How, specifically, does Hawthorne represent the Puritans in this story? Does he sympathize with the Merry Mount colonists in ways that Bradford does not? Why and how so?Discuss
In the epigraph to his 1832 short story, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” Nathaniel Hawthorne calls his fictionalization of the Puritan raid at Merry Mount colony a “philosophic romance” (p. 678) . By this phrase, he likely means that he sees his tale as using imaginative storytelling (romance) to ask his readers deep, thought-provoking questions […]