Complete 4 page APA formatted essay: The Scarlet letter.Download file to see previous pages... Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter' has several allusions to Biblical characters as well as storie

Complete 4 page APA formatted essay: The Scarlet letter.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter' has several allusions to Biblical characters as well as stories, particularly the Book of Esther. There are numerous connections between the book's character Hester and the biblical character Esther. Since Hawthorne was a member of a society for which the Bible had a finest standing in literature, Why does Hawthorne grant Hester Prynne the name Hester The query appears an unavoidable one for an author like Hawthorne, who works as a minimum partly in a Spenserian tradition of allegory. Dimmesdale's first name, Arthur, as well as Hawthorne's daughter's name, Una, proposes some of the influence of Spenser on Hawthorne's acts of baptism. Hawthorne himself, as is famous, changed his family name from Hathorne, to distance himself from those Puritan ancestors whose accomplishments and excesses haunted his creative writing. The Scarlet Letter enlightens of Roger Prynne's reinvention of himself by an act of naming: when he discovers his wife Hester in ignominy in the new world he takes on the name Chillingworth. Hester names Pearl with indication to the gospel of Matthew. The romance's fundamental symbol, conversely, the scarlet letter A, resists the kind of hermeneutic inflexibility that naming involves. As an initial letter, or merely as an initial, the A disreputably clues at all sorts of names while asserting none. As an immense orchestrator of meanings, Hawthorne is aware that names are complete and even stuffed of meanings, and he could in no means be thought to arrive at his characters' names indifferently. It is astonishing, then, that critics of Hawthorne have not cautiously thought about the question of Hester's name. (D. H. Lawrence, 1961, pp. 83-99).

In "The Custom-House" Hawthorne conscriptions "the figure of that first ancestor," the Puritan "who came so early, with his Bible and his sword" (1:9), and The Scarlet Letter contributes intensely in Puritan Biblicism. Chillingworth recognizes himself as "the Daniel who shall expound" (1:62) the puzzle of the individuality of Pearl's father. on one more biblical - or maybe to a certain extent Miltonic level he is a version of Satan. Dimmesdale, when in the concluding gibbet scene he proclaims himself "the one sinner of the world" (1:254), turns out to be a Christ figure. Hester, depictions to the eyes of the multitude, is compared to "the image of Divine Maternity" (1:56). in the "Conclusion" Hawthorne plays with the thought of Hester as a prophetess. D. H. Lawrence found in Hester's seduction of Dimmesdale the tale of Eve's attraction of Adam to eat the prohibited fruit. The wall-hanging of the chamber shared by Dimmesdale and Chillingworth portrays "the Scriptural story of David and Bathesheba, and Nathan the Prophet" (1:126). The array of biblical intertexts may reveal Hawthorne's wish to write a story of new world Puritanism that would recognize and, furthermore, integrate the tremendous textualization of that society. The Puritans could conceivably merely be brought back to life in creative writing if the fiction were as saturated in the Bible as the Puritans were themselves. Thus far one key biblical intertext, the Book of Esther, which serves as a kind of sunken foundation or secreted scaffolding for Hawthorne's story, has been absent from discussion of The Scarlet Letter.

That Hester is named for the biblical Queen Esther has been momentarily noted in a handful of vital studies, while it has most likely been quietly taken for granted by lots of more readers.