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Feminism In The Crucible

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The shot heard around the world came from the smoking gun of every individual who has challenged the authority in place in their environment. Claudette Colvin sent off her shot when she decided to sit down on a bus in Alabama during the civil rights movement, and Alice Paul pulled the trigger when she continued to protest for suffrage with no regard for the widely held negative opinion of the suffrage movement at the time. Protagonists in texts take on their own form of rebellion that authors want to be heard, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne with his novel, The Scarlet Letter, which challenges strict theocracies and Arthur Miller with his play, The Crucible, which disputes the communist hysteria of the 1950’s and 1960’s. However, all these crusaders …show more content…

posers public image, shaming individuals, and in extreme conditions, persecution. From a young age, it is ingrained into the minds of children that image is everything, and when that is taken away or ruined, it easily shatters a person. Believing the idea that how the world perceives you is a permanent thing once fully formed creates a weight on the shoulders of young people who are trying to discover their identities in their society. Pressure stemming from this burden leads to monumental downfalls of a person’s emotional health. With a specific message of this in mind, Nathaniel Hawthorne sculpted his lead character, Hester Prynne, to become an image of sin in her community. This image was derived solely from her sinful actions that branded her for the remainder of her days: “giving up her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of woman’s frailty and sinful passion” (Hawthorne 66). A young woman born to respected parents, Hester made the grave mistake of committing adultery, and because of this deviation from her Puritan community’s way of life by the bible, she is condemned to eternally embody sin. One action dictates the rest of her life; when the

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