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How the emergence of Puritanism and Hawthorne’s background and experiences contributed to his development as a writer
How the emergence of Puritanism and Hawthorne’s background and experiences contributed to his development as a writer
Nathaniel Hawthorne themes in his writing
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Nathanial Hawthorne. Considered to be one of the greatest American writers of the 19th century. But did you know that he hated portraits, and it is now thought that he was a mild manic-depressive? Born in Salem, Massachusetts on July 4, 1804. A decendant of a long puritan line of Hathorne's. His ancestry included his great-great grandfather, John Hathorne who was a judge at the Salem witch trials 112 years before Nathanial was born. Judge John Hathorne charged many with the crime of witchcraft,and condemned them to their deaths. Nathanial was embaressed by this and changed the spelling of his last name from Hathorne to Hawthorne. Alot of his family history, life experiences and where he lived influenced his writing greatly. Hawthorne had a cousin, Susannah Ingersoll. When he was young, in Salem, he would frequently visit her in her mansion, she lived there alone. The house had a secret staircase and once had seven gables. This house, Nathanial visited in his youth, was his inspiration for the house in his book " The House Of The Seven Gables". The story of The House Of The Seven Gables streches over two centuries. It's the classic scenario of two rival families, in this case the Pyncheons ( weathly aristocratic puritans) and the Maules ( humbler paupers). The story of these two families begins with Matthew Maule, who owned a certain amount of land and built himself a hut to live in, in this new puritan settlement. Maule was a hard working but obscure man, who was stubborn and protected what was his. His rival arrived at the settlement about 30 to 40 years after Maule had been there. Colonel Pyncheon, an ambicious and determined man, had a high position in the town. It was said that Colonel Pyncheon was very much for the execution of those who practiced witchcraft, and it was also said that he very strongly sought the condemnation of Matthew Maule for being a wizard. Pyncheon did manage to have Maule executed but not before Maule placed a curse on Pyncheon and his decendants. These were Maules exact words : " God, God will give him blood to drink !" Many of the characters in the book were influenced by actual people in and during Nathanial's life. For example : Colonel Pyncheon was based on The Reverend Wentworth Upham, a Minister and mayor of Salem. He wrote the books : Lecture's on Withcraft and History of Witchcraft and Salem Village. The Maule name was derived from Thomas Maule, a Quaker merchant living in Salem at the time of the trials.
The thoroughness is one of its key strengths, allowing for people of varying knowledge about Salem to gain an understanding of the events and background of the witch trials. The author includes multiple sources to show the exceptionally varying ideals and their effects on Salem. “the peace that came under Joseph Green's conciliatory leaders... the important role religious strife played in the events of 1692”(Latner, 2006, 118). Joseph Green completely paralleled his predecessors, he was responsible for restoring order to Salem. This is significant because it shows the impact that ministers had, they had the power to change the town completely, Green was one of the first to not cause strife. Compared to Christine Leigh Heyrman’s “Witchcraft in Salem Village: Intersections of Religion and Society” Latner’s article correlates with the central idea that religious leaders and religion itself started the witch
"The house is 10 feet by 10 feet, and it is built completely of corrugated paper. The roof is peaked, the walls are tacked to a wooden frame. The dirt floor is swept clean, and along the irrigation ditch or in the muddy river...." " ...and the family possesses three old quilts and soggy, lumpy mattress. With the first rain the carefully built house will slop down into a brown, pulpy mush." (27-28)
	In history Rebecca Nurse was hanged on July 19, John Proctor on August 19, and Martha Corey on September 22.
When one evokes The Salem Witch Trials of 1692, the image that comes to most peoples minds are that of witches with pointed hats riding broomsticks. This is not helped by the current town of Salem, Massachusetts, which profits from the hundreds of thousands of tourists a year by mythologizing the trials and those who were participants. While there have been countless books, papers, essays, and dissertations done on this subject, there never seems to be a shortage in curiosity from historians on these events. Thus, we have Bernard Rosenthal's book, Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692, another entry in the historiographical landscape of the Salem Witch Trials. This book, however, is different from most that precede it in that it does not focus on one single aspect, character, or event; rather Rosenthal tells the story of Salem in 1692 as a narrative, piecing together information principally from primary documents, while commenting on others ideas and assessments. By doing so, the audience sees that there is much more to the individual stories within the trials, and chips away at the mythology that has pervaded the subject since its happening. Instead of a typical thesis, Rosenthal writes the book as he sees the events fold out through the primary documents, so the book becomes more of an account of what happened according to primary sources in 1692 rather than a retelling under a new light.
Starkey, Marion L. The Devil In Massachusetts: A Modern Inquiry Into The Salem Witch Trials. London: Robert Hale Limited.
McBain, J. ‘The Salem Witch Trials: A Primary Source History of the Witchcraft Trials in Salem, Massachusetts’, (Rosen Publishing Group, New York, 2002)
story takes place in Salem in 1692, during the Salem witch trials. The story starts
Woodward, Walter “New England’s other Witch-hunt: The Hartford Witch-hunt of the 1660s and Changing Patterns in Witchcraft Prosecution” OAH Magazine of History, 2003
Godbeer, Richard. The Salem Witch Hunt A Brief History with Documents. Boston, New York: Bedford/St. Martins 2011
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights share similarities in many aspects, perhaps most plainly seen in the plots: just as Clarissa marries Richard rather than Peter Walsh in order to secure a comfortable life for herself, Catherine chooses Edgar Linton over Heathcliff in an attempt to wrest both herself and Heathcliff from the squalid lifestyle of Wuthering Heights. However, these two novels also overlap in thematic elements in that both are concerned with the opposing forces of civilization or order and chaos or madness. The recurring image of the house is an important symbol used to illustrate both authors’ order versus chaos themes. Though Woolf and Bronte use the house as a symbol in very different ways, the existing similarities create striking resonances between the two novels at certain critical scenes.
Hinds, Maurene J. Witchcraft on Trial: From the Salem Witch Hunts to the Crucible. Library ed. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, 2009. Print.
In the past, the word Salem has always been somewhat synonymous with the infamous witch trials. Thanks to works such as Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”, many people find it hard not to envision a community torn apart by chaos, even though Miller’s play was not so much about the witch trials but instead a commentary on the rampant McCarthyism going on at the time he wrote it. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, however, see a very different picture when the Salem witch trials are mentioned. Rather than overlook the “ordinary” people living in the towns in which they write about (in the case of Salem Possessed, the town of Salem, Massachusetts), they instead take the instance of the witch trials of 1692 and springboard from them into a detailed inquisition into the entire history of the small village of Salem; or, in their own words, Boyer and Nissenbaum have “exploited the focal events of 1692 somewhat as a stranger might make use of a lightning flash in the night: better to observe the contours of the landscape which it chances to illuminate” (xii). That is to say, the authors strive to show how the witch trials were not simply a completely spontaneous event, but rather a long, horrible process by which individuals were singled out, tried, and executed in order to vent emotions of hostility towards change. The way in which the authors go about this, however, is in a somewhat difficult to comprehend style that goes back and forth between the years, forcing one to rethink all the facts thus far each time a new chapter is introduced. In addition, the authors tend to focus mostly on the social and economic aspects of witchcraft, with little to nothing as far as further explanation of the actions of the women accused.
stood to inherit more economic power than most men in the area (Boyer, p66). By 1692 the young girls had continued to make false accusations of townspeople. Many of those accused were townspeople who were more prominent than others. Villagers, such as the young girl...
“the witchcraft accusations of 1692 moved in channels which were determined by years of factional strife in Salem Village”
expected to come to her house after church. The men would be in the den watching the