Compare/Contrast John Steinbeck's view of humanity versus Nathaniel Hawthorne's views - Research Paper Example

He believed that it was his duty to fight any idea, religion or thought that limited or destroyed the individual an individual thought. And he was always skeptical of the place of religion, feeling that the church and zealous churchgoers can stifle the soul of the individual. He even during his years of growing up took off on a restless spiritual quest that covered most of the major faiths from Hinduism to Jugianism and holistic thinking (Shillinglaw 86). He viewed life as a continuous internal struggle between good and evil (Tuffley par. 1). In his speech while accepting his Nobel Prize for literature in 1962 he reflected that humanity had passed through the confusion and that only the human heart in conflict with itself was worth writing about.

He believed that every man was capable of improvement, perfectibility even and that there was always good that could be found in all humanity. At this speech he also expounded upon his belief that man had finally understood and conquered the ideals that had been attributed to the Godhead and that he was on the brink of not only understanding his purpose but that he was able to achieve the notion or status of perfectibility. His feeling was that man always had a chance at breaking through and in his book, Cannery Row he saw such a “breaking through” by the vision of the Chinaman’s eyes or the Doc’s discovery of the drowned girl in the tide pool.

Nathaniel Hawthorne on the other hand was born and brought up as a Puritan and this colored a great deal of his writings. He was a deeply spiritual Puritan but spent a lot of his time and a lot of his writings pushing the envelope or seeing the limits to which Puritanism could be pushed. He did not fully agree with the Puritans belief of predestination but actually believed that sin was an individual matter and that one may, upon full repentance, actually be “educated” through sin. For the Puritans, one person’s sin led to a collective societal guilt and need for repentance and that was their basic doctrine (Thomson 23).

Hawthorne used his character in the Scarlet Letter, Dimmesdale to show the conflict between the Puritans belief of predestination and the more romantic notion of individual redemption. In Dimmesdale, Hawthorne shows his sympathy with the non-Puritan approved belief of redemption, not by grace but by deeds and works (Hunt par. 49). The character of Hester is one through whom Hawthorne also shows a great deal of the conflict that is caused by the Puritan thinking. He shows her as a person who is not only openly rebelling from the Puritan view but also one who, by maturing and through a lot of experience eventually mellows down in her rebellion against the Puritan thought and doctrine.

She works to achieve her redemption by presenting her works as a means to salvation, completely opposite of the prevailing Puritan view and practice. Her pursuit of individualism instead of the collective spirit of the Puritans also stands out and in a way Hawthorne shows his admiration and romantic preference or at the very least admiration for that line of thought (Thomson 46). Despite all the differences, there were certain themes that show similarity in their treatment of humanity for these two authors.

They both depicted women in a rather negative way. Steinbeck has been criticized for not having many