Overall, Transcendentalists was a very optimistic approach, underlying that divine truth is everywhere. Transcendentalists" approach to evil also brought up some question. They said they acknowledged evil, yet they do not see it as an obstacle to cross over to get to perfection. So basically, they deny evil because in their eyes a person can rectify all of his own evil actions. Hawthorne just could not accept these beliefs. His view of evil was rather different and he could not bring himself to agree in this manner.

             Many people believed that Hawthorne had a bit of gloominess about him, which helped him keep his mind at reassured. Probably the first person to recognize Nathaniel"s "darkness" was author, Herman Melville. In Melville"s essay, "Hawthorne and His Mosses", he describes the soul of Hawthorne as "shrouded in blackness" (Melville 1935). He even goes further to say that many of Hawthorne"s readers do not identify the blackness in his rather meek tales. However, this obscurity fits right in with the mentality of Hawthorne.

             Hawthorne got many of his viewpoints from his Puritan ancestry. His relatives were prominent Puritan judges in New England; his grandfather even supervised the Salem witchcraft trials. Hawthorne thoroughly adopted John Calvin"s central theory of Puritanism. As Henry James stated it in this manner, "Hawthorne found the necessary darkness.in his Puritan heritage. and [would] capitalize on the darkness latent in America"s Puritan history and heritage" (James 13). However, it is not totally accurate to say that Hawthorne spoke from a Puritan era, because Puritans maintain that society must be terrorized by the natural evil of sin and that certain people were capable of salvation. Hawthorne went even expanded this idea to say that a purification of a society was basically impossible. Hawthorne also found a problem in Transcendentalism for the fact that they refuse to acknowledge the noticeable existence and domination of evil.