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The scarlet letter by hawthorne essay
Scarlet letter as a literary response to Puritanism
The scarlet letter by hawthorne essay
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The exception indicated the ever relentless vigour with which society frowned upon her sin.” (Hawthorn, pg 48.) Even years after she committed adultery, her reputation was still so foul that the townsfolk would not allow her to make things deemed “pure.” They thought it was inappropriate. Still later, seven years after Hester was forced to stand upon the scaffold, the minister Arthur Dimmesdale announced that he was the one Hester committed adultery with, and then fell down, dead.
In this book, Hawthorne details an elaborate story showing the consequences of confessing sins in contrast to concealing it. A sin weighing down on you and destroying you from the inside out is a moral consequence and, the only remedy is confessing the sin. This notion can be seen in the difference between Hester and Dimmesdale with how they handled the scarlet letter and the effects of that. Hester had worn her scarlet letter out for the public to see from the very beginning. She the subject of a lot of the town’s scrutiny.
We are all sinners, no matter how hard we try to hide our faults, they always seem to come back, one way or another. Written in the 19th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne shows us Hester Prynne and how one sin can change her life completely. Hester Prynne changes a great deal throughout The Scarlet Letter. Through the view of the Puritans, Hester is an intense sinner; she has gone against the Puritan way of life committing the highest act of sin, adultery. For committing such a sinful act, Hester must wear the scarlet letter while also having to bear stares from those that gossip about her.
However, in The Scarlet Letter Hester accepts her sin: “Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost; more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom” (Hawthorne 56).
Considering the townspeople’s reactions toward Hester’s sin of adultery, it can be concluded that in the Puritan era, religion was of utmost importance, and the Puritans met sins with extremely harsh punishments. Because the majority of the Puritan town viewed Hester as a disgrace, she became “Lonely . . . and without a friend on earth” (56). This made it effortless for the inhabitants of the town to continue to insult and degrade Hester because they did not care to learn her true personality. While a few civilians had sympathy for Hester, the town mostly regarded her as shameful and
(73 Hawthorne) Hester accepted her decision and all the consequences that came with it going as far to say “here..had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment.” (74 Hawthorne) Her guilt also motivated her to make the best of her situation by doing what she can. “[She] incurred no
The sunlight entering the dark forest casting joy and rejuvenation upon the shadows parallels the emotions that come with casting something off that has defined her for so long. The relief is felt within Hester when the conflict is resolved between social obligations and personal feelings. The release Hester feels comes from and end of fighting her responsibility to the community by wearing the scarlet letter and being defined by her sin. All her life in the puritan community had been a struggle to keep her spirited personality against the community trying to brand her as a bad person and once she is free from the community’s judgements, represented by the letter, the pleasure felt comes from the release of her life long
Nathaniel Hawthorne, a famous American author from the antebellum period, notices the emphasis on individual freedoms in the works by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists during his residency in the Brook Farm’s community. In response to these ideas, Hawthorne writes The Scarlet Letter, a historical novel about Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale’s lives as they go through ignominy, penance, and deprecation from their Puritan community to express their strong love for each other. Their love, even though it is true, is not considered as holy nor pure because of Hester past marriage to Roger Chillingworth, and thus Hester gained the Scarlet Letter for being an adulterer. Hawthorne utilizes biblical allusions, such as the stories of
The townspeople “[began] to look upon the scarlet letter as a token, not of that one sin, for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance, but of her many good deeds since.” This quote exemplifies how sin is not a death sentence for Hester. Through hard work and charity it allowed the rigid Puritan society to see her as something different, and as someone who would not let society define who she was. Hester, thus, was not only able to change herself, but also the image in which society viewed her by working hard to benefit the public. Likewise, the scarlet letter which was supposed to represent sin was instead “fantastically embroidered with gold thread, upon her bosom.”
One of the biggest issues in today 's society is the affordability of continuing education. The increasing cost of tuition over the last couple decades have forced young adults and teenagers to make one of the hardest decisions of their life. They have to make a choice on either putting themselves in debt that could sometimes exceed over $200,000 or battle it out in today 's struggling economy with nothing more than a high school diploma. Now, this should not be the case, everyone should have the opportunity to continue their education without putting themselves at risk or in a situation where income after graduation heavily outweighs their tuition cost. For example, in Kelsey Griffiths case, she is graduating on Sunday from Ohio Northern
Throughout the history of literature, forests or woods were used to symbolise a lost in morals or spirituality. The devil or The Black man was used to symbolise corruption or evil. Nathaniel Hawthorne uses forests and The Black Man to embody the spiritual and moral struggles of Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth in his novel The Scarlet Letter. The first time Roger Chillingworth appears to the readers, is during the first scaffold scene. He was deformed and hunchbacked.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, The Scarlet Letter, the protagonist, Hester Prynne is a Romantic Hero. Throughout The Scarlet Letter, we see Hester Prynne’s struggle in Colonial America after she is condemned by the Puritan society. She is sent to America by her husband, but he never returns, and Hester later conceives a child with the local minister. She is convicted with the crime of adultery, but refuses to identify the father, she is then forced to wear the Scarlet Letter. The novel captures her experience as she struggles to survive the guilt, sin, and revenge.
When Hester finally takes off the scarlet letter “A” and her cape in the wilderness, it not only represents the beauty she held despite the emotional punishment she underwent, but it also represents her removing the Puritan and patriarch society holding her back. Hester’s feminist conscious is intricately portrayed throughout the
Receiving the scarlet letter changed every aspect of Hester’s life. Especially at the start of the story, the letter symbolized the solitude and great suffering Hester faced just because of a letter placed on her bosom. The “A” also depicted how no one viewed Hester the same way as before her peccant actions. “…she saw that, owing to the peculiar effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet letter was represented in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be greatly the most prominent feature of her appearance” (Hawthorne 109). The pejorative community Hester lived in never saw Hester as the beautiful, young woman she was, but now, as a horrible fiend.
In the “Scarlet Letter,” Nathaniel Hawthorne portrays hypocrisy of the Puritan society, where the protagonist Hester Prynne face many consequences of her actions and the how she tries to redeem herself to the society. During the seventeenth puritans believe that it is their mission to punish the ones who do not follow God’s word and it is their job to stop those from sinning. Therefore, the hypercritical puritan society punishes Hester harshly for committing adultery, but in Hester’s mind, she believes that what she did was not a sin but acts of love for her man. Eventually, she redeems herself by turning her crime into an advantage to help those in need, yet the Puritan society still view her as a “naughty bagger.” (Hawthorne 78)
