Ben Franklin and Nathanial Hawthorne
Benjamin Franklin and Nathaniel Hawthorne were both very important to America’s early literature. Franklin’s “Autobiography” and Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” represents the extremes of leaving home. Franklin makes accomplishing the American dream of the self-made man look easy. Hawthorne, however, revises and critiques that dream, showing the harsh realities of the real world. Franklin reveals his life story as a way to show the people of America that determination, hard work, and intelligence lead to success, while Hawthorne describes the harsh world waiting once youth and innocence are gone. Benjamin Franklin and Robin, Hawthorne’s main character, leave home for different reasons. Franklin, in his autobiography, explains how he journeys to Philadelphia in search of a job and to start life on his own. Franklin wants independence and he knows he will find what he seeks. Franklin states, “I took it upon me to assert my Freedom” (194). Robin leaves his home with the idea of depending on his second cousin, dependence not independence. Robin journeys from his family’s country farm to the city in search of his kinsman, Major Molineux, with hopes that his kinsman will help him get started in life. Hawthorne writes, “The Ma . . .
That freedom allows him to make it life, “Having emerg’d from the Poverty and Obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a State of Affluence and some Degree of Reputation in the World” (185). Tough decisions are a part of the advent into adulthood. Hawthorne shows that to get ahead in life one must leave the innocence of youth behind and harden one’s self against the ugliness of the world. Robin finally makes eye contact with his kinsman, “They stared at each other in silence, and Robin’s knees shook, and his hair bristled, with a mixture of pity and terror” (803). Franklin’s life represents the great American dream, but it is an unrealistic achievement. Franklin faces those tough decisions in life head on. Each author writes their story as a way of showing what they think it takes to get ahead in life. Franklin and Robin’s arrival to the new towns embody the two author’s feelings toward the idea of the self made man. He makes it seem that he achieves success very easily, and that any hard working American can do the same. His autobiography shows that gaining independence from his family as a form of gaining freedom, freedom to follow his dreams, and freedom to work at obtaining those dreams. With that loss of innocence and youth, neither Robin nor his home will ever be the same again. Franklin arrives in Philadelphia during the day, hungry, and dirty. The gentlemen Robin meets at the end of the story suggests to him, “as you are a shrewd youth, you may rise in the world without the help of your kinsman, Major Molineux” (804). Hawthorne stages Robin’s arrival to town at night, symbolizing the darkness of the harsh world. He encounters hardly any set backs in his climb from, “Poverty and Obscurity,” to the great man of American history he is now known as (185).
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