... sums up the meaning of Hawthorne's best known book, The Scarlet Letter in three sentences: "Taking its form in Hawthorne's imagination, the total context of The Scarlet Letter inheres in the letter itself. Invented by the community to serve as an unequivocal emblem of penance, the letter has frozen Hester into a posture of haughty agony, has brought Dimmesdale to a death of "triumphant ignominy" on the scaffold, has victimized the victimizer -- Chillingsworth. Hawthorne begins and ends with the letter, which encompasses ... and transcends all its individual meanings, which signifies, to...

• Word Count: 855
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... shameless consumerism. In the 17th Century, religion was the driving force that challenged people's freedom of thought. The Puritans of the 1630s added a new element of religious and social intolerance to America, expanding on the blueprint created by the Pilgrims. Known for their strict, repressive society, the Puritans barred all forms of deviation within their community, as described in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Set in the mid-1600s, The Scarlet Letter epitomizes the religious intolerance of ... Puritan society. By the mid-1800s, however, the religious fervor that had...

• Word Count: 789
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

American Renaissance Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," belongs to the period known as American romanticism, the period called, by F.O. Matthiessen, the American Renaissance. The American Renaissance took place roughly from 1840-1865, though the most significant work of this period was produced from 1850-1855. See F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, written in 1941. Matthiessen was influential in determining the canon of American writers from ... a variety of concerns central to the romantic movement. In reading Melville's B...

• Word Count: 917
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate