Alienation:A Thematic Study On Hawthorne's The House Of The Seven Gables

The 19th century saw the remarkable progress of America in the fields of industry,science and technology,and also the crucial changes in social structure.At the same time,various literary thoughts and movements sprang up,including Romanticism,Transcendentalism.The material abundance,however,could not used as a cure for loneliness and despair of American people in modern time;alienation and solitude branded modern man.Different from his contemporaries,such as Emerson and Whitman,who eulogized the flourishing advances at that time,Nathaniel Hawthorne reflected,with keen insight,on the major social dislocations caused by the development of economy,science and technology of his time:the abuse of science,the strained relations of man to Nature,the alienation of man from fellows.The criticism of Hawthorne's second romance The House of the Seven Gables focuses on its thematic studies(sin,the influence of the past)and writing techniques(symbolism,psychoanalysis).Different from traditional thematic studies on sin or the past,this thesis argues that this romance reflects Hawthorne's complex considerations of the centrifugal stresses in his time,his reactions to them and his tentative therapy for a reunion of man with Nature,and with fellows.A thematic study of alienation is made through a detailed and systematic analysis of the text and combined with Hawthorne's family and religious background and personal experiences.This thesis intends to find out how the alienated state is represented in the individual of Salem town,what effects of these alienated relations make a difference to individual psychology,and that how the individual breaks alienated state and restarts the quest for integration.Hawthorne himself experienced the same predicament—being cut off from the mainstream,and he groped for reunion in desperation,but ended only with frustration.Therefore,it is a crucial study issue in this thesis how the alienation can be breached and the individual achieves the reunion of himself or herself with the outside world.For this predicament,he proposes his own solutions—love and the return to Nature,which have guided the characters in the romance on their way to the restoration of totality that links Nature,man and his fellows organically.