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Let me quote the two paragraphs in full so thateveryone may focus on them while discussing

this issue:

Since Hawthorne always expressed his clearest convictions through

allegory, it is not surprising that his real stand on Puritanism was

revealed through his innovative use of this mode. In allegory there is

a doule meaning that allows a story to e interpreted on two levels:

a primary or surface level and a secondary or deep level, which is

understood through the first. !s a literary form closely related to

the fable and the parable, allegory is often used to convey moralmessages or teach ethical principles. !llegory had een employed y

the first Puritan colonists to set up a mythology of the "ew #orld,

and Hawthorne adopted the didactic framewor$ of allegory to

question such a mythology. In other words, Hawthorne appropriated

the allegorical rhetoric of Puritan culture for his own suversive

purposes, that is, he turned the Puritan allegorical method against

the Puritans themselves.

Hawthorne explained that his imagination was stirred y what he

called %an inveterate love of allegory,% a method that many of his

contemporaries despised. !ccording to Henry &ames, allegory %is apt

to spoil two good things'a story and a moral, a meaning and a

form.% Hawthorne, however, used the asic structure of this

traditional mode and transformed it to suit his needs, which consisted

in voicing his re(ection of Puritanism. His movement towards

seculari)ed allegory helped to mould the technique of symolism

which would e cultivated throughout the nineteenth century. Some

critics, such as *vor #inters, consider him essentially an allegorist,

while others see him as an early master of symolism. +here is a

asic difference etween allegory and symbolism. Allegory points

to a referent which stands outside itself, and it demands a strict

correspondence etween the concrete and the astract idea it

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represents. In contrast, symbolism is ale to emody astract

realities and allows for multiple possiilities of meaning. ather than

entering into the deate on whether Hawthorne was primarily an

allegorist or a symolist, it can e safely concluded that he rendered

these two related modes very effectively in his prose.