Nathaniel Hawthorne Outline

The American Renaissance

1. In 1850, there was a party in Stockbridge, Massachusetts that both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville attended.
a. They asked the question: Would there ever be an American writer as great as England’s William Shakespeare?
i. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville both agreed that there would be.
2. Hawthorne and Melville: Opposites Attract
a. Herman Melville wrote Typee in 1846 and his masterpiece was Moby-Dick
b. Nathaniel Hawthorn published The Scarlet Letter in 1850
c. Nathaniel Hawthorn and Herman Melville developed a friendship despite their differences as they both saw a dark side to human existence, and they sought to record this aspect of human nature in their works.
d. Melville was exposed
Emerson’s utopian group became knows as “The Transcendental Club”
i. The term transcendental come from the eighteenth-century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant ii. The word refers to the idea that in determining the ultimate reality of God, the universe, the self, and other important matters, one must go beyond everyday human experience in the physical world
b. For Emerson, Transcendentalism was not a new philosophy, but the “very oldest of thoughts cast into the mold of these new times”
i. “Oldest of thoughts” was idealism, which had already been articulated by the Greek philosopher, Plato.
c. Idealists said that true reality involved ideas rather than the world as perceived by the senses
i. Idealists sought the permanent reality that underlay physical appearances ii. Transcendentalists were idealists, but in a broader, more practical sense. They believed in human perfectibility and they worked to achieve this goal
6. A Transcendentalist’s View of the World:
• Everything in the world, including human beings, is a reflection of the Divine Soul
• The physical facts of the natural world are a doorway to the spiritual or ideal world
• People can use their intuition to behold God’s spirit revealed in nature or in their own
Its American roots included Puritan thought, the beliefs of the eighteenth-century religious revivalist Jonathan Edwards, and the Romantic tradition exemplified by William Cullen Bryan
b. This native mysticism – also typical of Romanticism -- reappears in Emerson’s though
i. “Every natural fact,” he wrote, “is a symbol of some spiritual fact
8. Emerson’s Optimistic Outlook
a. Emerson’s mystical view of the world came from intuition rather than logic.
i. Intuition is out capacity to know things spontaneously and immediately through out emotions rather than through out reasoning abilities
b. Emerson was very optimistic, a product of his belief that we can find God directly in nature.
i. His optimism and hope appealed to audiences who were facing tough times because of the economy, regional arguments, etc.
9. Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe: A Challenge to the Transcendentalists
a. Some think of the above authors as anti-Transcendentalists because their view of the world seems so very opposed to the optimistic view of Emerson.
i. These authors were known as Dark Romantics and actually had much in common with the Transcendentalists ii. Dark Romantics used symbolism to great effect in their