Open Endedness of the Scarlet Letter
EXAMINE THE SCARLET LETTER AS AN OPEN-ENDED NOVEL
Hawthorne wrote during the Romantic Period in American literature which lasted from 1830 to 1865. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allen Poe, and Walt Whitman were his literary contemporaries. The Scarlet Letter is considered a piece of American Romantic literature because it is set in a remote past, the
Puritan era 200 years prior to Hawthorne’s time, and because it deals with the interior psychology of individual characters. Some of the qualities of the novel are that its themes are relevant still today such as: Alienation; Appearance versus Reality; Breaking Social Rules amidst others which are presented through the appropriate language (it is to be noted that In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne tells the story using vocabulary and a writing style familiar to readers in 1850. The speech of the characters in the story, however, is that of Puritans in the early 1600s. Yet to many of contemporary readers, the speech of the Puritans seems more familiar than the “more modern” language of Hawthorne’s time. This is because the Puritans left England around the time when the King James Version of the Bible was written. Therefore, their language is similar to Jacobean (Jacobus is the Latin word for James) English of the King James Bible), Hawthorne uses precise language to provide his readers with vivid descriptions depicting the time, place, and mood, or the setting for The Scarlet Letter. In addition, he has been able to present a text with no definite ending which allows for several interpretations without being castigated for attack on the ‘ morality’ of readers. The ending of the movie based on the text is absolutely different from that of its archetype.
Nathaniel Hawthorn 's The Scarlet Letter is a sad story about adultery and the strong consequences of the sin. Contrastingly, Demi Moore stated that a happy ending was appropriate for the movie because,
Hawthorne wrote during the Romantic Period in American literature which lasted from 1830 to 1865. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allen Poe, and Walt Whitman were his literary contemporaries. The Scarlet Letter is considered a piece of American Romantic literature because it is set in a remote past, the
Puritan era 200 years prior to Hawthorne’s time, and because it deals with the interior psychology of individual characters. Some of the qualities of the novel are that its themes are relevant still today such as: Alienation; Appearance versus Reality; Breaking Social Rules amidst others which are presented through the appropriate language (it is to be noted that In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne tells the story using vocabulary and a writing style familiar to readers in 1850. The speech of the characters in the story, however, is that of Puritans in the early 1600s. Yet to many of contemporary readers, the speech of the Puritans seems more familiar than the “more modern” language of Hawthorne’s time. This is because the Puritans left England around the time when the King James Version of the Bible was written. Therefore, their language is similar to Jacobean (Jacobus is the Latin word for James) English of the King James Bible), Hawthorne uses precise language to provide his readers with vivid descriptions depicting the time, place, and mood, or the setting for The Scarlet Letter. In addition, he has been able to present a text with no definite ending which allows for several interpretations without being castigated for attack on the ‘ morality’ of readers. The ending of the movie based on the text is absolutely different from that of its archetype.
Nathaniel Hawthorn 's The Scarlet Letter is a sad story about adultery and the strong consequences of the sin. Contrastingly, Demi Moore stated that a happy ending was appropriate for the movie because,
Bibliography: WIKIPEDIA A T E A C H E R ’ S G U I D E TO T H E S I G N E T C L A S S I C E D I T I O N O F NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S THE SCARLET LETTER By ELIZABETH POE, Ph.D.