A Representative of the New Female Image—Analyzing Hester Prynne’s Feminist Consciousness in The Scarlet Letter

Pearl would seem to be the most enigmatic child in literature. Soon after The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850 Pearl was called both “an imbodied angel from the skies” and “a void little demon,” and time produced no unanimity of opinion. In the past hundred years she has been variously described as “most artificial and unchildlike,” and as possessing “the natural bloom… of childhood,” as a creature “of moral indifference, as one not born into the moral order,” and as an illustration of “that law which visits the sins of the fathers upon the children.” For some critics she performs the function of “a symbolized conscience,” but for others she is simply “a darksome fairy” or “the one touch of color in a sombre picture.” To one writer she typifies “a disordered nature torn by a malignant conflict between the forces of good and evil,” but to another she is an example of Rousseauian natural goodness. In the past five years Pearl has been found a symbol both of “unnatural isolation” from society and of the organicism of nature as opposed to the mechanism of society, a symbol both of the id and of “man's hopeful future.” Several critics have called Pearl a child of nature, but to one she is a symbol of wild uncivilized nature outside the realm of grace, to another an example of prelapsarian innocence, and to a third “an object of natural beauty, a flower,” and like nature, amoral, “not good or bad, because… not responsible.” Criticism of Pearl almost forces one to conclude that her character is an unfathomable maze, or of such an involved richness that it can become all things to all men.

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The Scarlet Letter of the Law: A Place for Shaming Punishments in Arizona

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.2471168 ◽

2013 ◽

Author(s):

Michael Lee Dynes ◽

Henry Edward Whitmer

Keyword(s):

Scarlet Letter ◽

The Scarlet Letter ◽

The Law

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“A” for Atlantic in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

Freedom's Empire ◽

10.1215/9780822388739-013 ◽

2007 ◽

pp. 301-329

Keyword(s):

Scarlet Letter ◽

The Scarlet Letter

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The Unavoidable Suffering in Selected Literary Texts: Poems and Novels

10.31235/osf.io/74xqd ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Amal Nasser Frag

Keyword(s):

Literary Criticism ◽

Literary Texts ◽

Allen Ginsberg ◽

Scarlet Letter ◽

Minor Characters ◽

The Scarlet Letter ◽

Modern Psychology ◽

Main Reflection ◽

To Come ◽

Almost All

The unavoidable suffering is an outstanding theme which has its impact to almost all literary texts. Typically, unavoidable suffering is the supreme touchstone in life and literature. Poets used its presence incessantly. They are always conscious of its inevitability. Investigation of this theme gives the reader a panoramic view of vital issues that are unusually linked to some extent with suffering; such as religion, God, nature, love and immortality. In the poems discussed in this study, unavoidable suffering reflects the effect of modern psychology has had upon both literature and literary criticism. The main reflection of suffering which is implied in the characters presented reveal the very contradictions, absurdities and complexities of our life. The poets and novelists chosen in this paper portray suffering, as “an abstract force, in an attempt to come to terms with it as well as to fathom it.” (Gurra, 2019, p.5) In the inexorable quest to comprehend it, poets do not offer a final view of suffering because it remains for them the great unknown mystery. This paper, however, is an attempt to meticulously examine and critically analyze the images of suffering in minor characters presented in selected poems. The selected poems are of Robinson Jeffers, Allen Ginsberg, and Maya Angelou. The characters selected from different novels are minor ones. Characters like: Roger Chiilingworth from The Scarlet Letter (1850), Walter Morel from Sons and Lovers (1913), Zeena Frome from Ethan Frome (1911), and Rezia Warren Smith from Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Different kinds of suffering are disscussed in order to gain a better understanding of the writers’ perception of unavoidable suffering as well as to understand the western philosophy of it.

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