An Analysis On The Sense Of Sin In Hawthorne's Novels

As the major originator of the American novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne was awriter with strong religious inwardness, focusing his pen firmly on the relationship ofreligion and human's minds and souls. Based on the Puritanism tradition and itsparticularity in the history of new England, Hawthorne's novels showed a sense ofreligious reflection, which formed a sort of inhibition and mysterious atmosphere inthe whole text. Hawthorne appeared strongly interested in some fields, the mostimportant one is the sense of sin. In his novel, almost every character's existencerelied on this and the author just wanted to do some philosophical thought through thestories of these characters. In Hawthorne's opinion, although sin was related with thelaw and punishment of this world, but the sense of sin rooted in human's souls and thehuman's existence's "tragic involvement". The sense of sin, as the high status ofhuman's religious reflection, gave people the true pain and the soul the sense of beingsaved and then belonging to something. The human being have to take the sin, theoriginal sin which is handed down from generation to generation through blood andthe sin happened in the community where he was a member, human beings have takeon the sins together. Only in this way, human beings can form the same destiny, walktoward the same future, during which the human beings realize the self-perfection,which Hawthorne regarded as one element of human education along the great historyof cultures.In this essay, four books of Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter,,The House of SevenGables,The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun were chosen as a try tounderstand his writings.Part â… : A brief introduction of the history of sin in the Christian theology, mainly...