In this book, Hawthorne details an elaborate story showing the consequences of confessing sins in contrast to concealing it. A sin weighing down on you and destroying you from the inside out is a moral consequence and, the only remedy is confessing the sin. This notion can be seen in the difference between Hester and Dimmesdale with how they handled the scarlet letter and the effects of that. Hester had worn her scarlet letter out for the public to see from the very beginning. She the subject of a lot of the town’s scrutiny.
The Scarlet Letter, a novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850, functions as an evaluation of Puritan ideas, customs, and culture during the 17th century. Through this evaluation, we can get a good idea of what core values and beliefs the Puritans possessed, as well as the actions they take in cases of adversity brought about by “sinners”. Some Puritan virtues created stark divisions between groups of people, some of which led to discrimination under certain circumstances. One of the most prominent of these is the treatment and standards of men and women, a concept that surfaced during some of the major points in The Scarlet Letter. The divisions that were created by Puritan standards of men and women played a great role in shaping the plot of The Scarlet Letter, determining the fate of many of the characters.
The first major difference between Hester and Olive is their position in the surrounding and the social status that they are in. In the beginning olive states that she gets no attention from anybody. In result, neglect ends up desiring to be to be popular and try to fit in the best she can amongst her peers. By her decision making she gets in the wrong way and ends up getting isolated from everybody in the end.
This is ironic because in this time of despair and acknowledgment of her guilt, he further elaborates on Hester's continuously
Although publicly admitting to sin can be a challenging task, time will heal the initial pain. Hester Prynne, of the Scarlet Letter, lives this lesson as she commits the sin of adultery. Her punishment for the sin is to wear the letter “A” on her bosom until she is allowed to remove it by the Puritan authorities wishes. Initially, Hester feels guilt and shame as she wears it. As Hester’s character grows in strength, she overcomes the letter’s original purpose of punishment.
In his essay, On The Scarlet Letter, critic D.H. Lawrence expresses his opinion about Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Because he sees her in a negative way, Lawrence focuses his essay on her sins and their effects on society. D.H. Lawrence effectively depicts Hester Prynne as an enemy to Puritan society through the use of thought-provoking biblical allusions, a choppy syntax, as well as critical diction and repetition in his essay, On The Scarlet Letter.
Hester was initially married to a man whom she never loved and was thought to be dead after being lost at sea for five years. After waiting for the arrival of her husband which never came, Hester had an affair with another man and together they produced a child. When Hester had an affair with a man who was not her husband she had committed an act of adultery and had to be punished in the eyes of God and of her community. It was decided that Hester would have to serve time in jail and
Even though the Puritans may have designated the letter as a representation of sin, Hester’s renewed sense of pride does not want society to define the A for her. Rather Hester wants to define it herself and by doing so she develops responsibility and power over her own actions. Because Hester has the power to change who she is, she also has the power to change what the Scarlet Letter represents. By letting the letter be “embroidered with gold thread” readers are able to see how for Hester sin is not something to be fearful of; furthermore, it allows one to see how Hester has developed into an independent individual who accepts who she is and the situation she is presented with. Hester’s lover unfortunately
Considering high school is generally a cesspool for immodesty and promiscuity there was no reason for everyone to treat Olive so badly because it was unlikely she was the only one to have had sex. Despite this simple fact, Olive is suddenly the target of hypocritical Marianne’s wrath for being a “trollop” and a “slut” despite Marianne dressing very immodestly for someone that is supposedly deeply religious. Her own friend, Rhiannon, ends up turning on her and trying to get her kicked out of school despite the fact that Rhiannon isn’t necessarily Saint Agnes of Rome herself. This is where the whole double standards aspect comes into play with the hypocrisy. All of the males who paid Olive to agree that they had relations only got more popular as a result while it had an opposite effect for Olive.
Because of their affairs, both Hester and Ingrid’s lives were destroyed for seven years but eventually they rebuilt themselves. Ingrid’s life did not end as tragically as Hester’s story did, since she was able to marry the man she had an affair despite being divorced later. However, their scandals are almost parallel to each other. Each scandal had shockingly close similarities with few differences when it came to what they both did, what their consequences were, and how they were both
The book “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a complex novel that has underlying themes of sin and the responsibility for sin. The novel takes place in a Puritanical society, but two people, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, fornicate with each other, even though Hester is married to someone else. Only Hester is punished, so Dimmesdale keeps his guilt inside, not revealing it to anyone. Hester’s husband, Chillingworth, then proceeds to ruin Hester’s partner in crime, corrupting his soul and being the ultimate cause for his death. Hester, on the other hand, leads a relatively happy life after she had repented for her sin.
In the “Scarlet Letter,” Nathaniel Hawthorne portrays hypocrisy of the Puritan society, where the protagonist Hester Prynne face many consequences of her actions and the how she tries to redeem herself to the society. During the seventeenth puritans believe that it is their mission to punish the ones who do not follow God’s word and it is their job to stop those from sinning. Therefore, the hypercritical puritan society punishes Hester harshly for committing adultery, but in Hester’s mind, she believes that what she did was not a sin but acts of love for her man. Eventually, she redeems herself by turning her crime into an advantage to help those in need, yet the Puritan society still view her as a “naughty bagger.” (Hawthorne 78)
After Olive wrongfully admits to having sexual intercourse with a guy, the entire high school starts labeling her as a promiscuous woman. Since the uneasy feeling of lying about her acts
Therefore, when Sheryl negates the fact on the “accident”, she also presupposes Olive did believe Frank hurt himself because he has an accident. Hence, when she needs to achieve her goal of telling Olive the truth, she has to use directness to clarify the fact. Moreover, she also simplifies the word from “suicide” to “killing himself”. The reason behind could be because Sheryl tries to find a more suitable word that is understandable for a child. According to De Leo, Schmidtke and Diekstra (2007), only ten percentage of fifth-grade children like Olive understands what the meaning of the word “suicide” yet eighty percentage know about “killing oneself”.
When Hester finally takes off the scarlet letter “A” and her cape in the wilderness, it not only represents the beauty she held despite the emotional punishment she underwent, but it also represents her removing the Puritan and patriarch society holding her back. Hester’s feminist conscious is intricately portrayed throughout the