The Scarlet Letter Essay The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is an intriguing novel that uses romanticism and symbolism to depict a natural setting throughout the book in various ways. Also, the novel’s many representations create a specific theme in the novel, which is man and the natural world. Additionally, The Scarlet Letter uses romanticism as a way of describing sin. Romanticism is a literary movement of the late 1700’s which poets created an effect of individualism, an emotional ecstasy
Throughout The Scarlet Letter, mostly in the beginning and the middle, one can see that Hawthorne is struggling between the two ideas of Christianity and Romanticism. The characters, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale display these two opposing qualities simultaneously. However, although Hawthorne struggled with the deadlock between Christianity and Romanticism throughout the story, he concluded the book with the victory of the Christian worldview. To begin with, Hester is mostly Romantic concerning
time in which great pieces of literature were written. The early 1800’s gave way to many of the worlds most famous writers. From the poetic stylings of Edgar Allen Poe in the “The Raven,” to the literary stylings of Nathaniel Hawthorne in “The Scarlet Letter,” the Romantic Period served as a basis of all future literary works. These writers all had one thing in common, the elements around which they wrote. Through the use of the supernatural, Hawthorne and Poe demonstrate that society has strong feelings
Hester’s exclamation in chapter 17 of The Scarlet Letter, “What we did had a consecration of its own!” (Hawthorne, 1992, p.236), attains particular significance when it is considered within the novel’s American Renaissance context. Consecration refers to sacredness; a theme which also surfaces also in Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself and. I am going to argue that both Hawthorne and Whitman present sacredness in their works in ways which would have been controversial within their Nineteenth Century
hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny. Frederick William Robertson. Seventeenth century Puritan civilization: Boston Massachusetts. The narrator depicts Puritan society as drab, confining, unforgiving, and narrow-minded that unfairly victimizes Hester. In The Scarlet Letter, the Puritans appear as shallow hypocrites whose opinion of Hester and Pearl improves only when they become more of an asset to the community, most notably when Hester becomes a seamstress and Pearl inherits a fortune from Chillingworth. The novel
The Scarlet Letter involves quite a few themes that can be related to today including: playing the role of God, sin, and guilt. People continue to play the role of God throughout our society, just as thwey did in the 17th century in Bostin, Massachusetts. Society declined on their morales, and haave lessened the definition of sin. Guilt was and is a major theme in our world, and more thatn likely will continuie to be a major part of out world. The Scarlet Letter has so many themes, and the individual
The Scarlet Letter Essay on Personal and Public Truths The Scarlet Letter was written in the 1850’s by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a custom house worker. Hawthorne wrote this historical fiction novel after he was fired from his job due to political reasons. He wrote this story to portray the story of a woman named Hester Prynne as he found some documents on her at the custom house before his departure. This novel includes fictional and non-fictional characters to add to historical background and to make
The Scarlet Letter is a well-known book that has been praised for its historical context and romantic literature. Some of the literary techniques that Hawthorne uses in Chapter 9, are metaphor, setting, irony, and tone. During this moment in The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses many of these literary techniques to describe Chillingworth's personality and motives to the reader as evil and disgusting. Now metaphor may be the first noticeable use of literary technique to describe Chillingworth's
In the Nathaniel’s Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter we see a hierarchy of sins. Roger Chillingworth’s pursuit of revenge is considered a "worse sin" than the passion that led Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale to commit adultery. All the characters recognize that sin will be punished, if not on earth immediately, than by God after death. The puritans believed many sins were punishable by death. Hester is spared execution because the Puritans of Boston decided it would benefit the community to transform
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a novel about adultery. The main character, Hester has an affair with Reverend Dimmesdale who doesn’t know that his physician, Chillingworth is actually Hester's husband. Hester also has a daughter, Pearl that is extremely smart and understands that something’s wrong with Dimmesdale when he clutches his heart. There are several important themes that vary from negative to positive that are discussed in the Scarlet Letter. The book focuses mostly on the