新乡学院外国语学院美国文学课件 第05章.pptVIP

Nathaniel Hawthorne1804-1864 His Life Born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804. Descended from the earliest settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. John Hathorne, one of the judges at the 1692 Salem witch trials. William Hathorne persecuted the Quakers. Both fascinated and disturbed by his kinship with John Hathorne. Raised by a widowed mother, attended Bowdoin College in Maine, met two people Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, the 14th president of the United States. Hawthorne also held positions as an editor and as a customs surveyor. He participated in the utopian experiment at Brook Farm, a commune designed to promote economic self-sufficiency and transcendentalist principles. He married fellow transcendentalist Sophia Peabody in 1842 and left Brook Farm and moved into the Old Manse. themes His works are deeply concerned with the ethical problems of sin, punishment, and atonement. Hawthornes exploration of these was related to the sense of guilt he felt about the roles of his ancestors in the 17th-century persecution of Quakers and in the 1692 witchcraft trials of Salem, Massachusetts. Black vision of human nature: He was obsessed by the Calvinistic concept of the original sin. For him, human beings are evil-natured and sinful this sin and evil is ever present in human heart and will pass on from one generation to another One source of evil is overweening intellect because devoid of fellow feeling He symbolizes moral or spiritual disease by the disease of the body and accordingly when a person commits any sin, it might appear in some form on the body. 1. Quakers: The Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers, was founded in England in the 17th century as a Christian religious denomination by people who were dissatisfied with the existing denominations and sects of Christianity.. 2. Persecution of Quakers: In and around Salem, Massachusetts the Quakers are harassed, beaten, deported, and sometimes even h