The Scarlet Letter

[Melissa]

I read The Scarlet Letter for an eighth grade book report a week ago. I found the book a very excellent example of literature. It deserves the title "classic" because it has been read and enjoyed by many people. Hawthorne was very brave to write a book about someone going against the Puritain faith at that time period. I have to say it not one of the best books I've everr read, but I enjoyed reading it.

[TH3 HAT3D ON3'S]

I agree with you, I jsut read the book in 9th grade english class. Very good book, one of the best one's I've read and I'm a major book worm!

[aeroport]

Hawthorne was very brave to write a book about someone going against the Puritain faith at that time period.

Was it? It was historical fiction even for him, you know. He didn't live in a Puritan society. It is, however, indeed a wickedly (:D) good book. One very impressive thing about it is that it's one of those great early American novels in which the author deals with America, rather than shipping off to Europe for his subject (though in his last book he did this).

[curlyqlink]

The Scarlet Letter is a very odd book:

--It has only four characters.

--It has a long, rambling introduction that seems apropos of nothing. This introduction has a comic, almost buffoonish tone that seems wildly at variance with the high seriousness of the rest of the novel.

--It is a stylistic throwback: it is not a nineteenth century novel (compare w/Balzac!). In fact it is not a novel at all-- it is an allegory. Its four characters are not so much people as they are moral types.

The character Pearl is incomprehensible outside of a medieval historical framework. She is constantly referred to as an elf-child, which to a modern mind evokes the response, "aww, how cute". In fact, an elf-child was a changeling, equivalent to devil-spawn. (This is made explicit at one point near the end of the book, when the sea captain calls her "devil child".) As a bastard child, she carries the taint of evil, of sin.

Pearl is connected with nature. The meaning of nature, too, has shifted. The modern mind associates nature with innocence, purity, and all things good. It had virtually the opposite meaning in the medieval world-- and that is the meaning it bears in Hawthorne's odd book. Nature is the haunt of the devil-- or "the Black Man", as he is called in The Scarlet Letter. The forest surrounding the Puritan town of Boston is entered only once, and it is depicted as dark and threatening, a place to flee; the path in the forest is nothing less than the path of perdition.

A very odd book.

[jewels390]

Wow, you read it and liked it? I'm a freshman, and I'm a MAJOR book person, but I was not a big fan of this book. We had to read it in my English class. I fell asleep almost every time I opened it. It was a tough book, and I suppose it had a few good things about it, but really, I like sticking to my contemporary stuff. I wouldn't recommend this book.