Nathaniel Hawthorne 's The Scarlet Letter

During the 17th century, a Puritan commonwealth presided over Boston and was known for its strict adherence to religious, moral and social codes. In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne utilizes rhetorical strategies in order to denounce the Puritan system of beliefs and bring to light the hypocrisy of the Puritan community as he tells the agonizing story of a young woman who was condemned by society.

The Puritan era in New England was inundated with an atmosphere of righteousness and judgment. This culture spurned those who strayed from its religious codes. In his novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses multiple symbols to bring a deeper meaning to the society, his characters, and to adultery. One of the motifs used comes as the character Pearl, the daughter of the two adulterers. Pearl has multiple descriptions; physically, she is “a lovely and immortal flower,” yet also “an airy sprite . . . as if she were hovering in the air and might vanish” (80, 83). She has a “wild, desperate, defiant mood” and is often referred to as a “flower,” a “bird,” and an “elf” (82, 80, 98, 87). Hawthorne uses Pearl’s multi-layered personality

Hawthorne chronicles Pearls opposition externally through conflict with puritan society. During Hawthorne’s introduction of Pearl, the conjunction between Pearl and the Puritan children that surround her is described,

For most people, there is nothing more terrifying than having their worst fears materialize before them. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne, the protagonist, and Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, her partner in sin, experience their worst fears form before them in an unusual embodiment: Pearl, their own child born from their sinful passion. For Hester, Pearl is an inescapable power, always forcing her to confront the weight of the scarlet letter she must don as punishment for her sin, physically setting her apart from society. While Pearl acts as a similar force towards Reverend Dimmesdale, his sin is kept a secret from society. In turn, Reverend Dimmesdale internalizes his moral struggle and sets himself apart from Puritan society. Pearl represents his greatest fear of revealing his sin. All in all, Hawthorne employs Pearl as a pragmatic force which binds Hester and Reverend Dimmesdale to their morally inferior positions in society by forcing them to confront their fears.

Hawthorne’s presentation of Pearl can be defined as ‘the sin child’ and profane product of the fall from grace of Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne. The author refers to her as the ‘the scarlet letter endowed with life’ (Hawthorne 90) and is seemingly the living likeliness of the letter. Incongruously, Pearls looks more like the Hester before the scaffold. The story depicts extreme repression of Puritan patriarchy where Pearl becomes the target of the attempts of the Puritans to control the literary, historical expression as well as human sexuality. The text thus comes out as a dramatization of a relationship between whose child Pearl is and questions regarding the interpretation of the letter. As such, one of the ways that Hawthorne makes it relevant is through the validity and supremacy of the doubt within the community regarding the child where he represents it as a separate investigation into its own significant

The children In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter play a major role in the Puritan society. With their honest opinions of Hester and Pearl, the children are presented as more perceptive and more honest than adults. Due to their innocence, children are capable of expressing themselves without constraints; there are no laws or regulations that they are bounded by. As an adolescent go through the stages of life and grow older, they begin to be more conscious of the how they act as they are more aware of society and the things that are occurring in the world, creating a filter for their actions. When they remain as the children, on the other hand, are adventurous; they are still exploring the universe that seems to fill with mysteries that are bound to be solved. They tend to attach to the truth and they are not afraid to speak it freely. Children differ from adults in their potential for expressing these perceptions. With their obliviousness to the things that are actually going on around the town, children therefore react differently compared to the adults, who are more knowledgeable. Perceived to be immature, young children are presented as more perceptive and more honest than adults due to their innocence, how they are unaware of the reality and the crimes that are presented in society by the adults enables them to be blithe and not afraid of saying what they feel like. Due to their naivety, when they express what they perceive to be true, they do not get punished,

There is a puzzling contradiction that while a certain figure is viewed to be the physical punishment and evil of a shameful sin by a religious society, the figure itself illustrates the purity and beauty of those most connected to God. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter, it is the little girl name Pearl who, shunned by the Puritan people for her birth from sin, embraces her distinctiveness and lives true and free from the laws of the controlling society. Pearl, a being of “great price”, has always been met with the same animadversions thrown at her mother, Hester Prynne, who had committed the sin of adultery and has shamed the Puritan community forever. However this “immortal flower” causes Hester to fear what Pearl represents and why she is here to share the same sentence of the scarlet letter. Hester becomes mystified by who Pearl really is because “God

Nathaniel Hawthorne was quite progressive for his time and his novel, The Scarlet Letter, is a wonderful example of this. Before he married his wife, Sophia Peabody, Hawthorne joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist group (Nathaniel Hawthorne). According to Merriam Webster, transcendentalism is, “a philosophy that emphasizes the a priori conditions of knowledge and experience or the unknowable character of ultimate reality or that emphasizes the transcendent as the fundamental reality” (“Transcendentalism”). Put simply, transcendentalists thought that intuition and knowledge of ourselves is more a more important reality than the scientific, sensual reality. As a group, these people held very progressive views on women’s rights, education,

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” (1850) embodies the ideals of seventeenth-century Puritan lifestyle in colonial Massachusetts and more specifically, Boston. These ideals consist of sin, religion, gender roles, and punishment. The ideal that is most prominent throughout that fictional novel is sin. Hawthorne’s use of sin conveys that it is not only something that is felt or expressed but something that can be embodied. The novel uses symbols to express this point; the biggest example being Pearl. Pearl is the daughter of the protagonist, Hester Prynne. “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne shows the point of sin through the connection of the scarlet letter Hester Prynne wears on her chest and her child, Pearl.

In The Scarlet Letter, author Nathaniel Hawthorne examines the moral consequences of sin, or an offense against religious or moral law, and poses the question to his readers; can individuals be redeemed for their sins? The two central characters in the novel, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, both commit the sin of adultery. However, each character deals with their wrongdoing in opposite ways. Initially it seems that Hester Prynne’s sin is worse than that of Reverend Dimmesdale due to her sin being visible to all of society. Even though Hester’s sin causes her alienation from society, she is able to find independence while living on her own that gives her strength. On the other hand, town reverend Arthur

In a surface examination of the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, it is quickly evident that no good things come from the wilderness. Therein, the wilderness is often associated with the savages and the devil. In his work The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne finds herself exiled by society for having an adulterous affair with the town reverend which brought forth the child known as Pearl. Pearl is quickly established as the child of the wilderness: wild, capricious, and thought by the town to be a demon-child. She represents several entities in the novel just by her being, but when her morality is delved into, much more of the nature of the story can be revealed. Pearl’s role is often overlooked as a formative force in the novel. Some scholars have gone as far as to denounce her as unnecessary to the story’s makeup. Upon close examination, it can be determined that Pearl is indeed a necessary element. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Pearl presents themes of morality, both personal and cultural, as well as the divide between society and nature, through her interactions with Hester, Reverend Dimmesdale, and the scarlet letter itself.

Romanticism in this book is described through the author as he thought out Hester Prynne’s story. He describes that some great techniques for romantic themes are light and setting. Hawthorne describes that details “are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect” (Hawthorne, 35). This then leads him to describe that, “when one removes further from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative” (Hawthorne, 36), the romance writer can actually, “dream strange things and make them look like truth”(Hawthorne, 36). The purpose of this chapter is to serve basically as a preface. It describes information about the author himself, leading him to describe when he had found the Scarlet Letter “A” in the Salem Custom House. Along with that, he had found historical sheets for which the story is based upon. “This I now opened and had the satisfaction to find, recorded by the old Surveyor’s pen, a reasonably complete explanation of the whole affair”(Hawthorne, 31). Hawthorne also describes throughout this chapter his connection to his ancestors. In my opinion, he has doubtful feelings about the role they play in his life. He states that his ancestors were, "dim and dusky.., they are grave, bearded, sable cloaked, and steel crowned"(Hawthorne, 7). To Hawthorne, his ancestors would find him unsuccessful because he "is a writer of storybooks"(Hawthorne, 8). However, though he has different opinions from

The Scarlet Letter: There is much significance to the title The Scarlet Letter. Much of the book is based off the scarlet letter that Hester Prynne wears to show to the world her darkest sin. The scarlet letter that Hester wears is a consequence of the harsh puritan laws.

2. The author of the novel is Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the novel was written during the mid-17th century during the Puritan settlements.

Appealing to the society that Hawthorne found himself in at that time was a very crafty strategy that surely picked up many fans of his writing. The conception of women’s rights movements was a perfect edifice on which Hawthorne crafted the ideas of his novel. Contrast would be a perfect word to describe reasoning behind the success of Hawthorne’s book. The fact that women did just not simply have a large role in Puritan society was an incredibly effective contrast to Hawthorne placing Hester at the center of the book, almost effectively negating the pure facts of history at the time. A thorough exhumation of the background of Hawthorne and the time period of the novel really gave insight into the style of The Scarlet Letter.