Reading Response Prompts
 

These prompts are meant to get you thinking about what you have read, and to help focus your thoughts for your reading responses. You can respond to any one of them, or, if you have another idea you would rather explore, you are free to write about that instead. Do not, however, attempt to answer multiple prompts for any assignment. If you choose to pursue an idea of your own or are not writing a response that day, you should still spend at least a few minutes thinking about each of the prompts in preparation for class. For more information, review the listserv assignment.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Chapters XVI through XXIV

To many readers, the meeting in the forest is the most crucial episode in the novel. Focusing only on this scene, consider any of the following three questions:

1)  As we have discussed, Hawthorne always referred to The Scarlet Letter as a romance (in contrast with a novel). One of the elements of Romanticism is a concern with the natural, the preternatural, and the supernatural. How does Hawthorne employ these elements in this scene?

2)  Hester and Dimmesdale clearly disagree about the morality of their love affair and the compensatory power of their suffering during the years since. With whom do you think the narrator sides? With whom do you think Hawthorne sides? Note that these are not necessarily the same question. Your interpretation of the book’s message will largely depend on how you answer this question.

3) Dimmesdale’s meeting with Hester and their decision to leave the New World behind changes him almost instantaneously. What indications do we have of this change? What do these indications tell us about how we should view the meeting in the forest and the plans Hester and Dimmesdale have made?

In this section, Hawthorne makes his most direct analysis of Puritan society, and perhaps his most direct criticism of his own. Overall, do you think Hawthorne is sympathetic to the Puritans or not? To return to a question we have considered before, what is Hawthorne’s view of history, and specifically of America?

The final scaffold scene is the dramatic climax of the novel, but the narrator offers multiple possibilities as to what actually happens, let alone what it all means. Critics have followed suit. Does Dimmesdale make a public confession or only a private one? What exactly appears on his chest? Given his final speech, would you say his priorities arein order? Is he redeemed by his actions?

Return to Pearl. Explain the meaning of her behavior in the forest, examine her ultimate fate, and discuss her significance to Hawthorne’s themes.

The Scarlet Letter, for obvious reasons, has attracted a considerable amount of feminist criticism.  What does this book say about women: their nature, their power, and their place in society during Hawthorne’s own time and in some undetermined but apparently better future?

 
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