Symbolism in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Works
Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the great nineteenth century masters of American fiction. "The Scarlet Letter" and "Young Goodman Brown" are two Hawthorne works that contain heavy symbolism of sin and immorality.
Hawthorne, being of Puritan heritage, sets his "Scarlet Letter" in the seventeenth-century Puritan settlement of Boston. The protagonist of his story, Hester, is forced to wear the scarlet letter "A" on her breast to symbolize her sin of infidelity, of which resulted in a daughter, Pearl. Then when town officials try to take the child away, a young minister comes to the aid of the mother and child, enabling them to stay together. In this story, man is sinful and moreover, human maladies are essentially punishments from God. Although Hawthorne portrays the young minister as compassionate and just, he also depicts him with physical and psychological symptoms that are taken to represent an unhealthy mind and spirit and thus, are basically are the result of guilt. Hawthorne writes, "Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the unhappy minister, a SCARLET LETTER - the very semblance of that worn by Hester Prynne -imprinted in the flesh" (Scarlet pp).
While the "Scarlet Letter" represents the story of Adam and Eve and the original sin resulting in banishment from the community of God, "Young Goodman Brown" represents the hysteria of the witch trials. Hawthorne had a connection to the infamous trials, as he writes in the introduction to the "Scarlet Letter," his ancestor, John Hawthorne had presided over the Salem trials of 1692, thus linking him through bloodline with the persecution of the "supposedly demonic forces" (Maus pp). Hawthorne writes that his family is stained by the blood from this "martyrdom of the witches" and hopes that his literary works can serve as some sort of repentance (Maus pp).
The protagonist, Goodman Brown, sets...
The only material similarity between Prynne's scarlet "badge" and Faith's pink ribbons is that both are made of cloth and adorn some type of clothing, i.e., Faith's ribbons are part of her cap while Prynne's "badge" is sewn into her dress as needlework. The reader is first introduced to Prynne's "badge" in Chapter Two of the Scarlet Letter when she emerges from jail -- "On the breast of her gown,
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