Hawthorne’s Writing Hawthorne’s Writing StyleStyle

Hawthorne’s Writing Hawthorne’s Writing StyleStyle

Amanda Bailey Erica BoddenAmanda Bailey Erica Bodden

Brigette Diaz Trenessa KennedyBrigette Diaz Trenessa Kennedy

Anthea Panton Mary OkowiAnthea Panton Mary Okowi

What is Hawthorne’s writing style?

• Hawthorne's work belongs to Romanticism, an artistic and intellectual movement characterized by an emphasis on individual freedom from social conventions or political restraints, on human imagination, and on nature in a typically idealized form.

• Some classify him as a gloomy “guilt-ridden moralist.”

• Hawthorne’s writing style was based on his beliefs – his central themes focused along the lines of reality – and having the readers question what was given as fact, just as he did.

• Hawthorne wrote this novel in the way of a frame tale, so the person who found the story that was already written about Hester Prynne, is retelling the work as the narrator.

• In the novel, The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne was able to bring notice to the paradoxical nature of the Puritan religion, all while creating a heap of plots that the reader does not come to figure out until the end of the play.

• With the Puritan faith, Hawthorne is able to show the reader that although the faith attempts to demonstrate a sense of godliness, the fact that the townspeople behaved so harshly towards Hester Prynne showed the contradictions of the faith; this in turn reflects Hawthorne's lack of belief in heaven, hell, and all else related to faith and a higher being.

With the prior knowledge of how Puritans are supposed to be forgiving and godly, Nathaniel Hawthorne is able to show the paradox in the townspeople, in how they were gossiping about Hester’s crime of adultery, saying that “It would be greatly for the public behoof, if we women being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne” (pg. 35)

“An effect – which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every individual who has occupied the position – is, that, while he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him.” (26)

• His writing style sounded archaic and was difficult to understand.  The dialogues were not like natural speech and very unlike the normal way people speak. (It was normal for people to speak like this back in Puritan times)

• Hawthorne conveyed modern themes of psychology and human nature through his crafty use of allegory and symbolism.

• The importance of his writing style is to put emphasis on the time period and also when the events took place.

• This contributes to the work as a whole because his writing style mimics the lifestyle of Puritans because he feels that he needs to keep it conformed to that time period in the past to make it believable.

“ While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and tortured by some black trouble of the soul, and given over to the machinations of his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant popularity in his sacred office.” ( page 97)

Hawthorne’s use of long sentence structure shows how detailed it is and how emotion is put behind his words. Within my quote Hawthorne uses words such as “ gnawed”, “tortured” and “ black trouble of the soul” to show when reading the sentence how slow and dark these words are. Showing how this explains the emotions of Dimmesdale and his pain he is feeling is shown though these words. Hawthorne's use of gnawed and torture is explaining how Dimmesdale becoming sick is from his own regrets of not admitting to his crime of sexual intercourse with a married women. Also seeing how Hester is suffering from a crime that took to two people to conceive. Hawthorne’s purpose for doing this is to explain how slow but hurtful these words can be. Therefore showing how slow but “deadliest” Dimmesdale is suffering slowly but in pain from his regret.

“All that guilty sorrow, hidden from the world, whose great heart would have pitied and forgiven,

to be revealed to him, the Pitiless, to him, the Unforgiving!” (96)

• -Hawthorne’s syntax is extremely complex and descriptive. There are a myriad of comma’s within the sentence that are added to dramatize the text. In this specific sentence each statement before a comma is a dependent clause. The purpose of the dependent statements could mean that Dimmesdale is not independent with all his troubles and guilt, every thing that he is going through has to do with other people including Hester. The words “Pitiless” and “Unforgiving” represent the views that the Puritans have of God. They revere him as unforgiving and when those words are capitalized it shows their true beliefs which are extremely important in their community.

“Next in order to the magistrates came the young and eminently distinguished divine, from whose lips the religious discourse of the anniversary was expected” (p163)

Before Minister Dimmesdale presented his sermon to the Puritan townspeople, the narrator described him as a “young and eminently distinguished divine” and he was greatly looked up to because they did not know the sin he had committed. The narrator also described Dimmesdales’ sermon as a “religious discourse”, and although he was preaching what the townspeople wanted to hear, his ending discourse did not follow through with the Puritan religion because in the end he confessed the great sin he had committed and had been living with. Through Hawthorne’s writing style, we learn what the Puritans thought was right from wrong. But Dimmesdale contradicted the “religious discourse” to show that the Puritans believed one thing but acted upon the other, referring to how Minister Dimmesdale was a Puritan but yet he lived with an “A” in his chest after committing adultery. Throughout the novel, Hawthorne's’ writes in a way that let us know and gives us examples on how the Puritans contradict their own beliefs.

“ But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush…with its delicate

gems… and fragile beauty (33).”

This quote is significant because it is an example of Hawthorne's romanticism writing style. This relates to the novel as a whole because the rose-bush was like Hester; after she was accused of adultery, she was going through a dark and melancholy time, but in the end she was able to blossom into a lively and colorful person despite the gloom that surrounded her; just like rose-bush at the prison. Hester had her individual freedom towards the end of the novel, which is one of the factors that contribute to a romanticism type story.