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NHNathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Life dates: 1804 AD — 1864 AD

Hawthorne’s narrator connects outward signs with concealed burdens. Read Hester’s moment of relief beside Dimmesdale’s inability to recognise an enemy, treating both as descriptions of these characters and circumstances.

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Life and writing

The catalogue identifies Nathaniel Hawthorne with lifetime years 1804–1864 and credits Dartmouth College for this electronic text. It notes a different, improved edition, but the selected counterparts here were checked against eBook 33 itself. This profile does not substitute the unexamined edition. The catalogue HTML ISBN identifies the linked digital text; its underlying print publisher and the composition dates of archive extracts remain unspecified.

Chapter XVIII describes Hester’s relief after she removes the embroidered letter in the forest; she then takes off her cap. The narrator’s contrast between weight and freedom belongs to that moment. Chapter X describes Dimmesdale becoming suspicious of everyone while continuing to receive Chillingworth as a physician and companion. His failure to recognise an enemy is part of their particular relationship, not a universal psychological diagnosis. Both selected extracts match this edition under limited normalization.

Reading this voice

Read the forest scene in Chapter XVIII beside the physician’s visits in Chapter X. Ask how a visible symbol and a concealed relationship shape each character’s experience. The selected narration provides local context, rather than general diagnostic or moral rules.

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Quotations and sayings

03c. 1834 AD
Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or—and the outward semblance is the same—crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more.
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22c. 1834 AD
There was a listlessness in his gait, as if he saw no reason for taking one step further, nor felt any desire to do so, but would have been glad, could he be glad of anything, to fling himself down at the root of the nearest tree, and lie there passive for evermore. The leaves might bestrew him, and the soil gradually accumulate and form a little hillock over his frame, no matter whether there were life in it or no. Death was too definite an object to be wished for or avoided.
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