Before Dimmesdale kills himself, he admits his sin to the whole town. Also, Dimmesdale receives treatment from Hester’s husband, Chillingworth, who knows their secret, and is trying to get revenge on them both. Chillingworth ends up realizing that he is going insane with trying to get revenge and believes that he has sinned more than both of them. The novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne uses satire to poke fun of the Puritan attitude toward sinning and the punishments of sinning. The reader learns from the text that the Puritan religion looked down on the idea of sin and punishes sinners harshly.
Driven by the need for power and status, Edmund sides with other evil characters such as Goneril and Regan who have the same motives as him. A modern audience might view Edmund as an evil character based on the fact he betrays natural family values and turns against his family, while a Jacobean audience might regard his actions as conventional at the time where social and political change was becoming more common. One way in which an audience is likely to personify Edmund as evil is through his decision to turn against his brother because he is “illegitimate” and therefore less likely to inherit his fathers land and status when Gloucester dies. Edmund can be seen as a malcontent, someone unhappy with what he has and his character. He therefore has to manipulate Edgar and Gloucester to “grow” and “prosper”.
who hides and what is hidden? how does deceit function in the world of the play, and how does it help the play comment on life in general? a central motif in the play is trickery or deceit, whether for good or evil purposes. counterfeiting, or concealing one's true feelings, is part of this motif. everyone seems to lie; good characters as well as evil ones engage in deceit as they attempt to conceal their feelings: beatrice and benedick mask their feelings for one another with bitter insults; don john spies on claudio and hero; don pedro and his 'crew' deceive benedick and beatrice.
The unnamed narrator has the burning urge to kill a man for no other reason than the fact that the man's eye is glossed over. Like in Poes's other story, the narrator is sure what he has done is the right thing but, the paronoia of the still beating hart drives the narrator mad with guilt. The two stories are full of Poe's attempts to leave lasting effects on his readers. The similarities and differences of the narrators are strong eveidence. It is hard to figure out who is crazeier, the paroniod schizophrenic or the revenge seeking phsycho.
His willingness to slaughter the man for so weak a reason is frightening though. It helps to show how twisted Chillingworth truly is. During the end of the novel though, Dimmesdale thwarts Chillingworth’s revenge plot by telling the Puritan community how he had an affair with Hester. This act absolutely ruins Chillingworth because he no longer possesses the power over Dimmesdale. All the horrible acts he had done in the past were undone, because Dimmesdale "Hast escaped me!"(228).
The moral of being human is to necessarily be flawed, and to strive for perfection is to deny one’s own morality. The themes of both narratives can be understood as morality. The morality of Aylmer in “The Birth-Mark” can be seen through his journals. “The volume, rich with achievements that had won renown for its author, was yet as melancholy as record as ever mortal hand had penned” (Hawthorne 220). This example shows the reader that Aylmer is trying to hide his imperfections by trying to make his wife completely perfect.
Iago feels that the best way to do so is by manipulating Othello telling him that his wife is cheating on him with Cassio, who Iago coincidently hates as well. Iago reveals, “That thinks men honest that but seem to be so, and will as tenderly be led by the nose as asses are. I have ‘t. it is sengender’d. Hell and night must bring this monstrous birth to the worlds light” (Shakespeare 1.
They lead lives based on lies and are soon exposed for the sinners that they really are. Ethan Brand has come to accept that he is a sinner. He even embraces the idea with an open mind. In these two stories Hawthorne expresses the idea that all humans are sinners and contain some amount of evil within them, and that they either accept the fact or attempt to cover it up and deny their natural tendency to
I think Friar Lawrence is to blame for Romeo’s and Juliet’s death because he gave poison married Romeo and Juliet without consent. Some people may disagree because he was trying to help them and didn't know his plan would result in Romeos and Juliet’s
For the Victorians, modernity meant numbness: urban life, with its constant over-stimulation and newspapers full of scandalous and horrifying stories, immunized people to shock. Many believed that the onslaught of amorality and the constant assault on the senses could be counteracted only with an even greater shock. This is the principle Browning adheres to in “Porphyria’s Lover.” In light of contemporary scandals, the sexual transgression might seem insignificant; so Browning breaks through his reader’s probable complacency by having Porphyria’s lover murder her; and thus he provokes some moral or emotional reaction in his presumably numb audience. This is not to say that Browning is trying to