Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne Like discussed in class, Nathaniel Hawthorne writes more about the guilt that comes from the sin. A lot of his stories are about the sins people did in their lives or he would even make up things that people did. His main theme that he focuses on is the theme of loneliness. When a person reads stories created by Nathaniel Hawthorne, you can feel the loneliness of the characters. In a way I find that some of his stories are depressing because the way he makes some of the lives of characters. For example, “The Scarlet Letter” is filled with samples of the lonely feeling of the characters in his stories. Sometimes a person might even feel bad for them even though his works contain fiction. According to studies, there was nothing major in Hawthorne’s life that would make him a sinful person. Just like in his story “The Minister’s Black Veil” it says that everyone is not perfect and there is some kind of sin. So my point is that he was not a bad person he just liked writing about people doing bad things and committing sins. I do believe that the loneliness in his life is what brought him to talk about the loneliness in his characters lives. Even though in his life he spent most of his time alone, he really did not base his stories off his personal life. Nathaniel was indeed a very shy, socially awkward person. This was brought forth from his lonely child hood. A lot of times he would speak to sad, lonely people he would understand them and the way they were feeling. He had a lonely childhood because his father was never around do his job. He did not have many memories of his father and when he was still young his dad ending up dying due to yellow fever. The death of his father left him to be the only guy in his household. He grew up in a household with all women, so he learned to be his own best friend because he did not have other boys to play with. He kind of kept himself isolated from the people in his life which reminds me a lot of his characters in his stories. When he finally decided to hang out with some guys he had an accident when he decided to play rugby with them. Since he completely smashed his foot and had to stay in bed, he began to be an avid reader. This is where he got a good education and started to become a writer. Once again he kept himself isolated and he used the attic in his home to get away from everyone and write. After several years away at college and exploring some places, Hawthorne disappeared for about eleven years and had no trace of what he was doing. After the eleven years, he came out with the book, “Twice Told Tales”. He got good reviews for this and this was believed to be where the story “Young Goodman Brown” came from. He lead a lonely life up until he meet his wife and she is the one that brought him out of this lonely feeling that he had. Hawthorne focused a lot on a character’s struggle within himself. Most of the character’s conflict was man versus himself but then his stories also contained the conflict of man versus man. A lot of the characters in Hawthorne’s stories are lonely and do not really involve themselves with other people. Many of Hawthorne’s characters do not have anyone to look to for love or even just someone to talk to about how they are feeling. Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, Goodman Brown and Beatrice Rappaccini are just some of the characters in Hawthorne’s stories that isolate themselves from other people. There are several more that we will run into in this paper that also were lonely and kept to themselves. The setting of his stories is just a very dark atmosphere. It can be dark like the actual night that Goodman Brown had or it can just be the dark lonely lives that the characters in “The Scarlet Letter” had. When he starts off with some of his stories a person can just get an eerie feeling that something is different about the place they are at. In Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” it seems like it is going to be a normal story until a person realizes that there is something up with the Doctor and his daughter because they do not involve themselves with other people. The first story we will take a look at is “Young Goodman Brown”. The setting shows somewhat of loneliness because it takes place on a dark night. Goodman Brown decides that he is going to go by himself out in the woods. His wife does not want him to leave because she is scare to be home alone. He insists that he needs to go out and he does. Since it is nighttime no one is around in the streets of the town. Just in that part of the story a person can tell that he wants to be alone. When he is on his walk, he no longer is the only one out. When he was walking down the path he runs into an older man. This is when he runs into the Devil and this is the turn of the story where he now feels more alone than ever. He instantly knows that something is wrong and he just wants to go back down the path and go home. When he is speaking with the Devil, an old lady from the village comes down the path. The Devil greets her and Goodman soon realizes that she is a follower of the Devil because she is a witch. When more people start showing up for the meeting the Devil was having in the woods he realizes that everyone follows the Devil. He said that he wants to return home because he does not want to be one of them. He soon realizes that he is one of the only ones that still believes in God and still follows the God. He is alone in still believing God and then he remembers he still has his wife. Then he thinks he hears his wife, Faith’s voice coming from the congregation and he goes back to try and save her. In the end he does not know if she converted to believing the Devil. This is where the major part of loneliness comes in the story. He becomes distant from everyone because he thinks everyone is evil. He wants to separate himself because he does not know if anyone in the town is still on God’s side. So when he is walking around the town he does not want to greet anyone or even look at them because all he feels is evil. Even when he is home he does not and will not even say anything to his wife. This brings him great loneliness because he isolates himself from the rest of the village. This is his own fault thought because it was just a crazy dream that he had. He freaked himself out, so now he will just continue to isolate himself and be lonely. Another fiction story that Nathaniel Hawthorne did was “The Scarlet Letter”. This was a story about a girl name Hester Prynne that committed adultery with another character within the story. When she committed the adultery, she conceived her daughter, Pearl. The main characters in the story include Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth. It is apparent that each of these characters has some type of loneliness that is in their life. In “The Scarlet Letter”, Hester Prynne is an outcast of the society and is defiantly alone with everything that she does. She is looked down upon by the community. She also has to wear an “A” on her chest which separates her even more because by that letter “A” everyone know that she has committed the sin of adultery. She does not associate with anyone from town besides when she has to go there to get things. She spends all of her time in her tiny home away from everyone. They make her live all by herself with her daughter outside of the town. Everyone knows she is alone and the only one she has is her baby. Her only friend is Dimmesdale and she cannot even be with him. When people would see her they were just mean to her and this made her feel more alone than ever. Her strong guilt makes her feel alone more than ever too. Also, it makes her live a life that is full of darkness and a life that is full of unhappiness. Since she decided to commit the sin of adultery, she also messed up her daughter’s life. She messed of up her daughter’s life also because now no one will let their kids play with Pearl because of what her mother did. So the result of this, will force Pearl to live a lonely life with no friends because of her mother. This will tie in with another story we are going to look at later in the paper. We will see how another parent’s actions will bring out loneliness in their daughter. Hester from “The Scarlet Letter” and Goodman Brown from “Young Goodman Brown” both have the loneliness factor in their lives. They both end up separated from the people in their towns. They both did not want this to happen but it was the end result to Hester’s actions and the nightmare that took place in Goodman’s life. Hester did not want to be separated from everyone else; everyone just hated her for what she did. Goodman chose to be alone and secluded from everyone else because he just thought that they were all evil. So they are both living lonely lives but one choose this lonely road and the other person was just destined with it. Another person that takes part of loneliness in “The Scarlet Letter” is Arthur Dimmesdale. Nobody in the town knows the truth about how he is the father of Pearl. He hides this sin that he has created within himself and he has a lot of guilt. Keeping this from everyone makes him feel alone because he has no one to go to and talk about his problems with. Emotionally this is killing him inside and he wants to tell everyone the truth but he knows if he does it will just ruin his life too. He does not feel right around people and kind of keeps himself isolated because when he is around people he has the sin in the back of his head. Since this bothers him so much he has a hard time fully opening up. Everyone looks up to him because they think he is a great person. He just feels that he is evil, so when he is a lone he punishes himself. His loneliness is completely different than the way Hester is. Everyone still likes him and wants to be around him. His loneliness is more similar to that of Goodman Brown. It is just man versus himself that is bringing these two men down. Nobody thinks that he has done anything wrong. He just feels that he cannot be close to the people because he knows he is a sinner. The final character that had some form of being lonely is Roger Chillingworth. Chillingworth isolates himself from everyone because he is seeking out revenge against the minister because he created the sin with Hester. Hester was his wife who cheated on him when he was away. When he returned the whole mishap was going on with his wife so he decided not to associate with her. He is kind of an odd character through the story. He actually still wants to be with Hester and he feels like he needs her in his life. He feels bad for what has happened but he hates Dimmesdale. Another thing he did was try to ruin the lives for Hester and Dimmesdale even more because the two used to meet up at night time. He planned on exposing Dimmesdale to get his revenge. Also, Chillingworth is living the life of a lie because he is not his true self since this happened with his wife. Since he does not want to be known for having a wife that committed adultery, he has no friends since he had to change his life. So not only does he separate himself from the community but also he separates himself from God. He becomes a completely lonely character in this story. These three characters and also Goodman Brown isolate themselves from the people around them and it eventually destroys their lives. The next Nathaniel Hawthorne story we are going to look at is “Rappaccini’s Daughter”. This story by Hawthorne also shows the theme of loneliness. Just like “The Scarlet Letter” there are three characters in this story that have some kind of struggle with loneliness. The three characters that we are going to look at is Giovanni Guasconti, who is the main character. The next person we will look at is Dr. Rappaccini and then also his daughter Beatrice. Beatrice has the worst form of loneliness in this story, and her loneliness can be compared to the same thing that Pearl is going through. Another comparison we can make in this story with “The Scarlet Letter” is the loneliness of Giovanni and Chillingworth. They are alike because both the people they loved caused the loneliness in their lives. Giovanni Guasconti is a student who lives in a mansion near the Rappaccini’s garden. He was a normal guy who was living an okay life but then his life went bad when he moved into his new place. He always looked out his window down at the garden to figure out his neighbors. From the first time that he laid eyes on Dr. Rappaccini’s daughter, Beatrice he thought she was beautiful and he wanted to talk to her. When looking out the window of his bedroom he realized that something was strange about the doctor and his daughter. He later realized that the one plant in their garden was deadly but it did not affect the daughter. He later has to become isolated and lonely because when he was falling in love with the doctor’s daughter her got the poison that was part of her body and life. This means that everything that Giovanni touched would die. He did not want any of this to happen, he just wanted to save his new love from the evil things that her father was doing to her life. Beatrice is the daughter of the doctor and is separated from the world because she is “poisonous”. This makes her lonely because since she has this problem she cannot go around other people because she will infect them with what she has. Everything she touches dies or becomes infected. She only hangs out with her father but even with that he father includes her out of stuff. For example, she has no idea about her father’s science. Beatrice hates being this way and she curses her father for making her like this. Her father thinks that it is a gift to be like this but she decides she wants to be normal so she drinks the antidote. She just wants to be loved than be feared. She is isolated, from the outside world because of her father. This is different from the other people in this paper because she did not choose this for herself and she did nothing wrong. She does not deserve to be lonely; it is just her crazy father who chose this path for her. Doctor Rappaccini is a brilliant medical scientist who cares more about science than mankind. Right in his description a person can tell that he keeps to himself and they could look at him as a lonely person. The doctor chose to be lonely and isolated from everyone else because he does not like mankind and he does not care if they died. He is the only one in this paper who wants to be this way. He would love to be by himself in the community and he would want to use all the people to gain knowledge. This is the character that I talked about before that will ruin his daughter’s life for the things he chose to do in his life. The last fiction story that we are going to look at is “The Minster’s Black Veil”. There is only one character in this story that deals with loneliness. This person is Reverend Hooper and he is not lonely in a sense that everyone had abandoned him. I kind of associate his loneliness with that of Dimmesdale in “The Scarlet Letter” because they are both hiding something. Also, everyone still looks up to them and still thinks that they are good guys. The reason why he is lonely is because he decides to wear a black veil to hide a sin and to cover up his face. He believes that covering up his eyes will hid the fact that a person cannot look into his eyes. He does not want people looking into his eyes because they will look into his soul and figure out what is really wrong. He even loses his wife to be because she does not want him to wear the veil over his face. She kept asking him why but he would not tell the truth. So she said that she does not want to be with him since he cannot tell her the reason for wearing the black veil. This makes everyone scared of him because they do not know why he is acting like this. So Copper then becomes isolated by everyone because they do not know what to say. This will eventually make him lonely because he does not want to talk about the sin and guilt. He is lonely also because his wife left him and because he is hiding what is bothering him so he cannot confront people without them bothering him about the black veil he wear on his face. After going over the fiction stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, it is apparent that he uses the theme of loneliness in most of his stories. He just does different kinds of loneliness in each one. Some characters in his story bring the loneliness upon themselves, other gain it from something someone else did. One character loves being lonely and another one hates it and wants to be normal. Most of the characters have something in common and they live with some king of guilt, fear or some kind of burden in their life. Even though none of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories deal with his life, he did bring the theme of loneliness from his childhood and put it into all of his stories.