Essays on Scarlet Letter

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 ...

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 one of the most famous novels by the American romantic writer. While the novel is well-known for its depiction of the relationships between the characters, and the romantic plots and subplots, the novel also has great value as a historical study of the Puritan period. Puritan society was a highly gendered society, with strict gender roles for men and women, and a well-established patriarchal society. Explorations of the novel, and of the depiction of Hester’s character, her punishment, and her actions in the novel can help reveal whether Hawthorne was realistically ...

Romanticism is an element that has played a crucial role in the development of literature from the 18th century. This philosophy has had a noticeable effect on many literature works including Nathaniel’s The Scarlet Letter. It is easy to identify its influence in the novel because it is very clear that Nathaniel Hawthorne was a supporter of romanticism and that is the reason he presents many issues with the philosophy of romanticism in the novel. The Scarlet Letter is a gothic romanticism novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne during the romanticism period. The book features the story of two ...

When considering the genre of Romantic Fiction, it is important to distinguish two main criteria. The first one is that the story should tell about the relationship and romantic love between two people. Secondly, the positive end of the story leaves the reader believing that love and relationship are very real and endure right next to them, and that love wins at all. In literature, realism expresses real situations, real people and real events, whereas romanticism shows messages by using fiction. Romanticism focuses on plot, hyperbole, metaphor and feeling. In contrast, realism focuses on characters, details, objectivity and separation ...