Hawthorne's Bulky Puritans

PMLA ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 75 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 420-423
Author(s):  
James F. Ragan
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
New Haven ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
American Novels ◽  
American Society ◽  
Blithedale Romance

In 1944 Lawrence Sargent Hall (Hawthorne: Critic of Society, New Haven) showed that an important theme in Hawthorne's work was the progressivism of American democracy. No one has yet pointed out, though, how Hawthorne demonstrates this progress of American society by emblematizing the human body in his fiction. Yet emblematic bodies appear in all three of the major American novels: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance.

Hawthorne's Fair-Haired Maidens: The Fading Light

PMLA ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 250-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Ogden Birdsall
Keyword(s):  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Blithedale Romance

Probably no reader of Hawthorne's four major novels can have failed to notice the similarities which exist among certain of the participating heroines. It would seem that if a lady had handled her first assignment well, Hawthorne could nearly always manage to find a place for her in his next production. Hence, not only did Hester of The Scarlet Letter turn up again as Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance and as Miriam in The Marble Faun, but, even more obviously, Phoebe of The House of the Seven Gables later found parts as Priscilla in Blithedale and Hilda in The Marble Faun.

Taking the Domestic View in Hawthorne’s Fiction

2015 ◽  
Vol 88 (4) ◽  
pp. 657-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria O’Malley
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Blithedale Romance

Shifting the emphasis within feminist criticism from the act of speech to the act of hearing, this article argues that, in The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne reveals how the public sphere depends on the voices of dispossessed women even as it attempts to silence them.

Hawthorne, Madonna, and Lady Gaga: The Marble Faun's Transgressive Miriam

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 625-640 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL BROEK
Keyword(s):  
American Music ◽  
Simultaneous Analysis ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Lady Gaga ◽  
Blithedale Romance

AbstractMost criticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Novel The Marble Faun has focussed on its many images of domestic containment, its supposed argument in favor of Christian idealism, as well as Hawthorne's apparent “castration” of the American sculptor Kenyon – just another in a long list of the author's male protagonists who succumb to a mixture of self-doubt (Dimmesdale, in The Scarlet Letter), narcissism (Coverdale, in The Blithedale Romance), and the allure of the chaste virgin (Holgrave, in The House of the Seven Gables). This essay, however, argues that Miriam, the novel's chief female protagonist, actually completes a complicated “liberation” from the proscriptions (as Hawthorne envisioned them) of her gender, enacted by her embrace of multiple, ancient, and organic symbols. Through a simultaneous analysis of the American music icons Madonna and Lady Gaga, we find that Hawthorne engages a complex set of ideational forces – misogyny, Catholicism, and female eros – as Miriam emerges, like these famous pop stars, as an independent artist, a position that not one of the author's male protagomists is able to attain. In this sense, Miriam may be reconsidered Hawthorne's internationalized Hester, or, more aptly, his mature Pearl.

Eros and Ideology: At the Heart of Hawthorne's Blithedale

2000 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
John N. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Heart ◽  
First Person ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Magnetic Chain ◽  
Blithedale Romance

The Blithedale Romance dramatizes Nathaniel Hawthorne's career-long preoccupation with the human heart. Rather than the oft-acknowledged "head versus heart" struggle, his third mature romance features a "heart versus heart" conflict, in which "heart" represents both the passional, erotic impulses of the romance's characters and the ideals of sympathy, brotherhood/sisterhood, community, and familial love. Blithedale's utopianism, especially as asserted by the romance's first-person narrator, Miles Coverdale, rests upon the latter, ideal, or ideological notion of "heart." Much to Coverdale's nostalgic regret, neither Blithedale's ideology nor the community itself can survive the jealousies, rivalries, and erotic entanglements of the romance's four main characters. This ideology corresponds to Hawthorne's own desperately affirmed belief in "the magnetic chain of humanity," "the great universal heart," and the powers of sympathy and familial love. This belief, in turn, might derive from the Age of Sentiment-the later eighteenth century and subsequent decades. Despite his dour portrayal of Puritan behavior in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne posits a "larger and warmer heart of the multitude" that can vibrate "into one accord of sympathy." An abstract, authorially asserted ideology in The Scarlet Letter, it becomes a motive and emotional complication for Coverdale and others in The Blithedale Romance, tested and ultimately defeated by eros.

scholarly journals Puritan Projections In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s "The Scarlet Letter" And Stephen King’s "Carrie"

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-86
Author(s):  
Maria Anastasova
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
American Culture ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Gothic Literature ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
American Novels ◽  
The Witch

It is considered that the Puritans that populated New England in the 17th century left a distinctive mark on the American culture. The article explores some projections of Puritan legacy in two American novels of different periods – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Stephen King’s Carrie (1974). After establishing a connection between the Puritan writings and gothic literature, the two novels are analyzed in terms of some Puritan projections, among which are the problem of guilt and the acceptance of an individual in the society. Some references regarding the idea of the witch and the interpretations it bears, especially in terms of the female identity, are also identified. Despite the different approach of the authors in terms of building their characters, those references are mostly used in a negative way, as an instrument of criticism and exposing inconvenient truths.

scholarly journals Some Connections of Africa and the U.S.A in American World Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Mendy
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Short Story ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Paule Marshall ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
Social Death ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
American Novels ◽  
The Usa

The plots in some novels by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Paule Marshall, to name but a few, remind the African readers of some sociological realities on the black continent. That interconnection of Africa and the U.S.A., through literature, reinforces the idea of American literature as world literature. If the U.S.A. was a child, we could assert that his or her parents are Africa and Europe thanks to their irrefragable contributions to the making of the country.  There is undoubtedly an interconnection of Africa and the USA in quite a few fields, especially in works of fiction Kimberly Crenshaw’s feminist theory of intersectionality is very much present in quite a few American novels. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the ostracism of Hester Prynne, a wife in seventeenth-century Puritan America, after she gave birth to an illegimate child, is tantamount to a “social death” in Africa, where women are still required to be paragons of virtue, especially when they are married. Under no circumstances, should espoused women, in many African societies have paramours and indulge in such a turpitude. Obinna Udenwe expounds on that issue in her short story “Bedfellows.”   In Maya Angelou’s Gather Together in My Name, Rita’s early pregnancy is similarly a poignant problem in Africa, where some girls are married as young as 12 or 13. That situation recurs in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, with Pecola who is impregnated at 12. As for Paule Marshall, her novel Praisesong for a Widow is full of African cultural representations and supernatural rites like the ceremony of “lave tête”.

Hawthorne's Literary Theory

PMLA ◽  
1942 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 241-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Howell Foster
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Insight Into

Like every original artist, Hawthorne may be approached in a variety of ways, and each of these ways will add something to the ultimate picture of his mind and art. Most of the work that scholars have done on Hawthorne, however, has been historical and biographical, and the result has been that Hawthorne the artist and thinker has been relegated to the background. This is particularly regrettable when one remembers that he was the most complete artist of the New England renaissance, and in The Scarlet Letter the author of a book which as art transcends all other American novels. It is to fill out the contemporary conception of Hawthorne that his theory of art is here considered as it may be pieced together from allegory, preface, and chance remark. Focusing attention on his ideals in art makes certain the meaning of the prefaces, and an investigation of his doctrine of the artist gives an insight into his method of achieving his ideal. In brief, to study Hawthorne's literary theory is to discover the intellectual basis of his art, and to see his work from the inside is to arrive at a fresh sense of his intention. It was Goethe's conviction that the critic should first of all ask what the author had intended. If the following investigation makes for clarity, it should furnish an opportunity for a new appraisal of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

scholarly journals Transcending self and society. The paradox of selfhood in Hawthorne’s novels

2017 ◽  
pp. 263
Author(s):  
Felipe Vale da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Hester Prynne ◽  
Blithedale Romance

Este artigo retoma a discussão acadêmica sobre a noção de autonomia em The Scarlet Letter, de Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hester Prynne, sua célebre protagonista, desperta a atenção de leitores modernos como um modelo de autossuficiência e inconformismo heroico, ainda que o autor lhe negue uma recompensa substancial por seus atos de autoafirmação. Hester é condenada a viver o resto de sua existência como uma proscrita, e, ainda pior, como alguém que se vê como tal. O argumento desenvolvido aqui parte de sua inabilidade de transformar agência autônoma em uma identidade plena, satisfeita consigo, para encontrar em um romance posterior do autor, The Blithedale Romance, uma abordagem complementar do caráter paradoxal do sujeito hawthorniano.

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