Themes Pertaining to The Scarlet LetterThe Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, illustrates upon many ideas referring to life and ways of living. He touches on values viewed by people of all types of social status. Morals, which should be engraved in one's mind, seemed to be forgotten. These a...

Laws and regulations in the mid 1600's were greatly influenced by beliefs and philosophies of the Puritan religion. In the novel, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne attempts to convince the reader of the superiority of repentance in dealing with sin. The humiliations and punishment endured by H...

The Truth Hurts The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne paints a picture of two equally guilty sinners, Hester Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale, and shows how both characters deal with their different forms of punishment and feelings of remorse for what they have done. Hester Prynne and Reverend D...

DimmesdaleIn the book The Scarlet Letter, the character Reverend Dimmesdale, a very religious man, committed adultery, which was a sin in the Puritan community. Of course, this sin could not be committed alone. His partner was Hester Prynne. Hester was caught with the sinning only because she had ha...

The Conscience's Roll in Dealing with Guilt and ShameWhat power the conscience holds, as it can, will bring a person to his doom. Throughout the novel, The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the main characters, Reverend Dimmesdale, expresses his feeling of guilt best by his action. The ...

If we cannot accept our own identity, how are we supposed to accept and eventually love others just like us? In the novel The Scarlet letter, Nathaniel Hawthorn addresses the issue of accepting ourselves before we can accept and love others. Hawthorn expresses this issue through the relationships ...

When the topic of a Puritanical society is brought up, most people think of a rigorous, conservative, highly devout society. While this may have usually been the case, this was not always so. The Puritan society was also known not to act out of brotherly, "Christian love", but to cruelly lash ou...

Can a theocracy be an effective type of government? Many object to this idea, but it was the basis of the Puritan religion, which reformed against the Catholic Church of England by placing their religion in the New England area. Theocracy is a government in which the church leaders are also the st...

Extended Definition: Scaffold"I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way (Bookshelf)," John Brown, a U.S. abolitionist in 1859, said in a letter to his children on the eve of his execution. The scaffold is a raised wooden framework or platform used for public...