2015-08-21
736
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, a wealthy seaport north of Boston that specialized in East India trade. One of his ancestors had been a judge in an earlier century, during trials in Salem of women accused of being witches. Hawthorne used the idea of a curse on the family of an evil judge in his novel The House of the Seven Gables.
Many of Hawthorne's stories are set in Puritan New England, and his greatest novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850), has become the classic portrayal of Puritan America. It tells of the passionate, forbidden love affair linking a sensitive, religious young man, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, and the sensuous, beautiful townsperson, Hester Prynne. Set in Boston around 1650 during early Puritan colonization, the novel highlights the Calvinistic obsession with morality, sexual repression, guilt and confession, and spiritual salvation (спасение).
For its time, The Scarlet Letter was a daring and even subversive (подрывной, губительный) book. Hawthorne's gentle style, remote historical setting, and vagueness softened his grim themes and contented the general public, but sophisticated writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville recognized the book's "hellish" power. It treated issues that were usually suppressed in 19th-century America, such as the impact of the new, liberating democratic experience on individual behavior, especially on sexual and religious freedom.
The book is superbly organized and beautifully written. Appropriately, it uses allegory, a technique the early Puritan colonists themselves practiced.
Hawthorne's reputation rests on his other novels and tales as well. In The House of the Seven Gables (1851), he again returns to New England's history.
Hawthorne's last two novels were less successful. Both use modern settings, which disturb the magic of romance. The Blithedale Romance (1852) is interesting for its portrait of the socialist, utopian Brook Farm community. In the book, Hawthorne criticizes egotistical, power-hungry social reformers whose deepest instincts are not genuinely democratic. The Marble Faun (1860), though set in Rome, dwells on the Puritan themes of sin, isolation, expiation, and salvation.
These themes, and his characteristic settings in Puritan colonial New England, are trademarks of many of Hawthorne's best-known shorter stories: "The Minister's Black Veil," "Young Goodman Brown".
Hawthorne's stories and novels repeatedly show broken, cursed, or artificial families and the sufferings of the isolated individual.
The ideology of revolution, too, may have played a part in glorifying a sense of proud yet alienated freedom. The American Revolution, from a psychohistorical viewpoint, parallels an adolescent rebellion away from the parent-figure of England and the larger family of the British Empire. Americans won their independence and were then faced with the bewildering dilemma of discovering their identity apart from old authorities. This scenario was played out countless times on the frontier, to the extent that, in fiction, isolation often seems the basic American condition of life. Puritanism and its Protestant offshoots may have further weakened the family by preaching that the individual's first responsibility was to save his or her own soul.
" YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN " (1835) is a short story by American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. The story takes place in 17th century Puritan New England, a common setting for Hawthorne's works, and addresses the Calvinist/Puritan belief that humanity exists in a state of depravity, exempting those who are born in a state of grace. Hawthorne frequently attempts to expose the hypocrisy of Puritan culture in his literature and is an over bearing theme in several of his works. In a symbolic fashion, the story follows Young Goodman Brown's journey into self-scrutiny which results in his loss of faith.
The story is set during the Salem witch trials, at which Hawthorne's great-great-grandfather John Hathorne was a judge. According to American literature scholar James Mellow, Hawthorne was plagued by guilt by his ancestor's role, wrote the story to vindicate (оправдать) his grandfather by featuring two fictional victims of the witch trials who were witches and not innocent victims of the witch-hunt. It was also this ancestral guilt that inspired Hawthorne to change his family's name, adding a "w" in his early twenties, shortly after graduating from college.
In his writings Hawthorne questioned established thought—most specifically New England Puritanism and contemporary Transcendentalism. In "Young Goodman Brown", as with much of his other writing, he exposes ambiguity (двусмысленность). The plot and textual references in "Young Goodman Brown" reveal the Puritans as being like "a city upon a hill" as John Winthrop, a founder of Puritanism, said, and wanting to be seen that way as good, holy men. However, their doctrine teaches that all men are inherently evil and they strive to cause each person to come to terms with this and realize their sinful nature. This hypocrisy that Hawthorne presents in his story is how he reflects on the hypocritical teachings of the Puritans. They taught that man was inherently evil in nature much in accordance to Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
