The Sin, Free Will, And Pessimism

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Fairbanks, Henry G. “Sin, Free Will, and "pessimism" in Hawthorne”. PMLA 71.5 (1956): 975–
989. Web.
In the beginning of this article it talks about how even though Hawthorne himself is not a church going man, he is a religious man in his books and his outlook on Christian heritage was important. This article focused on the sin of adultery committed by Hester with Dimmesdale. It talked about how her sin is in the will and not the sinful act itself. Pearl is the living representation of their sin. And it focused on the freewill of Hester and Pearl returning on their own. I found this source to be really useful but it had a lot of information in it so it was hard to soak it all in so it is helpful taking notes and highlighting key words while reading this article. The word choice was difficult in some paragraphs so I had to look up a lot of words while reading. This article is reliable because it was a peer reviewed journal article and when it referenced to something from a different article it gave you the links to access that article in the footnotes. The length of this article was about a full sixteen pages so it takes time to read and annotate it. But it was one of the longer articles compared to some other ones I read. This article bounced back and forth from sin to free will whereas my other articles where more focused on one topic.
Budick, Emily Miller. “Hawthorne, Pearl, and the Primal Sin of Culture”. Journal of American
Studies 39.2(2005): 167-185. Web.
This article also focuses on the aspect of sin. In this book it brought up that in the book the word “adultery” is never once mentioned. It talked about how Hester committed the sin but Pearl is the one who suffers it. In this article is asked multiple questions abo...

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...ocrisy of Hester Prynne. She has a lot of differences between who she is and who she shows to be. It describes how you must know the difference between “shame” and “compunction”. The words have a relationship between them but they are not the same thing. It explains how A Real, Honest Regretful Person describes Hester’s hypocrisy. This source was the most useful because the layout of this article was really good and crisp. All the information was clear and easy to understand. This source is reliable because it is a peer reviewed journal from the SearchIt database. This was the shortest article from all of my sources. Even though it was short it had a lot of information and it went right to the topic, hypocrisy. It didn’t go back and forth it focused on the book and the topic. This would be a really good article to help you understand the hypocrisy aspect of the book.

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