美国文学Hawthorne.ppt

1、Nathaniel Hawthorne,The Scarlet Letter,Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864),Novelist Short Story Writer Central Figure of American Renaissance,Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864),Life Story Literary Characteristics The Scarlet Letter,Life Story,Childhood Education Career,Childhood,Birth: Salem, Massachusetts

2、; July 4, 1804 Prominent ancestors: colonial magistrate (Quakers) judge (Salem Witchcraft Trial in 1692) father: sea captain dying in 1808 Leading a secluded life,Quakers,One of a religious sect founded by George Fox whose teaching was primarily a preaching of repentance The trembling among the list

3、ening crowd caused or confirmed the name of Quakers given to the body Men and women sometimes fell down and lay struggling as if for life Encyclopedia Britannica,The Salem Witchcraft Trials,Time: May-October of 1692 One of the darkest times in American history of religious tolerance Among the last o

4、utbreaks of the persecution of accused witches Reasons: an ongoing frontier war, economic conditions, congregational strife, teenage boredom, and personal jealousies,Trial of an accused witch in Salem,Examination of Sarah Good by Judges Hathorne and Corwin,What evil spirit have you familiarity with?

5、 None. Have you made no contract with the devil? No. Why do you hurt these children? I do not hurt them. I scorn it. Who do you imploy then to do it? I imploy no body. What creature do you imploy then? No creature. I am falsely accused.,Education,Bowdoin College (1821-1825) Friends: H. W. Longfellow

6、 The Scarlet Letter; The House of Seven Gables Poverty of Materials Interest in history and antiquity Romance,Sources,“there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight” “the genial atmosphere which

7、a literary man requires in order to ripen the best harvest of his mind”,Interest in history and antiquity,“to recall what was valuable in the past” “connect a bygone time with the very Present” “a new territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land where the Actual and the Imaginary may m

8、eet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other”,Romance,Predestined form of American narrative “Poverty of materials” Puritan prudence Treating physical passions obliquely Avoiding violating the human heart Telling the truth and satirizing and yet not offending,Style,Romance fiction Long vi

9、sual descriptions Formal dialogues (human emotion) Characters inner struggle Symbolism and allegory Flowing and almost feminine Ambiguity,The Scarlet Letter,Summary Major Themes Features,Summary,Hester is being led to the scaffold, where she is to be publicly shamed for having committed adultery. He

10、ster is forced to wear the letter A on her gown at all times. She has stitched a large scarlet A onto her dress with gold thread, giving the letter an air of elegance. Hester carries Pearl, her daughter, with her. On the scaffold she is asked to reveal the name of Pearls father, but she refuses. In

11、the crowd Hester recognizes her husband from Amsterdam, Roger Chillingworth. Chillingworth visits Hester after she is returned to the prison. He tells her that he will find out who the man was, and he will read the truth on the mans heart. Chillingworth then forces her to promise never to reveal his

12、 true identity as her cuckolded husband. Hester moves into a cottage bordering the woods. She and Pearl live there in relative solitude. Hester earns her money by doing stitchwork for local dignitaries, but she often spends her time helping the poor and sick. Pearl grows up to be wild, even refusing

13、 to obey her mother.,Summary,Roger Chillingworth earns a reputation as a good physician. He uses his reputation to get transferred into the same home as Arthur Dimmesdale, an ailing minister. Chillingworth eventually discovers that Dimmesdale is the true father of Pearl, at which point he spends eve

14、ry moment trying to torment the minister. One night Dimmesdale is so overcome with shame about hiding his secret that he walks to the scaffold where Hester was publicly humiliated. He stands on the scaffold and imagines the whole town watching him with a letter emblazoned on his chest. While standin

15、g there, Hester and Pearl arrive. He asks them to stand with him, which they do. Pearl then asks him to stand with her the next day at noon. When a meteor illuminates the three people standing on the scaffold, they see Roger Chillingworth watching them. Dimmesdale tells Hester that he is terrified o

16、f Chillingworth, who offers to take Dimmesdale home. Hester realizes that Chillingworth is slowly killing Dimmesdale and that she has to help Dimmesdale.,Summary,A few weeks later, Hester sees Chillingworth picking herbs in the woods. She tells him that she is going to reveal the fact that he is her

17、 husband to Dimmesdale. He tells her that Providence is now in charge of their fates, and she may do as she sees fit. Hester takes Pearl into the woods, where they wait for Dimmesdale to arrive. He is surprised to see them, but he confesses to Hester that he is desperate for a friend who knows his s

18、ecret. She comforts him and tells him Chillingworths true identity. He is furious but finally agrees that they should run away together. He returns to town with more energy than he has ever shown before. Hester finds a ship that will carry all three of them, and it works out that the ship is due to

19、sail the day after Dimmesdale gives his Election Sermon. But on the day of the sermon, Chillingworth persuades the ships captain to take him on board as well. Hester does not know how to get out of this dilemma.,Summary,Dimmesdale gives his Election Sermon, and it receives the highest accolades of a

20、ny preaching he has ever performed. He then unexpectedly walks to the scaffold and stands on it, in full view of the gathered masses. Dimmesdale calls Hester and Pearl to come to him. Chillingworth tries to stop him, but Dimmesdale laughs and tells him that he cannot win. Hester and Pearl join Dimme

21、sdale on the scaffold. Dimmesdale then tells the people that he is also a sinner like Hester, and that he should have assumed his rightful place by her side over seven years earlier. He then rips open his shirt to reveal a scarlet letter on his flesh. Dimmesdale falls to his knees and dies on the sc

22、affold. Hester and Pearl leave the town for a while, and several years later Hester returns. No one hears from Pearl again, but it is assumed that she has gotten married and has had children in Europe. Hester never removes her scarlet letter, and when she passes away she is buried in the site of Kin

23、gs Chapel.,Themes,Love Sin Moral, emotional and psychological effect of the sin on the people,Features,Cultural allegory Structurally compact Complex psychologies on the part of the major characters Ambiguity (multiple view) Strong fairy-tale element Supernatural element Symbolism “A”; names of char

24、acters; flower at the prison door;wilderness,A,“adultery and sin” individual punishment reconciliation “America and allegory” national sin human cost,Text: Hester at Her Needle,Hester Prynnes term of confinement was now at an end. Her prison-door was thrown open, and she came forth into the sunshine

25、, which, falling on all alike, seemed, to her sick and morbid heart, as if meant for no other purpose than to reveal the scarlet letter on her breast.,Text: Hester at Her Needle,Perhaps there was a more real torture in her first unattended footsteps from the threshold of the prison, than even in the

26、 procession and spectacle that have been described, where she was made the common infamy, at which all mankind was summoned to point its finger.,Text: Hester at Her Needle,Then, she was supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the combative energy of her character, which enabled h

27、er to convert the scene into a kind of lurid triumph. It was, moreover, a separate and insulated event, to occur but once in her lifetime, and to meet which, therefore, reckless of economy, she might call up the vital strength that would have sufficed for many quiet years.,Text: Hester at Her Needle

28、,The very law that condemned hera giant of stern features, but with vigor to support, as well as to annihilate, in his iron armhad held her up, through the terrible ordeal of her ignominy. But now, with this unattended walk from her prison-door, began the daily custom, and she must either sustain an

29、d carry it forward by the ordinary resources of her nature, or sink beneath it.,Text: Hester at Her Needle,She could no longer borrow from the future, to help her through the present grief. To-morrow would bring its own trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next; each its own trial,

30、 and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be borne.,Text: Hester at Her Needle,The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to fling down; for the accumulating days, and added years, would pil

31、e up their misery upon the heap of shame.,Text: Hester at Her Needle,Throughout them all, giving up her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of womans frailty and sinful passion.,Text

32、: Hester at Her Needle,Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast,at her, the child of honorable parents,at her, the mother of a babe, that would hereafter be a woman,at her, who had once been innocent,as the figure, the body, the reality of

33、 sin. And over her grave, the infamy that she must carry thither would be her only monument.,Text: Hester at Her Needle,It may seem marvellous, that, with the world before her, kept by no restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the Puritan settlement, so remote and so obscure, fr

34、ee to return to her birthplace, or to any other European land, and there hide her character and identity under a new exterior, as completely as if emerging into another state of being, and having also the passes of the dark, inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness of her nature might assi

35、milate itself with a people whose customs and life were alien from the law that had condemned her, it may seem marvellous, that this woman should still call that place her home, where, and where only, she must needs be the type of shame.,Text: Hester at Her Needle,But there is a fatality, a feeling

36、so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

37、Her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the soil.,Text: Hester at Her Needle,It was as if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynnes wild and dreary, but

38、 life-long home.,Text: Hester at Her Needle,All other scenes of eartheven that village of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mothers keeping, like garments put off long agowere foreign to her, in comparison. The chain that bound her here was of iron l

39、inks, and galling to her inmost soul, but could never be broken.,Text: Hester at Her Needle,It might be, too,doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent from its hole,it might be that another feeling kept her within the scene and pathway that had been so fatal.,Text: Hester at Her Needle,There dwelt, there trode the feet of one with whom she deemed herself connected in a union, that, unreco