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Transcendentalism In Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter'

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Jacob Bussey
Professor Caskey
American Literature
8 February 2016 The Real Side of Letters The Scarlet Letter was set in the 17th- century puritan Boston, Massachusetts during the years of 1642 to 1649. The people thought the church of England was to complex and wanted simpler truths and better structured forms of worship. They want to “purify” the church of England, they got the name of Puritans from that. The Scarlet letter starts off to let everyone know "all the characters are saved, and by this measure the novel is a comedy” ( Samuel Coale). The reason he is saying that is because through out the story they are not acting Christian like one bit. Dimmesale is the biggest hypocrite of them all, he will preach from the bible but does not live by it. Dimmesdale becomes the biggest sinner of them all when he declared himself from the scaffold after he finished his election sermon. “Dimmesdale is irreparably …show more content…
They believed in social reform, but most felt that it begins with the individual. ‘Members of the movement rejected the standard religious practices of the day and promoted freedom of thought or, as Emerson famously called it, “self reliance.” “ (Gale). From 1836 to 1855, transcendentalism's influence was at its top. Hawthorne who wrote the scarlet letter was never a convinced transcendentalist but he was against some of the movement ideals. “The Dial, a transcendentalist magazine. Its first editor was Margaret Fuller, a woman who supposedly had a child out of wedlock and may have, along with the rebellious Puritan Anne Hutchinson, been a model for the heroine Hester Prynne. Perhaps Hawthorne's involvement with the transcendentalist movement influenced his views on the individual placed in opposition to society, which is one of the primary issues explored in The Scarlet Letter” (Gale). Hawthrone more than likely used that to help write his

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