Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] You're listening to The Love Vox with psychotherapist Amynah Dharani.
Amynah Dharani: Hello, everyone. I'm your host, Amynah Dharani, and I am very excited to be here with you today. This is the podcast for people who are passionate about the human condition by people who are equally passionate voices in their field. If you are a new listener to our podcast, welcome to the show.
In this episode, we are back in Salem, Massachusetts. But this is not the Salem of the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692. This is the Salem of Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the greatest fiction writers of America. The time is July 4, 1804, when Nathaniel Hawthorne is born in Salem. The country is only decades old.
To give you some context, there are 5,308,483 people living in America, according to the second census conducted in the year 1800.
Of that number, over 422,000 were living in Massachusetts, and close to 9500 of those lived in Salem.
The 19th century is a period of growth in the new country. It is a period of industrialization and what came to be known as the period of the American Renaissance.
But there are still shadows of the Salem witch trials, which took place over 100 years ago in the area of Salem, and they reflect on our protagonist, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
In his second book, the House of Seven Gables, Hawthorne writes, the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones.
In his literary works, Nathaniel Hawthorne explored the themes of sin, guilt, retribution, and morality.
As a psychotherapist, I believe that Hawthorne was more interested in the psychological effects of the past sins of the ancestors and its intergenerational trauma, also known as curse.
This focus on the consequences rather than causes, can be traced back to his complex relationship with his Puritan heritage.
Our very special writer guest today will be sharing her abundant knowledge and understanding of Nathaniel Hawthorne and his complicated relationship with Salem. Let's go meet her.
Hello, friends. I have here with me Nancy Brewka-Clark. Nancy, welcome.
[00:02:43] Nancy Brewka-Clark: Thank you.
[00:02:44] Amynah Dharani: Nancy. Please tell us about yourself.
[00:02:47] Nancy Brewka-Clark: I'm a longtime lover of Nathaniel Hawthorne's work.
I went to his sister college, Wheaton College, in Norton, Mass. And did my senior thesis on Hawthorne many, many years ago. It brought me to the north shore of Massachusetts. I live in the city of Beverly, which was part of Salem until 1668, where Hawthorne was born.
And his sister Elizabeth, who was a huge feature in his life, lived right down the street where I live now, and I have spent my life literally tracking the Hawthornes.
[00:03:25] Amynah Dharani: Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was born July 4, 1804. The country was only 28 years young. What was going on specifically around this part of Salem in Boston.
[00:03:40] Nancy Brewka-Clark: The history of Salem really focused in the earliest days on the coast, and it always was a major sea court.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's family lived inland, and it was a much different life.
The family had come from England in the mid 16 hundreds and had a farm about 5 miles from the coast in what's now Danvers, which also was part of Salem.
And as the family lost money in bad investments, essentially their holdings, their land holdings, shrank. So by the time Hawthorne was born, they had one house. It was multigenerational, and the money really came from his mother's side of the family. They were stable owners. They were stagecoach owners. The name was Manning.
And when Hawthorne was born in 1804, his father was a sea captain who actually died in 1808 in Suriname while on a voyage.
And this left his family even more impoverished. And it was Elizabeth Manning, his mother's family, that really kept them afloat, both in Salem and in land in Maine that they also owned.
[00:05:20] Amynah Dharani: Now, this period, in terms of american literature, what is it known for? And who was famous among the various notable literary personalities?
[00:05:36] Nancy Brewka-Clark: When Hawthorne was born in 1804, our little new country was still uneasy about its relationship with England. The job really wasn't done.
America, as she was, was still dependent on trade and resources that England still controlled. So lying ahead was what we call the war of 1812. But, of course, in 1812, they didn't call it that. It was the second war of independence, and that is what it was called.
Wow. I know it's interesting because people don't connect the two, but this means that the writers that young Nathaniel Hawthorne was most influenced by were british and also religious in nature, because, again, this was a family with very strong puritan roots, and Puritans were a huge part of Salem's history and also part of its calvinistic, depressive control.
And if you didn't go to church, you were ostracized.
By the time Hawthorne was born, those scriptures had lightened. But he still came from a very pious family that read the Bible, went to church. And The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan was Hawthorne's book. He pretty much memorized it, along with his older sister Elizabeth, who was a huge influence all of his 59 years of life on this planet.
[00:07:22] Amynah Dharani: Now, you know, in a wonderful article that you've written about Hawthorne, you note a passage in which you mention the heavy psychic burden that Hawthorne carries with him.
What is going on for Hawthorne and I? You know, you mentioned his Calvinist Protestant ancestors. What is he internalizing about them?
[00:07:48] Nancy Brewka-Clark: After Hawthorne's father died when he was four, years old.
He had very few memories of the man and what is written about his father. Also another Nathaniel is mixed. It's checkered. And some say that he was the cruelest captain that ever sailed the seven seas. Others said that he loved poetry and he loved his wife and family.
And Hawthorne himself always missed having a father. Needing a father figure was elementary to Hawthorne. He had young uncles, the Mannings, again, his mother's brothers, his grandfather, Richard Manning. These were the men in his life. But the people he really turned to were female. And one of the things that I don't think has accurately been acknowledged about Nathaniel Hawthorne is that his writings are feminist in nature because his main characters are very strong women who face terrible adversity and they're not portrayed as the shining, beautiful damsel in distress. These are hardworking women.
Hester Prynne in the scarlet letter has an illegitimate child that would have killed someone with shame. And instead she thrives in her own way.
Hepzibah, the old lady who opens the house of the seven gables.
Hepzibah herself had come through terrible times. And her solution was to open a little shop in the house that's now called the house of the seven Gables. And most of Hawthorne's characters are based on people that he saw as a child.
[00:09:51] Amynah Dharani: You know, there is a point in his life that he adds the w to his last name, to his surname, Hawthorne.
What is that point in his life?
[00:10:04] Nancy Brewka-Clark: Well, as the earliest extant survival of that w creeping in occurs after he graduates from Bowdoin College up in Maine.
And there are theories about that. One is that he is trying to detach himself from the Hawthorns. It's pronounced Hawthorne, even with the w missing. And there's still a little segment of a town in Dander's that is actually called Hawthorne with its own post office. And that was the original farm in the 1600s. It was called Hawthorn Hill.
That w creeps in because his grandfather, or great-grandfather, John Hawthorne, great grandfather, I think, was the witchcraft judge.
Oye intermene.
He was the one who first heard the accusations and Hawthorne took on the guilt of the execution of what turned out to be ultimately 20 people, 19 hanged and one crushed to death during the witchcraft trials.
And one way of detaching himself from the Hawthorne name without the w was to add that w, which actually, if you trace them back to England, the w was in there. So it wasn't an original invention.
Some say his sister Elizabeth told him to do it.
[00:11:36] Amynah Dharani: Interesting.
[00:11:37] Nancy Brewka-Clark: Elizabeth was a very strong influence.
[00:11:40] Amynah Dharani: And, you know, having, when you speak of strong women in his writings. He, of course, was raised by a single mother and he had an older sister. So I'm thinking of this young boy having these women. Right. These women figures that could potentially be modeling how to live a life.
[00:12:06] Nancy Brewka-Clark: Yes, I think that's an excellent point, and that's the way I've always interpreted his writings. I am fortunate enough to own a complete set that my elderly piano teacher gave me when I was twelve years old, and it's printed in the 1880s. And one of the things that I really cherish about it is there are some illustrations and some of them actually are done by Hawthorne's wife, Sophia, another woman who overcame adversity.
She must have had terrible migraines, we would call them today, but they completely incapacitated her and she had no concept of marriage. She assumed she was going to go through life like her older sister Elizabeth, and like Hawthorne's older sister Elizabeth, as what we would in those days, they would be called spinsters.
And instead Hawthorne falls madly in love with her upon first sight. And Sophia herself is talented. She's an artist. And Hawthorne pays a lot of tribute to Sophia in his works as well. He honored and cherished his wife in a way that I think was very unusual for the 19th century.
[00:13:26] Amynah Dharani: You note his shame for not living up to his ancestors successes. Can you explain that in relation to how he sees himself and how he sees his ancestors?
[00:13:40] Nancy Brewka-Clark: I think one of the most interesting things about Hawthorne and the way we have always presented Hawthorne in studies is that his obsession with money really terrified him because he being fatherless at the age of four and being dependent on his grandfather and his uncles and not being quite like them, he wasn't raised to be rough and tumble. These other men were stable owners and stagecoach drivers, a very hard life physically. And Nathaniel himself was protected from that. He was schooled, he was educated, and when he injured his leg when he was about twelve, his mother hired a tutor for him. And this had never been done at that level before in his family.
And I think that that, again, it softened Hawthorne in a way that might have pertained to his ancestors 200 years before in England that had no place in rough and tough New England, between the rocky soil of the land they did own and the fact that his family consistently had lost money and had to sell off. That land really ate at him. And he never really acknowledged that the Mannings were so crucial. He always focused on what had been lost rather than what he had. I think because it was a much more romantic view to present to the world. Ah me. He actually says that as a boy, he. When he sent to another, he sent off the school, and he laments the fact that it's a $5 school.
Ah me. I feel so ashamed. And that was part of his Persona. I think he must have been a bit of a drama queen.
Yeah.
[00:15:51] Amynah Dharani: Yeah. And, you know, it's helping to understand how he's growing as a person, how he's viewing. Again, I kind of understand it as how we see ourself and the world around us. What is that connection that we. That we make? And that kind of takes me to his time at Bowdoin College in Maine.
He starts coming into his own, and he makes some really good friendships with people that become very notable, specifically Franklin Pierce, who becomes the president of the United States.
What is his time like that over there?
[00:16:31] Nancy Brewka-Clark: As usual, Hawthorne broke a lot of rules when he was at Bowdoin. He was constantly in trouble.
He gambled, he drank. This was not unusual for young men of the time in college, but it was at Bowdoin because, again, there were christian roots of that college at the time, as there were in most places of higher education in early New England. That was what was behind things, was the church and trying to educate a populace that would be able to take over the reins of good governing. So all those things were at work in the way that Hawthorne was educated, but he had this rebellious streak.
Pierce became one of his best friends.
Pierce has often been called the worst president ever. Now we have some rivals. But Pierce was single handedly blamed for the civil war because he refused to take a strong stand. He was a New Englander, but he sided with the south, and it made him very unpopular. And by this time, when he becomes president, he and Hawthorne are still best buddies, but they're fighting against the tide of, you know, what's rising in New England with the abolitionists half. It's very much similar to today politically. Families were divided. Abolitionists or slavery, slave owners, people who supported slavery as cheap labor.
And Hawthorne's own family was divided. A lot of families in New England were divided. And Franklin Pierce is with Nathaniel Hawthorne the night that Hawthorne dies in May of 1864.
And there are those who say Hawthorne died from a broken heart over the civil war, which I think is utterly too romantic.
[00:18:42] Amynah Dharani: He has some other very famous friends.
We have Melville and Longfellow. And I just have this vision in my head of all these people walking around and writing and hanging out together.
Probably my own romantic notion of that. What's going on in this period in terms of the literary scene at this time, it's actually.
[00:19:07] Nancy Brewka-Clark: That's a wonderful question because it's actually, it's growing extremely competitive because after the War of 1812 finally cuts the last apron strings to mother England and the United States are growing. More states are coming into the union, more exploration is being done, pushing west. And in New England now, this is becoming the old Ivy League. And consequently, the literature growing up in and around Boston from these people is really taking on power because tick new and fields was a very powerful publisher in downtown Boston. The Atlantic magazine was huge, very influential and also published people.
Hawthorne struggled. He was nothing automatically accepted, not just as a writer who fit in because he never quite fit in. People found him quite mysterious. He was, according to his portraits, incredibly handsome, almost beautiful as a young man. The portrait that is by Osgood that hangs in the Peobody Museum in Salem.
People flock to that portrait and they always have.
And it's a beautiful young man. And there's something very mystical about him. And that encapsulated audiences because he would give readings. He did attend other people's readings. He belonged to a lunch club, but underneath everything was competition. He meets Melville when hes out in the Berkshires, hes out in the western part of the state, and the two men instantly have a rapport.
And Melville really looks up to Hawthorne. He dedicates Moby Dick to Hawthorne. Moby Dick is one of the biggest literary flops of all time in his lifetime. And it actually ruins Melville. He can't. Why?
[00:21:23] Amynah Dharani: I did not know that.
[00:21:24] Nancy Brewka-Clark: Oh, yes. He can't get back on his feet because he has written books that were nonfiction about his days as a sailor and whaling and people just loved it. Omu and Taipei were big bestsellers for those days. And bestsellers, of course, if you sold probably 5000 copies, it's like selling a million today.
But that was Melville's background as a writer. When he tried to launch himself into deep literary fiction, his work was so strange. It was far stranger than Hawthorne's. For the time, Hawthorne sensed that and there was a competitiveness. And even though Melville dedicates Moby Dick, Hawthorne ends up wishing he'd never met him, essentially because now his name is stuck on a book that nobody wants to read and says, little did they know. Little did they know.
So, yeah. So Hawthorne just goes, thanks. No, thanks. But it was too late.
[00:22:28] Amynah Dharani: What was acceptable in those days, even.
[00:22:32] Nancy Brewka-Clark: Things that were based in religion, if they weren't absolutely still rooted in the puritanical concept of a severe judgmental God who must be pleased at all costs, following very rigid rules. That is, you know, what really essentially was behind the witchcraft trials is these women trying to get a little bit of power of their own as midwives or as healers, ended up at the end of a rope.
And that is such a powerful piece.
[00:23:07] Amynah Dharani: To really digest what's socially going on.
[00:23:11] Nancy Brewka-Clark: Yes. That underneath everything was a. And you are. You're seeing it right now in our society again. The fear of women, the fear of women gaining power, the fear of adult women having power over adult men. You could be a good mother.
But as soon as that little boy is seven or eight years old, people with money are looking around to send that little boy off to school just the way they had in England.
Get him away from mom and Hawthorne.
His mother was called madame, and that could be mockery.
She completely divorced herself from society. And even when she was dying, he couldn't quite forgive her for being unavailable. He actually says that there was a coldness between mother and me always. And now, as sick as I feel about her dying, I can't work myself up the way I should. That's essentially what he said.
[00:24:13] Amynah Dharani: It makes me sad, though, Nancy, just to imagine this young boy longing for nurture.
[00:24:19] Nancy Brewka-Clark: Yes. And what he had was his sister, two years older. I spent a lot of time with Elizabeth Hawthorne simply because when I found out that she lived in this old farmhouse half a mile from where I live, she lived in one unheated room for 30 years because the Hawthornes never had any money. And Hawthorne becomes consul to Liverpool. He gets this political appointment. He has had political appointments right along to keep the family afloat, which is how he ends up in the Customs house in Salem and writes the preface of the scarlet letter. And, oh, I want to go to.
[00:25:02] Amynah Dharani: That custom house and him working there, and also go to his ancestors. Right. We've got William Hawthorne and John Hawthorne, who were his ancestors of 100 or so years ago.
What is his shame in regard to his ancestors?
[00:25:22] Nancy Brewka-Clark: Right.
[00:25:23] Amynah Dharani: I'm kind of thinking of that one passage you wrote about him working in the custom house and feeling that his ancestors are looking down on him.
[00:25:31] Nancy Brewka-Clark: That's exactly what he writes in that preface, where, purportedly, they find this embroidered scarlet a in a trunk that's been stored, and that's the preface to the scarlet letter. Wow. Wow.
And psychically, she was working at the Customs house after the war of 1812.
They were developing much faster ships, clipper ships. They were developing ships that needed deep harbors. And consequently, shipping was moving away from the tiny New England ports that had been so wealthy in the 17th and 18th centuries. They were moving south. They were moving to New York. They were moving to places that could contain these big ships and clipper ships.
And so the customs house where Hawthorne sat day after day had been a bustling place, and it was dead.
If you do go there, his desk is still there, where he sat and looked out the window and saw that dead harbor where his father never sailed into again.
And I think those gloomy thoughts really possessed him all his life, the loss of the father and the loss of money hand in hand. And that's where William and John come in. William, who came as the settler and had a very beautiful farm that was eventually sold off, very hyped, a farm in New England.
And then John, the judge who Hawthorne felt was responsible for taking lives.
And Hawthorne wasn't exactly a pacifist, but he himself did have an abhorrence of violence.
And when he was in Liverpool, when he was consul, he tried to help out, down and out sailors who had been in brawl, who had been robbed at probably knife point. He had a great compassion for battered men down on their luck. He himself never was able to keep money, but he also sounds like quite.
[00:27:59] Amynah Dharani: A social worker when you kind of describe him in that way, helping people out, people that are down and out. Right.
[00:28:06] Nancy Brewka-Clark: I think that was, you know, that was certainly the case when he was in Liverpool. There really aren't too many other examples of Hawthorne giving money. Hawthorne was the recipient of a lot of gifts, his college classmates that were wealthier. There was one fellow by the name of Bridge, and he backed the publication of Hawthorne's first collection of short stories. Hawthorne could not sell them.
And Bridge put up a loan to the publishing house and said, when his royalties reach that amount, you can pay me back. Don't tell him.
[00:28:49] Amynah Dharani: So he must have been quite a likable fellow.
[00:28:52] Nancy Brewka-Clark: Yes, I think people. I think he was. Well, certainly his looks contributed to the way people reacted to him initially. He was very funny. A lot of his writing is very funny, the short stories and especially his nonfiction, his diaries, and his wife and he both destroyed a lot of their own papers. Hawthorne once said, there's no better friend than a fire.
And this is when he was sitting and throwing letters into it. And so I think he was an intensely private person because he was attractive and intelligent and charming. People tried to penetrate that shell that he had, and most of them failed miserably.
He did not let people in.
Wow.
[00:29:41] Amynah Dharani: Now the scarlet letter and the house of the seven gables, two of his most famous books.
What are the prominent themes that show up in these stories? And I'm specifically thinking about Hawthorne's past, his ancestral past, and how the themes start showing up in his books.
[00:30:00] Nancy Brewka-Clark: It's very hard for us to imagine how cloistered life was when he was a young man. He comes back.
He graduates from Bowdoin, and he comes back to Salem. He does not get a job like other people. He does not train to be a physician. He does not train to be a lawyer. He comes back because he wants to be a writer.
He returns to the manning home again. This is grandfather Richard Manning.
The place is still standing in downtown Salem. You would never find it unless you know where it was. It's basically a three story tenement about 100 yards up from the harbor. It's still there. It's got vinyl siding on it. I think you would never know. And the street numbers have been changed. But this is where he grew up. And he had a little room in the attic as a boy.
Back he goes to that room at the age of 21, 22. When he graduates, he starts to write. As a boy, he called the place Castle Dismal.
And as a young man, he still calls the place castle Dismal, but he has no other place to go.
And he, at the end, when he is finally published, he says, here in this chamber, was fame won.
And he was so proud of himself for finally getting published, not even knowing how many of his friends had helped him behind the scenes at that point.
And the one person who stood by him during those years of struggle was his sister Elizabeth.
[00:31:50] Amynah Dharani: When you mentioned the Manning home for explanation, this is not the house in The House of the Seven Gables compound, right? Correct. It's different.
[00:32:02] Nancy Brewka-Clark: Right.
He was born in this little gambrel cottage on Union Street, and that house still exists. And it was moved to the grounds of the House of the Seven Gables. The House of the Seven Gables itself certainly featured largely in Hawthorne's imagination. He had a cousin who lived there, and he'd go over and play cards, and that's pretty much the connection.
But as a writer, I suspect all those hours that he spent at that dismal desk in the customs house with no business, and he's looking out, he probably could see the rooftop, and his mind just told stories.
And I think that that, as much as anything, explains the House of the Seven Gables as a character rather than just a setting, because, again, it held all the tragic mysteries of early New England. People dying in shame, people dying, impoverished people whose roots were in England. That came here because they were seeking religious freedom, and that is becoming less and less a fact in how you were going to get ahead.
[00:33:24] Amynah Dharani: The devil plays a part in his stories.
[00:33:28] Nancy Brewka-Clark: Yes, he certainly believed in evil. That, again, was a Calvinist concept. And the thing that frightened the Puritanical mind so much was the theory of predestination, that you were born into a certain place and time, and whether you were going to be saved or not, really didn't depend as much on your own actions as what you were born with.
One of the signs of success, in fact, the biggest sign of success to the Puritans, was money.
They were money makers in their mind, how do you prove that God is on your side? You prosper.
And that, again, goes back to that psychic burden of losing money and losing the status that goes along with it. It's also, in a very strange way, a theological con for us. It's difficult to connect the two, but in the Puritan mind, they were very much connected because it was the way, aside from surviving all the terrible things that could happen to you physically. How do you know that God is on your side? He makes you wealthy.
This is what you were born to do.
[00:34:54] Amynah Dharani: I did not realize that money played such a central role, or wealth.
[00:35:01] Nancy Brewka-Clark: Yes, we always. Well, we always think of the Puritans, these gray, pallid, whining sort of.
I don't want to call them lunatics, but very pious.
And they must have been all of those things, but they also. They dressed beautifully. There are all these records. And even when you read Hawthorne closely and when he's describing characters from the 17th century, they're wearing beautiful colors, emerald green, ruby red. The clothing and the lace and the leather and the gold buttons, all those were signs of status.
[00:35:42] Amynah Dharani: Now, this would have been as an influence coming from England.
[00:35:47] Nancy Brewka-Clark: From England, I think.
And the American concept of it actually still dictates what we do in our society today.
[00:35:58] Amynah Dharani: I visited Salem a few weeks ago and saw the House of the Seven Gables and Hawthorne's home in that compound. I got goosebumps. Why is Salem so popular?
[00:36:09] Nancy Brewka-Clark: That's a really interesting question. My own opinion is that Nathaniel Hawthorne single-handedly invented Halloween.
[00:36:21] Amynah Dharani: Say more about that.
[00:36:23] Nancy Brewka-Clark: His early writing really does focus on the supernatural, in a way. When he was a more mature writer and a more successful writer, he and Edgar Allan Poe were going head to head with their writing, and we call them horror writers now, but what they're really doing is delving into the human psyche and hearing a heartbeat in the wall or having a vision of the devil coming down your chimney. These were all things because of the harsh conditions of early New England. Made perfect sense. And then both Poe and Hawthorne. Hawthorne is stung when Poe gives him a tepid review.
Again, like so many other people, Poe admired Hawthorne and probably wanted to take him down a peg or two. And he had the power at that point by writing a review.
And I don't believe Hawthorne ever returned the favorite.
[00:37:27] Amynah Dharani: It's so fascinating to see this competitiveness.
[00:37:33] Nancy Brewka-Clark: Everything was highly competitive, very few publishing resources, and a lot of people taking a crack at writing. And again, one person that succeeded long before these men even were born was Ann Bradstreet. She was the wife of Governor Bradstreet. They lived in a beautiful home in Salem that was constructed in the early days of Salem's founding around 1630 and onward. And that house is long, long, long gone, but there are etchings of it, and it was palatial by those standards. And Ann Bradsfeed had, I believe, at least six children. Six children. And she was also a very successful poet. And her work was sent to England, it was published, and she really made a name for herself. So Hawthorne was not the first writer to come out of Salem, but again, as a female, she was.
Eventually, her status was lowered as a writer. And you don't really hear about Anne Bradstreet now unless you're in Salem. So what draws people to Salem? I think it's still hunting for the supernatural, and I've always felt great pity for people who are trying to do that there, because, first of all, the actual Salem village, old Salem village itself is in Danvers, and it's only two or 3 miles from downtown Salem. The people there do not want tourism. They do not publicize it. But the original cellar hall of the parish house where the start of the whole witchcraft thing with Tituba, the famous Tituba, the Caribbean servant who, with her husband, are working for Samuel Parris, who is the minister.
[00:39:35] Amynah Dharani: What would you like the audience to take away about Nathaniel Hawthorne and Salem, their connection together?
[00:39:42] Nancy Brewka-Clark: I think that, as I say, my opinion is that Hawthorne invented Halloween because once his stories got into the public consciousness, it sparked an interest in old things, old graveyards, old tombstones, old churches, old cellar halls, and what might have happened there and ghost ships and mist on the harbor and everything that is so romantic and can be construed as a supernatural phenomenon.
And Hawthorne writes about this. He writes about snowmen that come to life and cursed daughters that bear birthmarks from their father's guilt. And his short stories really focus on these very unusual things, straw figures that come to life. And he created something that he would have abhorred because he always claimed to hate Salem. He couldn't wait to get away from it. He always came back. And when he couldn't come back, he died.
[00:40:54] Amynah Dharani: Nancy, I want to thank you. I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much.
[00:40:58] Nancy Brewka-Clark: It's been my absolute pleasure.
Welcome back.
[00:41:02] Amynah Dharani: So what is coming up for you from Nancy's discussion of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Salem?
For me, Nathaniel Hawthorne is a name that evokes images of dark woods and haunting tales, and it is forever entwined with the shadows of Salem.
The city infamous for its witch trials in 1692, served as both a backdrop and a catalyst for his literary genius.
The ghosts of the past shaped Hawthorne's stories and, more importantly, shaped his identity.
Salem wasn't just a setting, it was an emotional landscape for Hawthorne. It became both inspiration and torment. As he navigated the entwined fates of place and personal heritage, Hawthorne grappled with his family's tainted legacy. The wage of ancestral guilt permeated his stories, infusing them with themes of sin and moral complexity.
Characters wrestled with their pasts, mirroring Hawthorne's own struggles.
By examining societal judgment through a personal lens, Hawthorne transformed historical trauma into timeless narratives that resonate today.
His heritage didn't just inform his work, it became an essential element, driving the emotional depth found in each page.
Yet history cannot be ignored. The echoes of the salon witch trials resonate through time, shaping both community narratives and personal identities.
Nathaniel Hawthorne felt this way acutely. His family was intertwined in the fabric of that dark chapter.
Awareness of historical injustices can lead to healing, or at least understanding. It allows society to confront uncomfortable truths and encourages dialogue about the impact of the past on present day issues like injustice, prejudice, and scapegoating.
While descendants may not bear legal responsibility for their ancestors actions, they have a unique position to acknowledge history and advocate for progress.
This reflection can foster empathy toward victims while promoting social change today.
Ultimately, grappling with these legacies shapes our collective conscience, reminding us all how pivotal our histories are in informing a better future.
If you'd like to learn more about my private practice, you can go to the lifeinterrupted.com. In the meantime, please connect with The Love Vox on Facebook, Instagram, and X. And if you'd like to contribute to the show, please visit the show's website, lovevox.com, where you can leave voicemails that can be featured on the show. And you can also contribute to stories we're looking to feature. Until next time, stay passionate. Stay curious.
