Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in
Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804. His family
descended from the earliest settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony;
among his forebears was John Hathorne (Hawthorne added the “w” to
his name when he began to write), one of the judges at the 1692 Salem
witch trials. Throughout his life, Hawthorne was both fascinated
and disturbed by his kinship with John Hathorne. Raised by a widowed
mother, Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College in Maine, where he met
two people who were to have great impact upon his life: Henry Wadsworth
Long-fellow, who would later become a famous poet, and Franklin
Pierce, who would later become president of the United States.
After college Hawthorne tried his hand at writing, producing
historical sketches and an anonymous novel, Fanshawe, that detailed his
college days rather embarrassingly. Hawthorne also held positions
as an editor and as a customs surveyor during this period. His growing
relationship with the intellectual circle that included Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Margaret Fuller led him to abandon his customs post
for the utopian experiment at Brook Farm, a commune designed to
promote economic self-sufficiency and transcendentalist principles.
Transcendentalism was a religious and philosophical movement of
the early nineteenth century that was dedicated to the belief that
divinity manifests itself everywhere, particularly in the natural
world. It also advocated a personalized, direct relationship with
the divine in place of formalized, structured religion. This second
transcendental idea is privileged in The Scarlet Letter.
After marrying fellow transcendentalist Sophia Peabody
in 1842, Hawthorne left Brook Farm and moved
into the Old Manse, a home in Concord where Emerson had once lived.
In 1846 he published Mosses from
an Old Manse, a collection of essays and stories, many
of which are about early America. Mosses from an Old Manse earned
Hawthorne the attention of the literary establishment because America
was trying to establish a cultural independence to complement its
political independence, and Hawthorne’s collection of stories displayed
both a stylistic freshness and an interest in American subject matter.
Herman Melville, among others, hailed Hawthorne as the “American
Shakespeare.”
In 1845 Hawthorne again went to
work as a customs surveyor, this time, like the narrator of The
Scarlet Letter, at a post in Salem. In 1850,
after having lost the job, he published The Scarlet Letter to enthusiastic,
if not widespread, acclaim. His other major novels include The
House of the Seven Gables (1851), The
Blithedale Romance (1852),
and The Marble Faun (1860).
In 1853 Hawthorne’s college friend Franklin
Pierce, for whom he had written a campaign biography and who had
since become president, appointed Hawthorne a United States consul.
The writer spent the next six years in Europe. He died in 1864,
a few years after returning to America.
The majority of Hawthorne’s work takes America’s Puritan
past as its subject, but The Scarlet Letter uses
the material to greatest effect. The Puritans were a group of religious
reformers who arrived in Massachusetts in the 1630s
under the leadership of John Winthrop (whose death is recounted
in the novel). The religious sect was known for its intolerance
of dissenting ideas and lifestyles. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne
uses the repressive, authoritarian Puritan society as an analogue
for humankind in general. The Puritan setting also enables him to
portray the human soul under extreme pressures. Hester, Dimmesdale,
and Chillingworth, while unquestionably part of the Puritan society
in which they live, also reflect universal experiences. Hawthorne
speaks specifically to American issues, but he circumvents the aesthetic
and thematic limitations that might accompany such a focus. His
universality and his dramatic flair have ensured his place in the
literary canon.
