Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter: The Theory of the Romance and the Use of the New England Situation

PMLA ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 83 (5) ◽  
pp. 1439-1447 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Stubbs
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moral Argument ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Prose Romance ◽  
Complex Characterization

AbstractTo write The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne drew on mid-nineteenthcentury theories of the prose romance and the central situation of New England romances. The romance was distinguished from the novel by the idea of artistic distance; romancers wanted to set human experience at a distance from their readers' world so that the meaning of the experience would be more clear. To get the distance exactly right, they balanced three sets of opposites: verisimilitude and ideality; the natural and the marvelous; and history and fiction. Hawthorne discussed each of the balances and used them as part of his conception of the form of The Scarlet Letter. The central situation of most contemporary romances about Puritanism provided him with the conflict of the “fair Puritan” and the “black Puritan.” Hester is his “fair Puritan” whose capacity for feeling is opposed to the reasoned but harsh justice of his “black Puritan,” Chillingworth. These two characters in their roles as types define the extreme sides of the moral argument Hawthorne synthesizes in the complex characterization of Dimmesdale.

Between Intimacy and Distance, a “Neutral Territory”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Greyser
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Writer's Block ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Textual Space ◽  
Writer’S Block

This chapter examines masculine individualism’s push–pull relationship with sympathy, beginning in The Scarlet Letter’s Custom-House. There, Hawthorne’s narrator sympathetically presses Hester Prynne’s dusty, scarlet A against his heart, feeling a burning tingle as he places himself in her position. Sections read touch and untouchability in The Scarlet Letter, exploring what encouraged male readers to overcome what Henry Thoreau referred to as masculinity’s “gulf of feeling” to experience sentimental connection. Writing through alienation and writer’s block, Hawthorne’s tingling connection with Hester in the Custom-House propelled him to complete the novel in just five weeks, after being fired from his position as surveyor. His imagined intimacy with Prynne emerges against myths of the self-made man and the untouchable citizen-subject. Readings of tactility reveal alphabetic print and textual space as sites of flux and flow, intimacy and distance, as writers and readers sympathetically lean into and recoil from page and print.

An Analysis of Symbolic Images in The Scarlet Letter

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 1725
Author(s):  
Haihong Gao
Keyword(s):  
Work Experience ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Early American ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
American Law ◽  
Deep Meaning ◽  
Symbolic Images

The Scarlet Letter was written by Nathanial Hawthorne in 1850, with the background of seventeenth Century of the early American colonies, taking the tragic love between pastor Arthur Dimmesdale and a woman named Hester's as content, which revealed the dim of American law, and hypocrisy of religion. So this novel filled with the religion plot and conveyed the humanity feelings. This paper focuses on the symbolic technique to analyze The Scarlet Letter. By rethinking and criticizing the Puritanism, this paper wants to reveal the dark side of man nature and arouse readers ’thought on morality. Predecessor researchers analyzed The Scarlet Letter from the aspects of feminist, religion and moral. But this paper turn view, it analyze the novel from symbolic images technique. This paper consists of three parts. The first part introduces the author, including his background, study and work experience, and the influence of his novels. The second part introduces the symbolism, including its definition and effect. In the third part, in order to reveal the hypocrisy of the religious at that time, to reveal the rebellious spirit of women, I will interpret the symbolic images from three aspects: the nature, color, time. Through the analysis of the symbolic images, readers can find the deep meaning of the context, which can strengthen people’s understanding of the characters, scenes and the plot of the novel. This can promote the comprehensive understanding of this greatest novel.

Hawthorne's First Novel: The Future of a Style

PMLA ◽  
1963 ◽  
Vol 78 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-68
Author(s):  
Robert Eugene Gross
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Future ◽  
Basic Characteristics ◽  
A Minor

In 1828, about twenty-two years before the appearance of his second novel and chef-d'oeuvre, The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne paid $100.00 to arrange the anonymous publication of Fanshawe, his first novel. Almost immediately upon its public appearance, however, he tried to acquire all available copies in order to destroy them, and enjoined family and friends to silence about his authorship. His suppression of the novel was so successful that when a rare copy turned up twelve years after his death, his wife Sophia at first denied that he was the author. Nowadays a minor bibliographical treasure, Fanshawe can also be valuable to scholars as a primer of Hawthorne's style, because despite its defects—imitativeness, disjointedness, occasional silliness—it provides an opportunity for observing basic characteristics of his writing as they appear at the beginning of his career, secretive and abortive as it was. Even in The Marble Faun, his last completed novel, the manner, characters, and themes of Fanshawe can be clearly discerned. As Stanley Williams has put it: “The characters are thin and two-dimensioned, the dialogue pretentious; but a contemporary was right in declaring that in Fanshawe we may detect the weak and timid presence of all of Hawthorne's peculiar powers.”

The New England Sources of The Scarlet Letter

1959 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Ryskamp
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter

scholarly journals Puritan’s Hegemony in the Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-49
Author(s):  
Zakaria Zakaria ◽  
Akin Duli ◽  
Fathu Rahman
Keyword(s):  
Married Woman ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
Political Values ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Library Research ◽  
State Administration ◽  
The Social ◽  
Religious Law ◽  
Hester Prynne

Misperception and inhuman behave presented by Puritan in conducting state administration, consequently character of Hester Prynne in the novel of Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter under the implementation of religious values, law assembling, and political system. The implementation of Puritan’s inhuman religious, law and political values to Prynne’s personal character is something criminal behave, and assembling of the law in the case of sin of Prynne’s adultery presented by Custom House was irresponsible decision or immoral severance in front of court. Puritan’s values over the social living is regulated not only for social norms, culture, and law affairs, but even political matters, means that everything must be obeyed and be bent over the God’s rule, and so to whom (married woman) has committed adultery, must be committed as a sinner and impose a sentence in front of general public. It is a library research and used descriptive qualitative analysis. In challenging and lift it up the universal value in against suppressive, hegemonic in the case Prynn the writer used two approachings as solution to solve the problem and they are feminism perspective and deconstruction model as a solution over the Prynne’s problem.

scholarly journals Beyond Nature and Subjectivity——The Issues of Space in Nathaniel Hawthorne' s The Scarlet Letter

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Xiaohan Mei
Keyword(s):  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Material Space

In Nathaniel Hawthorne' s literary creation, the usages of space are usually highlighted by Hawthorne' s arrangement of the settings, scenes and social background. In The Scarlet Letter, according to the spatial turn in 20th spatial theories—especially the spatial theory of Lefebvre, Nathaniel Hawthorne constructed three spaces in this romance novel: the material space, spiritual space and social space. These three kinds of space are not simply juxtaposed, but are intervening, intermingling, superimposing each other, and sometimes even contradicting each other. It is through the construction of space that Hawthorne combines serious moral content with excellent artistic expressions, giving The Scarlet Letter its powerful vitality and enduring charm. It is also through the construction of space that the theme and meaning of the novel about the human spiritual ecological crisis is better manifested, and shows Hawthorne's contemplation and transcendence of the real world. In the process of interpreting the space construction of The Scarlet Letter, readers can appreciate the narrative techniques and artistic effects of the text, and then examine the social reality that the novel should express.

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