Intro to The Scarlet Letter

1
Intro to The Scarlet Letter

• Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Romantic Period

2
The Romantic Period, 1820-1860

• a period which believed that society had become
  corrupt and one should return to nature
• Other romantic writers include Harriet Beecher
  Stowe, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and
  Edgar Allen Poe

3
The Romance

• The Scarlet Letter is a romance, not a novel
• novels were supposed to deal with realistic
  representations of human experiences or external
  truths. Romances, on the other hand, were
  concerned with internal truths, or truths of the
  human heart, as Hawthorne states
• Romances were not love stories but heightened,
  emotional, and symbolic forms of the novel.

4
The Romantic Hero

• Typically, the protagonists are haunted,
  alienated individuals
• Most of the Romantic heroes die in the end

5
Nathaniel Hawthorne

• was born in Salem, Massachusetts, a wealthy
  seaport north of Boston.
• Interestingly, one of his ancestors had been a
  judge in an earlier century, during trials in
  Salem of women accused of being witches.

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The Scarlet Letter

• Set in Boston around 1650 (200 years before the
  time that Hawthorne wrote it)
• Time period of novel early Puritan colonization
• Hawthorne relied on his studies of history to
  recreate this time period.
• the novel highlights societal obsession with
  morality, sexual repression, guilt and
  confession, and spiritual salvation.
• For its time, The Scarlet Letter was a daring and
  even subversive book

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Puritans

• A religious group which migrated from England to
  the Massachusetts Bay Colony in New England in
  the early 1600s
• the Puritans believed in a pure interpretation
  of the Bible.
• Although the Church did not officially control
  the State in Puritan settlements, religion and
  government were closely intertwined.
• The Puritans had strict rules against the
  theater, music, poetry, and frivolous dress.