Hester Prynne and Christ Symbology
Nathaniel Hawthorne's character of Hester Prynne in the novel The Scarlet Letter remains one of the most powerful literary figures of all time and much has been made about her critically throughout the decades. Literary critics have compared her as an early feminist leader and others have compared her to a magical superhero. This paper intends to discuss how Hawthorne actually works very hard to consistently develop Hester Prynne into Christ-like figure through description and deed. Hawthorne's development of Hester in this manner manifests as a scathing criticism towards the puritan religion as a whole.
Nathaniel Hawthorne began to make a strong case in asserting that Hester Prynne was indeed a Christ-like figure and elevated above the baseness of the New England Puritanical religion from his very first description of Hester Prynne. Hawthorne begins slowly, establishing that Hester is a commanding, regal figure: "The young woman was…...
mlaReferences
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 2013. website. December 2013.
Lewes, Darby. Auto-poetica: Representations of the Creative Process in Nineteenth-century. Lousiville: Lexington Books, 2006. Print.
Ryan, Susan M. The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence. New York: Cornell University Press, 2004. Book.
Ushistory.org. Puritan Life. n.d. website. December 2013.
First, her sin is committed out of love and not from any negative motive, and second, her quietness and industriousness afforded her the time for self-reflection that led to her change and salvation.
Abigail, in contrast has no family in the Crucible. She latches on to John Proctor as a sort of father/husband substitute, reflecting the twisted nature of her character. Her manipulation of the other girls also reflects the lack of early family relationships. The culture of Salem in the play is also different from Boston in the Scarlet Letter; the people are far more selfish and greedy, and the availability of land creates a very different dynamic amongst the people that fosters Abigail's evil tendencies. At heart, however, Abigail is simply a self-centered and shortsighted girl. These two personal attributes are the main cause of her downfall, just as Hester's innate goodness is the main source of her…...
Hester Prynne: Courage and Integrity Incarnate The novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne depicts the struggle of Hester Prynne in attempting to live by the standards set by her own internal guidelines. This creates a great deal of conflict as she is forced to confront the standards set by the Puritan society of Colonial America for what is considered decent behavior. At the opening of the book, so much has already happened: Hester Prynne’s husband (Roger Chillingworth) was shipwrecked and captured by native people—many thought he had unfortunately perished. The town’s religious leader Arthur Dimmesdale offers Hester an understanding ear and shoulder to cry on, but this leads to an affair that results in the birth of Hester’s daughter Pearl, born out of wedlock. Thus, it is very revelatory about these townspeople that they offer Hester very little understanding for the ways that she has suffered. Instead she is just…...
But because of her own inner strengths as a woman of character, Hester goes against all of the principles of Puritan society and ends up spoiled and ruined by bigotry and prejudice.
As to the themes found in the Scarlet Letter, it is clear that Hawthorne meant to tell a moral story with Hester Prynne as the main focus. Perhaps Hawthorne was attempting to tell the reader that Hester Prynne, due to her innate compassion and defiance of Puritan law and customs, stands as a literary symbol of non-conformity which in the end of the story causes her to be cast out and admonished for her sins. After all, Hester's physical beauty appears to have created in the eyes of the men in her village a "halo of misfortune and ignominy," two negative traits which "enveloped" her entire inner and outer self, much like the scarlet "A" on her dress....
In conclusion, these works all illustrate the changing role of women in 19th century society. At the beginning of the century, women's work was inside the home and raising a family. By the end of the century, Victorian women were attempting to add meaning and fulfillment to their lives. Women in this country were attempting to gain the right to vote, they were forming women's groups and societies, and women like Gilman, Chopin, Wollstonecraft Shelley, and others, were attempting to create their own writing careers, allowing them to be at least partially autonomous and independent. They write of women's struggles for equality and understanding with great knowledge, skill, and perception. They also write of the realities of being a woman in the 19th century. For the most part, women's lives were unfulfilled and controlled by the men around them.
eferences
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening, and Other Stories. Ed. Knights, Pamela. Oxford: Oxford…...
mlaReferences
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening, and Other Stories. Ed. Knights, Pamela. Oxford: Oxford University, 2000.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wall-Paper." The Online Archive of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writings. Ed. Glynis Carr. Fall 1999. 9 May 2008. http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/gcarr/19cUSWW/CPG/TYW.html
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. George Parsons Lathrop (Riverside Edition), 12 vols. Boston, 1890.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus. New York: Collier Books, 1961.
Lawrence often compares the mechanistic world of industrialize Britain with the world of nature, and the fecundity and sexuality of the natural world is seen as distorted by the mechanistic world that has developed in this century. In such a comparison, Clifford is on the side of the industrial world, while Connie comes out on the side of the natural world. Yet, this is not what society wants women to be, and yet it is also the reason women were so restricted by society, because they were viewed as dangerous threats to the natural order because of their inherent sexuality.
In Lawrence's conception, living according to nature precludes the possibility of sin, though society may see the issue in a different light. hile one could apply this idea to Hester and Tess as well, their authors clearly do not view the issue in that way, though they do find their…...
mlaWorks Cited
Benson, Larry D. The Riverside Chaucer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987.
Euripides. Ten Plays by Euripides. New York: Bantam, 1988.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbervilles. London: Macmillan, 1953.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Boston: Bedford Books, 1991.
Scarlet Letter
Modern day movies rarely do justice for the classics. The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne falls into that category. Even Demi Moore could not meet the genius of the original writing. "Demi Moore plays the strong-willed Hester Prynne brilliantly, and Gary Oldman (I want to marry him) turns Reverend Dimmesdale into an extremely complex and passionate character. The love between Hester Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale lasts throughout the movie with great intensity - all of it rooted in the one amazing love scene which leads to Prynne's pregnancy." (hen Love Becomes Sin) I loved reading The Scarlet Letter much more than the I did seeing the movie and this report is an attempt to explain why I think so highly of the written work.
Nathanial Hawthorne was a writer from Salem, Massachusetts where his famous home, the House of Seven Gables, still stands to this day. Surprisingly, Hawthorne was not…...
mlaWorks Cited
Eagen, Jr., Ken. "The adulteress in the market-place: Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter." Studies in the Novel 22 Mar. 1995.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York: Bantam Dell, 1850.
Savoy, Eric. "Filial duty": reading the patriarchal body in 'The Custom House." Studies in the Novel (12/22/1993).
Traister, Bryce. "The bureaucratic origins of The Scarlet Letter." Studies in American Fiction (2001).
Trace the development (or lack) of one of the major characters in the story, from beginning to end.
From the opening of The Scarlet Letter, when Hester Prynne stands alone on a scaffold, condemned by the Salem community, until the end when she stands with Arthur and Pearl on that same scaffold, Hester is a remarkably strong character. Unlike Arthur Dimmesdale, her partner in sin, who appears strong initially but weakens throughout the story, Hester grows even stronger as the story progresses. Hawthorne's early descriptions of Hester are of her physical beauty: she is . . . tall, with a figure of perfect elegance," with "dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine . . ." (Hawthorne, 1334). ithin Hester's proud, haughty bearing when we are first see her, we also glimpse traces of her rebellion and impetuousness (some of which become evident in Pearl), which, as…...
mlaWorks Cited
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed.
P. Lauter. Vol. 2. New York: Houghton, 2002. 2235-2386.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. The Norton Anthology American Literature. Eds. N.
Baym et al., 5th ed. Vol. 1. New York: Norton, 1998. 1306-1447.
hen Hester is first alone with Chillingworth, for instance, and in several preceding descriptions, she appears to be undergoing a process of destruction herself. She is immensely ashamed, and very aware of the eyes that dart furtively towards the letter emblazoned on her chest; she is too weak to think straight when Chillingworth administers a medicine to Pearl that could, for all Hester knows, be poison, and she is far too weak to resist Chillingworth's insistence that she keep his secrets.
Hester is the first of the three major characters, however, to make a transition to a stronger and more secure position with herself and with her sin; she has clearly found an inner redemption long before the others. The reason for this is the same as the reason that she is the first, and for the bulk of the book the only, character to acknowledge her sin -- Pearl.…...
mlaWork Cited
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York: Dover, 1994.
The only material similarity between Prynne's scarlet "badge" and Faith's pink ribbons is that both are made of cloth and adorn some type of clothing, i.e., Faith's ribbons are part of her cap while Prynne's "badge" is sewn into her dress as needlework.
The reader is first introduced to Prynne's "badge" in Chapter Two of the Scarlet Letter when she emerges from jail -- "On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter a." Upon being led to her "place of punishment" for committing adultery with Arthur Dimmesdale, all eyes are immediately drawn to the scarlet "A" which "had the effect of a spell, taking (Hester) out of the ordinary relations with humanity and enclosing her in a sphere by herself" (ell, 163-164). Obviously, this scarlet emblem upon Hester's dress seems to emit a life…...
mlaBibliography
Bell, Millicent, Ed. Nathaniel Hawthorne: Collected Novels and Short Stories. New York: The Library of America, 1983.
Richardson, Robert D., Jr. "Ralph Waldo Emerson." Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 59: "American Literary Critics and Scholars, 1800-1850." Ed. John W. Rathburn. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Research, Inc., 1987, 108-129.
Scarlett Letter
Review of the Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850. Hawthorne has been canonized in many literary circles and is widely recognized as one of the most famous writers of American literature. He wrote The Scarlet Letter at the age of 46, at a time in which he lived with his wife in Concord, Massachusetts. Hawthorne belonged to the Transcendentalist school of writers, which included notable New England writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; this group of writers were less indebted to religion than was common at the time, and preferred to look toward nature and individual thought as sources of wisdom. By the time that The Scarlet Letter was written, Hawthorne was already a well-established writer. He had published his first novel in 1828, a full 22 years before The Scarlet Letter. In this regard, The Scarlet Letter should be…...
American Lit
Definition of Modernism and Three Examples
Indeed, creating a true and solid definition of modernism is exceptionally difficult, and even most of the more scholarly critical accounts of the so-called modernist movement tend to divide the category into more or less two different movements, being what is known as "high modernism," which reflected the erudition and scholarly experimentalism of Eliot, Joyce, and Pound, and the so-called "low modernism" of later American practitioners, such as William Carlos Williams. Nonetheless, despite the problems of reification involved with such a task, I will attempt to invoke a definitions of at least some traits of modernism, as culled from the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics:
First, [in modernism] "realization" had to replace description, so that instead of copying the external world the work could render it in an image insisting on its own forms of reality... [and] Second, the poets develop collage techniques for…...
mlaBibliography
Preminger, Alex and Brogan T.V.F. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter explores the method of public shaming as a form of legitimate legal sentencing. In the novel, Hester Prynne has an affair with Reverend Dimmesdale. Even though her husband has practically abandoned her and lives in another country, she is punished for what was in Puritan America considered a crime. The punishment reflects Puritanical values related to female sexuality, and reveals ways a patriarchal society controls women's choices by monitoring and controlling their private lives. Given private and domestic spheres were the only realms women had any degree of power, the control over women's sexuality in The Scarlett Letter shows how patriarchy becomes entrenched and immutable. Moreover, the use of public shaming to sentence Prynne serves an overarching function of social control. Religion, a core theme in The Scarlett Letter, is the vehicle of that social control and the law is also used to enforce and…...
Miller focuses a created, heterosexual alliance in his fictional retelling, but I, Tituba concentrates on the outcasts, which formed the actual, majority of the accused.
This alliance between marginal categories of persons is humorously underlined with Tituba meets a famous fictional outcast from Puritan society, Hester Prynne, while in jail. Conde creates a jailhouse meeting between the two women, since who knows what transpired while Tituba awaited her fate? Marginal women do not abandon Tituba, even though her Christian owner, the girls she helped, and her beloved John Indian abandon her to her execution. Hester Prynne helps Tituba say the right things to be released. Confession in Miller is shown as weakness and capitulation to the mad witch hunters, but Conde sees this as careful and clever planning, a just action because of the injustice of Tituba's captors. Finally, the alliance of 'others' is shown when Tituba, is freed from…...
mlaWorks Cited
Conde, Maryse. I, Tituba. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994.
Ebert, Roger. "The Crucible." 1996. Film Review. Chicago Sun Times. 7 Jul 2007. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19961220/REVIEWS/612200302/1023
Linder, Douglas. "The Crucible by Arthur Miller (1952)." Salem Homepage. Famous American Trials. Last Update 2007. http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/SAL_CRU.htm
Miller, Arthur. "The Crucible." 1996. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Wynona Ryder.
The actual sins are thus not Hester's adultery, but the minister's cowardice and her former husband's plans of revenge. Society as a whole could not help, but act according to the laws one thought fit to protect it from destruction. The community was blind, but not nearly as guilty of sin as the two men in Hester's life. The narrator reminds the reader of the two most important things a new colony was first raising on its new founded ground: a prison and a cemetery. Death and punishment were the two tools that gave people a certainty and the power to believe in their future as a community. That is why, although they are guilty of hypocrisy and prejudice, they are having the excuse of being blinded by their struggle to keep their community alive at all costs.
Hester is the element that seemed to threaten the very existence of that…...
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Scarlet Letter Essay Titles
The Significance of Titles in Defining Literary Content
In the realm of literature, a title serves as the captivating gateway to a world of words, a beacon that guides readers toward the essence of a work. Beyond its immediate function of identifying a piece, a title plays a pivotal role in shaping reader expectations, providing insights into the narrative's themes, and offering a glimpse into the author's creative intentions.
Setting the Stage for Reader Expectations
Titles possess an almost magical ability to evoke anticipation and set the stage for reader expectations. By crafting carefully chosen words, authors can instill within readers a sense....
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