Integration of the Individual in the Community and Home in Hawthornes Essay

Integration of the Individual in the Community and Home in Hawthornes Roger Malvins Burial and Andersons Mother - Essay Example There are still others who are at odds with the value system of their community and have chosen to be silent outsiders who may have only physical presence in the group. Yet, another type is the rebel who is at loggerheads with the values any systems of the community. Others have realized the futility of the existence of a community to which he or she belongs and may be out to reform it. The possibilities of the patterns of individual's integration to community are many and the study is targeted to examining the integrations of the individual in the community and home in Hawthorne's Roger Nathaniel Hawthorne's works are passionately taken up with moral problems of sin, punishment and atonement. His knowledge of the history of his own ancestors perhaps goaded him to explore these themes of guilt. The 17th century persecutions of the Quakers and the witchcraft trials of Salem troubled him. The insight of Hawthorne into the motivations of behavior and the guilt and anxiety in his characters are the legacy of the past sins to humanity. Hawthorne deliberately manipulated historical data and churned out the moral concerns behind them. The truth of human heart remains a mystery in his characters and his ambivalent approach to what is good and bad, is far ahead of his times. If Hawthorne was obsessed with ethical dilemmas in his works, Anderson Sherwood was concerned with mundane problems that affected the fortunes of the ordinary people. The machine age took away the human factor from work. This dehumanized the American work place in a way. Apart from that, it also threatened the very existence of the workers. In a world of competition many values were lost and in the ruthless drive for individual attainment human beings lost sight of the social and family dimension of their existence. Roger Malvil's Burial, when examined in the backdrop social dimension of man existing in a society reveals that concealment can cut off a person from the social communion with his community and family. Early Christian religious practices insisted on public penances for serious sins. Sin was not merely a matter between God and man; it has a social dimension and hidden crimes can cut him off from society and finally unhinge him. Hidden crimes often produce abnormal behavior in the sinner. Hawthorne in Roger Malvil's Burial reveals that even an apparently harmless act if hidden out of fear, can affect social integration of the individual with the community and family. To him crime itself was not so monstrous as the concealment of it. Roger Malvin's Burial may be called an overture to his grand exploration of this theme in The Scarlet Letter. During military operations, a soldier may have to leave his dying comrade. In such a situation, Reuben is forced to leave his friend, Malvin to di e, as there was no other option for him. However, he had agreed to come and bury him later, after his own wounds are healed. Nevertheless, he lacks the courage to tell Dorcas, who is the daughter of Malvin and his future wife, the fact that her father did not receive a burial in the wilderness. Not burying a fellow soldier in combat conditions is not even a venial sin. However, the hiding of it to his wife and thus to his community prevents him from fulfilling a simple but important social and religious