The Themes of The Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter is a romantic novel, mainly because it is a long, fictitious tale of heroes and extraordinary events. Unfolding over a seven year period, we are treated to the heroism of Hester Prynne and her adulterous beloved, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale and the mysterious actions and behavior of their love child, Pearl, and the witch, Mistress Hibbins. The story is set against the background of Puritan, New England, a stern, authoritarian, colony founded by a group of religious reformers. Before the novel begins, Hester is guilty of an affair which produced Pearl while her husband was abroad. Her husband, Roger Chillingworth, comes to America just as Hester is being pilloried. He determines to remain in Boston in disguise in order to discover the man with whom she had the affair. Chillingworth soon uncovers the identity of Pearl's father, the young and emotionally captivating pastor. He proceeds to torment Dimmesdale's soul, eventually foiling the escape of the pastor, Hester, and Pearl. At the end of the novel, Hester and Dimmesdale mount the pillory with Pearl together, where he reveals that he, too, has a scarlet "A" etched on his chest from remorse. However, this act of public repentance allows him to be free of the Satanic clutches of Chillingworth. Pearl, too, a child that barely seems human to others in the novel, reclaims her humanity by giving her real father a kiss and crying for the first time in the story. There are two main themes at work in the novel. The first is the conflict between romanticism and religion. The second is the nature of sin, which the novel suggests is a guilty secret of all people. The novel also portrays the sin of Chillingworth ...
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...in the novel come off less sympathetically than those who sin because they are human in the face of oppression.
In conclusion, we see that for Hawthorne there is sympathy and some kind of identification with imperfect beings oppressed by some arbitrary religious interpretation to be perfect. While Hester and Dimmesdale do, indeed, sin, it is only a sin in the eyes of others but an act of human love to them. In a world where no philosopher has ever absolutely defined the will of God, i.e. the divine truth, it is amusing to view this Puritan community so sure of its divine right to judge that it tramples the human heart to shreds in the process.
WORKS CITED
Gross, S., Bradley, S., Beatty, R. C., and Long, E. H. (eds.). The Scarlet Letter: An Authoritative Test, Essays in Criticism, and Scholarship. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1988.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter tells the story of Hester Prynne, a sinner, living in a puritan society. As punishment, she is forced to wear a scarlet letter on her chest. Her daughter Pearl is the product of her sinful ways, and a constant reminder of her wrongdoing. Pearl’s embodiment of the Scarlet Letter causes her hostile relationships with the world and her mother. However, when Dimmesdale kisses her, he frees her from isolation and allows her to form human connections.
The Scarlet Letter starts off by throwing Hester Prynne into drama after being convicted for adultery in a Puritan area. Traveling from Europe to America causes complications in her travel which also then separates her from her husband, Roger Chillingworth for about three years. Due to the separation, Hester has an affair with an unknown lover resulting in having a child. Ironically, her lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, is a Reverend belonging to their church who also is part of the superiors punishing the adulterer. No matter how many punishments are administered to Hester, her reactions are not changed. Through various punishments, Hester Prynne embraces her sin by embroidering a scarlet letter “A” onto her breast. However, she is also traumatized deep within from everything she’s been through. Nathaniel Hawthorne depicts this story of sin by using rhetorical devices such as allusion, alliteration and symbolism.
The controversial topic involving the existence of God has been the pinnacle of endless discourse surrounding the concept of religion in the field of philosophy. However, two arguments proclaim themselves to be the “better” way of justifying the existence of God: The Cosmological Argument and the Mystical Argument. While both arguments attempt to enforce strict modus operandi of solidified reasoning, neither prove to be a better way of explaining the existence of God. The downfall of both these arguments rests on commitment of fallacies and lack of sufficient evidence, as a result sabotaging their validity in the field of philosophy and faith.
Sewall, Richard B. "The Scarlet Letter: Criticism." Novels for Students. Ed. Diane Telgen. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 2001. 319-27.
In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne utilizes imagery to convey that Dimmesdale can represent Puritan Society rather than the round character that can be seen on the surface level. This is seen through the imagery and symbolism of hypocrisy, Dimmesdale as a Christ figure, and the scarlet letter.
“To the untrue man, the whole universe is false,--it is impalpable,--it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself, in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.” (Hawthorne 115) Throughout the hostile novel The Scarlet Letter, author Nathaniel Hawthorne used contrasting settings to represent opposed ideas that were central to the meaning of the work. Some have argued that when it came to the theme that secrets have a destructive effect on the secret-keeper and truth, by contrast, was natural, a character evaluation would best advocate these differences. However, two settings, Dimmesdale’s house and the secrets that lie within, and the scaffold representing the truth, better embody the adverse ideas posed by the point at issue.
Even though there are many cases and arguments for Dualism concerning mind - body, such as Descartes’ substance dualism, the theory does not often have hard, physical evidence to back up such premise like science does. The continued scientific progress over the past centuries has allowed us to better understand universal truths and the functions of the mind-body that were not able to have been explained scientifically in the past. Many complex, unexplained complexities have been simplified or “reduced” through chemistry,biology, or physics. Through both comparison of arguments supporting dualist theories and counter arguments, I will prove that Dualism is a concept of the past and the continued scientific progress is inevitable and will one day allow us to understand many Dualistic explanations with hard evidence and scientific proof that we have failed to do so in the past.
Machiavelli’s views were drastically different from other humanists at his time. He strongly promoted a secular society and felt morality was not necessary but stood in the way of a successfully governed state. He stated that people generally tended to work for their own best interests and gave little thought to the well being of the state. He distrusted citizens saying, “In time of adversity, when a state is in need of its citizens, there are few to be found.” In his writings in The Prince, he constantly questioned the citizens’ loyalty and warned for the leaders to be wary in trusting citizens. His radical and distrusting thoughts on human nature were derived out of concern for Italy’s then unstable government. Machiavelli also had a s...
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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne used symbolism to bring meaning into his book "The Scarlet Letter." Generally speaking, a symbol is something that is used to stand for something else. In literature, it is most often a concrete object which is used to represent something more abstract and broader in scope and meaning. Symbols can range from the most obvious substitution of one thing for another to creations as massive, complex, and perplexing as Melville's white whale in Moby Dick ( Dibble, p. 77 ). In The Scarlet Letter the symbols and the ingredients of the story come together "in a seamless unity in which each manifestation of the letter illuminates an aspect of the characters' or the community's evolving experience ( Brodhead, p. 159 ) .
A symbol is an object used to stand for something else. Symbolism has a hidden meaning lying within it; these meanings unite to form a more detailed theme. Symbolism is widely used in The Scarlet Letter to help the reader better understand the deep meanings Nathaniel Hawthorne portrays throughout his novel. He shows that sin, known or unknown to the community, isolates a person from their community and from God. Hawthorne also shows this by symbols in nature around the town, natural symbols in the heavens, and nature in the forest.
Gerber, John C. "Form and Content in The Scarlet Letter." The Scarlet Letter: A Norton Critical Edition. Eds. Seymour Gross, Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1988.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, there are many moral and social themes develped throughout the novel. Each theme is very important to the overall effect of the novel. In essence, The Scarlet Letter is a story of sin, punishment and the importance of truth. One theme which plays a big role in The Scarlet Letter is that of sin and its effects. Throughout the novel there were many sins committed by various characters. The effects of these sins are different in each character and every character was punished in a unique way. Two characters were perfect examples of this theme in the novel. Hester Prynne and The Reverend Dimmesdale best demonstrated the theme of the effects of sin.
In his work Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes defines his existence, being the only concept he can perceive as true. Existence of self is a necessity that arises simply from introspective thinking; one exists “since [one can persuade himself or herself] of something” (Descartes). This definition gives rise to a separation of the human entity, as what defines a person is not the physical but rather the nonphysical (Descartes). Descartes’ view of two separate essences of a person constitutes a theory known as substance dualism, which states that humans are composed of two elements: a material component (which is purely physical and makes up the “body”) and a mental component (all cognitive thinking which makes up the “soul”) (Kleinman
The Scarlet Letter is a fictional novel that begins with an introductory passage titled ‘The Custom-House’. This passage gives a historical background of the novel and conveys the narrator’s purpose for writing about the legend of Hester Prynne even though the narrator envisions his ancestors criticizing him and calling him a “degenerate” because his career was not “glorifying God”, which is very typical of the strict, moralistic Puritans. Also, although Hawthorne is a Romantic writer, he incorporates properties of Realism into his novel by not idealizing the characters and by representing them in a more authentic manner. He does this by using very formal dialogue common to the harsh Puritan society of the seventeenth century and reflecting their ideals through this dialogue. The Puritans held somewhat similar views as the Transcendentalists in that they believed in the unity of God and the world and saw signs and symbols in human events, such as when the citizens related the meteo...