Essays on The Scarlet Letter

In The Scarlet Letter, author Nathaniel Hawthorne uses Hester Prynne, an unhappily married seamstress, and Arthur Dimmesdale, the local Puritan clergyman, to prove that a community that forcefully suppresses the natural desires of an individual is dangerous, both to the individual and to the community....

Love and hate require intimacy and heart-knowledge. Both emotions leave the individual subservient to the emotion and become compulsory for survival. If an emotion develops into a discernible obsession, it may eventually abandon the zealous lover or no less zealous hater disheartened and dejected once...

One of the major themes in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” is the idea of the public self as distinguished from the private self. This leitmotif encompasses much more than the idea of an individual versus society; it also contains the themes of hidden thoughts...

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter Hester Prynne accepts that she has sinned and realizes that she must pay the price for her crime. In doing so she becomes overwhelmed with courage and conviction and assumes a redemption that is denied to most of...

Prejudice or alienation is almost always a theme, whether a prominent one or a minor one, within a work of literature. Art is about the human condition, and the human condition only significant because of struggle; a blessed life does not make a story. The...

In the novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne establishes a duality between piety and sin that manifests itself in the character of Arthur Dimmesdale. Throughout the plot, Dimmesdale is presented as a faithful and religious minister. Hawthorne primarily portrays this by detailing the power of...

In the pivotal “Chapter XVI: A Forest Walk” in The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorn uses symbolism and imagery to convey deeper themes. He intentionally makes the gloomy forest the setting of the meeting between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. The “feebly sportive” (Hawthorne, 296) light...

Throughout the late 18th century and 19th century, Romanticism was a highly popular literary style adopted by many novelists. Nature, a prominent element of Romanticism, is used in these authors’ writings not just for descriptions and images, but also to emphasize major ideas. One gifted...

The Scarlet Letter, perhaps the most notable work of prodigious American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, was first published in 1850 and has since been subject to a plethora of literary criticisms, including those from psychoanalytic, new historical, and reader-response perspectives. In each of their articles, scholars...

In The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hester Prynne Prynne redefines herself despite being shunned by the Puritan community. Although she has sinned, she does not dwell in the past. She grows stronger as a person from the cruelty of the townspeople and the shame...

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us,” stated Oliver Wendell Holmes. This eventually proves to be especially true for Hester Prynne, the main character in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne, a fair...

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne creates a division between the truth and a Puritan society tainted by hypocrisy. Such a division existed in Hawthorne’s life as well. Born into a historically Puritan family, Hawthorne developed an obsession with his Salemite ancestors as well as...

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne demonstrates the need for humans to abide by the laws of nature and conscience, rather than the laws of man, to achieve happiness. The laws of nature, enforced only by the human conscience, govern every individual. Humans learn these...

“Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Everyone knows this hackneyed quote, but people still judge others based on outer appearance. By doing so, these people ignore the possible inner greatness of those they so quickly set aside. The character Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s...

The Scarlet Letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne is set in 1600’s Puritan Boston. It tells the story of Hester Prynne, a woman who suffers public ignominy, forced to wear a red scarlet letter for her sin of adultery. The Scarlet Letter provides a look at...

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter employs dramatic clout within the characters with the light and dark contrast. The “blackness” did not allude to race. The dark colors underline sin and their evil, distraught intentions while the lightness emphasizes innocence and exposure. Hawthorne implies Calvinist...

Evolution is defined as “a process of change”(Webster’s Dictionary), and it has been proved many times in the past that sin is a direct process that leads to change in one’s spiritual as well as fleshly life. The three main characters, Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth,...

Puritans are often mischaracterized as overly strict and moral persons whose lives revolve around killjoy attitudes and laws against all innocent social pleasures. Qualities of sympathy, charity, and compassion are rarely tied to Puritanism or seen as characteristics that exemplified their way of life. (Newberry,...

The story of Adam and Eve illustrates the sinful nature of man. A common theory about the story of Adam and Eve is that God intended Adam and Eve to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge. The argument is, if God had not...

Despite differences in genre and content, both The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Douglass himself present a dehumanization of the seemingly weak protagonist. This occurs through stripping each character of their true identity...

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne writes the consequences of one sinful act in a Puritan community. This sinful act involves three main characters, Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingsworth. As The Scarlet Letter progresses, each character copes with his or her sin differently, and therefore...

Why does Hawthorne give Hester Prynne the name Hester? Hawthorne himself, as is well known, changed his family name from Hathorne, to distance himself from those Puritan ancestors whose achievements and excesses haunted his fiction. The Scarlet Letter tells of Roger Prynne’s reinvention of himself...

The literature of the American Renaissance is rich in symbolism, and in no author’s work is this more evident than in that of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Perhaps the most popular of his works, The Scarlet Letter has long been dissected and analyzed by scholars and critics;...

From Genesis, the true nature of humanity has been closely associated with sin. While the Puritans vehemently believed that sin degraded both God and human beings, in the Scarlet Letter, it is the very nature of transgression and the resulting scorn which bestows extraordinary powers...

Nature. It is a word that seems so expansive and all-inclusive. Within a novel, elements of nature and setting often become so expected and mundane that they are easily glossed over in order to get to the “more important” elements of a story-the plot, characters,...

The author of my book is Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by his other famous book, “The House of Seven Gables” which was published in 1851. Something that is common between the two books...

Hester Prynne is considered to be both one of the first heroines and feminist icons in American Literature. This is despite Nathaniel Hawthorne, born on July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, being labelled as a misogynist, threatened by the growing feminist movement. How Hawthorne portrays...

When a person or character makes a mistake or commits an affective act, their life can be altered both negatively and positively. This idea takes an important contribution in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This novel focuses solely on Hester Prynne: as the protagonist...

“The Puritans were members of a religious reform movement known as Puritanism that arose within the Church of England in the late 16th century. They believed the Church of England was too similar to the Roman Catholic Church and should eliminate ceremonies and practices not...

“The author should be in his work like God is in the universe present everywhere and visible nowhere” – Gustave Flaubert. Many fictional authors like to present their ideas and views through their writings. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is an example of a...