William Hathorne Analysis

The Guilt From Unrepentant Sins Nathaniel Hawthorne “was born on July 4, 1804” (Carton 2). When he lost his father, Nathaniel Hathorne, at age four, it was extremely devastating because he never had the privilege of knowing who his father was. When a child loses a parent at such a young age, the imagination creates pretend memories. When he was old enough, he began searching for facts to fill in the gaps of those memories. “He supplemented the images of his father’s nautical life that he gleamed from the logbooks by reading travel narratives, histories, and adventure stories about the exotic regions Nathaniel Hathorne had sailed” (Carton 147). Following his completion in college, Hawthorne spent “twelve years of self-imposed isolation” researching

William Hathorne was not a constable. Instead, he was the major who gave the command for the constable to whip the Quaker woman. Hawthorne made his character the constable because, even though William Hathorne did not administer the punishment, he was responsible for the actions. The sin belonged to William Hathorne. In “Young Goodman Brown,” there are some other similarities that he used from his tale of William Hathorne and the Quaker woman, Ann Coleman. When Coleman is being “driven into the forest,” perhaps William Hathorne believed the forest was the house of the evil; in his mind, Coleman was evil. In “Young Goodman Brown,” the forest was a dark and scary place where evil resides and where the devil holds communion. Hawthorne viewed the dew of the forest as the “dew of mercy, to cleanse this cruel blood – stain out of the record of the persecutor’s life” (Miller 21). It is interesting that when Brown seems to awaken from his dream, there was a “twig that had been all on fire that besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew” (Hawthorne 1130). Just as the dew could not cleanse William Hathorne from his unrepentant sins, it could not cleanse Brown from his own sins and