《红字》的读书报告

A Reading Report of The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter is written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was an influential American romantic novelist. Many of his works are inspired by Puritan New England, combining historical romance loaded with symbolism and deep psychological themes, bordering on surrealism. The Scarlet Letter makes Hawthorne known all over the world.

Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of puritans. The American puritans accept the doctrine and practice of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God. But due to the grim struggle for living in the new continent, they become more and more practical. American Puritanism is so much a part of the national atmosphere rather than a set of tenets.

A prominent characteristic of Hawthorne’s works is describing the dark side of society and humanity, which is inseparable to the influence of Calvinism on people's “original sin” and “intrinsic depravity” theory. Hawthorne is a pione er of psychological novel, who is good at analysis human’s “heart.” He focused on the ethics and the problem of evil, and advocated good deeds and self repentance to wash sin and purify the mind, and thus be saved. However, not all Hawthorne’s works are wrote the dark, at the same time in his expose social evils and human evil, he placed great sympathy for many kind-hearted heroes. As his friend, the great writer Herman Melville noted that Hawthorne's dark kept the dark even more bright dawn ahead. Hawthorne has made a great contribution on the development of American literature. The influence for writers such as Henry James, Faulkner and Malamud is obvious.

Hawthorne's works are imaginative and structured. In addition to psychological analysis and description, also use the symbolism. His sophisticated imagery idea added romantic to his works, deepened meaning for his works. But in his works, some places are mysterious obscure.

In The Scarlet Letter, he used symbolism skillfully to enhance the artistic effect. So it is regarded as the first symbolic novel in American Literature. Symbolism is the use of symbols to represent things such as ideas and emotions. Symbolism is

sometimes used to refer specifically to totemic symbols that stand on their own, as opposed to linguistic symbols.

In psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung envisioned symbols as being not of the mind, but rather the mind's capacity to hold information. The mind uses symbols to form free association, organization, and connections between symbols. Jung and Freud diverged on the issue of common cognitive symbol systems and whether they exist within the individual mind or among other minds, whether cognitive symbolism was innate or defined by the environment.

Symbolism is important to religion. Some religious oracles divine by interpreting symbols. Max Weber described religion as a system of sacred religious symbolism.

The story is set in Boston in the 17thcentury. At that time, the City Fathers moved to New England, and built the houses, the churches as well as the prisons with their own hands. They brought the customs and religion of old England with them, and strong bias towards women.

The gist of the story is as follows, Hester Prynne is the female protagonist in this novel. She is a young, beautiful and gentle woman –a perfect woman in people’s eye. However, she married Roger Chilingworth, an old misshapen man, who is also a doctor. She feels no happiness at all. Several years later, her husband was lost on the sea, so with nobody accompanying her, she had to live a lonely life. Just like the flaming fire in the night, a young, energetic priest named Arthur Dimmesdale, came into her life. They fell in love with each other, and they spent a period time of life full of passion and true love. Soon Hester found that she became pregnant. Owing to this, she was arrested and gave birth to a little girl in the prison. At that time, only would she tell the public the name of the adulterer, could she got rid of the imputation. As we know, a priest would be blamed and punished badly if he does something that is forbidden by God. In order to protect his high position and good reputation, she accepted the shame, wore the scarlet letter, which referred to shame, and stood alone under the scaffold in the public. The person who questioned Hester happened to be Mr. Dimmesdale. Dimmesdale himself had a pure heart--he may be able to help crying out that he was the adulterer, but at last he didn’t bring himself to admit his guilt. To him,