Hester Prynne

Misogyny, Conformity, and Obsession: A Feminist Criticism of The Scarlet Letter “And do you not know that you are Eve? God’s sentence hangs still over all your sex and His punishment weighs down upon you, she who first violated the forbidden tree and broke the law of God… Woman, you are the gate to hell! … Read more

Morally Ambiguous Characters What does it mean to be morally ambiguous? The characters created by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Francis Bret Harte are divided between being purely good or purely evil. The environments that the characters live in are judgmental and hypocritical. While being isolated from society, they also deal with struggling to disassociate themselves from … Read more

Nathaniel Hawthorne uses romanticism to portray the human soul under extreme pressures. Romanticism emphasizes individuality, imagination to discover truth, and values intuition over reason. Then, Romanticism branches out into Dark Romanticism, which embodies horrific themes, presents that individuals are prone to sin and self-destruction, affected psychologically from sin and guilt. In “The Scarlet Letter”, Nathaniel … Read more

Many punishments in the Puritan society are public. The point of this is to humiliate the “criminals” and make them feel as if they need to repent. There is nothing that the magistrates enjoy more than public confessions of the guilty (in text citation). The Scarlet Letter was written in the 1850’s and was based … Read more

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet letter, we are presented to a Puritanical society that resides adulteress Hester Prynne, whom must wear a scarlet letter to mark her shame. Within the novel, Hawthorne uses detailed descriptions of nature and introduces comprehensive characters such as Arthur Dimmesdale and Pearl with the intention of portraying the central … Read more