The moral implications of unbridled intellectual curiosity are a common theme in the Dark Romanticism Movement, and feature in Hawthorne’s short stories “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) and “Ethan Brand.” Ethan Brand’s obsession with intellect and the evil that he has committed to achieve it is central to the story and to his conviction that he has committed the Unpardonable Sin.

Ethan Brand epitomizes Enlightenment thinkers who championed the use of reason and empirical observation as the primary means of acquiring knowledge about the natural world, rejecting superstition, religious authority, and blind faith. In the story, the titular character’s quest is based on a paradox—he attempts to answer a spiritual question through purely rational means. Ethan Brand’s search is doomed from the start as he searches for the Unpardonable Sin as if it were a physical object that can be found and analyzed. By demonstrating Ethan Brand’s mental decline during his 18-year quest, Hawthorne illustrates the futility of applying rationalism to spiritual matters that are essentially mysterious and unknowable.

Ethan Brand’s descent into depravity is prompted by amoral intellectualism. Through the protagonist’s memories, Hawthorne underlines that Ethan Brand “became a fiend […] from the moment that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect” (Paragraph 68).