In Nature To better understand Transcendentalism, I referred back to a Unitarian Minister named William Ellery Channing. The text mentions the opposition Transcendentalists had with Unitarianism, such as “cold rationality and materialism”, but they both shared the belief that the “power of human intuition” was at the core of being close to God (Belasco and Johnson 730). Transcendentalists needed to relate to God, or be at one with Him, in a private, personal setting. They believed in “the spiritual
American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, quite simply, had a complicated relationship with women. When his father died from Yellow Fever in 1808, Hawthorne, then only four-years-old, was left to be raised by his mother and two sisters (Conway 16). Hawthorne’s childhood, which was shaped almost entirely by women, proved to have a profound impact on his life and perception of femininity. Consequently, Hawthorne more fully understood women and created female characters who were multifaceted, nuanced, and