Essay About Characters Owen Warland And Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne’S “Artist Of The Beautiful”
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Hawthorne’s “Artist of the Beautiful”
Throughout literature, we have come to know many characters who baffle us with
their unusual personalities to the point where branding them as delusional is the easiest
approach to understanding their nature. In other cases we ask ourselves whether or not
the character is living in a dream and perhaps out of touch with reality. We ask
ourselves, what would drive a person to walk into the night with a stranger when all logic
says not to? Why would a person laugh after watching his compatriot suffer public
humiliation? Nathaniel Hawthorne, without a doubt, is notorious for creating strange
characters who puzzle the reader when trying to understand them but of all of
Hawthornes characters Owen Warland must be the most difficult to analyze. The
troubled young artist in search of the beautiful has become the object of ongoing
criticism as to whether he is living a dream or simply delusional. In any case, it would be
easy for us to dismiss the matter by saying he is a little of both, a hopeless dreamer
who goes mad when people fail to understand him. On the other hand, claiming that he
is neither dreaming nor delusional is a far more difficult view to support. Nevertheless,
understanding Owen demands a closer look at “The Artist of the Beautiful”.
Owen Warland, seeker of the beautiful, is the lowly watchmaker around whom
this story takes place. He lives in a small village in which he is an object of peculiarity.
“What can Owen Warland be about?”(Hawthorne 447). Old Peter Hovenden may be
speaking for almost the whole town, except for his daughter Annie, to whom he is
addressing the question. Peter thinks Owen to be a dreamer and completely out of
touch with reality. Robert Danforth also does not think very much of Owen, his school
chum from prior days. Robert does not see much reward in what Owen does. When
speaking with Owen, he goes so far as to say: “I put more main strength into one blow
of my hammer, than all that you have expended since you were a prentice”(Hawthorne
453). So what is it about Owen that puzzles the characters that surround him? What
makes him so different? Surely it is not his profession; Hovenden himself was once a
watchmaker, not to mention the fact that he was Owens teacher. Perhaps it is how he
spends his days, always in solitude and preoccupied with things that most people found
to be a waste of time or the fact that “he found amusement in chasing butterflies, or
watching the motions of water insects”(Hawthorne 457). Apparently, as time goes on,
Owen gains a reputation for his fascination with and search for the beautiful. As the
story progresses we hear more about “The Beautiful” and his quest to achieve
it. Owens search for the beautiful comes in the shape of a butterfly but not just any
butterfly, one built by his own hands.
The butterfly becomes the object of Owens toil and the reason why he shuts
everyone out of his life. At the first glance it would appear that the butterfly is just an
object of fascination for Owen but by taking a closer look one is able to see just how
much the two have in common. Both the butterfly and Owen are fragile creatures and
susceptible to injury in their environments. Both are usually taken for granted and seen
as insignificant. However the real significance of the butterfly, the most likely reason for
Hawthorne choosing it, is the way it lives its life. The stages in the life of the butterfly are
closely related to the ordeals that Owen faces throughout the story.
Butterflies undergo a complete metamorphosis, that is, “their life consists of four
stages, each entirely different from the other three”(Sandved 55). “In the first stage, the
insect is concealed within the egg, which after fertilization, is deposited on a leaf” (Bassil
5). After five days or so, the caterpillar emerges in its larval stage. It spends the
two weeks feeding and increasing its weight by as much as 30,000 times. “To
accommodate such rapid growth and the increasingly visible insect, the caterpillar
sheds its skin five times; these instars, as they are called, provide important and
sometimes fantastic camouflage” (Bassil 5). After shedding the fifth and final skin, the
butterfly forms its chrysalis shell. During the next two weeks the butterfly goes through a
complete transformation and emerges as a fully developed butterfly. “In addition