Role Of Sin In American Literature

Role of Sin in American Literature Sin plays a role in everyone’s life whether you’re the one doing the sinning or someone you know is sinning. American Literature isn’t any different in that sin happens. The characters in the stories and poems are shaped by the sin that occurs around them or to them. Some of them accept the negativity and try to look at the positive in life like Hester did in The Scarlett Letter while others supply the negativity and create more sin like Minnie Wright did in Trifles. Throughout the stories and poems that we have read sin sticks out to me in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Trifles by Susan Glaspell, and “Ligeia” by Edgar Allan Poe. Sin is shown to play a key role in these three American literatures …show more content…
The story is mainly about sexism but sin does take place. A murder is conducted and the truth is held from the authorities. Mrs. Wright is suspected to have murdered her husband Mr. Wright by tying a rope around his neck. The authorities (the attorney Mr. Hale and the sheriff Mr. Peters) head upstairs to look around the crime scene. The women stay in the kitchen and notice odd things that were seen as unusual of a women during that time. The bread was left out, the bird cage was empty and there was an unfinished quilt. The women start to clean up and discover that the canary bird that Mrs. Wright adored was inside a box that was wrapped up in the quilt. They also discover that the quilt is put together by tying the pieces together in knots. All of these clues point to the “lifeless” life that Mrs. Wright had and how miserable it must had been to live with Mr. Wright. The ladies keep the information to their self and hide the box away from the men (Glaspell 743-752). The sin was murder and even though the women didn’t lie to the men about the discoveries that they found, they didn’t tell them about them either. The reason behind the act of murder committed by Mrs. Wright was so that she could have that sense of freedom that her canary bird represented for her before Mr. Wright killed it. The act of the women keeping valid information from their husbands and the authorities were to show their loyalty to women and to defy the corrupt world that they live in where men think less of women. Like The Scarlet Letter, if this poem had been written in a time where men and women were seen as more equal than the events would be more different. There would possibly be a women authority figure would be present at the crime scene along with a man and the women of the story wouldn’t be placed in the kitchen like they were