Consequences of Our Actions
In many of his works, Nathaniel Hawthorne, foreshadows what grim existences the human race might lead if people do not learn from their actions or take advice from others, such as Hawthorne himself. He is desperately trying to give an understanding of how important some decisions in people’s lives actually are, and demonstrate that occasionally some do make the wrong decisions without thinking. Hawthorne uses the lives of Wakefield, Aylmer, and Young Goodman Brown to provide instances of severe consequences due to the characters not considering what could be the outcome of their decision-making.
During the time when Hawthorne was writing these short stories the whole world was changing to an industrialized machine, and with this advancement in technology people were no longer satisfied with the lives that they were leading. Hawthorne is making note that as the world is changing people are not paying attention to what they might be losing since they are so determined to keep upgrading. Hawthorne is lingering on consequences as the Puritans did because he came from a Puritan family, “His prominent Puritan ancestors on the Hawthorne side of the family were among the first settlers of Massachusetts and included a judge in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692” (Hawthorne, 1272). Hawthorne’s family was obviously fairly dominant in the settling of the Puritans, but that is not to say that Hawthorne agreed with the Puritans as a whole. “In 1830 when he was 26, Nathanial added a "w" to his name due to his shame of his family's history” (http://www.bralyn.net), for Hawthorne to change his name has to give a good impression that he was not exactly pro Puritan. Hawthorne even wrote the Scarlet Letter out of disgust for the Puritan society, but through all this distrust in the Puritan community Hawthorne gained part of their ideology, which is hidden within his works. The ideology that he gained from the Puritans is the idea of consequences,...