Sarwar 1

Rubina Sarwar
Professor Samina Butt
American Literature 1
16 February 2011
For Hawthorne “Human life is essentially a moral story and he cons-
iders and analyses his characters as consciences in the face of sin”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) was born at Salem, Massachusetts, of a
prominent puritan family, which has spelled the name Hathorne and included a
judge at the Salem witchcraft trials, who figures as the accursed founder of The
House of the Seven Gables; a powerful and darkly tragic novel by Hawthorne.
Hawthorne has long been recognized as a classic interpreter of the spiritual
history of New England. Like Poe, but with an emphasis on moral significance, he
was a leader in the development of short story as a distinctive American genre. In
“The Old Apple Dealer”, one of Hawthorne’s slighter sketches in Mosses and Old
Manse (1846), he refers to himself as a “lover of the moral picaresque” who must
somehow strike beyond “word painting” to seize the essential moral quality of his
subject, a faded and featureless “old man who carries on a little trade of
gingerbread and apples”. Hawthorne asserts that he has “studied the old apple
dealer until he has become a naturalized citizen of my inner world” and then over
several pages of apparently aimless description, Hawthorne gradually coverts the
old man into a symbol of “moral frost” and the “torpid melancholy” of old age.
Through a skillful technique, using description and suggestion, Hawthorne is able
to capture the “spiritual essence” of this solitary figure. It is his ability to capture
the revelatory moment which separates the dark inner world of his stories from the
more external world of Irving’s tales.
Herman Melville in his famous review article “Hawthorne and His Mosses”
emphasizes the “power of blackness” as the key to Hawthorne’s imagination. He
held that it “derives its force form its appeal to that Calvinistic sense of Innate
 Sarwar 2

Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no
deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free”.
In fact, as Melville points out, it is Hawthorne great theme of moral guilt
and anxious weight of the past that give him a central place in the American
literary tradition. The exposure of superficial optimism and rationality in
Melville’s own stories, the exploration of themes of guilt and anxiety in Henry
James’s tales, theme of “fall from grace” in William Faulkner’s works—all these
are different manifestations of that great American moral drama of which
Hawthorne was the first great forerunner. In his tortured and problematic treatment
of themes of guilt and expiation, of intellectual and moral pride, Hawthorne shows
his constant preoccupation with the effects of Puritanism in New England. In
imaginative allegorical fashion, he depicts the dramatic results of a puritanism that
was root of the culture he knew recognizing its decadence in his own time.
Hawthorne’s great emphasis on allegory and symbolism makes his
characters to become embodiment of psychological traits or moral concepts rather
than living figures. He was repelled by the moral naivety of the Transcendentalists
and appalled by the psychological and social effects of Puritan obsession with sin.
Edgar Allan Poe imaginatively reveled in guilt but Hawthorne experienced
it with abomination. His art is an attempt to remove the curse brought down on the
family by John Hathorne’s participation in the Salem Witchcraft Trials (1692).
Hawthorne’s short stories and novels expose the corrupting influence of sin
on his characters. For example in “The Minister’s Black Veil”, Parson Hooper’s
obsession with sin and guilt severs him from the human community and “he
becomes a man of awful power over souls that were in agony for sin” and “His
converts always regarded him with a dread peculiar to themselves, affirming,
though not figuratively, that, before he bought them to celestial light, they had
been with him behind the black veil”. In the death bed scene, the veil achieves a
new prominence, though Father Hooper’s wearing of veil has been justified, in his
terms, by the belief that “any mortal” has secret sin enough to make the symbolic
 Sarwar 3

gesture appropriate, when about to die, he speaks of the Black Veil he sees on
every human face. Sense of one’s own sin, for Father Hooper as for Goodman
Brown, means obsession with the imagined pollution of the entire human race.
This awareness of human sinfulness is of central concern in Hawthorn’s
work. Richard Digby in “The Man of Adamant” also suffers from an intolerable
awareness of human sinfulness. His fear of moral contagion makes him to remove
himself from “communion with his fellow men and he retires to a cave in forest”.
Morally and emotionally he is petrified as his heart of flesh turns into heart of
stone. In another story Ethan Brand, the fire is shown as the actual cause of
Ethan’s guilt and he throws himself into it to escape and find relief from his
desperate awareness of sin. “Young Goodman Brown” is led by a satanic figure to
consort with witches among whom he recognizes, like Father Hooper who sees a
black veil on every face, pious figures of Salem’s puritan society as well as his
wife, Faith. “Welcome, my children,” says the dark figure, “to the communion of
your race. You have found thus your nature and your destiny. By the sympathy of
your human heart for sin ye shall scent out all the places ... Evil is the nature of
mankind. Evil must be your only happiness”. Henceforth Goodman Brown can
trust neither himself nor anyone else, and when he died, there was “no hopeful
verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom”. It is in import the most
tragic of Hawthorne’s tales, a sort of symbolic gothicism.
Hester Prynne’s scarlet “A” in The Scarlet Letter, stands not only for
“Adulterous” but also for “A” in the seventeenth century school primer: “In
Adam’s fall/we sinned all”. Sin is everywhere in The Scarlet Letter, as tangibly
present as the prison, the church and the graveyard. The church preaches sin and
guilt, the prison and the scaffold punish them and the graveyard opens a gateway
to everlasting damnation. In most of his fiction Hawthorne associates isolation
with sinners e.g. Hester Prynne, Clifford Pyncheon, Donatello, Father Hooper and
Goodman Brown are all lonely figures who are unable to communicate with their
fellow human beings and lose the ability to form warm human relationships. Even
 Sarwar 4

Roger Chillingworth who is motivated by revenge commits the unpardonable sin

in manipulating Hester, Pearl and Dimmesdale. Lady Eleanore who is the
“proudest of the proud” has a “moral deformity” which she confesses at the end,
admitting “the curse of Heaven hath stricken me, because I would not call man my
brother, nor woman sister. I wrapped myself in PRIDE as in a MANTLE, and
scorned the sympathies of nature, …”. The sin of intellectual pride is exemplified
by the monomaniacal botanist of “Rapaccini’s Daughter” who breeds a garden of
beautiful but poisonous flowers which so thoroughly infect his daughter that she
dies when given an antidote to the poison.
Beneath the elegant and almost motionless surface of Hawthorne’s stories
and novels, there lies one of the most disturbed, tormented and problematic world.
In fact a dark tragic night prevails everywhere in the form of evil, sin and death.
Hawthorne cannot look upon any aspect of reality, either human or natural, (Lady
Eleanore’s mantle or Georgina’s birthmark) without plunging beneath it and
eventually finding the germ which corrupts and destroys. In this regard the Note-
Books of Hawthorne are of particular importance because these note books record
not just events, but his own mental processes, his method of observing reality. For
example he writes:
The world is so sad and solemn, that things meant in jest
are liable, by an overpowering influence, to become
dreadful earnest,—gayly dressed fantasies turning to
ghostly and black-clad images of themselves.
There is evil in every human heart, which may remain
latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances
may rouse it to activity.
To symbolize moral or spiritual disease by disease of the
body; as thus - when a person committed any sin, it might
appear in some from on the body, - this to be wrought out.
A story to show how we are all wronged and wrongers, and
avenge one another.
 Sarwar 5

An ornament to be worn about the person of a lady – as a

jewelled heart.
After many years, it happens to be broken or unscrewed,
and a poisonous
odour comes out.
It is quite clear form above cited extracts that the world, for Hawthorne, is
not a clam, immobile landscape to be contemplated and sketched with the most
suitable and elegant words. It is an abyss into which he must continually peer and
probe to see images of sin and misery.
Although he had great admiration for Emerson and had actually taken part
in one of the Utopian ventures of the Transcendentalist movement Brook Farm,
but Hawthorne did not share their optimism and their passionate faith in human
destiny, expressed by Emerson and Walt Whitman. His lack of faith or enthusiasm
is amply demonstrated in the Blithedale Romance (1852), a work inspired by his
stay at Brook Farm. Evil and sin do not touch Emersonian brotherhood’s harmony.
For Hawthorne this harmony, although possible, is much harder to achieve and it
is always opposed and threatened by the evil hiding away in the heart of the world
—like the snake in a man’s body in one of his stories. That’s how life for
Hawthorne is essentially a moral story and his characters in their journey through
life usually are confronted by revelation of evil and sin.
In fact we must look for the origins of Hawthorne’s view of life in the great
spiritual movement at the roots of American tradition, Puritanism. Hawthorne is
not a puritan because he has a tolerance and understanding of life which set him
quite apart from the harsh discipline of that particular culture and religion. In
many short stories as well as in The House of the Seven Gables where the past is
shown in totally negative light, puritan inhumanity is placed in direct contrast to
the warmth and emotional vitality of love.
 Sarwar 6

In The Custom House – Introductory to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorn gives

as a vivid portrait of the Salem Custom House, he introduces his puritan ancestor
in a mocking way:
He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the
Church; he had all Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He
was likewise a bitter persecutor, as witness the Quakers,
who have remembered him in his histories…. His
son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself
so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their
blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him.
Hawthorne is attracted, in every imaginable way, to the Puritan world, even
though he condemns its less humane manifestations. Henry James in the critical
study of 1879, has rightly commented that Hawthorne “had, as regard the two
earlier centuries of New England life, that faculty which is called nowadays the
historical consciousness”. While considering the stories with Puritan themes or
moral themes, Henry James says:
Hawthorne was at home in the early New England history; he had thumbed its records
and had breathed its air, in whatever old receptacles this somewhat pungent compound
still lurked. He was fond of it, and he was proud of it, as any New Englander must be,
measuring the part of that handful of half-starved fanatics who formed his earliest
precursors, in laying the foundations of a mighty empire.
History of the Puritans is of primary importance in Hawthorne’s writings.
In fact it is the material background which he uses in order to explore the inner
consciences of his characters. The roots of his vision of the life of man and of
human history, lies in the Puritan culture and history, which interprets life
essentially as a moral episode. For example Reverend Dimmesdale in The Scarlet
Letter regards himself “a ruined soul” and “a polluted soul”. In most of his stories
even the ones which are termed as “Historical” with exception of few, historical
context is secondary to the portrayal of the moral elements of which the story is
the outward expression. “The Gray Champion” is one such example in which the
 Sarwar 7

figure of the mysterious old man, who succeeds in making the Governor’s troops
retreat, has symbolic dimensions. Another example is “The Maypole of Merry
Mount” where an episode of Puritan history moves “almost spontaneously, into a
sort of allegory”, and the elimination of the tolerant “settlement” of Mount
Wollaston, becomes a sort of pageant not far removed from the morality play.
We can trace the roots of this sense of evil and of conception of life as a
moral story running through all Hawthorne’s work in the bitter religiosity which
inspired one of his character, Jonathan Edwards to compose the terrifying words of
his sermons and made him see men as, “sinners in the hands of an angry god”. It
can further be traced to the society whose spelling book began with the stern
reminder “In Adam’s Fall we sinned all”. It is on this base that the major
contribution of puritan heritage to Hawthorne’s art takes shape. It is this
background which helps Hawthorne in creating the passionate, pitiless yet tolerant
portraits of human consciences in the face of sin.
Hester Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter; Donatello,
Miriam and Hilda in The Marble Faun and Father Hooper in “The Minister’s
Black Veil”, all derive their richness from the fact that Hawthorne considers and
analyses them as consciences in the face of sin. They are not shown having any
previous lives, their lives only begin with their guilt or with their knowledge of
guilt and sin and resultant suffering.
The Marble Faun is a significant example where Hawthorne examines the
consciences of his characters, analyzing the problem of sin and its consequences.
Donatello, after committing a crime (killing the man pursuing Miriam) undergoes
a profound transformation. His transition (Symbolic of original sin) from a state of
pure joy to a state of guilt is reflected in Donatello’s awareness of his own sin.
Hilda, who is pure, innocent and virtuous but through being touched by evil (she
was present when Donatello commits the crime) is so contaminated that she closes
into herself like a wounded flower and withers away until she is redeemed by the
maturity and strength gained through her experience.
 Sarwar 8

The subtlety with which Hawthorne probes into the consciences of Hester
Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale, makes The Scarlet Letter his greatest
achievement. He presents a profound crisis of the soul as little Pearl helps us to
understand it as:
A story about the Black Man … How he haunts this forest,
and carries a book with him, - a big, heavy book, with iron
clasps, and how this ugly Black Man offers his book and an
iron pen to everybody that meets him here among the trees;
and they are to write their names with their blood. And then
he sets his mark on their bosoms!
Pearl puts this question to her mother just after her request for a gothic
story, “Didst thou ever meet the Black Man, mother?” and Hester answers, “Once
in my life I met the Black Man! …. This scarlet letter is his mark!” Even earlier,
Hester has inquired of Chillingworth, “Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the
forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove the ruin of
my soul?” But Chillingworth smiling has only evaded her query, “Not thy soul …
No, not thine!” It is Dimmesdale whom he implies he has lured into the infernal
pact; and it is Dimmesdale who questions himself finally, though impelled by
Hester’s temptation rather than Chillingworth’s torment, “Am I mad? Or am I
given over utterly to the fiend? Did I make a contract with him in the forest, and
sign it with my blood?” This time it is Hawthorn himself who answers; “The
wretched minister! He had made a bargain very like it! Tempted by a dream of
happiness he had yielded himself with deliberate choice, as he had never done
before, to what he knew was deadly sin.”
Hester Prynne is seen in every movement of her psychological progress
through different phases of her life after being declared and brandished an
adulteress. Hawthorne also studies Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s husband, with
close attention. But, it is Reverend Dimmesdale, who is the finest achievement of
his literary career. He penetrates into this conscience tormented by guilt and his
 Sarwar 9

extreme awareness of his own responsibility to himself, to his fellow men and to
God. The gradual moral and physical decline of the pastor is made even more
agonizing by Chillingworth’s hounding of him. So in the end he feels a desperate
need to reveal his true self and makes a public confession and eventually dies. All
these aspects of his moral portrait make him one of the great introspective
characters of the modern novel.
The scene in chapter XII (The Minister’s Vigil) fully exhibits Dimmesdale
as a conscience in the face of sin and guilt:
Walking in the shadow of dream, as it were, and perhaps
actually under the influence of a species of somnambulism,
Mr. Dimmesdale reached the spot where, now so long
since, Hester Prynne had lived through her first hours of
public ignominy. The same platform or scaffold, black and
weather-stained with the storm or sunshine of seven long
years, and footworn, too, with the tread of many culprits
who had since ascended it, remained standing beneath the
balcony of the meeting house. The minister went up the
steps.
It was an obscure night of early May. An unvaried pall of
cloud muffled the whole expense of sky from zenith to
horizon. If the same multitude which had stood as eye
witness while Hester Prynne sustained her punishment
could now have been summoned forth, they would have
discerned no face above the platform, nor hardly the outline
of a human shape, in the dark grey of midnight. But the
town was all asleep. There was no peril of discovery …. No
eye could see him, save that ever-wakeful one which had
seen him in his closet, wielding the bloody scourge. Why,
then had he come hither? Was it but the mockery of
penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which his soul trifled
 Sarwar 10

with itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and wept,

while fiends rejoiced, with jeering laughter….
And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show
of expiation, Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great
horror of mind, as if the universe were gazing at a scarlet
token on his naked breast, right over his heart. On that spot,
in very truth, there was, and there had long been, the
gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily pain. Without any
effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked
aloud; an outcry then went pealing through the night, and
was beaten back from one house to another, and
reverberated from the hills in the back ground; as if a
company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in
it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it
to and fro.
‘It is done!’ muttered the minister, covering his face with
his hands. ‘The whole town will awake, and hurry forth,
and find me here!’
But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a
far greater power, to his own startled ears, than it actually
possessed. The town did not awake….
The full impact of this scene can only be felt when it is seen in the context
of Dimmesdale’s constant preoccupation with his sin. He felt overwhelmed, “by
the burden, whatever it might be, of crime or anguish, beneath which it was his
doom to totter”. And this very burden “gave him sympathies so intimate with the
sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison with theirs, and
received their pain into itself,” and when thinking of his grave, “he questioned
with himself whether the grass would ever grow on it, because an accursed thing
must there be buried!” The “Public veneration tortured him” because people
deemed him “a miracle of holiness….. In their eyes, the very ground on which he
 Sarwar 11

trod was sanctified”. Many a time he vowed to reveal himself as “… utterly a

pollution and a lie”. He kept fast as an act of penance. He also kept vigils and
indulged in constant introspection in an effort to purify himself.
Not only The Scarlet Letter but all Hawthorne’s works may be considered
as a profound, compassionate study of the relationship between man and sin.
Through this conception of human life as a moral story and his characters as
consciences in the face of sin, we are also brought to a realization of the positive
element of Hawthorne’s vision, to the discovery of the instrument of salvation.
Hawthorne makes it very clear that salvation lies in social harmony, in love, in that
“intercourse with the world” which he insists that he wants to establish through his
writings. He emphasizes that salvation can be found only in a life where man
accepts his own limitations. Arthur Dimmesdale after suffering for “heavy sin and
miserable agony” calls Hester to “come hither now, and twine thy strength about
me! Thy strength, Hester; but let it be guided by the will which God hath granted
me!” As a result of this newly gained strength, he is able to reveal his own “red
stigma” to the appalled crowd and dies expressing his faith in God’s mercy which
had helped him, “… to die this death of triumphant ignominy before the people!”
and bids farewell. Hawthorn comments:
That final word came forth with the minister’s expiring breath. The multitude,
silent till then, broke out in a strange, deep voice of awe and wonder, which could not as
yet find utterance, save in this murmur that rolled so heavily after the departed spirit.
In “Wakefield”, one of Hawthorne’s finest short stories, he tells the story
of a man who cut himself form the world and, when he decides to go back, finds
the most terrible emptiness around him and he becomes an “outcast of the
Universe”. Father Hooper isolates himself by donning the black crepe veil and
after his death though:
The grass of many years has sprung up and withered on that grave, the burial stone is
moss-grown and good Mr. Hooper’s face is dust; but awful is still the thought that it
mouldered beneath the Black Veil!
 Sarwar 12

What Hawthorne points with horror as “the unpardonable sin” is that of the
person who not only tends to cut himself off from the world, breaking off the
“intercourse” and rejecting the love, but also tries to reach, like Faust, a higher
knowledge and put himself in God’s position. As Ethan Brand asserts:
‘It is a sin that grew within my own breast,’ replied Ethan
Brand, standing erect with a pride that distinguishes all
enthusiasts of his stamp. ‘A sin that grew nowhere else!
The sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of
brotherhood with man and reverence for God, and
sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims! The only
sin that deserves a recompense of immortal agony!’
Another example is Puritan Richard Digby in “The Man of Adamant”
whose inhuman discipline and religious fanaticism results in material hardening of
his heart. Unlike the realistic novelists of his day (some of whom he particularly
admired and enjoyed) Hawthorne was not interested, as a writer, in the great social
and worldly spectacle of manners and affairs. What really concerned him was
what he himself once called “psychological romance”. He cared, as Henry James
said, for “the deeper psychology”, and his tales as well as his novels are
expression of his burrowing “into the depths of our common nature”. What he
found there was something which often saddened him and sometimes appalled
him. His finding made it impossible for him to share the great glad conviction of
his age that, as Emerson had told it, “love and good are inevitable and in the
course of things”, he came to feel that sin and guilt are inevitable. The moral
nucleus of most of his fiction is his understanding of what it means to be in the
wrong. That’s why Newton Arvin calls him “The elegiac poet of the sense of
guilt”.
 Sarwar 13

Works Cited
Millington, Richard. The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne. 2004.
Bloom, Harold. Nathaniel Hawthorne. 2007
McWilliams, John P. Junior. Hawthorne, Melville, and the American Character, A
Looking-Glass Business.
Hawthorne. Short Stories. New York: New York Vintage books, 1955.
Shapioo, Charles. Twelve Original Essays on Great American Novels.
Harding, Brian. American Literature in Context II (1830-1865).
Walker, Marshal. The Literature of the United States of America. Second Edition.