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Puritans In Nathanial Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

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American novelist and short story author, Nathanial Hawthorne, in his symbolic novel, The Scarlet Letter, describes the Puritans and their community. Hawthorn’s purpose is to convey the idea that, despite the contrary, the Puritans were not able to recognize the unjustness of their society and immoral treatment towards others. He adopts a bitter tone in order to disprove the common belief that Puritans were exemplary, pure, and innocent. Hawthorn begins Chapter Two of the Scarlet Letter, The Market Place, by depicting the scene. The scene takes place on Prison Lane, a street with a jail on one side and a stage for public executions and punishments held on the other. A crowd of people is waiting to see someone, “all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door.” For eyes to be intently fastened on a door is physically impossible, so Hawthorne uses it as a metaphor to demonstrate the crowd’s eagerness to see who will be coming out from the other side of the door. The “iron-clamped oaken door” can be split into three parts, the “iron-clamped” characteristic of the door, the “oaken” characteristic of the door, and the “door” itself. The door, itself, symbolizes a threshold separating nature and society. The …show more content…

The words “grim rigidity” emphasizes Hawthorne’s perspective of the Puritans, portraying their severity as forbidding and uninviting. The word “petrified,” defined as the act of being so terrified one could simply not move, is used to define other’s fear of the Puritans. Hawthorne’s animosity towards the Puritans is highlighted with his negatively loaded

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By negatively depicting the Puritans with his depressing diction, Hawthorne establishes a scornful tone that highlights the Puritan’s

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“The scarlet letter was represented in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be greatly the most prominent feature of her appearance. In truth, she seemed absolutely hidden behind it.” (120) Hawthorne’s description of the distorted scarlet letter illustrates the townspeople’s prejudiced view of

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Way back in the 17th century the Puritan religion was the leading religion in The New World. Their religious beliefs were strict especially in Salem, Massachusetts. They had extreme punishments for for laws even in the case of a minor offense. The punishments were based of the laws created by their religious beliefs. Hawthorne uses several examples of foreshadowing in “The Scarlet Letter” that reflects the strict beliefs of their society.

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Powerful or Powerless The novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding is an interesting novel that shows many different circumstances that happen to civilization, for better or for worse, through the actions of children. Ralph, the main character, and Piggy open up the novel, strolling through the woods on this island that they have been stranded on after surviving a horrible plane crash. From their knowledge, there were no adults that survived the crash, but there were other boys on the island that they had yet to meet. By coincidence, they found a perfect conch shell in a pond nearby, and they summoned up their first meeting where Ralph and Piggy met Jack, a character that thinks he is born to be the leader and doesn’t care what anybody else thinks about it.

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When you think of a Puritan society, what comes to your mind? Perfect, flawless, and a religion based on following God? Well, that is what it says on paper, but is it really that perfect? Throughout the Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne jabs at the Puritans in an attempt to portray just how flawed they really are. After reading the book, you want to think that Hawthorne is telling the story of sinning in a Puritan society.

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The exploration of societal pressures. Life can be separated into two equal parts totally independent from one another. The inner self, being the innermost thoughts and feelings of the individual, and the outer self, how the individual decides to conduct itself around the others in society. Often times one of these parts takes control of the other, suppressing its partner. The suppression is often not of equal frequency because of the obligation humans feel to be liked and to fit in causes the outermost self to be given the most thought and worry.

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With this setting, Hawthorne uses a character as a pawn in order to express his ideal of what is wrong with the Puritan faith, this character being Mr. Hooper. Hawthorne implies, through his depiction of Hooper’s beliefs and actions, that all humans are sinful and how all try to hide their sinfulness from one another because of how afraid mankind is to be singled out as evil, and viewed upon negatively by God. Mr. Hooper, the minister of the town’s church, is a man who would have been an ideal Puritan in their own terms. He was “self disciplined” (Hawthorne 1), a man of God, and someone envied by all. But Mr. Hooper was his own faith’s worst nightmare, a man full of sin.

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However, he also uses these allusions to create a new side to his narrative as evident when he describes Hester’s resilience, and to create a new element in the plot as evident in his description of Dimmesdale’s penance and need for redemption. Therefore, Hawthorne demonstrates an effective use of allusions to craft a religious and detailed narrative for The Scarlet Letter by reviewing on parallels between the Bible and the novel’s main characters. There’s more to The Scarlet Letter than these allusions though, and there are many questions to answer about this book. These questions may never be answered fully, but by reading the novel itself, we might find the right places to start searching for answers and formulate our own opinions on the matter. What’s important from this novel is the realistic warning about what might happens when an individual place themselves too highly among others, a message Hawthorne writes to warn against the fervor of transcendentalism of his time.

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Literary Devices in The Scarlet Letter Literary devices are often used to capture a reader’s attention in a text. Nathaniel Hawthorne used many different types of literary devices in his book The Scarlet Letter. He uses symbolism to give hidden meaning to elements in the story, conflict to make the story interesting, and allusion to make references to historical events (ex. biblical references). While reading The Scarlet Letter, the literary devices did not jump out at me, but now as I reflect upon them they help me understand the book well. Literary devices can make a passage have a whole different meaning.

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The Prison Door In this Chapter from The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne introduces the setting of the book in Boston. He uses a gloomy and depressed tone in the beginning of the chapter. He is able to convey this tone using imagery while describing the citizens, the prison, and the cemetery. However, as he continues to discuss the rose-bush, he uses parallelism to shift the tone to be brighter and joyful. To create a gloomy and depressed tone, Hawthorne uses imagery.

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The Scarlet Letter, a novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850, functions as an evaluation of Puritan ideas, customs, and culture during the 17th century. Through this evaluation, we can get a good idea of what core values and beliefs the Puritans possessed, as well as the actions they take in cases of adversity brought about by “sinners”. Some Puritan virtues created stark divisions between groups of people, some of which led to discrimination under certain circumstances. One of the most prominent of these is the treatment and standards of men and women, a concept that surfaced during some of the major points in The Scarlet Letter. The divisions that were created by Puritan standards of men and women played a great role in shaping the plot of The Scarlet Letter, determining the fate of many of the characters.

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The Scarlet Letter and Uses of the Puritan Past illustrate various aspects of the cultural values in Puritanism and their societal impacts. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne depicts Puritanism as a bleak, strict cultural instance in which people who do not conform to their rules are shunned and distanced from society. In Uses of the Puritan Past, Puritan culture is described as a social construct based on four primary virtues. These virtues were the main influence of Puritan activity in Uses of the Puritan Past, as they were responsible for the creation of social rules and essential morality resulting in increased power and influence of the Puritan over every day Puritan life in New England. Even though both The Scarlet Letter and Uses of the

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Amanda Vicente The Scarlet Letter Reading Response AP English Language Period J 16 August 2016 Journal Entry 1: Chapters 1-2 In The Scarlet Letter, the author sets a mood from the beginning of the book. The setting is old and beat up in front of an aged wooden prison with judgmental Puritans ready to tear a women apart. The Puritans are hypocrites and the author portrays that in the story.

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Point #1: Hawthorne effectively establishes a dark and gloomy atmosphere that adopts the conventions pertaining to the gothic genre by highlighting the oppressive nature of the Puritan society. • Use of dark imagery, and prison as a symbol of sin. • Juxtaposition

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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)

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