Professor Lee Quinby – Spring 2013

Posts Tagged: Hester Prynne


Posts Tagged ‘Hester Prynne’

The Puritanical Feminist

(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 […]

Hester the Anti-Hero

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 […]

Truth Floats like Witches

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 […]