"The dungeons were never empty; the streets of almost every village echoed daily with the lash; the life of a woman, whose mild and Christian spirit no cruelty could embitter, had been sacrificed; and more innocent blood was yet to pollute the hands that were so often raised in prayer." (...

Ambiguity and The Scarlet Letter go better together than two people that have been happily married for 75 years. There is no exemption in Hawthorne's exquisite symbolism of one of his main characters, Pearl. The Scarlet Letter A, worn by Hester Prynne, was a punishment for the immoral sin of ad...

A Feminist Reading of D.H. Lawrence's The Rocking Horse Winner The man that does not know sick women does not know women. - S. Weir Mitchell "The Rocking Horse Winner" is the story of a boy's gift for picking the winners in horse races. An omniscient narrator r...

The Rocking Horse Winner" is the story of a boy's gift for picking the winners in horse races. An omniscient narrator relates the tale of a boy whose family is always short of money. His mother is incapable of showing love and is obsessed with the status that material wealth can provide. This p...

Dimmesdale and Guilt The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of the most well known novels of the romantic writing era. It is a fascinating story about human frailty and its attempt to redeem itself. Set in Boston, the story involves a woman, Hester Prynne, who has a child by another man...

Many characters go through transformations in The Scarlet Letter, and one of those characters is Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. Author Nathaniel Hawthorne writes of a puritan society, and it is the laws of that society, both written and unwritten, that Dimmesdale breaks and which causes the changes to ...

Can a theocracy be an effective type of government? Many object to this idea, but it was the basis of the Puritan religion, which reformed against the Catholic Church of England by placing their religion in the New England area. Theocracy is a government in which the church leaders are also the st...

The Scarlet Letter The "6th Sense" of Sinners In the Novel, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the society of a Puritan town of Boston excludes anyone who is a nonconformist or is in any way deviant from their thoughts, laws, and standards. However, the townspeople themse...

A reverend has sex with a married woman and denies the baby of his own for seven years. Sounds like a sitcom on FOX, but it is the plot of The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. If Hawthorne intended us to read this novel solely based on plot, he would not have written it. He is a roma...

The Scarlet LetterThe prison is sad and gloomy. There is a small crowd of Puritans standing outside. Their clothes reflect the darkness of the prison. Hester Prynne is outwardly imprisoned. She committed adultery, and is now being punished for it through solitude and division. Arthur Dimmesdale is i...

Romanticism is categorized as "a preference for simplicity and naturalness, a love of plain feelings and truth to common place reality, especially as found in natural scenes". Nathaniel Hawthorne was an anti-transcendentalist and believed in the dark side of man, hence his dark romant...

Cruelness is what we try to avoid for our own sake of well being. Unfortunately our lives are somewhat in other people's hands where one has a choice to make another feel small, and incompetent, making our "well being" topple from icy hands that grip our heart. With every beat it shiv...

Throughout time, the human race has fought an on-going battle of lies and guilt from internal forces that divides the heart from the brain. In a community, especially one of high religious expectations, people suffer the warfare of every challenging consequence conceivable in order to alleviate th...