Breaking out of Prison
Hawthorne’s view on life is wrong. He says that in the depths of human nature there is an inner world in which every human being is alone. Hawthorne’s background and they way he lived his life gave him this dark view on life. His father and grandfather did things that he did not like and Hawthorne tried to redeem the bad things they did and when he couldn’t he went into seclusion and explored his own heart. Every person is not the same as Hawthorne; I believe that with certain people their heart could be their prison but not the average person.
People are not caged by their heart, their heart shows what kind of person they are. It is similar to Emerson’s “golden possibility,” Hawthorne did not meet his golden possibility and this is why he looks on things so darkly. He doesn’t try to look at the good things in life, he tries to see what is wrong with people and explain why. He only looked at himself though and he did not have much to be happy for and this is why he felt like he was in a prison. Most people if they look inside themselves they are happy and do not dwell on such things like Hawthorne does. A person’s cage is not their heart, their heart is something that lets them be free and go on about a normal day with a happy countenance on their face.
Your own heart could be your worst prison but every human being is not in that prison like Hawthorne was. Hawthorne is right that your heart is the worst prison a person could be in but everyone is that same situation. Hawthorne shouldn’t generalize so much, he was only looking at himself and not the world around him. He was too self-centered in his writings and quotes, he should have looked at other people and saw how they lived. Then he would see a world of bright colors and fun filled life, he could have lived life to the maximum but he chose to look at the dark side of things and keep living inside his prison instead of changing his life.
Lathrop, G. P., ed. "Hawthorne, Nathaniel." The Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature. Binghamton, New York: Vail-Ballou, 1962. 439-40. Print.
According to A.N. Kaul in his Introduction to Hawthorne – A Collection of Critical Essays, the themes of isolation and alienation were ones which Hawthorne was “deeply preoccupied with” in his writings (2).
According to A.N. Kaul in his Introduction to Hawthorne – A Collection of Critical Essays, the themes of isolation and alienation were ones which Hawthorne was “deeply preoccupied with” in his writings (2). Hawthorne’s personal isolation from people from 1825 to 1837 was probably due to his lifelong shyness among people. This reluctance to freely socialize may have been a result of a foot injury: “an injury to his foot at the age of nine reduced his physical activity for almost two years” (Martin 16). Wagenknecht says in Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Man, His Tales and Romances that this accident “reduced him for over two years to a state of invalidism that probably contributed toward developing his taste for reading” (2). Or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shyness was perhaps due to the death of his father when he was but four years old. Regarding the impact of this death upon Hawthorne, Edmund Fuller and B. Jo Kinnick in “Stories Derived from New England Living,” say:
Kaul, A. N., Ed.. "HAWTHORNE: A Collection of Critical Essays." Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1966.
Lang, H.J.. “How Ambiguous Is Hawthorne.” In Hawthorne – A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by A.N. Kaul. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966.
Everyone has experiences that change their lives and influence all that they do. Everyone has that special someone, or something, that impacts their choices and work. Nathaniel Hawthorne definitely had these types of experiences throughout his lifetime. Authors in particular have certain people they look up to when it comes to their writing, and Hawthorne had many different people like this as he was writing all of his novels, including The Scarlet Letter. He also was inspired and influenced like different events he experienced in his years, in good ways and bad.
what Hawthorne wants us to be concerned with; he wants to show us why it is wrong to try
I think Hawthorne may be implying in these stories that perfection is unattainable and the quest for it may be unrewarding, even fatal. In these and some of Hawthorne's other stories, I believe he is reminding people of the delicate blessings of life. Our pursuit of happiness outside of a connection with other people and our reckless endeavor to supersede the power of the supernatural may result in temporary satisfaction, but is ultimately unfulfilling and even dangerous.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings show how sin is sin until it is publicized. He goes into great depth to show both sides of private and public sin. People still sin and judge others today. However, the ways that sin is seen today is much different in a historical type of way. The idea of sin never really seemed to make sense to Hawthorne. Hawthorne’s writings are still relevant today because the world is full of sex symbolism and sin. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings show how people tend to overlook their own sin but speak loudly about other’s sin. Hawthorne understood that sin is unconsciously committed, but people are still judged by others for something they also tend to commit privately.
Lang, H.J. “How Ambiguous is Hawthorne?” In Hawthorne – A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by A.N. Kaul. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966.
“Mr. Hawthorne’s distinctive trait is invention, creation, imagination, originality…”(Poe). This was taken from a review of Hawthorne’s work written by Edgar Allen Poe in the late 1800’s. Nathaniel Hawthorne is a very well known author that had written books and works showing traits just as Poe had said. His stories and books are known worldwide and have been studied for many years. Through Hawthorne’s life, I believe he had developed a vast imagination. From developing an imagination, he had developed works that show his ability to make stories from his mind. Hawthorne used his imagination to develop his fascinating works.
Hester Prynne, the wearer of the scarlet letter, conveys a couple of different ways in which guilt can affect individual’s lives for worse and for better. Depending on the emotional depth of the sin and how it affects the society, one of the worst results of sin is the feeling of being an outcast. “Much of the marble coldness of Hester’s impression was to be attributed to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to thought. Standing alone in the world,–alone, as to any dependence on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected,–alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even has she not scorned to consider it desirable,–she cast away the fragments of a broken chain.” (Hawthorne 112) In this quote, Hawthorne describes Hester’s emotions of desertion and the ignominy of being alone. For Hester, these sentiments reach a point to where they are almost unbearable. After some time passes, she realizes that in order for her life to continue on, she needs to change the way she is living. “She wanted–what some people want throughout life–a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and mak...
Hawthorne was also a symbolist who had enormous respect for the material world and for common sense reality. Hawthorne usually established a neutral territory somewhere between the real world and fairy land, where the actual and imaginary meet. His ultimate purpose was always "to open an intercourse with the world" and out of this came symbolism (Kaul 66). For example, the cross -hybridization of the plants in the garden is called "adultery (Newman 267).
The man Nathaniel Hawthorne, an author of the nineteenth century, was born in 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts. It was there that he lived a poverty-stricken childhood without the financial support of a father, because he had passed away in 1808. Hawthorne was raised strictly Puritan, his great-grandfather had even been one of the judges in the Puritan witchcraft trials during the 1600s. This and Hawthorne’s destitute upbringing advanced his understanding of human nature and distress felt by social, religious, and economic inequities. Hawthorne was a private individual who fancied solitude with family friends. He was also very devoted to his craft of writing. Hawthorne observed the decay of Puritanism with opposition; believing that is was a man’s responsibility to pursue the highest truth and possessed a strong moral sense. These aspects of Hawthorne’s philosophy are what drove him to write about and even become a part of an experiment in social reform, in a utopian colony at Brook Farm. He believed that the Puritans’ obsession with original sin and their ironhandedness undermined instead of reinforced virtue. As a technician, Hawthorne’s style in literature was abundantly allegorical, using the characters and plot to acquire a connection and to show a moral lesson. His definition of romanticism was writing to show truths, which need not relate to history or reality. Human frailty and sorrow were the romantic topics, which Hawthorne focused on most, using them to finesse his characters and setting to exalt good and illustrate the horrors of immorality. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s experiences as a man, incite as a philosopher and skill as a technician can be seen when reading The Scarlet Letter.
Hawthorne is a dark romantic because of his early life, dismal adulthood. He grew up without a father, when he was four his father died, leaving his mother and two sisters (Pearson 1). Pearson said the woods helped young Hawthorne heal, when he was young he was considered to be “delicate”, and Hawthorne became a reckless child injuring himself leaving him laid up for almost a year (1). While he was healing he developed a strong love for reading (1). When he was old enough he added a W to his name to escape his ancestor’s background because his great-great-grandfather was a judge at the Salem Witch Trials, and he was the only man to not apologize for sentencing innocent people to their deaths (Allen 454). “I take shame upon myself for their sakes and pray that any curse incurred by them…may now and henceforth removed” (454). Hawthorne was also fascinated by common man because he saw himself different from them, and he avoided failures daily (Bloom 33). Hawthorne didn’t waste his time “chatting” with people especially people who he thought of as fools (33). Hawthorne’s methods were to love and pity mankind more than he mocked them, he never created a character which didn’t possess a soul; another method was to write with a noble respect for his own...