Transcendentalism In The Scarlet Letter

Before he began writing The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife Sophia Peabody worked and lived in a transcendental community known as Brook Farm. “There were those who said, when Hawthorne joined the Brook Farm experiment that he was more eager to write and get married than to farm” (Rosa 90). Although he felt like he did not fit in he stayed there for a year. At the farm he practiced transcendentalism views, though he never talked about his opinions on the religion himself “Hawthorne made few public comments about transcendentalism it is chiefly in his fiction that one can determine his attitudes towards the movement” (15). It is in the book The Scarlet Letter that readers can see his transcendental background and beliefs come through. …show more content…
Influenced by romanticism, Platonism, and Kantian philosophy, it taught that divinity pervades all nature and humanity, and its members held progressive views on feminism and communal living. “Transcendentalist embodied a number of the new attitudes regarding man’s relationship to the universe and the quality of the life that he leads” (16). Transcendentalist were basically optimists that live in the present and had no worry of the future. They focused on reason and believed they would find truth in themselves and through their own individuality. Transcendentalist believed that to focus on the right thing they had to ignore custom and social codes and relayed only on their reason. The believers chose to ignore the lifestyle of the puritans to live a better life without the darkness that came with