Happiness is an ideal emotion that everyone wants to experience and will go to desperate measures to achieve. If one wants to explore the facets of how important happiness is for people to achieve, they will have to put themselves in the shoes of...

Throughout his works Young Goodman Brown, The Minister’s Black Veil, and The Birth-Mark, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses symbolism to show that all humans are inherently flawed and are sinful by nature, and teaches the lesson that you can not obsess over...

Gothic literature uses gender to discuss social norms and explore stereotypes while commenting on whether gender stereotypes should be upheld or disrupted in society. In this essay, I will compare two female characters and two male characters in...

On the surface, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s "Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment" is a story about several troubled adults who are given the chance to go back to their youths and enjoy their former, more beautiful selves. The idea of youth in this story,...

Within Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and “Young Goodman Brown,” the presence of laughter is used repeatedly across both narratives, often for dramatic effect, showcasing the act’s many facets and qualities. Most...

It is always complicated to compare the literary pieces that belong to different kinds of literature. However, the word order is not the determining point due to perception and interpretation of literature. The lyric poem “Dover Beach” by Matthew...

In both “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Cask of Amontillado”, evil is something that the characters carry with them throughout the stories. The revelation of their personal evil is a journey that begins with the ostensible picture of faith and good...

The stories, “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”, are written with very similar plot lines despite them taking place more than two centuries apart. The forest in “Young Goodman Brown” and the wallpaper in “The Yellow Wallpaper” can be...

…[V]aliant to fight, and sober to toil, and pious to pray”:

The Physical Danger of Capitalism and Colonial Power in “The May-Pole of Merry Mount”

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” most critics claim, is an allegory of the...

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful” follows a watchmaker’s spiritual and emotional journey of creating the physical form of his idea of beauty, a butterfly. Light imagery plays out throughout the short story and its perception and...

Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville explore marriage through a significant physical object in their respective stories, “The Black Cat,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and “I and My Chimney”. In each of the stories, the object serves as a dividing force in...

After years of living in conformist Puritan North America, Nathaniel Hawthorne was inspired to create works of literature to stand against its flaws. In his work The Minister’s Black Veil, Nathaniel Hawthorne utilizes the black color of Hooper’s...

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” deals with the theme: “Undervaluation of Women”: the plot merits a feminist criticism because it brings to light the extent to which that men can go to have “trophy wives” that are impeccable. In the quest to...

To be a paradigm of a Gothic novel, The House of Seven Gables needs to include many elements, all which center on the ideas of gloom, horror, and mystery. The action of a Gothic novel takes place in a "run-down, abandoned or occupied, mansion or...

By the 19th-century, according to Hawthorne and Melville, a man's home was no longer his castle, but an effete parlor-room, a locus of stripped and castrated masculinity that hampered the development of classically intellectual and original...

In an attempt to write a more cheerful novel then his brooding Scarlet Letter during a time when optimism was the one quality shared by all, Hawthorne writes, what critics call today, a contrived ending for his House of Seven Gables. When all...

Ostensibly a tale of the effects of sin and guilt as manifested through successive generations of a New England family, Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables is a richly detailed novel with multiple levels of meaning and ambiguities that have...

It has almost become an everyday slogan, in light of present events, that behind everything that seems so perfect there is some horrible mistake, or some terrible sin waiting to come back and rear its ugly head. Nathaniel Hawthorne could not have...

Nathaniel Hawthorne uses symbols and characters to portray the struggle between aristocratic and democratic ideas in his novel, The House of the Seven Gables. The democratic ideas which develop throughout the novel prevail against the aristocratic...

In a rather prophetic statement about a doomed family residing in an ancestral home, where the curse of the father becomes the curse of the children, Hawthorne writes in The House of the Seven Gables, “Ambition is a talisman more powerful than...

Hawthorne’s science fiction short stories, such as ‘The Birthmark’ and ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’ are set in the seventeenth century. His novels, however, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, are set in the nineteenth century,...

Beauty is a part of the human condition; we are attracted to what we find appealing and repelled by what we find unappealing. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scholars captured this concept and put into words what it means to experience...

The epithet “the Land of the Free” is a distinctive phrase commonly associated with America, a country that prides itself for awarding its people with equal opportunity and the freedom to pursue their dreams. Yet, American literature does not seem...

The Scarlet Letter and Beloved, despite their vastly different settings, both emphasize the effect of community on an individual. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, set in Boston in 1642, the rigidly Puritan society criminalizes a young...