Hawthorne\'s Rejection of Puritan Values

Hawthorne's Rejection Of Puritan Values

Nathaniel Hawthorne, (1804-1864) often thought of today as a reflection of puritan values, would have in puritan times been recognized as a reformer at best and a heretic at worst.

The world in which Hawthorne existed, one of recurring themes of conservatism and repression, the Victorian era, a time known for strict social and moral codes that often involved a similar zeal as those values during the Puritan period, marked the stigmatism of personal freedom and strict social conduct. Hawthorne, born of Puritan stock reflected the changing values of an era of related moral values, that would occur much after his own time. ("Hawthorne, Nathaniel ") "Hawthorne tries to balance and neutralize the conflicts represented in the popular literature by condensing them and identifying them with a demonic working-class radicalism." (Streeby) Within his works, The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables, Young Goodman Brown, Birthmark and Rappaccini's Daughter there are countless examples of a stretching of strict values.

Much of Hawthorne's message in his most well-known work, The Scarlet Letter is one of feminine independence. The structure of Hester's society was such that she was challenged by her circumstances and even more challenged by the community in which she lived. Her social standing fell to that of a relative harlot when her very public fall from grace was revealed by her pregnancy, a pregnancy clearly begotten outside of her marriage bed. As has been clearly pointed out countless time the work is steeped in the biblical traditions of the Puritan Era and Hawthorne himself interweaves countless analogous meanings in his work.

The multiplicity of biblical intertexts may reflect Hawthorne's desire to write a story of new world Puritanism that would acknowledge and, moreover, incorporate the extreme textualization of that society. The Puritans could perhaps only be brought back to life in fiction if the fiction were as saturated in the Bible as the Puritans were themselves.

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The demonstrative theme of the work is that of female independence and self possession. Hester, downtrodden by her circumstances still remains true to herself and creates her own future, within the constraints of the culture. The minister, who is also implicated in the crime, rumored to be the father of Hester's child Pearl, was reported to express the following feelings about the choice of man to call judgment upon his fellow man.

According to these highly_ respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was dying_conscious, also, that the reverence of the multitude placed him already among saints and angels_had desired, by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the choicest of man's own righteousness.

Hawthorne 312)

The futility of earthly judgment, often associated with the overly pious is expressed by Hawthorne through just such sentiments in his works.

Within the works of Hawthorne there are many examples of the reevaluations of suppressive social morals. In The House of Seven Gables Hawthorne biographically relives a challenge that occurred within his own family many years before his life.

The daughter of Philip English was supposed to have married one of John Hathorne's sons. If this were true, then the blood of curser and accursed had mingled in the second generation. It was a story which the novelist was not to forget. We meet it again in the House of the Seven Gables.

Mather 21)

Hawthorne's ancestor was one of the most ardent persecutors of the Quakers and that legacy haunted Hawthorne in his own time. Supposedly, such haunting and continuing family challenges to his progeny was as the result of a reported curse by one of the persecuted. It is as if Hawthorne wishes to fictionalize his history as a resources for the solving of social and psychological problems that he attests to the repression of the Puritan faith and social morality. "CURSE or no curse, the fortunes of the Hathorne family declined gradually during the eighty-seven years which separated the death of Judge John and the birth of him who was to change his name to 'Hawthorne' and become America's first great novelist."

Mather 22)

Hawthorne clearly stepped away from the Puritan ethic by consistently alluding to the existence of the earthly supernatural. Though this was a fear of the Puritans, clearly it was associated with Satan and possession of the living. In Hawthorne's works the supernatural was associated with less grand sources, such as those seen in Young Goodman Brown. (Hoeltje 39-40) Hawthorne allows his characters to explore concepts that would have been those deemed heretical within the Puritan settings of the works.

In The Birth-Mark, Hawthorne associates the active expulsion of character traits of humanity clearly results in the death of the whole.

The line of divergence in "The Birth Mark" is indicated by its name. We all have our birth-marks, -- traits of character, which may be temporarily suppressed, or relegated to the background, but which cannot be eradicated and are certain to reappear at unguarded moments, or on exceptional occasions...The father who attempts to force his son into a mode of life for which Nature did not intend him, or the mother who quarrels with her daughter's friends, commits an error similar to that of Hawthorne's alchemist, who endeavors to remove the birthmark from the otherwise beautiful face of his wife, but only succeeds in effecting this together with her death.

Stearns 182)

Within this work Hawthorne clearly analogizes the challenges of a culture to repress the humanity of its members in the name of faith or propriety. Within Rappacini's Daughter, as in the Scarlet Letter, the challenge to culture is the internal psychological expression of sexuality in a repressed culture. The admissions of sexual desire is punishable even in the situation of matrimony and Hawthorne refuses this ideal, blaming it for indiscretions of morals.