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Romantic Elements Of Hester Prynne

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Born in 1804, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work belonged to Romanticism or Dark Romanticism. Many of his works were inspired by the Puritan Society of the New England usually combined with the historical Romances and surrealism. One of the Romantic works of Nathaniel Hawthorne “The Scarlet Letter” was published in 1850. The setting and the plot of the Novel canters on the seventeenth century Puritan society. He starts off with an introduction of the prison and followed by crowd starring at Hester Prynne who was being punished for her sins. Though Hester Prynne is on the foreground of the story some argue that her character and role is an unattainable one. To some extent Hawthorne does portray Hester Prynne’s and her deeds disapproving to the puritan morals and values, he however simplifies her attitude towards the situation she submits herself to, he focuses more on her positive strengths such as being honest to face her …show more content…

One can actually say that the novel begins in medias res, in the opening of the scene the audience is not very much clear about Hester except that she has committed a crime and she is now being punished for her crime. In the Penguins Study Edition of The Scarlet Letter the introduction of Hester standing on the scaffold with her illegitimate daughter in her arms seeking at once to efface and flaunt the scarlet letter, the narrator introduces a note to the Puritan procedure for ‘punishing’ the ‘sinner’. Puritan society had strict moral values; the women in particular were not allowed to perform any actions that would affect her status and status of women as a whole. Hawthorne in his introductory fraction in the novel begins with negative

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