Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) - RUA, Repositorio...
Transcript of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) - RUA, Repositorio...
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Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64)
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• Born in Salem, Mass, 4th of July 1804 • His father died young. Nathaniel lived with
his grief-stricken mother in relative isolation as a child
• Puritan background (one of his ancestors, William Hathorne, had been a notable figure, and his great grand-father, John Hathorne, was a magistrate presiding over the witchcraft trials of 1692)
Life
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The Salem Witch Trials
• May- October 1692: Salem, Massachusetts
• Constitute a series of investigations and persecutions that caused 19 “witches” to be hanged and many others imprisoned
• Period of public hysteria generated by false accusations and coerced confessions
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• Hawthorne’s family felt they had been “cursed” by their troubling Puritan past
• Seeking to distance himself from that past, Nathaniel changed his name into Hawthorne
• Much of Hawthorne’s writing deploys a lingering sense of guilt because of his Puritan connection
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• Twice Told Tales (1837), which included “The Minister’s Black Veil”, “The Pay-Pole of Merry Mount”
• Sojourn at Brook Farm in 1841 • Marriage to Sophia Peabody and move to
Concord • Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), which
included “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Birth Mark”
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• Work at the Custom House in Salem: • "I am trying to resume my pen... Whenever
I sit alone, or walk alone, I find myself dreaming about stories […]. I should be happier if I could write“
• Loss of his job in 1848 … and loss of his mother ("the darkest
hour I ever lived")
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• The Scarlet Letter (1850) • Moved to Lenox, Mass, and friendship with
Melville (author of Moby-Dick) • The House of The Seven Gables (1851),
like SL it contains history, legend, superstition and many gothic details
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• 1852: return to Concord (neighbours included Emerson,Thoreau and Margaret Fuller)
• The Blithedale Romance • 1857: the family sailed for England and
toured Italy and France • The Marble Faun (1860)
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The aesthetics of Hawthorne
• Asserts the independence of fiction, but insists that it should be interconnected with human experience
“it is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie” (letter to Emerson)
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Recommended lectures in youtube
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: Return to Puritanism
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• The Scarlet Letter as an example: • [This story is] somewhere between the
real world and the fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other” (“The Custom House”)
• The novel mixes history and story, reality and invention
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• He vindicates the artist’s right to work with the tools of the imagination, liberating fiction from its mimetic function
• Fiction as a lamp rather than as a mirror
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• The novel is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity to the probable and the ordinary course of man’s experience. The romance should be concerned with the truth of the human heart […].
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• And in order to present the complexity of the human heart…
• “The writer has a right to present the truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of his own choosing or creation” (Preface to The House of the Seven Gables)
• The romance allows “greater freedom and invention”
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• Other characteristics: • Hawthorne’s preference for distant times
or countries (The Blithedale Romance as the only exception)
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“No author can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity […] as is the case with my native land” (Preface to The Marble Faun)
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• The “imperative of evasion” or the
compulsion to escape from the ordinary world as a feature of Hawthorne’s and Melville’s works
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Two possible reasons: A) To distance themselves from the
literature that dealt with the ordinary social world: the province of women, “the dammed mob of scribbling women” (Harriet Beecher Stove, Louisa May Alcott, Susan Warner, Maria Cummings…)
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B) To dissociate themselves from contemporary American life. “The Custom House” illustrates Hawthorne’s discomfort with contemporary American life and values
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Literary themes and styles
• His works are dark meditations on the human condition, often dramatized with a Gothic language loaded with symbolism
• Guilt, hidden sin, evil, individual responsibility and retribution as recurrent topics
• Works have often moral messages and deep psychological insights
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On Mosses from an Old Manse
“ This blackness pervades through and through. You may be witched by his sunlight, but there is the blackness of darkness beyond” (Herman Melville)
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Bibliography
Mellow, James R. Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980.
http://www.americanwriters.org/writers/hawthorne.asp