Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, the descendent of a long line of Puritan ancestors, including John Hawthorne, a presiding magistrate in the Salem witch trials. After his father was lost at sea when he was only four, his mother became overly protective and pushed him toward more isolated pursuits. Hawthorne’s childhood left him overly shy and bookish, and molded his life as a writer. Hawthorne turned to writing after his graduation from Bowdoin College. His first novel, Fanshawe, was unsuccessful and Hawthorne himself disavowed it as immature. However, he wrote several successful short stories, but because of insufficient earnings as a writer he was forced to enter a career as a Boston Custom House measurer in 1839. After three years Hawthorne was dismissed from his job with the Salem Custom House. By 1842, his writing had earned him a sufficient income for him to marry Sophia Peabody and move to The Manse in Concord, which was at that time the center of the Transcendental movement. Hawthorne returned to Salem in 1845, where he was appointed surveyor of the Boston Custom House by President James Polk, but was dismissed from this post when Zachary Taylor became president. Hawthorne then devoted himself to his most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter. He worked on the novel with a determination he had not known before. His intense suffering infused the novel with imaginative energy, leading him to describe it as the “hell-fired story.”
The Scarlet Letter was an immediate success and allowed Hawthorne to devote himself to his writing. He left Salem for a temporary residence in Lenox, a small town the Berkshires, where he completed the romance The House of the Seven Gables in 1851. While in Lenox, Hawthorne became acquainted with Herman Melville and became a major proponent of Melville’s work, but their friendship became strained. Hawthorne’s following novels, The Blithedale Romance, based on his years of communal living at Brook Farm, and the romance The Marble Faun, were both considered disappointments. Hawthorne supported himself through another political post, the consulship in Liverpool, which he was given for writing a campaign biography for Franklin Pierce.
Hawthorne passed away on May 19, 1864 in Plymouth, New Hampshire after a long period of illness in which he suffered severe times of dementia. Hawthorne maintained a strong friendship with Franklin Pierce, but otherwise had few intimates and little engagement with any sort of social life. His works remain notable for their treatment of guilt and the complexities of moral choices.
The main action of the Scarlet Letter is the illicit love affair of Hester Prynne with the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale and the birth of their child Pearl. In Puritan New England, Hester, the mother of an illegitimate child, wears the scarlet ?A? for adulteress for years rather than reveal that her lover was the saintly young village minister. Her husband, Roger Chillingsworth, proceeds to torment the guilt stricken man, who confesses his adultery before dying in Hester’s arms. Hester plans to take her daughter Pearl to Europe to begin a new life. Hawthorne was one of the first American writers to explore the hidden motivations of his characters as he did in this story. The central theme is the effect of guilt, anxiety, and sorrow. Hawthorne’s picture of the sin obsessed Puritans was later criticized because the people were a far more relaxed people than presented in the works of Hawthorne.
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