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Nathan-iel Hawthorne’s fiction—particularly his short stories “Young Good-man Brown” and “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and his novel The Scar-let Letter (1850)—are some of the most well-known pieces of writing in American literature of this period; however, during his lifetime, Hawthorne struggled to make it as a professional writer and was often...
Nov 26, 2019 · Hawthorne complicates his story by weaving into it all sorts of subtleties and ambiguities. Brown’s guide in the woods is simultaneously fatherlike and devilish. He encounters a series of presumably upright townspeople, including eventually Faith herself, gathering for a ceremony of devil-worship.
His story revolves around the life of a young and married Hester Prynne who is punished by her Puritan village to perpetually wear a scarlet letter “A” on her bosom for committing adultery in the absence of her husband, Roger Chillingworth.
Hawthorne opens by explaining that facts in the history of the early settlement at Mount Wollaston, Massachusetts--called Merry Mount—“wrought themselves, almost spontaneously, into a sort of allegory.”
Hawthorne had a complicated relationship to the Puritan past.2 While it provided a fruitful background for much of his writing, it was also a source of guilt and a focus of criticism.
The first part focuses on Hawthorne’s interest in and knowledge of past (Puritan and colonial) and contemporary nineteenth-century history (women’s, African American, Native American) as the inspiration for his writings and the source of his literary success.
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Hawthorne complicates his story by weaving into it all sorts of subtleties and ambiguities. Brown’s guide in the woods is simultaneously fatherlike and devilish.
