Nathaniel Hawthorne – A Reader’s Guide

Harold Bloom, in The Daemon Knows, describes Hawthorne:

[Hawthorne] Celebrates the sexual vitality of women as a potentially saving force, tragically curtailed by male inadequacy and societal restraint. (Bloom, 228)

This characterization of Hawthorne also lends insight to Hawthorne’s most masterful work, the Scarlett Letter, and its heroine Hester Prynne.

Northrop Frye describes Hawthorne’s characters as “stylized figures, expanding into psychological archetypes.” (source)

Hawthorne was:

• A romantic, valuing originality and imagination over tradition and reason
• Fascinated by the life of the mind
• Appeals to Calvinistic sense of innate depravity and original sin
• Questing towards human understanding (rather than towards perfection)
• Compressed plot and character in ways that led to shorter forms like the short story
• Did historical research
• Makes readers do interpretive work
• Interpretation is a form of self expression (expand on this with discussion question)
• Refuses a single moral
• Often writes moral allegory
• Writes strong female characters
• For Hawthorne, the unpardonable sin is not to have love and reverence for the human soul
• Worried about cold, philosophical religion or science
• Related to the judges in the Salem Witch trials (grandfather)?

Bloom, Harold.  The Daemon Knows. 2015. New York:  Penguin Random House.  Print.