Posts Tagged: sin

The Never-Ending Confession The Scarlet Letter, a novel so imbued with the themes of sin, guilt, and confession, has an interesting confessional: the scaffold.  Hester is taken to the scaffold early in the narrative and a confession is demanded of her, but she refuses that with silence.  Her silence is in itself a powerful act, […]

The issues of sexual sin within colonial culture are examined in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Documents 1. and 3. of Chapter 3 in Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality, and in Richard Godbeer’s essay Sodomy in Colonial New England.  What stands out in the study of said documents is the focus on […]