Rereading Toni Morrison’s foreword to Sula at the end of the novel was indispensable in cementing my comprehension of the story. While I understand that the desire to have an audience consider a text alongside a set of principles requires a strategic placement of them, Morrison’s preface doesn’t do justice to the words that follow; […]
(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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Scarlett Letter addresses the issue of essentialism versus constructionism. Most of the characters seem to be essentialists, believing that there is a definite right and wrong, guilt and innocence; that there is sin. Even Chillingworth, the open-minded man who half-adopted Indian traditions, believes strongly that the adultery that Hester committed (though admittedly inevitable) was […]
For as long as the two have existed, the worlds of science and religion have been at war. It is not because of mutual hatred or a desire to dominate human consciousness (although I’m sure this plays some part in certain battles). Rather, it is that the two lines of thought are constantly contradicting each […]
The story of Hester Prynne’s persecution in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter encapsulates an issue that bothers me regarding society and religion: specifically, those individuals who oppress others in the name of religion. Not only can these actions be cruel, as is the ostracism in the case of Hester Prynne, but it also goes against […]
