Essay On Transcendentalism In The Scarlet Letter

Another use of inner guilt versus confession is used when Dimmesdale is on the scaffold with

The Scarlet Letter illustrates that the illumination of self-deception gapes open after one like the very jaws of hell. This is apparent through all the main characters of the novel. Although Hawthorne's work has several imperfect people as the main characters, including Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth, the worst sinner is Roger Chillingworth. Chillingworth commits the greater sin because of his failure to forgive; he has an insatiable appetite for revenge; he receives extreme pleasure in torturing Dimmesdale. Hester Prynne, however, has committed sins of almost the same magnitude.

Nathaniel Hawthorne portrays the ideology of Puritan society in the novel the Scarlet Letter; however reader also get to witness his characters being an illustration of hypocrisy and victims to their own guilt. In the Scarlet Letter, as in many of Hawthorne’s shorter works, he makes profuse use of the Puritan past: its odd exclusionary belief, its harsh code of ruling, its concern with sex and witchcraft. The Scarlet Letter is a story that is embellished but yet simple. Many readers may view this novel as a soap opera due to the way Hawthorne conveys this Puritan society’s sense of strictness and inability to express true emotion along with the secrecy and how deceiving the characters are being. As the story unfolds the main character Hester Prynne is bounded in marriage at an early age. She engages in an adulterous affair with an unknown member of their small village. Hester soon becomes pregnant and with her husband’s absence the chances of this child belonging to her husband are slim. The towns’ people know that she has committed a sin and imprisons her for her crime.

Born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1804, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote many novels and short stories. Hawthorne’s best novel, The Scarlet Letter, overtook the role of the first truly, American novel. His use of rhetorical devices, especially symbolism, established him as one of the most studied authors of all time. In order to convey meaning or to persuade, Hawthorne utilized numerous rhetorical devices. Rhetorical devices in The Scarlet Letter evoked emotions of the audience. In Hawthorne’s work, the devices helped the audience elaborate on the novel. Hawthorne used rhetorical devices to show his character's turmoil. He did this through the character of Hester Prynne, a social outcast bound to isolation by her sins. In novel, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hawthorne depicts Hester’s inner turmoil through the portrayal of the sinful nature of human beings utilizing rhetorical devices.

The Transcendentalist Movement of the early nineteenth century proved to be especially popular with American writers. Though many critics have associated authors such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson with this movement, many other American authors utilized themes of transcendentalism in their works. Likewise, although critics often do not portray Nathaniel Hawthorne as a transcendentalist, the multitude of characteristics central to those of the American Transcendentalist Movement suggest that Hawthorne was indeed a transcendentalist. In his novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne represents the Transcendentalist Movement by incorporating three major transcendentalist themes: self-reliance, the importance of nature, and the innocence of youth.

Dimmesdale's guilt surfaces through his brutal self-mutilation and absolute psychological anguish. Dimmesdale “piled it on his own shoulders” to relieve the guilt he feels from his sins (Hawthorne 110). Further, the more he “laughed bitterly at himself” the “more pitilessly” he whipped himself, which shows how Dimmesdale gains satisfaction from suffering for his sin. This satisfaction leads to him whipping himself harder because he believes he shouldn’t feel content. Hawthorne

In the book The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dimmesdale gets sicker and sicker the longer he holds in his secret sin of Adultery. It takes place in a Puritan society, which was a strict, conservative, and simple group in Boston Massachusetts. The book focuses on the sin of Hester Pryne committing adultery and having a child, Pearl, with a man other than her husband, Chillingworth. Hester gets shamed and laughed at on the scaffold used for public humiliation. The vulnerable and weakening Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale comes closer to confessing to being Pearl’s father throughout the three scaffold scenes. “Sin as sickness” is a major theme in the book that is represented through Reverend Dimmesdale’s internal conflict. The more Dimmesdale

Hester was once a transcendentalist, but has failed to transcend upon being shamed. She fails to transcend due to her conforming to the Puritan tradition, her lack of simplicity, and her lack of self-reliance, basic aspects of transcendentalism. Though she seems like a transcendentalist for similar reasons, such as the A being a symbol of her individualism or the fact that she lives alone in a cottage makes her self-reliant. But she wouldn’t be doing these things if she had choice. She would’ve loved to have been free of the letter A, and actually move into a house with Dimmesdale, but she didn’t have a choice.

Moreover, Dimmesdale`s suffering reflect on the outside when he was sick of not confessing his truth. For example, of this is that in the book the another has shown us that Dimmesdale suffering is reflecting him on the outside that why in the chapters Dimmesdale keeps on holding on his heart on where the letter “A” is carve on this chest. Another is that when Dimmesdale was leading the church to tell the town folks about how God will be like if you did not follow in the correct way he will sin you that why Dimmesdale did not what to tell everybody about it if he did he could get killed and thought out as a minister in the church and also the townsfolks always believe that Dimmesdale is the only one that can connect to God and he cannot do

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" is set in the early days of Puritan America. Hester Prynne, a seamstress, comes to the New World before her husband in order to prepare a place for them. During his absence, she develops a relationship with Arthur Dimmesdale, a rising minister in the newly founded Puritan community. Hester becomes pregnant. The novel is widely viewed to be a story about her trials and tribulations; however, critic Randall Steward argues that, "…Hester is not the protagonist, the chief actor, and the tragedy of the novel is not her tragedy but Arthur's. He is the persecuted one, the tempted one. He it was whom the sorrows of death encompassed…His public confession is one of

Guilt can kill a person- just ask Arthur Dimmesdale. Thus, a person suffers from guilt according to his individual conscience. In the novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne teaches the reader how one’s reaction to shame may differ from another person’s. How one deals with shame shows their personal characteristics. The characters involved in The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, all show the different types of reactions someone might have from the burden of guilt.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a descendant of, who he despised and thought to be hypocrites. Hawthorne, had a cynical view towards Puritans, believing they were intolerant and cruel. He was so discontent with his past, that he even changed his last name, to prevent any connection with puritan society. Nathaniel Hawthorne makes it his duty to victimize Hester Prynne, the main character in the Scarlet Letter. Hester, accused of adultery in the vicious Puritan community, finds herself struggling between guilt and innocence. Lost between her natural desire for a relationship, which she found in Reverend Dimmesdale, and her duty to maintain a relationship with her seven years gone husband, Roger Chillingworth, Hester finds herself in the form of her

The Scarlet Letter, a novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a novel that takes place in the town of Boston, Massachusetts in 1642. Hester Prynne, the main character of the story, commits the sin of adultery. Because of this sin, she is "blessed" with a child named Pearl. Her punishment is to wear a scarlet letter “A" on her chest for the rest of her life, which affects the way the townspeople look and act around her. Also, she must stand on the scaffold in the town for three hours for the whole town to recognize her grave sins. The man who should be standing upon the scaffold along with her and Pearl is the town minister, Dimmesdale. He is presented as a weak character because of his fear of losing his beloved reputation as such a holy

Although Puritanism, Romanticism and Transcendentalism do not coexist peacefully, these almost worldview kind of people groups are deeply embedded into three fictional characters from the book, The Scarlet Letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This enthralling and rich classic which takes place in Boston Massachusetts during the time of Puritanism gives the reader not only a taste of the Puritans and their staunch attitude, but also of a less common way of thinking and behaving which is expressed through a certain character in the book. The three main characters in this book are all diversely different but are bound tightly together by a long kept secret and discovering their methods of thinking and acting upon

Hawthorne had introduced Chillingworth as the victim, not the villain. After all, Hester and Dimmesdale both violated him by engaging in the act of adultery. This causes many readers to sympathize for Chillingworth until he plainly confesses that it was originally himself that sinned: "Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay."(66) Chillingworth knew that Hester didn't love him before they were married, but he was looking for what he