Modern critics and biographers often cite the need for a new study of Hawthorne and his wife, for a study of sex and sex symbolism in Hawthorne, and for a study of the love element in general in his works. Such aspects of his fiction have been all but totally overlooked by earlier critics who confined their comments largely to the sin and isolation of the characters. This paper cannot hope to satisfy any one of these needs, but does undertake to look at Hawthorne's treatment of the remedial effects of heterosexual love in lives where such love operates, and of the disaster which ensues in lives where it is excluded.

For Hawthorne pride is the root evil, for it is a voluntary separation by which man sets himself aloof from conmunication with himself, his fellow men, and God. Pride is an attitude which takes possession of him first as he allows himself to become blinded to his own faults and inadequacies, next as he ignores the virtues and claims of his fellow men, and eventually as he develops the bigoted idea that since he is superior to the rest of tho human race, he must make himself a place on the Godly level. He is now completely isolated from humanity by his own choice, from God by the incongruity of his presumptive claims, and from himself by the absence or any further self-comnunication on the basis of honest humility.