2. Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in The United States in 1804, and he died in
England in 1864. About his life, he moved to Maine to study in the Bowdoin
College , where he found the poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Franklin
Pierce.
After he published his first book, Twice-told Tales, he moved to Boston. There,
he married the painter Sophia Peabody in 1842, and he settled in Concord,
Massachusetts. There, they had as neighbors the writers Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
In 1852 he wrote the biography of his older mate Franklin Pierce, event that
made him won the elections, Hawthorne was appointed consul in Liverpool. In
1857 he was made redundant by different reasons, but the main one was he was
ill. In 1864 he died due to a stomach cancer.
Although he is known by his tales, Hawthorne published five novels; the ones
which are the best are The scarlet letter and The house of the seven gables.
We can also appreciate his works belonged to the Romantic period, which means
they had allegorical content and they recreated the puritan ideas that the
society had during those years.
3. The Romantic period has its origins in England in 1798.
The literary and artistic movement known as Romanticism quickly
spread to the rest of Europe and America. As a reaction against the Age
of Reason that saw both the American and the French Revolutions,
Romanticism emphasized everything the previous age did not: feelings,
emotions, reason over feelings, mysticism and instinct, natural man over
civilized man.
The main characteristics of Romanticism are: resulting in part from
libertarian and egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution , the Romantic
movement had in common only a revolt against the prescribed rules of
Classicism. The basic aims of Romanticism were several : a return to
Nature and to the belief in the Goodness of Humanity; the rediscovery
of the artist as a supremely individual creator; the development of
nationalistic pride; and the exaltation of the senses and emotions over
reason and intellect. In addition, Romanticism was a philosophical revolt
against Rationalism.
4.
5. About some of the works written by Hawthorne:
* The house of the Seven Gables The house of the title is a gloomy New
England mansion, haunted from its foundation by fraudulent dealings, accusations
of witchcraft and sudden death. Characters: Hepzibah
Pyncheon, Holgrave, Phoebe Pyncheon, Alice Pyncheon, Clifford Pyncheon, Uncle
Venner, Ned Higgins, Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon.
*The Marble Faun written on the eve of the American Civil war is set in a
fantastical Italy. The romance mixes elements of a fable , pastoral ,gothic novel
and travel guide. The four main characters are Miriam, a beautiful painter who is
compared to Eve, Beatrice, Cenci, Lady Macbeth, Judith and Cleopatra, and is
pursued by a mysterious, threatening man who is her "evil genius" through life;
Hilda, an innocent copyist who is compared to the Virgin Mary and the white
dove, and whose simple, unbendable moral principles can make her severe in spite
of her tender heart; Kenyon, a sculptor, who represents rationalist humanism; and
Donatello, the Count of Monte Beni, who is compared to Adam, and amazingly
resembles the Faun of Praxiteles: The novel plays with the characters' belief
that the count may be a descendant of the antique Faun, with Hawthorne
withholding a definite statement even in the novel's concluding chapter.
*The Blithedale Romance was a famous novel called “the lightest, the
brightest, the liveliest of Hawthorne's no humorous fictions. This book has no
main characters because it describes the Contemporary and Modern criticism.
