Similarities Between Hawthorne And Kate Chopin

After learning and reading about Kate Chopin and Nathaniel Hawthorne, one can recognize how their life experiences and era shape the message of their literary works. These two writers, born almost fifty years apart, had a completely different family setting, thus their writings differ and so does their morals. In literature, personal experiences in the writers’ lives have a great significance in their writing style, theme, and symbolism. Personal experiences always have a different impact on the readers as well as the writers. Kate Chopin and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing styles derive from their personal experiences. For example, some of Chopin’s personal experiences include her growing up surrounded by intelligent and independent women, her being widowed at the age of thirty-two and

For example, Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” depicts the themes of freedom and autonomy. The main character, Mrs. Mallard, explains how her marriage is somewhat dissolved of ties after the supposed death of her husband, she explains how freedom from her difficult marriage is the best outcome that could ever happen to a woman. Perhaps Chopin’s difficulties in her own marriage encouraged her to write about what freedom would be, as well as how independence would feel after the death of one’s partner. Hawthorne also writes according to personal experience. His themes focus mainly on sin and occasionally hypocrisy and he is persistent with the Puritan ideologies from his family in most of his works. In Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” the reader can perceive the hypocrisy amongst the people in the village and how even the holiest person in the village has his or her own deeds with the dark side. In most of Hawthorne’s works, the theme of sin is prevalent and it shows how Hawthorne’s experiences with his growing up in a Puritan family impacted his