Ethan Brand

“Ethan Brand” by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a short story written in 1850 and published in his 1852 collection The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales. The author uses allegory, ambiguity, and the literary devices of Dark Romanticism to explore the themes of The Dangers of Amoral Intellectualism, Spiritual Damnation and Pride, and The Loneliness of Social Detachment and Rejection.

Christian morality, spiritual anxiety, and the moral pitfalls of intellectualism and science appear throughout Hawthorne’s works. His most popular work, the 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, explores the religious landscape and moral dilemmas of 17th-century Massachusetts under Puritan governance. Both external and internal religious anxiety affect the novel’s protagonist, Hester Prynne, after she commits a moral and social taboo. Religious guilt and the nature of human depravity also appear in the later short story, “Ethan Brand.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne was inspired to write “Ethan Brand” after seeing a burning lime-kiln while taking a midnight walk at Mount Greylock in North Adams, Massachusetts. He originally titled the story “The Unpardonable Sin” and planned to write a longer story about Ethan Brand and his search for the Unpardonable Sin.