A Great Artist Good At Doctrine Of The Mean

Nathaniel Hawthorne is an outstanding novelist, short story writer, and a moralist in the American Renaissance in19th Century. As an extremely distinguished American writer, Hawthorne has made one of his most distinctive and significant contributions to the growth of American fiction through his use of symbolism. Symbolism is the most powerful device of allowing the reader to gain insight into a character’s personality and of revealing hidden ideas, values and profundity, while the system of color symbolism is considered to be one of the most significant artistic features in Hawthorne’s works. Hawthorne exquisitely displayed his moral ideas in the symbolic meaning of colors in his writings. These color symbols has the close connection to novels’plot constructing, character portraying and theme revealing, and also is a good way to convey Hawthorne’s inner thoughts and feelings. There are abundant symbolic implications in the colors of red, black, gray, white and so on in his works. These colors could be divided into two categories:the extreme colors and intermediate colors, each with different symbolic meaning, and the contrast of them represents Hawthorne’s complex thoughts on life and moral ideas.From Hawthorne’s point of view, any type of extremism is unacceptable and the Doctrine of the Mean is the best state of life. Red and black, most frequently applied in his works, as the highlighted and distinctive colors, are the typical representatives of extreme color. Black is associated with sin while red stands for radical revolt, self-indulgence, desire and rashness. The color white, also as one of the extreme colors, symbolizes the absolutely purity and chasteness, which, when plunged to the extreme, turns out to be hypocrisy in Hawthorne’s eyes, for he firmly believed the so-called "original Sin," the source of evil, was a natural part of humanity, and would breed all kinds of misdoings in the human lives.On the contrary, gray, pink and brown are the intermediate colors between extreme colors. They are on the neutral territory, not glaring and dazzling. The symbolic implication of these colors in character portraying is impartial, humble, without going extremes. The men with this kind of characteristics will perform well in job and life in society. The striking contrast between two kinds of colors just embodies Hawthorne’s wise and incisive philosophy of Life, that is, we should not be radical and extreme, but follow the Doctrine of the Mean.There are altogether five parts in this thesis, namely an introduction, three chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter is about Hawthorne and symbolism as a set of literary techniques employed in his works. This part lays a foundation for the latter contrast of two kinds of color symbolism. Chapter Two is mainly about Hawthorne’s Doctrine of the Mean in his works and life, which is embodied in three ways:contradiction, ambiguity and morality of compromise. The third chapter is entitled "Doctrine of the Mean Embodied by Hawthorne’s Color Symbolism", which is the body part of this thesis. It elaborates symbolic meaning of two kinds of colors:the extreme colors intermediate colors, especially the color symbolism applied in character portraying. Through the portraits on different characters as generated by the application of two kinds of color symbolism and the contrast between them, we could demonstrate Hawthorne’s Doctrine of the Mean. The fourth chapter deals with the source of Hawthorne’s Doctrine of the Mean form his life and family. Then Chapter five comes to the conclusion Hawthorne is an artist good at Doctrine of the Mean through the comparison of two kinds of color symbolism.