Nathaniel Hawthorne

A biography of the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the greatest Anti-Transcendentalist writers of all time.
2002, 871 words, 0 source(s).

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Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the greatest Anti-Transcendentalist writers of all time. He utilized his writings to express his dark, gloomy outlook on life. Hawthorne, a descendant of a puritan family, was born in Salem, Massachusetts. Some of his ancestors included a judge known for the harsh persecution of Quakers, and another judge who played an important role in the Salem witchcraft trials. Hawthorne's attitude was molded by a sense of guilt, which he traced to his ancestor's actions. After college, Hawthorne lived, secluded, for 12 years in his mother's house. He then published Twice Told Tales which didn't sell very well, yet at the same time, established him as a well known and respected author. He became good friends of two Transcendentalist writers of the period -- Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He also taught the only other Anti-Transcendentalist writer of his period -- Herman Melville. His most popular book, The Scarlet Letter, earned Hawthorne international fame. He died in his sleep while on a walking tour in New Hampshire. The period of time during which Hawthorne wrote was the New England Renaissance in America. By the year 1840, it was clear that the American experiment in Democracy had succeeded. England, trying again to retake their old land in 'The Second American War for Independence', was no longer a threat to the survival of the republic. Andrew Jackson, the first "people's president", had served 2 terms in office. New states were entering the Union. One French observer stated that Americans had, "a lively faith in the predictability of man", and that they, "admit that what appears to them today to be good may be superseded by something better tomorrow." There were two types of writing styles during Hawthorne's life -- Transcendentalism and Anti-Transcendentalism. Many of the authors of the period were influenced by the transcendental movement, which was flourishing at the time. Transcendentalists believed that intuition and the individual conscience transcend experience and were therefore better guides to truth than are the senses and logical reason. They respected the individual spirit and the natural world, believing that divinity was present everywhere. Anti-Transcendentalists, like Hawthorne and his apprentice Melville, focused instead on the limitations and potential destructiveness of the human spirit, rather than on it's possibilities. The major reason that Hawthorne was an Anti-Transcendentalist was that, haunted by the cruelty and intolerance of his Puritan ancestors, Hawthorne viewed evil as one of the dominant forces in the world. Some of that evil is portrayed in his stories by his use of allegories -- characters, settings, and events that have a symbolic meaning. Allegories are usually used to teach or explain moral principal universal truths. Dimly seen and mysterious truths were the ones to be found in Hawthorne's allegories. He sought for those truths in an area that has hardly been explored even today -- the human heart and mind. Hawthorne believed that the natural world around us, as well as ordinary humans, contained dark places that the cold light of reason alone could not break through. Relating directly to allegories is Hawthorne's use of symbolism in his stories. This is very evident in The Scarlet Letter where he uses setting and characterization to create an image of the various characters who each symbolize a different human trait. The Minister's Black Veil is the first of Hawthorne's stories in which the confrontation of a central symbol generates a principle of dramatic coherence and organization. The story is primarily about the effects and meaning of the Reverend Mr. Hooper's veil. It takes this meaning from what it signifies about the human condition, the consequences is has on Hooper, and the characters who try to interpret it's meaning. The focus in the story is on the meaning of the veil, not on Hooper's motives for wearing it. Because Hooper donned the veil, his emotional life was then ended, and the areas of human experience in which he might have participated in, effectively extinguished. Exemplifying the "power of blackness" in Hawthorne's work was Young Goodman Brown. The main purpose of this narrative tale is to move the protagonist toward a personal and climatic vision of evil, leaving in it's a rubble and prevailing feeling of distrust. From Goodman Brown's dream vision or his spectral adventure in the forest, he has received a paralyzing sense that the brotherhood and unity of man is only reachable through the fatherhood of the devil. Terence Martin sums up the meaning of Hawthorne's best known book, The Scarlet Letter in three sentences: "Taking its form in Hawthorne's imagination, the total context of The Scarlet Letter inheres in the letter itself. Invented by the community to serve as an unequivocal emblem of penance, the letter has frozen Hester into a posture of haughty agony, has brought Dimmesdale to a death of "triumphant ignominy" on the scaffold, has victimized the victimizer -- Chillingsworth. Hawthorne begins and ends with the letter, which encompasses and transcends all its individual meanings, which signifies, totally and finally, The Scarlet Letter itself." Shown by his past, and his feelings toward it, by the books that he wrote and the life that he led, Nathaniel Hawthorne was an Anti-Transcendentalist in the purest sense of the word.