Winthrop

With Hester, Dimmesdale can finally be true and live a real life. Dimmesdale describes his time with Hester with “‘Do I feel joy again?’ cried he, wondering at himself” (167). Joy, the greatest feeling in a human’s life. Without joy, life is meaningless. Dimmesdale finally feels true. Unity also brings about more changes in Hester. The long standing symbol of sin which has weighted down Hester for so long is finally tossed off. Hester feels, “the stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep…

A hero is one who displays actions which can be viewed as brave and courageous; something that separates one from an average person. Hester displays heroic qualities through her trials and tribulations by the town of Boston. She is shunned from the community, distances herself from the world she once knew, but by the end, has become a symbol of good deeds and charity. Her badge of shame had now taken on a new meaning, “Such helpfulness was found in her--so much power to do, and power to…

People endure many choices to make everyday, and the decisions they choose results in a lasting impact on the rest of their lives. In The Scarlet Letter, one decision that Hester Prynne executes influences humiliation for the rest of her life. A Puritan crowd gathers to shame Hester Prynne and find her guilty of adultery. As a result, she wears a scarlet “A” on her dress. As she stands on the scaffold, Hester sees her long-lost husband in the crowd, and he vows to find the father of the child,…

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, The Scarlet Letter, is a story about sin and redemption, the light and darkness of these areas, and the appearance of to what something means and what significance it carries with it. The Scarlet Letter, takes place within a puritan community in Massachusetts during the Seventeenth century. Where a young woman moves into this community and waits for 2 years for her husband to return, while her husband is away she has an affair with the reverend Dimmesdale. The young woman…

In the early nineteenth century, there was a philosophical movement known as Transcendentalism which supported the ideas of civil disobedience, self-reliance, and nature as a reflection of God. Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the Transcendentalist authors, uses the idea of this philosophy in The Scarlet Letter (1850), in which Hester Prynne along with her daughter, Pearl, is cast out by the Puritans as an adulterer. While Hester has been punished for her sin, Arthur Dimmesdale, the town pastor, is…

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard, both authors use images of grass in order to convey a lack of care for human suffering. Conrad emphasizes the ability of grass to grow to conceal something hidden in order to chastise European exploration, while Trethewey points out the tendency of grass to burn and regrow that parallels attempts made to dishonor and hide the efforts made by black regiments. Conrad uses images of grass in order to juxtapose grass’s growth…

Crime and Punishment shares the story of how internal conflicts can shape the an individual’s values and priorities, especially when the torment they’ve endured has been lengthy and emotionally consuming. Self-inflicted punishment from guilt and remorse at some point corners characters into finding a way out; a form of salvation and redemption, for they come to realize the magnitude of their crime. Dostoevsky reveals that psychological torment leads an individual to seek forgiveness and…

Imagery is included in The Scarlet Letter to insert a more profound message. The application of light and dark imagery is essential to the novel in creating a lively and melancholy moods to establish variance in the characters as well as their lives. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne uses the societal hypocrisy of Puritans, elements of nature and the importance of the scarlet letter to exude the how sin is an entity of life. Puritans are merciless and use public humiliation as an epitome of the…

Roger Chillingworth is a very interesting character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel "The Scarlet Letter". He is the novel's antagonist, and is Hester Prynne's husband who she was unfaithful to. As the antagonist of this story, he serves a crucial role when we examine the shame and guilt experienced by Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale, because while Hester Prynne has the entire village to shame her, Dimmesdale's only judge is Chillingworth himself, though he does it in ways that are less marked and…

The novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”, written by Margaret Atwood is a book based around Offred, a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead - a dystopian America ruled by extreme religious values. Offred’s forced to breed for couples in Gilead, and if she refuses to do so, she will be either killed or sent out to slowly die of radiation poisoning. The book ends where after breaking numerous rules, men are to take her away in a van. The reader doesn’t know if the men are there to arrest her for treason or…