Comparing Call Of The Wild And The Scarlet Letter

Who are we on this earth? What is the meaning of our lives? One question asked in many different ways, but with the same answer desired. Jack London and Nathaniel Hawthorne have distinct yet undeniably connected answers in their novels, The Call of the Wild and The Scarlet Letter. Each focuses on an individual, isolated from society in his own way, forced to bear a weight unknown in his lifetime previous, whose endeavors challenge his purpose and existence in the world. Each novel’s connection to the other provides further insight into humanity’s largest question, but where the two diverge proves to be as laudable a source of clarity as their accordance. The themes, characters, and events presented in The Call of the Wild and The Scarlet Letter …show more content…
Nature is undeniably connected to the characters of The Call of the Wild and The Scarlet Letter. In the former, Buck wrestles with the wild as he adapts to his new life as a sled dog in the Canadian wilderness. The cold, among other natural adversities, deprives him of all comforts his old, domestic lifestyle used to provide, while undomesticated animals threaten his life in a violent, combative form. Buck’s battle to find a home in nature’s harshest conditions embodies his internal battle to accept the wild within him. Buck, through the trials and tortures of primitive life, acknowledges his primal instinct’s role in his life at the cost of losing original attributes such as morality and domesticity. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne wrestles with social expectations of a Puritan community that has condemned her for an (admittedly wrong) act of sin: having an illegitimate child. Hester finds herself repeatedly in the forest, a place to the Puritans as the epicenter of evil. She loses a part of her human identity with the loss of her puritan identity. Hester’s challenging and defiance of societal expectations is her own conflict of accepting the wild