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.
Pearl is a symbol of Hester’s transgressions and even has similar qualities as the sin which she represents. Pearl’s life and behavior directly reflects the unacceptable and abnormal nature of Hester’s adulterous sin. Hester is plagued with more than just a letter “A”; she is given a child from her affair who is just as much a reminder of her sin as the scarlet letter. Ultimately Hester overcomes the shame associated the scarlet letter and creates a sense of family for herself and Pearl. This relationship is integral to the theme of this novel and the development of its characters.
The original sin of adultery is what starts the events that end up ruining the characters' lives. "Come up hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl...Ye have both been here before, but I was not with you. Come up hither once again, and we will stand all three together!" (p. 133). Though it is never said out in the open, you come to the realization that Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale have committed the sin of adultery and when Hester becomes pregnant, she is convicted for that sin. "I'd been in the arms of my best friend's / wife" The man and his best friend's wife also commit the sin of adultery and when he cannot give an alibi to a judge because he does not want anyone to know where he was that night, he is convicted for murder and executed. Adultery is what ends up destroying the characters lives because none except for Hester are willing to admit to the sin of adultery.
The characters Hawthorne develops are deep, unique, and difficult to genuinely understand. Young, tall, and beautiful Hester Prynne is the central protagonist of this story. Shamefully, strong-willed and independent Hester is the bearer of the scarlet letter. Burning with emotion, she longs for an escape from her mark, yet simultaneously, she refuses to seem defeated by society’s punishment. Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale claims the secondary role in The Scarlet Letter; he is secretly Hester’s partner in adultery. Conflicted and grieved over his undisclosed act, he drives himself to physical and mental sickness. He fervently desires Hester, but should he risk his godly reputation by revealing the truth? Dimmesdale burns like Hester. Pearl, the child produced in Hester and Dimmesdale’s sin, is the third main character. She is fiery, passionate, perceiving, and strikingly symbolic; at one point in the novel she is referred to as “the scarlet letter endowed with life!” Inevitably, Pearl is consumed with questions about herself, her mother, and Dimmesdale. The reader follows Pearl as she discovers the truth. Altogether, Hawthorne’s use of intricately complex, conflicted ch...
Imagine your whole town knowing the sin you committed. The article, The Scarlet Sin: Analyzing Secrets in The Scarlet Letter by Brian Stroner, discusses how two individuals encounter their mutual sin. Hester Prynne had to confront her whole town, who knows her sin. While on the other hand, Arthur Dimmesdale secretly coped with it. This article shows us how Hester's endurement of her sin, Dimmesdale’s coping of his sin, and the meaning of Pearl are all combined to give the novel worth.
Hester changes the meaning of her sin completely. It went from being “Adultery’ to “Able”. Hester and pearl together beat the odds and because of it they are
The very heart of the novel’s conflict begins with the protagonist, Hester Prynne. Her crime of adultery is presented
Hester is being considered as the devil (Bellis 1), which is a sign that the town’s people are slanderous and judgmental. Their judgment has caused her to be isolated. “… A woman who had once been innocent…” is now considered as “…the reality of sin” (Hawthorne 39). They look at her as a threat diminishing their community’s chance for purification because “there was the taint of deepest sin…” (Hawthorne 24). My apprehension of Pearl is that she is the fruit of evil, because she is seen as “immortal” (Hawthorne 11). Because, she has caused a ruckus, her immoral acts have disturbed the nature of their society. They think this is morally correct because, “Political and generational ambivalence has its psychological counterpart…” (Bellis 2), which give them the right to make her an evil outcast.
The society in which she lives is legitimized such that people follow a certain moral code. Refraining or overlooking of such codes leads to punishment as revealed by the women “this woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die” (The Ugly Woman, 7). The narrator however, echoes concern against following strict codes of conduct. Hawthorne presents the idea that lack of compassion and forgiveness makes a society dictatorial, he believes the need to observe and practice grace is imperative. Ruling through grace was expressed by Hester when she is forgiven by a society that had once punished her for same mistakes as the young girl retorts “let her cover the mark she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart” (A Young Wife, 6). Reverend Dimmesdale finds adequate grace after seven years of not confessing his sins because of the repercussions that would come thereafter. He begs Hester to reveal his name so that he can as well reveal his sin “be not silent from any mistaken pity, and tenderness for him” (Reverend Dimmesdale, 26) YOur
... off exhibition across her mother chest. The through Pearl, the letter whispers to Hesters conciouosness that she cannot be released from her sin, the letter will not allow it, and neither will Pearl. The letter has become a part of Hester, it is no longer an act that she was involved in, it has come to define her as a person in Pearls point of view.
Hester is a youthful, beautiful, proud woman who has committed an awful sin and a scandal that changes her life in a major way. She commits adultery with a man known as Arthur Dimmesdale, leader of the local Puritan church and Hester’s minister. The adultery committed results in a baby girl named Pearl. This child she clutches to her chest is the proof of her sin. This behavior is unacceptable. Hester is sent to prison and then punished. Hester is the only one who gets punished for this horrendous act, because no one knows who the man is that Hester has this scandalous affair with. Hester’s sin is confessed, and she lives with two constant reminders of that sin: the scarlet letter itself, and Pearl, the child conceived with Dimmesdale. Her punishment is that she must stand upon a scaffold receiving public humiliation for several hours each day, wearing the scarlet letter “A” on her chest, represe...
People all over the world continuously commit sins some are bigger than others and some do more damage. In the book, The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a woman, Hester Prynne, is publicly shamed and force to wear a scarlet A upon her bosom for committing adultery. Throughout the book, Hester and her daughter, Pearl, try to adapt to life as an outsider. The two are continuously judged for Hester’s sin, and humiliated, however, they overcome this judgment and are seen in a different way. Hester and Pearl have been publicly shamed, Pearl has been considered an elfish devil like child, and after all the humiliation they were able to turn their lives around.
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.
The Scarlet Letter, a novel based in Boston with Hester Prynne, Roger Chillingworth, and Arthur Dimmesdale as the main characters, focuses on sin and its repercussions. Adultery and Hypocrisy are two such sins that are the main focus of the plot. Some think that adultery is the sin that the book is concerned with, but if that were so it would pervade through the entire novel on a less superficial level that it does. Hypocrisy, on the other hand, has a constant and repetitious under light in the entire novel that leads to the conclusion that the novel is not teaching about adultery, but hypocrisy with an underlying idea of adultery.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter, many of the characters suffer from the tolls of sin, but none as horribly as Hester's daughter Pearl. She alone suffers from sin that is not hers, but rather that of her mother's. From the day she is conceived, Pearl is portrayed as an offspring of vice. She is introduced into the discerning, pitiless domain of the Puritan religion from inside a jail; a place untouched by light, as is the depth of her mother's sin. The austere Puritan ways punish Hester through banishment from the community and the church, simultaneously punishing Pearl in the process. This isolation leads to an unspoken detachment and animosity between her and the other Puritan children. Thus we see how Pearl is conceived through sin, and how she suffers when her mother and the community situate this deed upon her like the scarlet letter on her mother's bosom.
As evident in The Scarlet Letter, when a person sins they face positive and negative consequences that lead into development of their own personal character. Hester’s scarlet letter gave negative consequences in the beginning, but as Hester persevered she discovered benefits that aided in her becoming a strong woman in society. While Arthur Dimmesdale suffered the guilt and pain of his sin, his sermons benefited from his anguish, making him better than he ever had been. As an ever-constant reminder of sin, Pearl was able to show Hester the goodness in life and keep her going. In conclusion, in modern and past society there has always been sin or badness that people fall into, but it is important to get through these hard times as only then will people grow into who they are meant to be, and not remain stagnant in the pool of the “immaculate”.