30 pages • 1 hour read
Nathaniel HawthorneEthan Brand
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1850A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Fire
The fire of the lime-kiln at Mount Graylock is a physical embodiment of God’s justice. Ethan Brand’s production of the Unpardonable Sin and his rejection of his heart have made him guilt-ridden and accepting of eternal punishment. As a result, he embraces the fire and by his death, embraces the fire as his “familiar friend” (Paragraph 72). The fire consumes him when he jumps into the kiln, representing his presumed descent to hell as God’s righteous judgment for him. Ethan Brand’s readiness to enter the flames furthers the theme of The Dangers of Amoral Intellectualism, with his grievous actions, and his spiritual and psychological inability to atone for them, resulting in the lime-kiln’s fire killing him.
Fire is also a purifier in that it can purify certain matter, especially marble and lime, and even reveal their true nature. The morning after Ethan Brand’s death, Bartram and Joe find a skeleton with a heart of pure marble. The fire had destroyed Ethan Brand’s physical body and shown the heart that he had long neglected.
Marble
Marble represents the impenetrable nature of Ethan Brand’s heart after he has found the Unpardonable Sin. When Bartram and Joe discover his skeleton the morning after his death, Bartram remarks, “Was the fellow’s heart made of marble?” (Paragraph 83). Bartram’s question both points to the oddity of this occurrence and establishes a parallel between the rock that the lime-burners produce and the cold, hardened heart of Ethan Brand. This develops the theme of The Dangers of Amoral Intellectualism by giving a physical example of how worship of knowledge has damaged his heart.
The marble symbolism also supports the theme of The Loneliness of Social Detachment and Rejection. Ethan Brand’s heart hardened not only due to his obsession with knowledge, especially about the Unpardonable Sin, but due to his alienation from the rest of the world, including his fellow villagers. Their mutual rejection of each other leads to Brand’s heart becoming like marble, hard and unfeeling, which ends with his death inside the lime-kiln.
The Dog
The dog represents Ethan Brand, whose task, like Brand’s, becomes an extreme, life-consuming obsession. The dog, as a symbol, highlights both the question of Spiritual Damnation and Pride and the loneliness that stems from social isolation and rejection. The narrator presents the dog’s goal to catch his extremely short tail as futile and pointless, making the dog an aggressive spectacle of the villagers and causing him to exhaust himself. In the same way, Ethan Brand’s goal of finding the Unpardonable Sin has given him a one-track mind that has made him uninterested in making human connections. Furthermore, it has made him unapproachable and hostile to other people, cutting them off from him except when they want to ask about the Unpardonable Sin out of curiosity and amusement. His task, like the dog’s, is also implicitly pointless, causing him to exhaust and, eventually, kill himself for the Unpardonable Sin, which is implied to be unattainable and a source of his own mind.
Related Titles
By Nathaniel Hawthorne
