Puritanism

However, the personalities of these two characters are opposite of the traditional gender roles. Hester symbolizes a masculine role in the novel, while Dimmesdale symbolizes the feminine role. Even when Hester was examined according to today’s criteria for the typical American women, she is able to fit in accordance with that model. All in all, Hawthorne did an exceptional job in showing the conditions as to which people who had committed adultery were forced to live with. However, in…

Inis Beag: Isles of Ireland The ethnography, Inis Beag: Isles of Ireland, was written by John C. Messenger in May 1969 and expresses in detail the culture of Inis Beag island. John C. Messenger was a “Professor in the Department of Anthropology the Folklore Institution in the program of African Studies at Indiana University. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Publishes numerous articles, chapters in books and monographs concerning the cultures of the Anang, the Irish, and the…

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne are very influential and great novels. These two stories have many comparisons toward each other and many differences toward each other. I read these novels during my junior year. I found these novels to be very interesting and perhaps influential to me and many different women in general. These two stories portray adultery. Adultery was considered very bad during the olden days. God gave Moses the Ten…

Societies tend to acclimate well to changes that are gradual or singular. In certain cases, however, dramatic or multiple simultaneous changes often hold great influence over many a people, whether they promote alterations in social, political, or overall cultural aspects of life. One such society that underwent dramatic change was the Puritanistic Salem, Massachusetts. A society’s actions are combustible when imposed by factors that bring about unwanted differences. A comparative society to…

human kind. There was a popular movement in the late 1820’s called Transcendentalism. Transcendentalism is the idea that at the core every human is inherently good and that society and institutions corrupt us and turn us evil. This belief was very popular and was found in many literature pieces during the time. Nathaniel Hawthorne was very involved in this movement. Turner writes, “It Becomes Clear that Hawthorne was at home with both transcendental thought and language, but he can by no means…

location at the pole. The Garden has been the illusory dream of scientists, kings, writers, and at least one contrarian Southern lawyer. It is a story so compelling they’ve sometimes abandoned gold, tenure, country, and family. I see it as a Puritanism streak to get back to a flawless existence. A natural heaven repopulated. As the thinking goes, we pulled stakes during the Genesis flood. If we could only find our way home, across time and evolution,…

To a child, a forest is a place where they can explore and let their imagination run free without parental interference, but the Puritan culture of the 1600s portrayed the forest as the devils playground where people go, only to bring evil back to their supposed perfect society. Nathaniel Hawthorne displays the clash between these conflicting perspectives in his book The Scarlet Letter (1850). The story is set in seventeenth-century Boston that is surrounded by wilderness, as most American…

William Brewster and Separatist Pilgrims’ Immigration to America William Bradford wrote of his close friend and mentor, “[Elder William Brewster] would labor with his hands in the fields as long as he was able; yet when the church had no other minister, he taught twice every Sabbath, and both powerfully and profitable, to the great contentment of his hearers” (qtd. in Gragg 291). This hard work and dedication of my ancestor, Brewster, was greatly admired. The work ethic he exhibited made the…

later, women still held a subordinate role to men and lacked the power to make decisions about their own futures (Case). The courtship system still endured, patriarchy governed all aspects of life, particularly marriage, and the majority adopted puritanism as the standard of life. Women had started to develop ideas of their own individuality, but such theories often became labeled as some form of mental illness (Clark 343). Into such a similar climate comes Edna…

Identity is a social self-construct which is a constant battle between an individual’s sense of true self against roles and expectations placed by members of society. Furthermore, identity is a concept that can be both gained and lost. This may happen by virtue of an individual’s beliefs and notions of surrounding environments. In addition with laws allowing more freedom of expression, individuals are now able to express original thoughts and represent a sense of self. Although, in times of…