Arcadia Is The Garden Of Eden

Hawthorne liked to repeat typed heroines in his novels. These two kinds of heroines called Black lady and Fair maiden by foreign critics can always be found in his novels. Due to Hawthorne’s obsession with redemption, women in his novels mostly were dealing with the problem of sin and salvation. The difference between their paradises derived from the prototypes of Arcadia and Eden are worth researching.Hawthorne paid more attention to the beauty and passion of his Dark ladies, while emphasizing purify and marriage of the Fair maidens. Goals of his heroines are linked with the prototypes of Arcadia and Eden. Under the influence of the drama prosperity of America in the19th century, a kind of dramatic trendy can be found in the women roles’ setting of Hawthorne’s Romances. Arcadia is a fixed element in pastorals as that of Eden in morality plays. The heroines are also linked to these paradises in that way. Hawthorne had an obsession with Carnivals, and he always made his Dark ladies stars of Carnivals. There existed his intention of letting these ladies become the crowned queens to bring Arcadia into the real world. These Dark Ladies represent Transcendentalists who believed that the power of redemption was within human beings. As an offspring of Puritan, Hawthorne wouldn’t accept that, so Dark ladies’ misery were inevitable. Although Hawthorne wanted his Fair maidens to shoulder the responsibility of redemption with the principle of Puritanism, the social environment of the19th century went against him. So his Fair maidens have no choice but to make Eden return only in these Romances which resemble morality play.As a solemn, conservative speculator of this world, Hawthorne had never been away from Puritanism. All of his efforts made him a profound thinker ahead of his era.