Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is set in Salem, Massachusetts in 1642, while Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame takes place in Paris, France in 1482. Despite their vastly different settings, Hawthorne’s heroine Hester Prynne and...

In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the Compson family experiences a downward spiral accelerated mainly by two of the novel’s central characters: Caddy and Quentin Compson. Caddy’s sexuality, pregnancy, and banishment from the Compson...

“In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. [...] Every great work of art [...] is a celebration, an act of...

American fiction has been dominated by historical romances since Sir Walter Scott coined the genre with Waverley in 1814. American historical fiction indicates that the literature is unique in its character to any other nation; but instead, in ‘...

In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, many of the characters suffer from the tolls of sin, but none as horribly as Hester's daughter Pearl. She alone suffers from sin that is not her own, but rather that of her mother. From the day she is...

In the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hester and Dimmesdale are entangled in self-delusion because they are both caught up in a false interpretation of their respective sins and in an opaque vision of a better life. Hester is confused by...

In Hawthorne's intricately woven tale The Scarlet Letter, his characters create a parallel theme with the Biblical story of Original Sin. By examining the characters and their interactions and insights about each other, one can examine the...

A few moments before Reverend Dimmsdale professes his sin to the crowd of onlookers, Hester's hopes of escape are dashed by the knowledge that Roger Chillingworth also booked a passage on the departing shipa ship that she prayed would give her and...

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us," stated Oliver Wendell Holmes. This eventually proves to be especially true for Hester Prynne, the main character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet...

Hawthorne wrote his great, psychological novel, The Scarlet Letter, not only in the literal sense, but also symbolically to thoroughly instill his strong ideas into the minds of readers. He uses sunshine, the forest, roses, the scarlet letter,...

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne writes the consequences of one sinful act in a Puritan community. This sinful act involves three main characters, Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingsworth. As The Scarlet Letter progresses, each...

Evolution is defined as "a process of change"(Webster's Dictionary), and it has been proved many times in the past that sin is a direct process that leads to change in one's spiritual as well as fleshly life. The three main characters, Hester,...

The entity of Nature acts as a double-edged sword in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. In the novel, Nature shows its ability to both harm and heal through its effects on the characters. The novel highlights Nature's complexity by showing...

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne has committed adultery, and her subsequent bearing of an illegitimate child has cast her beyond the pale of polite society. It is difficult for us, in the late twentieth century, to...

"This child hath come from the hand of the almighty, to work in many ways upon her heart. It was meant for a blessing, for the one blessing of her life! It was meant, doubtless, for a retribution too, a torture to be felt at many an unthought of...

The story of Adam and Eve illustrates the sinful nature of man. A common theory about the story of Adam and Eve is that God intended Adam and Eve to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge. The argument is, if God had not intended Adam to eat the...

Throughout the late 18th century and 19th century, Romanticism was a highly popular literary style adopted by many novelists. Nature, a prominent element of Romanticism, is used in these authors' writings not just for descriptions and images, but...

Threads are rather insignificant by themselves. It is when a weaver connects them together that they form a beautiful tapestry. Each thread now contributes to the quality of the tapestry and are bound together by the common picture that form. In a...

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne demonstrates the need for humans to abide by the laws of nature and conscience, rather than the laws of man, to achieve happiness.

The laws of nature, enforced only by the human conscience, govern every...

"Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom." Through this statement, Anatole France, a 1921 Nobel Prize recipient, states his belief that irony is only lighthearted reflection. However, Nathaniel Hawthorne employs irony to reveal...

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the young American establishment appeared to have surmounted the instability of its formative stages. The citizens of what had originated as a disorganized and inefficient alliance of thirteen diverse...

In the first chapter of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, a solitary rosebush stands in front of a gloomy prison to symbolize "some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human...

"Don't judge a book by its cover." Everyone knows this hackneyed quote, but people still judge others based on outer appearance. By doing so, these people ignore the possible inner greatness of those they so quickly set aside. The character Hester...

Nature. It is a word that seems so expansive and all-inclusive. Within a novel, elements of nature and setting often become so expected and mundane that they are easily glossed over in order to get to the "more important" elements of a story-the...