Romanticism In The Scarlet Letter

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Joe alaberte 11/2/11 The Scarlett letter essay

In the novel The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne romance influences his portrayal of purism. heater has cheated on her husband after being sent ahead to Boston From England. These portrayals of romanticism is shown when Hester gets the scarlet letter A, when she is affected by her adultery, and the importance of the scaffold.

The letter is taken as a label of punishment and sin. Hester Prynne wears the label of the letter upon her chest. She stands as a label of an outcast in front of society. She is wearing this symbol to burden her with punishment throughout her life. She stands on a plank where her punishment is given, "'Thus she will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious letter be engraved upon her tombstone'"(59). The letter's meaning in Puritan society banishes her from her normal life. The letter also put Hester through torture: "Of an impulse and passionate nature. She had fortified herself to encounter the stings and venomous stabs of public contumely wreaking itself in every variety of insult but there was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn mood of popular mind, that she longed rather to be hold all those rigid countenances contorted with scornful merriment and herself the object"(54). This implies that Hester's sin of bearing a child without the presence of a husband will always be remembered.

Hester Prynne, is greatly affected by her act of adultery. The adulteress lives during the Puritan age of seventeenth century in Boston,which was inevitably controlled by puritan principles and values. Surrounding the occurrences of this one moment of sexual lust, the lives of three individuals are changed forever. In addition, the sins between Arthur Dimmesdale,Roger Chillingworth, and

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