scholarly journals Misogyny or Feminism? A Probe into Hawthorne and His The Scarlet Letter

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 139
Author(s):  
Yueming Wang
Keyword(s):  
Family Relationships ◽  
Family Relationship ◽  
Female Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Hester Prynne

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter has been focused onby critics from different aspects due to his ambiguity used in the novel. Hawthorne himself has been doubted as to whether he is a misogynist or a feminist when describing the female character, Hester Prynne. This article supports the idea that Hawthorne holds the idea offeminism in his work The Scarlet Letter. A writer who mirrors Hester’s life as his own cannot be a misogynist; a writer who honors a woman’s rebelling against patriarchy cannot be a misogynist; a writer who has a beloved wife and mother cannot be a misogynist. Harmonic family relationships, sympathetic character descriptions, and mild demonstrations against patriarchy all prove that Hawthorne is not a misogynist, but a feminist. Hawthorne depicts through four aspects on Hester’s life, Hester’s rebel, Hawthorne’s own family relationship to advocate feminism in his novel.

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.

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.”

Hawthorne, Pearl, and the Primal Sin of Culture

2005 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-185
Author(s):  
EMILY MILLER BUDICK
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Critical Essay ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Hester Prynne ◽  
Coming To Know ◽  
As If

In his long critical essay entitled simply “Hawthorne” (published in 1879), Henry James narrates the story of his own coming to know Hawthorne's most famous work of fiction, The Scarlet Letter. Speaking in an impersonal third person, James, “who was a child at the time,” explains that heremembers dimly the sensation that book produced, and the little shudder with which people alluded to it, as if a peculiar horror were mixed in its attractions. He was too young to read it himself, but its title, upon which he fixed his eyes as the book lay upon the table, had a mysterious charm. … Of course it was difficult to explain to a child the significance of poor Hester Prynne's blood-coloured A. But the mystery was at last partly dispelled by his being taken to see a collection of pictures (the annual exhibition of the National Academy), where he encountered a representation of a pale, handsome woman, in a quaint black dress and white coif, holding between her knees an elfish-looking little girl, fantastically dressed and crowned with flowers. Embroidered on the woman's breast was a great crimson A, over which the child's fingers, as she glanced strangely out of the picture, were maliciously playing. I was told that this was Hester Prynne and little Pearl, and that when I grew older I might read their interesting history.

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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