红字英文介绍The_Scarlet_Letter

Novels:

Fanshawe (1825，《范肖》） The Scarlet Letter(1850,《红字》） House of the Seven Gables (1851,《七个尖角阁的 房子》) The Blithedale Romance (1852,《福谷传奇》) The Marble Faun (1857,《玉石雕像》)
Many of his works featuring moral allegories (寓 言）with a Puritan inspiration. A man of literary craftsmanship, extraordinary in the use of symbol: ★symbols serve as a weapon to attack reality. It can be found everywhere in his writing. His themes often center on the inherent evil and sin of humanity. His works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity.
Major characters in The Scarlet Letter
来自百度文库
heroine Arthur lover Hester Prynne Dimmesdale daughter Pearl
husband Roger Chillingworth
• Hester Prynne • Hester is portrayed as an intelligent, capable, woman. She speculates on human nature, social organization, and larger moral questions. Hester’s tribulations also lead her to be stoic and a freethinker. • She cares for the poor and brings them food and clothing.
• Arthur Dimmesdale • Dimmesdale was a scholar. The fact that Hester takes all of the blame for their shared sin goads his conscience, and his resultant mental anguish and physical weakness open up his mind and allow him to empathize with others. • The personal guilt drives Dimmesdale to further internalize his guilt and selfpunishment and leads to still more deterioration in his physical and spiritual condition.
In contrast, the studies of Hawthorne in America, put focus on the concept of romance with drawing on the achievements of science community, like electric theory. There are so many great achievements concerning all kinds of ideas, however, when readers think of Hawthorne’s attitude to religion, they are limited to the idea that Hawthorne was in a dilemma: either betray his religion or depress the nature. But in fact Hawthorne found the balance between them in The Scarlet Letter when he treated religion as a tool of regulation function rather than pure belief. 相比之下，中国的研究主要是文学研究，而美国则关注于作品中的科学原理。 虽然研究众多，但是读者在思考霍桑的宗教态度时候总是认为霍桑处于两难 境地，是背叛信仰还是抑制人性。但是在《红字》中，霍桑其实已经找到了 两者之间的平衡点——他把宗教当成是一种具有调节社区的工具而不是纯粹 的信仰
The Scarlet Letter: Background
The setting of The Scarlet Letter is Boston in the 1640s.Persecuted in England, the Puritans came to North America to form their own communities. Life in the Colonies was harsh, but it gave the Puritans the opportunity to form a society based on their religious ideals. Puritans sought the freedom to live by their beliefs. However, the Puritan leaders did not tolerate religious beliefs that differed from their own.
Nathaniel Hawthorne 纳撒尼尔·霍桑 (1804-1864)


An American novelist and short story writer in the 19th century. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, dark romanticism（黑色浪漫主 义).
Introduction
• The Scarlet Letter told a story of a puritan woman Hester Prynne who was punished to wear a scarlet A which stood for the crime of adultery. The pretty young lady tried to settle down in Boston with her old and ugly husband Chillinggworth, a scholar. But the latter did not appear for years. During this time, Hester committed adultery with a local Minster Dimmesdale, and gave birth to a girl Pearl. Facing the terrible punishment, Hester refused to give her lover’s name away to protect him. Years later, the husband Chillinggworth came to the town and found out the whole truth, and he operated an horror revenge on Dimmesdale, with hiding his own true name. Yet, as the story going, Hester and Dimmesdale became sympathetic figures, while Chillinggworth was a devil at last. • Just because of the ending, The Scarlet Letter was defined as nothing but a coarse and vulgar book with ideas that would pervert the minds of readers, when it was published at first. However people realized that it was a thoughtful book with great value and worthy to study again and again.
Short stories:
Twice-Told Tales （1837，《故事重述》） Mosses From an Old Manse (1846,《古屋青苔》)
Background
• 17th Century • Boston, Massachusetts, New England colony • Puritan 清教徒:Puritans believed God and Satan were present in everyone’s soul. They were constantly fighting against each other. They believed that the relationship of an individual to the community was an important concern. • Antinomian 唯信仰论者：主张基督徒可以废弃道德，依靠信仰 来拯救灵魂。 • Quaker 教友派：靠内心意识指引的教派 • Witch 巫女
The achievements of the novel
• ⑴ The Analysis of Various Subjects • On the thinking side, the topics of those achievements varied as widely as from feminism to nineteenth-century male identities, from Puritanism to Race and Slavery, from Transcendentalism to Policy. For instance, from the point of religion, Feng Guoling said the religious ethics stopped the author from uniting the lovers with wedlock, • ⑵ The Study of Writing Skills • It is the first point that he was good at putting symbols into full play. The second one is the phantasmagoria that was imbedded into his novel. • ⑶ The Use of Intertextual Reading • This mode covers two parts that intertextual reading of different literary works as well as of literary works and history.