NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE ESSAY

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a descendant of a puritan family, playing a noticeable role in history of New England and his historical interests were closely tied with his epoch. The writer was dissatisfied with the society’s state; in search of public evil’s roots he appealed to human personality, its spiritual world, to the “secrets of human heart”. Hawthorne delighted courage, firmness, independence spirit and freedom love inherent to puritans, but at the same time, fanaticism, cruelty, intolerance caused his disgust. He was absorbed by good, evil, conscience and moral perfection problems, i.e. the core issues of puritans’ spiritual world.

Hawthorne considered spiritual life of America, its dispositions and dominant moral principles, a projection of internal reality. According to romantic humanism he saw the public evil’s source and simultaneously an instrument of its overcoming in individual consciousness. Human soul seemed a deep cave filled with wicked and kind thoughts, and only in its depth clean Good was found ”“ the veritable nature of man rarely succeeding to reach the surface. Transformation of reality should start, in Hawthorne’s opinion, with “clearing of hearts”.

However, some material points in writer’s looks weren’t relying on transcendentalism. He denied thesis about human consciousness’s divinity and the idea of personality’s complete autonomy, considering an individual was firmly connected with social systems, and firstly, with the spiritual life field, arising on verge of transformation of individual morality to the public moral.

Hawthorne did not build illusions concerning moral nature of man. He found the Mankind a great fraternity in sin, and hoped the coming “clearing of hearts” would help. So, not by chance there is constantly a motive of human fate’s fatality and an idea of the certain higher force presence, which a man is not imperious above, in his works. In spite of the fact, that Hawthorne couldn’t finish his last beginnings, being conscious of the creative weakness in front of new historical time’s necessities, Hawthorne was a profoundly Christian writer.



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