美国文学 unit4 红字

Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864)I. Brief Introduction :With the publication of The Scarlet Letter in 1850, Hawthorne became famous as the greatest writer living then and his reputation as a major American author has been on the increase ever since. Over the years a good number of biographical and critical studies have been written, and almost all aspects of his life and work have been treated with meticulous care. He is also becoming more and more popular with Chinese readers. Since Chinese translation of The Scarlet Letter appeared in the 1950’s, scholars and readers in China have shown an ever-increasing interest in his works, which offers another testimony of Hawthorne’s power and permanence. II. Life and works:Hawthorne was born on the fourth of July, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts. Some of his ancestors were men of prominence in the Puritan theocracy of 17th century New England. Gradually the family fortune declined. His father, a sea captain, died in Dutch Guiana, leaving the widow and the child behind to shift for themselves. Young Hawthorne was intensely aware of the misdeeds of his Puritan ancestors, and this awareness led to his understanding of evil being at the core of human life, to "that blackness in Hawthorne ," as Herman Melville put it . There is a certain amount of truth in the statement that Hawthorne wrote some of his books like The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables as an attempt at expiating the sin of his ancestors.In 1821 Hawthorne went to Bowdoin College, and had Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as a classmate. He also developed a friendship with Franklin Pierce who was to become the 14th President of the United States. From 1825 to 1837 Hawthorne lived in solitude and seclusion. He read widely, became further acquainted with local history, and began to practice writing. His first tale appeared in print in 1830. The year of 1837 saw the publication of his Twice-Told Tales, a collection of short stories, which enjoyed critical attention. Another collection of short stories, Mosses from an Old Manse came out in 1846. All these works, however, brought him neither great fame nor any fortune large enough to relieve him of the harassment of poverty. It was The Scarlet Letter which did it for him: not only did the book make his name as a writer of no small talent, it also brought him the money which made him finally financially comfortable. The House of the Seven Gables came out in 1851, to be followed by The Blithedale Romance in 1852 and The Marble Faun in 1860. During the 4 years (1853-1857) when President Pierce was in office, Hawthorne was the United States consul in Liverpool, England, and later traveled in Italy. He died in 1864.III. Spirit in his works :All his life, Hawthorne seems to be haunted by his sense of sin and evil in life. Reading his tales and romances, one cannot but be overwhelmed by the "black" vision which these works reveal. Evil exists in the human heart as is evident, for instance, in the short story, it tells us that, though all symbols of tradition and the past have been burned in the bonfire of the life of the New World, the source of evil--- the human heart--- remains intact. Everyone possesses some evil secret as tales like "Young Goodman Brown" set out to prove. Everyone seems to cover up his innermost "evil" in the way the minister tries to convince his people with his black veil. Evil seems to be man’s birthmark. Although Hawthorne is ambiguous and his tales are often capable of more than one interpretation, he is certainly at his best when writing about evil. Most of his works deal with evil one way or another. The blackness of vision which comes as a natural corollary has become his trade mark. It illustrates to some extent the influence that the Calvinist doctrine of"original sin" and total depravity had upon his mind. It also explains Hawthorne’s aloofness from Emersonian Transcendental optimism and his skepticism about it.To Hawthorne sin will get punished, one way or another. As a matter of fact he was said to be often troubled by the thought that the decline of his family’s fortunes had to do with the sins of his ancestors. The House of the Seven Gables is and appalling fictional version of Hawthorne’s belief that "the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones," and that evil will come out of evil though it may take many generations to happen. It is true that the book concludes on a happy note, and that good triumphs over evil, and love and reconciliation end an enmity, but one feels somehow that the tragic part of the story impresses more. It is also interesting to note that Hawthorne seems to be of the opinion that evil educates. The Marble Faun is a good illustration. What Hawthorne seems to be saying is this, that the achievement is possible only "under the impact of and by engagement with evil-the tragic rise born of the fortunate fall," and that man is better for the crime which brings about the fall.One source of evil in Hawthorne is overweening intellect. The tension between the head (intellect) and the heart (warmth and feeling) constitutes one of the elements which make his writings enchanting. Hawthorn’s intellectual characters are usually villains, dreadful because devoid of fellow feeling. Hollingsworth in The Blithedale Romance and Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter are but a few specimens of Hawthorne’s chilling, cold-blooded human animals. "Rappaccini’s Daughter"is a sad story that seems to be Hawthorne’s view of what science can do to man. Hawthorne’s negative attitude toward science, while it may represent his oblique reaction to the dehumanizing process to which, as we noted somewhere earlier, all thinking minds of his time were hypersensitive, is not always well justifiable. It may reveal a mind befuddled in face of a complex, developing life.第页Hawthorne’s aesth eticsIV. Hawthorne’s aestheticsHis aesthetics is clearly enunciated in the prefaces to his larger fictions, particularly those to The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Marble Faun. Like Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Henry James after him, Hawthorne repeatedly complained about "the poverty of materials" in a land where "there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight" ("Preface to The Marble Faun") and where "there has never been… the genial atmosphere which a literary man requires in order to ripen the best harvest of his mind" ("The Custom-House: Introductory to The Scarlet Letter"). A man with any literary ambition would have to resort to the help of his imagination, "to recall what was valuable in the past," and "to raise up from dry bones" a treasure of even as small an interest as a rag of scarlet cloth ("The Custom-House"). He would have to try "to connect a bygone time with the very Present," "to relate a legend, prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in distance, down into our own broad daylight" ("Preface to The House of the Seven Gables"). In this way he may be able to create "a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other" ("The Custom-House"). Thus Hawthorne took a great interest in history and antiquity. To him these furnish the soil on which his mind grows to fruition. "Romance and poetry, like ivy, lichen, and wall flowers, need Ruin to make them grow" ("Preface to The Marble Faun"). With their mist brooding over the real world and turning it into a "cloud-land," antiquity and history enable him to "dream strange things, and make them look like truth."Hawthorne was convinced that romance was the predestined form of American narrative. It is not only "the poverty of materials" in America that led him, as he says in his prefaces, to write romances rather than novels; there is also his Puritan prudence to consider--- romance allowing him to treat the physical passions obliquely and to avoid violating the human heart.Now let us take a look at The Scarlet Letter in which all elements of his thinking and aesthetics seem to find an adequate expression. The story is simple but very moving.Hawthorne’s art is cumulative. Many of his earlier stories had treated themes that led to The Scarlet Letter. Puritan severity toward sex and matrimony and its tendency to suppress bright color and true feeling and the stern Puritan punitive measure of making an adulteress wear a scarlet emblem of sin as a warning to the general run of mankind. In all these and The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne drew heavily from the New England past. Literary historian A. H. Quinn perceptively states that Hawthorne is at his best when dealing with sin, the supernatural, and New England past. The Scarlet Letter is set in the 17th century. It is an elaboration of a fact which the author took out of the Puritan past.The way in which Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter suggests that American Romanticism adapted itself to American Puritan moralism. The load of didacticism is nowhere heavier and the desire to elevate nowhere stronger than it is, perhaps, in this 19th-century American classic. One wonders whether it is a story of love or a story of sin. What he was, predominantly concerned with was the moral, emotional and psychological effect of the sin on the people in general and those complicated in it in particular. In the strong character of Hester Prynne we see the tension between society and solitude. The Scarlet Letter is not a praise of a Hester Prynne sinning, but a hymn on the moral growth of the woman when sinned against. Hawthorn’s female characterstend to fall into two broad categories, the blond and effete, and the dark-haired and sensual Oriental type. Attractive, appealing and mildly aggressive, she gives the impression that she represents sexual guilt as love with her is fatal, but she is really pure and innocent, and dies to go to Heaven, too good for a world which cannot accommodate her. Her life eventually acquires a real significance when she reestablishes a meaningful relationship with her fellowmen. Symbolic of her moral development is the gradual, imperceptible change which the scarlet letter undergoes in meaning. At first it is a token of shame," Adultery," but then the genuine sympathy and help Hester offered to her fellow villagers changes it to "Able." Later in the story, the letter A appears in the sky, signifying "Angel."The Scarlet Letter shows Hawthorne, the literary artist, at his best. In craftsmanship perhaps only The Great Gatsby can touch it in American Literature: Both works are a kind of cultural allegory, about different phases of American cultural history; both are structurally compact in a tiny frame and impregnated with meaning. All the major figures have complex psychologies; there are a semblance of interior monologues which reveal their states of mind. One salient feature of Hawthorne’s art is his ambiguity, of which the technique of multiple view employed in the last part of the book offers a good illustration. Here in the "Conclusion" people are heard to offer different views concerning the sign of th e letter A on the dead minister’s chest. The author’s refusal to commit himself gives his work a richness which would otherwise have been impossible to achieve. There is a strong fairy-tale element in the story. It reads like a kind of romance, with two lovers coming together, finally united in death. Little Pearl acts like the forsaken child asking for recognition, and kissing her father (toward the end of the book) seems to break a spell. We note Hawthorne’s use of the supernatural, too. The response of P earl to the symbol of sin on her mother’s breast is adumbrated so that a mystic influence is apparently felt. The appearance of the symbol A in the sky is another good example of Hawthorne’s consummate skill to manipulate the reader’s credulity: He pushes him into a twilight atmosphere in which all things, natural or otherwise, may become probable. The use of the supernatural can be seen as a hallmark of Hawthorne’s art. The voice of the dead , the contact with the spiritual world, the denial of a natural law, the supernatural allegory and vivid studies of the supernatural--- all these and more are enough to demonstrate Hawthorne’s flair for the supernatural.Hawthorne’s influence has been great. He was accorded due recognition by his contemporary James Russ ell Lowell in the latter’s A Fable for Critics. He changed Herman Melville’s original scheme for his Moby-Dick. The Jamesian psychological realism may have taken its cue from Hawthorne’s soul-searching works. Other realists like William Dean Howells learned to use Hawthorne’s fiction as the bench-mark for their novel-writing practice. In this century William Faulkner and some Gothic novelists clearly show their indebtedness to him. If Hawthorne’s reputation is still rising, it is indeed as it should be. As Henry James put it, "Hawthorne’s work will remain… Among the men of imagination he will always have his niche."参考：迈克尔·莱恩. 文学作品的多重解读. 北京：北京大学出版社，2006. 2.6.。