The Scarlet Letter红字英语读后感,总共有五篇.pdf

Impression of“The Scarlet Letter”The Scarlet Letteropens with a long preamble about how the book cameto be written.The nameless narrator was the surveyor of the customhousein Salem,Massachusetts.In the customhouse s attic,hediscovered anumber of documents,among them a manuscript that was bundled with ascarlet,gold-embroidered patch of cloth in the shape of an“A.”Themanuscript,the work of a past surveyor,detailed events that occurredsome two hundred years before the narrator s time.When the narratorlost his customs post,he decided to write a fictional account of theevents recorded in the manuscript.The Scarlet Letter is the finalproduct.The story begins in seventeenth-century Boston,then a Puritansettlement.A young woman,Hester Prynne,is led from the town prisonwith her infant daughter,Pearl,in her arms and the scarlet letter“A”on her breast.A man in the crowd tells an elderly onlooker thatHester is being punished for adultery.Hester s husband,a scholar mucholder than she is,sent her ahead to America,but he never arrived inBoston.The consensus is that he has been lost at sea.While waitingfor her husband,Hester has apparently had an affair,as she has givenbirth to a child.She will not reveal her lover s identity,however,and the scarlet letter,along with her public shaming,is her punishmentforhersinandhersecrecy.OnthisdayHesterisledtothetownscaffoldand harangued by the town fathers,but she again refuses to identifyher child s father.Themes1篇一：Sinandknowledgeare linkedintheJudeo-Christiantradition.TheBiblebegins with the story of Adam and Eve,who were expelled from the Gardenof Eden for eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.As aresultoftheir knowledge,AdamandEve are madeawareof theirhumanness,that which separates them from the divine and from other creatures.Once expelled from the Garden of Eden,they are forced to toil and toprocreate two“labors”that seem to define the human condition.Theexperience of Hester and Dimmesdale recalls the story of Adam and Evebecause,in both cases,sin results in expulsion and suffering.Butitalsoresultsinknowledge specifically,inknowledgeofwhatitmeansto be human.For Hester,the scarlet letter functions as“her passportinto regions where other women dared not tread,”leading her to“speculate”about her society and herself more“boldly”than anyoneelse in New England.As for Dimmesdale,the“burden”of his sin giveshim“sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind,so that his heart vibrates in unison with theirs.”His eloquent andpowerful sermons derive from this sense of empathy.Hester andDimmesdale contemplate their own sinfulness on a daily basis and tryto reconcile it with their lived experiences.The Puritan elders,ontheotherhand,insistonseeingearthlyexperienceasmerelyanobstacleon the path to heaven.Thus,they view sin as a threat to the communitythat should be punished and suppressed.Their answer to Hester s sinis to ostracize her.Yet,Puritan society is stagnant,while Hesterand Dimmesdale s experience shows that a state of sinfulness can leadto personal growth,sympathy,and understanding of others.Paradoxically,thesequalities areshownto be incompatiblewith astateof purity.2Thecharactersinthenovelfrequentlydebatetheidentityofthe“BlackMan,”the embodiment of evil.Over the course of the novel,the“BlackMan”is associated with Dimmesdale,Chillingworth,and MistressHibbins,and little Pearl is thought by some to be the Devil s child.The characters also try to root out the causes of evil:didChillingworth sselfishnessinmarryingHesterforcehertothe“evil”she committed in Dimmesdale s arms?Is Hester and Dimmesdale s deedresponsibleforChillingworth stransformationintoamalevolentbeing?This confusion over the nature and causes of evil reveals the problemswith thePuritanconceptionofsin.Thebook argues thattrue evil arisesfromthecloserelationshipbetweenhateandlove.Asthenarratorpointsout in the novel s concluding chapter,both emotions depend upon“ahighdegreeofintimacyandheart-knowledge;eachrendersoneindividualdependent.upon another.”Evil is not found in Hester andDimmesdale s lovemaking,nor even in the cruel ignorance of the Puritanfathers.Evil,in its most poisonous form,is found in the carefullyplotted and precisely aimed revenge of Chillingworth,whose love hasbeen perverted.Perhaps Pearl is not entirely wrong when she thinksDimmesdale is the“Black Man,”because her father,too,has pervertedhis love.Dimmesdale,who should love Pearl,will not even publiclyacknowledge her.His cruel denial of love to his own child may be seenas further perpetrating evil.After Hester is publicly shamed and forced by the people of Boston towear a badge of humiliation,her unwillingness to leave the town mayseem puzzling.She is not physically imprisoned,and leaving theMassachusetts Bay Colony would allow her to remove the scarlet letterand resume a normal life.Surprisingly,Hester reacts with dismay when3Chillingworth tells her that the town fathers are considering lettingher remove the letter.Hester s behavior is premised on her desire todetermine her own identity rather than to allow others to determineit for her.To her,running away or removing the letter would be anacknowledgment of society s power over her:she would be admitting thatthe letter is a mark of shame and something from which she desires toescape.Instead,Hesterstays,refiguringthe scarletletter as asymbolof her own experiences and character.Her past sin is a part of whoshe is;to pretend that it never happened would mean denying a partof herself.Thus,Hester very determinedly integrates her sin into herlife.Dimmesdale also struggles against a socially determined identity.Asthe community s minister,he is more symbol than human being.Exceptfor Chillingworth,those around the minister willfully ignore hisobvious anguish,misinterpreting it as holiness.Unfortunately,Dimmesdale never fully recognizes the truth of what Hester has learned:that individuality and strength are gained by quiet self-assertion andby a reconfiguration,not a rejection,of one s assigned identity.4The Scarlet Letter is rich with symbols whichcan stand for an idea,belief,action,or materialentity.It is a characteristic of Hawthorne.Heused symbols to reveal the psychology of thecharacters.So in the essay,I will mainly talkabout the symbols in this book.The most important symbol in the book is the“thescarlet letter A”.When I first saw the main characterHester Prynne at the beginning of the book,the imagecome to my mind was the woman appeared in the bible,the angle“took me away in the Spirit into a waste land:and I saw a woman seated on a bright red beast,full ofevil names,having seven heads and ten horns.And thewoman was clothed in purple and bright red,withornaments of gold and stones of great price and jewels;and in her hand were a gold cup full of evil things and herunclean desires”(revelution 17:3,17:4).Here thewoman“full of evils”was dressed in red,and seated onred.Red,or scarlet color was a kind of symbol of sin.The“scarlet”in this novel,however,can reflectmuch,not only sin.The color“scarlet”is just like the love between第 1 页篇二：Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale,pure,sincere andenthusiastic.This kind of love is the foundation of thefamily and the society.It should be cherished if thesociety is well established.But,the novel was written inthe mid-nineteenth century and took themid-seventeenth century for the events it describes.People at that time sought to establish an idealcommunity in America that could act as a model ofinfluence for what they saw as a corrupt civil andreligious order.This sense of mission was the center oftheir religious and social identity.Directed toward therealization of such an ideal,the Puritans required a strictmoral regulation;anyone in the community who sinnedthreatened not only their soul,but the very possibility ofcivil and religious perfection in America and in England.Not coincidentally,the years Hawthorne chose torepresent in The Scarlet Letter were the same as those ofthe English Civil War fought between King Charles I andthe Puritan Parliament;the latter was naturallysupported by the New England colonists.Under the ruleof the Puritanism,the human nature had beenconstrained;people can not develop in a healthy way.第 2 页The scarlet feeling that should be full of passion andhappiness was suppressed.Meanwhile,the“scarlet”can also stand for the punishment of stake.Hester andDimmesdale were just like pagans;their guilty souls wereburned by the fire,and the fire had turned into thescarlet letter“A”.That meant their souls werepurified in the long lasted punishment.As the novel described that Hester was a youngwoman who was tall with a figure of perfect elegance on alarge scale.She had dark and abundant hair,so glossythat it threw off the sunshine with a gleam,and a facewhich,besides being beautiful from regularity of featureand richness of complexion,had the impressivenessbelonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes.Shewas ladylike,too,after the manner of the femininegentility of those days;characterized by a certain stateand dignity,rather than by the delicate,evanescent,andindescribable grace,which is now recognized as itsindication.There is no doubt that she was a charmingwoman,especially in the common crowd.But the scenewas quite irony.This charming woman was the sinner.The scarlet letter A was on the breast of her gown,in fine第 3 页red cloth,surrounded with elaborate embroidery andfantastic flourishes of gold thread.She was a sinner whocommitted adultery more than an attractive woman.Thescarlet letter A people gave her was to show she was anadulterous woman.It was a shame;As A is the first letterof the alphabet which means the start.As to doctrine,thestart is fallen.The origin of the world is fallen.Adam andEves leaving Eden was a punishment for their act.Lifebeginning was a kind of fallen.The story begins with thescene that Hester was on the scaffold to accept thepunishment implied that the beginning was the fallen.The name of Arthur Dimmesdale started with the letter Ajust liked Adam.He should be together with Hester,buthe did not.For Hester,she hadnt been faced with this,so whats her first impulse is to clasp the infant closelyto her bosom to hide this shame.But in a moment,sherealized its unwise to hide a shame by another.Thenshe smiled,in a haughty way.At this moment,the scarletletter A was no longer a kind of symbol of“adulterous”,a shame,but the fire inside that gave her the supporttogether with the baby on her arm.She pulled throughthis situation and in her later life the scarlet A also第 4 页accomplished her and turned into different meanings.Itjust like a ferule that regularize her behavior,cultivateher virtue,constrained her human nature and alsofirmed her faith to pursuit her happiness.In her latter life,she lived a pure life.Her needle work was supremely goodthat the scarlet letter A seemed to become a praise thatrepresented art.Not only had her needle work winned herpraise,but she herself was such a kind person whoalways helped others who were in trouble that winedothers respect.The scarlet letter A became a symbol of“able”or“angle”.It could be also regarded as thecross of nuns,stranded for“Acts of the apostles”.Tillthis moment,the scarlet letter A was no longer a symbolof shame.Whats interesting,in Geoffrey ChaucersThe Canterbury Tales,there also a nun who had an A.The scarlet letter itself is the principal symbols inthe novel,and there are many others.In the first chapterthe wild rosebush symbolizes dissent in its reference tothe historical figure Anne Hutchinson,who led a group ofreligious dissenters in colonial Massachusetts.Meanwhile it also symbolizes Hester and even aforeshadowing of the scarlet letter that she wears.第 5 页