Nathaniel Hawthorne is the most influential romantic novelist and psychological novelist in America in the 19th century. Born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, a declining family. One of his ancestors was involved in the Puritan persecution of heresy, and he was one of the three judges in the famous Salem Wizarding Case in 1692. This period of history had a profound impact on Hawthorne's thought. Hawthorne's father, a captain, died when he was four years old. Hawthorne entered Bodoine College in 1821 with the help of his relatives. Among his classmates were Longfellow, a poet, and Pierce, who was later elected president. After graduating from university in 1825, he returned to Salem and started writing. He has anonymously published his novel Fan Xiao (1828) and dozens of short stories, and has successively published collections of short stories such as Green Moss in Ancient Houses (1843) and Snow Shadow (1851), which have gradually received attention and praise.
Hawthorne served in the Customs twice in 1836 and 1846, and in 1841 he joined the Brook Farm founded by Transcendentalists. He married in 1842, lived in Concord Village, and met the writers Emerson, Thoreau and others. In 1848, he lost his post as a customs officer due to different political opinions from the authorities, and devoted himself to creative activities, writing his most important novel The Scarlet Letter (1850). Taking New England life in colonial period as the background, this work depicts a young woman bound by unreasonable marriage who committed adultery prohibited by Calvinism and was exposed to the public, exposing some darkness in colonial society under the rule of theocracy at that time. The author describes in detail the young woman Hester Prynne, who has been remorseful in spirit after a long period of atonement, the Reverend Dimsdale, who has been reproached by faith and conscience for a long time and finally confessed her sins frankly, and the husband Roger of Prynne, who is full of revenge psychology and has completely lost humanity, to explore various moral and philosophical issues related to crime and humanity layer by layer. The novel opens with a prison and roses and ends with a cemetery, full of rich symbolic meanings.
As Hawthorne's masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter is the most typical embodiment of Hawthorne's contradictory treatment of Puritanism. In this work, he portrayed a firm and magical woman Hester Prynne, who was condemned by the Puritan Church because of her adultery with the priest Dimmesdale. She was punished by wearing the red letter "A" on her chest and was abused and humiliated in public. The needle of the red letter "A" pierced Hester Prynne's heart. Even if "the mark is covered up", the red letter "A" is proof of crime and punishment, and is the embodiment of a woman's evil. In order to get a new life, Hester Prynne openly admitted his crime and started the long road of salvation like "martyrdom" with his daughter in a lonely hut in the countryside. In Hawthorne's opinion, Hester Prynne is guilty. She committed the crime of adultery that the society could not tolerate at that time, but more importantly, her crime of deception. She reached an exchange with Chillingworth, that is, Chillingworth would no longer ask who the child's father was, and she would not reveal Chillingworth's true identity to the priest. Such a means is questionable, even if it is for love. Hester Prynne's original intention was to protect Pastor Dimmesdale, but it also brought him greater pain. She tried to make up for her mistakes with her good deeds, so that many women confided their inner secrets to her, seeking comfort and advice. "Puritans believe that people have a natural tendency towards virtue, but only through some kind of 'training' can people achieve the perfection of virtue." It is through this "training" that Hester Prynne tries to make up for his crimes with his good deeds, "and finally purifies her soul.", "And create a purer and more sacred soul than she lost". The scarlet letter is no longer the stigma of humiliation and crime, but the symbol and symbol of inspiring spiritual revival.
Hawthorne vividly expresses Hester's idea of pursuing the interests of natural persons. In Hester's view, the pursuit of love is a personal matter and has nothing to do with society, morality and religion. So although she was formally punished and wore a red A on her chest, she was ideologically "not punished by those social ethics". Moreover, the formal symbol A of this punishment for crime was also embroidered brilliantly by her, and became "her passport to enter the fields that other women dare not enter".
Dimmesdale is a very complicated character in The Scarlet Letter. As a priest, he had an affair with Hester Prynne, which was a betrayal of God's morality. More importantly, he did not have the courage to admit his crime. When Hester Prynne stood alone on the scaffold and was humiliated and scolded by others, he stood high in the bleacher, enveloped in everyone's trust and worship. In order to maintain his status and reputation, he became a secret sinner. After deceiving everyone to the extent of God, he even continued to work as a priest, which was irresponsibility to the public and blasphemy to God. In this case, he chose to self punish: beat himself with a bloody whip, hunger strike, introspection and repentance, privately branded his chest with the red letter "A", "the voice already contains a melancholy that indicates the trend of decadence", and Chillingworth vented all the anger of a husband's jealousy on Dimmesdale, Dimmesdale's spirit and body were on the verge of collapse, and finally walked to the scaffold. At the peak of honor, he completely confessed himself, showed the scarlet letter on his chest with one last breath, fell into the arms of Hester Prynne, and was freed from the inextricable knot. Hawthorne makes Dimmesdale suffer from seven years of spiritual and physical torture, which is more cruel than public punishment. From this point of view, Dimmestra has become a tool of Puritan doctrine. Hawthorne wants to show that it is necessary to make corresponding efforts to realize the immortality of the meaning of life, so as to make the helpless soul and guilty body obtain spiritual stability and physical pleasure.
Chillingworth is a person who has changed from a victim to a sinner. His marriage with Hester Prynne was a crime in itself, because it was wrong and unnatural. In addition, his crime is also manifested in his revenge on Dimmesdale, who Hawthorne believes is a moral crime. He constantly revolves between his wife and her lover, and in order to achieve his own goals, he infringes on others' souls and hurts others' feelings. The seeds of revenge were deeply buried in his heart. He is calm and gentle on the outside, but he has deep malice on the inside. As Dimmesdale said: "Hester, we are not the worst sinners in the world! There is a man in the world whose sin is even more serious than that of the blasphemous priest! He insidiously infringes an inviolable heart." However, Chillingworth's survival depends on Dimmesdale. Once the priest dies, he also loses his sense of life, Less than a year later, he withered and died. Before his death, Chillingworth, who was deeply sinful, left a considerable legacy to little Pearl, which undoubtedly contained a certain degree of repentance. At the same time, Hawthorne also shows the readers a beautiful picture: people need forgiveness, and a guilty body can also purify its unclean soul, which can also be redeemed.
In Puritanism, everyone was guilty and achieved spiritual detachment through redemption. We can see that Puritanism plays a positive role in purifying people's souls, but it is superficial after all. Through the surface, we also clearly see that Hawthorne has his own contradictions and doubts about Puritanism, which is determined by the negative factors of Puritanism's suppression of human nature.
In the colonial period, under the harsh religious rule, religion and law were almost the same, and what dominated human thought was not individual independent judgment, but religious power. The right of religion replaces people's thinking, and the right of religion replaces people's judgment. The Puritans tried to religionize the society. Perhaps the initial motive was good, but in the process of concrete implementation, they inevitably went to an extreme. When the will of God becomes a part of the authoritative social order, the salvation of human nature by divinity will lose its meaning in human operation. In The Scarlet Letter, we will always feel the gloom from religious pressure, and more intuitively see Hawthorne's suspicion and dissatisfaction with Puritan ethics.
Dimmesdale, who is "a real monk and a real religionist, his reverence is highly developed, and he has developed a state of mind that can naturally advance vigorously along the path of faith", is also a living person, with naturally endowed seven emotions and six desires, devout faith in religion and pursuit of secular life, It was he who fell victim to religious asceticism. When the affair between Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne was revealed, his thought fell into a complex contradiction, which made the spirit and body more and more decayed. Hawthorne's portrayal of Dimmesdale, a monk with holy caresses but secretly breaking the rhythm, further mocks and criticizes the hypocrisy of Puritanism. We can see more clearly that in the Puritan society, people regard the most sincere feelings of human beings as the biggest taboo and sin, and want to suppress human desires. People with higher moral cultivation will gradually become more and more divine, and the distortion of his repression will become more and more heavy.
Chillingworth is Hawthorne's character who gives criticism and criticism. He did not give Hester Prynne the happiness he deserved, and buried Hester Prynne's youth. When Hester Prynne had another love, he broke her happiness again. In order to vent his personal anger, he turned into a devil like figure and appeared in front of Dimsdale as "a most reliable friend", "making the other party to tell him all the terror, shame, pain, invalid regret, and inextricable inner condemnation" (10). Chillingworth's long-term spiritual persecution of pastors is a very sinister and cunning avenger. The author tries to describe the ugliness and evil of Chillingworth, but such a person is regarded as a friend by the Puritan rulers, who let him do whatever he wants. This further reveals the hypocrisy and cruelty of Puritanism.
Little Pearl, the author compares her to "a lovely immortal flower blossoming out of a kind of exuberant evil enthusiasm" (11), "her posture contains an infinite variety of charm" (12) Although she is young, she has clearly recognized the ferocious power of the world against her, and has fiercely resisted people's contempt and insult to their mother and daughter. She has a lively and stirring life characteristic, and her bright clothes are rebellion against the society at that time. The harsh Puritan society strangled her mother's youth. With her character, there would be no happiness in this gloomy land. At the end of the novel, the author gave little Pearl a happy and complete destination. Let her start a new life in another place. In terms of the feelings Hawthorne expresses, there is a tendency towards a free, happy, emotional and pursuing society.
Hawthorne inherits the anti traditional critical spirit of the Enlightenment, starting from everyone's humanity, reveals the dark side of Puritanism with abstract forms and symbolic techniques, and then explores complex social problems. Hawthorne affirmed some Puritan tenets in the Scarlet Letter, but more criticized the cruel regulations and laws of Puritanism. He believes that God is universal and everyone has the possibility of being saved, but what he preaches more is the publicity of human nature and praises the strong pursuit of happiness. Therefore, as far as the whole work is concerned, Hawthorne reveals that the suppression of Puritan ethics on human nature is still the main aspect. From the Scarlet Letter, we can deeply feel that Hawthorne's religious view is complex and contradictory, which also makes the Scarlet Letter have a strong artistic appeal.