"
Mather 22)
Hawthorne clearly stepped away from the Puritan ethic by consistently alluding to the existence of the earthly supernatural. Though this was a fear of the Puritans, clearly it was associated with Satan and possession of the living. In Hawthorne's works the supernatural was associated with less grand sources, such as those seen in Young Goodman Brown. (Hoeltje 39-40) Hawthorne allows his characters to explore concepts that would have been those deemed heretical within the Puritan settings of the works.
In The Birth-Mark, Hawthorne associates the active expulsion of character traits of humanity clearly results in the death of the whole.
The line of divergence in "The Birth Mark" is indicated by its name. We all have our birth-marks, -- traits of character, which may be temporarily suppressed, or relegated to the background, but which cannot be eradicated and are certain to reappear at unguarded moments, or on exceptional occasions...The father who attempts to force his son into a mode of life for which Nature did not intend him, or the mother who quarrels with her daughter's friends, commits an error similar to that of Hawthorne's alchemist, who endeavors to remove the birthmark from the otherwise beautiful face of his wife, but only succeeds in effecting this together with her death.
Stearns 182)
Within this work Hawthorne clearly analogizes the challenges of a culture to repress the humanity of its members in the name of faith or propriety. Within Rappacini's Daughter, as in the Scarlet Letter, the challenge to culture is the internal psychological expression of sexuality in a repressed culture. The admissions of sexual desire is punishable even in the situation of matrimony and Hawthorne refuses this ideal, blaming it for indiscretions of morals.
Emmett) "The Birth-mark', like the preface to 'Rappacini'sDaughter',raises the possibility that Hawthorne sees himself penned up in an allegorizing mode that produces the masculine obsession to stereotype how women read themselves."
Pfister 45) Hawthorne expresses the gender conflicts that have been born of the repression of thoughts and feelings within a conservative culture.
Rejecting...
Nathaniel Hawthorne's beliefs concerning ethics, morality, and guilt as made evident in one of these stories. Consider how beliefs affect characterization, setting, plotting, and theme. In the story of Rappaccini's daughter, the narrator becomes infatuated with a young woman whose life literally has become poisoned, because of her father's influence. Unlike a conventional Christian system of morality, as is typical of most of the author's other tales, the girl is
Emerson believed that the broader culture could rid itself of slavery through moral persuasion. At the beginning of the renaissance, Emerson "maintained that reform was best achieved by the moral persuasion of individuals rather than by the militant action of groups," (Lowance, 2000, 301). but, in the years immediately leading up to the Civil War, Emerson's philosophy collided with reality. In 1855, he wrote and delivered his Lecture on
Irrationalists and the Enlightenment Thomas Carlyle and his friend Mazzini were a couple of the "irrationalists" who opposed the Enlightenment developments and believed men needed a "new religion" (Stromberg 50) in order to guide them towards future progress. The Napoleonic Wars had upset the order that the Age of Enlightenment had cultivated -- essentially a Protestant takeover throughout Europe in which the Protestant ethos sat at the heart. The backlash
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