Nathaniel Hawthorne

Paper Summary:

Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, into an old Puritan family. Hawthorne's own 17th-century ancestors, as he frankly admitted, had been among the real-life Puritan zealots. "Young Goodman Brown" is a story of initiation. Evil is the nature of mankind. "Rappaccini's Daughter" is filled with symbols and symbolic allusions of both Hawthorne's time and his ancestral past. It serves to point up the significant contrast between Dante's Beatrice and Rappaccini's daughter Beatrice. Hawthorne repeatedly and with gentle irony characterizes Robin as "a shrewd youth." The religious polemic is the standard form of Hawthorne's writing. "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" blends yet another theme of initiation into the sobering responsibilities of adulthood with the historical movement of the American colonists in defiance of royal authority.

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