Nathanial Ha(w)thorne

Paulina Smolinski

This post focuses on the author of The Scarlet Letter.

Sometimes the past that so desperately haunts us can also lead us to eternal fascination.  Often the ideas of the past that loom inadvertently in our minds make a more profound impact than we imagined. Such is the case of the author Nathanial Hawthorne. The past that he tried to stifle eventually arose again and became the main inspiration for his greatest works. This not so hidden secret that he kept stemmed to his ancestors as his family descended from the earliest settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Hawthorne).  Among those early Puritan relatives was John Hathorne, one of the judges at the notorious 1692 Salem witch trials. Nathanial Hawthorne was a descendent of the man responsible for the death of many innocent people and two dogs (“Nathaniel Hawthorne – Biography.”). This is not a past that anyone would want to expose in a family-tree-portrait-in-the-living-room fashion. Hawthorne was no different as he changed his name from Hathorne to Hawthorne with a w in order to eliminate association with his ancestor’s infamous past (“Nathaniel Hawthorne – Biography.” n.pg.). In the end, it was the Puritan culture that initially Hawthorne so intently pressed down which became the topic of his most successful novels such as The Scarlet Letter as well as other stories such as “Young Goodman Brown” (“Nathaniel Hawthorne – Biography.”).  Hawthorne criticizes and highlights all the elements of the culture that made it so characteristic and strange. The idea for the novel is described with the introduction “The Custom House” as Hawthorne describes a narrator who is eerily similar to himself (Hawthorne 3). The narrator finds himself in a sea of Puritan mystery as he finds the scarlet letter that a women had to wear during the Puritan Era along with her story. In the same fashion, Hawthorne’s course of life events from his birth in Salem to fascination with the obscure culture lead him to the creation of The Scarlet Letter in my opinion.  Overall, I believe that he could not escape the past that haunted and fascinated him considering that eventually it became the central topic of his works.

I find it intriguing that Hawthorne chose to write about Puritan culture; considering the fact that he could write about any topic and he chose to write about the one element of his life that he has been trying to desperately hide. Honestly, there are certain things in everyone’s life that they are not proud to claim; however few people go on to then write a successful novel about them. This inspiration to describe the Puritan culture in a slightly sarcastic, judgmental tone may lie in the fact that he spent some time in Salem after graduating college. I mean he could have also have been sarcastic since the Puritain culture was ever so slightly covered in a sheet of insanity. Hindsight is twenty-twenty,looking back, the whole killing innocent people on no physical evidence does not seem like the brightest idea. Hawthorne’s diaries show us that he spent most of his time in the witch trial fatherland reading and writing as he began to develop the historical basis of the novel (“Nathaniel Hawthorne – Biography.”). Personally, the creative narrative where the narrator often steps out to speak to the reader is what I enjoy so far in Nathanial Hawthorne’s style. Furthermore, I find it fitting that my description of his inspiration to write the novel be done in that same opinionated, slightly sarcastic manner.

Work cited

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York: Bantam Dell, 1850. Print.

“Nathaniel Hawthorne – Biography.” Nathaniel Hawthorne. The European Graduate SChool, n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2015.