Friday, February 15, 2019
The Benefits of Sin Revealed in Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet Lette
The Benefits of Sin Revealed in The violent earn t tout ensembley to Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter, each of us is born with original loathsomeness we have inherited from the misdeeds of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. As Eve bit hungrily into the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, starving for wisdom, sm wholly-minded did she know that the entire human race would thereafter be corrupt by her wrong. Hawthorne and many others believe that ever since, human beings have been given up to evil, more likely to disobey than to act in a worshipful manner. This is a faithless, cynical view of humanity, but one perhaps justify by the actions of Hester Prynne and the Reverend Dimmesdale. Sin seems to be an inevitable factor in their lives though they are good people, their sin boils up and nearly destroys them. Do they make a conscious choice to sin? Or does their sin simply take control, as it is bound to do in all human beings? Perhaps this leads to a greater question of fate and spare will, but in the end, the one thing they can really flip-flop in their lives is the way they deal with sin, how they attempt to atone for it - and whether they view the routine they had as sinful in the first place. Puritan society in the Massachusetts Bay Colony was a system based on religion. The Bible and the law were intertwined and could not be separated, not even in the minds of the people. Therefore it was difficult to argue that there were any laws at all that were worth having, if they were not spelled out explicitly in the Bible. Hester had committed fornication and given birth to a bastard child, and there it was, in the hug drug Commandments Thou shalt not commit adultery. And so she was punished. The Puritans nodded and were satisfied, comfortabl... ...., C.E. Frazer, ed. The Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal 1975. Englewood Indian Head, 1975. Coxe, Rev. Arthur Cleveland. The writings of Hawthorne. Church Review 3 (1851) 489-511. Gartner, Matthew. The Scarlet Letter and the Book of Esther scriptural Letter and Narrative Life. Studies in American Fiction (1995) 131-144. Hawthorne, J. (1886, April). The Scarlet Letter. The Atlantic Monthly On-line, pp. 1-20. Available http//wwww.theatlantic.com/unbound/classrev/scarlet.html Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York St. Martins, 1991. Loring, G. B. (1850). The Scarlet Letter and Transcendentalism. Massachusetts Quarterly Review On-line, pp. 1-6. Available http//eldred.ne.mediaone.net/nh/loring.html Scharnhorst, Gary. The Critical Response to Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter. New York Greenwood, 1992.
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