Puritianism and Literary Techniques in The Scarlet...

Nathaniel Hawthorne has made a beautiful, admirable, extraordinary approach in this novel said Henry James regarding The Scarlet Letter. It has the beauty and harmony of all original and complete conceptions and its weaker spots are not of its essence, but mere light flaws and inequalities of surface. The novel has the inexhaustible charm and mystery of great works of art. It has a high style of polish as well as a charming freshness. Hawthorne has cultivated with great industry his natural sense of language, his turn for saying things lightly in touchy mood, picturesquely yet simply, and for infusing a gently colloquial tone into matter of the most unfamiliar import. The Scarlet Letter deals with different aspects, which are portrayed†¦show more content†¦Hawthornes careful distinction between the type of fiction, the romance, and another type, called the novel, is one that we no longer observe today, when any long fiction is called a novel. But Hawthornes words guide us to the perception that he was writing about what goes on inside people, the truth of the human heart, rather than what goes on outside and around world. He called this novel a romance, not a novel. In The Custom House he suggests that life seen in the sunlight is the stuff of the novel, while the familiar seen in the moonlight and warmed slightly by the light of the coal-fire is the stuff of the romance. A romance, while it must not deviate from the truth of the human heart, has a right to present that truth under circumstances, which to a great extent are the writers own choosing and creation. While a novel is a realistic representation of human nature, human life, a romance may present these under circumstances, which seem improbable, extraordinary, or fanciful, shrouded in an atmosphere of mystery. Romance must not stray from the truths of human heart and, as regards its structure, must subject itself to artistic laws. In the writing of the story, Hawthorne depended to a very large extent upon actual persons, places and events pertaining to seventeenth-century Boston. The realistic elements in The Scarlet Letter far outnumber and outweigh the marvelous elements. The punishment of Hester Prynne for her sin of adultery is thoroughly