La lettera scarlatta: recensione

LA LETTERA SCARLATTA RECENSIONE

“… Let us pick one of its flowers and give it to the reader. Hopefully, this sweet flower will serve to soften the dark tones Of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.” I thought it would be nice to quote these words which open the story, because they’re an anticipation of the themes of this novel and also because here we can see the feelings of the author when he thinks about this story.

In my opinion he has not a Puritan mind, he feels a great pity on suffering people, especially if sorrow is the consequence of a beautiful feeling, such as love. 
A The Author. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, from a puritan family. In 1825 he took degrees at the Bawdoin College . He had not a friendly character, and he was melancholic and introspective . He travelled, going to Boston, Liverpool and Italy. He is the first important novelist of American literature, even if his models are still English writers, like Spenser and Milton. But he had no luck with his first works: Fanshawe ,1828, Twice Told Tales ,1837, and Mosses from an old Manse ,1846.

La lettera scarlatta: recensione

LA LETTERA SCARLATTA PERSONAGGI

Even if the form of these works isn’t perfect, there are the themes which are fundamental in Hawthorne’s works: the contraposition between good and evil, the reason, the feelings, the instinct. The Scarlet Letter has been written in 1850 and it is Hawthorne’s masterpiece. Later he wrote The House of Seven Gables ,1851, tells about a family which lived under a curse. It’s not a strange theme for him, because his family also lived under the curse of a woman condemned to death in 1692. The writer was aware of this curse! In 1852 he wrote The Blithedale Romance and in 1860 he wrote The marble faun. When he came back to his country, in 1860, he wrote some essays about England: Our Old Home,1863, the Notebooks, published posthumous in three series: 1868, 1870, 1871. He wrote also books for children, like Famous Old People, 1841, and A wonder book , 1852. He died away from home, during a vacation with his friend, Franklin Pierce, on May 19th of 1864.

La lettera scarlatta: personaggi e riassunto

TEMI DELLA LETTERA SCARLATTA

The Scarlet Letter. The story of the publication - This novel was born when, as Hawthorne says, he found a package. When he opened it he found an old cloth and on the cloth there were traces of a letter A. He found also a lot of sheets where was written the story of the scarlet letter. In 1838 Hawthorne wrote some sketches on the characters and in 1850 the novel was published.
The plot - Hester Prynne, a woman who lived in Boston , has been condemned to wear, for her adultery, committed because she thought that her husband had been killed by indians, a scarlet letter on her breast. She didn’t want to reveal the name of her lover, the father of her child, who was Reverend Dimmesdale. But when her husband had been released by Indians and went to visit her, she made a promise: she would have hidden his real identity, so he could be free to change his name in Roger Chillingworth and could look for revenge, becoming the Reverend Dimmesdale’s assistant. In the meantime Hester and Pearl lived alone, excluded by society. After a long persecution, made by Roger Chillingworth, the reverend decided to pay for his sin, revealing Pearl’s father’s identity.