SETTING The Scarlet Letter is set in the seventeenth century, puritanical, New England colony of Massachusetts. The complete action is set in the town of Boston with the scenes shifting within it. The crucial scaffold scenes are set in the market place, while the decisive meeting of Hester and Dimmesdale is set in the forest. The novel, however, opens with a prison setting, foreshadowing the future seclusion, gloominess and condemnation ... of the Protagonists. THEME The central theme of the novel is that unconfessed sin destroys the soul. Hester's sin of adultery has been confessed, and as i...

• Word Count: 1929
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: High School

... could use a bright and sunny day to create the mood, in this case, peaceful, loving and happy. In contrast to this, the author could also use a gloomy and dark setting to make the mood scary and evil. Darkness is used to portray hatred and punishment, or in the puritan society sin. The novel The Scarlet Letter is mainly a gloomy, dark story because it is centered on ... sin in the puritan society. Through out The Scarlet Letter, light is used to show happiness and goodness. One of ... killed him, and the darkness was quick to overtake him. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, t...

• Word Count: 1649
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

Scarlet Letter 1.Setting: Where and When does the action of the story take place? The story begins in seventeenth-century Boston, during a Puritan settlement. It takes place in Salem and Concord, Massachusetts; late 1840. A young woman, Hester Pryne, is led from the town prison with her infant daughter, Pearl, in her arms and the scarlet letter "A" on her breast. A man in the crowd tells an elderly onlooker that Hester is ... their appearance, attitudes, motives and anything else that is important to know about the characters. A. Hester is the book's protagonist and the wearer of the scarlet ...

• Word Count: 1337
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

... as "a preference for simplicity and naturalness, a love of plain feelings and truth to common place reality, especially as found in natural scenes". Nathaniel Hawthorne was an anti-transcendentalist and believed in the dark side of man, hence his dark romantic novel The Scarlet Letter. This allegorical novel depends heavily on symbol and character. The novel is chock full of symbolic dimension of images, characters ... , and descriptions. The Scarlet Letter defines the American Romanticist movement while using symbolic characters and places that give the book seemingly two different stor...

• Word Count: 1687
• Approx Pages: 7
• Grade Level: High School

... tapestry and is bound together by the common picture that is formed. In a work of literature, each thread is an idea and the common picture is a theme. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, each thread is an ironic element of setting, and together, they demonstrate people's tendency to seek shelter from, instead of in, society. Vivid yet ironic descriptions are used by Hawthorne, just as a weaver ... uses bright threads to draw more attention to the finer points of the work. The past always comes back to haunt us in our lives ... a child that she loves and then she sees the outc...

• Word Count: 1828
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School