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Discuss Puritanism in Scarlet Letter
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In The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, adulteress Hester Prynne must wear a scarlet A to mark her shame. Her lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, remains unidentified and is wracked with guilt, while her husband, Roger Chillingworth who seeks revenge. In June 1642, A young woman named Hester Prynne was found guilty of adultery in the Puritan town of Boston. Then a crowd gathered to witness the punishment and now she must wear a scarlet A on her dress as a sign of shame.
Hester's True Side In committing an act of adultery, Hester Prynne, the primary character in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, finds herself a victim of harsh judgement and ridicule by her Puritan community. She becomes isolated as a result of this scandalous behavior and becomes emotionally involved in a love triangle between her husband and her lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, who is the town minister. As a result of her shameful history, the townspeople attempt to destroy and embarrass her by socially neglecting her and labeling her as an outcast and loner. Though the people of the community pursue several attempts to shame her, Hester Prynne's beauty, selflessness, and strength help her overcome this rejection from the townspeople and
In the beginning of the Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne introduces the main character Hester Prynne, a young, beautiful member of a Puritan society being punished for her sin of love, not lust. The opening chapters introduce the reader to gossips who deem her original punishment, death, too harsh and contrary to Puritan beliefs that unborn babies should be given a chance at life. Instead, Hester and her child are to be alienated and shunned. In addition she is to wear the letter ‘A’ (which stands for ‘adultery’) on her chest which will forever display her as a symbol of shame for her sin. Though a very resilient figure who soon overcomes this pain, Hester’s isolation takes a negative toll on her life.
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.
Although publicly admitting to sin can be a challenging task, time will heal the initial pain. Hester Prynne, of the Scarlet Letter, lives this lesson as she commits the sin of adultery. Her punishment for the sin is to wear the letter “A” on her bosom until she is allowed to remove it by the Puritan authorities wishes. Initially, Hester feels guilt and shame as she wears it. As Hester’s character grows in strength, she overcomes the letter’s original purpose of punishment.
The Puritan belief and lifestyle plays a major role in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter. The story takes place in Puritan New England, and opens with a scene presenting to the audience that a young woman named Hester Prynne has committed adultery. Wearing her punishment proudly, a scarlet letter “A” on her breast, Hester continues to live in New England where she raises her daughter and creates an embroidering business for herself. All the while, in the heart of the town, Hester’s lover and the child’s father, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale silently suffers and is ultimately overcome with guilt from his secret sin until the point of death.
The book The Scarlet Letter was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and it is about a woman who had committed a sin in a Puritan town at a time when the United States had just been founded. Her name was Hester Prynne, she had a husband, no kids, or older relatives. She had thought her husband was dead so she had moved on in her life and had relations with the reverend of the town, well her husband wasn’t dead, and since he wasn’t and they hadn’t been divorced. Since the town was puritan the rules were that you would be punished for your sins, Hester was punished for her sins by having to wear the scarlet letter.
Hester Prynne is the heroine of “The scarlet Letter”, and it is possible for us to fully sympathize with her because Through reading the text “The Scarlet Letter” we can find out Hester Prynne had a difficult life and had been suffering very much comparing to other characters because she handles her situation by keeping Dimmesdale a secret even under pressure refusing to let them take her daughter Pearl from her and not hiding from the public after her sin of adultery is revealed and she is punished. Though Hester Prynne does faced her situation better than the other characters it is still she who sufferers the most. The another reason which compel the reader to sympathize on Hester Prynne is because she had to under gone the worse consequences of her sin that she must live with her relationships and interactions with Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, and the way she deal with her sin and the results of it.
The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is one of the most famous and influential novels written in American literature. The story takes place in the seventeenth century in the Puritan settlement of Boston where a young woman named Hester Prynne is punished after having a daughter with a man who was not her husband. Though, instead of hanging Hester they spare her life because of her beauty. She is then shunned and forced to wear a scarlet “A” (for adultery) on her breast for the rest of her life, while, the “unknown” man who Hester had an affair with moves on with a guilt-filled life. The novel is a classic romance with it’s countless symbols tossed throughout the book.
The book The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne has symbolism all throughout it. People and objects are symbolic of events and thoughts. Throughout the book, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses Hester, Pearl, and Arthur Dimmesdale to signify philosophies that are evident during this time period. Hester Prynne, through the eyes of the Puritans, is an extreme sinner; she has gone against their ways, committing adultery. For this sin, she must wear a symbol of shame for the rest of her life.
Imagine living in a place where one small sin could define who you are for the rest of your life. That is what happened in The Scarlet Letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850. The novel is set in a seventeenth-century Puritan community in Boston, Massachusetts. A young woman by the name of Hester Prynne commits a small act of adultery and is shamed for the rest of her life, by wearing a scarlet letter “A” on her breast. The book is centered around the theme of justice and judgement.
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
Feminism is the philosophy advocating equal political, economic, and social rights for women. The idea of feminism was not at all prevalent during the 1850s when Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter was published. In spite of this, Hawthorne wrote one of the most influential feminist novels of his time: The Scarlet Letter. This novel was hailed as an important feminist novel because of the main character: Hester Prynne.
In the very beginning of the novel The Scarlet Letter, the author starts with a puzzling discovery of an old manuscript in the attic along with a rag of scarlet cloth with the letter “A” sewn on it. As the mysterious tone arouses a sense of curiosity in the reader, the suspense takes hold and the author begins his story. The attention then switches to Hester Prynne, a young woman condemned for committing adultery, and the mood transforms into a more sardonic yet heartfelt sympathy for the poor girl. When Dimmesdale and Chillingworth are introduced, the tone switches between the truth of righteousness and true malevolence. Then as Pearl comes into play, she is the symbol of Hester's sin, but the author still introduces her with an innocent tone.
The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, was published in 1850. It focuses on the life of the main protagonist, Hester Prynne, living in a Puritan community. Both Yamin Wang and Maria Stromberg offer insight into The Scarlet Letter and analyze multiple aspects of the story.. Both Wang and Stromberg claim that there is an underlying ideology hidden in the texts of the book. Wang approaches the story from a feminist approach and states that Hester represents the feminism in the Puritan community, and she analyzes the Puritan’s outlook on women in their society.
