Hawthorne Writing Style :: essays papers

Hawthorne Writing Style Nathaniel Hawthorne was a prominent early American Author who contributed greatly to the evolution of modern American literature. A New England native, Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts on July 4, 1804 and died on May 19, 1864 in New Hampshire. An avid seaman, Hawthorne^s father died in 1808 when Nathaniel Hawthorne was only a young child. After his father^s death, Hawthorne showed a keen interest in his father^s worldwide nautical adventures and often read the logbooks his father had compiled from sailing abroad. Hawthorne was a descendant of a long line of New England Puritans, which sparked his interest in the Puritan way of life. After he graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825, Hawthorne returned to his home in Salem were he began to write in semi-seclusion. Hawthorne published his first novel, Fanshawe in 1828. In 1839, Hawthorne was appointed weigher and gauger at the Boston Custom House. He later married Sophia Amelia Peabody in 1842. In the following years, Hawthorne wrote his more famous novels which shaped his own literary style, as well as the genres of the romance novel and short story. Eventually, Hawthorne developed a style of romance fiction representative of his own beliefs. Although Nathaniel Hawthorne^s writing style was often viewed as outdated when compared to modern literature, Hawthorne conveyed modern themes of psychology and human nature through his crafty use of allegory and symbolism. To begin with, Hawthorne^s style was commonplace for a writer of the nineteenth century. During the time period in which Hawthorne wrote, printing technology was not yet advanced enough to easily reproduce photographs in books. Therefore, Hawthorne frequently wrote lengthy visual descriptions since his audience had no other means to see the setting of the novel. (Magill:1 840). One example of such descriptions was in The Scarlet Letter when Hawthorne intricately describes the prison door and its surroundings. Another aspect of Hawthorne^s writing which was exclusive to his time period was the use of formal dialogue which remained fairly consistent from character to character (Magill:2 140). Such overblown dialogue was evident in The Scarlet Letter when the dialogue of Pearl, a young child, exhibited no difference from the dialogue of the other characters in the novel. Hawthorne adopted the use of overly formal dialogue partly from a British writer, Sir Walter Scott, whose works were popular in the United States and Great Britain (Magill:1 841). Although Hawthorne^s dialogue was overly formal, it was an accurate tool in describing human emotion (Gale). Absence of character confrontation was another component of Hawthorne^s literary style.