Perilous solitude : isolation in selected short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne's life was, in many ways, a solitary one, and his concern with solitude is reflected in his writings. In three of his short stories--"The Minister's Black Veil," "The Birth-Mark," and "Ethan Brand"--he depicts the struggles of three men who suffer isolation because of their intense devotion to one idea. The tales illustrate Hawthorne's increasing conviction that isolation damages the human spirit.j The way that he lived his own life indicates that he avoided such isolation, but that he found solitude to be an enjoyable part of life, necessary to his creative activity. That Hawthorne's ideas about solitude are shared by other authors is evident in essays written by Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Thomas Wolfe.