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The Scarlet Letter
There are three scaffold scenes overall in The Scarlet Letter. The first is in chapter 2, when Hester is on public trial for her crime of adultery. Hester, though being haraungued by the crowd and...
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The Scarlet Letter
The second scaffold scene in the narrative of The Scarlet Letter begins with Reverend Dimmesdale on the scaffold on "The Minister's Vigil." It is clear that he longs to share in the punishment of...
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The Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter is rife with characterization. Hawthorne does both kinds of characterizations, direct and indirect, to effectively convey to the reader both the surface and the depth of each...
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The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne offers insight into the characteristics of both men and their influence in Chapter VII, "The Governor's Hall" and Chapter VIII, "The Elf-Child and the Minister." As the head of...
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The Scarlet Letter
The Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale is the quintessential Puritan and suffers his fate because of his Puritan faith and weakness. With the theology of "the elect" and the depraved, Puritans were...
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The Scarlet Letter
In the dramatic second scaffold scene, the dying Dimmesdale cries out: I withheld myself from doing seven years ago, come hither now, and twine thy strength about me! Thy strength, Hester; but let...
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The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne creates a dichotomy in The Scarlet Letter by aligning characters with either darkness or light. Those who are part of the dark are part of the world of sin and repression while...
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The Scarlet Letter
Chapter 17 of The Scarlet Letter can be regarded as a feminist text because of its portrayal of Hester Prynne in three ways: as an equal to Arthur Dimmesdale, as his strong savior, and as the...
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The Scarlet Letter
Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter contains a tense episode in chapter 17, when Hester decides to meet Dimmesdale in the forest and reveals her relationship to Chillingworth. While the question does...
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The Scarlet Letter
Both The Scarlet Letter and Assata detail misogynistic treatment of women. The Scarlet Letter tells the story of Hester Prynne, a woman punished for her sexuality by the patriarchal Puritan society...
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The Scarlet Letter
While Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, an Early American novel, does not have the detailed character development evinced in more contemporary novels nor the dialogue that also reveals...
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The Scarlet Letter
To Pearl, the scarlet letter is a part of her mother. She has never known a time when her mother has not worn the letter, and she also seems to understand that it causes her mother great distress...
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The Scarlet Letter
Over the course of Hawhorne's novel, Hester Prynne changes from a young woman who is young, bouncy, full of life to one who bears a child out of wedlock and is shamed by the society in which she...
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The Scarlet Letter
In order to fully answer the question, let us first assume that "scarlet letter" includes both the symbol of the punishment that Hester bears as well as the piece of cloth she wears. In this...
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The Scarlet Letter
As soon as the reader meets Chillingworth, he is not an attractive man. He emerges from the woods in a mixture of Native American and European dress with one shoulder slightly higher than the...
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The Scarlet Letter
Hawthorne uses a metaphor in which he compares Hester's scarlet letter "A" to a spell that takes "her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclos[es] her in a sphere by herself."...
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The Scarlet Letter
The Puritans were a rather idiosyncratic bunch, and one would be hard-pressed to find another group that is more strident in their moral beliefs and, perhaps ironically (or perhaps not), more...
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The Scarlet Letter
The biggest thing you should probably be sure to talk about in this essay is that light tends to be associated with Pearl and darkness tends to be associated with Chillingworth (and Dimmesdale at...
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The Scarlet Letter
Pearl's relationship with her mother is complex and puzzling, the result of the circumstances of her birth and her life in the Puritan colony. Pearl loves her mother and sometimes treats her with...
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The Scarlet Letter
Poor Dimmesdale! :) This quote means that you can't pretend to act one way with all of your friends and family (the multitudes) all the while knowing that the way you are acting is NOT who you...
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The Scarlet Letter
The Reverend Dimmesdale is an example of this assertion. For, before he sins and is tortured by his sin, he is perceived as "ethereal," "angelic." His subtle, emotional...
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The Scarlet Letter
The most obvious example of irony is the fact that Reverend Dimmesdale is the man who committed adultery with Hester Prynne. The "goodwives" of the community remark in the second chapter...
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The Scarlet Letter
In the beginning, Hawthorne goes into great detail to describe the elaborate, intense, beautiful letter A that Hester makes. This type of ornate decor was highly unusual, even looked down upon, in...
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The Scarlet Letter
Dimmesdale certainly cannot treat Hester as the rest of Boston treats her, simply because he knows that he is as guilty as she—perhaps even guiltier because he keeps his guilt a secret. He...
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The Scarlet Letter
The views of the villagers toward Hester Prynne change dramatically from the beginning toward the end of the novel. In chapter 2, "The Market Place" the puritanical "goodwives" gather around to...
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The Scarlet Letter
As underpinning to his theme of "Be true! Be true!" Nathaniel Hawthorne, as instructive narrator also observes in Chapter XX of The Scarlet Letter," No man, for any considerable period, can wear...
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The Scarlet Letter
There is much to consider before formulating a thesis statement for Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. One valid reason is because there are so many viable themes and symbols running...
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The Scarlet Letter
In "The Scarlet Letter", the forest has a dual symbolic meaning. This is not unusual in Nathaniel Hawthorne's stories because he believed in the duality of meaning--in other words symbols can have...
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The Scarlet Letter
Many in number, rhetorical devices are techniques used in order to persuade the reader to consider a character or an object or a topic from a different perspective. Among the most prevalent...
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The Scarlet Letter
Hester's sin causes her to be singled out and ostracized--physically and emotionally--from the rest of her community. However, Hester seems to find peace in this outcasting, which was certainly...
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The Scarlet Letter
In Chapter VII of "Scarlet Letter," Hawthorne develops his symbolic "A" with imagination: The scarlet A, unimaginative symbol of itself is magnified in the breastplate as well as in Pearl, the...
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The Scarlet Letter
Hester, shunned by the Puritan community, comes to transcend it, and by the novel's end, is a source of comfort for the afflicted in that community, as one who had suffered "A mighty...
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The Scarlet Letter
As a Romantic author, Hawthorne ascribed to the idea that nature is a positive entity that stands in contrast with the corruption of society. Hawthorne introduces nature to the plot of his famous...
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The Scarlet Letter
As an ideaology that supports equal political, economic, and social rights for women, Feminism was certainly not in existence in the setting of Hawthorne's narrative, nor was it supported in 1850...
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The Scarlet Letter
As Hester stands on the scaffold with all the puritans looking up at her, she thinks back to a simpler life in what she calls "Old England." Before she arrived in America she used to live in a...
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The Scarlet Letter
In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne presents the Puritan belief system as oppressive and based in fear. More specifically, Hawthorne is significantly critical of the intolerance inherent in Puritan...
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The Scarlet Letter
A hook, or an opening sentence at the start of an essay, has a specific purpose, which is to draw the reader in and to give the reader reason to be interested in reading the essay. Some teachers...
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The Scarlet Letter
In chapter XIII, entitled "Another View of Hester," we learn that many people in Boston have begun to think of Hester's scarlet "A" as a symbol for the world "Able" instead of "Adultery," its...
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The Scarlet Letter
It is consistent with Hester's strong sense of honor that having promised Chillingworth she would not reveal his identity as her husband, she sticks to her word. However, I would say she is not...
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The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne begins his great novel, The Scarlet Letter, with a description of his experiences as an employee at a Customs House. Although Hawthorne is not a particularly humorous author,...
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The Scarlet Letter
This quote pertains most completely to Chillingworth. Chillingworth is a secretive individual who has evil intentions. Chillingworth gets Hester to agree not to let anyone know he is her husband...
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The Scarlet Letter
This quotation applies to Chillingworth because he attempts, with great success for a while, to convince both the town and Reverend Dimmesdale that he is simply a caring doctor who has been...
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The Scarlet Letter
Dimmesdale finds it difficult to discharge his duties as a minister because he is almost constantly wracked by guilt. He is supposed to be a man of God yet he engaged in an adulterous liaison with...
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The Scarlet Letter
Dimmesdale, a clergyman and the father of Pearl with Hester, is a victim of a society that he knows will react harshly and punitively to his sin of adultery. Because he knows how judgmental Puritan...
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The Scarlet Letter
The townspeople’s opinions about Chillingworth change greatly within Chapter 9 of The Scarlet Letter. First, all of the townspeople seem to be thrilled with Chillingworth’s appearance because they...
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The Scarlet Letter
Pearl and the brook in Chapter 16 are very similar. Pearl notices the brook when sent off so her mother and Dimmesdale can have some privacy to talk about Chillingworth. Pearl feels that the brook...
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The Scarlet Letter
One could argue that the crowd are silent because, as Puritans, law and God's word are synonymous. Their silence, therefore, can be interpreted as awestruck reverence for what they regard as the...
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The Scarlet Letter
The town beadle must enforce all of the laws of the Puritan society. He is the one who has kept Hester imprisoned during her pregnancy; he is the one who makes her stand on the scaffold and he is...
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The Scarlet Letter
Sadly, I don't believe this novel illustrates the idea that love, compassion, and forgiveness have the power to overcome evil and sinful deeds. Despite Hester's love for Arthur Dimmesdale, the...
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The Scarlet Letter
There is an antagonist in The Scarlet Letter. His name is Roger Chillingworth, Hester's husband. Once he resurfaces after a long period of absence, Chillingworth finds out about his wife's adultery...
