摘 要

纳撒尼尔·霍桑，美国浪漫主义小说家和短篇小说作家，是寓言小说和象征小说的大师。美国文学史中最伟大的小说家之一。他的短篇小说系列和长篇小说《红字》、《带有七个尖角阁的房子》有着极其深刻的心理及道德层面的洞察力，在美国文坛独树一帜。本文旨在从多个角度分析美国著名作家纳撒尼尔·霍桑作品的主题，分别是他的宗教观尤其是清教主义在他作品中的体现；他和超验主义及超验主义者的关系，他对超验主义的认同与批判；他对女权主义的认知，和他作品当中出现的女权主义观点。

关键词：霍桑；清教主义；女权主义；超验主义

Abstract

Nathaniel Hawthorne, American novelist and short-story writer who was a master of the allegorical and symbolic tale. He is one of the greatest fiction writers in American literature. His greatest short stories and fiction The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables are marked by a depth of psychological and moral insight seldom equaled by any American writer. This article aims to analyze the themes of Nathaniel Hawthorne's works from different angles. It is his religious outlook, especially the manifestation of Puritanism in his works; his relationship with transcendentalists, and his recognition and criticism of Transcendentalism; his views on feminism, and the feminist point of views that emerged in his works.

Key Words: Nathaniel Hawthorne; Puritanism; Transcendentalism; Feminism

Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Biography 1

1.2 Literature Review 2

2 Puritanism and Hawthorne 5

2.1 The Origin and Development of Puritanism 5

2.2 The Reflection of Puritanism in Hawthorne’s work 7

3.1 The Background of Transcendentalism 9

3.2 The Influences of Transcendentalism on Hawthorne 10

4 Feminism in Hawthorne’s work 12

4.1 The Risen of Women 12

4.2 Hawthorne’s Pro and Anti Feminism Attitude 14

References 15

Acknowledgements 16

On the Themes

in Hawthorne’s Works

1 Introduction

1.1 Biography

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts. His great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was one of the three judges of the famous Salem Witch Trials in 1692. His father, also named Nathaniel, was a sea captain who died when Hawthorne was only four years old and left Hawthorne grew up with his mother, Elizabeth Clark Manning, a strong woman from a successful merchant family that had lived in New England since the seventeenth centuries. (Irvin, 118)

Later in 1821, Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College in Maine with the help of his relatives. In the school, he became friends with the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who would later become famous poet and future United States president Franklin Pierce. After graduating from college in 1824, Hawthorne returned to his hometown Salem and began writing. After completing some short stories on the trip of his traveling New England, he began to attempt to write his own novels based on his experiences as a Bowdoin College student. This novel Fanshawe, published without a name in 1828, but did not attract any attention. Hawthorn burned all the novels that had not been sold.

Hawthorne served in customs in 1836. Despite his early failures, in 1837 his friend helped him to publish a short story collection Twice-Told Tales and began formalizing his own name, effectively launching his career. Among them, The Minister's Black Veil (1836) is the most popular and impressive one. Then Hawthorne took part in Brooke Farm founded by Transcendentalists that focused on education and progressive thought. He was married Sophia Amelia Peabody on July 9, 1842 and moved back to Salem. He lived in the old vicarage residence of Concord Village in Massachusetts for three years, during which Hawthorne completed the short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). This collection of stories featured new and revised works including Young Goodman Brown (1835) and Rappaccini's Daughter (1844).

In 1846, Hawthorne was offered a position as the official surveyor for the Port of Salem. He bought an old house in Concord called The Wayside from Alcott and lived there. In 1848, because of political differences and the authorities, Hawthorne lost his job in Customs. Thus, he committed himself to writing activities, encouraged by his publisher, he completed his most important novel The Scarlet Letter (1850). Hawthorne had a chance to meet in nearby Herman Melville and became a friend. Melville dedicated Moby Dick to him, he wrote, “in token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne” (Walter,176) Edgar Allan Poe is also very interested in Hawthorne’s works like "Twice-Told Tales" and wrote many reviews.

After the publication of The Scarlet Letter, it was gained a great success. Hawthorne then wrote another dark and controversial work The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) which is based on the relationships of people he met at the Brook Farm commune. Later after Pierce was elected the fourteenth president of the United States in 1853, Hawthorne was appointed as American consul in Liverpool. When his term ended in 1857, Hawthorne took his family on a trip through Italy, where he wrote about his journals into an autobiographical collection The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1860). In 1860, Hawthorne returned to the United States, settled in Concord, and insisted on writing. On May 19, 1864, Hawthorne died in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.

1.2 Literature Review

The moment Hawthorne made his appearance in American literature, he and his works received contemporary response, praising his sentimentality and moral purity. In the eyes of Herman Melville, a close friend to Hawthorne, “No thunder for his great power of blackness that derives its force from its appeal to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin”. Henry James praised Hawthorne, saying, “The fine thing in Hawthorne is that he cared for the deeper psychology, and that, in his way, he tried to become familiar with it” (James, 20). Edgar Allan Poe, in spite of having written somewhat unflattering reviews of both Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse by Hawthorne, admitted “The style of Hawthorne is purity itself. His tone is singularly effective-wild, plaintive, thoughtful, and in full accordance with his themes... We look upon him as one of the few men of indisputable genius to whom our country has as yet given birth.”

For such great writer there are already tons of articles and research paper about him and his works both in West and in China. With the publication of Twice-Told Tales in 1837, Nathaniel Hawthorne gained recognition as an important American author; “a new star rises in the heavens,” declared his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in a review of the book. With the publication of The Scarlet Letter (1850), Hawthorne became one of America's greatest writers. “None but a man of true genius and a highly cultivated mind could have written it,” declared a typical contemporary review. “It is a work of rare, we may say of fearful power.” (Reynolds, 3) During the 150 years since the publication of his masterpiece, Hawthorne certainly gained his reputation.

Foreign scholars’ research on Hawthorne has a long history. As early as 1836, the first review article by Park Benjamin about Hawthorne’s work came out in the New England Magazine. (Chen，11) In the West, the research about Hawthorne’s work seems to be endless, so it also provide large number of resource for this paper, especially research like Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography by American critic Randall Steward. Since his works being translated to Chinese, there were enormous passion for research on him and his work in China, especially his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter, more than half of the research was about this book and it being approached in different angles such as Cultural Criticism, Psychoanalysis, or Comparison Research. Also, the rest of his work start being noticed such as Young Good Man Brown or The Minister's Black Veil.

This thesis aims to analyze few fundamental themes in Hawthorne’s work, by exploring his life and analyze few of his works. Some of the previous works given me a lot inspiration. First, Hawthorne’s ambivalent attitude towards Puritanism and how that impact on him and his works “The Sin of Humanity--Analysis of Hawthorne’s Works” written by Maqinlin is an early article in China actually connected Hawthorne and Puritanism; Second, Hawthorne’s relationship with some famous transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his idea about transcendentalism “The Bystander of Transcendentalism: A Study of Hawthorne’s Thought” written by Daixianmei brings new idea about this topic; Third, Hawthorne’s view on women and his ambiguous feminism point view and the inspiration comes from “Hawthorne’s Thoughts on Women” written by Zhangxianyu. These are three main themes in Hawthorne’s work and most of the research about, so there are three chapter in this paper.