You will prepare and submit a term paper on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Transcendentalism. Your paper should be a minimum of 1250 words in length. Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American author who lived in the nineteenth century and wrote his novels and short stories at around the same time that a lot of other eminent writers were writing, in America, a fact that has led many to term this age the ‘American Renaissance’ (Meltzer, 9). He wrote at the same time as other writers such as Emerson and Thoreau. As a result, an analysis of his work needs to be conducted by placing him in his historical context, as writers like Larry John Reynolds have said (Reynolds). The influences of a Puritan lineage are marked in Hawthorne’s writings, and there is also a heavy influence of his hometown, Salem.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, there is a conspicuous presence of the ideas of Transcendentalism oval can be well interpreted as a strong critique of the Puritanical society of seventeenth century Boston, Massachusetts, where Hester Prynne, the protagonist was ostracized and persecuted for life owing to the adultery that she committed with the Puritan minister Arthur Dimmesdale. The theories of Transcendentalism have been employed for numerous reasons in Hawthorne’s novel. While there is an obvious critique of orthodox Puritanism at an ostensible level, there is also a clear articulation of the need for change in the glaringly unequal power dynamics of gender. Transcendentalism in The Scarlet Letter also urges us to question the very ideas of good and evil. While Hester is punished for having strayed from the path of virtue, the novel depicts her as a healthy and morally upright person. Roger Chillingworth, who enjoys excellent social repute, is shown to be an utterly degenerate man.This paper shall seek to closely examine these nuanced facets of the novel.
The concepts of free-enquiry and liberal questioning are central to the theory of Transcendentalism, Hester is seen to quietly accept her persecution, she is also seen to question and rebel against the rules of the Puritanical society in which she lives. .This can be seen in the uncharacteristic vehemence with which she opposes the decision of the clergy to take away her child from her. .