Archive for the ‘February’ Category
First Rays
Tuesday, February 26th, 2013
“The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed…” Like a tremor shaking its way from the depths of Earth’s trenches before splitting the surface in two, or a storm that swirls unheard from up the coastline in all the epochs before radar, the retrospective observer can feel the force of […]
First Rays
Tags: Medicine, Scarlet Letter, Scientization, Transformation
Posted in February 26, Sam Barnes | 2 Comments »
Passionlessness as a Sacrificial Tool of Subversion
Monday, February 25th, 2013
In Puritan society, women are compelled to sin through their passion. Hester, losing all passion, in one ironic sense loses her ties to sin. She learns power over herself, and power to define her own code of ethics. This, as Lee pointed out, is distinct from the biblical code of morality that rules Puritan society. […]
Passionlessness as a Sacrificial Tool of Subversion
Tags: feminism, passion, Passionlessness, sin, Victorian
Posted in Eli Bierman, February 26 | 2 Comments »
Some Notes on the Physical Descriptions of Characters
Monday, February 25th, 2013
Dimmesdale’s weakness is highly sexualized in that peculiar way that the Victorians and the eighteenth century Romantic poets were so endeared to. Dimmesdale’s description, with his “large, brown, melancholy eyes” and “mouth which, unless when he forcibly compressed it, was apt to be tremulous” evokes the sensitive, suicidal heroes of Shelley, who were eager […]
Some Notes on the Physical Descriptions of Characters
Posted in February 26, Kalliope Rodman Dalto | 1 Comment »
The Puritanical Feminist
Monday, February 25th, 2013
(I apologize for the slight tardiness of tonight’s post–Oscar Night is the New England Holiday of my family!) Aristophane’s play, Lysistrata, is one of the most prominent literary displays of women’s sexual power. In attempts to end the Peloponnesian War, Lysistrata convinces her fellow Grecian women to withhold sexual pleasures from their husbands until peace […]
The Puritanical Feminist
Tags: feminism, Hester Prynne, Nancy F. Cott, Peiss, Power, The Scarlet Letter
Posted in February 26, Nadia Cook-Loshilov | 2 Comments »
The Colors of Sin
Monday, February 25th, 2013
As a reader of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter today, it is safe to say that many of us are shocked by the treatment of Hester Prynne at the hands of her Puritan society. We feel that we have grown as a society, and that as American citizens who value the separation between Church and […]
The Colors of Sin
Tags: birth control, reproduction, The Scarlet Letter
Posted in Ariella Michal Medows, February 26, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
When Did We Start Thinking About Marriage?
Monday, February 25th, 2013
The Scarlet Letter motivates me to examine the human pursuit of truth and happiness in “The Minister in A Maze”. Hester’s moment of confession reveals that happiness for her, her lover and her former spouse, involves more than the revelation of truth. In fact, truth here is conflated with happiness. Hawthorne illustrates that happiness for […]
When Did We Start Thinking About Marriage?
Tags: aliiance, Dimmesdale, Family, Hester, The Scarlet Letter
Posted in February 26, Kwame K. Ocran | 2 Comments »
Foucault and ‘A Flood of Sunshine’
Monday, February 25th, 2013
The most extravagant shift in Hawthorne’s novel is one mobilized by a light that can come only after an extreme darkness: Hester and Dimmesdale’s meeting in the forest is traced by their mutual illuminations on personal truth in contrast to the “human law” and the “higher truth” that govern their fellow townsfolk (217). Their revelations […]
Foucault and ‘A Flood of Sunshine’
Tags: freedom, Michel Foucault, morality, Nathaniel Hawthorne, peace, personal truth, power-knowledge, The Scarlet Letter
Posted in February 26, Sophia Curran | 1 Comment »
Hester the Anti-Hero
Monday, February 25th, 2013
The Scarlett Letter presents a lot of radical ideas (although I do acknowledge that it was written in a more modern time so perhaps it is not as radical as I think it is) in the way that Hawthorne sympathizes the character of Hester and she becomes a martyr. “Here, she said to herself had […]
Hester the Anti-Hero
Tags: Hester Prynne, martyr, passionless, Puritan
Posted in Alannah Fehrenbach, February 26, Participants | 1 Comment »
Evil Senses
Wednesday, February 20th, 2013
In class yesterday we talked a bit about eyes (sight) and mirrors (reflection) as symbols in The Scarlett Letter. Our discussion focused on how the characters’ perceptions of themselves and their surroundings are shaped by the peculiar, perhaps deceiving, sense of sight. I would like to continue on this vein and explore how Hawthorne portrays […]
Evil Senses
Tags: Evil, eyes, intuition, mirrors, Nathaniel Hawthorne, reflection, sight, The Devil, The Scarlet Letter, Truth
Posted in February 19, Sophia Curran | 1 Comment »
Truth Floats like Witches
Tuesday, February 19th, 2013
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s extensive writings are like the lumbar spine in the body of American (and, for that matter, global) fiction that was still very much in utero when he first placed paper under his quill: essential supports to the increasing weighty system of nerves and nodes and cerebration that grows above it, and locus of […]
Truth Floats like Witches
Tags: Hester Prynne, Literature, Subjectivity, The Great American Novel, The Scarlet Letter
Posted in February 19, Sam Barnes | 3 Comments »