Psychological Symbolism of Guilt and Isolation in Hawthorne

The tittle of this paper indicates its concern with symbols of guilt and isolation in a psychological sense. As a preliminary it would appear necessary to make a distinction between guilt and sin in order to avoid confusion later in the paper. Guilt is essentially to be considered as a psychological phenomenon, while sin and its ensuing retribution, frequent in Hawthorne, lie within the realm of morality and religion, spheres with which this paper will not deal except where they impinge on the area of psychological phenomena.

On the most superficial level of symbolism Hawthorne concerns himself with problems of religion and morality; however, at a deeper level this symbolism may be treated as the representative of psychological processes operating within the individuals who are a part of the remote and seemingly unreal society created by Hawthorne. This society removed from the modern reader both by the period of several centuries and by the skill and intention of the author is peopled with types and symbols of psychological phenomena rather than with credible characters. Greed, Avarice and Pride of the medieval morality play have been replaced by Compulsion, Guilt, and Isolation in the forerunner of the modern psychological drama. It is difficult to establish the extent to which Hawthorne intentionally depicted man's conscious and subconscious processes. The advent of modern psychoanalytic theory after his writing enables the reader to analyze