The situation brought into light in the beginning in the novel “The Scarlet Letter” Hester Prynne is mother to a child whose father is not the husband of Hester. Although no one in society knew that Hester was married, they knew she had committed adultery with another male from the town. The child is seen as an evil spirit child because the outcome of an act of mortal sin to the public. Today, Adultery occurs very often and in secret, away from the adulterers spouse and others who would judge their act of disloyalty. More often than not, these forbidden relationships are revealed in strange and dramatic ways. When the information is found out, all involved with the situation is emotionally and socially destroyed. The conception of Pearl was seen as an obscene act in the time of the novel. The Scarlet “A” that is put on Hester’s chest shows that she has committed acts of dishonor to her name.
In our modern world our society has become very tolerant of the actions that take place in the world. But some actions, such as adultery, are still forbidden like in the Puritan times. Hester Prynne, a puritan woman who must wear a scarlet A to mark her shame of her crime of adultery in the book” The Scarlet Letter”. In this time and age, most of the national news we receive from something similar to adultery come from celebrities. For example, Tiger Woods was having an alleged affair with a woman. This news had a huge impact on his life, several of the companies he was endorsed with reconsidered him and many major companies that were sponsoring him cut their contracts with him, stating that Tiger Woods was “No longer the right representative.”
Society had an immediate and negative response towards Tiger Woods. The world today still views many...
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...mes of “The Scarlet Letter” was that she, Hester Prynne, was a disgrace to society and shunned because of it. Now a day, being an adulterer is only the problem of very close people, not a whole city. It was the norm during that time to have adulterers announced to shame them, now it’s a hush-hush affair, and not many people know. Today she would be in the right, our society today would consider that not “correct” to call out someone who did something morally wrong, the townspeople would be the ones shamed, not Hester. Norms define how a people act, and the people of the Puritan times were very harsh on specific people. Also Pearl who was looked down upon and seen as a demon child is in today’s standards seen as a poor unfortunate girl created from a lapse of judgment and is need of help, But in that society pearl was seen as a demon child and a sign of a mortal sin.
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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, tells the story of a young adulteress named Hester Prynne and her bastard daughter, Pearl, as they endure their residence in a small town of the Massachusetts British settlement in the1600s. Pearl’s illegitimate birth is the result of the relationship between Hester Prynne and a minister of the Puritan church, Arthur Dimmesdale. Through public defamation and a perpetual embroidery of an “A” upon her dress, Hester is punished for her crime. Whereas, Arthur choses to suppress the secret over illuminating the truth and endures internal and self-inflicted punishment as consequence.
A sinful nature is an aspect in man that makes him rebellious against God. Everyone has a sinful nature and it affects every part of us. Sin corrupts the human mind and has consequences for doing wrong in the eyes of the Lord. Every individual on Earth sins, and this is represented in the novel The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel Hawthorne uses Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale to portray how different people cope with their sin and the consequences of that sin.
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...
In his novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses the storyline of Hester Prynne’s adultery as a means of criticizing the values of Puritan society. Hester and her daughter Pearl, whom she conceives out of wedlock, are ostracized from their community and forced to live in a house away from town. The reflections of Pearl in different mirrored surfaces represent the contrast between the way Puritans view her and who she actually is. In the fancy mirrored armor of the society’s elite class, Pearl is depicted harshly as a devilish and evil spawn, unable to live up to the expectations of such a pristine society. However, in the natural reflections of the earth’s surface, Pearl’s beauty and innocence is much more celebrated. The discrepancies between these positive depictions of Pearl as an angelic figure and the Puritans’ harsh judgment of her character suggest that Puritans inflated her oddities and strange habits in order to place her and Hester in a place of inferiority within the community. Hawthorne employs reflection and mirrors in his novel to convey the Puritans’ misconstrual of Pearl as an elfish, evil child and to critique the severity of early Puritan moral codes.
This research paper will determine whether professional athletes deserve a second chance to play in professional sports after inappropriate behaviors. Professional athletes are considered idols and are often held to higher standards. Society has become concerned with so many of today’s athletes making the evening news for their unsuitable behaviors.
As celebrities stand distinctively among the masses and cast out their halos of personality charm and strong suits of skilled abilities, the controversies about them are unavoidable shadows created from their fame. With the popularization of celebrity culture, information synchronization, and communication technology, their lives are publicly exposed and various forms of media (depending on eras) record their flaws. Tough information transmitted to audiences are frequently biased, evidences of objective reality remains, even in the remote past.
The Scarlet Letter is a novel revolving around a woman who committed the sin of adultery in a small Puritan town in seventeenth-century Boston. Hester Prynne, the adulteress, refuses to reveal her lover’s name, and as a result is forced to wear a large, red "A" on her bosom. This is to tell everyone of her sin. Hester is also forced to live isolated with her daughter, Pearl, who is the result of her sin. Meanwhile, the small Puritan town remains very devoted to and very proud of their young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. What they do not know is that it is Dimmesdale who is Hester’s Lover and Pearl’s father. The fact that Dimmesdale keeps his sin a secret is tearing him up, both physically and emotionally. To complicate matters even more, Hester’s old and slightly deformed husband is back. He had stayed in England for quite a while allowing Hester to settle into their new home.
celebrity may be found in the words of one of America’s Founding Fathers, John Adams, who wrote, ‘‘The rewards . . . in this life are steem and admiration of others—the punishments are neglect and contempt. The desire of the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger—and the neglect and contempt of the world as severe as a pain.” (Price, 463). The author suggests that fame is not at all w...
Adultery, in almost any society is viewed in a negative manner that results in specific penalties in relation to the culture in which it is committed. In The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the punishments in accordance with adultery in a Puritan Society are portrayed in a less-accurate, fictional context. However, if the character of Hester Prynne, or any puritan woman, was placed in Iran, her consequences for the sin would differ. In both a 17th century Puritan society in Massachusetts and in Iran, the act of adultery has varied, yet firm consequences meant to penalize women who commit the offense.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne is virtually banished from the Puritan society because of her crime. She was guilty for adultery with the town’s minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. However, the reader is kept in the dark that Dimmesdale is the child’s father until latter part of the novel. Although Hawthorne’s novel accurately depicts the consequences that Hester and Dimmesdale suffer from their sin, the novel does not accomplish the task of reflecting upon the 17th century Puritan gender roles in Hester and Dimmesdale. For one, the mental and physical states of Hester and Dimmesdale are switched. Hester takes on the more courageous role throughout the novel whereas Dimmesdale takes on the more sensitive role. In addition, Hester is examined in accordance to the gender roles set for today’s American women. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is written in a manner that accurately depicts 17th century Puritan society, but does not accurately show gender roles.
Readers generally characterize the Puritan Townspeople in The Scarlet Letter by their attitudes in the beginning of the novel. When Hester first walks into the scene, most of the townspeople are very harsh and strict in their religions. They believe that adultery is one of the worst sins possible. One unyielding woman says, “This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not law for it? Truly, there is, both in the Scripture and in the statutebook. Then let the magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if their own wives and daughters go astray.'; Although a young woman and a righteous man try to intervene with the angry old women, their voices are never heard. Also, Hawthorne associates ugliness with wickedness; therefore, all of the stingy women are described as being very ugly. They regard her not as a fellow sinner but as a woman so evil that she must be ostracized from her “perfect'; community. They view the scarlet letter that she wears upon her breast as a symbol of her atrocious crime of adultery and nothing more. The women in the beginning of the novel are so quick to pass judgment on others, yet they fail to recognize the sin in themselves. Once they realize this obstacle, the townspeople will become more understanding of Hester’s situation.
Hawthorne claims that the sin greater than adultery is that of hypocrisy, or forbidding an offender the chance to hide even though “our common nature” is to mask our sins behind others. Throughout The Scarlet Letter many of the main characters and the townspeople were hypocrites and only cared for themselves. The only innocent one was Pearl because she did not do anything wrong; she was the result of a sin that Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale committed. Throughout the novel one can see the growth of some characters and the demise of others due to the sin of hypocrisy. Dimmesdale is the minister within the novel that everyone looks up to.
The strict Puritan code in the mid seventeenth century is evident in The Scarlet Letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The novel addresses the issue of adultery and the intensity of the sin. Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale commit the sin of adultery and face challenges inflicted upon them by the Puritan society and personal values. Nathaniel Hawthorne centers the plot of his novel The Scarlet Letter on the four major characters, Hester Prynne, Pearl, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth, analyzing their physical appearances, personalities, and roles.
In the Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne commits adultery, a disgraceful sin, and she is severely punished. Yet although her sin was not a good choice, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author, attempts to justify her actions. His writing indicates that he does not accept of her behavior but that it was not completely her fault. Being a Puritan, Hester was forced into one way of life, the only acceptable way in the eyes of her community. This pressure to adhere to numerous strict rules was metaphorically compared to a difficult journey down a narrow, winding road in the forest with little light. The Puritanical way of life curbed deviant behavior and is a justification for Hester's sin because every so often, everyone strays from the path but it the reaction to the wrongdoings that should be defining and Hester remained strong and took the consequences.