英美文学选读学习笔记 Nathaniel Hawthorne

Imbued with an inquiring imagination, an intensely meditative mind, and unceasing interest in the "interior of the heart " of man's being, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) remains one of the most interesting, yet most ambivalent writers in the American literary history.

In fact, Hawthorne's life story is totally without the exciting or at least unusual events which characterize the lives of so many American writers. He was born on the fourth of July, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, into a prominent Puritan family. His first American ancestor, William Hawthorne, as a magistrate of the Bay Colony, was active in the 1650's in persecution of the Quakers, while William's son, John, was a judge at the Salem witchcraft trials. However, the 17th century prominence of his family declined during the century that followed. Nathaniel's father, a sea captain, died of yellow fever in 1808 leaving at Salem a widow and three children in genteel poverty. With the financial support from his more prosperous maternal relations, Hawthorne passed a serene childhood in spite of his father's death and spent his adolescence reading some books of those literary master minds, especially Bunyan, Spenser and Shakespeare, which were essential for his formation as a writer. From 1821 to 1825, he attended Bowdoin College in Maine, where the decision to devote himself to writing was gradually taking shape and finally put into practice during those years when he was living with his mother in Salem. The solitary years proved to be fruitful, for in 1837, he published Twice-Told Tales, a collection of short stories which attracted critical attention.

After 1837, a series of salient events of Hawthorne's life happened that mattered a lot to his literary imagination and creation. He met Sophia Peabody, whom he married later and with whom he had three children; he worked in the United States Custom House in Boston and later in Salem, which definitely provided some authentic materials for his long works; he also stayed for some time at Concord and Lenox, where he met the principal literary figures of the time, Emerson and Thoreau and Melville. He was affected by the former's transcendentalist theory and struck up a very intimate relationship with the latter, and all the three people had played an indispensable role in Hawthorne's literary career. During these years, Hawthorne wrote and published the best and the greatest of his works, which have doubtlessly become part of the American literary heritage. Among them, the tales collected in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) and The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales (1851) best demonstrate Hawthorne's early obsession with the moral and psychological consequences of pride, selfishness, and secret guilt that manifest themselves in human beings; The Scarlet Letter (1850), always regarded as the best of his works, tells a simple but very moving story in which four people living in a Puritan community are involved in and affected by the sin of adultery in different ways; The House of the Seven Gables (1851) was based on the tradition of a curse pronounced on the author's family when his great-grandfather was a judge in the Salem witchcraft trials; The Blithedale Romance (1852) is a novel he wrote to reveal his own experiences on the Brook Farm and his own methods as a psychological  novelist. In the following years, Hawthorne went to Europe and worked as American consul to Liverpool, then traveled as a tourist in France and Italy, the experience of which helped him produce another book, The Marble Faun (1860). A romance set in Italy, the book is concerned about the dark aberrations of the human spirit. His last years were dramatic and frustrating, during which period Hawthorne tried but had never been able to finish four other different works. He died in 1864, while on a journey.

As we can see, Hawthorne's literary world turns out to be a    most disturbed, tormented and problematical one possible to imagine. This has much to do with his "black" vision of life and human beings. According to Hawthorne, "There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity." A piece of literary work should "show how we are all wronged and wrongers, and avenge one another." So in almost every book he wrote, Hawthorne discusses sin and evil. In "Young Goodman Brown," he sets out to prove that everyone possesses some evil secret. “The Minister's Black Veil” goes further to suggest that everyone tries to hold the evil secret from one another in the way the minister tries to convince his people with his black veil. "The Birthmark" drives home symbolically Hawthorne's point that evil is man's birthmark, something he is born with.

One source of evil that Hawthorne is concerned most is overreaching intellect, which usually refers to someone who is too proud, too sure of himself. The tension between the head and the heart constitutes one of the dramatic moments when the evil of "overreaching intellect" would be fully revealed. Hawthorne's intellectuals are usually villains, dreadful because they are devoid of warmth and feeling. What's more, they tend to go beyond and violate the natural order by doing something impossible and reaching the ultimate truth, without a sober mind about their own limitations as human beings. Chillingworth, Dr. Rappaccini in "Rappaccini's Daughter" are but a few specimens of Hawthorne's chilling, cold-blooded human animals.

Hawthorne's view of man and human history originates, to a great extent, in Puritanism. He was not a Puritan himself, but he had Puritan ancestors who played an important role in his life and works. He believed that "the wrong doing of one generation lives into the successive ones," and often wondered if he might have inherited some of their guilt. This sensibility led to his understanding of evil being at the very core of human life, which is typical of the Calvinistic belief that human beings are basically depraved and corrupted, hence, they should obey God to atone for their sins. In many of Hawthorne's stories and novels, the Puritan concept of life is condemned, or the Puritan past is shown in an almost totally negative light, especially in his The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne is attracted in every way to the Puritan world, even though he condemns its less humane manifestations. On the one hand, it provides him with a subject, and on the other, with the Puritan world or society as a historical background, he discusses some of the most important issues that concern the moral life of man and human history.

Hawthorne's remarkable sense of the Puritan past, his understanding of the colonial history in New England, his apparent occupation with the moral issues of sin and guilt, and his keen psychological analysis of people are brought to full display in his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter. In this particular novel, Hawthorne does not intend to tell a love story nor a story of sin, but focuses his attention on the moral, emotional, and psychological effects or consequences of the sin on the people in general and those main characters in particular, so as to show us the tension between ,society and inspaniduals. "The Custom-House" as an introductory note to The Scarlet Letter proves fruitful to Hawthorne's imagination. By relating his own experience of discovering a small package that contains a piece of red cloth shaped like "A" when he was a surveyor in the Custom-House in Salem, Hawthorne succeeds in giving his tale a sense of historical reality and an air of authenticity, and demonstrates fully his artistic pursuit and his theory about "Romance."

As a man of literary craftsmanship, Hawthorne is extraordinary. The structure and the form of his writings are always carefully worked out to cater for the thematic concern. With his special interest in the psychological aspect of human beings, there isn't much action, or physical movement going on in his works and he is good at exploring the complexity of human psychology. So his drama is Thought, full of mental activities. Thought propels action and grows organically out of the interaction of the characters, as we can find in The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne is also a great allegorist and almost every story can be read allegorically, as is the case in "Young Goodman Brown." Whereas allegory is used to hold fast against the crushing blows of reality, the symbol serves as a weapon to attack and penetrate it. Hawthorne is a master of symbolism, which he took from the Puritan tradition and bequeathed to American literature in a revivified form. The symbol can be found everywhere in his writing, and his masterpiece provides the most conclusive proof. By using Pearl as a thematic symbol, Hawthorne emphasizes the consequence the sin of adultery has brought to the community and people living in that community. With the scarlet letter A as the biggest symbol of all, Hawthorne proves himself to be one of the best symbolists. As a key to the whole novel, the letter A takes on different layers of symbolic meanings as the plot develops, but people come up with different intertations and they do not know which one is definite. The scarlet letter A is ambiguous. And the ambiguity is one of the salient characteristics of Hawthorne's art.