Essays on Prynne

When Herman Melville was writing, capital punishment was a much more commonly used punishment than it is in our own time, and as much as modern death penalty opponents talk about the mistaken use of it in cases when the convict has been wrongly sentenced, the swiftness of the execution and the shoddiness of the evidentiary requirements in Melville’s time were comparatively barbaric. Captain Vere is typical of the sort of judge who would have rendered that sentence in that day, brought in at the last moment and then hearing a fairly swift (and legally shaky) summary of ...

Introduction

The novel, The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850, has a protagonist named Hester Prynne who was forced to live in solitude for her act of adultery. The novel is phased in the era of 1960s which is almost two centuries prior to its year of publication and aims at explaining the plight of a woman who was forced to live with the imposed consequences by the members of the Puritan community in the city of Salem, Massachusetts. With respect to the analysis of her character in the novel, there are some stark contradictions affixed to her ...

Hester is the hero of the novel. She is portrayed as an energetic, lovely, lively, and glad lady. When she is initially introduced in the story, there is as of now an embarrassment joined to her name that is symbolized by the red letter "A". She holds her head high and stays in full general visibility without shedding a tear when she goes to jail. Her soul is likewise reflected in her brightening the red letter with gold string. Hester's quality of character out in the open, is truth be told, her method for steeling herself against her inward ...

Bad faith in The Scarlet Letter

It can be really difficult to come to a decision when the outside world persuades you to meet your own wishes first. Being by nature a weak-willed creature, people are inclined to rash actions and misguided dealings. We are, at times, sneaky and foolish. Sometimes even the good intentions we may have and a deep longing to act justly may also be seen as a display of bad faith. According to Sartre, bad faith is the use of freedom without the acknowledgement of its presence (Detmer 203). Being consciously aware of their bad conduct, people still refuse to ponder ...

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is the narrative of a fallen woman whose story is not the result of her own innate character, but of social forces which execute their power upon her and the subsequent transformations that these forces evoke. Thus, the personal opinion of this reader is that Hester Prynne truly is a courageous heroine who, prone to flaws like all human beings, makes a choice, which changes her life forever. Whether it was a wrong choice or a feat any of us would endeavor upon is questionable, because as it was said, it is not so much Hester’s instinctive ...

Hawthorne’s presentation of the wilderness in The Scarlet Letter is both literal – the unexplored and untamed wildness of forest beyond the town – and also metaphorical – he describes Hester’s as being cast into a “moral wilderness” because of her punishment at the hands of the Puritan community of New England. At the same time, Hester’s life in the “moral wilderness” and the forest itself are always juxtaposed with civilization – or the Puritan civilization of 17th century New England. Hawthorne was descended from New England Puritans, but as a Transcendentalist he has a rather different attitude to the wilderness and nature. ...

It should be no surprise that the idea of utopia has often been explored by American writers, since one could argue that America itself exists as a sort of utopian ideal. The words of the Declaration of Independence posit a sort of utopia in their idealistic talk of ’life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ This is very bound up with the notion of America as a new world, a new place where fresh starts can be made and the mistakes of the past avoided: The utopian passages in Euro-American writings tended to elevate American spaces and colonists by comparing them to ...