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 WonderBook (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
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synopses
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>