Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Scarlet Letter: A Romance is a work of historical fiction by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850. [2] Set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony during the years 1642 to 1649, the novel tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter with a man to whom she is not married and then struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity.
Hester Prynne is the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter. She is portrayed as a woman condemned by her Puritan neighbors for having a child out of wedlock . The character has been called "among the first and most important female protagonists in American literature".
The minister decides to confess his sin and face judgment, but Hester convinces him otherwise. Sentenced to wear a scarlet "A" for adultery, Prynne is ostracized by the public, and a drummer boy is charged to follow her whenever she comes to town. Meanwhile, Hester's husband resurfaces, having spent his absence in captivity as a prisoner of war ...
Meeting Hester in jail, Chillingworth presses her to divulge the name of her partner in adultery, but she refuses. Searching without her help, he eventually discovers that her lover is the town minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. Using his position as a doctor, and under the guise of treating Dimmesdale's unexplained sickness, Chillingworth ...
Next to Hester Prynne herself, Dimmesdale is often considered Hawthorne's "finest character." His dilemma takes up a significant portion of the novel, bringing out Hawthorne's most famous statements on many of the concepts that recur throughout his works: guilt and redemption, truth and falsehood, and others.
Aside from Hester Prynne, the model women of Hawthorne's other novels—from Ellen Langton of Fanshawe to Zenobia and Priscilla of The Blithedale Romance, Hilda and Miriam of The Marble Faun and Phoebe and Hepzibah of The House of the Seven Gables—are more fully realized than his male characters, who merely orbit them. [113]
“Early in the film Gish, as Prynne, loses her bonnet chasing a songbird through a summer glade. When the wind catches her waist-long tresses, Gish appears for an instant as if she had stepped into a painting by Botticelli...Seastrom seizes on Gish's sensuality throughout the film...bringing this largely faithful adaptation down squarely on the side of love and ardent sensuality.”—
In old Puritan Boston some two hundred and fifty years ago, a girl was born. Her mother was Hester Prynne. Her father was "unknown." The Rev. Wilson and the Governor urge Hester to reveal the name of the child's father. She refuses and the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale is asked to plead with her.