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Nathaniel Hawthorne And Transcendentalism

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Nathaniel Hawthorne Nathaniel Hawthorne was born July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts. Growing up, he was both reserved and well read. He attended Bowdoin College, against his wishes, and there he met friends Henry Longfellow and Franklin Pierce. Though, he was associated with many transcendentalists, he did not fully agree with transcendentalist thought due to the fact that it overlooked the sin nature of people. He lived in their commune however, in order to save up money for his marriage to Sophia Peabody. He later became companions to Emerson and Thoreau. Throughout his life, Hawthorne pursed his dreams of becoming a writer by creating stories that often contained elements of his Puritan background, New English heritage and cynicism. …show more content…

To Hawthorne, sin was any defiance of God’s law and led to guilt. In one of his private journals he wrote, “There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, throughout the whole life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.” Evil was a dominant force in the lives of men and as a result man’s depravity or corruption they were inevitably going to do wrong. Hawthorne also considered diseases to be the manifestation of sins. He decided that there was no way in escaping the grievances of life except through death. Hawthorne thought that true justice could not be achieved under any system of government, but must take place through Providence, also known as divine intervention. Hawthorne believed that slavery was unjustifiable and wrong, however it was a symptom of man’s imperfections. He did not believe slavery would end with some legislative decree or military force. The problem needed both time and God. He explains his reasoning against the works of abolitionists by …show more content…

Hawthorne concluded that until man’s character was purged by God, it was useless to fight slavery. There would always be nefarious forces in life. If slavery was abolished, another evil would unavoidably take its place. “A person to spend all his life and splendid talents in trying to achieve something naturally impossible- as to make a conquest over nature.” Hawthorne believed that Abolitionists and other reformers were people who were wasting their lives attempting to do what only God could. He did not understand why the opponents of slavery put so much faith in themselves to change the world for the better when really the only person they could have faith in was God. There would always be something wrong with the carnal world they lived in, so there was no use in trying to fix

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