Characterization of Women in the Fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne

While his Transcendentalist contemporaries were expounding their optimistic philosophy of natural goodness, progress, and perfectibility, Hawthorne probed into the human heart, recording the darkest motives of his characters and writing bitter criticism of life. Around him men were declaring that scientific inventions, political organizations, and religious reforms were ushering in a new era; but Hawthorne viewed the new society as a probable continuation of old evils and a manufacturer of new ones. His fiction has been called "an elaborate study of the centrifugal, . . . a dramatization of all those social and psychological forces that lead to disunion, fragmentation, dispersion, incoherence. Critics generally comment on Hawthorne's obsession with guilt. His pessimistic analysis of the mind, his somber outlook on living, and his personal tendency to solitude are frequently credited to his Puritan ancestry; yet as Arvin points out, "He had no more Puritan blood than Emerson and hundreds of other New Englanders of his time: and who will say that they were obsessed with the spectral presence of guilty. One must go beyond Calvinist theology to comprehend the source of guilt that hovers over the pages of his fiction. His religious, moral, educational, and economic background was so typical of his time and locality that one can hardly believe that the nature of his writing or thinking could have been determined by these factors. Indeed, his imperviousness to contemporary influences causes one to look intensely at his personal life in searching for the explanation of the Hawthorne enigma. An important influence on his writing was his prolonged association with women. From his life in a feminine world and his reaction to that world, he devised the major part of his style, themes, and feminine character types. A review of the facts of his biography will establish the nature of the influence that dominated him as a man and as a writer. And an analysis of his fiction will indicate the extent of that influence on his writing. Although this study will necessarily begin with a review of his life, this thesis is not another biography; for Hawthorne already has a large number of biographers. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the literary influence of his mother, sisters, wife, daughters, and women acquaintances, with particular emphasis on their relation to his themes, style, and character types