This paper explores the role of children and childhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction. Moreover, it asserts that the child and childhood are keys to a better understanding of Hawthorne's fiction.

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.

This study examines Hawthorne's use of symbols, particularly flowers, in The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. Romantic ideals stressed the full development of the self¬reliant individual, and romantic writers such as Hawthorne believed the individual would fully develop not only spiritually, but also intellectually by taking instruction from the natural world. Hawthorne's heroines reach their full potential as independent women in two steps: they first work together to defeat powerful patriarchies, and they then learn to read natural symbols to cultivate their artistic sensibilities which lead them to a full development of their intellect and spirituality. The focus of this study is Hawthorne's narrative strategy; how the author uses symbols as a language his heroines use to communicate from one generation to the next. In The Scarlet Letter, for instance, the symbol of a rose connects three generations of feminine reformers, Ann Hutchinson, Hester Prynne, and Pearl. By the end of the novel, Pearl interprets a rose as a symbol of her maternal line, which links her back to Ann Hutchinson. Similarly in The House of the Seven Gables Alice, Hepzibah, and Phoebe Pyncheon are part of a family line of women who work together to overthrow the Pyncheon patriarchy. The youngest heroine, Phoebe, comes to an understanding of her great, great aunt Alice's message from the posies her feminine ancestor plants in the Pyncheon garden. Through Phoebe's interpretation of the flowers, she deciphers how the cultivation of a sense of artistic appreciation is essential to the progress of American culture.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine in selected tales and romances Hawthorne's intent and the effectiveness of his transmutation of American colonial and Revolutionary War history in his fiction. This study examines the most important of Hawthorne's original sources. While indicating the relationship between fictional and historical accounts as necessary to a study of Hawthorne's romantic transmutation of history, this thesis further investigates Hawthorne's artistic reasons for altering events of the past.

In its first part, this thesis attempts to explore Nathaniel Hawthorne's influences and sources of writing with an emphasis on his interest in the Puritan past and the historical basis of many of his stories. This part also provides basic information about the origin and characteristic features of Puritanism, focusing on those historical events which influenced Hawthorne's short stories. In its second part this thesis will attempt to analyse selected short stories with the focus on Hawthorne's presentation of Puritanism. Partly, it also focuses on Hawthorne's perception of sin in his stories. As a conclusion, the thesis tries to show the connection between Puritanism and sin and uses this connection to demonstrate why Hawthorne's judgement of the Puritans was not impartial, and it attempts to define what he saw as the biggest mistake of his (and generally Puritan) ancestors.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

This study attempted to create experimentally the Hawthorne effect in a freshman general psychology class at Utah State University during tall quarter of 1967. It also attempted to discover the differential effect of cueing, sex, and relevance on the experimental creation of the Hawthorne effect as measured by six general psychology criterion tests. The design of this study included a control group and three experimental groups. The following five hypotheses were postulated: The experimental groups will show greater influence from the Hawthorne effect than the control group. Within the three experimental groups there will be an increasing Hawthorne effect with the least effect in the subject-object cue group and the greatest effect in the subject-object-observer group as compared to the control group. The females in all experimental groups will show significantly greater Hawthorne effect than males within the same groups. The group rating high on the Relevance scale will show significantly greater Hawthorne effect than the groups rating low in relevance. There will be sufficient interactive effects between factors to the extent that some will reach significance. The hypotheses were tested by means of analysis of covariance with ACT predicted grade point average as the covariate. None of the differences were significant at the .05 level. It was concluded that the Hawthorne effect does not exist as a potent enough variable to distort the influence of the independent variable on the dependent variable in educational and psychological investigations of short duration involving freshman university students. It was also concluded that the variables of Cueing, Sex, and Relevance are not functionally related to the creation of the Hawthorne effect and, therefore, need not be controlled.

Nathaniel Hawthorne lived and wrote in an age of reform efforts, and the progressive movement with which he was most familiar was Transcendentalism. However, he was not sympathetic with Emerson's idealism, a sentiment which comes out in his fiction in way of critique. Throughout Hawthorne's work there is an emphasis on human limitation, in stark contrast to the optimism that characterized his time a "materialist" response to idealism (as defined by Emerson in "The Transcendentalist"). And one important vehicle of this critique of human possibility is his shrewd use of biblical motif particularly the tropes of Eden and the Promised Land, which were adopted by the Transcendentalists. Although these allusions can be traced through much of Hawthorne's work, they are especially apparent in two novels: The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Scarlet Letter (1850). Hawthorne exposes the irony behind the use of these biblical motifs by the Blithedale community (in their effort to create a utopian society) and the Puritan community, which looked to its religious leaders as the embodiment of its ideals. / Graduation date: 1999

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 225-232). Also available on the Internet.