In the Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne conveys several different types of irony – not just in the characters but in the symbolism and true meanings as well. There are numerous examples throughout the novel. One example is the rosebush, a plant which stands outside of the prison and is considered the only living thing in society. The rosebush is ironic because it is marked by both the thorn and the color red and it is where Hester is located for a period of punishment of love. One of the most obvious examples of irony is that Dimmesdale is a minister who is highly admired for his sermons but is Hester’s lover.
Just like relationships, which also have rules and if they are broken the relationship fails. In Act Two, Scene Three, Friar Lawrence discus’s on how flowers and herbs have good qualities and bad. Just like the people, “with baleful weeds and precious juiced flowers” The weeds can be bad as they are evil and poisonous, whereas the flowers are good and “precious”, By this he is saying that the good times are rare. Friar Lawrence is also commenting on how this can relate to the way that in every relationship there is good and bad qualities. The Laboratory is an example on the relationship between people and revenger.
Pearl symbolizes evil in the story by representing God's punishment of Hester's sin, symbolizing the guilt and the scarlet letter that controls her behavior and defying Puritan laws by being cheerful and associating with nature. Pearl is a greater punishment then Hester’s “A”. First, Pearl represents God's punishment by her mocking and nagging of Hester. This is shown throughout the novel she sometimes seemed to her mother as almost a witch baby (Hawthorne 88).Second, Pearl is a baffling mixture of strong emotions with a fierce temper and a capacity for evil; with Pearl, Hester's life became one of constant nagging, and no joy. This is proven when Hester remarks to herself, "Oh Father in heaven - if thou art still my father - what is this being which I have brought into the world" (Hawthorne 89).Thirdly, Pearl represents the sins of both Hester and Dimmesdale.
The same blackberries become stinky and disgusting which reflects to the story of Death of a Naturalist. 2. Imagery: In the first stanza the persona vividly describes the scenery to place the reader in the exact place of the persona. The reader is therefore able to start to “feel” the text after which the berries are introduced. The berries are described with sensuous imagery so that the reader can imagine the taste, smell, touch and sight of the blackberries.
Then he says “harnessed to a pot of dirt.” That’s talking about how the ‘flowers’ are just “rooted to the ground” and stuck in the same place as everyone else. They don’t know what the real world is like; they will live their whole life stuck in their little bubble. The second example of symbolism I found in the poem was “I’d rather be a tall, ugly weed. clinging on cliffs, like an eagle.” What he means by that is he’d rather be an outcast, but successful, tough, confident, and free. He uses the weed to represent his desire to stand tall and free rather than be stuck in a pot.
Also foreshadows the events of the short story, a gothic technique. Page 14: “ I clung to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could comfort me for suffering it.” The heroine feels instinctively that the Marquis's desire for her is tied with a love of destruction. What makes the heroine appear so powerless to the Marquis and
While the narrator in “A Rose for Emily” wants readers to hear his bias against women, in “Odour of Chrysanthemums” the narrator approaches readers with a more sympathetic element. From the beginning, readers are told that Elizabeth is too good for the life she is living. The narrator describes the life she lives and her surroundings in an unattractive manner. “The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the whimsy, a reedy
A jail of hardships and melancholy that made her stronger and built an unbreakable bond between two people: Hester and Dimmesdale. In Chapter 5 of The Scarlet Letter it compares the” A” and her Prison and how both made everyone point at her and idolize her as the epitome of sin. “Her prison-door was thrown open, and she came forth into the sunshine, which, falling on all alike, seems, to her sick and morbid heart, as I meant for no other purpose than to reveal the scarlet letter on her breast. Perhaps there was a more real torture in her first unattended footsteps from the threshold of prison, than even in the procession and spectacle that have been described, where she was made the common
The effects of sin in The Scarlet Letter are the sins that are represented through characters, events, and symbolism. Hester represents the effects of sin throughout the novel by showing the ways it can affect characters. When Hester is at the forest, she takes off the scarlet letter, and she “felt the freedom.” She has to wear the scarlet letter her whole life because of the crime she committed. This causes her to become depressed and sad, but if she did not wear the scarlet letter she would feel free. Also, when Pearl and Hester were at the governor’s hall, the governor thought Hester was not “of authority and influence” and had “stumbled and fallen amid the pitfalls of this world.” The
We can see 3 symbols in the first chapter — prison, cemetery and rose. They respectively represent the Puritan Society, mortality, and pain or human’s beautiful but fragile hope. This sets a gloomy opening for the dark novel, in which readers can hardly find any merry plots. Also in chapter 7, the outré garden of the Governor’s Hall divulges problems of decay and disrepair in the Puritan society in Boston. The main symbols are the scaffold and the scarlet letter, they have a key difference in function — the scaffold witnessed the changes of the characters as time went by, while the scarlet letter seemed never change, imposing the same burden on Hester Prynne, and brought out the theme of the story － the effects of sin and guilt on human heart.