Purificación y violencia en los relatos de Nathaniel Hawthorne

Abstract

Hawthorne made himself a writer analysing his own puritanical individualisin and the historical past of New England. As many American writers he started his literary carear writing short stories, more than fifty between 1830 and 1850. In this short fiction we can see all the strength of his style: a combination of allegory, simbolism and ambiguity. Hawthorne belonged to no church but he was a perfectionist and he belteved that man was, by nature, sinful and required regeneration. In his short stories this regeneration (purification) is obtained by four different ways of violence: social, religious, psychological and physical violence. A Violence that nearly always ends in tragedy.