...Jessica Helin Paper 1 U.S. History 1 GEN223 John Smith vs. John Winthrop In the early years of America, there was a great deal of political and religious turmoil occurring in England. People wanted to escape to a place where they wouldn't be outlawed for their independent congregations and personal philosophies that they believed in. Eminent men, like John Smith and John Winthrop, saw America as a great opportunity to start over where they could establish new communities separated and undisturbed by England. They each wrote a proposal to the people of England to recruit them to come and help establish colonies in the New World. Both of these men had very different visions of what America was and what they wanted it to become upon their arrivals. Smith believed in the importance of hardworking to achieve wealth and the option of becoming financially independent. While Winthrop was concerned with working for God and averting selfishness to form a community with a close bond. John Smith was an English adventurer and soldier well known for his many adventures to different lands. Smith saw the New World as a place for people to set out on a journey for economic success. In his mind, America had resources that were waiting to be discovered for both utilization and profit. In a Description of Virginia, Smith communicates that in the New World, there is a definitive likelihood for many successful business enterprises by saying, 'the fertility of the soil, and the situation...
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...point, and brings the plot up again later. The most significant technique of her narration however, is Sedgwick's use of the figurative language. In this research paper, I intend to decrypt and interpret the different aspects of the metaphorical language and omens in Hope Leslie. 2. The Metaphorical Language and Omens in Hope Leslie 2.1 The Puritans as God's Exemplary Instruments in Connection with Texts from Contemporary Witnesses Catharine Maria Sedgwick uses a very strong language to describe the Puritans, who see themselves as the "chosen servants of the Lord" (Sedgwick 75). The author's word choice strongly reminds me of John Cotton's remarks in Gods Promise to His Plantation (1630), a fair-well sermon for the people, who were going to leave Great Britain with John Winthrop. One of Cotton's doctrines reads, "The placing of a people . . . is from the appointment of the Lord" (Cotton 65). Furthermore, the Puritans are appointed "to...
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...Dilemmas In the story of John Winthrop by Edmund Morgan and Pocahontas by Camilla Townsend, the word dilemma is thrust at the center and is the driving force for these biographies. Using the word dilemma suggests there is a conflict and one must make decisions and/or choose a particular side. This most certainly is the case for both John Winthrop’s Puritans and Powhatan. Edmund Morgan uses the title The Puritan Dilemma because the whole idea of the Puritans establishing themselves in America is itself a dilemma. Dilemma is used in Camilla Townsend’s title Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma because the situation that Pocahontas’s people, the Powhatan, are forced into is very much so a dilemma. The word was chosen with a purpose and the reasons for why both authors use dilemma in their biography titles is explored individually and then compared. The dilemma of John Winthrop and the Puritans is depicted throughout the biography. It is clear that the dilemma they faced was surrounded by their religious views. Winthrop and the Puritans embraced religion so much as to move to New England and create the “kind of society that God demanded of all His servants but that none had yet given Him (Morgan, 42).” Morgan puts a lot of effort to show the reader that the Puritan view of religion was plagued with the idea and question of what responsibility does a religious person owe to society. Morgan argues that this question and dilemma that Winthrop and the Puritans faced is in...
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...First, the speech Mr.Winthrop gave to the Puritans in his Christian Model address is intended exclusively for a Puritan audience. He informs them that God has created men with diverse economic and social equity as a manifestation of His infinite wisdom. Furthermore, explaining that God expects them to be helpful towards one another by walking in unity by demonstrating justice and mercy towards one another despite their differences. [2] Some of the points and admonitions find their roots in scripture. For example, Jesus stated,” Love your neighbor as yourself’” so it’s understandable for John to encourage his group to treat one another with love and respect but he forgot to extend this principle to non-Puritans, Native Americans, and Africans.[3]...
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...The Scarlet Letter summaries. Chapter 1 This chapter somewhat introduces seventeenth-century Boston, where a group of gloomy, sad Puritans stand in front of an old prison in Boston, which seems to be a horrible and degrading place. By the descriptions given (heavy oak door, with spikes) it sounds like the prison is meant to keep and hold deadly murderers and ax murderers. The area around the prison is gray and gloomy. Decay and ugliness are in the author's descriptions, the only thing that sticks out is a lovely wild rosebush, blooming by the prison door. I believe the rosebush links us to Hester. They are both in full bloom, the rosebush in numbers of roses, and Hester in her humiliation. They both stand out. Chapter 2 The chapter opens to townspeople talking about Hester Prynne’s sin. Hester comes out of the prison and walks to the scaffold wearing an elaborately embroidered scarlet letter A on her breast, and carrying a small infant in her arms. When she did this she was to be ashamed of her sin, and the townspeople made mockery and fun of her. One of the most ugly woman in town implied that she be killed for her sin. As Hester looks out over the crowd, she realizes that her future will be lonely, being alone. Just her daughter and herself. When she realizes this, she squeezes Pearl so hard she starts to cry. The market place is described as the punishment of Hester. She was compared to Mary. Chapter 3 While standing on the platform, Hester sees and...
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... The Scarlet Letter: Dimmesdale’s Guilt In Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, The Scarlet Letter, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale grows weaker, whilst dealing with the insufferable guilt brought on by his adulterous temptations. Dimmesdale’s sinful counterpart, Hester Prynne, faces her shame externally, while the reverend suffers from the inside. Dimmesdale, hypocritically, would rather be highly regarded by his peers than being truthful to himself, and in turn, God who would easily be able to see the transparent acts of hypocrisy that Dimmesdale tries to fool himself with by subconsciously convincing himself of its purity. Dimmesdale's guilt eats him from the inside out and eventually leads to his demise. Hawthorne sets the stage for Dimmesdale’s character in the first scaffold scene, where the reverend’s uncomfortable attitude condones suspicion. Dimmesdale anxiously watches Hester and Pearl on the scaffold from his balcony and is eventually asked to try to pry out the father’s name from Hester, which he hesitantly attempts and uses it as a coded message for Hester. Dimmesdale says to her I charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer...believe me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so than to hide a guilty heart through life...Take heed how thou deniest to him--who, perchance, hath not the courage to grasp it for himself. The speech is full of double meanings;...
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...LEssay: Imagine living in a world where all sins are viewed as equal, this is the society of the Puritans, where people received the same punishment for murder as they would for theft. In The Scarlet Letter, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale is affected by the secret of his adultery with Hester Prynne, that he must keep hidden. This secrecy has affected Dimmesdale, from him having a mental break down and punishing himself to him constantly being weak and lethargic. Overall, The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, presents the negative impact of secrecy on the physical and spiritual state of the character Arthur Dimmesdale, who is forced by society to keep his secret hidden. Throughout The Scarlet Letter, the self punishment Dimmesdale performs is used to engrave into the audience the negative effect of secrecy. Dimmesdale has a constant inner turmoil between the fact that he really needs to reveal his secret adultery for his own well being, while on the other hand if he reveals it then it would involve many consequences for him and Hester. This one secret results in Dimmesdale’s complete mental breakdown. During this break down, Dimmesdale would feel very guilty for his sin because he is unable to speak out about what he did, therefore,”This Protestant and Puritan divine had plied it on his own shoulders, laughing bitterly at himself the while”(136). This shows that this secrecy is causing his mind to constantly be in conflict because he must keep such a big secret for multiple...
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...English II Assigned Essay When Opposing Passions Merge In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, dualities vie for the soul of an emerging American generation. The novel proves that opposing passions, such as love and hate, paradoxically coexist in the human spirit, and they dictate the actions of Hawthorne’s multifaceted characters. Although such emotions may be similar, one transcends the other. Hawthorne’s novel, on the surface, often teems with hatred; but love is at the root, both driving and transforming destructive social interactions. Hatred is a superficial passion that develops in the character’s souls, emanating from—often perverse, confused, and hidden—love. In the novel, Roger Chillingworth’s life and spirit are dominated by his fierce desire to destroy the man who had an illicit affair with his wife. Chillingworth “digs into the poor clergyman’s heart, like a miner searching for gold” (113), scouring Dimmesdale’s psyche for hints of dishonesty. He becomes obsessed with his secret plot for revenge, and before long, his malicious intentions distort his physical appearance. The physician transforms into a walking emblem of hatred. The town realizes: “Now, there was something ugly and evil in his face, which they had not previously noticed” (112). Behind Chillingworth’s gloomy countenance, however, lies a motivation deeper than his desire for revenge: his enduring love for Hester. As he says to Hester while visiting her in prison, “I drew thee into my heart, into...
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...She woke up to the sound of rustling. A sharp pain came over her heart but, she knew what it was considering, it was always there. No one else knew about it besides her and the reason why she didn’t wear low cut shirts anymore or cute tops that showed off her upper chest. One night she realized that she was just like Hester Prynne with an A stuck on her breast but, it stood for something completely different then like the book’s meaning. The Scarlett Letter was for adultery to teach her a lesson but for the girl it was a symbol of abuse and annihilation. It was literally burned into her chest one day she woke up with it being there and panicked. She then began to get pains over her heart constantly before something bad happened or just to remind her of it. When she tries to cover it up with foundation it seems to get even brighter and gleam a bright red so she cannot escape it. She gave up with attempting wearing cute tops that were lower. When she was getting into the shower and started washing her body there was pulsing. When she got out she went to her room slowly walking. Then something went wrong she dropped to the floor and started convulsing. No one was home at the time and her whole body was shaking with her vision blacking out. Then after about 45 minutes, all she could feel was chills racking through her body and the pounding in her head. She went to go to take her normal medications in the kitchen. When she went to take them she began to start shaking again. Her body...
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...In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book, The Scarlet Letter, some of the major characters are isolated from the other Puritans and from Puritan society. One of the main characters, Hester Prynne is forced to wear a scarlet letter A on her chest for committing the sin of adultery. The Puritans during this time period were known as unforgiving and would often judge others for their sins instead of themselves. In the book Hawthorne reveals that Pearl’s true father is the minister Dimmesdale, while everyone else in town thinks it is Hester’s husband who is not in the town. The people in the town shame Hester for her sin and humiliate her in the streets - making her tell what the scarlet letter A represents on her chest. Hester is isolated because of her sin, Dimmesdale is isolated by hiding his sin, and Pearl as well has been isolated because of her parents’ sin. In the book Hester Prynne has been isolated from the other Puritans around her. She has been forced to wear a scarlet letter A on her chest for her sin and the people in town shame her. Hester is often stopped in the streets, as shown by a quote in the book. The quote states, “Clergymen paused in the street to address words of exhortation that brought a crowd,” (38.) This however is not the only way Hester is isolated in the book - she chooses to isolate herself even further. She felt as if she was not a part of everyone else because of her sin and isolation. Even Hester Prynne has isolated herself further than what she already was...
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...The Scarlet Letter: Symbolism For symbolism we used this illustration as a way to show the connection between all the symbols and their relation to sin. The path of sin starts at the prison door. The break in the door shows that a person cannot run from their past and sins, they will come out eventually. Notice how the river expands to include more and more symbols. We chose that to show how the longer these confessions are repressed the larger and more difficult to deal with they become. The symbol closest to the prison door is the rose. The rose is a direct parallel to Pearl as they both serve as a stark contrast to the surrounding environment. The rose bush’s main function was to symbolize a moral blossom in the story as it shows that justice will eventually prevail. The rose bush also reflects the moral values in proportion to the nature. Because within the bonds of the nature everything acts in a way than what it is really like and what it should do by its nature without resisting to its essential needs. But civilized man especially puritans rejected the mostly part of human needs like enjoys and spices of the life especially sexuality. But to deny means nothing because you can change nothing by denying it or covering the truth. So the roses symbolized normally passions and desires thus we can deduce that here it symbolizes how the freedom of the human nature is imprisoned by the conventional wisdom. Under this circumstance the nature will resist to the later doctrines...
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... Hester’s perception of Pearl is skewed because of the sin that Pearl symbolizes. As Pearl grows up, Hester is often struck by a feeling that her child is abnormal and even somewhat evil. This is best seen when Pearl is first described through Hester’s eyes as Pearl looks up at her mother, “It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, so perverse, sometimes so malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help questioning, at such moments, whether Pearl was a human child” (86). Pearl is a human child and like most human children, she has tantrums and fits and she gets angry and sad. Only to Hester, is Pearl fearsome and inhuman and it is her guilt that transforms Pearl. Only a guilt-ridden mind could use this one look to transform Pearl into something that is beyond human. Hester is viewing Pearl in a biased way that is filtered to reflect the circumstances of Pearl’s birth. Hester’s guilt acts as this filter. BP#3 Both Hester and Dimmesdale see nature as being focused on them and against them. In Dimmesdale’s case, this is best seen when he stands on the scaffold hand in hand with Pearl and Hester. The scene is told through his eyes and it is recounted that, “Solely to the disease in his own eye and heart, that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld thee the appearance of an immense letter, -the letter A,- marked out in lines of dull red light” (144). Dimmesdale is seeing this celestial occurrence as revolving around...
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...When a meteor past causing a figure similar to an “A” to appear, Dimmesdale immediately took it as a conviction from God of his sins. However, fellow townsfolk saw the bright red “A” in the sky and immediately interpreted it to mean the recently deceased Governor Winthrop had become an “Angel”. It was as Foster discusses in chapter 12 of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Dimmesdale’s subconscious guilt and personal want for punishment that immediately caused him to assume the sign was aimed at him; whereas, the townsfolk, unaware of Dimmesdale’s sins and heavy hearted about the death of the governor, believed the symbol was a show of assurance that Winthrop was resting in peace and so could they. This example shows that as Foster said, symbols mean “one thing for all of us” and will be interpreted based on what’s personally on their minds and hearts during interception, causing variation. Variation of symbol meaning is shown through The Scarlet Letter by the scarlet letter on Hester’s chest and the blazing red “A” that appeared in the sky after the meteor. In both situations the meanings varied due to different personal experiences past and present, which is what Foster discussed in chapter...
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...Forgiveness in The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne had intentionally given the reader the choice to decide whether or not Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale were forgiven by God in The Scarlet Letter. From Evidence collected from instances in the book, God has unmistakably pardoned the pair. The act of adultery, one of the most vile crimes to possibly commit of this period, was carried out by both Prynne and Dimmesdale. Resulting in harassment and maltreatment towards Hester. Also bringing about her daughter Pearl, a witty young girl. Considered sinners, the two went on without contact for years Eventually, Hester and Dimmesdale have been scorned in many ways for their past sin. The leading cause of much of this suffering is Roger Chillingworth, previous husband of Prynne “Violated in cold blood, the sanctity of the human heart.” Chillingworth had played himself into their lives and had become consumed by hatred. In conclusion, Sin has strengthened and humanized Prynne and Dimmesdale, whilst converting Chillingworth into a demon, along with exposing him. Once Dimmesdale passes, Chillingworth simply “withers away” showing that his only object of desire, was to agonise the two. Bailey 2 In the same way Pearl remarks curiously while outside one morning, “The sunshine does not love you. It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom... for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!” Young Pearl notices that the sun shines everywhere...
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...The Scarlet Letter, a book of guilt and confession, shows the effect of guilt through Dimmesdale and Hester. Hawthorne illustrates the awful effects of guilt, and freedom through confession. The book can either be seen as a comparison of suppressing or admitting sin, or of Hester and Dimmesdale. The ideas of keeping in and openly admitting sin contrast each other. Guilt is only in society, and cannot be seen in the forest. Society does play a major role on guilt, but guilt is only torturous if kept in secret. Arthur Dimmesdales torture from his guilt comes from his secrecy. The pain from guilt is a universal feeling. Guilty know their wrongdoing and it eats them away. Society has rules and laws to abide by that if broken makes a person feel...
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