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The Meaning Of Adultery In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

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Several years ago it would hardly have been necessary to discuss the meaning of “adultery”. Virtually every educated person knew that “adultery” is a sexual relationship that somehow or another breaches a marriage relationship. In recent years, a new view of adultery has been espoused by a minority element within the church. It is the notion that “adultery” is merely the act of repudiating one’s marriage vows (whether or not the covenant breaker ever enters a new marital union). Task here is to analyze the word as such when it intrudes the scenario of great novels in the literary genre. The novel which is subjected to analysis is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Anyways, to label Hester by such a crude word as “adulterous” would rather be insulting and so the paper tries to adhere to the term ‘passion’, which is the most gorgeous term in the dictionary. To make it clear, she had an unadulterated passion towards her “instincts”. So this paper claims her as the “grand feminine”, and her tragedy as the “Tragedy of Grand Passions”. …show more content…

His works reflect reality and romance, actuality and illusion, the real and fanciful, the natural and supernatural, the literal and the imagined. He was a natural moralist and a philosopher. Hawthorne usually treats Puritanism, not as central theme but as a dark background for the ideas and for experiences, which deeply concerns him. He is not a mystic. He cannot be considered as a transcendentalist, but he was attracted by its free inquiry, its radicalism and its contact with radical life. Some call him as a romancer of Puritanism. His biography makes it clear that he was an admirable man and in all ways

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