The term archetypal deriving from the Greek words of “arkhe (primitive) + tupos (model) = arkhetupon: something moulded first as a model” (Stevenson 81), refers to the universal symbols, images, patterns that exist in the memory of the entire...

In the seventeenth century, genuine scientific breakthroughs were ideals of the future. The reality was alchemy, an extremely basic science in which procedures were practically guesswork. It is this sense of the unknown that induces both fear and...

Laden with allegories, dualisms, and symbolism, Hawthorne’s "The Birth-Mark" makes light of a variety of multi-faceted and complex issues, foremost among them those of sexuality and humanity. While the character of Aylmer seems both emotionally...

Happiness is an ideal emotion that everyone wants to experience and will go to desperate measures to achieve. If one wants to explore the facets of how important happiness is for people to achieve, they will have to put themselves in the shoes of...

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s gothic work, “The Birth-mark”, the central character, Aylmer, expresses his disgust with the mark’s ability to diminish his wife’s aesthetic beauty, as well as betray her mortal tendency to sin. The hand on Georgiana’s...

It is hard to believe that there was a time even before the Internet, seeing how it is used so frequently. As technology started to become more popular, no one considered the ramifications of identity theft. The main source of these crimes are...

To be a paradigm of a Gothic novel, The House of Seven Gables needs to include many elements, all which center on the ideas of gloom, horror, and mystery. The action of a Gothic novel takes place in a "run-down, abandoned or occupied, mansion or...

By the 19th-century, according to Hawthorne and Melville, a man's home was no longer his castle, but an effete parlor-room, a locus of stripped and castrated masculinity that hampered the development of classically intellectual and original...

In an attempt to write a more cheerful novel then his brooding Scarlet Letter during a time when optimism was the one quality shared by all, Hawthorne writes, what critics call today, a contrived ending for his House of Seven Gables. When all...

Ostensibly a tale of the effects of sin and guilt as manifested through successive generations of a New England family, Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables is a richly detailed novel with multiple levels of meaning and ambiguities that have...

It has almost become an everyday slogan, in light of present events, that behind everything that seems so perfect there is some horrible mistake, or some terrible sin waiting to come back and rear its ugly head. Nathaniel Hawthorne could not have...

Nathaniel Hawthorne uses symbols and characters to portray the struggle between aristocratic and democratic ideas in his novel, The House of the Seven Gables. The democratic ideas which develop throughout the novel prevail against the aristocratic...

In a rather prophetic statement about a doomed family residing in an ancestral home, where the curse of the father becomes the curse of the children, Hawthorne writes in The House of the Seven Gables, “Ambition is a talisman more powerful than...

Hawthorne’s science fiction short stories, such as ‘The Birthmark’ and ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’ are set in the seventeenth century. His novels, however, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, are set in the nineteenth century,...

Beauty is a part of the human condition; we are attracted to what we find appealing and repelled by what we find unappealing. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scholars captured this concept and put into words what it means to experience...

The epithet “the Land of the Free” is a distinctive phrase commonly associated with America, a country that prides itself for awarding its people with equal opportunity and the freedom to pursue their dreams. Yet, American literature does not seem...

The Scarlet Letter and Beloved, despite their vastly different settings, both emphasize the effect of community on an individual. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, set in Boston in 1642, the rigidly Puritan society criminalizes a young...

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is set in Salem, Massachusetts in 1642, while Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame takes place in Paris, France in 1482. Despite their vastly different settings, Hawthorne’s heroine Hester Prynne and...

In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the Compson family experiences a downward spiral accelerated mainly by two of the novel’s central characters: Caddy and Quentin Compson. Caddy’s sexuality, pregnancy, and banishment from the Compson...

“In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. [...] Every great work of art [...] is a celebration, an act of...

American fiction has been dominated by historical romances since Sir Walter Scott coined the genre with Waverley in 1814. American historical fiction indicates that the literature is unique in its character to any other nation; but instead, in ‘...

In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, many of the characters suffer from the tolls of sin, but none as horribly as Hester's daughter Pearl. She alone suffers from sin that is not her own, but rather that of her mother. From the day she is...

In the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hester and Dimmesdale are entangled in self-delusion because they are both caught up in a false interpretation of their respective sins and in an opaque vision of a better life. Hester is confused by...

In Hawthorne's intricately woven tale The Scarlet Letter, his characters create a parallel theme with the Biblical story of Original Sin. By examining the characters and their interactions and insights about each other, one can examine the...