Article: Cultural confessions: penance and penitence in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun.(Critical essay)

ACCORDING to Nathaniel Hawthorne's biographer, Henry James, Jr., Hawthorne's heritage as a descendant of the "clearest Puritan strain" served to restrict his literary talent to the exploration of one theme: the "consciousness of sin" (5, 8). In 1858, Hawthorne observed Catholicism as he sojourned in Rome; this encounter enriched his investigation of the effects of sin upon human beings. Soon after his arrival in Rome, for instance, he describes the scene of a "lady, confessing to a priest" within a "wooden confessional" (Notebooks 184). Hawthorne lingered until "the lady finishe[d] her confession," observing her closely (184). In The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The Marble ...

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