The Scarlet Letter question

Oh, I love this book!

The chief pleasure, for me, is the extraordinarily lush and powerful language -- as with Shakespeare, the language is a huge part of the allure. It is so chewy, and Hawthorne's word selection impeccable. He reminds me of his American contemporary Poe, another man with a golden ear.

Then again, the degrading of alluring women as temptresses by a (yes) Puritanical, patriarchal society, and the oppressiveness of theocratic regimes, are themes that, lamentably, should resound even today in huge pockets of the world.

Meanwhile, the Hester-Pearl relationship is priceless, and Pearl is one of the richest child characters I can think of in all of literature.

Still, I have tutored bright high school students in this book, and they clearly would have been lost, frustrated, and angry without tutelage. It is far from accessible, and asking harried high school students to read it cover to cover strikes me as not much worse than sticking them in the pillory!

First, let me preface everything I'm about to type with "I'm a huge nerd and just loved this book". Different types, right?

I like the last line because of the (I guess) handshake that it gives to the establishing image which is of the prison house door.. which I thought might have been sable field he was referencing.

I'm that typical English teacher who drags kids into this book insisting they look into each symbol tho, so I'm a dork. Someone else take this and make something cooler with it! :)

Jess, I totally get where your coming from. I read it the summer before I was supposed to read it in class-forced myself through it- and then when it came time to read it in class, I couldn't do it. And this is coming from the girl who usually finishes the books the day they're assigned.

That said, my extremely anal English teacher who I love started out this book with a speech where she told us she had been assigned the book in an honors class and she hadn't read it either, and when she did her project at the end of the book, her teacher started yelling at her and freaked her out so she never took an honors class again. This speech was punctuated with "So I know most of you aren't actually going to read this, and you're going to find ways to get around it and use Sparknotes and watch the movie, and I sympathize, so I'm just going to make sure you understand the main points and symbols and don't worry about the rest. And if you're going to watch the movie, don't watch the one with Demi Moore."

The main points, she taught us, were about grace and hypocrisy. I actually really loved the idea of the novel and what it taught about hypocrisy and why people should give grace. One of my favorite quotes from the text was, "If truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a busom besides Hester's," Which basically means that everbody screws up, but we pick out certain people to punish all the same.

But I just hated Hawthorne's execution and writing style. It seemed monotonous and longwinded. I hated having to search for the symbols isn line after line of text.

"Thank god I've finished it" sums up eveything I felt about this book at the last line! I hated it to such an extent that I couldn't have cared less what the imagery was supposed to represent! Fantastically badly written, turgid prose throughout, unmemorable and unlikable (supposedly sympathetic) characters, and a plot that actually had potential but does nothing to realise it.

I believe it is required reading in schools in many of the States in the US - "God Bless America" indeed for almost ensuring that children are put off books and reading for life! There are great American writers, just because Hawthorne was one of the very first to be read and recognised outside of the USA, by what was, then, the European academic elite, does not mean he is among the great now!

In the UK, we had to do Thomas Hardy in school and I know that several of the more reluctant readers in my class vowed they'd never read anything they didn't have to, ever again, after The Mayor of Casterbridge and Hardy is, compared to Hawthorne, light sparkling and fascinating to read.

I REALLY, SERIOUSLY hated this book - is it obvious? I have no idea how/why I actually finished it! I can recall no redeeming qualities at all.

My all time favorite book -okay it ties with Hamlet. The last line has to do with the letter "A" following her to her grave. The symbolism is well explained in the paragraphs just before the last line. Basically, she becomes a saint, the townspeople/preacher the true sinners.

Well, I guess I cheated and I listened to it on audio... I had a REALLY hard time reading it!! I thought it was great. I know, I'm a huge nerd too!

To answer your original question, Sable and Gules are color terms used in heraldry (for black and red, respectively). To me, this is suggesting that the scarlet letter A is the coat of arms for Hester and Dimmesdale. This, with the joint tombstone and the side-by-side graves, suggests that Hester and Dimmesdale are united at last. The ending of the book is overall very bright and optimistic.

I, too, love the language Hawthorne uses; I find that it communicates in a deep and layered manner. I enjoy grappling with symbolism and advanced vocabulary which forces me to grow intellectually.

Hawthorne's message about Puritanical hypocrisy and the emptiness of legalistic religiosity was a literary right cross considering the time and place in which he wrote it.

In fact, I think his message still issues a moral sting, even in what is now a far more liberal society.

It's about the Scam (WitchHunt) in which over 40,000 Beautified-Cosmetically through forced Magnesium Stearate (a chemical that reduced toxins increases "Beauty"/pinkness in young women) poisoning, in order to ultimately skin their cadavers and paste those same skins on the bodies of demoiacal south indian dravidian women in order to make them "white" and infiltrate royal families of europe.

A red scarlett A gules = jalta (aka burning) (Om Symbol) on a field of black .... that's the Universe and God.