24 pages • 48 minutes read
Nathaniel HawthorneThe Hollow of the Three Hills
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, American author Nathaniel Hawthorne was raised by a widowed mother in his uncle’s household. Hawthorne’s ancestors had been heavily involved in Puritanism, a strict sect of Christianity that focused on the inherent evilness and sinfulness of people. Puritans were known for their strict moral code and their desire for others to adhere to the same code. Hawthorne had an ancestor named William Hathorne who was a magistrate and had ordered the public flogging of a Quaker woman, and William’s son John was a judge in the Salem witch trials. The shame that Hawthorne felt about his ancestors’ actions led him to change the spelling of his name from Hathorne to Hawthorne when he started writing so that he could distance himself from their actions.
Hawthorne grew up mainly in Salem and attended Bowdoin College in Maine. While in college, he wrote his first novel, Fanshawe. He was later embarrassed by the quality of the writing and tried to prevent any copies from being read. A few years after his graduation, he had substantially honed his craft and published “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” as well as several other short stories. His writing generated little income for several years, and he supported himself with odd jobs, even living for a short time at the utopian commune Brook Farm. In 1842, his writing had become more lucrative, and Hawthorne and his wife, Transcendentalist Sophia Peabody, moved to Concord, Massachusetts. As a Transcendentalist, Sophia Peabody believed in the purity of nature and humanity and desired severance from the perceived corruption thought to come with a progressing society. Transcendentalism culturally affected writers, artists, and philosophers. In Concord, Hawthorne associated with members of a thriving Transcendentalist community which included writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau.
Hawthorne and his family returned to Salem in 1845, where he was involved in politics under the Democratic Polk administration. When Whig Zachary Taylor became president, Hawthorne was dismissed from his job, which left him feeling very resentful. However, during this time he wrote The Scarlet Letter, his most well-known novel. Over the next several years Hawthorne moved multiple times, seeking the financial security that continuously eluded him even though he was a well-respected literary figure. In 1853, Hawthorne rejoined the political realm for a few years, and for the last 11 years of his life, he produced very little writing. His mental and physical health took a rapid decline in the final two years of his life. During this period of decline, Hawthorne began to quickly physically age and would continuously write the number “64” on pieces of paper. He died in his sleep on May 19, 1864, at the age of 57, on a trip with his old friend Franklin Pierce.
“The Hollow of the Three Hills” is best understood by considering Hawthorne’s background and influences through traditional literary theory. Hawthorne was from Salem, Massachusetts, home of the Salem witch trials in the late 1600s, and had an ancestor who participated in the witch trials. He had a deep sense of guilt regarding his ancestry. This sense of guilt bleeds into his writing as many of his characters, including the lady in “The Hollow of the Three Hills” and Arthur Dimsdale in The Scarlett Letter (1850), struggle with guilt of their own. Parallel to his characters, Hawthorne found his family’s background so shameful that he considered his financial struggles a type of karmic retribution. Not only did Hawthorne struggle with internalized guilt over his family’s background, but he was also rebelling against the Puritan idealization of shame. Puritans embraced shame as a marker of holiness and insisted on others doing so as well. Anyone who did not comply was publicly scorned and ostracized. Hawthorne lived among Transcendentalists for many years, even going so far as to marry and start a family with a Transcendentalist and to live in a Transcendentalist utopian community. Even though Hawthorne did not follow the tenets of Transcendentalism, he was able to respectfully live in that community, which shows his belief that people should be able to choose their own path.
Literary Context: Dark Romanticism
Romanticism is a literary genre that emphasizes the importance of feelings, subjectivity, and personal interpretation over depictions of stark realism. Most of Hawthorne’s works, including “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” would be classified in the subgenre of Dark Romanticism. Dark Romanticism also emphasizes the importance of feelings and personal interpretation, but Dark Romantics believed that all humans are drawn to sin and self-sabotage. Dark Romanticism may have been a reaction to the Transcendentalist movement but ironically shares some Puritan beliefs as well. Transcendentalists believed that people were godly and could exist in harmony with nature, while Puritans believed that people were evil and could only be redeemed by God. Dark Romantics in some ways opposed Transcendentalism by asserting the complexity and “evilness” of people while simultaneously reacting against Puritanism by claiming that there would be no salvation. Though not all Dark Romantic writing engaged as directly with these concepts and genres, Hawthorne suggests good and evil are at odds with human complexity in “The Hollow of the Three Hills.”
In “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” Hawthorne uses elements of Dark Romanticism to foreshadow the protagonist’s demise and to illustrate the story’s themes of The Destructiveness of Guilt and Shame, Good Versus Evil, and The Danger of Strict Religious Beliefs. The location where the two women meet is described as resembling a place where witches would put on a “performance of an impious baptismal rite” (Paragraph 1). This contrast of “holy” and “unholy” baptism shows that unlike the holy baptism Puritans believed in that brought people to a new life, the old woman is leading the lady into a ritual that will result in her death. The lady kneeling in front of the older woman in a worshipful position illustrates the lady’s agreement with aligning herself with evil in order to obtain the information that she desires, even if, by her own proclamation, she might die.
The lady’s parents are described in a Dark Romantic style as “broken and decayed” (Paragraph 11), and the fact that their daughter has deserted her family has caused “shame and affliction to bring their gray heads to the grave” (Paragraph 11). Another Dark Romantic, supernatural element in the story is the character of the old woman, who is presumably a witch. Her evilness in showing the lady only painful visions contributes to the lady’s death at the end of the story. In this way, the characters of the lady and the old woman are representative of good and evil, though good does not prevail and the societal pressures regarding shame complicate an otherwise simplistic interpretation of the characters. All of these elements highlight Hawthorne’s Dark Romantic writing style and incorporate many of the primary elements of both Romanticism and Dark Romanticism.
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