The Scarlet Letter And Antitranscendentalism

The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, was first published in 1850. It was set in a harsh Puritan community in Massachusetts during the seventeenth century. Hawthorne was of Puritan descent and researched the community. The focus of his novel is based on the adulteress act of Hester Prynne and how she was treated by her community. The novel is known for it’s abundance of rhetorical and literary devices, and was one of the first novels to effectively use them. Hawthorne uses rhetorical devices to portray his views and thoughts about the community. One device Hawthorne uses is irony. Specifically, dramatic, situational, and verbal irony. Hawthorne's use of irony is employed to show the true characteristics and emotions of the characters,

Society has unintentionally been guided by the same themes since the beginning of time. The recurring themes that are present in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic The Scarlet Letter are still relevant in today’s society. When high school students and teachers claim that Hawthorne’s novel is archaic and should be removed from the curriculum, they are absolutely wrong. Hester Prynne, the main character of the novel, commits adultery and as punishment, has to wear a scarlet letter “A” on her chest for everyone to see. Throughout the novel, Hester is faced with obstacles such as the struggle between self and society and the burden of publicly suffering for her sins. Despite a substantial amount of time having passed since Puritan times, the themes that Hester Prynne had to experience are still pertinent. Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s husband, is driven mad by his incessant need for revenge and in society today there are many occasions where people are plagued with the desire to seek vengeance. There are some instances in life where human nature takes over without people even realizing and revenge is one of them. Also, people are right when they say “history repeats itself” because some of these themes never go away. The Scarlet Letter takes place in the strict religious time of the 1600’s and although the book seems outdated and obsolete, the ideas inside are still relevant and therefore high school students should continue to read this work

Nathaniel Hawthorne once said, “I do not want to be a doctor and live by men’s diseases, nor minister to live by their sins, nor a lawyer and live by men’s quarrels. So, I don’t see that there is anything left for me but to be an author” (Nathaniel). This statement describes Hawthorne’s personality and life in a way that no other quote could. Nathaniel Hawthorne was an Anti-Transcendentalist writer meaning that he had a negative view of all humans. The Anti-Transcendentalist movement was a pessimistic branch of Romanticism and it began in mid 1800s and lasted until late 1800s. Nathaniel Hawthorne was influenced greatly by his childhood, which is what caused him to be an anti-transcendentalist, yet in his novel The Scarlet Letter there was a bridge created between anti-transcendentalism and utopian transcendentalism.

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.

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne often demonstrates the frailty of humans. Nature is often described as beautiful, while the Puritan society and human nature are viewed in a harsh light. Hawthorne illustrates that human nature is flawed and judgmental through use of figurative language, critical diction, and symbolism.

Not only symbolism but imagery too, has a critical role in the Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne is successfully able to describe in detail the prison when it is first described in the beginning of the novel. From the door that is “heavily timbered with oak” to the building with a “beetle-browed and gloomy front,” Hawthorne successfully describes the place of darkness and sin. Oddly enough, in front of the prison, there is a rose bush. The rose bush can be used to describe a concept of peace or

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.

Romanticism is categorized as “a preference for simplicity and naturalness, a love of plain feelings and truth to common place reality, especially as found in natural scenes”. Nathaniel Hawthorne was an anti-transcendentalist and believed in the dark side of man, hence his dark romantic novel The Scarlet Letter. This allegorical novel depends heavily on symbol and character. The novel is chock full of symbolic dimension of images, characters, and descriptions. The Scarlet Letter defines the American Romanticist movement while using symbolic characters and places that give the book seemingly two different stories. The first story denotes the story going on in the book, including the characters. The other story has symbols that speak on

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne was written in 1849. This novel won him much fame and a good reputation as a writer. In writing The Scarlet Letter, Hawethorne was creating a form of fiction he called the psychological romance. A psychological romance is a story that contains all of the conventional trappings of a typical romance, but deeply portrays humans in conflict with themselves. The Scarlet Letter won Hawthorne great critical acclaim, and even today the book remains on the best seller list. The Scarlet Letter is so popular maybe because generations of readers can interpret it and see subtle meanings that somewhat reflect their own lives. Each of us, has

Transcendentalist philosopher Emerson once noted that “the universe is composed of Nature and the soul” (qtd. in Perkins 591). The vitality of nature’s power is one of the fundamental pillars of Transcendentalism. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter mirrors this concept, nature playing a vital role in the story from cover to cover. From the influence of the nature (specifically the forest, flowers, and sunlight), on the plot, there is a common theme shown throughout the novel. Hawthorne implemented these elements in The Scarlet Letter to emphasize how nature is a ways of shining light on the truth.

Throughout the short story, Hawthorne uses symbols to illustrate the selfishness of man and the barriers between life on Earth and eternal life in Heaven. In the short story, Hawthorne uses symbolism to emphasize the strange shape of his wife’s “earthly imperfection” (630) and his desperate need to have the stain of imperfection gone. There is a

The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, takes place during the 17th century in Puritan Boston, where a woman, Hester Prynne, has committed adultery with the Reverend, Arthur Dimmesdale; she is then forced to eternally wear a scarlet letter on her bosom as punishment for that sin. While coming out of prison with the child that resulted from her infidelity. Hawthorne strategically employs nature in his novel for remarkable imagery, insight into characters, and an underlying theme within the book. In this novel, nature is used with both of its definitions, the natural forces and human nature itself. The theme of nature has allowed The Scarlet Letter to illustrate the dichotomies within the book. Also, in The Scarlet Letter, physiognomies and descriptions of nature around characters correspond with their own human nature and how it changes. Conclusively, nature plays a crucial role in The Scarlet Letter; it foreshadows action, recurs as an important theme that also indicates character, and reflects the changes in the characters ' behavior and beliefs.

The novel is displayed as gloomy and dark. The reason for this is that Hawthorne uses excellent imagery, the use of

In the stories of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, the antagonist characters display parallel story lines through their searches for the enemy. Roger Chillingworth, the former husband of Hester Prynne and the antagonist of The Scarlet Letter, works against his wife in order to find her untold second lover. Frankenstein is a contrasting story in which an unnamed monster is the antagonist towards his human creator, Dr. Frankenstein. Yet despite quite different story lines, the two characters possess traits that exibit parallels between them. In the novel The Scarlet Letter, Roger Chillingworth displays the startling passionate characteristics of an unwavering drive to seek out his foe, madness as his focus on his search takes over his entire being, and terrible anguish when his task is unexpectedly over, all of which are reflected in the daemon created at the hand of Dr. Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley 's novel Frankenstein.

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