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Puritan influence on early american literature
Puritan influence on early american literature
Brief biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Hester and the Puritan Society of The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, The Scarlet Letter, focuses on the Puritan society. The Puritan society molded itself and created a government based upon the Bible and implemented it with force. The crime of adultery committed by Hester generated rage, and was qualified for serious punishment according to Puritan beliefs. Ultimately the town of Boston became intensely involved with Hester's life and her crime of adultery, and saw to it that she be publicly punished and tortured. Based upon the religious, governmental, and social design of the Puritan society, Hester's entire existence revolved around her sin and the Puritan perception. Therefore it is evident within The Scarlet Letter that the Puritan community to some degree has constructed Hester's character.
In the novel The Scarlet Letter it is evident that the base of their social framework was that of the Church. The Church and beliefs of Protestantism became all encompassing within the town of Boston; meaning that the Church would be directly involved in the running of the community and its regime. The Enforcing of laws were established by scripture read from the Bible, as the Puritans considered the Bible as the "true law" of God that provided guidelines for church and government. Those who disagreed or committed crimes against the government, were not only criminals but also sinners, and they were sought to be punished severely. The Puritans stressed grace, devotion, prayer, and self-examination to achieve religious virtue while including a basic knowledge of unacceptable actions of the time; this was expected to secure order and peace within the Puritan community. The Puritan culture is one that recognizes Protestantism, a sect of Christianity. Though a fundamental of Christianity is forgiveness for one's sins, this seems to have been forgotten amongst the women of the community: "Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fiber in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants." As read between the lines we can notice a concern in Hester's acceptance within the Puritan community. More so, Hester senses a lack of acceptance within the circle of woman in the community. The use of the term "coarser fiber" intertwines the relationship that she once had, and what it has become within the woman of the community. It has also come to my attention that when Hester compares the women of the community to their descendants, she clarifies that the women of the community have become deviant, and or immoral to their religious past.
John Winthrop aimed to created Christian utopian society when he founded the puritan community, he failed in this goal. Even with his failure, people still thought of the society as pure and just. What he engendered instead was a community whose theology denied human being’s free will, filled with paranoia, racism, sexism and hatred of sexuality and youth. These themes are clearly represented in the Scarlet Letter. The hatred of youth is shown early on in the novel, when Hester Prynne first enters from the prison, “This woman [Hester Prynne] has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not law for it? Truly, there is, both in the Scripture and the statue-book.”(199). The aged ugly woman who makes this statement is used by Hawthorne to serve as representative for the puritans, while Hester represents youth and sexuality. The undeserving punishment of death for the crime of adultery only further demonstrates the extremities of this so-called perfect society. While perhaps seen as God’s will that a person who commits adultery must die, it is instead the government’s way of controlling the people by fear and terror so that t...
Hester is a committer of the sin adultery. She receives a letter with an A on it, which is meant to represent her sin. Hester is free to go wherever she wants with her letter, but she decides to stay within the boundaries of her Puritan town: “Kept by no restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the Puritan settlement...” (Hawthorne 73). Hester has a newfound sense of pride in the letter she wears, even though that letter is her reason for her own personal condemnation. She doesn 't have any restrictive boundaries, but she feels like her letter is that line that keeps her in her town where she will constantly be judged by others. Constantly criticized, evaluated, and assessed. Hester appears to have a negative mental state caused by her mental condemnation due to the adverse diction when she’s addressed through use of words such as sin, dark, or inscrutable. As her condemnation continues on, she (unlike Jake) changes her subjective thoughts into ones that represent pride and acceptiveness. She turns her views on life into ones that are happier and more accepting, since she has already gone through so much. Condemnation often changes how one might go through processes mentally, but those do not always have to be awful. Most see the restrictiveness in the actions of being condemned, yet new ideologies on how one
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.
The Puritan society was extremely restricting. They had strict laws and rules, and harsh punishments for even the smallest of misdemeanors. They lived with only the bare necessities and discouraged uniqueness or boldness. As a Romantic writer, with beliefs the complete opposite of the Puritans, Nathaniel Hawthorne was very critical of the Puritan’s strict society. In the allegorical novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses the characters of Hester Prynne, Reverend Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth order to convey the central moral of rejecting societal ideals and acting upon one 's own desires and emotions.
To this day, the word “puritan” connotes both rigidity and a generally narrow view on life. The dictionary definition of Puritan (the capital refers to the actual religious group) includes, "...demanding the simplification of doctrine and worship, and greater strictness in religious discipline” (Source A). Simplification of their religion would be an understatement of what the Puritans did. Basically, acts were separated into good or evil, approved by God or frowned upon. In this robotic fashion, with no gray area, cruel ignominy was shockingly popular, and used in unworthy situations. An example lies in Source B, a still from the movie adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s magnum opus, The Scarlet Letter. (Although classified as a fictional work the novel is known for it’s factual representations of the Puritans’ behavior.) For committing adultery, Hester Prynne is assigned a lone standing position on the town scaffold, essentially to be put on display and judged while nervously clutching her new baby. To add ridicule, she is enclosed by guards carrying swords and other various weapons. It makes one wonder just how much destruction a woman and her baby are capable of.
In the story, all the people who moved from Europe were not necessarily Puritan. The main character, Hester Prynne, was supposedly Puritan but acted differently than how the others acted in the book, Hester is what they call an adulterer and was rejected from the society by having to wear the letter A on her clothing. Hester showed she was not like the others. From the story we can see that she might have been a Transcendentalist. Transcendentalism was a new type of Christianity led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, an english lecturer, and was the leader of spreading this new religion. This version of Christianity was not as strict as the Puritan ways and had satisfied people's religious and spiritual
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.
Through Hester and the symbol of the scarlet letter, Hawthorne reveals how sin can be utilized to change a person for the better, in allowing for responsibility, forgiveness, and a renewed sense of pride. In a Puritan society that strongly condemns adultery one would expect Hester to leave society and never to return again, but that does not happen. Instead, Hester says, “Here…had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost; more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.” Hes...
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s feelings towards the Puritans, though already very clear, are portrayed vividly in his novel, The Scarlet Letter; particularly through his use of both religious and natural imagery. Hawthorne’s use of religious imagery is seen when Hester Prynne is at church. While she is there she is ridiculed because she committed the sin of adultery. Even though the other Puritans that ridiculed her had sinned themselves they still had the nerve to look down upon Hester as a sinner. Hawthorne shows in this scene how hypocritical the Puritans truly are. They scold Hester without even realizing that they too, are sinners. Religious imagery is used yet again when the women of the story don’t allow Hester, a seamstress, to make or even touch their wedding dresses.
The Scarlet Letter, a classic American novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, contains a plot that follows the controversial life of Hester Prynne, the main protagonist of the story. Set in the mid 1600’s in Boston, Massachusetts, it represented the Puritan society and its ideals at that time. Its rich plot has enticed and enraptured readers for many years, while Historical elements have allowed readers to analyze and understand the content better. The Scarlet Letter is a piece of historical fiction that contains a real representation of the period in which it is set in and is mostly historically accurate, barring a few minor inaccuracies.
The historical setting is highly significant in the novel since it is intertwined with the public’s belief and values, which shape overall themes of the novel and the main characters’ traits. The main setting of the novel takes place in New England during the middle of the seventeenth century, and the setting is the essential factor that develops the core conflicts among Hester, Dimmesdale, and the Puritan society; in fact, the historical setting itself and the society within it is what Hawthorne intends to reveal to the reader. New England in the seventeenth century was predominately organized around religious authorities, and indeed, a large portion of the population had migrated to the colony of New England with religious purposes. Therefore, the strict and religiously centered historical setting is well demonstrated through Hester’s townspeople when Hester commits adultery. The church authority and the townspeople require Hester to wear the large “A” embroidered scarlet letter, which symbolizes adultery. This act is aligned with the historica...
alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true
newspapers to collect my data. I have chosen to do this so that I can
Newspapers have allowed for such a freedom in our everyday lives, and most have not even realized this fact. They have provided us with an outlet to speak our mind about politics, societal issues, public differences, and religion and cultures. Searching online to find such knowledge can be extremely challenging; moreover, newspapers always seem to be a place to find valid information. Newspapers have started to come off the printer more slowly over the past decade. More people are turning to electronic ways to find information rather than going to the direct source where that electronic media got their information. Most reliable information comes from newspapers where high up and educated citizens or leaders speak their mind on certain and important topics. The reason newspapers should stay a part of today’s society is because they offer a way for people to speak freely about what they please and get their voice heard, they are always credible, and they help us hear the problems of the world openly from different perspectives.
For a plant to stay healthy, fluids (like water), need to reach all parts of the plant.