/And science
irretrievable must die)

In 1771 he decided do a postgraduate study in
theology. But two years later he gave it up.
Later he attended the War of Independence, and he
was captured by British army in 1780.
After being released, he published The British
Prison Ship in 1781.
In the same year, he published To the Memory of
the Brave Americans.
After war, he supported Jefferson, and
contributed greatly to American government.
But after 50 years old, he lived in poverty. And
at last he died in a blizzard.

25
3. Evaluation

He was the most significant poet of 18th century
America.
Some of his themes and images anticipated the
works of such 19th century American Romantic
writers as Cooper, Emerson, Poe and Melville.

4. Aspects of Freneau

Poet of American Independence Freneau provides
incentive and inspiration to the revolution by
writing such poems as "The Rising Glory of
America" and "Pictures of Columbus."
Journalist Freneau was editor and contributor of
The Freeman's Journal (Philadelphia) from
1781-1784. In his writings, he advocated the
essence of what is known as Jeffersonian
democracy - decentralization of government,
equality for the masses, etc.
Freneau's Religion Freneau is described as a
deist - a believer in nature and humanity but not
a pantheist. In deism, religion becomes an
attitude of intellectual belief, not a matter of
emotional of spiritual ecstasy. Freneau shows
interest and sympathy for the humble and the
oppressed.
Freneau as Father of American Poetry His major
themes are death, nature, transition, and the
human in nature. All of these themes become
important in 19th century writing. His famous
poems are "The Wild Honey-Suckle" (1786), "The
Indian Burying Ground" (1787), "The Dying Indian
Tomo Chequi" (1784), "The Millennium" (1797), "On
a Honey Bee" (1809), "To a Caty-Did" (1815), "On
the Universality and Other Attributes of the God
of Nature," "On the Uniformity and Perfection of
Nature," and "On the Religion of Nature" (the
last three written in 1815).

26
Poem Appreciation

The
Wild Honeysuckle
The following poem was published in his Poems
(1786) and was virtually unread in the time when
he was living.
In the poem the poet expresses his keen awareness
of the liveliness and transience of nature
celebrating the beauty of the frail forest
flower, thus showing his deep love for nature.
The poem was written in six-line iambic
tetrameter stanzas rhymed on ababcc pattern.
The poem is said to anticipate the
nineteenth-century romantic use of simple nature
imagery.
It is considered one of the authors finest
nature poems.

Fair flower, that dost so comely grow,
Hid in this silent, dull retreat,
Untouchd thy honeyd blossoms blow,
Unseen thy little branches greet
No roving foot shall crush thee here,
No busy hand provoke a tear.
By Natures self in white arrayd,
She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,
And planted here the guardian shade,
And sent soft waters murmuring by
Thus quietly thy summer goes,
Thy days declining to repose.

Smit with those charms, that must decay,
I grieve to see your future doom,
They died----nor were those flowers more gay,
The flowers that did in Eden bloom
Unpitying frosts, and Autumns power
Shall leave no vestige of this flower.
From morning suns and evening dews
At first thy little being came
If nothing once, you nothing lose,
For when you die you are the same
The space between, is but an hour,
The frail duration of a flower.

29
The Indian Burying Ground

The poem was published in the poets
Miscellaneous Works in 1788.
Like The Wild Honey Suckle, it anticipated
romantic primitivism and the celebration of the
noble savage.
The poem portrays sympathetically the spirit of
the nomadic Indian hunters, who were
traditionally buried in a sitting position and
with images of the objects they knew in life.
It is believed to be the earliest to romanticize
the Indian as a child of nature.
The poem was written in ten iambic tetrameter
quatrains with the rhyme scheme of abab.

In spite of all the learned have said
I still my old opinion keep,
The posture, that we give the dead,
Points out the souls eternal sleep.
Not so the ancients of these lands
The Indian, when from life released,
Again is seated with his friends,
And shares again the joyous feast.
His imaged birds, and painted bowl,
And venison, for a journey dressed.
Bespeak the nature of the soul,
Activity, that knows no rest.

His bow, for action ready bent,
And arrows, with a head of stone,
Can only mean that life is spent,
And not the old ideas gone.
Thou, stranger, that shalt come this way.
No fraud upon the dead commit
Observe the swelling turf, and say
They do not lie, but here they sit.
Here still a lofty rock remains,
On which the curious eye may trace,
(Now wasted, half, by wearing rains)
The fancies of a ruder race.

Here still an aged elm aspires,
Beneath whose farprojecting shade
(And which the shepherd still admires)
The children of the forest played!
There oft a restless Indian queen
(Pale Shebah, with her braided hair)
And many a barbarous form is seen
To chide the man that lingers there.
By midnight moons, oer moistening dews,
In habit for the chase arrayed,
The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer, a shade!

And long shall timorous fancy see
The painted chief, and pointed spear,
And Reasons self shall bow the knee
To shadows and delusions here.

34
Chapter Three

American Romanticism
(1820-1860)

35
General Introduction

Romanticism
The term ,Romanticism, is associated with
imagination and boundlessness, as contrasted with
classicism, which is commonly associated with
reason and restriction. The most profound and
comprehensive idea of romanticism is the vision
of a greater personal freedom for the individual.

36
Its origins may be traced to

the economic rise of the middle class, struggling
to free itself from feudal and monarchical
restrictions
the individualism of the Renaissance
the Reformation, which was based on the belief in
an immediate relationship between man and God
the scientific deism, which emphasized the
deitys benevolence

the psychology of Locke, Hartley, and others, who
contended that minds are formed by environmental
conditions, thus seeming to be indicate that all
men are created equal and may be improved by
environmental changes
the optimistic humanitarianism of Shaftsbury
the writings of Rousseau who contended that man
is natural good, institutions also having made
him wicked.

38
Romantic Attitudes

1. Appeals to imagination use of the "willing
suspension of disbelief."
2. Stress on emotion rather than reason
optimism, geniality.
3. Subjectivity in form and meaning.

39
1. Time Range

From the end of the 18th century through the
outbreak of the Civil War.

40
2. Ideals

Ideals Democracy and political equality became
the ideals of the new nation.

41
3. Social Background

Economic boom
Industrialism
Immigration
Westward expansion

optimism and hope among people

42
4. Features

American Romanticism was both imitative and
independent.
Imitative
Independent

English and European Romanticists
Emerson and Whitman
43
5. Themes

home, family, nature, children and idealized
love, etc.

Imitative
Independent

major problems of American life, like the
westward expansion and democracy and equality,
etc.

44
Washington Irving (1783--1859)

Father of American Imaginative literature
Father of the American short story

45
1) Works

A History of New York from the Beginning of the
World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty by Diedrich
Knickerbocker

????
46
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent
????

Rip Van Winkle
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

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?????
47

????????

c) Bracebridge Hall 1822
d) Oliver Goldsmith 1840
e) Life of George Washington 1855-1859

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????
48
2)Life

Irving was born into a wealthy New York merchant
family. From a very early age, he began to read
widely and write juvenile poems, essays and
plays.
Later, he studied law.

His first book A History of New York, written
under the name of Diedrich Knickerbocker, was a
great success and won him wide popularity.
In 1815, he went to England to take care of his
family business there, and when it failed, had to
write to support himself.

With the publication of The Sketch Book, he won a
measure of international recognition.

Knickerbocker
Rip Van Winkle
51

In 1826, as an American diplomatic attaché, he
was sent to Spain, where he gathered material for
his writing.
From 1829 to 1832, he was secretary of the U.S
Legation in London.

Then when he was fifty, he returned to America
and bought Sunnyside, his famous home. There he
spent the rest of his life, living a life of
leisure and comfort, except for a period of four
years (1842--1846), when he was Minister to Spain.

View of Sunnyside
53
3)Evaluation

Washington Irving was the first American writer
of imaginative literature to gain international
fame.
The short story as a genre in American literature
began with Irvings The Sketch Book.
The Sketch Book also marked the beginning of
American Romanticism.

54
2. James Fenimore Cooper(1789-1851)

novelist

55
1) Works.

Leatherstocking Tales
The Pioneers 1823 4
The Last of the Mohicans 1826 .2
The Prairie 1827 5
The Pathfinder 1840 3
The Deerslayer 1841 ........1

Precaution 1820
The Spy 1821
The Pilot 1823

57
2) Life

Born into a rich land-holding family of New
Jersey, Cooper was one of the new American
authors who did not have to worry about money.
He was sent to Yale at 14, but was expelled in
his junior year because of improper behavior.

He went and spent five years at sea then, while
still in his early twenties, he inherited his
fathers vast fortune and settled down to a life
of comfort and even luxury.
His second book, The Spy, a novel about the
American Revolution, proved to be an immense
success.

He was a prolific writer, wrote more than thirty
novels.

Fiction
Precaution,1820
The Spy,1821
The Pioneers, 1823
The Pilot, 1824
Lionel Lincoln,1824
The Last of the Mohicans, 1826
The Red Rover,1827
The Prairie, 1827
The Red Rover,1827
The Red Rover, 1828
The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish,1829
The Water Witch,1830

The Bravo,1831
The Heidenmauer,1832
The Headsman,1833
The Monikins,1835
Homeward Bound,1838
Home as Found,1838
Mercedes of Castile,1840
The Pathfinder, 1840
The Deerslayer, 1841
The Two Admirals,1842
The Wing-and-Wing,1842
Le Mouchoir an Autobiographical Romance,1843

Ned Myers, 1843
Wyandotte, 1843
Afloat and Ashore,1844
Miles Wallingford A Sequel to Afloat and
Ashore,1844
Satanstoe,1845
The Chain Bearer,1845
The Redskins,1846
The Crater,1847
Jack Tier,1848
Oak Openings, 1849
The Sea Lions,1849
The Ways of the Hour,1850.

Non-Fiction
Notions of the Americans Picked Up by a
Travelling Bachelor, 1828
Sketches of Switzerland,1836
Gleanings in Europe,1837
The American Democrat,1838
The History of the Navy of the United States of
America,1839.

Title Publication Date
Natty Bumppo's Age Set in Year
The Pioneers 1823
70 1793
Natty Bumppo first appears as a seasoned
scout in advancing years, with the dying
Chingachgook, the old Indian chief and his
faithful comrade, as the eastern forest frontier
begins to disappear and Chingachgook dies.
The Last of
the Mohicans 1826
40 1757
An adventure of the French and Indian Wars in the
Lake George county.
The Prairie 1827
90 1804
Set in the new frontier where the
Leatherstocking dies.
The Pathfinder 1840
40 1757
Continuing the same border warfare in the St.
Lawrence and Lake Ontario country.
The Deerslayer 1841
23
1740-45
Early adventures with the hostile Hurons on Lake
Otsego, NY.

65
Contributions of Cooper

The creation of the famous Leatherstocking saga
has cemented his position as our first great
national novelist and his influence pervades
American literature. In his thirty-two years
(1820-1851) of authorship, Cooper produced
twenty-nine other long works of fiction and
fifteen books - enough to fill forty-eight
volumes in the new definitive edition of his
Works. Among his achievements

66
Cooper Creates many first in the field of
American novels

1. The first successful American historical
romance in the vein of Sir Walter Scott (The Spy,
1821).
2. The first sea novel (The Pilot, 1824).
3. The first attempt at a fully researched
historical novel (Lionel Lincoln, 1825).
4. The first full-scale History of the Navy of
the United States of America (1839).
5. The first American international novel of
manners (Homeward Bound and Home as Found, 1838).
6. The first trilogy in American fiction
(Satanstoe, 1845 The Chainbearer, 1845 and The
Redskins, 1846).
7. The first and only five-volume epic romance to
carry its mythic hero - Natty Bumppo - from youth
to old age.

67
3)Evaluation

Leatherstocking Tales is a series of five novels
about the frontier of American settlers.
The Pioneers was probably the first true romance
of the frontier in American literature.

Natty Bumppo represents the ideal American,
living a virtuous and free life in Gods world.
To him and to Cooper, the wildness is good, pure,
perfect, where there is freedom not tainted and
fettered by any forms of human institutions.

Natty Bumppo is a veritable embodiment of human
virtues like innocence, simplicity, honesty and
generosity, a man born with an immaculate sense
of good and evil and right and wrong.

Cooper is a mythic writer. His preface to the
Leatherstocking series indicates that he wrote
with increasing consciousness to create a mythic
figure. Cooper is good at inventing plots. His
plots are sometimes quite incredible.
Cooper has been known as a powerful yet clumsy
writer. His style is dreadful, his
characterization wooden and lacking in
probability, and his language, his use of
dialect, is not authentic.

Anyhow, Cooper did help to introduce the western
tradition into American literature.

72
3. William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

the first American lyric poet of distinction

73
1) Works

a) Poems 1821
b) The Fountain 1842

Poes reputation was first

?
74
???

c) The White-Footed Deer 1844
d) A Forest Hymn 1860
e) The Flood of Years 1878

????
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75
???

f) To a Waterfowl 1815
g) Thanatopsis 1817
h) The Yellow Violet 1814

????
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76
2)Life

Bryant was a poet, and editor.
He was born into a doctors family in
Massachusetts.
He started to write poems when he was 14 years
old.

Bryant quitted his study in university and then
became a lawyer.
In 1825, he turned to journalism. In 1827, he
became an editor for Evening Post and wrote a lot
of political criticism. But it is his poetry
which made him popular among people.

78
v

He was influenced by Graveyard School in England
and wrote Thanatopsis.
His best works are his lyric poems about nature
and so his style is quite similar to that of
Wordsworth.

79
4. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

father of modern short story
father of detective story
father of psychoanalytic criticism

80
1) Works
???????

Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque
MS. Found in a Bottle
C) The Murders in the Rue Morgue

????????
??????
81
???????

The Fall of the House of Usher
The Masque of the Red Death
The Cask of Amontillado

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82
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The Raven
Israfel
Annabel Lee
To Helen

?????
???
?????
83
????

The Poetic Principle
The Philosophy of Composition

????
84
2) Life

Famous American Poet, short-story writer and
critic.

85
3) Evaluation

Poe remained the most controversial and most
misunderstood literary figure in the history of
American literature.

Emerson dismissed him in three words the jingle
man ,Mark Twain declared his prose to be
unreadable. And Whitman was the only famous
literary figure present at the Poe Memorial
Ceremony in 1875.

Ironically, it was in Europe that Poe enjoyed
respect and welcome.
Bernard Shaw said Poe was the greatest
journalistic critic of his time his poetry is
exquisitely refined and his tales are complete
works of art.

Poes reputation was first made in France.
Charles Baudelaire said that Edgar Poe, who
isnt much in America, must become a great man in
France.

Today, Poes particular power has ensured his
position among the greatest writers of the world.
The majority of critics today, in America as well
as in the world, have recognized the real, unique
importance of Poe as a great writer of fiction, a
poet of the first rank, and a critic of acumen
and insight. His works are read the world over.
His influence in world-wide in modern literature.

90
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
91
Works
Collections of short stories
????

Twice-Told Tales 1837
Mosses from an Old Manse 1843
The Scarlet Letter 1850

????
??
92

The House of the Seven Gables 1851
The Blithedale Romance 1852
The Marble Faun 1860

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????
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93

Young Goodman Brown
The Ministers Black Veil
Dr. Rappacinis Daughter

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94
Life

Hawthorne was born in Salem Massachusetts.
Some of his ancestors were men of prominence in
the Puritan theocracy of seventeenth-century New
England. One of them was a colonial magistrate,
notorious for his part in the persecution of the
Quakers, and another was a judge at the Salem
Witchcraft Trial in 1692.

When Nathaniel was four, his father died on a
voyage in Surinam, Dutch Guinea, but maternal
relatives recognized his literary talent and
financed his education at Bowdoin College.
Among his classmates were many of the important
literary and political figures of the day writer
Horatio Bridge, future Senator Jonathan Ciley,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and future President
Franklin Pierce. These prominent friends supplied
Hawthorne with government employment in the lean
times, allowing him time to bloom as an author.

Like James Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne was
extremely concerned with conventionality his
first pseudonymously published short stories
imitated Sir Walter Scott, as did his 1828
self-published Fanshawe.
Hawthorne later formally withdrew most of this
early work, discounting it as the work of
inexperienced youth. From 1836 to 1844 the
Boston-centered Transcendentalist movement, led
by Ralph Waldo Emerson, was an important force in
New England intellectual circles.

The Transcendentalists believed that human
existence transcended the sensory realm, and
rejected formalism in favor of individual
responsibility. Hawthorne's fiancée Sophia
Peabody drew him into "the newness," and in 1841
Hawthorne invested 1500 in the Brook Farm
Utopian Community, leaving disillusioned within a
year.
His later works show some Transcendentalist
influence, including a belief in individual
choice and consequence, and an emphasis on
symbolism. As America's first true psychological
novel, The Scarlet Letter would convey these
ideals contrasting puritan morality with passion
and individualism.

The Scarlet Letter represents the height of
Hawthorne's literary genius dense with terse
descriptions. It remains relevant for its
philosophical and psychological depth, and
continues to be read as a classic tale on a
universal theme.

99
Reasons for Hawthorne's Current Popularity

One of the most modern of writers, Hawthorne is
relevant in theme and attitude. According to H.
H. Waggoner, Hawthorne's attitudes use irony,
ambiguity, and paradox.
Hawthorne rounds off the puritan cycle in
American writing - belief in the existence of an
active evil (the devil) and in a sense of
determinism (the concept of predestination).

100

Hawthorne's use of psychological analysis
(pre-Freudian) is of interest today.
In themes and style, Hawthorne's writings look
ahead to Henry James, William Faulkner, and
Robert Penn Warren

101
Influences on Hawthorne

Salem - early childhood, later work at the Custom
House.
Puritan family background - one of his
forefathers was Judge Hathorne, who presided over
the Salem witchcraft trials, 1692.
Belief in the existence of the devil.
Belief in determinism.

102
Major Themes in Hawthorne's Fiction

Alienation - a character is in a state of
isolation because of self-cause, or societal
cause, or a combination of both.
Initiation - involves the attempts of an
alienated character to get rid of his isolated
condition.
Problem of Guilt -a character's sense of guilt
forced by the puritanical heritage or by society
also guilt vs. innocence.

103

Pride - Hawthorne treats pride as evil. He
illustrates the following aspects of pride in
various characters physical pride (Robin),
spiritual pride (Goodman Brown, Ethan Brand), and
intellectual pride (Rappaccini).
Puritan New England - used as a background and
setting in many tales.
Italian background - especially in The Marble
Faun.
Allegory - Hawthorne's writing is allegorical,
didactic and moralistic.

104

Other themes include individual vs. society,
self-fulfillment vs. accommodation or
frustration, hypocrisy vs. integrity, love vs.
hate, exploitation vs. hurting, and fate vs. free
will.

105
Hawthorne as a Literary Artist

First professional writer - college educated,
familiar with the great European writers, and
influenced by puritan writers like Cotton Mather.
Hawthorne displayed a love for allegory and
symbol. He dealt with tensions involving light
versus dark warmth versus cold faith versus
doubt heart versus mind internal versus
external worlds.

106

His writing is representative of 19th century,
and, thus, in the mainstream due to his use of
nature, its primitiveness, and as a source of
inspiration also in his use of the exotic, the
gothic, and the antiquarian.

107
Features of his works