The Power of Secrets in The Scarlet Letter
Deception is defined by Webster's Dictionary as the art of
misrepresentation. Throughout the history of mankind, the use of deception
to promote oneself to a higher level, or to hide one's past, has been a
common occurrence. In the novel The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne ,
Chillingworth and Dimmesdale both use deception to hide secrets from each
other, and from the rest of the town.
Hester Prynne is the only one who knows the secrets that Dimmesdale
and Chillingworth are hiding from the townsfolk. Hester has to control her
desire to tell the truth and practices the art of deception to hide these
secrets. When she will not reveal the father of Pearl, Reverend
Dimmesdale says, "She will not speak." It is ironic that the person who
committed the sin with Hester is the one who announces publicly that she
will not reveal the name of the other sinner. Later, Chilling worth wants
to know who it is and he says, "Thou wilt not reveal his name?" Hester
refuses and continues to hold her silence. Then Chillingworth, still
trying to find out the name of her lover, comments, ". . . but Hester, the
man lives who has wronged us both! Who is he?" When he says this, he is
hinting that he is going to do something to Dimmesdale. This is why Hester
makes Chillingworth promise not to kill her lover if he finds out his
identity. Chillingworth deserves to know who slept with his wife,
although Hester should not have had to tell him. I think that Dimmesdale
should have admitted that he was Pearl's father. Today, if a priest
admitted such a crime, he would probably be sent to jail. However, in the
novel, had Dimmesdale confessed, the townsfolk would have liked him even
more. Hester also has to live with, and conceal, the secret that the
scholar, Chilling worth, is her husband. When he comes to visit her in
jail he says, "Thou hast kept the secret of thy paramour. Keep, likewise,
mine! There are none in this land that know me. Breathe not, to any soul,
that thou didst ever call me husband.
The punishments that the characters must undergo are worsened by the fact that they do not tell the whole truth. Hester has been found guilty of adultery but when she is asked to tell whom it was that she committed the sin with she refuses saying "Never.
Pearl is an example of the innocent result of sin. All the kids make fun of Pearl and they disclude her from everything. She never did anything wrong, but everyone treats her like she committed the sin also. Pearl acts out against the children that make fun of her and acts like a crazy child. She cannot control the sins that her parents committed.
One of the many factors that have contributed to the success of Australian poetry both locally and internationally is the insightful commentary or depiction of issues uniquely Australian or strongly applicable to Australia. Many Australian poets have been and are fascinated by the issues relevant to Australia. Many in fact nearly all of these poets have been influenced or have experienced the subject matter they are discussing. These poets range from Oodgeroo Noonuccal Aboriginal and women’s rights activist to Banjo Patterson describing life in the bush. Bruce Dawe is also one of these poets. His insightful representation of the dreary, depressing life of many stay at home mothers in “Up the Wall” is a brilliant example of a poem strongly relevant to Australia.
Everyone at some point has lied and kept a secret, but it depends on the situation you're in. In the first scene, Hester is pressured to tell the truth about the father’s name, but Hester refuses. This is an example of keeping a secret in order to keep someone else from harm; which in this case in Pastor Dimmesdale. Dimmesdale is a well known, honorable man who the town looks up to, but Hester doesn’t want for him to ruin his name, even if it means she has to live in ignominy. There are numerous accounts of secrecy displayed throughout the movie. In The Scarlet Letter it begins with Hester Prynne and her child, Pearl, being brought forth onto the scaffold to confess the father’s name. With his hand over his heart, Pastor Dimmesdale b...
Hester is indeed a sinner, adultery is no light matter, even today. On the other hand, her sin has brought her not evil, but good. Her charity to the poor, her comfort to the broken-hearted, her unquestionable presence in times of trouble are all direct results of her quest for repe...
Most everyone has two sides to their character, one that shows in public and one that stays confined to the safety of a more private setting. However, there are times when the private side overshadows the public persona and escapes. Then the person is either left standing there to clean up their damaged reputation or liberated with a sense of relief to finally show their true colors to society. Thus creates the predicament of the characters in The Scarlet Letter, written in 1850 by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Instead of starting the audience at the beginning of the ordeal, Hawthorne sits the reader right into the aftermath of Hester Prynne’s sin. The unforgiving nature of Puritan culture condemns Hester for having passion for any other besides her husband, even though they do not know if he is even alive at this point. Her private self, the side that longed for another man, overwhelmed her public Puritan image and escaped, leading her down the path of temptation. This Puritan atmosphere collides with many dark romantic elements, such as the guilt and sin of someone romanticized to the reader, and the evocation of sympathy to the “bad” character, the one wrong in the context of the book, but most everyone secretly roots for. Hawthorne mixes the Puritan culture with romantic elements to evince the struggle of the private self to create a false public image and conform to the masses.
Good morning/afternoon invited teacher and students. The expressive poem ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ written by the prominent poet Andrew Barton Paterson illustrates the country life of a drover as the ideal lifestyle as it is the beauty and nature of mankind. This poem is extremely critical of city life and seems to only convey the negative aspects that are involved. During this analysis various poetic techniques as well as aesthetic features will be used including suggestive language, alliteration, metaphor and imagery are applied to describe the author’s use of poetic devices and to show how effectively the poet conveyed its messages and the link to Australian diversity.
The poem “We’re not trucking around” by Samuel Wagan Watson presents an Aboriginal perspective on Australian National identity, showing the audience that Australians still mistreat Indigenous people, expressing his perspective through the ideas that white men still mistreat Aboriginals and the marginalization of Aboriginal culture. Watson reinforces his idea through poetic and language
Hester goes so far as to dwell upon the letter as a symbol of her guilt. The brilliant crimson “A” resides on her humbly clothed chest, making the letter stand out all the more; Pearl, the child of sin, runs beside her mother, dressed in spectacular clothing “abundantly embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold thread,” in effect, personifying that same symbol (102). In each case, Hester advertises the fact that she has sinned and that she is paying for her crime, again bring more suffering upon herself. And again, she accepts it. She realizes the letter should only be removed when she is no longer guilty of her crime. She knows, therefore, that day will never come.
One of the main themes in The Scarlet Letter is that of the secret. The plot of the book is centered on Hester Prynne’s secret sin of adultery. Nathaniel Hawthorne draws striking parallelism between secrets held and the physical and mental states of those who hold them. The Scarlet Letter demonstrates that a secret or feeling kept within slowly engulfs and destroys the soul such as Dimmesdale’s sin of hypocrisy and Chillingworth’s sin of vengeance, while a secret made public, such as Prynne’s adultery, can allow a soul to recover and even strengthen.
letter *A* embroidered on her chest. The A served as a symbol of her crime, was
Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place...better were it so, than to hide a guilty heart through life…(47).
The way Hester and Dimmesdale approached their sins has a direct correlation with how they lived the rest of their lives. Hester confessed her sin because she had no choice she already had incriminating evidence in the form of a child and had to confess or be expelled from the community. In this sense, Hester had no choice but to confess or leave the community and she chose to confess. Although, we may not know why she made this choice, but we know she made it and she decided to stay with it and not leave the community in order to possibly confess her sins. Arthur Dimmesdale did not confess his sins for all the wrong reasons. He didn’t confess for mostly two reasons those being: his belief that man did not judge other men but only God can do that or that he will better serve his people with a sinful heart and not a sinful appearance. Arthur had to deal with all the pressures of a life of sin but also the pressure of his own conscience to confess those sins. The pressures on his body were worse than that of Hester who had confessed her sins. One of the main reasons that Arthur was in poor physical condition was that the wise Doctor Chillingworth had poisoned him, and kept poisoning him until he had confessed of his sins at the end of the book. This and the fact that his grief and guilt had led him to totally decimate his body both spiritually and physically he had just driven himself too far. Farther than any person should take this kind of self-mutilation. His social life also suffered as a result of this physical and mental torture because he had turned into a walking zombie and had not been very responsive to anything but his terrible torment. In this way, he was degrading himself and thought it necessary to do so for repentance. Although, he had not voiced his sin publicly he had preached about himself not being pure and being a sinner. In spite of this, the unknowing congregation worshiped him all the more for his self-proclamation of sinfulness without telling what his sin was.
The guilt that now rests in Hester is overwhelming to her and is a reason for her change in personality. The secrets Hester keeps are because she is silent and hardly talks to anyone. “Various critics have interpreted her silence. as both empowering. and disempowering. Yet silence, in Hester’s case, offers a type of passive resistance to male probing”
All throughout the play Hamlet mourns the loss of his father, especially since his father is appearing to him as a ghostly figure telling him to avenge his death, and throughout the play it sets the stage and shows us how he is plotting to get back at the assassinator. Such an instance where the ghost appears to Hamlet is when Hamlet and his mother are in her bedchamber where the ghost will make his last appearance. Hamlet tells his mother to look where the ghost appears but she cannot see it because he is the only one who that has the ability to see him.