Transcendentalist Codes in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
Uploaded by Zroadrunner88 on Apr 25, 2007
Discovering Transcendentalism as a movement that supports the conviction that divinity can be found in all things, Hawthorne deliberately represents his personal beliefs and observes all the ethics of transcendentalism in The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel Hawthorne who had been brought up in a puritanical society with its rigid laws tried to blend his favor upon transcendentalist ideas with his religious thought together in his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter.
At first we have to know some about Transcendentalism and its meaning, also the relation between Hawthorne and it. In philosophy and literature Transcendentalism defines as “a belief in a higher kind of knowledge than achieved by human reason.” It was strongly influenced by Deism which was opposed to Calvinist orthodoxy.
Transcendentalism rejects the Puritan religious attitudes and it opposes the strict ritualism and dogmatic theology of all religions. It was also influenced by romanticism for example in the ideas of self-reliance, the respect of individualism and the admiration of the nature and humankind. In this way transcendentalists saw a direct connection between the universe (macrocosm) and the individual soul (microcosm), so according to this concept intuition, rather than reason, is regarded as the highest human faculty. Kant taught the doctrine that instead of looking for evidence of a Supreme Being in the external world, we should seek him in our own hearts; that every man could find a revelation in his own conscience,-- in the consciousness of good and evil, by which man improves his condition on earth; that the ideas of a Supreme Being, or of immortality and freedom of will, are inherent in the human mind, and are not to be acquired from experience; but that, as the finite mind cannot comprehend the infinite, we cannot know God in the same sense that we know our own earthly fathers,…..The new philosophy was named “Transcendentalism” by Kant’s followers, because it included ideas which were beyond the range of experience.
In its most specific usage, transcendentalism refers to a literary and philosophical movement that developed in America in the first half of the 19th century. They believed that man has something more valuable than its fleshy body. Man has a spiritual body that has senses to perceive what is true and right and beautiful.
What attracted Hawthorne in Transcendentalism was its free inquiry, its radicalism, its contact with actual life. It is remarkable to pay attention that the main aspects of...