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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.
But his conviction that the dream was real, and that his wife, his minister, Goody Cloyse, and the others are all secretly marked by evil, suggests that extreme puritanism destroys one’s moral compass and leads to a life devoid of pleasure or meaning.
Jun 4, 2018 · Hawthorne’s reaction to Rome, complicated by his daughter Una’s illness, was mixed. He never, as he put it, felt the city “pulling at his heartstrings” as if it were home. Italy would seem to present to Hawthorne not only the depth of the past he deemed necessary for the flourishing of romance but also a neutral territory, this time ...
Oct 26, 2015 · To read “Guest” is to watch Hawthorne play a very wanton God: he creates a cast of characters with only the mildest of imperfections and then, just as we’re settling in, he kills them all. Hawthorne is remembered as a moralist—but what, really, is the moral to be drawn from “Guest”?
Nathaniel Hawthorne had deep bonds with his Puritan ancestors and created a story that both highlighted their weaknesses and their strengths. His knowledge of their beliefs and his admiration for their strengths were balanced by his concerns for their rigid and oppressive rules.
‘The Birthmark’: analysis. Like many of Hawthorne’s stories, ‘The Birthmark’ is, at bottom, allegorical: it is about the dangers of seeking perfection, especially human perfection, of all kinds, because to do so runs the risk of destroying what makes us ‘human’ in the first place.
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Even fewer recognize how persistently Hawthorne involves the reader in his own efforts to probe such antitheses. To address these problems, try approaching Hawthorne as a riddler and wry joker who challenged all authority including his own. Students enjoy recognizing Hawthorne's self-mockery and his various forms of ironic self-presentation.
