“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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
(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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
