1. I empathize with Hester Prynne in the book of The Scarlet Letter. She survives through guilt, hopelessness, and loneliness throughout the novel. Like the letter A that is sown on her bossom, Hester is the symbol of sin in the Puritan society she lives in. Guilt is something everyone can relate to. It is something we all hate but is, sadly, inevitable. As Nathaniel Hawthorne says, “...guilt...once made into the human soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired” (75). Guilt is a never
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne uses an admirable character, Reverend Dimmesdale, in order to portray that being a hypocrite is one of the worst sins that one can commit. Hawthorne uses hypocrisy as a major theme of the novel. Consequently, Hawthorne is able to express his hatred of the Puritanical society, by proving to the readers that the majority of Puritans were hypocritical. Throughout the novel, poor Hester Prynne had to face the evil Puritans by herself, and bravely wore the Scarlet letter
he went by in his writings. In 1850, Hawthorne wrote what is considered to be his greatest novel, The Scarlet Letter. The novel is set in a Puritan community in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1640s. Hester Pryne is a young woman in the town that performs an act of adultery with a man unknown throughout most of the novel. She is forced to wear an ‘A’ on her breast, which is called ‘The Scarlet Letter’,
An analysis of The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, reveals several symbols, one of the most prominent being the scarlet letter. Throughout the novel the scarlet letter contributes to the plot by being the object of concern. Nearly every event in the novel is due to the scarlet letter and its significance to others. The scarlet letter takes several forms throughout the novel, first being adultery and sin. Branded on her chest by the letter glowing with scarlet, Hester Prynne is commanded to
To what extent and with what success are the characters Hester and Pearl used to critique Puritan values? Hawthorne criticises the Puritan values throughout ‘The Scarlet Letter’, mainly through the characters Hester and Pearl, in how they are treated in society by the Puritan people, using the town’s people to represent the hypocrisy of Puritans. He forces the reader to sympathise with Hester and her illegitimate child as Hawthorne commits to a strong yet subtle negativity towards the Puritan society
The Scarlet Letter carries many themes and one major theme is “sin”. As the three main characters carry on many sins throughout the this novel which are Dimmesdale, Chillingsworth, and Hester Prynne. These three major characters carry a big role in the society, Dimmesdale being the minister and Chillingsworth being the doctor and Hester being a housewife. In the novel Hester wears her sin on her chest the letter “A” reminding her of her sin every single day of her life. There is Dimmesdale who
In Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, one of the characters faces the struggle of having to keep a secret. The use of deception to achieve one self’s goals, or to hide one’s past, is a theme present in the novel. In this novel, some characters use deception to hide secrets from themselves and from the rest of the town. Their choice to reveal or keep a secret affects how the characters change throughout the novel and how the novel progresses as a whole. Instead of demonstrating that keeping a secret
not care enough to have an opinion. The ones applauding him show how normal and even idolized judgement is. Many people approved of his
Everything begins in a seventeenth century settlement which back then was a puritan society. A young woman, whose name is Hester Prynne, is taken from the parish prison with her little baby, Pearl, in her arms and the scarlet letter “A” perfectly visible in her breast. Nathaniel Hawthorne shows us immediately what is happening by exposing the people’s comments. A man explained to another that the woman had been punished for adultery. Hester’s arrived a long time ago there. She had been sent by her
by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter, is shown to be extremely hypocritical. Shown in the book, the Puritans love to criticize others, and refuse to think that they might be wrong themselves, even when their actions go against their own religion. Also, Puritan society is hypocritical because they said they only worried about God’s grace, when in reality they only talked about sin and how bad people were, like the words of Jonathan Edwards. Puritan hypocrisy can be shown through the pride