Peter Hovenden represents materialist skepticism, the first force working against Owen, Peter’s former apprentice. The father of Annie, he once owned the watch shop Owen now holds and now has intense disdain for him because of his eccentric art project he works on instead of watches. He first shows this disdain in the opening scene of the story, where while passing by Owen’s shop he tells Annie "He has not the sort of ingenuity to invent anything better than a Dutch toy… A plague on such ingenuity… He would turn the sun out of its orbit and derange the whole course of time, if, as I said before, his ingenuity could grasp anything bigger than a child's toy!” (Hawthorne 1). From here Peter’s skepticism discredits Owen’s work by saying his ingenuity …show more content…
Robert, an old classmate of Owen, works as a blacksmith in the town and marries Annie halfway in the story. In his first scene, Peter publicly praises Robert and his work by saying “Give me main strength for my money. And then, how it takes the nonsense out of a man! Did you ever hear of a blacksmith being such a fool as Owen Warland yonder?” (Hawthorne 2). Peter praises Robert for being the polar opposite of Owen, a simple mind but a great deal of body and strength which let him into a job that allowed him to suppress his spirit, which Peter refers to as “nonsense”, unlike Owen who’s greater mind but smaller body led him to watchmaking. Despite these two big differences, Hawthorne never implies which one outranks the other, and Joseph Church, a critic, points out that “If Danforth forgoes spirit for body, Owen does the reverse, giving up the body altogether… he seems to have too rigorously ignored or denied his body and now as a man he appears especially diminutive, ‘like a child’” (Church par. 4). Owen neglects his body throughout the story trying as hard as he can to reject the idea of brute force, and Hawthorne never necessarily praises or denounces him for that letting the reader decide how much of a sacrifice an artist should take and if Owen’s sacrifice was worth his final creation. Even as opposites, Robert visits Owen in the story bringing him an anvil as gift but it distresses Owen so much it causes him to accidently break his Butterfly causing him to go on a hiatus for a period of time, with Hawthorne explaining that “ideas, which grow up within the imagination and appear so lovely to it and of a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are exposed to be shattered and annihilated by contact with the practical.” (Hawthorne 5). The strength and logic of the world hunts down artists as Robert did to Owen, attacking their unique creativity as it must be up