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critically analyse The scarlet Letter
in the scarlet letter written by nathaniel hawthorne what are the broader meanings
in the scarlet letter written by nathaniel hawthorne what are the broader meanings
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Recommended: critically analyse The scarlet Letter
In the story The Scarlet Letter, there are three main kinds of bondage, each with its own respective rout to freedom. Being imprisoned by the laws of society, held captive by the weight of guilt, and confined by the desire for revenge; these three types of bondage are clearly seen in three of the main characters in the story. Hester Prynne is imprisoned by the laws of society, while Mr. Dimmesdale is held captive by the weight of his guilt, and Roger Chillingworth is confined by his desire for revenge. To be free, Hester must accept her badge of humiliation as part of who she is and integrate it into her life, Mr. Dimmesdale must openly confess his sin, and Roger Chillingworth must forgive Mr. Dimmesdale.
Hester Prynne, an adulteress, is imprisoned by the laws of Puritan society and instead of running away, struggles to accept her badge of shame as a very real part of who she is. When she is first commanded to wear a scarlet letter A, she sees it as a curse. For the first few years she tries to ignore the ignominy under a mask of indifference. “Hester Prynne, meanwhile, kept her place upon the pedestal of shame, with glazed eyes, and an air or weary indifference,” Hawthorne writes. (page 48) Even so, she cannot hide from what her sin has produced. Every day her daughter Pearl reminds her of her sin. The only way to freedom is to avoid being defined by the society in which she finds herself. It is a gradual process but slowly, due to her compassion for the poor and sick, people start to view Hester's badge as meaning “Able” rather than “Adulteress”. Eventually her badge becomes a blessing as other women come to her for advice and counseling in that,
“people brought all their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as...
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...pite being forgiven by Mr. Dimmesdale. Right before Mr. Dimmesdale dies, Roger Chillingworth exclaims, “Thou hast escaped me!” (page 175) Roger Chillingworth is held in bondage because of his refusal to forgive Mr. Dimmesdale.
Throughout The Scarlet Letter, these three types of bondage are clearly seen. Hester Prynne is imprisoned by the laws of society and is only set free when she defines herself rather than letting society define her. Mr. Dimmesdale, who is held captive by his guilt, is released when he openly confesses his sin. Roger Chillingworth is confined by his desire for revenge and would have been set free if he had forgiven Mr. Dimmesdale. These three kinds of bondage and their paths to freedom are clearly played out in The Scarlet Letter through the characters of Hester Prynne, Mr. Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth.
Works Cited
The Scarlet Letter
Throughout The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne attempted to expose the varying ways in which different people deal with lingering guilt from sins they have perpetrated. The contrasting characters of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale ideally exemplified the differences in thought and behavior people have for guilt. Although they were both guilty of committing the same crime, these two individuals differed in that one punished themselves with physical and mental torture and the other chose to continue on with their life, devoting it to those less fortunate than they.
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.
Hester Prynne, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, the Scarlet Letter, faces a crucible. She commits adultery with Reverend Dimmesdale and becomes pregnant with a daughter, Pearl. She is isolated from the community and the general public except for when she must stand upon the scaffold for three hours as part of her punishment for her sin. She must also wear a scarlet letter “A” for adultery on her breast. The town looks at her differently because of her sin but Hester stays true to her personality. Hester fairs her life by honoring her punishment and her mistakes, as well as taking care of Pearl and teaching her to be kind.
In the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hawthorne portrays a society filled with betrayel, secrecie, and sinners. The people of society do not show their true colors and hide their true intentions. Dimmsdale, Chillingsworth and Hester all have fallen to sin, however they all believe they are not the worse sinner and try to seek justice for themselves.
The meaning of the word feminist in the dictionary is the people who advocates or supports the rights and equalities of women. Hester Prynne is a very strong and honest feminist, because she did not follow the traditional role of women in the eighteenth century.
The Scarlet Letter is a classic novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne which entangles the lives of two characters Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale together through an unpardonable sin-adultery. With two different lifestyles, this act of adultery affects each of them differently. Hester is an average female citizen who is married to a Roger Chillingworth from Europe while Dimmesdale is a Puritan minister from England (61). Along the course of time after the act of adultery had happened, Hester could not hide the fact that she was bearing a child that was not of her husband, but from another man. She never reveals that this man is in fact Arthur Dimmesdale, and so only she receives the punishment of prison. Although it is Hester who receives the condemnation and punishment from the townspeople and officials, Dimmesdale is also punished by his conscience as he lives his life with the secret burden hanging between him and Hester.
Both Hester and Dimmesdale, are characters in the Scarlet Letter. They suffer with the guilt of the sin of adultery that they committed. At the time, the Puritans looked down on this type of sin. Hester and Dimmesdale can be compared and contrast in the way they handled their scarlet letter, their cowardliness, and their belief of what the afterlife is.
At the beginning of the Scarlet Letter Hester Prynne is labeled as the “bad guy”. The townspeople demand the other adulterer’s name, but Hester denies this revelation. She does not reveal it because she knows that the information will crumble the foundation of the Puritan religion and the town itself. “‘But, Hester, the man lives who has wronged us both! Who is he?’ ‘Ask me not!’ replied Hester Prynne, looking firmly into his face. ‘That thou shalt never know!’(Hawthorne 52). Hester knows that finding out that the father of the child, the Minister that is leading the town, will diminish credibility for the church and for Dimmesdale, the Minister. During her punishment, Hester decides to move out near the woods and make a living as a seamstress. Hester is regarded as an outcast from Boston, but she still gives back to the society that shuns her. ‘“Do you see that woman with the embroidered badge?’ they would say to strangers. ‘It is our Hester, —the town's own Hester, —who is so kind to the poor, so helpful to the sick, so comfortable to the afflicted!’”(Hawthorne 111). Her acts of kindness, helping the sick and comforting the afflicted, toward the society that makes her an outcast shows the inner goodness of a person. Throu...
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Mr. Dimmesdale’s greatest fear is that the townspeople will find out about his sin of adultery with Hester Prynne. Mr. Dimmesdale fears that his soul could not take the shame of such a disclosure, as he is an important moral figure in society. However, in not confessing his sin to the public, he suffers through the guilt of his sin, a pain which is exacerbated by the tortures of Roger Chillingworth. Though he consistently chooses guilt over shame, Mr. Dimmesdale goes through a much more painful experience than Hester, who endured the public shame of the scarlet letter. Mr. Dimmesdale’s guilt is much more damaging to his soul than any shame that he might have endured.
"Confess thy truth and thou shall have eternal rest." I belive that is the moral to be taught in this novel of inspirational love, yet a novel of much sorrow. The impossible became possible in The Scarlet Letter, a story set back in the Puritan Times. In this response, I will give my reactions in writing to different aspects of the novel;the characchters, my likes and dislikes, my questions, and my opinion of the harsh Puritain lifestyle. Hester Prynne, the Reverend Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth each suffered guilt in their own way in the novel The Scarlet Letter. In the beginning of the novel, Hester Prynne should have not suffered the way she did on the scaffold alone. She was forced to be intergated by the high-officials of the town, while holding her little Pearl in arms. Making matters worse, the father of the child was in that very group of officals. She was then sentenced to wear the scarlet letter "A", showing her guilt "externally". Unable to take it off, she was forced to show her guilt to the entire settlement. However, the Reverend Dimmesdale suffered "internally", with a scarlet letter of his own engraved in his mind, and on his chest as well. He felt like he betrayed God, and beat himself in a frenzy to prove his wrongdoing. He often questioned wheather his authority was true or not. Roger Chillingworth suffered the least, because he only failed to reveal the secret that he knew, the father of the child who Hester Prynne was forced to live with. This small restriction to his life forced him to suffer "internally". I had different likes and dislikes in the novel The Scarlet Letter. There were many things that needed to be judged to fit into the given catagories, including; character attitudes, and character decisions. For example, the attitude displayed from the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale was rather unnapealing to me. There are different ways of settling ones guilt rather than whipping oneself in a closet. The one character whose attitude was appealing to me was that of Pearl's. She showed that mistakes in a relationship often lead to bad situations. Her mischeif and connection to the devil are examples of just those situations. Character decisions played an euqally important role. For example, I thought the descision for Hester not to tell who was the father of Pearl on the scaffold to be very brave, but was wrong.
Roger Chillingworth utilizes his deceptiveness in a number of occasions throughout the novel. For example, in chapter three, Roger Chillingworth innocently approaches Hester Prynne, acting as if he has never once seen her. Roger Chillingworth even interrogates a local townsman about Hester Prynne and her committed sins. This shows that Roger Chillingworth purposely intends to concept a deceptive knowledge of his character in order to disconcert one who may read The Scarlet Letter. Although Roger Chllingworth is the foremost antagonist of the novel, his deceptiveness empowers him to withhold an excessive amount of moral ambiguity. With this moral ambiguity, Roger Chillingworth is able to surreptitiously accomplish a various amount of things, including the death of Arthur Dimmesdale himself.
As Hester grows throughout The Scarlet Letter so does her strengthen. Despite the feeling of loneliness, Hester has remarkable strength withstand townspeople and the government. The primary offender against her is Roger Chillingsworth, who married Hester before she was old enough to know the needs of her own nature (Abel 304). Hester married Chillingsworth for a fresh start but he is sent to America to live and she must wait for him to return. Hester is surprised to see Chillingsworth he comes to visit her cell...
In the novel, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a love triangle among three characters leads to trouble in their lives. Hester (the central character) sufferersing from punishment for her adulterous acts from the public. Arthur Dimmesdale suffers inwardly innerly and punishes himself for fortifying with Hester knowing she is married. Simultaneously Roger Chillingworth longs for revenge to kill Dimmsdale for he has Hester's heart; something he hungers for. The love in this story keeps these characters commingled in this loved crazed novel.
Hester Prynne committed a crime so severe that it changed her life into coils of torment and defeat. In The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hester is publicly recognized as an adulteress and expelled from society. Alongside the theme of isolation, the scarlet letter, or symbol of sin, is meant to shame Hester but instead transforms her from a woman of ordinary living into a stronger person.
After seven years progressed Chillingworth and Hester meet in the woods to discuss the scarlet letter. Hester realizes how evil and nasty Chillingworth has become. “What choice had you?" asked Roger Chillingworth. "My finger, pointed at this man, would have hurled him from his pulpit into a dungeon, —thence, peradventure, to the gallows!’” (188). Once Chillingworth found out Dimmesdale was the person Hester commits adultery with, he could have easily told on him and had him locked up or hung. Instead Chillingworth chose to keep it a secret and psychologically torture