Hawthorne and Puritanism

Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his novel The Scarlet Letter and in "Young Goodman Brown" and other short stories, offers a fictional critique of the strict, conservative, and even cruel moral values and world view of Puritanism. The major characters in the novel and short stories suffer mightily not because they are evil, but because they live in a society whose Puritanical values condemn them for acts which are merely human, however wayward. Hawthorne draws these characters with great understanding and compassion, responses fully lacking in the Puritan society which condemns them. At the same time, Hawthorne, through his narrators, offers a stiff indictment of the cold-hearted Puritans who so cruelly condemn and isolate these characters from society for their all-too-human transgressions. This rejection of Puritanical values is the thread which unites the novel and the stories to be examined here. However, an even more destructive force than Puritan society is the internalization of Puritan values by many of the major characters themselves.

In The Scarlet Letter, the letter "A" is sewn onto the dress of the adulterous Hester Prynne, marking her as evil, sinful, and inferior to the others in the town who, in comparison to Hester, consider themselves moral, religious, spiritual, and Christian. There is no doubt that Hester, and her lover, the minister Arthur Dimmesdale, have committed an act which transcends the standards which hold together not only Puritan society but most soc

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. not to cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and corrupt his spiritual being" (Scarlet 168). In both the novel (Scarlet 193) and the story "Young Goodman Brown," Hawthorne uses the forest as a symbol of the dark side of humanity, the sinful or temptable side, the side upon which the Puritan mind fixes itself in unholy obsession. At the same time, in the novel, Hawthorne makes clear that the nature of the forest, or the dark side of humanity, is profoundly affected by one's perception of it. Goodman Brown and Dimmesdale see the forest as a terrifying place where evil waits to swallow them irretrievably, but young Pearl, innocent and sinless, sees the forest as a place of wild and harmless delights (Scarlet 178). Young Goodman Brown, like Dimmesdale, does not have the spiritual independence to see through the Puritan interpretation of human existence as either completely good or completely evil. The unholy, terrifying ceremony which Brown and his wife Faith undergo in the forest may be intended by Hawthorne to be seen as aa nightmare, or a flight of imaginary horror, or an actual event of Satanic evil manifested, but in any case it is symbolic of a state of mind and spirit in which the individual is convinced that he and al

Category: Literature - H