红字人物性格分析论文文献摘要

Plot:The story describes the illicit affair of Hester Prynne with Reverent Dimmesdale. Hester is a young woman who married Chillingworth. She had an adultery with the Reverent and gave birth to a child Pearl. 红字这本书讲的是一个Hester和Reverent之间发生一些不正当关系的故事，Hester是一个有妇之夫，他的丈夫是Chillingworth。但是她爱上了Reverent并和他孕育了一个小孩，取名为珍珠。 Character: 1)Hawthorn portrays Hester as an aristocratic and sensitive young woman who meets her sentence with dignity and courage. When she is set free, she does not flee the community but devotes her life to helping her fellow villagers, and finally she wins the admiration and love of her fellowman. 2) Arthur Dimmesdale banishes himself from the society and lives as a stranger among his admirers. He undergoes the tragic experience of physical and spiritual disintegration. 3) Chillingworth, the scholar, the embodiment of pure intellect of the story, who commits “unpardonable Sin”--the violation of the heart. Symbolism: 1)The scarlet letter is a hymn on the moral growth of the woman. The scarlet letter undergoes changes in meaning. At first it is a token of shame, “adultery”, but then the genuine sympathy and help Hester offers to her fellow villagers changes it to “Able.”Later in the story, the letter A appears in the sky, signifying “Angel”. Her life eventually acquires a real significance when she establishes a meaningful relationship with her fellowmen. 2)The names of its character, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, are also symbolic. Dim represents dark and weak, and dale means valley, so the name is actually a symbol of the “dim-interior” of the clergyman. The word “Chillingworth” indicates this man is a merciless avenger. He is calm in temperament, but he conceals evil intention. Moreover, Pearl is a living symbol of Hester’s sin, a constant reminder of her infidelity. Theme: The novel assumes the universality of guilt and explores the complexities and ambiguities of man’s choices. Hawthorn does not intend to tell a love story nor a story of sin, but focuses his attention on the moral, emotional and psychological effects of the sin on the mind of the people and those characters in particular, so as to show the tension between individuals and society. To Hawthorn, everybody is potentially a sinner, life is guilty, sin is human nature, and the evil is in the hearts of men. Evil seems to be man’s birthmark and exists in human heart. Therefore, great general courage is indispensable for the improvement of human nature.

一、海斯特：勇敢和坚强

主人公海斯特被写成了崇高道德的化身，她不但感化了表里不一的丁梅斯代尔，同时也在感化着充满罪恶的社会。海斯特是一个惨遭教会统治迫害的妇女形象，这个善良美丽的姑娘却不幸嫁给了伪善、心理阴暗的罗杰奇林沃思，毁掉了自己的幸福。

二、牧师丁梅斯代尔：怯懦和纠结

牧师爱上了已有丈夫的海斯特，不断忍受内心的折磨。虽然没有在示众台上受辱，但是他越发的阴郁和憔悴，身体也日渐虚弱，在忧伤的内心深处是一个痛苦的世界。这位青年牧师的面颊日渐苍白，因为他研究学问过于执着忘我，更重要的是他经常通宵达旦地进行斋戒和祈祷以求内心的安宁和平静。他认为这是一种报应，整个人呈现颓废之势。

终于有一天，牧师在临死前鼓起了勇气上到刑台和海斯特一起道出真相，他也同时逃出了罗杰齐林沃思的阴谋，获得了内心真正的安宁和解脱，不过他到死都认为自己是个罪人，内心充满了痛苦、罪恶和悔恨，认为应该负起自己的耻辱。因此这是一个宗教殉道者的形象，人物命运充满了悲苦。

三、罗杰齐林沃思：伪善和恶毒

这是个长相怪异的人，内心感到孤独和凄凉，感觉不到一丝一毫的家庭温暖。他虽然没有当众揭穿妻子情人的名字，但却用更加阴险的方式进行自己的复仇计划。他既不会害他性命也不会毁坏他的名誉，不是显示他的仁慈，而是他不愿意接受这种耻辱。这种行为看似慈悲，但事实是用更为阴险的内心折磨的方式去惩罚牧师。

内容简介

《红字》讲述了发生在北美殖民时期的恋爱悲剧。女主人公海丝特·白兰嫁给了医生奇灵渥斯，他们之间却没有爱情。在孤独中白兰与牧师丁梅斯代尔相恋并生下女儿珠儿。白兰被当众惩罚，戴上标志“通奸”的红色A字示众。然而白兰坚贞不屈，拒不说出孩子的父亲。

小说惯用象征手法，人物、情节和语言都颇具主观想象色彩，在描写中又常把人的心理活动和直觉放在首位。因此，它不仅是美国浪漫主义小说的代表作，同时也被称作是美国心理分析小说的开创篇。

Although criticism of The Scarlet Letter for a long time took Dimmesdale as the central character, it has more recently reacknowledged what was well understood in Hawthorne's own time, that Hester is protagonist and center. The narrator allies himself with her and, despite occasional adverse judgments, devotes himself to her cause. His cause as narrator is to obliterate her obliteration, to force the reader to accept Hester's reading of her letter as a badge of honor instead of a mark of negation. The narrator forces us, just as Hester forces her Puritan townsmates, to see her as a good woman on her own terms. In contrast to the two distorted male personalities who counterpoise her-the one obsessed with revenge, the other with his own purity-Hester appears almost a miracle of wholeness and sanity. While these men struggle with their own egos and fantasies, she has real battles-to maintain her self-respect in a community that scorns her, to stay sane in solitude, to support herself and her child, to raise that child to normal adulthood despite so many obstacles. Curiously, though she has been cast out of society, Hester remains very much in the world, whereas Chillingworth and Dimmesdale at the very center of society, are totally immured in their self-absorption. In her inner integrity and her outer responsiveness, Hester is a model and a counterstatement. Cautiously, Hawthorne advances the notion that if society is to be changed for the better, such change will be initiated by women. But because society has condemned Hester as a sinner, the good that she can do is greatly circumscribed. Her achievements in a social sense come about as by-products of her personal struggle to win a place in the society; and the fact that she wins her place at last indicates that society has been changed by her. Might there be in the future a reforming woman who had not been somehow stigmatized by society? Although in his later works Hawthorne was to answer this question negatively, in The Scarlet Letter the possibility, though faint, is there. There is more to be said about Hester than space allows; let me confine myself to two points: first, the relative insignificance of her relation to Dimmesdale in comparison with her relation to Pearl-the supersession in her portrait of sexual love by maternal love. The downplaying of her passion for Dimmesdale means that--although she continues to love him, and remains in Boston largely on his account-her goodness and her essential nature are not defined by her relation to a man. Hawthorne does not cooperate in the masculine egotism that he excoriates in The Blithedale Romance by making Hester a mere event in the great sum of man. Hester is a self in her own right portrayed primarily in relation to the difficulties in her social situation, in relation to herself, and in relation to Pearl. Through Pearl, Hester becomes an image of "Divine Maternity" (1:56). But though so signally a mother, she is not a "mother figure." By detaching her from the social milieu that defines and supports the concept of motherhood, Hawthorne is able to concentrate on the relation of Hester to her child without any social implications. In fact, society in this instance wishes to separate the mother and child. By giving her a recalcitrant daughter as child, Hawthorne has even more cleverly set his depiction of motherhood apart from Victorian ideology. What remains is an intense personal relation that expresses Hester's maternal nature in a remarkably role-free way. But adult love, sexual love, has not been written out of the story by this emphasis, and this is the second point I would stress. At the end of the work Hester expresses the hope "that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of Mutual happiness." The "angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman" who would show "how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end!" (SL:263). These are Hester's ideas rather than the narrator's, but he does not distance himself from her at this point. "Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess." Hester could have had this vain imagining only during the very brief period of her secret affair with Dimmesdale, for once she was stigmatized she could have no further hope of living a life such as she describes. But during their affair, she felt that what they did had a consecration of its own-it was this consecration, then, that she wished to put to the test of a lifetime. Therefore, what Hester means by "sacred love" is really "sexual love," and she looks forward to the time when sex and love can be united by men in one emotion, a time when somehow women can heal the split in the male psyche. As Freud, writing later in the century, was to observe the male inability to feel passion and tenderness toward the same "object," so Hawthorne not many decades earlier found the male's revulsion and fear of sex leading him to separate from women and incapable therefore of love. Hester's letter represents not merely adulterous sex but all sex, and the image of divine maternity becomes even more telling than it seemed at first. Every child testifies to the sexual experience of its mother and is, in a society that finds sex shameful, a shameful object. For Hester to try to return to Dimmesdale by "undoing" her letter is to return to him incompletely, in a manner that denies sex, denies her child. It is no wonder that Pearl objects. What one senses here--though how opaquely!--is Hawthorne's tentative engagement with the subject of men and their mothers, his suggestion that the relation between men and their mothers was the deepest and most central core of their lives. The great liberation of The Scarlet Letter comes not only from its celebration of a woman, but of a woman who is centrally a mother (73-53).