Advanced Placement language and Composition 30 October 2014 The Scarlet Letter Essay Every person is colorful; no one is absolutely good or bad. The sum of our actions might be the measure of our morality but in reality, each event does not have a specific value and so the sum is questionable. The value of a person’s soul, at the same time, cannot be determined as good or bad because we are made up equally of both. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hawthorne portrays moral ambiguity through
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