Hawthorne: the context and his style

1798, the year of the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads marks the beginning of the Romantic movement in England. The movement, relying strongly on the power of the imagination, euqlity of all men and women, and the belief in the possibility of continuous improvement, was a literary, social, political and artistic response to a background in which industrialization, rationalism, unequal treatment and unfair conditions for many, characterized the turn of the century.

In general terms, Romanticism meant:
*a return to nature
*a renewed interest in the past
*an idealization of the simple, pure states of humanity
*exaltation of the imagination
*rejection of material reality in favor of intuition

American Romanticism was not an imitation of its European counterpart. On the contrary, it developed its own traits. Its novelty lay on the abounding strangeness of this continent. The return to nature was effectively put into practice by people like Henry David Thoreau, who recounted his experience in Walden. The interest in the past was directed not to the distant Medieval Era, but to what Americans considered their own past: the Colonial Period. There was also an idealization of pure life, as seen in Native Americnas. Yet, they were presented in literary works as fictionalized, idealized charcacters, far from the harsh realities that politics and history show. 

The rebellious spirit typical of the Romantics was set to work on reform movements that overflew with optimistic expectations of improvement. At the beginning, there was a belief in the possibility of uninterrupted human progress. Yet, towards the mid-century, the catastrophe of the Civil War showed otherwise.

In this context, the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne shows the complexities of the Romantic movement, its interest in the Colonial past as an explanation of the causes for the 19th century present, the dark and luminous sides alike of the human soul, and the first example of symbolic fiction in America, namely, The Scarlet Letter (1850).

His style is marked by the following characteristics:

* Rich, ambivalent allegory.
* Reference to his Puritan past.
* Investigation of the problems of moral and social responsibility.
* His enemies are intolerance, hypocrisy (which hides true sin), withdrawal from humanity, the greed that kills joy, cynical suspicion, arrogance.
* His remedy is in nature and in a world free from the corrosive sense of guilt.