A Thematic Analysis of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter
Keywords:
appearance, reality, society, Puritan Culture, individual, religion, love, sable, gules
Abstract
The Scarlet Letter is yet another story of the never-ending conflict of individuals versus society in which the recurrent theme of appearance versus reality is central and woven into different elements of the novel. The significance of this theme lies in the fact that it is adopted by both the Puritan Culture to subjugate its members and hide the truth, and by a protagonist who claims a new identity and violates the Puritanical codes. This is traceable in two major binary oppositions elaborated in this paper as: Society / Individual; and Religion / Love with a look at the two characters of Dimmesdale / Hester and the two colours of Sable / Gules. This paper is an attempt to show how these binary oppositions work, throughout the novel, to stress appearance as a tool for fixing Puritanical codes, and reality as a tool for constructing new ones.Downloads
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References
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Fox, R. (1991). The novel and the people. London: Commonwealth Publishers.
Godwin, W. (1974). Life of Chaucer (2nd ed.). New York: AMS Press.
Harding, B. (1990). The scarlet letter. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marx, K. (1968). Preface to A contribution to the critique of political economy. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
------------. (1975). Early writings. (R. Livingstone, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1851).
Salami, I. (Ed.). (1999). Study of thirty great novels. Tehran: Mehrandish Books.
Stevenson, D. (1990). The temporal-moral matrix of Heinrich Boll's billiards at half-past nine. 20th Century Literature, 36(1), 95-113. [CrossRef]
Webster, R. (1993). Studying literary theory. London: Hodder Headline Group.
Weston, R. (2002). Politics, passion and the 'Puritan temper': Godwin's critique of Enlightened Modernity. Studies in Romanticism, 41(3), 448-469. [CrossRef]
Williams, R. (1976). Keywords. London: Fontana.
Ziff, L. (1966). The ethical dimension of "The Custom House." In A. N. Kaul (Ed.), Hawthorne: A collection of critical essays (pp. 123-129). New York: Prentice-Hall.
Published
2009-12-04
How to Cite
Ghasemi, P., & Abbasi, P. (2009). A Thematic Analysis of Hawthorneâs The Scarlet Letter. K@ta: A Biannual Publication on the Study of Languange and Literature, 11(1), 1-17. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.9744/kata.11.1.1-17
Section
Articles
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License
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