Nathaniel Hawthorne

- born in Salem
- Boadwin college
- Massachussetts
- isolation-12 years
contemporary with E.A Poe
novelist, many short stories
Magazines

The Token
The New England Magazine
The Democratic Review
Twice-Told Tales (1837)
Twice-Told Tales( 1842)
Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)
Ancestors
- John Hawthorne (Salem 1962)
- Puritans and the imagination
- What is he? murmurs one grucy shadow of my forefathers
- What would their ancestors think that if they knew he was a writer?
Power of Blackness
- - Herman Melville- close friend of Hawthorne, neighbours in Massachussetts
- - review of Hawthorne’s Tales- Review of Mosses from an Old Mause
- - filled with blackness
- - Poe, Hawthorne, Melville- power of blackness- become a literary term

Hawthornes’tales

- Puritan and American history

- Coming of age stories
- Tales of sin (psychological)
- Tales about science and art (philosophical, aesthetic)
Young Goodman Brown
- living in Mass., leaving young wife at home, going to the forest, lurked evil, and unknown,
Goodman- like Mr. and Mrs
- man the devil himself, puritan, coming of age story, sin
The minister’s Black Veil- sin
American history

The Maypole of Merrymount (Puritans in the 17th century)

My Kinsman, Major Molineux (18th century) coming of age story

Rappacini’s Daughter

The theme of science and art in R’s Daughter

Gothic conventions: Villains?
Rappacini, Baglioni, Giovanni? The death of a beautiful maiden
Padua in the 16th century
Giovanni’s gloomy room (Dante’s Inferno)
Beatrice can’t live in the garden of Eden, her father created her, She is poisonous, no one can teach
her, she breathes in a plant that is poisonous, Giovanni falls in love with her- he can pass into the
garden and meets Beatrice
Garden:
There was a shrub in particular, set in a marble vase in the midst of the pool, that bore a profession
of purple blossoms
some crept serpent like
wreathed itself
not make it in the Garden f Eden- it is man made
the more he see her he realizes that he becomes poisoned- he has to be isolated from society- does
he love her
beautiful or terrible?
insects die from her breath, touch
Does Giovanni want to be an Adam?
Artist and scientist
Similarity between the scientist and artist:
Precision, passion, and patience in creating
Committing blasphemy in creating a new world
Punishment is inevitable- for the artist as well?
both creators- who commits the greater sin?
scientist: sg. that is artificial, sinful, is he allowed? is it useful?
artist: creates characters, people, world, is the writer allowed to dig into the souls of character?-
commiting blasphemy like the scientist
Poe on Hawthorne (Review of Twice Told Tales- “We have always regarded The Tale as… give birth”
indisputable genious

The Birth Mark

Aymer conducting scientific experiments and striving for perfection
Parable for the artist
Questions
Which scientist is to be blamed?
Is Giovanni in love with Beatrice?
What are the Gothic elements?
Is there any foreshadowing in the story?
The question of sin