The Thoughts And Fancies: Nature As Narrator In The Scarlet Letter

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.

The settings in The Scarlet Letter are very important in displaying the themes of the novel. The settings in this novel are almost characters, for they are an important part in developing the story. The scaffold, the forest, the prison, and Hester’s cottage are settings that show sin and its consequences result in shame and suffering.

            Hawthorne's moods or prevailing feelings during certain scenes are revealed to the reader through nature.

    In Nathaniel Hawthorne's work, The Scarlet Letter, nature plays a very symbolic role. Throughout the book, nature is incorporated into the story line. One example of this is with the character of Pearl. Pearl is very different than all the other characters due to her special relationship with Nature. Hawthorne personifies Nature as sympathetic towards sins against the puritan way of life. Hester's sin causes Nature to accept Pearl.

Danish author Hans Christian Andersen once said, “Just living is not enough... one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.” A person should be able to find beauty in nature to truly live their life. Nature gives symbols for how life happens. Every spring trees comeback to life and every winter trees “die”. Sunshine gives warmth and life to the plants. By being free to live however they please, plants are given the truth of how life truly is. People have to find nature and believe in the power of nature to explore life. Just as Hans Christian Andersen believes one should find nature, Nathaniel Hawthorne believes nature should be shown in The Scarlet Letter. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, nature uncovers the truth about

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 origin of everything is found in one place, nature. It is home to good, evil, and everything in between. Many of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings share nature as a reoccurring theme. In The Scarlet Letter, “Young Goodman Brown,” and “The Minister’s Black Veil,” nature tells something about the character, behaves in different manners, and reveals the truth. Nature can show people’s beauty and shine light on their wrong-doings.

Every human being needs the opportunity to express how he or she truly feels, otherwise, the emotion builds up until they become volatile.  In Nathaniel Hawthorne's, The Scarlet Letter, life centers on a rigid Puritan society which does not allow open self-expression, so the characters have to seek alternate means in order to relieve their personal anguishes and desires. Luckily, Hawthorne provides such a sanctuary in the form of the mysterious forest. The forest is a sanctuary because it allows the freedom to love, the freedom to express emotions, the freedom for sympathy and the freedom to be one’s self.

In the beginning of the novel, Hawthorne represents nature as a rose bush that would “offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom” and “had merely survived out of stern old wilderness” (Hawthorne 50). By saying this, the narrator suggests that the rose bush is holy even though it’s grown out of “wilderness”. Similarly, even though Pearl is a daughter of sinners, Hester and Dimmesdale who have had committed adultery with each other, she is blessed with a heavenly appearance and voice. Like the rose bush’s connection to the prisoner, Pearl has been Hester’s hope and light across her ignominy. The quote also suggests that nature shows sympathy towards sins, specifically Pearl, the outcome of a sin.

     In Hawthorne's revered novel The Scarlet Letter, the use of Romanticism plays an important role in the development of his characters. He effectively demonstrates individualism in Hester to further our understanding of the difficulties of living in the stern, joyless world of Puritan New England.  It is all gloom and doom.  If the sun ever shines, one could hardly notice.  The entire place seems to be shrouded in black.  The people of this society were stern, and repressed natural human impulses and emotions than any society before or since.  But for this reason specifically, emotions began bubbling and eventually boiled over, passions a novelist

Nature: what does one think of when this is brought to mind? Is it beautifully colored butterflies fluttering atop of a glistening river? Is it unthinkable amounts of biomass striving and maintaining their lives in a swampy marsh? In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s case, nature represents the ever-present idea of sin, and different matter in the natural world show this. This is evident in Hawthorne’s

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne associates the natural world with negative elements to suggest that it is ultimately evil. Using the woods as a representative of nature, Hawthorne associates the environment with particular characters to portray it in a negative manner. The setting is visited by individuals such as the main character Hester Prynne; Roger Chillingworth, the vengeful spouse of Prynne; and Mistress Hibbins, a woman who is rumored to be a witch. Hawthorne uses Mistress Hibbins’ negative connotation and has her ask Hester whether she wants to go into the forest, for “[she] wellnigh promised the Black Man” that Prynne would join (106). Hawthorne additionally portrays the woods in an evil way when he has Prynne suggest

The aspect of Nature in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter seems to have been characterized to readers with a mixed blessing. In other words, Nature shows its power to both heal as well as harm various characters throughout the text. The Scarlet Letter highlights Nature's complexity by showing that the Puritan idea of Nature as an entirely evil force is a naive misconception. The text reveals the beneficial attributes of Nature that the Puritans overlook or fear. Conversely, the text shows that aspects of Nature that help mankind also harm him. The duality and complexity of Nature mirrors the complex inner feelings and dual nature of the book's characters. Nature represents the paradoxical juxtaposition of both good and evil in man,

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