Ethan Brand

Ethan Brand is a former lime-burner who left Mount Greylock and the village 18 years before to find the “Unpardonable Sin.” He is also a subject of curiosity and terror for Bartram, Joe, and the villagers. He returns and tells Bartram and the villagers that he has found the Unpardonable Sin in his own heart. He reveals that the Unpardonable Sin, of which he is guilty, is an intellectualism that had alienated him from the fellowship of other people and from reverence for God. It is an intellectualism that led him to perform a cruel psychological experiment on Humphrey’s daughter Esther, which he fears might have “annihilated her soul” and which he is convinced has damned him eternally to hell (Paragraph 49). He feels an extreme guilt for his actions, to the extent that he does not believe himself worthy of redemption and willingly throws himself into the lime-kiln to confront his fate in hell.

Despite the horror of his situation, Ethan Brand has soberly accepted his fate and readily awaits his punishment. He sees his punishment as a just, correct, and, ultimately, natural consequence of his misdeeds and believes that his physical and spiritual deaths will complete his, and God’s, work. He hopes that his finding of the Unpardonable Sin will help prevent the villagers from idolizing knowledge to the detriment of his fellow man like he did, but also resigns himself to isolation and rejection as punishment for his sin. He also isolates himself from the villagers because he sees them as half-hearted and because he does not see himself as capable of regaining his relationship with them. His last name signals his sin and isolation: He has been “branded” (or has branded himself) as a sinner too wicked for God to redeem or for others to associate with.

Ethan Brand is an example of the highly anxious and religiously attuned figure that commonly appears in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s works. He embodies both the self-reflective terror and the somber resolution of the acceptance of doom that occurs in more radical and strict Calvinist traditions, an acceptance of God’s complete, untampered will regardless of what happens to him in the next life. His characterization is important to shaping the themes of The Dangers of Amoral Intellectualism, Spiritual Damnation and Pride, and The Loneliness of Social Detachment and Rejection, as all these themes focus on his complex spirituality and psychology.