Literatura Norteamericana I

American Literature I
Ricardo Menéndez
10 ECTS Credits 2019-2020
Authors & Contents 2nd Semester
Study Block II

 Romanticism (part II)  Realism and Naturalism

 Nathaniel Hawthorne – Feb 19th
 Herman Melville – Feb 26th
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – Mar 4th
 Edgar Allan Poe – Mar 11th
 Frederick Douglass – Mar 18th
 Harriet Beecher Stowe – Mar 25th
 Walt Whitman – Apr 1st
 Emily Dickinson– Apr 15th
 Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) – Apr 22nd
 Henry James – Apr 29th
 Kate Chopin – May 6th
 Stephen Crane – May 13th
 Review past exams – May 20th

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“
Easy reading is damn
hard writing
”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 - 1864)
 Biography
 Works by author
 Online resources
 Q&A
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Unit 13 – Nathaniel Hawthorne

Objectives of the Unit

 Learn about Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the major writers of the
American Renaissance, with a polished prose style, unanimously
acclaimed for his aesthetic qualities which won him a central position
among the canon of American Literature throughout time
 Discuss The Scarlet Letter as an outstanding example of
“psychological romance” a genre which allowed adding supernatural or
mysterious elements, giving space to explore the irrational
 Recognize Hawthorne’s ambivalence towards Puritanism through
subversive use of Puritan allegory
 Examine closely Young Goodman Brown and examine the use of
allegory in a subversive way. Draw conclusions about its philosophical,
ethical and aesthetic aspects. From the narrative perspective, analyze
the short story and learn how to evaluate it.
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Unit 13 – Nathaniel Hawthorne

Biography
 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s father died when Hawthorne was only four and his
impoverished family barely made a good living
 Born in Salem when the town was still very prosperous (before the Embargo Act
and the 1812 war)
 He attended Bowdoin College for four years though he was attracted towards
traditional professions like being a lawyer or a doctor
 He befriended future president Franklin Pierce and writer Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow at college. They remained lifelong friends
 Hawthorne became author by necessity but struggled to begin to be published
and struggled even more to be acclaimed well-known
 His first work Fanshawe (1828) was a failure and cost him an important sum of
money
 Hawthorne was not very close to Emerson (his landlord) but did have a
remarkable relationship with Thoreau, Melville and Longfellow
 Under US President Pierce he served as American Consul in Liverpool. He died in
the company of Pierce in 1864
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Unit 13 – Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne, a true Classic

 One of the major writers of the American Renaissance (the richest period in
American literature)
 Relevant contemporary writers (James, Melville, Poe, and Longfellow) favorably
reviewed his works
 His fiction allows many interpretations and has been reviewed by
poststructuralists, new literary historians, reader-response theorists, feminists,
and deconstructionists
 All these reinterpretations attest for Hawthorne’s enduring literary value
 Hawthorne’s use of irony, paradox, symbolic complexity, psychological depth,
subtlety, density of composition and clever use of deliberate ambiguities to
allow readers to speculate are his greatest strengths as a writer
 His work is currently viewed as a revolt against the sentimentalized literature of
his time
 The purity of his literary style, that Poe called “grammatically complex, yet
rhetorically subtle” is one of the most appreciated factors in his writings
 His prose is intentionally old-fashioned and full of archaisms (even for his time)
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Unit 13 – Nathaniel Hawthorne

Work of Nathaniel Hawthorne I

 It took Hawthorne a long time to get published. His first work (Fanshawe, 1828)
came at his own expense. He afterwards sought to destroy all the copies. He
would not publish a long narrative again for twenty-one years.
 The period of obscurity the go between Fanshawe and his three successive
midcentury novels were spent in an upper room of his mother’s house. His
writings and himself were hidden
 Yet these stories displayed his true talent and dealt with his major themes:
 Puritanism past and ambiguous heritage: The Maypole of Merrymount
 Human sin and guilt: Young Goodman Brown, The Minister’s Black Veil
 Complex deceitful messages of Nature: Roger Malvin’s Burial
 Faustian pursuit of perfection: The Birthmark
 In the early 1830s he commenced to publish Short Tales in the New England
Magazine and other ladies’ magazines anonymously
 His friend Horatio Bridge would convince him to compile and republish his very-
well-considered Tales with his ‘name on the cover’ and thus Twice-Told Tales was
conceived. The name could also stem from a Shakespearian quote
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Unit 13 – Nathaniel Hawthorne

Work of Nathaniel Hawthorne II

 He became closely acquainted to the Transcendentalists even though he didn’t
share some of their ideas
 Before serving political roles for President Franklin he lived his most prolific
period where he wrote three full length novels between 1850 and 1852
 The Scarlet Letter (1850)
 The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
 The Blithdale Romance (1852)
 He wrote a glowing biography of his lifelong friend from school Franklin Pierce,
14th president of the United States, called The Life of Franklin Pierce, in support
of Pierce's 1852 presidential campaign
 One year after The Scarlet Letter there appeared the fictional masterwork of
the century: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (or The Whale). The dedication reads
In Token of my admiration for his genius
This book is inscribed to NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
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Unit 13 – Nathaniel Hawthorne

Romancer or Novelist?
 Even though nowadays we state that Hawthorne produced four full length novels
between 1850 and 1860 that statement would not stand in his days.
 Sir Walter Scott defined romance as a “fictitious narrative in prose or verse, the
interest of which turns upon marvelous and uncommon incidents”
 Hawthorne in the preface of The House of the Seven Gables regarded the novel as
“presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the
probable and ordinary course of man’s experience” → similar to current realistic
novel
 Romance gave Hawthorne the freedom to explore irrational forces that affect the
human mind, not explainable with empiric evidence and to incorporate mysterious
and supernatural elements
 The author always insisted on judging his lengthy works as romances, a genre he
would eventually rename as “Psychological Romance”: The Scarlet Letter

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Unit 13 – Nathaniel Hawthorne

Young Goodman Brown

 Young Goodman Brown (YGB) is an example of allegory this is a literary form close
to a fable or parable
 It is probably Hawthorne’s best example of allegorical literature and it allegorizes
evil
 Special attention must be paid to double meaning, allegoric names like Faith and
Goodman’s own name that resemble the Everyman of classic literature
 Hawthorne probably felt its literary quality was lower than other tales and
excluded it from being included in the Twice-Told Tales book.
 Apart from the allegorical interpretation we can analyze aspects regarding
morals, philosophy, history and psychology.
 The motifs of guilt, arrogance and Puritan binary good and evil are present and it
exploits Puritan ideas about witchcraft, the devil, faith, or innocence among
others
 Puritanism sins with the witch hunts of Salem are present as guilty stains of
human nature in all of Hawthorne’s work

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Unit 13 – Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter

 Written exactly at midcentury right after his prolonged period of obscurity
 It was his most successful book and America’s first great novel
 It is a historical romance that focuses on adulterous love between a Puritan
minister and Hester Prynne, a married member of his congregation in the Boston
of exactly two hundred years earlier
 There is a calculated distance between the historical, religious, literary, and
emotional New England of the past from the Transcendentalist New England of the
present
 The story starts not with the love affair itself but with the consequence, the child
of the adulterous relationship in Hester’s arms, and a scarlet letter A emblazoned
on her breast standing for Adulteress
 Her daughter Pearl, comes to signify natural innocence, released as in Eden from
guilt and fault
 The Scarlet Letter is a work of allegory and symbolism
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Unit 13 – Nathaniel Hawthorne

Online Resources for Nathaniel Hawthorne

 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wikipedia entry
 Nathaniel Hawthorne on Britannica and Biography.com websites
 Nathaniel Hawthorne on LION (Proquest Literature Online)
 Cambridge Companions to Nathaniel Hawthorne
 Essays on Hawthorne’s major tales
 Resources and Links suggested in the Curso Vitual
 Audiobook of Young Goodman Brown
 Nathaniel Hawthorne eBooks:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/28
 The Scarlet Letter eBook: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33
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 Remember to complete
Self-Evaluation &
Exploratory Questions
from the Book
Online Self Evaluation Quiz

Questions?
Thank you