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The Scarlet Letter
One could specify several main themes to this story: sin, guilt, lust, and dishonesty come to mind. But I think a significant theme worth exploring is that of double standards of morality for men...
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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 Crucible
The philosopher George Moore describes basing "ought" statements on "is" statements as a "naturalistic fallacy." In other words, although one can judge the feasibility of ideal and whether a system...
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Literature
In the final chapter of the novel, "Conclusion," the narrator says that "in the view of Infinite Purity, we are sinners all alike." Therefore, despite the fact that some people try to live without...
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The Scarlet Letter
The first chapter of The Scarlet Letter opens with a description of the prison door, specifically the prison where Hester Prynne has been held since it was discovered that she committed adultery....
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The Scarlet Letter
Hester's daughter, Pearl, needs her father to acknowledge her. Until he does, she exists only as a symbol: of her parents' love, their sin, their secret, her father's guilt, her mother's scarlet...
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The Scarlet Letter
Because Hawthorne used so many allusions in the novel, the only way not to miss any is to read a well-footnoted edition such as the Norton Critical Edition. I will give you two examples from...
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The Scarlet Letter
Hester does penance for her sin by simply remaining in the colony in the first place. She could simply leave, go home or go elsewhere in the colonies, and begin life anew with her daughter, but she...
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The Scarlet Letter
In this novel, the witch, Mistress Hibbins, is tolerated because she is the sister of a prominent politician in the colony, Governor Bellingham. I'm not sure that we can, with total accuracy, say...
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The Scarlet Letter
The majority of the women in the village are critical of Hester. In the second chapter, "The Market-Place," an older woman in the crowd in front of the scaffold of the pillory suggests that in...
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The Scarlet Letter
It might be said that the entire thesis of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter has to do with condemnation of the so-called double standard by which men and women were judged in his day. Both Arthur...
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The Scarlet Letter
Toward Salem itself, the narrator of this introduction, who seems to be Nathaniel Hawthorne, professes to have something like affection, despite the fact that the town seems rather haphazardly...
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The Scarlet Letter
At the beginning of The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne and her illegitimate child, Pearl, stand on the scaffold in Boston so they can be public objects of scorn. Hawthorne writes, "The very ideal of...
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Moby Dick
First, according to a search on the Google Ngram viewer, this particular phrase "living life to its fullest" originated in the 1920s, had a few brief years of moderate popularity, and then did not...
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The Scarlet Letter
In the last chapter of the novel, Hawthorne reveals many themes. The narrator describes the way Hester and Pearl left the colony, as well as the fact that Hester returns many years later. In...
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The Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter takes place in Puritan Boston in the middle of the 17th century. This is a pretty singular time and place in history because the Puritans were a pretty peculiar group. They...
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The Scarlet Letter
I would argue that the character most responsible for the Reverend Dimmesdale's suffering is Dimmesdale, himself. He whips himself with a scourge, fasts, keeps late-night vigils, and wrestles with...
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The Scarlet Letter
In chapter 14 of The Scarlet Letter, titled "Hester and the Physician", Hester goes to Chillingworth and wants to have a word with him. Chillingworth starts to talk by telling Hester about how the...
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The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter slowly escalates to the climax beginning in Chapter 16. I'll identify each of the significant events leading up to this point with a brief touch of...
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The Devil and Tom Walker
The Devil being referred to as "The Black Man" mostly likely has no one true origin in literature, but was a euphemism that had become widely accepted by the time period of Irving and Hawthorne....
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The Scarlet Letter
When the narrator introduces Chillingworth, he is wearing a "strange disarray" of European and native attire. His brow is "furrowed" and he is a somewhat small man, but he possesses a "remarkable...
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The Scarlet Letter
In this chapter, the narrator refers to Hester as "the people's victim and life-long bond-slave." This is a metaphor that describes the way Hester feels and has felt for quite a long time; she...
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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
Ironically, Hester Prynne, who is on the Puritan scaffold because she has committed the sin of adultery, is compared to the Virgin Mary and Child of the Papists (Catholics). Of course, another,...
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The Scarlet Letter
In the first scene of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the reader is shown a prison surrounded by the people of the community. Hawthorne's heavy use of imagery paints a clear picture and...
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The Scarlet Letter
If Dimmesdale had confessed himself as Hester's co-sinner, he would not have been hanged. Although one character suggests that there is a law to hang Hester for the crime, this was not actually...
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The Scarlet Letter
The themes of sin, punishment, and redemption are most clearly illuminated by Hester Prynne. First, she commits the sin of adultery. Her husband never arrived from Europe, and though he is...
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The Scarlet Letter
While it's much more complicated than the following summary will allow for, Feminist critical theory generally seeks to describe and illustrate the specific experiences of those who identify as...
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The Scarlet Letter
Both Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale have committed a sin, probably prompted by a moment of love, lust, and loneliness, but thereafter, each of them goes forward in a way that consists only of...
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The Scarlet Letter
Hester implores Reverend Dimmesdale to speak on her behalf when she is at the governor's house and is told that city officials are considering removing Pearl from her care; many of them consider...
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The Scarlet Letter
When Hester and Dimmesdale meet in the forest to speak to one another, Dimmesdale seems, in many ways, a broken man. Hester confesses to him that Chillingworth, Dimmesdale's housemate and doctor,...
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The Scarlet Letter
Chillingworth gives in to sin when he makes finding and torturing Hester's co-sinner the singular goal of his life. He tells her that "'[He] shall seek this man, as [he has] sought truth in books...
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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
The stranger who comes to the village eventually offers the name Roger Chillingworth, but he is actually Roger Prynne. He is Hester Prynne's estranged husband. Theirs had been an arranged...
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The Scarlet Letter
Because the Puritans believe that everything is part of "God's plan," the members of Hester's community, especially the religious elders, are convinced that the physician's arrival and his apparent...
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The Scarlet Letter
Chillingworth is several years older than the last time he and Hester were together, and when she sees him in the crowd, he is dressed in "a strange disarray of civilized and savage costume."...
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The Scarlet Letter
I don’t believe that the pain of the letter is ever lessened for Hester, but I do think she becomes accustomed to the pain, and so it doesn't seem quite as dramatic as when it was new to her....
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The Scarlet Letter
In Chapter Three, Reverend Dimmesdale and the other ministers attempt to compel Hester to name her co-sinner, the father of her young baby. Although she has just been released from prison and is...
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The Scarlet Letter
While Hester's relationship to conformity is a complicated one, Hawthorne generally depicts her as a kind of conformist. The key scene for this reading is in Chapter XVIII, "A Flood of Sunshine,"...
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The Scarlet Letter
As the Reverend Dimmesdale passes Hester in the Election Day procession, she feels a sudden gloom come over her and gets the sense that he is "utterly beyond her reach." Hester feels very isolated...
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The Scarlet Letter
There are three key ways that the Biblical King David is like Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter. The first, and most obvious, is that both King David and Hester...
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The Scarlet Letter
Hester and Pearl do pay a visit to Governor Bellingham, but they do not stay with him for any length of time. The reason for their visit is so that Hester can drop off a pair of gloves that she...
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The Scarlet Letter
Dimmesdale's mark is first revealed in the novel's penultimate chapter, "The Revelation" (Chapter 23). He calls Hester and Pearl to him, just after he has delivered the Election Day sermon, and...
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The Scarlet Letter
In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, there are a number of quotes that show that the 17th century society thinks of Hester as a sinner. Hester Prynne makes her first appearance in chapter...
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The Scarlet Letter
Dimmesdale's guilt seems to be making him somewhat less discerning. Chillingworth had chosen Dimmesdale to be his spiritual guide, and it was at about this time that "the health of Mr. Dimmesdale...
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The Scarlet Letter
Comparing Hawthorne's Hester Prynne to Milton's Eve provokes a great deal of questions, most of which inevitably involve religion and morality. By weighing the two female characters we see that...
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The Yellow Wallpaper
These are two very disparate pieces of literature. Aside from the former being a short story and the latter a novel, both take place within two very different times: The Scarlet Letter is a novel...
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The Scarlet Letter
Pearl seems to think, on some level, that Roger Chillingworth is the Devil, whom she calls "the Black Man." In her childish innocence, she certainly picks up on the truth that Chillingworth is...
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The Scarlet Letter
The narrator tells us in the final chapter that "Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet to be her penitence." In other words, Hester had chosen to return to Boston because this...
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The Scarlet Letter
In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne chooses to stay in Boston out of attachment to the life-changing events that had happened there and to the person involved in them--the man who desecrated her...
