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- The term scarlet letter designates a representation of the letter A in scarlet cloth which Hester Prynne, publicly disgraced for committing adultery and giving birth to an illegitimate child, is condemned to wear in The Scarlet Letter, A Romance (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1850), by the U.S. novelist and short-story writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864).
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Find a quote in chapters 1-8 of The Scarlet Letter that illustrates text-to-self, text-to-world, and text-to-text connections. How does The Scarlet Letter relate to American...
- The Mass Influx of English Puritans Into Boston
- The Height of The Puritan Revolution in New England
- Hawthorne’s Ancestral Legacy
- The Salem Custom House
- A ‘Decline’ of America’s Literary Industry?
- Influence of Transcendentalism
The historical context of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Scarlet Letter’ can’t be complete without tracking back to 1630, the year that John Winthrop led one of the biggest English puritans crossing from The Uk to the United States – and then settling across Massachusetts. Born in a family which enjoyed a fair share of the scarce privilege of feudal we...
Winthrop’s reign – which would go on almost consequently for the next twenty-something years – marked the height of the puritan revolution in Boston, Massachusetts. Based on the core tenets of the Christian tradition, Winthrop’s Puritanism centered on the ten commandments of God – and other moral rules which going against would constitute ‘sin’ and...
Another important backstory responsible for the creation of ‘The Scarlet Letter’ was the tremendous involvement of the author’s ancestor in the Salem witch trial and execution, which took place toward the end of the 1600s. Hawthorne had several ancestral relatives on this, but in the thick of the affair was his great grandfather, John Hathorne – wh...
In ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ the Salem Custom House is mentioned, and it goes to mean much more than just a fictional creation because it’s a place and building that existed. The author had worked for the Salem Custom House – an establishment with was responsible for the people’s tax needs. He was later dismissed for his contradictory if not slightly c...
From the mid-1800s, the literary industry had been saturated by female authors – with the majority of the popular and best-selling books of this time all having been written by women. Hawthorne wasn’t a big fan of these works, not because they were written by women, but because he thought they lacked real substance and, as a result, were merely wri...
Although Hawthorne was more concerned with writing about dark romanticism ( – as he was one of its 19th-century pioneers) than he was about transcendentalism – dominated by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, his book ‘The Scarlet Letter’ carries some of the ideas of transcendentalists. For example, readers can notice from ...
Study guide for The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, with plot summary, character analysis, and literary analysis.
The Scarlet Letter is a novel about what happens to a strict, tight-knit community when one of its members commits a societal taboo, and how shame functions in both the public and private realms of life.
The Scarlet Letter is the final product. The story begins in seventeenth-century Boston, then a Puritan settlement. A young woman, Hester Prynne, is led from the town prison with her infant daughter, Pearl, in her arms and the scarlet letter “A” on her breast. A man in the crowd tells an elderly onlooker that Hester is being punished for adultery.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, 晧四郎 木畑
- 1850
Important information about Nathaniel Hawthorne's background, historical events that influenced The Scarlet Letter, and the main ideas within the work.
The Scarlet Letter is set in colonial Boston and begins in June of 1642. The story references other Massachusetts Bay Colony towns such as Salem and highlights the meaning and legacy of Puritan culture during that period while questioning the repressive nature of the culture. Historical Context Examples in The Scarlet Letter: The Custom-House.
