All his life, Hawthorne seems to be haunted by his sense of sin and evil in life. Reading his tales and romances, one cannot but be overwhelmed by the “black” vision which these works reveal.

One source of evil in Hawthorne is overweening intellect. The tension between the head (intellect) and the heart (warmth and feeling) constitutes one of the elements which make his writings enchanting. Hawthorn's intellectual characters are usually villains, dreadful because devoid of fellow feeling such as Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter.

Hawthorne's aesthetics is clearly enunciated in the prefaces to his larger fictions, particularly those to The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Marble Faun. Like Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Henry James after him, Hawthorne repeatedly complained about “the poverty of materials” in a land where “there has never been”, “the genial atmosphere which a literary man requires in order to ripen the best harvest of his mind” (“The Custom House: Introductory to The Scarlet Letter”).

Hawthorne uses the technique of symbolism in his works. The names of its characters, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, are symbolic, too, as are the flower at the prison door, little Pearl, the wilderness on the verge of which stands the Puritan community, and so forth.