Transcendentalism In The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850 and was set in a Puritan society in the colonial age. The story explores the ideas of truth, sin, guilt, hypocrisy, and social stigmatizing by interactions between Hester, her Scarlet Letter, Chillingworth, Dimmesdale, and the Puritan Society. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote this due to his background history with his Puritan ancestors, financial problems, and disdain for Transcendentalism ideology. Nathaniel’s background as a Puritan helped influenced his writing in The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel was born in 1804 at Salem, Massachusetts. His great-great-great grandfather was John Hathorne and was the first of his family to move from England to Massachusetts. John Hathorne was known for his harsh punishments after he became an important member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony with various political positions. John’s son, William, was also notoriously known for being the only judge during the Salem Witch Trial that refused to repent for his actions. Nathaniel noted that even though they committed great sins, they committed unknowingly with good intentions. He was so ashamed of his predecessors’ sins that he added an extra “w” in Hathorne to distinguish himself …show more content…
In the beginning, Nathaniel was part of the prominent circle of transcendentalist writer and philosophers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He was also one of the founding members of the Brook Farm- a utopian experiment in communal living in the United States that was inspired by idea of Transcendentalism. However, as time passed, Nathaniel began to stray from the ideas of Transcendentalism and migrated to a Dark Romantic writer, which focused more on reality. The Scarlet Letter exemplify Dark Romanticism as it emphasis sin and its effect in each of the characters and does not believe in the innate goodness of the