/lit/ - Literature

>>22510969
I just re-read it recently. It's actually about how Arthur and Hester are descending deeper and deeper into depravity and moving further and further away from God throughout the book, and that they deserve every consequence coming to them. The presence of Chillingworth as a "villain" is focused on too much, because he's really there to remind the reader of the pain their sin has inflicted him with, rather than demonizing him. The sad truth is, however, that when you become like Chillingworth, where your entire life is dedicated to revenge and and bottled-up anger, you do become an ugly person, no matter if you were the one who was wronged in the first place. Pearl essentially fills the same role as Chillingworth, really, but instead of using hatred and jealousy to shine a light on their sin, Hawthorne has her childish ignorance and purity be a constant reminder of the gulf between them and her, and how eventually, the sins of the parents do indeed reflect on the child should they not repent. Hawthorne did have his misgivings concerning certain Puritan behaviors, but that is far and away from being entirely against his Puritan forefathers as he is taught as being. This is especially clear in his earlier work, Mosses From an Old Manse, or even in the introduction of The Scarlet Letter itself. You have to first reclaim Hawthorne's writings for yourself in order to be able to appreciate them in the same way Melville did, and they are incredible.
>Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim that I have ever cherished would they recognise as laudable; no success of mine — if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success — would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. “What is he?” murmurs one grey shadow of my forefathers to the other. “A writer of story books! What kind of business in life — what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation — may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!” Such are the compliments bandied between my great grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time! And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine. Planted deep, in the town's earliest infancy and childhood, by these two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since subsisted here; always, too, in respectability; never, so far as I have known, disgraced by a single unworthy member; but seldom or never, on the other hand, after the first two generations, performing any memorable deed, or so much as putting forward a claim to public notice.

>>22494574
I do the same thing, but only with books I want to do deep reads on, just absolutely filling up the margins. This makes it so the only books I have on my shelf are books I absolutely love. So far I've got:
>The Sound and the Fury
>Don Quixote
>Moby Dick
>The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
>Mosses from an Old Manse
>The Bible (In English, Spanish, and Japanese)
>Augustine's Confessions
>Edgar Allan Poe's Poetry and Tales
>Edgar Allan Poe's Essays and Reviews
>Shakespeare's Sonnets
>Kokoro
>Snow Country
I do mark up even my most expensive books, because I want each book I love to be a part of me.