美国文学课件4

3. Hawthorne’s moral vision in short stories (1)―Young Goodman Brown‖ : A young man’s initiation to realize the all-prevailing power of sin among the puritan community and their attempt to hide the sin.
Hawthorne’s Style: (1) Hawthorne’s truth, which is more psychological than theological, is conveyed mainly through allegory and symbol. (2 )ambiguity. Hawthorne seems to imply that polarities of good and bad can not always be reconciled..
Negative Capability in 19th Century American Literature --Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe
I. Relationship with Transcendentalism:
II. Key concept: Negative Capability: 1. the origin of the phrase: negative capability was first used by John Keats. In a letter written in December 1817, Keats defined it as the capability in good poets of including uncertainties and other negative emotions without stretching for reason and without losing reason.
of the three, Poe was not associated with Transcendentalism or any other noticeable –isms of his age. On the other hand, Hawthorne and Melville were marginally associated with the ideas of Transcendentalism, and they would often take a critical distance from that movement.
3. different manifestation: Hawthorne, Melville and Poe were healthy skeptics. Their ability in doubts, irony and detachment enabled them to interrogate the innocence of the age. To put it differently, it is a way to question the basis of optimism so that optimism is not
Another theme : withdrawal from marriage. Many of Hawthorne’s male characters live in isolation. It seems extraordinarily difficult for them to know someone else and to disclose themselves to another person. This kind of alienation, strangely, even becomes extreme in a family setting.
(3) Hawthorne’s dramatizations of sin made him a deep explorer of human psyche and an examiner of optimism.
Ne Scarlet Letter and Hawthorne’s Moral Vision: 1. the importance of Salem: Hawthorne was a native of Salem, Massachusetts. Salem was his birthplace. Salem was a symbol of the Puritan past or the heritage of Puritanism in the ―present‖. For that reason, Salem, with its puritan heritage and its history of witchcraft, was the symbolic locale for Hawthorne’s creative imagination. Salem, together with the ―all the puritan traits, both good and evil‖ found an unalienable imprint upon Hawthorne’s works.
4. An Analysis of the Main Characters in The Scarlet Letter : Hester Prynne: being the one penalized by the community for the adultery and thus the one bearing the scarlet ―A‖ openly, gains a sympathetic knowledge of the existence of sin in other hearts. In that sense, Hester embodies this Hawthornian moral tenet:" if the truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth from many another bosom .‖.
Letter :
The themes in The Scarlet
(1) the juxtaposition between the puritan past and the present: nature seem to be a much higher moral force. (2) Doctrinarian morality is not the substance of Hawthorne’s moral vision. For his characters, the moral vision is acquired through an inner struggle or exploration which first places them in unfamiliar territories.
2. classical expression: Keats wrote: ―…that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.‖ The negative capability, by immersing us in ambiguities, doubts and other negative emotions, in fact strengthens us and improves our judgment by complicating our existing system of judgment. It is therefore a sign of the kind of aesthetic sophistication found only in good poets.
(2)―The Minister’s Black Veil.‖ Reverend Hooper wears a thin black veil for life because he feels a sense of personal guilt not confessed. The veil is a symbol of universal guilt concealed by hypocrisy.
Roger Chillingworth: guilty of the unpardonable sin: the invasion into another person’s soul in order to manipulate the other person’s will for a very selfish purpose. To Hawthorne, this is the worst sin and a person guilty of this sin is completely corrupt.
2. The Scarlet Letter: (1) first Great American novel. The storyline, set 200 years earlier in the Boston area, is ostensibly focused on the adulterous love between Arthur Dimmesdale, a Puritan minister, and Hester Prynne, a married woman in his congregation. (2)The focus of the novel is their moral situation in the long years in which they have to endure suffering., it is the consequence of the adultery and respective struggle of the two lovers that get us involved.