Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a story of how Hester Prynne committed a sin and is punished but learns to live with herself with her daughter. According to Benjamin Kilbourne, in his article “Shame Conflicts and Tragedy in The Scarlet Letter,” the” ‘A’ of Hester Prynne, shed light on what makes shame unbearable, and on what makes shame conflicts tragic” (465). Dimmesdale, Hester lover that is a preacher, and Chillingworth, Hester husband also had much shame throughout the book, the two-character
her act as a sin. She is self-aware, penitent and rather dutiful to the puritan society and she bears her punishment according to the dogma humbly. For the seven solitary years, it is told that “Hester never battled the public, but submitted; uncomplainingly ...she never raised her head to receive their greeting. If they were resolute to accost her, she laid her finger on the scarlet letter, and pass on” (Hawthorne 92). Yet, she never succumbs to the community’s thoughts about her. She feels guilty
Nubakht 1 Parisa Nubakht S1436406 Dr. 't Hart Literature 3A: American Literature 10 November 2014 Hester Prynne the Symbol of Non-conformism and Self-reliance In his essay Self-Reliance, Emerson emphasizes the importance of individualism and self-reliance rather than surrendering to the standards of society. He believes that trusting ' 'other people 's judgment is cowardly ' ' (Self-Reliance 14) and instead, he emphasizes the value of acting independently. "What I must do is all that concerns me
Abstract The present study is intended to illustrate the analogous concepts in two great American literary works, The Scarlet Letter a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and "A Rose for Emily" a short story by William Faulkner with the help of deconstruction. Deconstruction is Jacque Derrida’s inventive strategy, which aims to subvert the traditional ideas and methodologies related to language and textual interpretations and put into question the entire history of Western metaphysics from Plato to the
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), is a worthy allegorical novel in which a young woman commits the sin of adultery with a local pastor and gets pregnant, once the townspeople realize they punish her by forcing her to use the symbol of adultery. Light and dark symbolisms can be reduced easily to white and black, hence to good and bad. For Hawthorne, the interplay between white and black, or light and dark does not serve a mere imagery purpose or a descriptive one. They are entrenched