Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne - Essay Example

Nathaniel Hawthorne Although Nathanial Hawthorne wrote his stories in the middle of the nineteenth century, he wrote them using a style and subject matter that accurately reflected the ideals and way of life of early colonists in Puritan-influenced New England. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts on the fourth of July, the middle child sandwiched between two sisters, but was moved to his mother’s paternal home, full of aunts and uncles, when he was just four after his father died of yellow fever on a trip to the Caribbean (Swisher, 1996). Raised mostly by his uncles, Nathaniel spent the next five years in a stern yet creative home, greatly preferring the latter. “Nathaniel’s passivity and indolence appeared especially unmanly in the presence of Robert Manning’s energetic capabilities, not only to the uncle but to the boy himself. The resulting self-distrust was to be permanently in conflict with Hawthorne’s innate pride” (Erlich, 1984). His family’s Puritan past would weigh heavily upon him throughout his life and would be strongly reflected within his writings. Although he was strongly encouraged to take up the family trade and become a merchant marine, Hawthorne had decided, by age 17, that he wanted to be a writer. Hawthorne’s official education started at the age of 15 when he attended the Samuel H. Archer School as preparation for college. He entered the Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine by 1821 (Swisher, 1996). While he was there, he formed lifelong friendships with future literary giant Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, future president Franklin Pierce and future Navy Commander Horatio Bridge. He also spent another 12 years following college living in his mother’s house and educating himself in how to be a good writer by studying his Puritan past, nonfiction and fiction works of note (Swisher, 1996). While he always styled himself a writer, he held several small jobs necessary to support himself. These included magazine editor, customs house worker (in a variety of capacities) and as a farmer for a brief period at Brook House, an experimental commune (Swisher, 1996). After he moved to the Lenox countryside to escape angry Salem residents, he met Herman Melville who was to have a profound influence on The House of Seven Gables. “The presence of this brooding mariner, poetic soul such as Hawthorne’s father had been, stirred the deepest memories – and doubts – of the older writer. Melville’s talk of the sea, of time, eternity, death, myth, and literature, his metaphysical leaping, struck Hawthorne’s own particular woe. Hawthorne eventually recoiled from Melville’s truth – but not before giving to Moby Dick; or the Whale the bitter duplicity of his literary technique in The House of the Seven Gables” (St. John, 2002: Ch. 4). However, Lenox was not to be the permanent home of the Hawthorne’s, who eventually purchased their own country seat in Concord, within walking distance of the Ralph Waldo Emersons and Waldon Pond. Hawthorne continued to support the family on his writing and traveled extensively with his wife, including tours through Europe. He died in a wayside hotel while on holiday with his widowed friend Franklin Pierce on May 19, 1964 and was buried in Concord. In addition to the writers already mentioned, Nathaniel Hawthorne had a profound influence on other writers such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Comparisons have been made, for example, between Arthur Dimmesdale of The Scarlet Letter and Arthur Donnithorne of Adam Bede, just as Dimmesdale has been compared to the character of Godfrey Cass from Silas Marner (Eigner, 1986: 231). A list of his works could easily fill pages, but some of his more major works include The Blithdale Romance, Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment, Feathertop, Twice Told Tales, The Scarlet Letter, The Marble Faun, Mosses from an Old Manse, Rappaccini’s Daughter, The Red Letter Plays, several short stories and, of course, The House of the Seven Gables. The House of the Seven Gables is introduced as a romance novel and is focused upon the individuals who have lived in the house, giving it a moral that the sins of the past can live on to torment the innocence of the living. The house, it turns out, has come into the Pyncheon family through questionable means as the original builder of the house was hanged for witchcraft after Colonel Pyncheon decided he wanted Matthew Maule’s property. However, Colonel Pycheon is not able to enjoy his victory as he is found dead in his new study on the day of the housewarming party with his beard covered in blood. From then on, the house seems to bring nothing but bad luck to the family. This history has a bearing upon the nearsighted scowling old maid Hepzibah who is forced to open a shop in the house as well as take on a boarder in order to keep herself from starving. The boarder is Holgrave, who is a photography artist. The two are soon joined by Phoebe, Hepzibah’s much younger cousin and Clifford, Hepzibah’s brother who has just been released from prison. The residents of the house are terrified of the current Judge Pyncheon and the ideas of Holgrave, who advocates the idea that each generation should tear down the work of those that have come before it. Some sense of retribution is introduced in the story of Alice Pyncheon, who caught her death of pneumonia as the result of a younger Matthew Maule who had hypnotized her, a trait that seems to run in the Pyncheon family as Phoebe becomes entranced by Holgrave’s story. Eventually, Judge Pyncheon returns to the house again, demanding that Clifford reveal the location of the document that would return a family fortune to the judge’s pockets, but he, too, is found dead. This death is seen as the lifting of the family curse as all the remaining members of the household, upon hearing of the death of Judge Pyncheon’s only son, move into the judge’s country estate and leave the House of the Seven Gables to continue rotting back into the ground. There are several themes that run through the novel, including the theme of class status as is shown through Hepzibah and her family and Holgrave, the rootless artist, and the theme of the deceptiveness of appearances as the old maid at the beginning of the story ends up being the heroine by the end, however the strongest theme remains the moral pointed out by Hawthorne himself at the beginning of the novel. There are many indications of this throughout the story, such as in the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, which has been forbidden to be taken down and which looks over every action that takes place within the home. The murder that Clifford is accused of looks suspiciously similar to the deaths of the old Colonel himself, found sitting in his chair with blood coating his shirt and beard. Another similar death awaits Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon after his demand that Clifford turn over the missing documents that give the Pyncheon family control of a valuable and sizable piece of land. Although it is suggested in the Romantic tradition that the family’s hardships have come about as the result of a curse laid upon it by Matthew Maule from the scaffold, the true nature of the sins of the earlier generations can be found in their greed as it is only the greedy Pyncheon’s that meet with disaster. It is the result of greed that Alice is made available to the younger Matthew Maule, who is the leading cause of her death by pneumonia and it is greed that kills old Jaffrey Pyncheon who tries to keep Clifford from finding the missing land deed. Finally, it is only when Judge Pyncheon enters the house also demanding the land deed that he suffers his fit and is found dead in much the same manner as his distant grandsire. The remaining Pyncheons, who wish simply to live in relative comfort and peace with their fellow creatures, are permitted to leave to the country unharmed. This theme is the main focus of a discussion of the book by Rita Gollin (1979). In her essay entitled “The Past Revisits the Present in The House of the Seven Gables,” she discusses the various elements of the story that contribute to this idea. “From the start, Hawthorne describes the house as if it were human … It seems to have a will of its own” (Gollin, 1979: 132-133). She points out that the ghost of the past, represented by the portrait of the old Colonel, is reflected in the present by its resemblance to the current Judge Pyncheon, which is further emphasized by the prevailing greed and covetousness of the Judge as he tries to force Hepzibah into giving him something she doesn’t have. The past is also tied in to the strange deaths of so many of the more greedy Pyncheon men as Matthew Maule had cursed them to drink their own blood, a profoundly accurate statement describing the deaths each would face. The innocence of the other Pyncheons in the story – Clifford, Hepzibah and Phoebe – is protected by various forms of dreamy escape. For Clifford, it is in his childlike mental state as he comes out of thirty years of prison. For Hepzibah, it is a somewhat staid kind of half-madness that allows her to remain in the house, kept sane by occasional interactions with her neighbors and by the love she carries for her brother. Phoebe is touched with the sweet innocence of the fresh country air from which she has come, yet proves herself also susceptible to the dark and gloomy atmosphere of the house and the vague threat of Judge Pyncheon himself. Mark Van Doren (1949), however, chooses to focus upon the idea that The House of the Seven Gables is instead a portrait of a decaying America, losing its first blush of early success and moving into the decline prior to a new wave of innovation. He argues that the house itself, Hepzibah and Clifford represent “the decay even in America, and indeed especially in America, of hereditary estates … it as a part of it to correct the picture of Hepzibah and her house with dashes of new life in the form of Phoebe, an unspoiled country cousin, and Holgrave, a photographer who was counted on to represent in his modern ideas and his mechanical competence the coming age of America” (Van Doren, 1949: 141). In this discussion, he argues that the novel is strongest when it focuses upon the image of its pathetic characters, primarily Hepzibah herself and the house in which she lives, who exist continuously under a curse. Picking up on that same concept, Van Wyck Brooks (1954) claims that the story preserves much of the atmosphere of the old Salem without making much mention of Hawthorne’s alleged attempt to capture the modern. “The book was Salem itself, as Hawthorne saw it in these eighteen-forties. Since his boyhood there, the town had lapsed into quietude and decay … Salem was still Gothic in its frame of mind, here and there, at least. In its rusty, moss-grown gabled houses still dwelt the remnants of a race that savoured the emblems in the graveyards, the death’s heads and scythes and hour-glasses” (Brooks, 1954: 127). To Brooks, the book is about these moldering old maids and men who remained half-hidden in their old homes and half-crazed by their memories of an earlier time, constrained by their past and the social structures of their house. As this analysis of The House of Seven Gables indicates, Nathanial Hawthorne wrote from a deep immersion in the Puritan world, having had ancestors that landed on North American soil with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other, ready to tame the wilderness. His hometown of Salem, Massachusetts was the setting for the most brutal witch trials documented in this country and his education reinforced the beliefs espoused by such trials. These influences figured strongly in his writings, often forming the basis of his tales and revealed a deep questioning of the validity of the beliefs to which he’d been raised to adhere. This is evident not only in his attempt to find redemption for future generations in The House of Seven Gables, but also in his exploration of the culture of his ancestors as demonstrated in The Scarlet Letter. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne realized that Puritanism dictated just about everything involved in colonial life in 1600s New England, even including how people talked with each other, how they dressed and what kind of relationships they had. “In addition to believing in the absolute sovereignty of God, the total depravity of man, and the complete dependence of human beings on divine grace for salvation, they stressed the importance of personal religious experience” (Bowden, 2004). Because of this connection to personal religious experience, Hester knew she would not be able to run away from her marriage vows to marry another even if she did stretch them in her relationship to Reverend Dimmesdale. As a Puritan herself, she had to remain in the village as a married woman as was agreed upon in her marriage to Dr. Prynne, aka Roger Chillingsworth, until she had confirmation that he was deceased. Anything less would have violated her own road to salvation even though she had not married him voluntarily. “They [the Puritans] also spoke of salvation in terms of ‘covenant.’ In the notes to the Geneva Bible … emphasis was on a personal covenant of grace, whereby God both promised life to those who exercised faith in Christ and graciously provided that faith, on the basis of Christs sacrificial death, to the elect” (Noll, 2004). Once Hester’s secret was out, through the undeniable and unavoidable manifestation of her pregnancy, it was obvious to the entire village that Hester was not provided with the same degree of faith as the rest of the villagers and was therefore a greater sinner. To win her place in heaven, it was necessary for her to suffer the lowest status on earth to do penance for her past deeds. Although Hester hates her scarlet letter, she wears it both because she is convinced she has committed the worst sin, but also because the society in which she lives will never allow her to forget that she is the worst sinner of them all. This is the reason Hester returns to her old home in the end, taking up her stigma and the scarlet letter until her death. Understanding the Puritan ideals also makes it easier to see how Reverend Dimmesdale could not be seen to be associating himself with Hester after Pearl was born even on a more professional level. This was because Hester was a fallen woman and he was the highest moral authority in the village. They came from opposite ends of the social spectrum, one representing extreme sin and the other representing ultimate righteousness. Pearl’s crime was in simply being born. She was born without a father, in obvious and undeniable violation of her mother’s wedding vows as well as the word of God. Socially speaking, this meant that she was touched by the devil himself and was therefore unclean and unworthy to associate with the other children in the village or to be treated with any kind of humanity by the other villagers. With all this harsh treatment of not only herself, but also of her child, it is difficult for a person in modern times to understand why Hester didn’t just pack up and leave for another town. This is in large part because of the technological advances of the time and the interdependence the colonies had with one another. Colonies were not necessarily separated from each other to the point that Hester could not have made the journey to the next town. However, if she had, there was no guarantee that there would be a home waiting for her to move into. “Building homes and establishing farms required intensive and often backbreaking toil” (Jones, 1853). However, even had she overcome that obstacle, trade that existed between the Puritan colonies would have ensured her scarlet letter would have followed her no matter where she went as long as she stayed within her religious framework bringing her additional shame. Although Hester’s crime was considered one of the worst crimes that could be committed, it would not have served the colony to have her locked away in prison, nor would it have been possible for her to have rebuilt her life elsewhere. Finally, it was considered necessary for colonists, especially female colonists, to stick close to the settlement as a measure to protect themselves against possibly hostile Indians. This is seen in The Scarlet Letter as it becomes evident that Roger Prynne was detained from rejoining his wife because he had been captured by Indians and had only recently secured his release before stumbling into Salem. Finally, even in his short stories such as “Young Goodman Brown”, Hawthorne presents the idea that the Puritan religion, because of these strict and self-defeating beliefs, has lost all sense of meaning to the younger generations. In his journey through the dark woods and the events he witnesses there, Goodman Brown’s steps symbolize Hawthorne’s own doubts and observations about his religion based on his knowledge of what has gone before and the inevitable result of the Puritanical teachings he’s received. As Young Goodman Brown sets off on his dark journey, his young wife Faith implores him not to go, sensing some kind of immediate peril. The emphasis on young here indicates the journey Goodman Brown is proposing to undertake is a journey to find the necessary conversion experience deemed important in the Puritan religion of Hawthorne’s time. Without having gone through such a transformation, individual members were not considered to be full-fledged members of the congregation. As a newly married man, it would be among Goodman Brown’s chief concerns to establish himself as a member of the community and take his proper role as the head of a household. Yet, the fear expressed by Faith indicates there is a hidden peril in undertaking such a journey. Her warning, “may you find all well when you come back” (293), seems to indicate the peril does not apply strictly to Goodman Brown as he sets off on his journey, but for Faith as well in being left behind, alone in the darkness. The sense of foreboding in testing his own faith is further emphasized as Goodman Brown enters the forest “on his present evil purpose. He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed immediately behind” (294). In this solitary journey, Hawthorne indicates that the doctrine of purposefully seeking challenges to a faith already weakened by church dictates is a highly dangerous proposition with the capability of leading many men and women to their dooms rather than their salvation. The people that Young Goodman Brown sees and hears as he makes his way to the heart of the forest further illustrate the concept that the human soul is beyond redemption, regardless of their good works performed in the light of day. First, he is told of the acquaintance his father and grandfather have had with the wily fellow met in the woods as well as given reason to doubt the goodness of the men and women Young Goodman Brown looks up to in his village life. Then the two men come upon an elderly woman walking through the woods, presumably to the same destination: “a female figure on the path, in whom Goodman Brown recognized a very pious and exemplary dame, who had taught him his catechism in youth, and was still his moral and spiritual adviser, jointly with the minister and Deacon Gookin” (295). It is his meeting, or rather the witnessing of the meeting between the good woman and his companion, that first opens Young Goodman Brown’s eyes to the idea that the people he has considered so good in his lifetime are as full of the sin and corruption that his religion professes exists in all men at the time of their birth. Despite her many good deeds in the town and her close association with everything good and honorable, Young Goodman Brown sees Goody Cloyse as a well-versed witch, the most evil creature in creation, as she associates herself with the stranger and unhesitatingly makes use of his serpentine walking stick. Despite Young Goodman Brown’s last second decision to turn to God before being consecrated in the Devil’s congregation, the fact that he is able to find no peace in his future life emphasizes Hawthorne’s viewpoint regarding his religion. Although his Faith has been tested, Goodman Brown is no longer able to believe in her. His experience has taught him that all people contain evil in their souls and that no one can be trusted. Even his own thoughts are subject to questioning and at no point in time does he ever return to the easy lifestyle with his neighbors he once knew. Regardless of appearances, his life is now one full of evil at every turn where the slightest evil counteracts even the greatest good and no hope remains that a Godly life might eventually lead one to heaven. Understanding Hawthorne’s background and approach brings much understanding to the meanings and themes embedded in his works. From his explorations into the inner workings of his ancestor’s culture through such novels as The Scarlet Letter to his understanding of how this might have affected future generations in stories like “Young Goodman Brown” and The House of Seven Gables, Hawthorne manages to attain a sense of understanding regarding his predecessors. With this understanding, he is able to move forward to find a sense of peace and redemption. Works Cited Bowden, Henry Warner. “American Puritanism.” 2004. Believe. November 27, 2007 Brooks, Van Wyck. “The House of the Seven Gables Captures the Atmosphere of Old Salem.” Introduction to The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Heritage Press, 1954. Reprinted in Swisher, Clarice. Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Eigner, Edwin M. “Hawthorne’s Influence on Dickens and George Eliot: A Review.” Nineteenth Century Literature. University of California Press, (1986), pp. 230-233. Erlich, Gloria C. “The Divided Artist and His Uncles.” Family Themes and Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Tenacious Web. Rutgers University Press. Reprinted in Swisher, Clarice. Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Gollin, Rita K. “The Past Revisits the Present in The House of the Seven Gables.” Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Truth of Dreams. Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Reprinted in Swisher, Clarice. Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. Pleasantville, NY: The Reader’s Digest Association, 1851 (reprinted 1985). Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1992. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Young Goodman Brown.” Literature Network. (2007). November 27, 2007 < http://www.online-literature.com/hawthorne/158/> Jones, Abner Dumont. “Cotton Mather.” The Illustrated American Biography. New York: J. Milton and Company, 1853, p. 59. Noll, Mark A. “Puritanism.” Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (2nd Ed.). Walter A. Elwell (Ed.). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House Company, 2001, p. 857. St. John, Thomas. Nathaniel Hawthorne: Studies in the House of the Seven Gables. (2002). November 27, 2007 Swisher, Clarice. Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Van Doren, Mark. “The House of the Seven Gables: Hawthorne’s ‘Second Best Book’.” Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Viking, 1949. Reprinted in Swisher, Clarice. Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Read More