Summary Of Dr. Heidegger's Experiment By Nathaniel Hawthorne

The book of Proverbs 28:13 says ,“Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy.” This quote explains that anyone who keeps in their sin will continue to guilt and torture themselves by doing so. Hawthorne uses many different forms of imagery and allusions to show the significance of hidden sin. The reader can see how Hawthorne uses sin to change his character's physical and mental state. There were three characters he changed throughout the book: Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne, and Roger Chillingworth.

Nelson Mandela once said, “There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.” In most cases, it is difficult to distinguish and fully understand when you have changed. Whether it be a trivial change in habit to a crucial character transformation, it is best to set oneself up against an untouched canvas, and begin to analyze the newfangled person from there. Throughout Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, the concept of identifying one’s changes is apparent in two of the main characters, Pearl and Dimmesdale. Both characters experience their own engenderment of maturity and personal growth, though Dimmesdale’s involvement with it is much more deleterious in comparison to Pearl’s.

Therefore, Hawthorne is saying that people need to look at themselves, to see the sin in their own lives and the things that cloud the way in which they view the world which has helped shape society into what it is today.

            Hawthorne's moods or prevailing feelings during certain scenes are revealed to the reader through nature.

The Past, an ever growing pool of time, is always biting at the heels of a person. It reminds him of what they have done wrong, done right, or when he did nothing. For most people, recalling the past leads to loose ends and blanks where memories should be. No matter how much a person may want to return to the past, it is not possible. It is lost forever. These forgotten moment lead to uncertainties and confusion in the present, and chaos in the future. Forgetting the past leads to spirals, spinning downwards as people look to what they have lost. They retrace their steps hoping to find a sliver of who they are and what may become of them. In the poem, Itinerary, Eamon Grennan shows how an individual searches through his past, but can never return to it. Through the poem and with a personal experience I will explain how individuals deal with uncertainties in their pasts.

“…it was nevertheless to potent to be resisted,—she felt or fancied, then, that the scarlet letter had endowed her with a new sense.” (72) The fact that Hawthorne gives Hester a new

And in some way it foreshadows the outcome yet you have to make a educated guess to figure out this question. It is important to remember that Hawthorne was considered a "Dark Romantic" rather than just a Romantic author. The Dark Romantics, as they were named, consisted of authors such as Hawthorne, Poe and Melville. They were considered as almost anti-Transcendentalists because the way they looked at the world was so different to the optimistic views of Emerson and authors of his time. However, the work of these Dark Romantics did actually have much in common with the Transcendentalists. Both groups valued intuition over logic and reason. Both groups saw signs and symbols in all events. Where they differ is that the Dark Romantics, when considering nature, placed an emphasis on Original Sin, its sense of the innate wickedness of human beings, and its notions of predestination.To emphasize he is a romantic in this case categorized as a Dark romantic.

In his short story "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment", Nathaniel Hawthorne makes a point to grant all of the characters varying human vices to try and instill in the reader a lesson about learning from their mistakes. When the reader is first introduced to Dr. Heidegger and his guests, the author gives some background on all of the characters. It becomes clear that Mr. Medbourne is known for his love of money, Widow Wycherly for her pride, Colonel Killigrew for lusting after sinful pleasures, and Mr. Gascoigne for his abuse of power and hypocrisy. From what is shown, all of the characters possess the trait of greed. When given the chance to return to their youth, they repeat the same mistakes.

" This could be his way of proving himself worthy in some way due to the fact that he say that neither his father nor his grandfather had completed his task at hand. The second idea is in the reasoning that Hawthorne had simply utilized it as the setting and forged the story around the forest and its characterized darkness and evil notions compared to that of the town which is light and absent of evil until Goodman Brown returns. This is a definite formalistic observation in the contrast of forest and the town. The forest is used as a setting which Hawthorne utilizes to expose the faults in all of mankind, including the self professed religious. No matter which way you believe, Hawthorne has successfully left the issue as a mystery and an undeclared element of the narrative.

Women in today’s world use many scientific measures to look young, beautiful, and perfect. Some women even undergo surgeries to perfect their bodies. True natural beauty comes from within one’s self and not what is on the outside. While critics argue that Hawthorne’s “The Birth Mark,” “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” and “Rappaccinni’s Daughter” stand as an overt commentary on nature vs. science, Hawthorne actually uses these works to explore personal familial connections.

Hawthorne’s short story “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” highlights four major vices that humanity as a whole struggles with. For each of the four vices there is an elderly character that has failed at life due to them. The first such character is Widow Wycherly; her vice is vanity, the next is Mr. Medbourne; his vice is greed, after him is Colonel Killigrew; his vice is lust, and finally Mr. Gascoigne; his vice is corruption. All four of these characters are invited into Dr. Heidegger’s lab to partake in an experiment. They are given water that is believed to be from the fountain of youth. They will be given another chance to right their wrongs and fix their vices. Upon consumption of the water, the four elderly people begin to act young again and return to their old ways of vanity, greed, lust, and corruption. Dr. Heidegger said that, “if the fountain gushed at

Hawthorne couldn’t hold a job for long, and with Sophia’s health, she couldn’t help much. To make it a better environment for her husband to write, the artist gave her paintings for her sister

Hawthorne uses the strong emotion of despair that overwhelms Arthur Dimmesdale, a beloved reverend in the town, to show how pretending to be the pure, sinless man that the town believes him to be causes him great pain, but by confessing he was relieved from his suffering. Romanticism encourages the acceptance of strong emotion, and embraces the free expression of feelings, unlike the Puritans, and in Dimmesdale’s case the emotions were mostly negative. Dimmesdale has been bearing the guilt of his sin for several years after his daughter Pearl’s birth, while Hester has been isolated and able to move on. This has enabled him to keep his religious position in the town, and his status with the townspeople. He attempts to continue the image society has of

Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of American literature's finest writers; his writing style was very distinct and unusual in some aspects. It is his background that provided this ambiguous and complex approach to writing. Hawthorne's New England heritage has, at times, been said to be the contributing factor in his works. The Puritan view of life itself was considered to be allegorical, their theology rested primarily on the idea of predestination and the separation of the saved and the damned As evident from Hawthorne's writings his intense interest in Puritanical beliefs often carried over to his novels such as, Young Goodman Brown, The Scarlet Letter, and The Minister's Black Veil just to name a few of the more well known pieces of his work.

William B. Dillingham has, with immense precision, conjectured in his literary criticism of Hawthorne that amidst the theme of ‘inherited curse’ Hawthorne has placed a significant ‘real’ theme which is “necessity of man’s participation” in the “united struggle of mankind”. In fact, he begins his essay on “Structure and Theme in the House of Seven Gables” by stating, “Most critics of The House of Seven Gables fail to discover any structural pattern. The usual conclusion is that the book consists of a series of episodes