Stereotypes In Scarlet Letter

As a misogynist himself, Nathaniel Hawthorne easily incorporated his own sexist views into his novel, The Scarlet Letter, through the representation and comparison of the sexes. Considering the time period in which Hawthorne wrote the piece, feminism was still a movement in the making, so nobody really thought twice about the author’s demeaning text. However, his cruel treatment of women on and off paper is so foul, it cannot go unnoticed. In an unfair contrast to the female characters, Hawthorne grants the men with power and sympathy, leaving the women to suffer.

The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a novel about a young woman who commits adultery and is forced to wear the letter A, which symbolizes adultery, on her chest. In this novel, Hawthorne includes many symbols to display hidden meanings, including character symbols to wake up the reader. Irony is an important element as well, used to reveal the hypocrisy of humankind. The Scarlet Letter is a unique blend of characters, irony and symbolism.

Over the course of our nation's 240 year history not one time has its people seen a

Before the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, women were meant to remain in the household and do all the work there. They were supposed to take raise the children, maintain the house, support the husband, and be overall dependent on men. Women did not often work outside of their homes nor did they have any real independence to say or do whatever they pleased. For the most part, women were very dependent on men for most things in their lives. Women were meant to be meek,

Guilt and shame haunt all three of the main characters in The Scarlet Letter, but how they each handle their sin will change their lives forever. Hester Prynne’s guilt is publicly exploited. She has to live with her shame for the rest of her life by wearing a scarlet letter on the breast of her gown. Arthur Dimmesdale, on the other hand, is just as guilty of adultery as Hester, but he allows his guilt to remain a secret. Instead of telling the people of his vile sin, the Reverend allows it to eat away at his rotting soul. The shame of what he has done slowly kills him. The last sinner in this guilty trio is Rodger Chillingworth. This evil man not only hides his true identity as Hester’s husband, but also mentally torments

The author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, is the nephew of John Hathorne. During the Salem Witch Trials, the only judge that did not apologize for the remorseless and cruel acts that were put upon many men and women was in fact John Hathorne. Nathaniel changed his last name from Hathorne to Hawthorne in an attempt to disassociate himself from his uncle. John Hathorne is the reason why Nathaniel Hawthorne is obsessed with the puritan times. Hawthorne lived in the 1800s, but the setting of the novel is based before the Salem Witch Trials were held in the 1600s. In his novel, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses the symbolism of the scarlet letter, Dimmesdale, and burrs to contribute to the overall theme of guilt.

In the nineteenth century novel, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne utilizes different origins of allusions and archetypes to emphasize how individuals in order to encourage individuals to forgive sins and work towards redemption.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a brilliant writer of the 19th century. Hawthorne created a novel that reflected the time period of the Puritans in New England. The Scarlet Letter contains a representation of the people during that time period but can also be related to the reader’s time period. Originally, God created the world with complete perfection until man fell, and sin entered the world. In the eyes of God, a sin is a sin. There is no worse sin that one can commit. Man is the one that decided that one sin could be more harshly judged than another. Hawthorne uses the theme of sin to show the importance of one’s faith and conviction and how those principles relate to fallen sinners.

Back in the day, men did not treat women with much respect, and men did not allow women to do anything, other than being a housewife. Men took charge of women, and if women did earn any money their husband would take it away from them. Women did not have any rights, and no one did anything about it for awhile. As women did not have a say, they continued to obey the rules and tasks as told. However, the lives of women did improve during the 1920s and 1930s, as technology improved over time, there was better labour for women, and women were allowed to be a part of the political world.

Secrets can destroy even the most respected people. Sometimes is not the secret itself that drives people into exhaustion, but the emotional baggage that comes with it. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Reverend Dimmesdale physically deteriorates because of his guilt caused by a dishonorable sin. The Puritan society in which the story is set discourages the idea of the private self, which Hawthorne shows by creating distinctions between the characters’ private and public lives, specifically Dimmesdale’s.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, Arthur Dimmesdale struggles to overcome sin, guilt, and public shame in Puritan society. Shame is a painful sense of having done something wrong, improper or immodest. Arthur Dimmesdale reveals his guilt and shame towards the end of the novel, when Hester and Pearl stand with him on the scaffold while he confesses his sin to the townspeople. In order to feel shame or guilt, one must have a clean conscience. Dimmesdale is a good example of this because he is loyal to god, and his shame hurting him represents that he is a good person.

Double standards, a term used to describe how unfair our society can be of the male and female population, still affect us today. This principle has been around since the beginning of human species, the perplexed idea that men are far better than women. As the idea of double standards became more pertinent, it smeared into literature. An example of this would be the story of Hester Prynne and her daughter Pearl in the novel, “Scarlet Letter”, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who went through the struggles of facing public shaming and the crime of Adultery because of the way her society treated her. Living her life as a Puritan, she underwent the unfair “inferior to men” belief and was punished greatly for her actions, unlike her accomplice Dimmesdale.

Public shaming is not new. Shaming a person is a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior. Public shame ruins a person’s life over what they did wrong by being called names, being fired from a job, receiving death threats, and being known for what they did for the rest of their life. Public shame never goes away and is still used today to mock people. Thus, public shame can ruin a person’s life socially, mentally, and personally.

Imagine a world in which everyone believes it is in their best interest to suppress their feelings. Most people in the modern world would undoubtedly find this prospect awful and depressing. After all, our phenomenon of instantaneous communication was conceived with the belief that humans desperately want and need to share their emotions and ideas. The widespread popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking websites seem to affirm this assumption. If one was to compare the Puritan setting of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter with this hypothetical world, they would soon realize the two

Through out the course of history, those who were considered sinners were often out casted from the society. This is much the case with Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. After a public trial, Hester is considered a sinner due to her birthing of a so called “devil child”. Hester is convicted to the life long bearing of a scarlet letter on her chest. The Scarlet Letter that Hester Prynne wears symbolizes the change in perception of sin through out the novel. Due to the revelations of the governor Winthrop and the reverend Dimmesdale, the way sin is perceived changes from one of shame to the idea that every one is a sinner in their own right.