ISLT
Third Year Novel
N.Fgaier
The Scarlet Letter
The New England Holiday
1.Pearl betrays the emotions felt by Hester in The New England Holiday. She is an allegorical figure, used to reveal the mother's changes of mood, to show her rebellious spirit. What Hester hides, pearl brings forth. Her restlessness evokes the mother's desire to escape. The desire to escape shows that she is not a coward. As long as Dimmesdale is with her, she is ready to move towards self-fulfilment. In the beginning, she couldn't escape from her past because her other (Dimmesdale) would keep tormenting her. In making the decision to flee, she makes a political decision. She was simply not ready to conform. The puritans were the ones who betrayed their ideal of non- conformism, and imposed conformity on the individual.
2. The sea was an uncontaminated space. The description of the seamen in the novel is meant to stand as a contrast with the way the Puritans were unable to domesticate (the forest, the Indians) the seamen but severely punished the most minute error made by one of them. In the sea, it was possible to infringe the law and then man could become associated with piety on the land(hypocrisy, allusion to the relativity of the law)
The Procession:
Mrs Hibbins tells Hester what will happen : the mark will be disclosed. The puritans were not pure as their name suggests. Mrs Hibbins has corrupted and tarnished their identity. The other can simply not be repressed. Sin is human and natural.
Hawthorne always starts with the description of the setting and then smoothly gives us the event. Description is both vertical and horizontal because it contributes to the progress of the plot. Hawthorne does not directly tell us what happens; he shows us what happens.
The Revelation of the scarlet letter:
If Dimmesdale, the sinner, could be capable of producing such a miraculous speech as the community itself