e Salem Custom House, an appointment received from the administration of President James K. Polk. However, he was ousted form the post in 1849 at the beginning of the administration of Zachary Taylor (Stewart 487-488).
In his fiction, Hawthorne is considered a symbolic writer, and critics since his time have continued to find different layers of meaning in his writings. As Stewart notes, Hawthorne's work shows an attitude that could be called Puritan but that is more broadly Christian "in that he is concerned always with the conflict between good and evil, and the consequences to mankind which flow from 'Original Sin'" (Stewart 489).
Nathaniel Hawthorne looks back directly to the Puritan period and the hypocrisy he sees as inevitable in a community that denies the validity of a range of human emotions and behaviors. The Scarlet Letter is probably his best-known work and is a novel about the consequences in Puritan society of a seduction. The seduction has taken place perhaps a year before the opening of the novel, but the fact of the seduction is incontrovertible because of the baby Hester Prynne has born. She is the only person being punished for this sin, though this is a sin that could not have been committed alone. She will not reveal the name of her partner in sin, and she bears her public burdens with stoicism and courage. Her sin is a sin of passion, but this passion is never evoked directly in the novel. This has all taken place off stage, and it is the aftermath of the seduction that interests Hawthorne.
For that matter, it is less the seduction itself than the response to it that is important in
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