Literary Text and Historical Context in the Romance of Nathaniel Hawthorne

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During the past ten years there came a remarkable advancement of so-called neo-bistorical approaches in the area of the study of the 19th century American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. The direction of my own research into the same author, though somewhat similarly history-oriented, has distinguished itself by its strong emphasis on the investigation of the varieties of American "cultural representations" that served to characterize Hawthorne's imaginative creation of mythical "romances," above all, of his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter.Those "cultural representations "of the type found in 17^<th>-century colonial New England find their equivalents or precedents in the customs, beliefs, symbols, arts and ceremonies and in other products of human thought and imagination that prevailed in Elizabethan England and Hapsburg Europe. Such cultural representations as "tapestry," "pearl," "portraiture," "coat-of-arms," "court-masque," "pageantry and spectacle," "tomb-stone;' are found imaginative … More ly incorporated into Hawthorne's "romances," especially into The Scarlet Letter. Tapestry for instance, is seen to combine multiple aspects of art and culture that characterize the development of its theme and giving emphasized expression to its thematic idea of "one out of many" The romance as a whole artistically manifest the idealistic theme of "union" which was unanimously approved and supported by monarchs of early modern European countries.Hawthorne gave expression to this idea of "union" in The Scarlet Letter and the undeniable example is found in the naming of Hester's daughter as "Pearl," since the English word "pearl" corresponds with the Spanish term of "Margarita," a name given to a Hapsburg princess, and the remarkable thing about that is that both of these words symbolically represent the idea of "union." The story ends by affording a strong impression that the United States is an incarnation of the ancient ideal of union, or of the idea of Pax Romana which had been inherited by the Holy Roman Empire (practically becoming extinct in 1804, which coincides with the year of the birth of Nathaniel Hawthorne himself). The final year of the period of my study supported by the research grant falls on 2004, the year celebrating the bicentennial anniversary of Hawthorne's birth, and in commemoration of this anniversary my book entitled Hawthorne, <The Scarlet Letter>, Tapestry was published in 2004. Less