The Scarlet Letter Notes
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These are my classnotes about THE SCARLET LETTER; be careful I have had no time to revise it, but I think it can be useful.
REMEMBER BE CAREFUL WITH THIS INFORMATION
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804. His family descended from the earliest settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; among his forebears was John Hathorne, one of the judges at the 1692 Salem witch trials. Throughout his life, Hawthorne was both fascinated and disturbed by his kinship with John Hawthorne. The theme of guilt is typical of Hawthorne. Melville said that Hawthorne was ashamed for what his ancestors had done in religious persecutions.
After college Hawthorne tried his had at writing, producing historical sketches and an anonymous novel, Fanshawe. Hawthorne also held positions as an editor and as a custom surveyor during this period. His growing relationship with the intellectual circle of Ralph Waldo Emerson led him to abandon his customs post for the utopian experiment at Brook Farm, a commune designed to promote economic self-sufficiency and transcendentalist principles. Transcendentalism was a religious and philosophical movement of the early 19th century that was dedicated to the belief that divinity manifest itself everywhere, particularly in the natural world. It also advocated a personalized, direct relationship with the divine in place of formalized, structure religion. This second transcendental idea is privileged in The Scarlet Letter.
Hawthorne””s relationship with Transcendentalism was ambiguous:
• He disagree with it:
a) because of the very optimistic vision of Transcendentalists: the Party of Future. Hawthorne was more inclined in the contemplation of the past.
b) Hawthorne was more interested in arts as a technique in form than most transcendentalist artists.
c) He was more ambivalent and less didactic than transcendentalists, in The Scarlet Letter the narrator is always putting doubts in what he is telling.
• He agree with Transcendentalism in the tendency to see everything in a symbolic way. Emerson said that “every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact”. The world is sees as a manifestation of the spirit.
After marrying a transcendentalist in 1842, Hawthorne left Brook Farm and moved into the Old Manse, a home in Concord where Emerson had once lived. In 1846 he published Mosses from an Old Manse, a collection of essays and stories dealing with early America. This collection of stories earned Hawthorne the attention of the literary establishment because America was trying to establish a cultural independence to complement its political independence, and Hawthorne””s work displayed both a stylistic freshness and an interest in America subject matter. Even Melville called Hawthorne the “American Shakespeare”.
In 1845 Hawthorne again went to work as a customs surveyor, this time, like the narrator of The Scarlet Letter, at a post in Salem. In 1850, after having lost the job, he published The Scarlet Letter. His other major novels included The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860). In 1853 Hawthorne was appointed a United States consul and he spent the next 6 years in Europe. He died in 1864, a few years after returning to America.
Most of his novels are based on the past: on the history of US and on the familiar tradition. However, one of the problems frequently quoted was that America didn””t have a past. There is an obsession with Puritanism. He has an ambivalent attitude:
– criticism towards the intolerance of Puritanism (persecution).
– Puritan had qualities in the development of America.
His early influence was John Bunyan””s Pilgrim””s Progress; an allegorical story. From here, Hawthorne tends to use allegories. He is also influenced by Spenser, Walter Scott and Gothic novels.
THE SCARLET LETTER
“THE CUSTOM HOUSE”: FUNCTIONS
1) To balance the very dark tone of the work giving some kind of comic relief.
2) To create a narrator and a context for the story (framing device).
3) The Scarlet Letter as a literary manifesto.