霍桑《带七个尖角阁的房子》所体现的矛盾的清教思想.docxVIP

重庆大学硕士学位论文 Chapter One Introduction American writers…he (Hawthorne) is the most original, the one least indebted to foreign models or literary precedents of any kind”(2). Of all the writers and men of letters at Hawthorne’s age, Herman Melville was the most fervent admirer and favorable commentator of his writings. In Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses”, he described Hawthorne “a Man of Mosses”, and “an excellent author of your (American) own flesh and blood, an unimitating… and an inimitable man”(3). He even ranked Hawthorne in American literature with the same position as that of Shakespeare in England, and declared that Hawthorne was a man with the largest brain, and with the largest heart. As to the gloomy atmosphere frequently hovering in Hawthorne’s tales, Melville explained “there… lurks in him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritan gloom” and “this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin”(4). As a novelist who had intimate acquaintance with Hawthorne, Melville was acute and accurate in detecting Hawthorne’s blackness, and though his criticism hadn’t aroused much immediate attention after its anonymous publication, modern critics have credited Melville’s essay as one of the most penetrating and important criticisms on Hawthorne. Henry James, another prominent American novelist, also shed light on Hawthorne’s writings. He emphatically directed critics’ attention to Hawthorne’s genius in his imagination and creativity. He commented that “in Hawthorne’s novel, the element of cold and ingenious fantasy, the elaborate imaginative delicacy…constitute a great strength”(5). He also claimed Hawthorne’s works excellent because the thing in Hawthorne’s writings was absolutely American and belonged to the soil and came out of the very heart of New England. However, Henry James didn’t ignore Hawthorne’s main weakness in “the absence of a certain something warm and straight