Transcript The Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter
What happens when a private sin becomes a public crime?
• • In Puritan New England a young woman named Hester Prynne gives birth to a baby girl.
Hester’s elderly husband has been missing for years. Everyone knows he can’t be the father.
• The town punished Hester harshly for her adultery. • • First they imprison her.
Then, they condemn her to wear a scarlet letter A for the rest of her life.
Introduction
• • The townspeople treat Hester as an outcast.
What her neighbors don’t know is the identity of the baby’s father.
• • Hester refuses to tell.
Her lover, whoever he is, seems to escape punishment. Or does he?
Introduction
• The name "Puritanism" came from the group's intent to purify the Church of England by making government and religious practice conform more closely to the word of God. • Persecuted in England, the Puritans came to North America to form their own communities.
Historical Context
• Life in the colonies was harsh, but it gave the Puritans the opportunity to form a society based on their religious ideals.
• Puritans sought to live by their religious beliefs.
• However, the Puritan leaders did not tolerate religious beliefs that differed from their own.
Historical Context
• As for personal freedom, every member of the community was held to a strict standard of behavior.
• In a Puritan community such as Hester’s, no act of life was truly private.
• People kept a close watch on their neighbors.
• Those considered sinners were publicly—and harshly—punished, as an example to others.
Historical Context
• The Puritans believed that all things are controlled beforehand by the will of God. This doctrine is known as predestination.
• No one could know for certain if they were destined to receive salvation.
• However, a good Puritan still had to live as pure and righteous a life a possible—and to watch for signs of sinfulness in others.
Historical Context
• • The novel’s setting is Boston in the 1640’s.
Boston had recently been founded by about one thousand English Puritans, led by John Winthrop.
The Novel
• •
Romantic literature
is marked by the belief that the imagination is capable of discovering truths that the rational mind can not reach. These truths were usually accompanied by powerful emotion and associated with natural beauty. • To the Romantics,
imagination, individual feelings, and wild nature
were of greater value than reason, logic, and cultivation. The Romantics didn't flatly reject logical thought as invalid for all purposes; but for the purpose of art, they placed a premium on intuitive, "felt" experience.
Romanticism
• • • • • Places faith in inner experience Shuns the artificiality of civilization and seeks unspoiled nature Prefers youthful innocence to educated sophistication Champions individual freedom Reflects on nature's beauty as a path to spiritual and moral development
Characteristics of Romanticism
• Transcendentalism is a school of thought that began to take form in New England, mainly Concord, MA around 1836 when Ralph Waldo Emerson published
Nature
. Major thinkers in the Transcendentalist Movement include: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott. It was a part of a larger literary movement called Romanticism, which emphasized the importance of nature, the emotions and individualism. • • • • The individual is important, inherently good and has free will Conscience, morality and intuition are present at birth Intuition is what one must use to perceive basic truths Each individual is connected to God
Transcendentalism
• • Themes: • Sin, Knowledge the Human Condition • • Individuals and Society Nature Symbols • The Scarlet Letter • Pearl • Colors: Red and Black • • • Development of characters Notions of Romanticism and Transcendentalism The Gothic Romance • Supernatural events • Gloomy atmospheres • • Castles Mysterious
What should I look for in the novel?
• • • • • • • • • What kinds of wrongs do you think should be punished publicly?
What kinds should remain private for the people involved?
What kinds of secrets should you keep?
When might it be better to reveal a friend’s secret, even though he/she will be angry?
What kind of satisfaction does seeking revenge for a wrong provide?
Have you ever experienced prejudice as a woman? Have you ever been publicly blamed for something when you aren’t the only person who did it? Have you ever been publicly humiliated? Would you ever allow someone to take the blame for you if you knew they would be publicly humiliated?
Anticipation Guide
• • • • The nameless narrator, who shares quite a few traits with the book’s author, takes a post as the “chief executive officer,” or surveyor, of the Salem Custom House.
He finds the establishment to be a run-down place, situated on a rotting wharf in a half-finished building. His fellow workers mostly hold lifetime appointments secured by family connections. They are elderly and given to telling the same stories repeatedly. The narrator finds them to be generally incompetent and innocuously corrupt.
• • • • The narrator spends his days at the customhouse trying to amuse himself because few ships come to Salem anymore. One rainy day he discovers some documents in the building’s unoccupied second story. Looking through the pile, he notices a manuscript that is bundled with a scarlet, gold embroidered piece of cloth in the shape of the letter “A.” The narrator examines the scarlet badge and holds it briefly to his chest, but he drops it because it seems to burn him.
The Custom House
• • He then reads the work of one Jonathan Pue, who was a customs surveyor a hundred years earlier. An interest in local history led Pue to write an account of events taking place in the middle of the seventeenth century—a century before Pue’s time and two hundred years before the narrator’s.
• • The narrator has unease about attempting to make a career out of writing. He believes that his Puritan ancestors, whom he holds in high regard, would find it frivolous and “degenerate.” Nevertheless, he decides to write a fictional account of Hester Prynne’s experiences.
The Custom House
• • It will not be factually precise, but he believes that it will be faithful to the spirit and general outline of the original. While working at the customhouse, surrounded by uninspiring men, the narrator finds himself unable to write.
• When a new president is elected, he loses his politically appointed job and, settling down before a dim fire in his parlor, begins to write his “romance,” which becomes the body of The Scarlet
Letter.
The Custom House
• • Hester’s story comes to us twice removed. It is filtered first through John Pue and then through the narrator. Awareness of the story’s various stages of treatment gives the reader a greater sense of its remoteness from contemporary life, of its antique qualities—it is a history with a history. Yet the story’s survival over the years speaks to the profundity of its themes: the narrator has found, in American history and in Hester’s life, a tale rich in philosophical meaning.