Nathaniel Hawthorne

Style
• His works are deeply concerned with the ethical problems of sin, punishment, and atonement • Hawthorne wrote romance which was to present the truth of the human heart by the writer’s own choice. • Psychological truth was more important than actual truth. • He used symbols and setting to reveal the psychology of the characters. • His language is soft, flowing, and almost feminine.
• Hester’s husband, assuming the name Roger Chillingworth as a physician, makes unremitting efforts in searching for her paramour and is haunted by the desire of revenge. • He becomes cold-blooded, dehumanized, and finally withers up, shrivels away, and dies not over a year after Dimmesdale’s death.
• Hester is not overwhelmed by the harsh life imposed upon her. • She encourages her lover to flee with her to Europe but in vain. • She becomes sympathetic with other unfortunates, regains the trust of her neighbors and eventually redresses the shame from the Scarlet Letter.
• Hawthorne also held positions as an editor and as a customs surveyor. • He participated in the utopian experiment at Brook Farm, a commune designed to promote economic self-sufficiency and transcendentalist principles. • He married fellow transcendentalist Sophia Peabody in 1842 and left Brook Farm and moved into the Old Manse.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (纳撒尼尔.霍桑)
1804-1864
英翻0902 温丽萍 方乐怡 方丽玉 刘婷婷 方凯瑞
Portrait of Hawthorne
Life
• Birthplace: Salem, Massachusetts • Family background: a family with a long Puritan tradition; father died when he was only 4 years old; mother relied on relatives in rearing her four children • Education: reading extensively by his mid-teens and aspired to be a writer; from 1821-1825, he studied at Bowdoin college in Maine. Met two people Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, the 14th president of the United States.
• While Hester is living in humiliation, her lover, whose name she refuses to tell, is suffering from a guilty conscience. • He is the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, a revered, seemingly saintly young minister. • After years of hidden torture and struggle he makes a public confession on the scaffold, receives the kiss of his daughter Pearl and dies, in Hester’s arms, his “death of triumphant ignominy.”
Major works
• • • • 1837，1842Twice-Told Tales故事重述 1846Mosses from an Old Manse古宅青苔 1850The Scarlet Letter红字 1851The House of Seven Gables 七个尖角阁的房子 • 1852The Blithedale Romance福谷传奇 • 1860The Marble Faun玉石雕像
The Scarlet L in The Scarlet Letter
Arthur Dimmesdale daughter Pearl
lover
heroine Hester Prynne
husband Roger Chillingworth
Plot
• The story takes place in Puritan Boston during the mid-17th century. • Young Hester Prynne, a “fallen woman,” is sentenced to wear a scarlet letter A, signifying “adultery,” because she has a lover when her aged husband is not with her. • Consequently she is driven “out of the ordinary relations with humanity,” and is thus able to view critically the various aspects of society.
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