Monday, June 17, 2019
Hypocrisy in The Scarlett Letter and The Adventures of Huckleberry Essay
Hypocrisy in The Scarlett earn and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Essay ExampleThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, on the other hand, is a critique of the lack of unity in the moral and spiritual standards of the people of the southern states of America before the abolition of slavery. painting a realistic picture of the antebellum south, Mark duad manages to bring to the notice of the reader the evils of the practice of slavery and the contradictions inherent in this system. The awareness regarding this social ill among the southerners is a testimony to the remarkable hypocrisy that they demonstrate when it came to issues regarding African Americans who were discriminated against and ill-treated because of the color of their skin. This was used against them and they were required to do a lot of unpaid work for the whites who considered themselves to be the repository of a great galore(postnominal) beliefs that they considered noble and elegant. The coexistence of these be liefs with the practice of slavery is contradictory and hypocritical this is precisely what the author seeks to say through his novel. The theme of hypocrisy in The Scarlet Letter is explored in the beginning through the critique of the Puritan establishment of New England. In the very beginning of the novel, Hawthorne introduces the hypocritical attitudes of the people who live in the nineteenth centuries and profess to be owners of great virtues but are interested in the same sensual activities as the others. In the chapter titled The Custom-house, Hawthorne uses irony as a tool to strike hard the shallowness of the Puritan establishment of nineteenth century America (Subbu, 300). He thus seeks to establish a connection between the renegacy of the protagonist of The Scarlet Letter and himself in their acts of defiance towards the hypocritical attitudes of the Puritans, who failed to employ the same standards of virtue to everybody. The gluttony and the sloth of the members of th e custom-house are remarkable since they are the very people who are against this in other people, at least in theory (Basu). However, it is this very discrepancy between theory and practice that is critiqued constantly in The Scarlet Letter. This discrepancy characterizes the blood between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale who is a priest in the Puritan establishment. Neither Hester nor Dimmesdale chooses to expose the secret behind the birth of Pearl and the puritan emblem of virtue, Dimmesdale, is fine with permit Hester bear the brunt of the punishment that is given by the society for the crime of adultery. This exposes the hypocrisy that even people who were apparently of great moral rectitude could fall course to in a puritan society where the appearance of virtue was more important than the actual presence of it in a person. This theme is something that Hawthorne explores even in the short stories that he has written. One such story would be Young Goodman Brown which rev eals the presence of vice in the best of hearts in a puritan society that sought to repress even the basic human desires that a person was likely to have. The
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