Romanticism is categorized 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 romant...

The moral dilemma's presented in The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible are predicaments distinctly connected to early American society. The Puritan church, America's first community forum and system of social organization, provided a strict rule of individual lifestyle that encompassed dai...

True redemption of sin comes from suffering. When a person goes against what they judge as wrong, the only way to be freed of the guilt that their actions have caused is to feel the pain emotionally from the guilt of their sin. The guilt they feel on the inside and the shame they have to face others...

Arthur Dimmesdale of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter and Ethan Frome, the main character of Wharton's classic Ethan Frome, though separated by over a century of time, find themselves in remarkably similar situations--a bleak existence, punctuated only be intermittent glimpses into a life that might have ...