scarlet letter criticism essays

Nathaniel Hawthorne is the strange American author who has never been out of fashion; since his death in 1864, his stories and novels have resisted the tides of taste, canon reformation, and critical vicissitude. Herman Melville had to be “rediscovered” in the 1920s, Henry James fell out with the social realists of the 1930s (ditto Edith Wharton), and today formerly acclaimed novelists like William Dean Howells seem quaint or antiquated when placed alongside Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Toni Morrison. Not Hawthorne. Henry James, William Faulkner, Robert Lowell, Flannery O’Connor, John Updike, Philip Roth—even Morrison herself—have had to come to terms with his work, as if Hawthorne were their literary father, which in a way he was, and even today writers as different from one another as Baharti Mukherjee, Paul Auster, Susan Lori Parks, Rick Moody, and Stephen King continue to refashion his tales and novels. And this cursory list does not even begin to include a multitude of Hawthorne-inspired plays, films, and operas. Take The Scarlet Letter. Just four years ago, an inventive New York City high school teacher asked me if I would come to her English class and talk about the novel with her students, almost all of whom spoke English as a second language. Consenting, I entered the plain cement-block public school by passing through a metal detector and found myself among a polyglot group of teenagers who, one after another, opened their dog-eared copies of The Scarlet Letter to read me passages aloud and then explain why Hester didn’t rat out Roger Chillingworth (partly she feared him, partly she resented Dimmesdale), why Reverend Dimmesdale seemed so weak (he was an egotist), why the Puritans dreaded the forest (it represented the scary unknown). Then they asked whether Hester’s illegitimate daughter, Pearl, was nuts. And they had other questions, too, just the sort.
Introduction Nathaniel Hawthorne had deep bonds with his Puritan ancestors and created a story that both highlighted their weaknesses and their strengths. His knowledge of their beliefs and his admiration for their strengths were balanced by his concerns for their rigid and oppressive rules.The Scarlet Letter shows his attitude toward these Puritans of Boston in his portrayal of characters, his plot, and the themes of his story. The early Puritans who first came to America in 1620 founded a precarious colony in Plymouth, Massachusetts. While half the colonists died that first year, the other half were saved by the coming spring and the timely intervention of the Indians. These first settlers were followed ten years later by a wave of Puritans that continued in the 1630s and thereafter, until, by the 1640s, New England had over twenty-five thousand English settlers. The second group in the 1630s settled in the area of present-day Boston in a community they named Massachusetts Bay Colony. It is this colony that forms the setting of The Scarlet Letter. City upon a Hill The Puritans left the Old World because they wanted to purify the Church of England. Their chief complaints were that the services should be simpler and that religion should contain an intense spiritual relationship between the individual and God. In England, the clergy and the government mediated in the relationship between the individual and God. Because the Puritans chose to defy these assumptions, they were persecuted in England. A group of them fled to Holland and subsequently to the New World, where they hoped to build a society, described by John Winthrop, as a city upon a hill — a place where the eyes of all people are upon us. In such a place and as long as they followed His words and did their work to glorify His ways, God would bless them, and they would prosper. Hawthorne, of course, presents.
Introduction Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of the most prolific symbolists in American literature, and a study of his symbols is necessary to understanding his novels. Generally speaking, a symbol is something used to stand for something else. In literature, a symbol is most often a concrete object used to represent an idea more abstract and broader in scope and meaning — often a moral, religious, or philosophical concept or value. Symbols can range from the most obvious substitution of one thing for another, to creations as massive, complex, and perplexing as Melville's white whale in Moby Dick. An allegory in literature is a story where characters, objects, and events have a hidden meaning and are used to present some universal lesson. Hawthorne has a perfect atmosphere for the symbols in The Scarlet Letter because the Puritans saw the world through allegory. For them, simple patterns, like the meteor streaking through the sky, became religious or moral interpretations for human events. Objects, such as the scaffold, were ritualistic symbols for such concepts as sin and penitence. Whereas the Puritans translated such rituals into moral and repressive exercises, Hawthorne turns their interpretations around in The Scarlet Letter. The Puritan community sees Hester as a fallen woman, Dimmesdale as a saint, and would have seen the disguised Chillingworth as a victim — a husband betrayed. Instead, Hawthorne ultimately presents Hester as a woman who represents a sensitive human being with a heart and emotions; Dimmesdale as a minister who is not very saint-like in private but, instead, morally weak and unable to confess his hidden sin; and Chillingworth as a husband who is the worst possible offender of humanity and single-mindedly pursuing an evil goal. Hawthorne's embodiment of these characters is denied by the Puritan mentality: At the end of the novel, even watching and.
Critical Analysis of the Scarlet Letter: The Difference Between Hester and Dimmesdale The ways in which Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale acknowledged, accepted, and repented their sins were completely opposite each other. Hester, although she did not have much of a choice, openly accepted her punishment for committing adultery. She struggled with her conscience as she raised her child, Pearl, and dealt with being the town outcast. Dimmesdale lived a cowardly life. He hid behind the respect his title afforded him with the townspeople (Loring, 254). He would not be seen in public with Hester and Pearl, but he would meet with them in the forest (Hawthorne, 151) and at night on the scaffold (Hawthorne, 111). It was only on his deathbed that he confessed to being Pearl’s father (Hawthorne, 180).If he had not been near death, the town may never have known the truth. The same sentiments are echoed in George Bailey Loring’s “Hester versus Dimmesdale”. Arthur Dimmesdale, it seemed, was in a sort of denial. He knew what he and Hester did, but he did not confess it. By having not admitted the sin out loud, he may have thought that it was not real. He created his own hell, which he alone knew, and which Chillingworth got quite close to finding. But his repentance was not for his sin; he hardly thought of that. His was inspired by his “ sorrow for sin, and which grows out of fear of consequences ” (Loring, 254). With each day, Dimmesdale grew paler and weaker. Had he sought redemption for his sin, he may have grown stronger and wiser. His cowardice and selfishness “ added tenfold disgrace and ignominy to his original crime ” (Loring, 253). Hester, on the contrary, bore her shame publicly. On her chest she wore a bright, scarlet red “A” embroidered by her hand, and outlined in gold thread (Hawthorne, 44). She did not rely on anyone. She did not expect to be offered any help to.
Since its publication in 1850, The Scarlet Letter has never been out of print, nor indeed out of favor with literary critics. It is inevitably included in listings of the five or ten greatest American novels, and it is considered the best of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings. It may also be the most typical of his work, the strongest statement of his recurrent themes, and an excellent example of his craftsmanship. The main theme in The Scarlet Letter, as in most of Hawthorne’s work, is that of sin and its effects both on the individual and on society. It is frequently noted that Hawthorne’s preoccupation with sin springs from the Puritan-rooted culture in which he lived and from his knowledge of two of his own ancestors who presided over bloody persecutions during the Salem witchcraft trials. It is difficult for readers from later times to comprehend the grave importance that seventeenth century New Englanders placed on transgression of the moral code. As Yvor Winters has pointed out, the Puritans, believing in predestination, viewed the commission of any sin as evidence of the sinner’s corruption and preordained damnation. The harsh determinism and moralism of those early years softened somewhat by Hawthorne’s day, and during the twelve years he spent in contemplation and semi-isolation, he worked out his own notions about human will and human nature. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne proves to be closer to Paul Tillich than to Cotton Mather or Jonathan Edwards. Like Tillich, Hawthorne saw sin not as an act but as a state—what existentialists refer to as alienation and what Tillich describes as a threefold separation from God, other humans, and self. Such alienation needs no fire and brimstone as consequence; it is in itself a hell. There is a certain irony in the way in which this concept is worked out in The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne’s pregnancy forces her sin.
Critical Analysis: The Scarlet Letter Length: 1275 words (3.6 double-spaced pages) Rating: Red (FREE)   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - In the book The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne is convicted of adultery and ordered to wear the scarlet letter A on her chest as a permanent sign of her sin. Hester is sentenced to never take off this badge of shame, and doesn't until chapter thirteen. As the novel proceeds, Hawthorne presents several questions that are left unanswered. How does the nature of the letter A seem to change? What role of does Hester's own response to her situation play in changing the meaning of the letter A ? How does the letter A come to be seen as a symbol of the mysterious connection between human experiences (sinful in nature) and a kind of wisdom that would be impossible without failure? Why does Hester not tell who Pearl's father is when she is on the scaffold? Hawthorne does not tell us very much about Hester's life before the book opens. Actually, the passionate moment between Hester and Arthur that the whole book is centered around was left out. Hawthorne relies more on the emotional and psychological drama that surrounds Hester, than action. Hawthorne shows us how remarkable Hester's character is, revealed through her public humiliation, and her isolated life in Puritan society. Her inner strength and compassion may have been there the whole time, as we don't know because we weren't told anything about Hester before the book opens, but the scarlet A does bring all these qualities to our attention as we read the book. Hester is physically described in the first scaffold scene as a tall young woman with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. Her most impressive feature is her dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam. Her complexion is rich, her eyes are dark and.