English

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English 11th grade
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MAP Standards and Other Information

• Language Arts English 11th grade
• Creator Julie Taylor
• MAP Standards Useful ways to organize
  information, Read for Specific Purposes, Analyze
  Literary Techniques

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What is American Romanticism?

• Values feeling and intuition over reason
• Places faith in inner experience and the power of
  the imagination
• Shuns the artificiality of civilization and seeks
  unspoiled nature
• Prefers youthful innocence to educated
  sophistication
• Champions individual freedom and the worth of the
  individual

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How does Romanticism apply to the The Scarlet
Letter?

• The internal conflicts resulting from individuals
  actions and emotions that drive the story
• Hawthorne connects characters feelings with
  their outward appearance
• There are many scenes that take place away from
  civilization. Public places take on a negative
  connotation.

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Who is Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)?

• Writer born in Salem, Mass
• A descendant of a judge in the Salem witch
  trials.
• In 1842 he married Sophia Amelia Peabody, a
  transcendentalist, and they moved to Concord,
  Mass.
• Financial pressures forced his return to Salem
  (1845-49) and he became a surveyor.
• His dismissal from the surveyor ship initiated
  the brief period of his greatest novels The
  Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven
  Gables (1851), and The Blithdale Romance (1852).

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Nathaniel Hawthorne (contd.)

• He then went to live in Italy (1858--59) where he
  began The Marble Faun, which he published after
  returning to the U.S.A. in 1860.
• Back in Concord, he published his last major
  work, Our Old Home (1863), which drew on his
  experiences in England, but by then he was
  becoming ill and disillusioned.

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The Custom House

• The Scarlet Letter opens with a long preamble
  about how the book came to be written.
• The nameless narrator was the surveyor of the
  customhouse in Salem, Massachusetts.
• In the customhouse's attic, he discovered a
  number of documents, among them a manuscript that
  was bundled with a scarlet, gold-embroidered
  patch of cloth in the shape of an "A."
• The manuscript, the work of a past surveyor,
  detailed events that occurred some two hundred
  years before the narrator's time. When the
  narrator lost his customs post, he decided to
  write a fictional account of the events recorded
  in the manuscript.
• The Scarlet Letter is the final product.

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Purpose of the Custom House

• Establishes point of view and narrative framework
• Suspends disbelief by creating the illusion of
  historical account (in other words credibility
  is established)
• Connects narrator of the story with Hawthorne
  himself (dont confuse narrator with author)

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Overview of the Story

• The Scarlet Letter reaches to our nations
  historical and moral roots for the material of
  great tragedy.
• Set in the early New England colony, the novel
  shows the terrible impact that a single act has
  on the lives of three members of the community
  the defiant strong Hester Prynne the fiery,
  tortured Reverend Dimmesdale and the obsessed,
  vengeful Chillingworth.

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Symbols Symbolism

• A person, object, image, word, or event that
  evokes a range of additional meaning beyond and
  usually more abstract than its literal
  significance. Symbols are educational devices for
  evoking complex ideas without having to resort to
  painstaking explanations that would make a story
  more like an essay than an experience.
• A literary or contextual symbol can be a setting,
  character, action, object, name, or anything else
  in a work that maintains its literal significance
  while suggesting other meanings. Such symbols go
  beyond conventional symbols they gain their
  symbolic meaning within the context of a specific
  story.

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Journal Enrty

• Make a chart with the following symbols in column
  1.
• You will fill this in as you read the novel and
  we hold discussions.

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Symbols in The Scarlet Letter

• The Scarlet Letter
• Pearl
• The Scaffold
• The Rose near the Prison Door
• The Meteor
• Hesters Clothing
• The Forest
• The Brook
• Indians
• Black (the color)

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Journal 2

• Please copy the following themes into your
  journal. As we read you will be required to
  discuss how they relate to the novel.

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Some Themes, Motifs and Conflicts

• The consequences of sin
• Individual identity versus societys perspective
• The destructiveness of hypocrisy and vengeance
• Passion versus principle (or ideas)
• Relationship between strength of character and
  morality

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Now let the story begin