Sin And Innocence In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “the Scarlet Letter“

=== 1f07ed9c9a00c8d1c60e6789cfdd2b315dcfa6c6_155510_1 ===

FIRST PART: RESEARCH STUDY

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Goals of the study

This study is centred on presenting the main important aspects of “The Scarlet Letter” written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850, such as analysis of sin and the theme of innocence. Then, one would observe a lesson plan, orientated towards aims and objectives, methods and strategies, stages of the lesson and annexes.

1.2. Main themes in “The Scarlet Letter”

The Scarlet Letter is a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, written in 1850. It is framed in the puritan New England of the early seventeenth century. It tells the story of Hester Prynne, a woman accused of adultery and condemned to carry in her chest an "A" letter, of an adulteress, that marks her. She does not reveal the identity of her daughter's father, and tries to live in an unjust and hypocritical society with dignity. In the novel, Hawthorne deals with the themes of divine grace, justice and punishment.

Written in 1849 and published in 1850, the novel The Scarlet Letter, by the American Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864), investigates in a very penetrating way the concept of sin, the conscience of guilt and the effects that religious fanaticism can have on human communities and on concrete individuals. My intention is to reflect on these aspects from the personality, character, temperament and soul structure of the three main protagonists of the work, Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth, although I will also make special references to Pearl, the daughter of Hester and Arthur, as a counterpoint, above all, to the tormented existences of their parents.

The historical context and the religious-spiritual climate in which the story unfolds have a more than remarkable importance in the unfolding of the facts and in the evolution of the characters, whose lives take place in very specific historical circumstances, perfectly known by the author of the novel. In the first place, the chronological arc and the geographical place in which the events take place: in Boston, in the colony of Massachusetts, between 1642 and 1649; that is, in the territory of New England. The first stable settlement of the English in North America took place in 1607, in Jamestown, by the hand of John Smith, north of Cape Hatteras, calling Virginia that first colony, in honour of Elizabeth I Tudor, the "virgin queen" [Plischke, 1978, pp. 102- 103].

In November 1620, the so-called Pilgrim Fathers, aboard the Mayflower, and after an eventful crossing that had begun on August 5 from the English port of Southampton, arrived in an area next to Cape Cod. , southeast of present-day Boston, in what would be the territory of the Massachusetts colony. In the spring of 1630, along with other towns, Boston was founded, in the Bay of Massachusetts. The 102 members of the Mayflower were English Calvinists who had to settle in Holland because of the harassment they were subjected to when they refused to recognize the ecclesiastical supremacy of the king, James I Stuart, which entailed wanting to establish his own Church. Max Weber affirms that "the discrepancies in the Anglican Church were insurmountable from the moment when the Crown and Puritanism (at the time of James I) maintained dogmatic differences just around the doctrine of predestination; In general, this doctrine "was considered as the anti-state element of Calvinism, for which it was officially opposed by the authorities" [Weber, 1989, p. 422]. The English Puritans, that is, the Calvinists, were the object of an authentic persecution between 1628 and 1640; therefore, under the reign of Charles I Stuart. The dissolution of the Parliament by the king, who governed without him during ten years, diminishing notably the English liberties, impelled the emigration towards the colonies of the coast this of which later would be the United States, leaving twenty thousand people during the mentioned period , the vast majority of deep convictions. During the period in which the story of Hawthorne passes, that is, from the beginning of the English civil war in 1642 to the execution of Charles I Stuart in 1649, nevertheless, the Puritan emigration waned.

From very early on, self-government emerged in the colonies. The first constitutional charter was drafted in Virginia in 1619, and with it was intended that the settlers enjoyed the system of freedoms for which so long had been fought in England. Immediately afterwards the representative system arrived at the Bay of Massachusetts, and, therefore, to Boston. But with an important and decisive peculiarity: that, since the autumn of 1630, the new members admitted to the political body of the colonial government must necessarily be part of some of the established Churches within the limits of that political body. In practice, this translated into the establishment of a kind of theocracy or Church-State. The concentration of the judicial and legislative powers in the hands of the governor of the Bay of Massachusetts, its assistants and the Protestant pastors, led to the creation of a small oligarchy in the colony. This oligarchical system began to falter in 1632 due to the protest of the citizens lacking representation, who refused to pay a new tax to guarantee the defense of the colony. From that moment, the foundations of an authentic unicameral legislature began to be laid, in that the Governor and his assistants began to meet periodically with the representatives or delegates of the different populations. The Chamber began its sessions in 1634, having full legislative authority, although in 1644 it split into two assemblies, a high, constituted by the assistants, and another low, composed of the delegates of the towns. For half a century, the Massachusetts Bay Colony continued to be a Puritan republic, ruled by its own legislators. The story narrated by Hawthorne enters fully into that period of the colony understood as a Puritan republic [Nevins, 1994, pp. 15-23].

The absence of a tyrannical government in the colonies does not prevent recognition of the establishment of a theocracy in New England until the last decade of the seventeenth century. This theocracy must be nuanced. While in Virginia and in other southern colonies, "the Anglican Church accepted the help of the Government", though without exercising "the least control over the State"; instead, "in Massachusetts and Connecticut, the Puritan Church largely identified with the state for decades, exercised strong control over the government, and, in fact, long maintained a kind of ecclesiastical despotism" [Nevins, 1994, pp. 15-23]. Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager claim that "the fundamental reason why the Puritans emigrated to Massachusetts was to establish a Church-State and not to find religious freedom. The Puritans were not radical religious; they were religious conservatives »[ Nevins, 1994, pp. 15-23]. It should be clarified that the purpose of finding religious freedom can not be disregarded, as it is demonstrated that they suffered persecution in England since about 1628. In England they had not been satisfied with the pre-eminence of the king over the Church, the residue of Catholic forms in worship and moral relaxation, a decisive plot in which they were much stricter.

The fact is that the Calvinist Church-State triumphed in the Bay of Massachusetts, which meant both the establishment of a harsh discipline, and the dissolution of the pilgrims' ideal that each congregation should self-govern. We are particularly interested in recalling here the steps that the two aforementioned historians admit in the creation of the Church-State in Massachusetts, a reality remarkably articulated as early as 1646. The first of these steps was that for a man to vote or to hold office in the administration of the colony, must necessarily be a member of the Puritan Church. The second step was that it was obligatory to attend religious services, a measure that purported to protect the Puritan Church from the unbelievers. The third step assumed that both the Calvinist Church and the Colony State should jointly and inseparably approve the establishment of a new Church in the territory of Massachusetts Bay. No dissenting religious spirit, then, could be established throughout the territory of Massachusetts. Fourthly and finally, that the State should support the economic maintenance of the Puritan Church, in such a way that both the State and the leaders of the Puritan Church acted together when it came to punishing an infraction of moral and ecclesiastical discipline [Nevins, 1994, p. 30] As a complementary description to the above, I reproduce the words used by the narrator of the novel to outline the features of the community in which the adventures of our protagonists unfold: "… a community that owed both its origins and its progress, and its current state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the austere and controlled energies of maturity, to the grim sagacity of experience, having achieved so many things precisely because they had imagined and expected so little "(chapter 3).

In the last years of that turbulent period that chronologically comprises the novel, the powerful figure of Oliver Cromwell emerges in England, the only English political leader whose power has been sustained in the Army [von Ranke, 1966, pp. 231-237]. Cromwell was, in religious matters, a Puritan, that is, a Calvinist, although his tolerance was much greater than that practiced by the inhabitants of the English colonies in the mid-seventeenth century. In fact, the novel has as one of its main purposes to denounce the religious fanaticism of the Puritan society of the colonies of the North American East Coast; specifically, in Massachusetts. About the inhabitants of New England at the time when the events take place, says the narrator, because the novel is told in third person, that "these little puritans [belonged] to the most intolerant generation that has ever stepped on the earth" (chapter. 6).

The intolerance that we have described in New England was documented and analyzed in the famous study of the German jurist Georg Jellinek (1851 – 1911), entitled The declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen, published, for the first time, in 1895. In it we are told that, when in 1629, the Puritans founded Salem, the second city in Massachusetts after New Plymouth, they forgot the persecutions they had been subjected to in their homeland and "manifested themselves intolerant of those who professed religious principles other than yours »[ Jellinek, 2009, p. 80]. Upon landing, in 1631, Roger Williams in Massachusetts, the Salem community soon chose him as their pastor, but Williams's tolerant ideas on religious issues would end up turning him into an outlaw and a persecuted man. He had to leave Salem, and, in 1636, along with other followers, he founded the city of Providence, which would become a refuge for those who suffered religious persecution in the adjoining territories. Roger Williams was in favor of "the separation of the Church and the State, and claimed, in addition, an absolute religious freedom, not only for all Christians, but also for Jews, Turks and pagans, who should have in the same State civil and political rights that believers. The conscience of man belongs to himself, not to the State "[ Jellinek, 2009, p. 80].

Democratic liberties and religious tolerance were not established in the English colonies in America precisely by the puritanical "Calvinist" communities established in New England, but by the influence of the Puritan Independentism, whose most primitive form is the "Congregationalism" that was articulates in Holland around the figure of John Robinson, whose activity transformed the ideas of Robert Brown, who, at the end of the sixteenth century, was promoting in England a Reformed Church, or, what is the same, Calvinist. But this Reformed Church of Robert Brown had to identify with the community of believers in a superior form of Community through a covenant with God, a community of believers that should be governed by the decisions of the majority. It will be John Robinson, then, who breaks this original idea, since the Congregacionismo advocated the separation of the Church and the State [Jellinek, 2009, p. 77]. Precisely, such principles of Congregationalism, now turned into "Independentism," despite its Puritan origins, did not materialize in the territory of New England, which, as we have explained, was oriented in a theocratic direction.

Based on Jellinek, the German historian and sociologist of religions Ernst Troeltsch (1865 – 1923) is going to provide us with a convincing explanation of the origin of the idea of ​​the rights of man in the English colonies of America, an idea that Jellinek derives from the Constitutions of American States, although such Declarations of Rights derive in turn from Puritan religious principles. Now, what kind of puritanism are Jellinek and Troeltsch talking about? The latter emphasizes how Jellinek establishes a direct relationship between the Puritan religious principles and the political-democratic demands that are contained in the Declarations of Rights as legal formulations. The relation established by Jellinek, is thus summarized by Troeltsch: "We would be, therefore, in the presence of a very important action of Protestantism, which would have introduced into the state reality and in the general juridical validity a fundamental law and ideal of a modern nature" [Troeltsch, 1967, p. 25]. But then, Troeltsch also admits a certain lack of precision in Jellinek, because that Puritan Protestantism from which the Declarations of Rights derive for both is not precisely "Calvinist", "but an interwoven of Baptist, independent and subjective spiritualist ideas fused with the old Calvinist idea of ​​the invulnerability of the divine majestic rights, combination that from the beginning is very close to the transition to a rationalist foundation. The American Calvinist Puritan states have been democratic, but they not only completely ignored freedom of conscience, they rejected it as skeptical atheists. Freedom of conscience was only in Rhode Island, but this State was Baptist and hated, because of this its condition, by the neighboring States as the seat of anarchy [Troeltsch, 1967, p. 25]; his great organizer, Roger Williams, went first to baptism and then became a spiritualist without confession. And, likewise, the second home of freedom of conscience in North America, the Quaker State of Pennsylvania, is of Baptist and spiritualist origin »[14]. Notice that this "invulnerability of the divine majestic rights" would then pass to the rights of the person, insofar as they are inalienable.

What I want to highlight here is the distancing of the theocracy that is installed in Massachusetts Bay from the spirit of religious tolerance and its low participation in the genesis of the Declarations of Rights within the framework of a democratic society, although, as It has been said, things change drastically there since the late seventeenth century. There is only one problem, about which nothing says neither Jellinek nor Troeltsch. The problem is that, despite the degree of religious intolerance of Massachusetts, among those who belonged to the "high assembly" of this puritanical republic, a democratic operation did rule. Saving the distances, and without the intention of establishing forced comparisons, also in the Athens of Pericles democracy was quite developed among free male citizens, despite the exclusion of slaves, women and other social groups. The enslaving democracy of classical Athens offers, therefore, serious limitations, as was democracy in the colony of Massachusetts during the seventeenth century, however much it functioned within an oligarchy of notables.

As regards the opinion of Nathaniel Hawthorne himself about the revolutionary convulsions as historical events, he partially slides it through the figure of the narrator of the novel, when he ironically compares the character of the scaffold in which Hester was exposed. Prynne, "such an important factor in the formation of good citizens", with the role of "the guillotine among the terrorists of France" (chapter 2). Although with infinite greater awkwardness, I allow myself, in the same way as Herman Melville in chapter four of his great story Billy Budd, sailor (written in 1889), to make a digression here in relation to the words that I have just reproduced, in which I repeat the observations that I have already made, with regard to a penetrating political-moral judgment of the character of Andréi Petróvich Versílov on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in my September 2013 essay on Dostoevsky's novel The Teenager (1876). Naturally, Hawthorne is referring to the bloodthirsty period of the "Terror" in France, that is, since Maximilian Robespierre assumed the leadership of the Committee of Public Health in August 1793, the omnipotent organ of Power in which he had joined on July 27. , until the coup d'état of 9 of Termidor (July 27, 1794), which is when Robespierre, Saint-Just and their henchmen fall, although the Terror continued, because only by the "law of the Great Terror" of 9 Termidor were sent to the guillotine 1376 people. There was already a "First Terror" between September 2 and 6, 1792, a few weeks before the opening of the Republican Convention. There would also be, along with other execrable excesses, a "larval form of White Terror" in the winter of 1794-1795 and in the spring-summer of 1795, under the Termidorian Convention. Not to mention the renewed massacres of priests (between 1700 and 1800 individuals) during the Second Directory, as a consequence of the provisions adopted on 19 Fructidor of 1797 (September 5) [Soboul, 1994, p. 120].

It is important to note the narrator's observation, because the American Revolution was exempt from such terrorist practices, which, in the case of France, were already prophetically interviewed, as a consequence of a rigorous analysis of the facts, and not by any special gift for the prophecy, by the Dubliner Edmund Burke in his famous book Reflections on the Revolution in France, published at the end of 1790 and probably the founding text of conservative political thought in Europe, using here the term "conservative" in its noblest sense, a book whose premonitions, in spite of the rapid response against Thomas Paine with his Rights of Man (1791), would be unfortunately verified by the facts, as Burke himself could personally verify, since he died in July 1797 (although he could not know the massive assassinations of priests of the late summer of that year). And, as the Jewish thinker of German origin, Hannah Arendt, analyzed in a masterly and insurmountable way, in On the Revolution (1963), the "general will" of Rousseau, which is the only one that Robespierre admits, is still that "will". divine "of the absolute monarchy" whose only will is sufficient to produce the law ". This legal argument has its foundation and its explanation in the deification of the people that took place in the French Revolution, and that, for Hannah Arendt, "was the inevitable consequence of the attempt to derive, at the same time, law and power of the same source. The claim of the absolute monarchy to be based on a "divine right" had modeled the secular power in the image of a god who was both omnipotent and legislator of the universe, that is, in the image of the God whose Will is the Law »[ Arendt, 2009, p.251].

The Founding Fathers did not commit the subsequent disastrous mistake of the French revolutionaries to confuse the origin of power with the source of the law. For the Founding Fathers, the origin of power springs from below, from the "spontaneous rooting" of the people, but the source of the law has its place "up", in some higher and transcendent region. It is in the course of French revolutionary events, and, above all, after the Jacobins seized power after the failure and incapacity of the Girondins, when the volonté générale de Rousseau will definitively replace the volonté de tous of the Geneva thinker . The "will of all" implied the individual consent of each one, and this did not fit the dynamics of the revolutionary process. Hence, it was replaced by that other abstract "will" that excludes the confrontation of opinions and is one and indivisible. The republic is thus replaced by peuple, which, in the words of Arendt, "meant that the enduring unity of the future political body was to be guaranteed not by the secular institutions that the people had in common, but by the same will from town. The most striking quality of this popular will as volonté générale was its unanimity, and thus, when Robespierre constantly alluded to "public opinion", it referred to the generality of the general will; he did not think, when speaking of her, in an opinion on which the majority publicly agreed »

The immense advantage of the Revolution that gave rise to the United States was to have had as model Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède and Montesquieu, that is, the principle of the division of powers, while the misfortune of the Revolution French was to have had as model Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that is, the dictatorship of volonté générale, a pure rational abstraction that asphyxiates freedom. Hence the much more violent and bloody character of the French Revolution and the totalitarian embryo that was incubated in its midst. Who did appreciate the invaluable performance of the Founding Fathers and the American revolutionaries was the Marquis of Condorcet in his brief but extraordinary essay Influence of the Revolution of America on Europe (1788), which little case was made in France. Condorcet himself, who did not vote in favor of the execution of Louis XVI, as it was contrary to the death penalty, had to take his own life, poisoning himself, on April 8, 1794, because, despite his work in the Convention , in spite of his spirit of tolerance and of his essays, pamphlets and pamphlets in favor of a real, non-abstract freedom, he was arrested with the almost certain purpose of sending him to the guillotine.

CHAPTER II. ANALYSIS OF SIN IN “THE SCARLET LETTER”

2.1 Puritan influence on Hawthorne

The moral and religious concern occupies prominent place in the work of the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. This characteristic has been the main guide of the writer's criticism, leading to often reductionist approaches to his writing. Thus, the most common tendency has so far been to read Hawthorne as a mere proponent of Puritan ideals. Such a tendency shows itself to be reductionist in that it neglects the influence of another stream of thought on the writer's work: transcendentalism. If on the one hand, for Hawthorne Puritanism represented ancestry and tradition, on the other, transcendentalism was the possibility of renewal of moral and individual values. In this way, it is perceived that Hawthorne lived between two worlds, sometimes flirting with the past (Puritanism), or with the future (transcendentalism). This position allowed him, often, to act as an observer and critic on both sides. In the short stories "The Artist of the Beautiful" and "The Wooden Image of Drowne," Hawthorne reveals his progressive side and assumes the critical posture of Puritanism or, as Stuart Pratt Sherman suggests, "a critic of Puritanism from the point of view transcendentalist. "(MILLS, 1948, p. 72) This position can be confirmed by analyzing divergent points between the two schools of thought regarding the subject of creation. The relevance of this theme lies in its various implications from the biblical perspective of Genesis, among which I cite the sin of pride or pride, the doctrine of inherited sin, and the view of women as a threat to morality. According to some critics, Hawthorne shared these Puritan principles. Heather O'Toole (1985), for example, asserts that the "writer believed that in the essence of the individual soul there is some innate evil, some deep degeneration that prevents anyone from achieving real goodness." In contrast, AW Ward et al. influence of Emerson on Hawthorne, and point to the adoption of the transcendentalist ideas of the over-soul super-soul and self-reliance by the writer. In the short stories selected for this analysis, these ideals constitute an opposition to the principles of pride and innate evil, which confirms Hawthorne's position as a critic of Puritanism. In "The Artist of the Beautiful," two antagonistic characters (Owen Warland and Peter Hovenden) represent the clash of values ​​between the two lines of thought. Owen is the romantic inventor who seeks to "shape the spirit of the Beautiful," bringing the mechanical replica of a butterfly to life. On the contrary, Peter Hovenden, a former master of Owen, is a practical man who has always cultivated utilitarianism and opposes the experiments of his former student.

From a puritanical perspective, the inventor's determination to materialize the spirit of the Beautiful is absolutely reprehensible. In fact, in religious terms, only God is able to give life to creatures. So in trying to emulate God, Owen would be committing the sin of pride. In view of this, Peter Hovenden assumes the position of his judge, representing the Puritan approach to creation and, upon seeing the incomplete design of the butterfly, accuses the young man of witchcraft and the threat of exorcism. In contrast to this approach, Emerson argues, according to the ideal of self-reliance, that "man must live according to his nature, hearing the dictates of the super soul revealed in his impulses; for this, he must remain free of the past, and of the conventions of society … " This premise is paralleled in" The Artist of the Beloved ", as the following excerpt confirms: It is necessary that the ideal artist possesses the force of character that is hardly compatible with his delicacy; he must keep faith in himself, while the unbelieving world attacks him with his utter disbelief; he must defend himself against humanity and be his only disciple, both as regards genius and the objects to which he is directed. Thus, considering the influence of Emerson's thought on Hawthorne, the ideal of the self -reliance "would exonerate Owen from the sin of pride. Similarly, the transcendentalist concept of "over-soul" is opposed to the Puritan notion of inherited evil. In "Spiritual Laws" Emerson defines "over-soul" as "… the spirit that is at the centre of nature, and upon the will of man, so that none of us can harm the universe." It is this spirit that leads Owen to create his own version of the Beautiful, not his penchant for evil. In fact, as the narrator comments, "He knew that the world, and Annie as the representative of the world, … could never say the proper word, nor express the exact feeling that would be the perfect reward for the artist who, symbolizing a superior morality through a trivial materiality – converting what was earthly, spiritual gold – had reached the Beautiful in its craft. "9 In addition to transcendentalist ideals, the representation of the female characters provides another example of criticism of the Puritan belief. In "The Artist of the Beautiful," Annie Hovenden is the only person to support Owen from the outset and is, in fact, his greatest motivation to bring the Belo project to life.

Thus, Annie's representation illustrates Barbara Ellis's commentary on Hawthorne's women, according to which the author "… never conceived women as unnecessary or threatening Evas, but otherwise as emotional, intellectual, and intellectual pillars. of men. " 10 Annie's positive portrayal of the narrator is highlighted in "… for if any human spirit could have revered the process so sacred in their eyes, it should be that of a woman." 11 The Puritan view of the woman is also fought in "The Wooden Image of Drowne." Another characteristic that connects this tale with the "Artist of the Beautiful" is that it also deals with the creative process. However, it distinguishes itself from the latter in two essential respects. First, the creator in "Artist of the Beautiful" is not an inventor but an artist. Moreover, creation is not a butterfly, but a human being. Drowne is a skilled woodcarver who specializes in making bow figures for ships. Before being commissioned to decorate Captain Hunnewell's brig, his works are described as lifeless, deprived of "that deep quality, whether of soul or of intellect, which gives life to the inert and heat to which it is cold, and the which, if she were present, would have impregnated Drowne's wooden image with a soul. "Copley, a friend and admirer, thus reasserts the narrator's description:" … for a touch of more would make this figure of General Wolfe, for example, a living, intelligent, human creature. "But when Drowne begins to work on the Captain's figure, this touch seems to emerge from the oak block, and Copley is the first to notice the transformation:" Here is the divine touch, the giver's touch of life! "An orthodox Puritan would consider blasphemy Copley's comment, since he attributes divine quality to the artist and the work of art. On the other hand, both the narrator and Copley himself ignore the Puritan view of pride and are in tune with the transcendentalist ideals of creation, according to which "the reference of all production to an Aboriginal power explains the traits common to all major works of art – that they are universally intelligible; that they restore us to the simpler states of mind; and that they are religious. " At the end of the picture, the figure of a woman emerges from the oak block. This female figure bothers the Puritans of New England for their urban, independent quality. The narrator's initial description suggests that she would be perverse, since she carries "strange flowers of Eden in her head."

The narrator, however, is explicitly critical of Puritan obtuseness in describing the details of the woman's attire, "They were… Laid there as gladly as a beautiful woman, a thing of her elegance, and no one would have shocked, except a person spoiled by artistic rules. " 18 The initial reverence of the population before the image soon gives way to fear and to the belief that the woman would be the very projection of evil. Later, when the image leaves the block of wood and comes to life, the carver himself is seen as perverse. Finally, after the captain leaves with the oak lady, Drowne goes back to being the mechanical cutter from before. The narrator suggests that the transformation occurred because of his disappointment with society's response to his work. In fact, his final account leaves no doubt as to the strong influence of transcendentalism in Hawthorne. In comparing the mechanical to the more spiritual Drowne, he comments: "However, whoever doubts that the highest state a human spirit can attain in its most sublime aspirations, is not its most true and natural state, and that Drowne was more consistent with himself when he worked out the admirable figure of the mysterious woman, than in perpetrating a whole progeny of fiery images? Thus, the narrator justifies Drowne's ambition to create life through art and reacts against Puritanism by enhancing human spontaneity. Again, Hawthorne demonstrates his consonance with the transcendentalist ideals of "self-reliance" and "over-soul." The themes addressed by Hawthorne in "The Artist of the Beautiful" and "The Wooden Image of Drowne" are proof of his interest in morals and religion. However, the two stories show that Hawthorne was not as conservative a puritan as some critics say. In fact, he sought inspiration from Emerson to subvert principles of Puritanism such as the sin of pride, belief in the evil inherent in the human race, and the representation of the woman based on Genesis. In this way, he was able to express his distrust of a Puritan society that closes itself to the new and cultivates a blind "utilitarianism", demonstrating its faith in the spiritual portion of the man and putting itself in defence of the idealist, be he the inventor or the artist.

2.2. Aspects of sin in the puritan community of "The Scarlet Letter"

In the most recent version for the cinematograph is preceded by a Wim Wenders of 1972, the writers took from Hawthorne those indications that could be translated into a situation apt to construct a narration of typical opportunism in the use of the melodramatic effects, it was sought to create its efficacy: a forbidden love relationship, the scandal of adultery, endless guilt, infernal jealousy, the thundering voice of the law, transgression that hurts, the pathos of sin, the enigmas of conscience and the pursuit of redemption.

In this respect, these are present both in the film and in the novel and is even a consubstantial part of the somber beauty of Hawthorne's art. And this is true. Only in the film episodes are transposed, new circumstances are created, the characters are simplified; but above all it is ignored what the spirit of the original work is stronger and better defines it: its moral plot, where a disturbing ambiguity makes it almost impossible to fix a unique meaning to its content. Is it an indirect criticism and a condemnation of the closed and obscurantist mentality of the Puritan community that, coming from Europe, takes root in the nascent union of American states? Or, rather, is it the exposition of the consequences of the sin of one who has ignored the commandments of the Law of God for which he must receive a deserved punishment? Final Catastrophe Erase all traces of this rich and complex ambiguity, the film version distorts the path that in the work leads to a conclusion, broad but precise and severe, to create a happy ending in complete disagreement with what the author imagined as meaning final. If Hester Prynne, guilty of adultery, has to carry as punishment for the rest of her days the infamous A darned on her breast and resigns with a heroic courage and courage to point out her furtive lover, and if this one, the Reverend Dimmesdale, lives under the crippling weight of his sin, being as the respected cleric of the community, who in his own eyes has become unworthy of his mission, is so that the torment of his life and the suffering of Hester remain as reasons for a allegory about guilt, sin and the consequent punishment. But still, with those same elements, Hawthorne composes a sombre picture of the intolerance of that society, which with its cruelty marks with fire and inflexible severity what she considers an unforgivable moral loss.

Joffe proceeded in a curious way; ignoring that spirit and ambiguity, it reduces the subtle and enigmatic nuances and the more defined contents of the novel to a narrative created under the mechanisms based on the stereotype of the actions, which define the characters according to the Manichean division of the good and the bad ones.

Undoubtedly, the characters of Hawthorne are much more complex, more contradictory, more cryptic than those we can see in the film. Their place in the world is usually equivocal and indeterminate and with their unfathomable torments, they seem to enter and leave the world of shadows incessantly. Precisely, here resides the strength of the story, in the inner struggle that his characters fight with the dark forces, with the secrets that lie at the bottom of his heart and with that violence with which the conscience pushes them towards the final catastrophe.

The loneliness, the loss, the unbearable weight of the guilt and the fact of being carriers of indecipherable mysteries, are things that in Hawthorne's characters conform a superior goal, ignored and transposed in a film that also throws away coherence, the inner unity and perhaps the deepest purpose of the original work.

The main character of the novel, around which everything revolves, is Hester Prynne, a young and beautiful woman, of solid moral principles, cultured, untamed and lover of freedom, at a time when the human intellect began to emancipate itself (cap 13), because we are in full scientific revolution, as a result, above all, of the findings in the field of astronomy of the Italian Galileo Galilei († 1642) and the German Johannes Kepler († 1630), who pushed decisively the establishment of the new scientific method, clearly delimiting the plots of faith and science, which, as Galileo repeatedly argued after 1610, do not have to enter into contradiction, as long as both remain in their respective fields, without invading each other.

Galileo, who was a believer and a convinced Catholic, sincerely sought, in addition, to preserve the Church itself, preventing it from falling into ridicule in front of the Protestants. If the truths of science, discovered through observation and the experimental method, can not be altered, since that would contravene the laws and evident phenomena of nature, what theologians must do is to reinterpret the Sacred Scripture, in order to accommodate it to such truths, which in no case means subordination of faith to science, but strict delimitation of their respective fields of action. It is not necessary to insist that the other two fundamental figures in the changes that are taking place in the mathematical sciences and in the emancipation of the human intellect with respect to prejudice, ignorance and fanaticism, are the French thinkers Renato Descartes († 1650) and Blaise Pascal († 1662), although the latter will do well to warn of the danger, while the man would commit a serious error, as in fact occur later, in believing a god and not be aware of its limitations.

As for Hester Prynne's indomitable nature and love for freedom, the reader immediately evokes the anticonventional and passionate Catherine Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights (Wuthering Heights), the immortal novel by Emily Brontë, published in December 1847, only a year and a half before the beginning of the writing of The Scarlet Letter. Although the circumstances are completely different in both novels, and although Catherine marries the young Edgar Linton, who knows if by dumbstruck youth or dazzled by the refinement of the family that welcomes her, although her heart belongs entirely intimately to Heathcliff, the narrator of Hawthorne's novel makes an interesting observation in relation to Hester: "It is curious that people who dare to let their imagination speculate freely are often the ones who adjust themselves more calmly to the external regulations of society »(chapter 13). The reason for this is found, at least in Hester's case, both in the activity of thought and in the fact that his soul remains completely free. Another very powerful reason is the compensation he finds in his full dedication to the care and education of his daughter, little Pearl. It will be this set of reasons, mainly, that leads her to accept the humiliating punishment imposed by the community in which she lives.

What has been your sin? According to the great logician of the first half of the twelfth century in the Christian West, Peter Abelard, "the characteristic of sin is its consent to evil." For Abelardo, "the cause of the transgression" is "a simple movement of abandonment". But, as we shall soon see, in the action of Hester Prynne neither can properly speak of evil nor of "abandonment," that is, of carelessness or lazy unconsciousness; in any case, and we can not be sure either, of unreflective impulse. His sin, if it can be called that, is the only slip he has committed in his life: to maintain a fleeting relationship with the Protestant pastor Arthur Dimmesdale, fruit of which will be his pregnancy and the birth of Pearl. The judges, who could very well have condemned her to death if it had been a normal adultery, that is, in the case of having maintained extramarital affairs by deceiving the husband, force her to permanently carry a large letter A of an adulteress on her chest, a letter that she will embroider exquisitely, since she was an excellent embroiderer, with gold thread, on a red background. Notwithstanding Peter Abelardo's concept of sin, which I thought was pertinent, Hester Prynne will indeed have an awareness of having committed a sin, although this feeling of guilt will be greater in Arthur, a truly tormented personage. The education received and the oppressive religious environment in which they live predispose them, without doubt, to have that awareness.

But it is worth noting in a series of circumstances that Hawthorne does not allow that they are those that surround the fact by a simple whim of his creative imagination, but presenting them, if it can be said thus, in a certain way as attenuating, at the same time that accompanies them. of a decision at least that enhances from the moral point of view to his brave heroine. The first is that Hester, when surrendered to Arthur, is absolutely convinced that her husband, Roger Chillingworth, is dead, submerged forever in the depths of the Atlantic, believing all the inhabitants of the town that had shipwrecked the ship that was transporting from England to Boston, since Chillingworth, in order to solve a series of pending matters, left after Hester. I insist that it is not that she and Arthur believed it, but that the whole population of little Boston thought about it. What Hester does not forgive is that she has maintained a relationship, even though she is almost certainly widowed, with a man who is not married.

A second circumstance is that a Calvinist pastor, like any other Protestant priest, could marry, that is, we are not faced with a clear obligation of celibacy, such as that established by the Catholic Church for priests, and even more after the Council of Trent, whose sessions ended in December 1563. Naturally, a Calvinist pastor, like any other Protestant, could not have sex outside of marriage, even though the only two authentic sacraments finally admitted by Martin Luther would be Baptism and the Eucharist. These relationships, in such circumstances, were a serious sin, especially among Puritans and other confessions of a similar nature, and hence, to a large extent, the deep awareness of sin that will seize both lovers. It should also be noted that, although celibacy only applied to Catholic priests, however, the intolerance within the Protestant confessions about these issues related to extramarital carnal contact was much greater, then also, than that which It was common in the Church of Rome. It is very probable that this intolerance derived in part from the profound rejection of deception and lies among the different Protestant Churches.

A third circumstance that should not be forgotten is that both Hester and Arthur have maintained their fleeting relationship as a result of the attraction, both physical and spiritual, that they felt to each other, an affinity that can be deduced from the interview that both will hold, seven years after the condemnation, inside the forest, with the intention of clarifying its future. Although the novelist does not provide us with any detail related to the carnal contact between the two, it immerses the reader, from the very beginning of the narrative, in the midst of the humiliating spectacle of Hester's public condemnation, that is, it places him in media res, in the middle of the story, without preliminary preambles of any kind, the truth is that the narrative itself is responsible for making clear in the reader's assessment that Hester is not exactly "anybody", a slut with a lax morality, but on the contrary, a woman of solid moral principles, of irreproachable conduct, who has been a good and patient wife during the time her marriage lasted, despite the character of the husband, and who for nothing in the world would be given to a man by whim of the will or to satisfy merely a carnal appetite. If Hester has given herself to Arthur, it is because she loves him, because she has immediately realized that he is also responsible and that they can build a future together. It is not possible to think that Hester Prynne has given herself to a fickle, dissolute man, to a man who only pretended to take advantage of her. Nor Arthur is that kind of man, because his moral scruples are very firm, nor would she have allowed it. But the conscience of having done something forbidden -as it is indisputable that it was forbidden by the religious laws of the community in which they voluntarily live- is so strong in both, that the grips prevent them from satisfactorily bringing back the delicate situation that has led them his impulsive attitude. Even more; very close to the village there are Indian tribes, and she could have perfectly contacted some of them in order to obtain a concoction that would interrupt her pregnancy. He has not done it; It has not even been imagined, and this has as much to do with its firm moral and religious principles as with the perception that, although it has done something forbidden, a sin in the eyes of men, deep down it does not it is something that can be considered absolutely bad in the eyes of God. The sentence that hangs over her is a condemnation exercised by men, by human censors and judges, not an explicit condemnation of God Himself. But, being fully aware of the fault committed, accepts with all its consequences the imposed punishment, without opposing the slightest resistance, just as he has not hidden either the pregnancy or the birth of his daughter.

Now, yes, and this would be a new circumstance that must be taken into consideration, or rather, a decisive factor that highlights the dignity and moral integrity of the heroine with privy clairvoyance, Hester refuses repeatedly, and thus He will maintain until the end of the story, to reveal the name of his lover, even though he, devoured by remorse and what she has been suffering since being imprisoned, exhorts her, in front of the gallows where his humiliation public, to say the name of his lover, to pronounce it out loud, without taboos or half words. This exhortation from Arthur is undoubtedly sincere. It is a desire to atone for your guilt. But Hester does not do it, precisely because she loves Arthur, because she knows that he has behaved honestly with her, he does not want to hurt him, ruining his career, because it would entail doing with him what they are doing with her, in front of all his parishioners , who consider him to be a righteous, honest and virtuous man. In fact it is, and even, as soon as he has a chance, he will intercede bravely and nobly for Hester so that little Pearl will not be taken away.

Hawthorne draws in Hester the character of a strong woman, who manages to overcome adversity, concentrating all her life in the care and education of her daughter. Already on the way from prison to the scaffold for public display, Hester Prynne maintained a serene attitude that can only be explained by that condition of human nature according to which "the sufferer does not know the intensity of what he suffers but because of the pain that follows that moment »(chapter 2). She will endure the humiliation to which she is permanently subjected with exemplary dignity, but she will end up earning the admiration of her fellows, not only for her life of recollection, work (I have already said she is a stupendous embroiderer) and self-denial, but also because Altruism will be dedicated to doing good to their fellow men, helping them in truth in times of tribulation, illness or misfortune. Hawthorne's creed is expressed in the words of the narrator, when he says that human nature, except for the presence of selfishness, is more predisposed to love than hatred (chapter 13), despite the thin border separating it to both. Hester Prynne is a living example of that. Following these words, we summarize the spiritual evolution of Hester after her condemnation, how she has not expected her fellows to pity her suffering, how she has sincerely moved on the path of virtue, without any hatred towards those who they have humiliated so frightfully, but accepting the punishment due for their sin and channelling their life on the path of good (chapter 13). For Hawthorne, one of the greatest enigmas in the world is "that mystery which is the feminine soul, sacred even in its corruption" (chapter 3), a mystery that Arthur will have to address, impelled by his superiors, to convince Hester to reveal the name of your lover. At the young woman's refusal, Dimmesdale murmured to herself: "Portentous strength and generosity of the feminine heart!" (Chapter 3).

Despite the insult, humiliation and ignominy, Hester refuses to leave the village. This gallant and noble determination also deserves a reflection on the part of the narrator: "But there is a fatality, a sensation that almost invariably drives human beings to wander and grieve like ghosts around the place where some big and important event has marked their lives and the more irresistibly the darker the mark that has left them "(chapter 5). The scarlet letter seemed to have given him a sixth sense, the strange acquisition of "a very special perception, full of understanding for the sins hidden in other hearts" (Chapter 5). Sometimes there were momentary and intermittent losses of faith, which could only be interpreted as "one of the saddest consequences of sin" (Chapter 5). But these temptations of the Evil One were temporary, because their faith was deep and strengthened more and more.

Nor had the femininity that was consubstantial with her disappeared in her; in spite of the sobriety of her arrangement and of her daily hard work, of her privations and abnegations, femininity remained with her: "The woman who once was a woman and stopped being one can at any time become a woman again; it depends only on the magic touch that the transfiguration accomplishes »(chapter 13). Later on, when she meets Arthur inside the forest, far from every unhealthy curious look, although without any hint from both of them of surrendering to her hidden passion, she will wake up again in her, it is true that as a pure and ephemeral flame, that femininity.

Like the vast majority of men who believe in the supremacy of the kingdom of the Spirit, Nathaniel Hawthorne not only shows us a sacrosanct respect for the feminine condition, but considers it equal, as far as his intellectual potentialities are concerned, to man. But he also knows that in a society, like Hester Prynne's life, which does not allow women to develop those spiritual and intellectual potentialities, if the woman indulges in speculative meditations, as was Hester's case, she could sadden her even more, then, after all, he is giving himself up to a hopeless task. The first step so that the full realization of women is possible, must be to destroy the constituted society and rebuild it. Naturally, Hawthorne is not manifesting here those destructive anarchist tendencies that are exposed in the texts of Mikhail Bakunin (1815-1876), for whom the new world of his personal anarchist utopia had to rise above the complete ruins of the old. Hawthorne is only referring to the inequality between men and women, which must be corrected on the basis of destroying, through education, the old and unfounded prejudices about women. At no time does Hawthorne manifest that ridiculous idea that men and women must be completely equal in everything: of course they must continue to be different in their organic nature and in their psychic life. Equality, of course, is understood by Hawthorne as a legal equality and equal opportunity. Both men and women are subjects of full individual rights, and, in this sense, there can be no restriction of any kind on the individual rights of women as members of society and of a political body.

However, it is true that in Hawthorne, and especially in this novel, certain vaguely anarchic tendencies are manifested, probably under the influence of two American thinkers whom he personally knew and esteemed: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), both from Massachusetts, the first from Boston and the second from Concord. Like Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Nathaniel Hawthorne was also persuaded that the natural rights of man spoken of by the English thinker John Locke (1632-1704), such as the right to freedom, to life and to the property, are self-evident truths, not subject to empirical demonstration, truths, as we said, axiomatic, such as are the geometric truths. Many of the main ideas of John Locke's political liberalism, as expressed in his Second Treaty on Civil Government, whose third and last edition in life of the author is from 1698, passed to the Founding Fathers, like Jefferson himself, the aforementioned Emerson and Thoreau. For no historian of political thought it is a secret that William Godwin's anti-state ideas (1756-1836) come from Locke's political liberalism, taken in the case of Godwin to its ultimate consequences, which does not mean that the great English political thinker does not Believe firmly in political power and in the State. In the first chapter of his Second Treatise, it can be read: "I consider, then, that political power is the right to make laws under pain of death and, consequently, to dictate others under less serious penalties, in order to regulate and preserve the property and use the force of the community in the execution of said laws and in the defence of the State against foreign insults. And all with the sole intention of achieving the public good ». Also, in Emerson and in Thoreau, although to a lesser degree than in Godwin, there is a distrust of the State, as in fact there was in the third president of the United States and principal drafter of the Declaration of Independence. But distrust of the State does not mean hostility towards the State. We will see this hostility very clearly, after Godwin, in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), and later in the Russian anarchism of Bakunin and Piotr Kropotkin (1842-1921). But this is not the tradition, much less, that feeds the two aforementioned American thinkers that influenced Hawthorne. In the case of Emerson, his ideas can be ascribed to what has been called "Transcendentalism," and it seems evident that he professed a diffuse pantheism.

In the third of a set of five essays gathered under the title of The Foundations of Contemporary Society, dedicated to «Politics» («Politics», 1844), the following can be read: «All public purposes present an aspect vague and romantic next to private ends. Indeed, with the exception of those that men impose themselves, all laws have something that moves to laughter […] Deduct from all this that unless government, unless laws and less delegation of power, greater welfare corresponds. The antidote to this abuse of formal government, is the influence of personal character, the development of the individual, the action of the teacher to replace the revolt of power, the influence of the wise with who, you need to recognize, existing governments barely keep a very slight resemblance […] The State exists to educate the wise; when it appears, it disappears. The presence of character renders the State useless. The wise man is the State ».

The idea of ​​"civil disobedience" is even clearer in Thoreau, who found it hard to become independent of Emerson's conceptions, which undoubtedly was his main disciple. Thoreau, still more eager than Emerson, advocated a return of man to the natural environment, to a greater contact with the innocence of nature, as alien as it is to the artificiality of civilization. He tried to explain it in the most famous of his texts, Walden, who began writing in 1846, fruit of the experience he lived in the cabin that he himself began to build, on a plot of his friend Emerson, in the spring of 1845, together to the Walden lagoon, in Concord, where he moved on July 4 of that year. In 1848 he delivered his famous lecture on the relationship of the individual with the State, which would end up adopting the title of Civil Disobedience, although it was first published under the Resistance to Civil Government, in 1849. In relation to the conscience of sin of both lovers in The Scarlet Letter, as well as of the possible connection of that conviction of having sinned with the fact of having maintained carnal contact, attention should be given to a few Thoreau lines written in the chapter entitled "Higher laws" of Walden. They read the following: "Perhaps there is no one who is not ashamed because of the inferior and animal nature to which he is attached […] Wisdom and prudence come from exercise; the ignorance and sensuality of laziness […] An impure person is universally lazy […] If you want to avoid impurity and all sins, work seriously, even if you are cleaning a stable. These words are very close to puritanical morality (remember the selfless dedication of Hester to the hard work of embroiderer after her condemnation), and, on the other hand, it would be too risky to think that Hester Prynne – as far as Arthur Dimmesdale would have no foundation doubt it – even after its public punishment, it has completely abandoned some of the essential principles of Calvinist morality, such as the rejection of lies and the ethics of effort and work as a good in itself for the man. What Hester rejects with all her strength, apart from social hypocrisy, is, above all, fanaticism, the extremism to which an intransigent and intolerant religious confession can lead, and, of course, that it invades in such an impudent manner and so aggressive his private life, given that his action has not derived any concrete evil for the community in which he lives. Naturally, her judges did not see it that way, and that is why they condemned her, because they appreciated in her behavior a bad example, a solvent example of the social structure. It is evident that the Protestant ethic in general and the Calvinist ethic in particular, at least as far as carnal contact is concerned, although it is based on a clean and authentic love, is more inspired by certain passages of the Old Testament, which it takes at the foot of the letter, that in the ethics that emerges from the Gospels. It would suffice to bring here the way Jesus proceeds with the adulterous woman. Only if they had taken into account those members of the tribunal that judged Hester the infinite humanity and the infinite capacity for forgiveness that emerges from Jesus' way of acting towards that sinful woman, would have resolved the case in a completely different way, this is , evangelical. But that was something completely utopian, in those times, within the Puritan communities of the North American East Coast.

Continuing with the ideas that Hawthorne pours into his novel about the liberation of women, he considers that the nature of man, of man, must "be modified in its essence before a woman can assume what must be her just position and true "(chapter 13). When all these difficulties have been overcome, the woman herself must, in turn, change completely. But the woman can never overcome these problems through thought. They are problems without solution, unless the heart acquires the pre-eminence in the nature of the woman (chapter 13). We appreciate here the distrust of Hawthorne, as we sort of saw in Emerson and in Thoreau, towards civilization, towards bookish culture, even toward reason. Here we are shown, perhaps, the most romantic and less enlightened Hawthorne. Although Hawthorne is referring to the feminine condition, its principle could equally apply to the masculine condition, namely, that the heart acquires primacy over the intellect. Such an anti-enlightened allegation, however, is of dubious practical application in social life, unless material progress is renounced, or, at least, the artificial comfort of civilization for the spiritual well-being of intimate contact is considerably reduced. with nature. Hawthorne, and it is not advisable to sweeten or distort his words in this delicate matter, is demanding a key position in society to the mysterious and problematic territory of feeling, insofar as it should be the heart of each human being that preferentially guides his actions. What would happen then with the wild competitiveness? And with the profit motive?

As for the lie, the only time that Hester has lied is hiding the world, and especially Chillingworth, the identity of his lover. He did so, no doubt, to guarantee Arthur's welfare, "but lying," he tells Arthur, revealing Chillingworth's identity, "is never good, even if it is a threat of death" (Chapter 17). In the biography of Kant written by one of his earliest disciples, Borowski, completed in October 1792, but which the Königsberg philosopher – despite authorizing it after making some corrections – strictly prohibited publication as long as he lived, we were reports how the father of Kant, who was a humble saddler, instilled in his son the firmest rejection of the lie, just as it was his mother, a fervent believer of pietistic religion, who taught him that he should pray every day.

2.3. Exposed sin versus hidden sin

Hester Prynne, protagonist of The Scarlet Letter, has committed an unforgivable sin for seventeenth-century Boston society: she has had extramarital affairs with a minister in the Anglican church and, as a consequence, has to be ostracized for life .

Hester's isolation is moral, while her fellow citizens take her word. But – condition or consequence of this – Hester also suffers physical isolation. In fact, the protagonist lives in a cabin located on the outskirts of the city, in a wasteland that no Bostonian would want for himself, and that socially "left her out of the sphere of activities that then marked the customs of the emigrants".

On the one hand, loneliness is a punishment for Hester; even more so if one considers that, as a result of adultery, the protagonist has given birth to a girl, Pearl, whom she is forced to take care of without help and with the aggravating circumstance of repudiation. On the other, however, loneliness gives this strong woman the possibility of developing an independent conscience, free of the constraints of Puritanism that coerce the consciences of her New England neighbours.

This double consideration of loneliness is reflected in the emblem that Bostonian justice forces her to wear on her breast: the letter A of an adulteress, visible mark of her sin, warning and invitation to her fellow citizens; warning of the ignominy that awaits those who repeat a similar act, and an invitation to marginalize their bearer. Hester carries, nevertheless, a particular badge, embroidered with great talent and fantasy, so that this mark inflicted from the outside – social coercion – is assumed and transformed from the inside – individual creation -, just like the solitude imposed by his fellow citizens result in a free conscience.

Throughout the novel there is a relation between this moral isolation and its corresponding physical isolation, as well as between isolation (to dryness) and free thought. Let's see it by points:

1. From the very moment that Hester Prynne leaves prison with the scarlet letter embroidered on her breast, an insurmountable distance separates her from her fellow citizens; it is a moral distance, but it is expressed in spatial terms:

"[The Scarlet Letter] It produced as an enchantment that took her out of the normal sphere with the rest of humanity and locked her to herself as if inside a sphere" (56).

"As always happened in the place where it was, there was a small empty space around it, a kind of magic circle within which, despite the fact that people were piled up and at a distance from there they were side by side, nobody He dared to enter. It was a palpable signal of the moral solitude in which the scarlet letter enveloped his unfortunate carrier "(228).

2. The only characters capable of traversing that "magic circle" are their daughter Pearl, the sailors who dock in the port of Boston and the maddened Mrs. Hibbins, that is, a goblin, a pirate and a witch: the spirits that live margin of the rules, in their own spaces: the air (there are constant avian metaphors), the sea and the forest.

3. This "sphere", "emptiness", "circle" drags Hester to the margins of society, isolates it, but also contains it, protects it, makes it self-sufficient. Loneliness soon gives him a special power: that of being able to see the weaknesses of people.

"Walking from one place to another with solitary steps, in the little world with which he interacted externally, sometimes Hester seemed to him – and, if it was nothing more than a fantasy, was too powerful to resist -, he felt or thought he felt , then, that the scarlet letter had given him a sixth sense. (…) He had acquired a very special perception, full of understanding for the sins hidden in other hearts "(87).

4. Later, as time passes, loneliness also gives you a treasure: the ability to develop your own thought. The rupture of the ties that unite her neighbours gives her the freedom to travel through places that the social constraint would not allow:

"As she was alone in the world – alone in regard to any kind of dependence on society – (…), alone and without any hope of recovering her former position even though she did not disdain it, as was her case, she got rid of what was left of the broken ties. His intelligence did not recognize or accept the laws of the world. (…) His mind allowed himself the freedom of thought that, although common or ordinary on the other side of the Atlantic, would have been considered by our ancestors, had he known it, as a crime more serious than the one that deserved the stigma of the scarlet letter " (163).

5. This is also expressed in spatial terms: to think independently is compared to walking along paths in the margin. This is best reflected in the forest scene in which Hester meets the Reverend.

"Saving the obstacles, he entered the wild mountain. (…) Hester had the feeling of representing fully the confused moral waste for which she had wandered for so long "(180).

In effect, the forest is a "moral waste" because it is free of the Puritanism of the city, it is a space of witches, Indians and spirits (the meeting with the minister recalls the interview with the deceased, studied by Feidelson (1954) . It is in this place where for the first time both characters dare to dream of a new beginning: only from this space of freedom can their minds imagine a life in freedom. In his words is reflected all the moral topography of the novel: England vs. USA, city vs. forest. Boston itself no longer sees itself as necessary and transforms into something contingent. "Is the world so small? – Hester Prynne exclaimed (…) -. Does the universe end at the edge of the town, which until very recently was nothing more than a wilderness dotted with withered leaves, as solitary as the forest that surrounds us? "(193)

This story takes place in Boston Massachusetts in the Puritan era of the 17th century; Hester Prynne is a miserable young woman who is accused of adultery, so in a puritanical society of the time this is one of the greatest sins that can be, so the punishment deserved for the authorities of that time granted was to carry I got the letter "A" scarlet referring to her sin, however Hester was not the only one who should wear the badge of sin but there should be another culprit but that is the great mystery that Hester does not want to reveal. Throughout history is told how this young woman lives the guilt of the enigma with herself for having committed such a grave sin, but even if that unknown does not share the punishment, Hester does not live her excluded life alone … It is known that Hester Prynne has committed adultery because she has a little daughter named Pearl, but her husband, whom nobody knew and thought was missing is not the father of this baby; But this man arrives at the town just when Hester Prynne comes out of the carcel and is shown to the whole world with that striking scarlet letter mounted on his chest. Hester's husband tells the citizens he is a doctor and his name is Roger Chillingworth. He is an intelligent man, so he quickly realizes that the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale is probably the father of the baby. As is logical, his next step is to harass the pastor night and day. The pastor is very afraid to confess his sin in public, but he feels very guilty, and uneasy because Chillingworth studies him all the time, and maybe he feels some pain because of the strange red mark on his chest. Tortured by the guilt, Hester realizes that her husband has been psychologically manipulating the man she loves, in a very deranged way and reveals the true identity of Chillingworth to Dimmesdale, which leads to a desperate act of wanting to flee together to England, encouraged by Hester mainly. The latter leads us to question ourselves: Who does Hester really protect, Pearl, Dimmesdale or herself? If he always believed that staying in the town was the punishment he had to pay for having a being as beautiful as Pearl, why was the guilt bigger than Pearl's welfare? Did he think he paid for her and Dimmesdale? An important point of this book is that like every book, it carries a small personal mark of the author, and not physically but morally between letters, in the case of The Scarlet Letter it takes "the guilt" adjusted with the Puritan period of its ancestors! casual combination !. It is interesting the way in which the author interprets each of Hester's feelings, for which in some moments he makes us see the meaning of the scarlet letter in a different way from that of a badge of sin and guilt and then show that that act of despair is nothing more than something expected by Hester and that nothing has really changed.

"Sin arises virtue" Talmud American culture is based on a biblical sentiment of various tendencies, unlike the Spanish American countries that were evangelized with the New Testament, the American colonists had as their cornerstone the Old Testament. They came to our shores with an attitude of crusade, of medieval reconquest, the Puritans arrive fleeing from the persecution that their sect had unleashed in England and Holland, while the Spanish imposed the cross of Christ, the Puritans defend, sects, their conception of Christianity. This difference marks the history of the two nations, some come to prevail, others to hide, some arrive conquering, others colonizing. The friar dedicated himself to catechize, the pastor to reaffirm his religion began to know a new God and the dogmas that this religion imposed on them, others knew the history of the Jewish people and the norms that their religion interpreted to them; some were just beginning a new story; others were extensions of an older story. And from this biblical sense, a culture will arise in which all Puritans would agree that, in order to become a chosen of God, the individual must go through the "experience of conversion," during which they feel spiritual rebirth. The Presbyterian Puritans will follow the precepts of Calvin, believing in the intimate relationship between Church and State, while the Congregational Puritans believed that only the elect should be part of the Church. In one way or another religion was the bond that united these people, for them religion will be a practical and daily way of life, while for the Catholic convert this daily life will be limited to the rites and public demonstrations that the church imposed them. doing so a dissociation between work and belief.

While the Catholic Church tries to convert all of the neophytes to the new Faith, the Congregationalists were convinced that the church should not include the ungodly and the renegades (for something they were called Puritans). With these characteristics, we see how different paths each of the colonial societies took, both New Spain and Anglo-American. So that. "The premises of New England Puritanism affected each of the spheres of life: politics, economic, cultural, social and intellectual." According to Kemper Fullerton great scholar of Calvinism in a essay entitled Calvinism and Capitalism, assures us that the intimate relationship of the Calvinist religion and progressive society is based on three basic points: "a) it is a rationalized theory of life, b) it is an intensified mood of work, and c ) the quasiascetic discipline which accompanies both theory and mood that have immediate interest "(Wright et al., 1975, p. 65) Reaffirming the famous postulate of Luther:" The work is prayer ", so contrary to:" You will win the bread with the sweat of your forehead "that apparently While the Puritans are trying to find meaning in their lives, not only at work, but in the Bible, Catholics consider this life as Santa Teresa said: "A bad night in a bad inn. "As The Congregationalists are awaiting salvation through work, while Catholics must achieve it through their actions.

In 1636, when Harvard University emerged as a need to "project a center of higher education, in which the tradition of a learned clergy, not tainted by theological tendencies, was continued" (Green, 1965, p. 65), in Mexico the image of Santa is consecrated Maria de Guadalupe as patron of the city, for having saved her from the terrible floods that occurred in 1629. With this motive, Miguel Sánchez published a book entitled: Image of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God of Guadalupe, celebrated in her story with the prophecy a of chapter twelve of the Apocalypse (Wright et al., 2011, p. 65). Thus, while some base their religious life on the cult of images, others devote their religious interest to the study of the Sacred Scriptures.

This feeling and biblical formation will have a very great repercussion among American literati, not only among the romantics but also among the innovative romantics. Herman Melville, for example, shows in his works a very great interest in "the deep mystery of sin", and the philosophical pessimism of this author was the cause of the incomprehension he suffered in his time. Melville he rebels against the religious conservatism of his time and criticizes the customs of "civilized" men through a lack of religious and community resignation, this attitude of Melville we will find in the theories that would be very much in vogue at that time by this author as by others such as Hawthorne or Emerson O.Thoreau and their Brook Farm experiments. Thus, the great meaning of Moby Dick is the struggle of man against the symbol of evil. However, Melville's work took on great significance until after the First World War, when disillusionment and despair vibrated exactly in consonance with the philosophical pessimism of this author, since that profound sense of sin was clearly reflected through the destruction left by this first war disaster.

Another very clear example and subsequent to Melville is that of John Steinbeck who in his works East of Paradise and Viñas de ira, will develop two great novels based on biblical themes, in East of the parafso, will make a great alegoda of the struggle between Caln and Abel, where as much as the son does to please the father, he will always show a clear preference for the other, stigmatizing the race of Cain in Viñas de Ira, in addition to carrying a clear denunciation of the poverty suffered by the American agricultural society during the depression of 1929, will be subliminally allegorical of the exodus of the Jewish people during their pilgrimage in search of the promised land. Another example, in a more recent author, is the one of Lillian Hellman, writer very controversial and persecuted by the McCarthyism of the 50's.

We thus arrive at Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the most brilliant romantic writers of New England, and whose works at the same time that Poe and Melville are considered as the classics of American literature. Hawthome is considered the main heir of the Puritan tradition, and although he criticizes Puritanism through his writings, they represent the most important ideals that Congregationalists brought to New England. Hawthorne is heir to the traditions of the ancient Puritan magistrates based in Salem. But he focuses his puritanism from another point of view and that is why his literature is surprising. since it takes place during a time of liberalism and progressivism. For Hawthorne – and this is one of the postulates by which he opposes transcendentalism – man is an innate sinner, evil is a present reality and not an illusion that can be put aside, and confidence in himself It does not save the individual from destruction. Hawthorne. unlike Emerson. not only does he recognize evil (sin), but he makes it the center of his writings (Wright et al., 2001, p. 189).

The Scarlet Letter, is the most known and widespread work of this author, in the prologue that makes his work tells us: '' It seems that I have a greater right to reside here because of this solemn and bearded ancestor. with his black cloak and his pointed top hat who arrived so long ago, with his Bible and his sword. "( Hawthorne, 1984, p. 49) Note that in this brief description, he puts the Bible before the sword, this ancestor to which the author refers, it was John Hawthome who participated in the persecution and death of the famous witches of Salem, and Nathaniel himself says: "I do not know if these ancestors of mine have ever thought of repenting and asking heaven for their cruelties" (J). that the author of his ancestors has that "should be" within his puritanism, leads him to question whether what he does (write) is a way of praying "what form to glorify God or to be useful to humanity However, in spite of feeling that puritanism on their backs, Hawthorne has a great historical conscience, which he considers it an obligation to transmit to us: "All this will have been due to the fact that I I was aware that I had the option to recall what was valuable in the past "(9) and for this author the Puritan past. be. naturally, the past of New England, full of sin, guilt, persecution, but also purification. This work, according to the same author, is: "a story of hellish torments and it was almost impossible to throw any encouraging light on it" (Hawthorne, 1984, p. 17). The work finished it to write in 1850 and was very novel for the novels of its time; David Copperfiel of Charles Dickens and the School of Christianity of Kierkegaard were published that same year, and he went ahead one year to Moby Díck de Melville and Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet B. Stowe, both also cornerstones of the literature of the States. United.

The scarlet letter is the old story – as old as marriage – of the love triangle (husband, wife and lover) "It is not the story of love, but of guilt and revenge, of the broken law, of sin secret, of the hidden passions "( Hawthorne, 1984, p. 17-18). It is a story of tormented consciences, some for sin, another for shame, it is also a book in which a severe criticism is made of a supposedly good society, a series of values ​​in crisis where those that are apparently good result not be it and those who bear guilt are more virtuous than the rest of society, and coupled with all this game of appearances the spirit of evil that will be the catalyst for consciences. The work is going to be a great allegory of David, Bathsheba and Nathan, of a man of God, like David, who lacks his ministry, but who, unlike David, he is corroded by guilt, while the adulteress in Instead of staying in court like Bathsheba, he leaves the community to atone for his sin. "The novel is perfectly structured, it is not just a narrative, but a thoughtful and worked-out subject until it becomes a work of art.The development of the story is so well achieved that there are no incidents or superfluous images. It employs the symbols of romanticism in a very effective way Some critics have pointed out that the disposition of the argument is almost theatrical: the scaffold appears three times: at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the novel, pointing out with that static reference point the progression of the theme and the evolution of the characters "( Hawthorne, 1984, p. 5-6).

Hester Prynne, the protagonist, is publicly condemned to use on her chest the letter A of an adulteress, of a scarlet color; Hester is repudiated by the people, especially by women, for whom "religion and the law were almost identical" (Hawthorne, 1984, p. 52). In this work as well as in Divine words, which are another allegory of adultery but based on the New Testament, there is public condemnation, but unlike that of Divine words where there is someone who says: "He who be free from guilt that throws the first stone ", in The Scarlet Letter, social and religious condemnation is given to this lack. Hester appears before her accusers who "expected to see her obscured and overshadowed by the clouds of misfortune, (but) are surprised and almost overwhelmed to perceive how her beauty stood out and transformed into a halo the misfortune and ignominy that surrounded her" (Hawthorne, 1984, p. 55)

Back from prison, Hester falls victim to a crisis, and the jailer decides to talk to the doctor, who is Roger Chillingworth, Hester's husband, who returned from his long trip that day. Chillingworth whose name means chill is announced within the novel as a dark, vengeful and evil character, who will be dedicated to torment Hester and find out, who is the father of the girl who had his wife, a name that she has not wanted to reveal. Chillingworth swore to Hester to find out who the man was who seduced and tortured him – not physically – but morally.

Thus begins the development of an argument where sin, the purging of guilt and revenge are the motors of the plot.

Hester isolated from the world goes to live in a hut in a forest where she begins to purge her faults through her manual work with thread and needle. For a society like the Puritan where community life was indispensable for social identity, Hester's isolation from the world is in itself one of the worst punishments, and on the other hand the redemption of sin will be obtained through work. . Here it is important to note the Protestant thinking of "work is prayer" that was established in the world of the Reformation, and contrary to the sense of expiation of the sins of the Catholic world. The ascetic life that Hester led. her purification, her social relationship through her needle work is marking a dialectic between her and the society that surrounds her, a dialectic between that "good" community and "bad" and those values, like the pendulum of a clock, they change place making Hester more pure and good and that their society is showing their misery and evil, and the author will be describing us to great society ladies dedicated to the worst of sins: witchcraft. of the envy of those who repudiated it, and all are going to contrast, little by little, with the virtue of that repentant sinner, who in her solitude is shining more and more, although "she always experienced that dreadful agony when feeling human eyes on the symbol (of the scarlet letter) "( Hawthorne, 1984, p. 85). All the characters have a symbolic meaning in the novel, as Pearl, the daughter of Hester, fruit of that adultery, is in the meaning of his name a product of nature, a product that, like a pearl, is conceived by an agent external and results in a jewel. Pearl as a symbol is associated with nature itself: barbaric and full of vital force, also associated with Eden, daughter of the forbidden apple. "Certainly, he had no physical defect.For his perfect form, his vigor, and his natural dexterity in the use of his little limbs, the nit was worthy to have been born in Eden, worthy of having been left there for to be a toy of the angels, after the first parents of the human race were expelled "( Hawthorne, 1984, p. 85). Pearl for Hawthorne not only symbolizes original sin, but is the representation of the human race expelled from Paradise. it is all original sin, but in turn it is the same beauty of the divine creation. "In this unique girl, there are many girls, including all the existing range, from the beauty of wild flowers of a village to the pomp, in miniature , of a princess … no matter how many whites and cigars they had originally been, on the way they had acquired the deep stains of carmine and gold, the burning name, the black shadows and the intemperate light of passion "( Hawthorne, 1984, p. 85-86) . Pearl is the good savage, the man not redeemed by civilization, he is a force that speaks to domesticate. "Little pixie of evil, emblem and product of sin, had no right to be among or" baptized ". (Hawthorne, 1984, p. 88) But, on the other hand, Pearl is the medium through which his mother will erase the stigma of sin:

"One afternoon on a certain summer day, when Pearl had grown enough to run around, she amused herself by cutting and gathering wild flowers that she threw one by one to her mother's breast, dancing from side to side, like a true pixie, every time that hit the scarlet letter "( Hawthorne, 1984, p. 20).

And finally Pearl is considered like Martln Luther as a hellish entity, or renovator? "Luther, in accordance with the scandal of his monastic enemies, was a spawn of that infernal species, Pearl was not the only creature to whom this cursed origin among the Puritans of New England is distressed". Pearl is the new blood that will break with the puritanical structures since later they will refer to her as "an angel of justice, whose mission is to punish the sins of the new generation". Finally comes the harassment of the chilling Roger Chillingworth, who only wants to find the man who seduced Hester, and who directs his suspicions to Arthur Dimmsdale the virtuous and tormented minister of that community. Chillingworth arranges, in his capacity as a doctor, to move the sickly pastor to his home, whose surname also has a symbolism: Valle de las sombras or Valle sombrefo. At the doctor's house we find a clear reference to the argument and the Holy Scriptures. a gobelin with the biblical narration of David, Bathsheba and the prophet Nathan. Chillingworth begins to search the soul of his victim, begins to corner him to the confession: "And why not ?, the doctor continued. no, since the powers of nature push so strongly the confession of sin, these black herbs sprouted from a buried heart to make manifest a crime not confessed ". Dimmsadale begins to feel increasingly strong guilt, the inner torment -attached by the doctor- will begin to corrode, to question: "What was he, then? A substance? Or just the most opaque of shadows? I longed to speak clearly from the pulpit, in full voice, and tell the faithful what it was. whom you see with these black habits of the priesthood, -I, who ascend to this sacred pulpit and take my pale face to heaven and commit myself to communion, in your name. with the Supreme Maker, in whose daily life you discern the sanctity of Enoch, me, and my steps. that, according to you, leave a luminous trace along my earthly path. So that the pilgrims who come after me may be guided by the regions of the blessed, I have placed the hand of baptism on your children, who have murmured the farewell prayer with your dying friends who they could barely hear my Amen coming from a world they have already abandoned; I, your pastor, who inspires you with such reverence and confidence, I am a contamination and a lie! "(23) Thus the minister begins to make a need for the expiation of his guilt, and to feel fear of Chillingworth, to feel before his presence a constant accusation: • Who is that? man, Hester? … I tell you, my soul trembles before him … I have an indescribable horror for that man ".

Hester, moved by the torment of Dimmsdale feels obliged – like the Daisy of Faust – to save that man, more in those moments, when she was considered an Ann Hutchinson after seven years of atonement. However, Hester had promised not to reveal Chillingworth's identity and therefore can not do anything to help Dimmsdale. Joined to Chillingworth. Another demonic entity appears, the old Hibbins, a woman well known for her witch arts. and with whom the unfortunate minister begins to have dealings and obviously to lose more and more his soul. "And the poisonous poison of that sin had been spread rapidly through his mortal system, it had stymied all his good impulses and aroused the whole congregation of badly, contempt, bitterness, free desires to do evil, ridicule what was good and holy, all these impulses, although they frightened him, woke up to tempt him ".

Thus, the text shows us that when one is not completely pure, one can not fight against evil, in such a way that Hester's efforts will be useless for the redemption of the minister and the announcement of his end becomes imminent. In the last chapters, when the pastor of souls had to make a speech on the gallows, guilt harassed him and publicly confessed that he was the seducer of Hester, and opening his shirt appears on his chest marked a letter A. Dimmsdale asks divine forgiveness and saves his soul from the Mephistophelean Chillingworth. Hester forgives him and Pearl: "he kissed her lips, the spell broke, the great scene of pain, in which the untamed girl had a piece of paper, had awakened all her sensibility, and her tears fell on her father's cheek" (Hawthorne, 1984, p. 227). Dimmsdale dies redeemed and forgiven by God and by the two victims who carried their guilt alone for seven years. Thus ends this romantic novel where, besides the protagonists, there is a social critique full of biblical allegories as profound as the religious formation of New England.

2.4. The sinners in “The Scarlet Letter”

An exemplary woman is Hester Prynne, and why I call her that, because she shows a strong willpower and her convictions go beyond the everyday. The author describes a very particular epoch and traditions that now become non-believable, although deep down hypocrisy and falsehood continue to endure in our times. Why Hester is able to protect Pearl's father and does not give his name, he loves him so much that he is not punished, but she and her daughter suffer the consequences. We do not use the letter "A", but we judge by appearances or titles. The value of a person is beyond the outside, we would say, is inside each one. The husband Roger Chillingwirth is enigmatic and convincing, wants to know by other means the identity of his rival and makes an evil plan. He seeks revenge and gives his wife forgiveness. Intelligence at the service of evil. Roger suspects that Reverend Dimmesdale is probably the father of Hester's baby. He spends it harassing and wants to walk to confess, but the reverend is afraid and lives tormented by his sin. Roger also spends psychologically manipulating him and Hester reveals Roger's true identity to Reverend. They want to seek happiness that they have not had, despite the love they feel for each other. Dimmesdale finally decides to confess his sin after 7 years, will he be able to redeem his guilt? Not only is the responsibility to accept the fault, but also to rescue the dignity of his beloved. When Roger dies, he leaves an inheritance to his stepdaughter and apparently there will be happiness. But no, the love felt by Hester and Dimmesdale marked them to death and until they were together in the afterlife.

The scarlet letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is carried out in an American Puritan community, where public punishment is the first step of redemption for sinners. Such is the case of Hester Prynne, a woman married to an Englishman who had been missing for more than two years, died at sea according to rumours in the village. Accused of adultery, since her first appearance in the novel is with her daughter Pearl, Hester begins the story of a story that, in the first instance, seems inconclusive (well, she does not know who the father of the child is), which it accentuates the seriousness of the sin committed and enlivens the airs of the Puritans and their desire for punishment. The omission of factors, even complete actions throughout the novel, not only give a dark and mysterious character to the narrative, but also functions as a catalyst for the actions themselves. The same scarlet letter, as a symbolic object, has a meaning from what is supposed, that which is omitted. As the novel progresses, and almost in its final part, we find all the answers that both the people and we, the readers, get. Prior to the development of this, it is necessary to mention that the factor of adultery is a classic theme in the novels of this time, as Tony Tanner says, in his work Adultery in the novel: "Adultery, as a phenomenon, is an evidence in literature since ancient times […] But it seems to me that adultery takes great importance for the novel in the late eighteenth century and during the nineteenth "(Tanner, 2001, p. 52).

The initial theme of the story is the adultery committed by Hester Prynne represented in the girl that she carries in her arms, which, as a consequence, leads her to possess on her breast the inscription of an "A" letter embroidered by herself, in order to remind her and those who see her, every day, the sin committed. If we take it to context, in a puritanical, moralistic and demanding society in compliance with the principles that regularize it, the punishment seems slight, if we compare it with the actions of many current communities that punish such action with death. This is because the sentence itself has a mystery in itself, an unfinished situation that responds to the search for the second responsible, the father of Pearl. Her sentence is summarized in a dialogue in the third chapter of the book: "Now, good sir, the Massachusetts magistracy has considered that this woman is young and beautiful, and that she was undoubtedly impelled to fall into temptation; and, moreover, since it is more likely that her husband is at the bottom of the sea, he has not wanted to put into force the full force of our just law against her, since the penalty is death "(Hawthorne 92). In this sense, the presence of adultery, as the main and / or initial problem of the work, contributes to the use of the omission as a catalyst of the action, since, during the public exhibition in the square near the market, a man makes his appearance foreigner who recognizes Hester Prynne on the stage. We know, through the comments of this individual, that there is a relationship between the two: the way they look, the interest in discovering who is the father of the child and how he is responsible for lowering the profile to public punishment to give place to the culpability of the second responsible. This omission is accompanied, in turn, by a mystery typical of the dark romantics of the nineteenth century, keeping the intrigue of the people and readers around this unresolved adultery. But despite this, in the "public", Hester Prynne is sentenced in front of the eyes of all and of God, according to the Christian writings: "According to the Old Testament, the adulterous man and the adulterous woman are, almost without exception, excluded from society, even reaching the point of execution "(Tanner 14). Not so, however, in the private aspect, where the characters, through inquiries and confessions, seek to fill this space that leaves the omission of what happened.

After the punishment of Hester Prynne in front of the public, the narrator, in his genius, introduces a change of perspective, a game that leaves aside the protagonism of the adulteress, to give rise to the beginning of action: the demystification of the sin committed. Then, the focus is now on the foreigner in front of the crowd, who emphasizes the need to find the father of the child Hester carries in his hands. Said character begins to undress more, in terms of his true identity, once he performs an interview with the defendant in the cell, self-declaring himself a doctor, capable of resolving the hysteria that Prynne felt. This encounter is key, because at no time does she confront him directly, nor does she rebuke him for his disappearance; Directly, "Chillingworth" – as he called himself now – resolves the first part of the mystery that surrounds this woman: "[…] medicinal plants have made me a more skilled doctor than many of those who can boast to own the title. Take woman! This creature is yours, it's nothing of mine; neither will he recognize my voice nor my appearance to his father "(Hawthorne 101). In this way, not very subtle in my opinion, the character enters fully into history as himself, as the husband who has died and returns from the afterlife to torment his mistress with her sins. This was my first impression, but it is through a pact between the two, where they agree not to reveal their identity, that the possibility exists that the mystery and the action will continue. Here we also have an omission; From the "linguistic" point, the character, in his first identity, does not exist, so a new reality is created that does not reveal the truth of the whole either. The name of Chillingworth supposes the need of the individual to reintegrate into society, to "start over" together with his new knowledge acquired with the Indians and medicine based on herbs. Throughout history, without saying how or why, the new doctor is gaining popularity among the population, getting to win the trust of other characters that will help us achieve fill what the narrator has omitted in previous pages. We can say, then, that the construction of the plot is based on what the characters do not say, giving a justified place to each character within it. After all the description of Prynne's husband, another character is added to the mystery of the scarlet letter: the clergyman Dimmesdale, indispensable, like the others, for the construction of the story.

Dimmesdale was a young pastor of the community, admired and honoured by all because of their great wisdom at a young age and their devotion to them and the mission to fulfil the commandments of the scriptures at all costs. This had transformed him, under the eyes of the community, into an exemplary model. This is why his character works perfect in terms of contrast, in the first instance, with Prynne, so that his relationship with her is explained through a process of cause and consequence, in the first instance: he carries the redemption to sinners and she is the sinner. Up to this point, the relationship is understood by itself, but, like all the other characters, Dimmesdale also hides something, contributing to the construction of the "global" scarlet letter that is in this book. I mention this because, although Hester is the only one who wears it, there is more than one character who wears an "inside" embroidery of her own letter "A". The narrator changes the perspective and puts on the relationship of Chillingworth and Dimmesdale; the first character helps build the second. Chillingworth puts his interest in clergy, particularly, in an assumption of his own regarding the secret that hides us. Based on this, the husband of Prynne fulfills the function of revealing the secrets hidden behind the scarlet letter and makes use of his social skills to achieve their friendship. As the novel progresses, their relationship grows, as does Chillingworth's intrigue and Dimmesdale's fear. The latter feels that something causes this man about himself, a terror that could be justified by the cunning that characterizes him, but, in the end, it is because such a level of trust between the two supposes a confession. There is a great instance in the book in which the three components – I call three components or participants as a hypothesis of personal reading -, Hester, Dimmesdale and Pearl are standing at night on the platform where the letter was once scarlet and its carrier. Personally, I think that this moment of the book is a genius to bring together three fundamental characters for the resolution of what is omitted. The framework that generates the presence of these three characters, associated with the figure of man, woman and girl, causes us, as readers, to associate the image of a family. Even more brilliant is placing them precisely on this platform of shame and, much more, doing it at night. But this topic, the use of the night in the work, we will deal with later. It is in this book event that the cleric undergoes a process of inflection. "She went up on the platform in silence and stood next to the cleric, with the little Pearl holding her hand. At the very moment he did, he felt like a tumultuous renewal of his life, another life different from his own, turning like a torrent in his heart […] "(Hawthorne 185). There is a self-recognition of oneself, that which he had wanted to omit; what caused him pain and fear at the same time, he was standing next to the scourge that haunted him day and night, and for a moment he felt calm, finding, even, a pleasure in it.

This "triangular" union of these two components summarizes and reveals the omission of the mystery of the scarlet letter. As if it were a painting, the Hawthorne takes them, these three characters, evoking a touching and gloomy image: "And there was the shepherd with his hand over his heart, and Hester Prynne with the embroidered letter shining on his chest, and little Pearl, herself a symbol and the link that connected those two beings "(Hawthorne 186). It is in this instance that sin is revealed to us, almost as if it were a picture. But this painting includes gloomy figures in itself; what they had wanted to keep hidden, now has been revealed to us: the fragment quoted begins with "the shepherd", a religious figure that should promote chastity and fidelity, the scarlet letter in person and the fruit of the mixture of the first two . It is here that we can return to the idea of ​​the nocturnal, of the night and the dark, as a moment of narration in which secrets can be revealed. It is paradoxical, if we think that light is associated with visibility, the truth, different from the night, at which time the confessions are produced, as if the characters were liberated; Regarding this, Samuel Chase Coale (2015) says: "On the one hand, the facts seemed substantial (to Hawthorne) and he felt at their service: the darker the greater his obedience; on the other, moral judgments and values ​​were insignificant "(10). In this sense, the night corresponds to a moment in which what has been omitted can be revealed without danger. A situation that could scandalize everyone – a clergyman and the woman with whom he committed adultery, plus the fruit of it – is put on paper as a normal situation, with incredible subtlety. And all this brings us to little Pearl, which is the omission and the revelation at the same time par excellence. She is the only one who transgresses at all times, day and night, with the fact of living and doing her demonic dances around her mother the idea of ​​the night as a moment in which sins can be mentioned. She is the sin that wanders through the town, among other children (although she loves us), boasting the "acceptability" that her mother does not achieve. She walks and plays with freedom, even, repeatedly plays a role similar to the voice of conscience with its many questions that scandalize the interior of the characters: "Tell me then, who are you and who sent you here, asked the mother. Tell me your mother! – said the girl, very serious approaching Hester […] Your Heavenly Father sent you! […] He did not send me! "The girl yelled decisively. I do not have a heavenly Father. "(Hawthorne 127). The demands of the girl, unlike the rest of the named characters, gives it a revealing character. It is not an omission, but a revelation of everything that happens; in turn, it represents the union of all the sins that they carry in the scarlet letter. Here, too, is the mutual symbolism between the scarlet letter and the girl, the two revealing aspects within this book that speak for themselves. Pearl represented the most precious thing to Prynne, but also his greatest terrors. This shared duality between the letter and its daughter, at the same time, fulfils a shared function, that is, to remind him of the sin in which he inquired; He loves them both, and he carries them both in an honourable way: one in the chest and the other in the hand.

However, despite the fact that Prynne considers wearing both the girl and the scarlet letter, it also means her own prison, what she omitted and that, due to her silence, punished her. "Hawthorne looked over a dark world, passionately. Also within a imprisoned, isolated soul. The world oppressed his ego, which, in turn, oppressed the soul, his spirit "(Chase 12). In the same way, the scarlet letter and the presence of the girl, complete allegory of the truth in the story, oppress it, if we think that it was, in part, forgiven by the judges for being beautiful and young. At the same time, these two components represent the prejudices of the time, the judgments made by the people, so it is not a symbol that applies only to the young, but also corresponds to a social message, a truth that has to be heard, as Chase says in his work: "It represents a consistent sadness, the weight of sin, the tragic burden of self-doubt, and plaintive irresolution produce that vision of a fragile and birthed humanity that hides at the heart of every story […]" (twenty-one). But in this contradiction between sin, punished by the public world and by day and light, and passion, they suggest certain art in the way in which the narrator carries out the story.

In conclusion, we can say that the whole story of The Scarlet Letter revolves around the construction of the characters who, in turn, are concatenated in an intimate relationship, as if they were accomplices in sin. The way in which they make themselves known and the way in which they are introduced in the story is due to the other, a kind of otherness between them and also to the meaning they take for us, the readers, and the very understanding of what narrated. For this, the narrator relies on a series of tactics such as the use of contrasts, allegories and changing perspectives to accentuate the hypothesis raised regarding the omitted as the main and solid basis of the construction of the plot of The Scarlet Letter.

Regarding the contrasts, we can glimpse that the game night and day, light and shadow, favour not only a technique occupied by the author in his novels, but also support the atmosphere of what you want to keep silent or that is only acceptable during the night, to avoid the prejudices of the day. Interesting idea, if we think that in the day we show ourselves as we are, not only before ourselves, but also before the rest (which in the case of the book, corresponds to the people). As for the allegories we have the figure of the letter "A" and all the assumptions and contradictions that it supposes; the burden she possesses corresponds to a message for those around Prynne and herself, a reminder to the voice of what she committed and, in turn, what she kept silent (as, for example, when they ask her the name of the father at the beginning and she decides to remain silent). Next to her, we find the character of Pearl who has not only in her representation as "daughter of sin", but also in her way of acting, many behaviours that the narrator calls demoniac, which constantly reaffirms, in a revealing way, her origin. Curiously, looking in a dictionary of symbols, Pearl that in Spanish translates as Pearl in the book explains his nomination because, for the mother, she is the most precious to Prynne, we can find the following: "Born from the waters or from the moon, found in a shell, the pearl represents the essential symbol of creative femininity. The sexual symbolism of the shell communicates all the forces that it implies […] "(Chevalier 813).

There is, according to this, a direct relationship between Hester and Pearl as the shell and the pearl: both under the sea, in the case of the former, under the sea of ​​prejudice. Finally, we have the perspective game that the narrator does, without giving a total protagonism to any of the characters, giving rise to the story, chronologically, the resolution of the omitted, ending at the end of the work with the confession of Dimmesdale, Pearl as an aristocratic woman and Hester back in her old house in the woods. It is by means of them that we are of the different perspectives of the same problematic, as well as, from the point where all the components come together to give the solid construction to the plot of The Scarlet Letter of Hawthorne.

2.5. The consequences and effects of sin

It is not God who punishes sin, but it is he who contains within himself his punishment. This supposes that punishment does not simply follow sin, already past, but that sin remains. In effect, sin is not just a bad external action; It is also a personal decision. Every action has a transitory character in its external appearance, but in its core it remains. This core of each action is the decision by which the person is made in a certain direction: it is the attitude that she adopts. That is why one can speak of the state of sin or state of grace. However, this state can not be considered as something juridical – a kind of "book of accounts of the divine court" – because it is a state insofar as it is "attitude"; nor as something definitive, because while we are on earth there is no state of grace without temptations, nor a state of sin without solicitations of grace. This brings us to a critical examination of Catholic truth. according to which, after the remission of sins, there may be "temporary penalties" that we must suffer in this life, or purify (in purgatory) or be remitted (indulgences).

According to the usual explanation, although the fault has been forgiven, their sentences have not been remitted. However, this explanation is very reminiscent of a legal situation, possible only because such punishments are the sign that reveals (although it can also hide) the attitude of the culprit. But the temporary penalties that are dealt with here are not juridical ones, but rather they are in the order of our relationship with God, just like the "eternal punishment" for obstinacy in evil. And if this eternal punishment is remitted when mortal sin is forgiven, what does it mean that the sinner still has to endure temporary punishments? Temporary punishments mean – here we can continue to identify punishment and guilty attitude – that our attitude has not yet been perfectly purified, that the good fundamental attitude is still involved in bad peripheral attitudes. Purgatory represents the definitive purification of these attitudes, and indulgence is a blessing given to our purifications, although falsely it has been presented as a remission of external punishment.

In its deepest sense, punishment is not, then, outside of sin, but coincides with it. Now, sin arises outside of man and against him, insofar as both do not identify. Sin imprisons man and causes his death. This is clear in specific sins (homicide, all injustice …), but is it proper for the very nature of sin to oppress man? To what extent? How does death, loneliness, anguish result? of turning away from God? Is the sinner lost because he loses God, self-destructs because he turns away from him? Sometimes sin is presented as a self-destruction and it is attributed to the justifying grace that the sinner continues to exist and be a human being. This metaphysical argument is given: God is the source of being, and apart from Him, man destroys his own being. Or else: without the others man can not be realized, how much less without the One who is the source of his being. Such arguments only show that the sinner works in his self-destruction; but the sinner does more than that: he performs an essentially "ambivalent" action; He strives to achieve a good, to realize a value, but he does it against the covenant of God, in a negative and destructive way. In other words: sin is negative, but it concretizes its rejection in a positive action, which is in any case a self-affirmation. And it can not stop being it, because the creature can not stop being fulfilled; nor can it be annihilated for the same reason that it can not give itself existence either: being or not being is not within the reach of its power. Hence, although the power of annihilation of sin is reduced, its severity is not diminished. On the contrary: by not annihilating the sinner, sin establishes a contradiction in his being between the "Lord, open to us" and the decision by which the door itself has been closed. Thus, sin is first of all not self-destruction, but break of the covenant: in the decision that is a mortal sin, the sinner himself rejects the life of grace, refusing it or usurping it (that is, not wanting to receive it as grace).

From these preceding considerations we must interpret the loss of sanctifying grace as punishment of God: sin itself punishes the sinner by dispossessing him of the life of grace. This is the life realized by the covenant, in personal communion; an "existence-with", which is given to us, and which, therefore, is offered to our freedom, and which can not exist if we do not respond to God's invitation with a receptive attitude of love, faith and hope. This supernatural character of sin could be conceived in an extrinsic way: the sinner loses grace and preserves his nature. But this is not exact, for in fact there is no pure nature: human nature, as it exists, is made for grace intrinsically (not accidentally) and absolutely (its orientation to grace is the only one that exists and counts ). Obviously, this communion with God is also the supreme good of the creature. Consequently, to lose grace is to lose the communion that fills the heart of man, is to fall into total solitude, is to frustrate nature in its deepest purpose. With this, man certainly does not lose his being, but abandons his fullness and meaning. In this sense we can speak of self-annihilation. It will be useful, finally, to indicate the repercussion of sin in our existence and activity in the natural plane. To answer this question we must take into account the nature-person relationship. By nature we understand human reality as it is presupposed and usable in our free decisions.

The person is the subject of freedom itself. What in man benefits from the gifts of grace is not only his nature, but also his person, and the tension-in-unity that exists between person and grace, more than between it and nature, is more fundamental. we call "nature" is always the human nature of a human person, and what we call "grace" is the personal participation of another human nature: that of the Son. The source of grace, then, is that human nature of the Son, and the subject of grace is human nature, but as it exists in the human person, it is not nature itself that is under the influence of human nature. grace, but the person. Therefore, our nature responds to grace insofar as it is available to the human person and to the extent that it is an expression of his response to grace. The truth of this is confirmed by some experiences. For example, a patient reached by the charm of grace: the disease does not change, but the attitude of the patient with respect to it, and as a consequence, the disease itself.

2.6. The benefits of sin revealed in the novel

It is an analysis and a reflection of the mentality of the American people in those times and their perception of "sin" and fear or lack of freedom of expression. The book is about a woman who betrays her old husband with a young and attractive reverend, whose relationship is born a daughter and then the husband discovers all that, wants to make the reverend pay him until he can no longer confess everything before His Followers. After the husband takes his life. In those times, machismo was a constant as it governed the lifestyle of almost all people, but at the same time, it also destroyed in a certain way the pride of man as seen in the work with the doctor, who despite having married to a beautiful young woman, and probably thinking that he had everything under his feet, that woman gives him a lesson that torments him and makes him take revenge on the reverend. For his part, the reverend in his role as a pure and chaste man, is no more than a puppet first of society, of his religious belief, then his lover and then the torment of the doctor and the feeling of guilt. On the other hand, Hester, the apple of discord, is a victim of society, since she lives 7 years tormented by her actions. In my personal opinion, I liked the history of the book, because it makes us realize a little more about what the mentality of the people was like in those times, and that on many occasions we sometimes find ourselves with thoughts or ideas that still exist today. They are very traditional because they have some "etiquette", however, they are bonds that do not allow them to be happy or make others happy; but reading it was not an activity that I enjoyed very much, the book did not catch me although I did not dislike it. It is important that we know what beliefs, or attitudes, have tied us in the past to the human race and how, over time, we have broken barriers of communication, of inequality, but at the same time, how much work we still have to do.

With its early American prose and long preamble, some students may feel that the first lesson I learned from 'The Scarlet Letter' is to prevent Nathaniel Hawthorne. However, his themes of good versus evil, humans, hypocrisy, conformity and the meaning of sin, can keep the real world relevant to today's adolescent. Teachers use interactive reading and debate that could use 'The Scarlet Letter' to teach more of the lessons of history and classical literature. The classic of literature has a couple of life lessons as well.

The Actions Have Consequences

• Hester Prynne

The situation could resonate with students who find their lives turned upside down when faced with an unplanned pregnancy. In light of the ever-present controversy surrounding abortion, The Scarlet Letter can also spawn debate on a contemporary theme of the day. Promoting the concept of practicing safe sex could not have been Hawthorne's intention when he wrote the romance novel in 1850, but the 21st century students can find a lesson in history, however.

Good vs. Evil

• At first glance, students can assume that a doctor and a 17th-century pastor would take their symbolic places as representatives of the good. However, as Roger Chillingworth's name and occupation implies in the novel, it is something else, but good. His cold is a 'leech' & a term used for doctors all day. He represents evil in its most brazen form. Minister Arthur Dimmesdale's role is more complicated, especially when he seems to urge Hester to reveal the name of his mistress before the other ministers. As received by his companions, Hester the adulteress, to whom the evil incarnate might seem. However, the reader discovers that his being of good heart and the symbol of justice.

Hypocrisy in Power

• Hypocrisy is found throughout the book, but it is more fully personified in Dimmesdale. He is a minister who is also an adulterer. In his role as pastor, he must be above reproach and his parishioners assume that he is so, although he vaguely confesses himself as a sinner. Students who study 'The Scarlet Letter' could easily move from the hypocrisy of the 17th century, the Puritans to modern revelations, in the Catholic Church. As Dimmesdale hid his dark secret, he did it from pedophilia of Catholic priests and those who protect them.

Isolation

• Middle school and high school students, probably see the test of isolation in their daily lives, but as it is portrayed in 'The Scarlet Letter', the injustice of which could be even more evident. Hester Prynne was only one part of the matter, however, it was she who was only ostracized by the community. His daughter Pearl, who was the most important symbol of good, suffered a lack of company for no other reason than the circumstance of his birth. As a lesson for good and evil, Hester of Destiny could serve as a symbolic example of the students the hierarchy and the cliques where belonging and exclusion seem nothing but just.

It is crucial to understand the scarlet letter as a love story, although it goes against the opinion of some critics, who consider precisely the opposite, or who claim that it is merely about adultery. But the predominant feelings in the novel (the value of Hester, the fear of his lover Pastor Dimmesdale, and the hatred of his husband Dr. Chillingworth) are different manifestations of the love relationship that identifies that well-known novel. Among the protagonists, it is Hester who possesses the ability to love with extraordinary strength and constancy, to the point that she accepts the punishment of being permanently marked as an adulteress in the eyes of others by the capital letter A in scarlet which she must wear in his clothes. He defends with his silence and acceptance of suffering the man he loves, and learns a lot from that scarlet A. However, she is not sorry: she wants Dimmesdale's love before the forgiveness of society and even of God. Kierkegaard or Fichte would praise this seemingly negative position, since they consider repentance a moral weakness. To think is to love, says Heidegger. The one who loves wants and needs to know, to think, to the beloved. In addition, thought and intellectual reflection help Hester to realize the slavery to which the social rules subject her. Hester is thus die Einzelne, the "singular individual", who in his solitude before "the crowd", the "mass" that constitute the others, feels that fullness of being that is accompanied by anguish, a conception that Kierkegaard was developing in the same years that Hawthorne wrote his novels.

Because of that individual's independence, Hester hardly needs to communicate with the society that surrounds her-a society that does not understand her-because she has transgressed her norms: she is a woman who refuses to live according to the dictates of the convention. Instead, his love for Dimmesdale is so strong that he is able to communicate with him even without being physically together. Love, as the most primary and deepest mode of communication, is Hester's way of reaching fulfillment and filling all possible spheres of her being; that is why Dimmesdale's egocentricity paralyzes her. On the contrary, the pastor's obsession with preserving his consensual place in society is stronger than his ability to love in a personal relationship.

He does not want to take the risk of giving himself to others, of "throwing himself" into the world in the Heideggerian sense, and that is why he is so alone: ​​lack of love, says Hegel in his Jena writings, produces isolation. Dimmesdale is a lonely conscience thirsting for love but too cowardly to fight for the one she loves. His attitude could be described with what Carlos Gurméndez in his Studies on love called "subjective love". This love "encloses us in our intimate abode … No, never live happily loving like this …, this inner life is not peaceful retreat". On the other hand, Hester's love for the clergy is "objective love", a risky and total surrender, a search for the other and for one's own being, strength, courage and generosity. Therefore, Hester is, thanks to her capacity to love, a fuller being than Dimmesdale because, as Xirau points out in Love and the World, love supposes abundance of inner life.

Chillingworth himself recognizes this surrender and strength of Hester out of love, in the face of Dimmesdale's weakness. She knows that love arises, but also that it is done, cultivated, so that it grows. It is the culmination of his person, because "where there is no you, there is no me," as Feuerbach says. That impulse is generous, because it is giving the self so that you live. Thus, Hester is, in expressions of Gurméndez, "the mistress scorned and wounded who renounces herself and consumes the holocaust". It is this strange conjunction between denial and self-affirmation that constitutes the act of love here, a mysterious attitude that also, for example, Hegel studies in Love and Death. Rilke, for his part, associates the essence of love precisely with giving himself to the other, and discovers in the woman capable of this, Hester in our case, "the being who can carry out the true destiny of love." Hester accepts the difficulties that derive from love. Sartre maintains that "Love is conflict"; that "love is sometimes sad, torment", while Ortega maintains in his Studies on love that "true love is perceived better … in the pain and suffering of which one is capable".

It is precisely this struggle that helps Hester to continue living, because "what maintains the subject, what constitutes its support … is the affectivity". This principle is also applicable to Chillingworth, although in a negative sense; what keeps him alive is hatred, the desire for revenge. And it is that, according to del Pino in his Introduction to Psychiatry, "love and hate are the couple of basic activities of human existence." Indeed, Hester is not only able to love intensely, but also to hate with all her strength: love Dimmesdale, hate Chillingworth. Kierkegaard associates anguish with freedom, and this relationship also appears in The Scarlet Letter, since in it Hawthorne not only gives us a mere Calvinist doctrine of predestination, but gives the protagonists free will. This freedom causes them anguish, and results in romantic relationships rich in psychological tensions. The difference between Hester and Dimmesdale in terms of her freedom is that she assumes the consequences of her act, of her choice, while, on the contrary, the cleric does not take responsibility, does not respond to life, is not capable of "throwing herself " to the world. Precisely, freedom is, according to Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anguish, "a vertigo. He fixes his eyes on the abyss of his own possibility and, trying to hold on, takes hold of finitude, falls to the ground and, when he gets up again, he is already guilty ". The freedom of choice, the strength of the will, is what Kierkegaard calls "instant". This category also appears, for example, in Jaspers and Heidegger; it is the Entschlossenheit, the capacity of choice, which gives life all its seriousness; and, as Ortega points out, love is a choice. Or in the words of Erich Fromm, it is "an action that can only be done in freedom". All this is the opposite of the Calvinist theory of predestination, according to which Hester would only be demonstrating that she is a cursed person. But Hawthorne goes further. Enter the will, which is revealed as struggle and dramatic presence. The will is also present in Chillingworth; however, he chooses revenge, a choice that contrasts with Hester's. In it, the ability to love becomes an art, as Fromm would say, which is increasingly configured and strengthened "risking any pain or subsequent consequence."

Loving is, above all, giving. Dimmesdale's fear, on the other hand, becomes a real neurosis. This fact is intuitively accepted by some critics, but I found it very interesting to note that the cleric manifests the characteristics that a psychiatrist such as del Pino attributes to the neurotic personality. According to this author, one of those features is insecurity, along with other very obvious symptoms: "obsession, anguish and hysterical phenomena." The first two are evident throughout the novel; the latter appears, for example, in the imagined flagellation or in his vision of the scarlet A in the sky. Another important aspect of Dimmesdale is its physical weakness. The neurotic is "afraid to stop being what he is", panic to lose his social status. This is what del Pino calls an "attitudinal neurotic self," because it shows "fear of being rejected by others, and ambiguity in interpersonal relationships." The neurosis of Dimmesdale is what psychiatrists call "anguish neurosis": he feels fear before something imprecise, and this threat is felt in the totality of his person. An example in relation to this would be his relationship with Chillingworth, whom he feels as a threat, but of which he is not able to elucidate his typology until Hester explains it to him. In the "neurosis of anguish", the subject "centres all reality on himself, precisely because he is at risk, he does not know what". In the end, his panic and anguish are so intense that "he arrives at the collapse, the collapse and the inability to sustain himself … the anguish is permanent". This feeling of neurotic anguish has also been addressed by Kierkegaard.

According to him, the anguish opens before the possibility, and this is precisely what happens to Dimmesdale. His terror does not appear before an accomplished fact, but before the possibility of being discovered. The fault is in his case, as Freud would say, social anguish: the anguish is created by others. But the anguish is what leads the cleric to think about the subject, it is also a watchtower of human life, says Kierkegaard, and from it Dimmesdale is forced to reflect on himself and his life. The anguish also has a Freudian defensive function in his case, urging him to "avoid the relationship with the object that is [provoked]" and that is why he avoids any kind of public contact with Hester, to the point that he does not even know if She is alive. In addition, Dimmesdale has "sometimes difficulty in falling asleep, although, once achieved, the sleep may be longer than usual in him". It is also interesting to note that, according to del Pino, the majority of neurotic depressions have to do with unfortunate love stories. In The Scarlet Letter manifests the inability to love on the part of the cleric due to the influence of social rules, a situation which, in Fromm's words, "means insanity or destruction of himself and others". We must also take into account that psychologists also recognize that shame causes anxiety and, with del Pino, which "is intimately linked to the possible loss of prestige of that aspect of the self that can be manifested in a social relationship." Moreover, the shame, the feeling of guilt, etc, "provoke aggressiveness against himself", which is what happens to Dimmesdale with his imaginary flogging. The defence mechanisms that Dimmesdale uses can be analyzed following Freud and his book Inhibition, symptom and anguish: the "punishment of the self", for example, or the "conversion", by which the conflict becomes not only psychic, but it also manifests on a physical level. Another feature of Dimmesdale's psychosis appears clearly in his vision of the A in heaven, since neurotic visions work in relation to the inner obsession of the subject who, according to Fromm, "sees the world as symbols of his inner world", an observation that Spinoza and Freud did before. His nervous tics, such as his hand always on the chest, are also typical of the neurotic personality, as well as its silence: the word is, says Freud, a way to alleviate the weight of a secret and, when it does not occur, there is an increase of anguish and an approach to madness. In addition, according to Freud, it is also important to note that "those memories that have become causes of hysterical phenomena have been preserved with wonderful clarity through long periods of time." This is precisely what happens to the cleric. Any type of psychic pathology is caused or at least related to poor communication with others. In this sense, it is very interesting to highlight the four forms of communication that, according to Fromm, can be given among people, since all of them are present in the novel that concerns us: the relationship with nature (exemplified in Pearl, the daughter from Hester and Dimmesdale); submission to a person, group or institution (Pastor Dimmesdale); the desire for dominance and revenge (husband Chillingworth) and the love relationship (the protagonist Hester). Only in this last form, in which Fromm also includes the love of nature, does the individual become a person. And it is in that love that the deepest, most intimate and original part of being arises. Three of these forms are also present in the opera. If there is a clear reference to nature in this, it is because the atmosphere of the religious community in Stankar Castle is underlined. Love is essential but at the same time very difficult to achieve. It takes extraordinary strength, like Hester's, not to remain in the realm of the mediocre. It is a constant challenge; no place of rest, but work in common; it requires humility, courage and generosity, difficult values ​​for the man of any age, according to the novel and the opera. However, Emerson is right (let's hope so) by saying in The Man and the World that "we have more tenderness than we think".

CHAPTER III. THEME OF INNOCENCE IN “THE SCARLET LETTER”

3.1. The recurring theme of “loss of innocence” in literature

Since in the contemporary literature the infantile characters abound, it is not possible to be exhaustive at the time of speaking of them, for that reason what I tried to do in this chapter is to trace the axes by which the child has passed in the literature in relation to the paths followed by the stories that I will deal with later, but those lines had to be framed, because the visions of childhood represented by the protagonists of children are part of an uneven trajectory of the presence of children in literature. Literary children have ancestors, from the first attempts at picaresque, through Romanticism, to reach the peak in twentieth century literature. Several critics have seen in the literary child a representation of the artist and his creative process; however, as I said, this is not the only version. To say that the child in literature appears as a metaphor for one's artistic work or as a representation of the concept of literature, would be to limit it, since it appears with enormous complexity and variety in twentieth-century literature. Contemporary literary works have shown us that this character is more than a symbol of the creative process through memory, as some have wished to see. Its multiple facets, its complicated relationships within the texts with the other elements of the work invite us to be careful when analyzing the presence of the child protagonist in the texts. Even the child character tends to be minimized, just like the real child, enclosing it in drawers labelled with the names of: metaphor of literature, representation of the artist in front of society, voice of the marginalized. I am not saying that the literary child can not be read as a metaphor for literature, as an artist's representation in front of society, as a voice for the marginalized, but, in addition, it can be all of this at the same time and something else. (Stewig, 1980: 66)

We must accept that to deepen the analysis of an object of study it is sometimes necessary to parcel, I did in this presentation of the different versions of the infant in literature, but I am aware that it is difficult to find in literary works characters of a single cut. Because if something literary child has is going through a period of changes, which lead to transform within the same text. I have already mentioned that the challenge presented to the student who intends to analyze the child character, is the complexity and variety of it. The separation is only to mark some paths that can be followed, but never to exhaust it: each novel, story or poem in which a child protagonist lives, will have something new to say in relation to the sense of its presence in works of art verbal. For now I can not speak of a typology of the literary child, what I tried to do in these pages is to show some of the most important visions of literary childhood; especially those in which you can locate the characters of the stories that I will analyze in the following chapters. No doubt here are missing famous children's characters that can be found in verbal works of art since the nineteenth century, but I do not intend to cover them in their entirety, but analyze literary childhood as a narrative strategy that entails certain challenges for the writers who work it.

Once the foundations of a modern conception of childhood were laid, the terrain was ready for a children's character to appear in the imagination of the writers, located at the centre of literary compositions. This new vision of childhood that takes shape in the work of Rousseau (2004), will be greatly appreciated by English romantic writers, for whom the child is "the father of man" and not the other way around. According to the ideas of his time, Rousseau crowned the experience as a source of knowledge, what would be preferred by romantic poets, for whom there would be no more poetry than the one fed by the individual experience and the subjective perception of the I of the enunciation, breaking thus with previous aesthetics that looked for the absolute truth and not the different points of view of a reality. Rousseau was one of the first to consider the subjectivity of the Self as a legitimate form of perception and enunciation. On the other hand, the romantic English writers idealized the figure of the child. Thus, Wordsworth crafted the phrase "the child is the father of man". Tired of the values ​​of their time, some romantic poets of England saw in childhood the vehicle to return to the origins, to a primitive state of humanity in which the language was concrete, onomatopoeic, always new and related to the object; that is, they put the accent on the popular word and the surprised look of the child. These writers mythified the origin of man because he represented an alternative value system. Some romantics imagined childhood as a higher stage, such as the golden age and the childhood of man as the childhood of mankind. They related the child's creative potential to the writer's imagination. Under this idea, the child is wise and not the adult, then to get the wisdom had to return to the moment in which it is possessed: childhood. In different writings, childhood gives a lesson about the coexistence between life and death. Here, childhood is represented from physical beauty and innocence not as ignorance, in this case of death, but as a particular way of understanding even funeral events, not as absence but as transformation. In this poem a man asks a girl how many siblings she has in total, she responds that seven, she indicates the location of each one, two of which are buried in the cemetery, so the man insists that then only There are five of them, but the girl insists on telling her dead brothers, in whose green tombs she plays. Romantic poets aspired to culture, through reason and freedom, return to the natural state, and saw in the child the ideal state of human nature: In the child is represented the disposition and determination; in us its realization, which always remains infinitely lagging behind them. Hence, the child is for us an actualization of the ideal; not by the way of the realized ideal, but of the indicated one; and thus, what moves us is not in any way the representation of its weakness and its limits, but, on the contrary, that of its pure and free force, integrity, its infinity. (Schiller, 1981: 23)

These poets understood the sensitivity and language of the child as a possibility to renew poetry, they saw in the childhood of humanity, primitive men who were poets by nature. Then the concepts of poetry and fantasy were related to those of antiquity, primitive and popular.

On the other hand, some consider that romantic literature is a precursor to the scientific study of the mind and psychology. The authors of Infant languages point out that Freud, Lacan, Darwin, Chomsky, Roger Brown and Vygostsky studied the child to understand adult processes. Remember that for Freud the phrase "the child is the father of man" is literal. Nora Pasternac mentions: “[…] not only child sexuality exists and the innocence and purity of children are a myth, but adult sexuality is still childish. We glimpse a formula: neurotics have retained the infantile state of his sexuality or have been referred to him”. And on the other hand: "Do not forget that the insistence, perhaps surprising, on childhood memory in the life of the poet ultimately derives from the premise that poetic creation, like the daydream, is a continuation and substitute for old child's games”. (1996: 32) For the Romantics, the child became not only a different sensitivity to what the poet should aspire, but in the symbol of romantic resistance to the vices of language in the society of his time.

The myth of childhood as a critic of everyday language and meaningless, is found in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, and has reached writers of later times such as Rilke, Unamuno, Bergamín (poetic state as a state of childhood or popular longing) and , even, in authors of the Anglo-Saxon Modernism like Virginia Woolf. As Elizabeth Goodenough points out in "We haven't the words: the silence of children in the novels of Virginia Woolf", in the novels of the English writer the conscience of the children is celebrated, because they embody the purity, the type of integrity to which a character can aspire; nevertheless, the scholar is surprised that although childhood is fundamental in Woolf's response to understanding human life, children rarely speak in their novels (1994: 184). This could lead us to think that it is the child's point of view rather than his voice that determines the importance of childhood to appreciate another face of life. In addition, Goodenough points out that „At lighthouse (1927)” is a good example of how childhood is associated with imagination and artists, an idea that was already in the romantics. The Romantics' view of childhood also influenced other artistic movements of the twentieth century, for example, in European surrealism. Goodenough (1994) points out that "Breton attributes to the child the ability to perceive a truer reality, since not being limited by the values ​​of adults can see everything with eyes not yet contaminated by prejudices" (221). The idyllic vision of childhood that shaped the romantics, childhood seen as a stage of originality, freedom and happiness, therefore, yearned for, we can also find it in more recent writers.

Childhood as " lost paradise " or transit towards puberty

For many, childhood represents the "lost paradise" and returning to it through memory is the only possibility of recovering that paradise. The actions of the stories that present this vision of childhood are developed in specific places: the garden of the house, the street , the train tracks, the park. Sites where you play with sisters, brothers, cousins, cousins, friends, animals or with yourself. The garden, the street, the train tracks or the park are spaces exempt from the surveillance of adults, places that only belong to children, plants and insects or, at least, that's what the characters believe. But of all those spaces I just want to stop in the garden because it is symbolic, mythical, primitive, since it is linked to the Edenic garden, where, according to the Bible, the fathers of humanity (Adam and Eve) lived in harmony with nature and with God. In the garden time will stop, and children will be free to play, to invent realities, and many times, the garden will hide the loss of the innocence of the child character. Children experience the collapse of their childhood also free from the eyes of parents, adults or all those who are not part of their lived or imagined world. With regard to the garden in the stories of Elena Garro, the researcher Goodenough points out that this space "refers to paradise, origins, innocence and a primary language" (1994: 139), so it is also "a time first, "Other", outside of linear, chronological time "( Goodenough, 1994: 139). In such a way that in the symbolic space of the garden, the characters have the happiest adventures, but also the most unfortunate, because their childhood collapses to give way to a new stage: puberty, in which children's games are exchanged for experiences that include feelings of jealousy, awareness of personal limitations, disappointments and betrayal among others.

Contemporary American literature has given us examples to think of childhood not only as the redoubt of happiness or the only real paradise to which man has access, as the Romantics believed, but as one of the most painful moments of life because it is something like the expulsion from the paradise of Adam and Eve. The children's characters of Elena Garro, Juan de la Cabada, Aline Petterson, Julio Cortázar and Cristina Peri Rossi, are not happy children who play to invent words, but, rather, beings who suffer disappointments, disappointments that expel them irremediably from the idyllic place of early childhood. In the work of these Spanish-American storytellers the first stage of human life has a happy and sad face at the same time, it is a vision of childhood less perfect than romantic poets imagined. In the stories of the Latin American authors mentioned above, the idea of ​​childhood remains as the "lost paradise" of man, but here it results in rupture and transformation.

Child in psychoanalysis or childhood as hell

Several modern literary works give a twist to the conception of childhood by representing it more as an individual hell than as a forgotten earthly paradise. After the proposals of psychoanalysis appeared, literary works that coincided or accepted the vision of Freud, reinforced the idea of ​​the sexed child so distant from the angelic being that Christianity had proposed as a childhood stereotype. From stories in which a young child wishes to accelerate the time to grow up and marry his mother ("Happy Birthday" by Cristina Rossi), to the heartbreaking and raw extreme in which three schoolchildren rape, maim and kill the humblest of his classmates ("The proletarian child" of Osvaldo Lamborghini), American literature has given an account of a version of the child figure, which is perfectly capable of committing crimes that reveal their perversity. But, as in the examples of the picaresque given above, here also belongs to the adult characters part of the responsibility of the behavior and actions of the children's characters. In stories in which the victim of children is another child, an adult will be the first to provoke and unleash the evil in infants. Three of Stroppani's classmates, protagonist of "The proletarian child", not only have fun seeing how the teacher humiliates him publicly, but in his search for sexual pleasure, they violate and murder him. In the child victimizers of the story there is nothing innocent and a lot of sadism. And on the other hand, adult characters do not sympathize with a vulnerable child. American writers are examples to affirm that literary childhood does not always appear as the paradisiacal stage of man or the golden age, as idealized by poets of European romanticism. On the contrary, some American writers compose childhood as the territory of horror and uncertainty. This could address the fact that changes in the concept of childhood that are taking place according to the different proposals of different areas of knowledge such as philosophy, psychology or sociology affect the representation of childhood in literature; but also, it can happen the other way around: that the different versions of childhood that are presented in literature, influence to understand from other paradigms the child of flesh and blood. Something of that could have happened with Rousseau, who took advantage of a work of fiction, Émile, to launch into society his revolutionary concepts about the nature of the child and the needs of his education; the effect was such that even today there are many primary schools that bear the name of the French thinker. In such a way, the relationship between childhood and its literary representation is not easy to clarify, because both one and the other are in constant movement. Even today we are surprised by the scientific discoveries of the mind and behaviour of children, just as the child character of modern literature is still presented as an enigma, whose decipherment has much to say about literature and its infinite strategies for creating works novelties and modify with them the sensitivity of the reader.

Rebellious child, creative child: child character and literary renewal

The literary child can also present itself as a look and a marginal voice. Facets of which the literary childhood can transgress and renew, give origin to the transformation of the genres, to the reformulation of the tradition. When the strategy of the omniscient narrator (adult and male) was exhausted, new looks and voices appeared in literature, looks that did not deny the bias from which they saw and voices that announced their particular universe, but, for that reason, they could be voices and more credible views than that of the omniscient male narrator, who did not give space in his speech to any other point of view that could provide the reader with a version of history contrary or different from that offered by him. The emergence of marginal voices such as that of the child, the woman, the indigenous, the crazy or the gay, gave rise to other narrative universes, other stories to tell or the same as always, but from different angles. It is not that previously unknown genres appeared in the literature, but these voices and glances modified those that existed, through different tones, sometimes ironic, as in the case of What Only Maisie Knew (1897) by Henry James, novel of intrigues and amorous entanglements narrated from the eyes of a girl. The voice of the child in literature, especially that of the twentieth century, is called to give a particular version of the facts. Andrea Mariana Jeftanovic recalls the voice of the girl's character evokes a "perspective from below", the girl can not see her father until her knees, so imagine what is there beyond that height. "The gaze is unable to see beyond its level, beyond the height of the girl, but that gives a characteristic of that writing because it allows you to imagine what you can not see" (Jeftanovic, 2005: 21). "I'm not a grain of anise. I am a girl and I am seven years old. The five fingers of the right hand and two of the left. And when I stand up I can look straight at my father's knees. Higher no. I imagine that it continues to grow like a big tree and that a diminutive tiger crouches on its highest branch. " (Jeftanovic, 2005: 9) The child character overcomes the lack of information with his extravagant imagination.

When the child protagonist does not understand a situation that he observes among the adults with whom he lives or when he does not know the meaning of a word, he does not remain passive, he does not remain with the doubt, but, using his little experience and his enormous fantasy, he invents meanings for that which he does not yet know. Since the child differed from the adult beyond size, it was possible to consider it as a different, autonomous, even transgressive look. Elizabeth Goodenough, Mark A. Heberle and Naomi Sokoloff consider that the child perspective is a perspective from the exotic, the unknown, what Bachelard called the antecedent of being (1994: 12). In such a way that the literary construction of childhood offers the opportunity to tell from another space, from another angle, from below, from an inner world, which entails a renewal of writing. In this sense Jeftanovic (2005) proposes: "Let's say that childhood is the place of experience in modernity. In this respect, it is easy to recognize in the child's vision the predominance of a differentiated and unusual perspective, freed from stereotypes and, above all, discontinuous with respect to the adult vision, which is the inexorable starting point to access the first. Perhaps this is why we can postulate, retrospectively, a greater authenticity, integrity and fullness in the relationship with the child's own world." (90) Showing from the "other side of the coin", making reality or truth, only issues of perception, is one of the functions of the child's perspective. Because there will not be much discussion to accept that you do not see the same from childhood as from maturity. In the words of Jeftanovic (2005) the child has "a multiple and fragmented subjectivity that questions the conception of being as an existential unit, unified under a coherent idea of ​​personality, body and gender" (24). In such a way that we could affirm that the use of the child's vision in the story bets on an aesthetics of fragmentariness.

The child is a changing subject, so his perception is mobile and "His voice is not obliged to follow the linguistic norms of rationality nor the rigidity of learned or consecrated discourses, that is why literature from childhood can handle a language economic, sensory, repetitive and apparently illogical, children narrators can take away the tradition and generate a transgressive proposal "(Jeftanovic, 22). More ahead Jeftanovic observes: "The protagonists children reject the language of the powerful ones, the rhetoric of the official thing, the speech that generates the power" (Jeftanovic, 26). This idea may be valid to think certain stories, but we must also say that there are cases in which the child character not only rejects "the rhetoric of the official" but, trapped in the networks of power, ingenious mechanisms to dethrone the authoritarianism from the inside. Rebellious children of literature create words, encrypted languages ​​with those who understand each other and with those who pretend to marginalize adults, but go beyond that, even win, even symbolically, battles to authoritarian regimes represented already by the father of a family, oblivious to the world of the child, or because of American dictatorships. Children characters of this type of literature are not only the witnesses of injustice, but they also integrate the generation of revenge and the creation of new languages ​​as a form of freedom in front of a previous tradition represented by parents, teachers and political systems; an example is "The rebellion of children" by Cristina Peri Rossi.

In the same respect, Feidelson (1954) argues that in the stories of Silvina Ocampo "children are not innocent or pure , without any desire for power, nor even savage, a danger to control. Rather, it would seem to say Silvina Ocampo, childhood is a "different" look that privileges other structures and different modes of power "(105). So in Ocampo's work: "childhood is privileged over maturity as a way of subverting the social structures of the adult world -family, friendship, religion, education-. Through the eyes of children – as new or different – it undermines the very bases on which those structures rest "(108). In such a way that several critics agree that the child in literature represents marginality and rupture. Feidelson (1954) goes a little further and, with Perrault as an example, unites the marginality of childhood with the marginality of the story genre against the classicist tradition (43). "It is not only, then, an idea of ​​childhood but also the consideration of the child as privileged receiver, which finds its channel through the story. Significantly, a form located in the canonical periphery, between orality and writing, high culture and folklore "(44).

If for Romanticism the assessment of the surprised perception of the child and its onomatopoeic language motivated the search for the renewal of poetry, at other times the literary child figure could be supporting the struggle of a genre to gain ground against canonical traditions. I think it is suggestive to think of the story as a genre that has experienced its existence in the margins of the literary tradition and that, therefore, can be related to the child, who for centuries was outside the concerns of adults. However, I know that the idea is risky, because the study of genres can not be reduced to its representation through a specific figure, in this case that of the child character as a synthesis of the marginality of the narrative genre against the canonical. Undoubtedly, today's children's characters, like the story, occupy an important position in contemporary literature, but their relationship must be addressed through a serious, extensive and thorough investigation, to clear doubts about the relationship between childhood, fairy tale and literature. However, I do not think it's useless for us to question the relationship of the story with childhood in more ways than one, for example, why is the story the most popular genre among children? Perhaps because its extension allows the child's memory to retain it, perhaps because some children who are fans of the genre still do not read by themselves and need someone to read or "tell the story", a dynamic that continues to link the literary story with its ancestor, the oral story.

The childlike perspective as another perspective, transgressive of the tradition, opens up suggestive questions about the presence of the child in literature, but we must bear in mind that this is only one of the editions of the literary child, since there are others, even opposed to this one, in which the child characters are inheritors of thoughts, traditions and tragedies that are delivered to them through the blood, literary children so well aligned to the system in which they are born, that they are incapable of making the slightest question, no because they do not detect the vices or weaknesses of their world, but because nothing can be done before them, nothing but repetition. For example, in "The proletarian child", young offenders follow the ideas imposed by their class to the letter. In this story, schoolchildren are determined by the social structures to which they belong. The text shows that it is not the same to be a child of the upper class, as a "proletarian child", making it clear that children are not free from social stratification. In certain literature of the twentieth century where children appear as victims, a cultural idea might be operating in which infant innocence depends on the class to which the infant belongs; that is, if the child belongs to the marginal class, the children will not only have sexual activity, but will be sexually and laborly exploited by the representatives of the upper classes. Thus, while a high-class girl is expected to be "innocent" until her marriage and protected in her father's house, lower-class children appear on the streets, in mines or as victims of rapes and exploitation, not only exercised by adults, but by other children, but of privileged social class.

Child as a victim of the chasms between classes or aesthetics of misery

An example of how a child character does not escape the tragedy of his class, we find it in the story "The hatch number 12" of Baldomero Lillo, in which the only inheritance of the infant is the family disgrace, which is the same as live all the families of your class. Here the described poverty reaches tragic tones because the one that suffers is a miserable one of only eight years of age, given to the foreman of the mine by his father. The literary child also functions as an agitator of consciences, as that which moves the reflection and stops the inertia that makes us perceive as common what should horrify us. When the one who suffers the misery is a child, that acquires greater dimensions, perhaps tragic or terrible, since the misfortune of a person condemned to the abuses and unable to defend himself moves a feeling of discomfort in the reader-witness, who can not and to look away. Nora Pasternac in "Writing Childhood" warn that contrary to the literature that draws childhood as "that field of happy memories where tranquility, tenderness, affection, love corresponded make up the myth of the "lost paradise" (17), there is another vision of childhood that presents it as" a space of horror, emptiness, abandonment and separation from parents. This is how a childish space of fright has been constituted, which opposes the previous interpretation of childhood as a happy redoubt "(Pasternac, 17). Studying the space in which the children's characters of literature move can be useful to discover the type of childhood that is represented in it. Because when a child character does not stick to the walls of the father's house, framing what might seem natural for a child, we are far from an innocent and protected childhood, which has been erased to make way for children in the street, in an environment of labor exploitation, in the orphanage or even in the hands of an authoritarian regime. We already know that in many countries we have not been able to protect children from the streets, prostitution, child labor or the ravages of violence. Literature also knows it and represents it in its own way. The child character can be surrounded by adults who are in charge of their vigilance and care, but who do not always provide, as expected, an environment of security and affection; but, on the contrary, they are those same adult characters, relatives or tutors, those who exploit them, punish or expose them to the most terrible situations. Jones (1968) makes a study of the novel where the narrator is a girl who lives in misery, looking for food in the garbage dumps of the city, fighting for trash with the vagabonds, dogs and cats; in this context of misery, hunger and pestilence, the girl is not worth more than an animal.

Jones (1968) explains that through the infantile gaze of the girl "the fictionalized reality expands, intensifies and enlarges and, in doing so, appears as grotesque, raw and torn, in a faithful portrait of what it is" (203). The researcher adds that Jara's work is presented from the marginality of marginality: […] where the struggle for survival is more fierce, since it is outside those margins. This would somehow correspond to a stylistic and, mainly, aesthetic level, since the most nauseating and raw of extreme poverty is exposed in Montacerdos from within itself, creating what might be called a literary aesthetic of misery. (294) Jones (1968) believes that by narrating from the child's perspective the misery, a particular aesthetic is created, narrating the marginal from the most marginal figure: a poor girl, has stylistic consequences in the story. In her doctoral thesis, Andrea Mariana Jeftanovic wonders how, without the protection expected from parents, the children's characters survive war, exploitation, dictatorships, "in short the violation of human rights that always allude to the cruelty of the human nature, but that, without a doubt, becomes tragic and raw when it is lived by a child or when it is seen from his eyes "(10). In The Great Notebook (1986) by the Hungarian writer Agota Kristof, children protagonists, twin brothers, have to learn to survive in the worst conditions: in the middle of a war and under a training consisting of the hardening of the body and the spirit so as not to feel the physical or the spiritual pain. The twins have the will to survive in the most difficult of scenarios for a couple of children: abandoned by the mother, with a father in the front of war, a grandmother who does not believe in protection and mimes as strategies to raise children and in the middle of a war that forces them, even, to sacrifice the father to save himself and to glimpse a hope for the future. The child character is active, his movements are intense and his actions passionate and committed to justice. A child character, when he realizes the injustices of the world in which he lives, will try to stop the inertia of that chaotic space that came with his birth and from which no one has asked his opinion. A child protagonist who is a witness and victim of a hierarchical, violent and, therefore, painful world, like the one in The great notebook, will seldom stay with his arms crossed; rather, its tendency is towards action: survival, revenge, transformation, that's why its presence in these stories is crucial. The child is the one who observes in silence or who pretends not to be listening, sometimes asks, sometimes he keeps for himself what he sees and hears; but he is often not taken into account, he is not listened to, he is not asked if he agrees or not with the situations he lives, for all of this, he is located in the margin, but he almost never resigns to that situation, because it seeks to adapt to what is presented to it or tries, under its own methods, to give another face to its reality, it will help with imagination, fantasy or insight to modify its environment. Which is the case of Kristof's novel.

There are, then, writers who provide crude views of childhood in a modern era that is supposed to have made people aware of the importance and responsibility that falls on the adult who has in his hands the care of a child. Even the school, as a space where the child is protected and where it is prepared for adult life, has been presented in literature as a space of abuse among children and suffering for those who suffer the harassment of their peers class. What little or nothing has to do with the idea of ​​pure and innocent childhood, or the "lost paradise" that is missed. We saw it, some literary texts show us some students capable of abusing others, of humiliating, discriminating, of repeating the behaviours and visions of their family environment, societies of small children as corrupt as adults. Texts that from the motive of child innocence, present other versions, even opposite. So we can say that the literature of the twentieth century has multiplied the faces of the child character, making it increasingly wide and complex, which should encourage us to deepen the study of this phenomenon and not ignore it or see it as a uniform mass , as it still happens. For this change in the configuration of the child character, necessarily has implications of style and meaning in the interior of the works.

Child on the border between two worlds

Special mention deserves the literary child located in borders of diverse nature (between different cultural or socioeconomic worlds, between different stages of life or between reality and fantasy); The child character in this vision of childhood opens wide frames to understand the reasons that have led this figure to be one of the most constant in modern literature. When standing on the dividing line, the child character can see both what happens on one side and what happens on the other, in such a way that his field of perception is comprehensive, expanding with him the possibilities of the narration that is made from your point of view. If we compare it with adults, the child, because of its youth, is a malleable being, with fewer preconceived ideas, more willing to discover and with greater ability to adapt to new circumstances, characteristics that have been transferred to children, whose versatility allows you to move and observe different situations, multiple characters and different real or imagined places. The child character can have a richer view of the narrated facts because his curiosity leads him to spy on others even in intimacy, that is why the child character keeps secrets, witnesses forbidden acts, is, in short, a literary resource that allows the writer to design ambiguous, novel stories of an aesthetic from the intensity and breadth of the child's gaze and, at the same time, an aesthetic of the multiplicity of visions because it makes clear that an object can be seen from very varied perspectives. In such a way that two or more perspectives can coexist in the same story motivating the reader to be attentive or disturbing because the perspectives can be, even, contradictory. To clarify the idea, I will review some examples of the literature in which the figure of the child in different luminal functions is presented. In this picture of childhood on the border, the figure of the child can move between a contemporary and an indigenous world. In different works, as in the life of the authors, a child is born in a European culture, but grows among indigenous people of America, which allows him to learn the language and customs of that another group, which are recreated aesthetically through the memory and nostalgia of Ernesto, the protagonist of the novel, which in this case is not a small child, he is already fourteen years old, but he is not an adult either and he can still see and think as a child: "Yes, son. You see, as a child, some things that we adults do not see "(9). The child has two visions, two cultures, and tries to vindicate the indigenous tradition in which he was raised, but he does not find translation on the western horizon.

In this case, the child is not the communicating vessel between the two realities, but he tries. Perhaps the border location of the child makes him see realities that adults do not know or simply ignore, for example the suffering of people: "I was fourteen years old; I had spent my childhood in an alien house, always watched over by cruel people. The lord of the house, the father, had eyes with reddened eyelids and thick eyebrows; He liked to make those who depended on him suffer, servants and animals. Later, when my father rescued me and I wandered with him through the towns, I found that everywhere people suffered". The "Maria Angola" cried, perhaps, for all of them, from Cuzco. No one had seen more humiliated than that old man. At each stroke, the bell became more sad and sank into all things. (12) The child is, as described in the novel itself, "an Indian who looks white," looks like his "old friends from far away: Don Maywa, Don Demetrio Pumaylly, Don Pedro Kokchi … who brought me up, who did my heart similar to his "(50). The child's relationship with a culture that is not his birth goes a long way, because Ernesto not only had contact with the indigenous culture in his childhood, but he even became one of them.

The last scene of The Great Notebook, the one called "The Separation", is the most tangible example of how the children's protagonists stand on the border, in this case between their country at war and the neighbouring country. So that one of the twins manages to cross this division without being stopped by the security guards, the children sacrifice their father by passing him first. There is an explosion. We run to the wire with the other two boards and the cloth bag. Our Father is lying near the second barrier. Yes, there is a means of crossing the border: make someone else pass before one. Carrying the cloth bag, walking on the footsteps of the steps, passing over the inert body of our Father, one of us goes to the other country. The one who remains returns to the Grandmother's house. (191) We must take into account that although the twins are two characters, they are so close that we could say that it is only one, but unfolded. That is why I dare to think that a part of that terrible two-headed child who is capable of sacrificing his father to save himself leaves part in his country of origin and the other part in that of his neighbour, who does not live in the middle of the war. In this version of literary childhood, the child figure can be presented not only, as we saw, located on the border, but also, as a translator between the two worlds.

Thus, for example, Ernesto, protagonist of The deep rivers, tries to translate this universe of oppositions between the Indians and the landowners, since he knows both territories well and intends to describe them accurately, so when he cites some of the indigenous songs his artistic word is placed at the service of the memory of his childhood in the indigenous community, because that is the place where he finds relief for his sadness. The plot of the novel, although it follows domestic events such as the construction and decoration of the new palace, breakfasts on the golf course, travel, vacations, bullfights, meetings and parties of the lords, revels of the older children, the experiences of Julius in school or the problems of the lords with the servants, manages to penetrate, through the eyes of the child, into the miseries of the rich, the needs and tragedies of the poor, the death, oblivion, memory, memories, the double morality of a social class, dreams and writing as vehicles of revelation, all seen from a perspective that does not judge others, but strips them to be the reader who judges or justifies them. For many of the works in which the child appears are of a nature contrary to predetermination or the closed end.

This ability of children's characters to see more than adults, as already pointed out in the case of The deep rivers, defines the child's perspective as a narrative strategy that allows broad fields of perception and greater sensitivity to the other. For children nothing goes unnoticed, everything provokes them, everything suggests them, their interest and curiosity for objects and people do not run out, these characteristics of the child of flesh and blood are aestheticized in literature, allowing the narrator to design a character that he still experiences surprise and that, therefore, he can turn into something strange that which, before the accustomed look of the adult, goes unnoticed. Is the child character within literature come to be something like a lens that increases the dimensions of reality? Is it the amount of elements that the child character can see or the depth of his gaze that makes him the literary mechanism that transforms not everything he touches, but everything he sees? The range of the literary child is, without a doubt, wide. Nora Pasternac mentions that although the child's face in literature can be painted from the prodigy of angelism (The Little Prince) or misfortune (Dickens), we also find it in its diabolic facet (The other twist), and even stupid and evil (The Lord of the Flies) (34). To the spectrum of Pasternac could be added that of child-nation. In other literary works, the child is part of a national discourse that projects into the future and sees in the infant the seed of the future citizen (21). The researcher recalls that in Mexican literature we can associate the child with social movements such as the Revolution or the agrarian movement. From this perspective, modern literature presents children with the ability to fall in love, to seek and exercise power, to experience sexual pleasure, to suffer the loss of the beloved object, jealousy, envy, anger, shame, hidden desires, passions that for a long time they were considered alien to children's sensitivity.

3.2. Innocence of children in the novel

In modern novels, from a socio-legal point of view, childhood corresponds to the social group that is under the condition of minority, which in Chile extends between 0 and 18 years.

However, the age ranges used will vary according to the criteria that stand out (sexual maturity, criminal responsibility, faculty to work, etc.) within the framework of a society that wanted to think of childhood as a period defined by limits natural, forgetting the social and political nature of these boundaries. Currently, the issue of the age limits of childhood is especially controversial, not only in the academic world, but in everyday conversations, since children seem to get ahead and leave very soon to be and do what really belongs to them (Mayall, 2002). Thus, the social field of childhood studies is in constant conflict with a natural and moral world (or what the child should be). Therefore, as will be seen in more detail, it has been a controversial and complex field of work.

As in the case of other groups, whose social status has been historically devalued, in the study of childhood an affectivism has predominated (Giberti, 1997), which makes children be seen as inhabitants of a zoomorphic and animistic world, of contours diffuse, full of emotions and impulses not socialized or socialized. This is how the way in which it has habitually focused on children is the expression of intellectual tendencies that are no longer easily admissible in other areas, such as ethnic studies, gender studies, youth studies, etc. We refer, among other aspects, to the marked essentialism and naturalism that has characterized its study, to its universalization as a mere individual evolutionary stage, to the a-historical character of the concepts that surround it (Burman, 1994) and to its interpretation starting from an idealized model of the adult, by virtue of which it is constituted by negation or lack, almost like the exact reverse. Thus, the notion of childhood has corresponded, on the one hand, to a permanent essential object with respect to which science speaks in an ahistorical form and, on the other, the character of childhood has been pre-defined, as well as the ranges of normality and abnormality that characterize it, avoiding any question about the social and power relations in which it is involved. Citing Sandra Carli, "[…] childhood is a concept that is part of diverse types of work, ranging from the omission of the story of the transformations that affect it, from substantialist perspectives, and the absolute prescription of the status of childhood from professional interventions and disciplinary "(2002, p.13).

Recently, a defined field has begun to be recognized as the new social studies of childhood, initially emerging as a new anthropology or new sociology of childhood, but later understood as an interdisciplinary field to which history, geography has been incorporated , literature, psychology, social work, legal sciences and other disciplines. This field was configured as such in the European world, but it also exists in Latin America, even though there has not been such an explicit self-definition of the authors who participate in these emerging perspectives.

Childhood should be thought of as a social and historical institution, based on the sedimentation of meanings and material processes such as power relationships, corporality, temporality, spatiality, etc., around children (James & James, 2004; 2008a; 2008b). As a social institution, childhood has a public dimension expressed in scientific logic and practices, presence in the media, in political discourses, in legislation and in public policies, among others; in addition to a more private and daily dimension manifested in face-to-face relationships that occur within the family, in relationships between peers, in the conformation of child identities and in other spaces of the world of life. From this perspective, childhood is rather an abstract notion, different from children, which correspond to the historical subjects that inhabit the social space of childhood in a particular way, reproducing it, but also contributing to its structural transformation. Simultaneously, from the perspective of Mayall (2002), childhood does not allude to a particular subject, but is a relational concept, similar to that of gender, since it accounts for the historically configured relationships between children and the adult world. In a line similar to that of James and James, for Mayall these relations are manifested in a more public and social macro and in another more intimate and microsocial. Mayall (2002) works with the notion of generation, pointing to the historical experiences shared by certain cohorts and the potential to configure particular perspectives, identities or socio-political positions among them. However, for the author, the notion of generation also includes age relations, derived not from the constitution of historical cohorts, but from the differentiations that societies generate between children and adults, as subjects of different ages (similar to the notion of age classes, proposed by Bourdieu (1998). These generational differences are fundamental when analyzing childhood (and any age group), since they realize that there is no homogeneity, but a specific historical contextualization. Additionally, Mayall (2002) emphasizes the fact that children are located in a subordinate and dependent position with respect to adults, accepted by both parties, because it is assumed that they have not sufficiently developed their morality and autonomy. This is why an important part of the research work of Mayall (2002) is designed to design studies capable of making children visible as acute interpreters of social life and as moral agents, who do not act impulsively, but seek to legitimize their decisions based on of values ​​and of the affective commitment established with the others.

In a similar vein, other research conducted by the new social studies of childhood has begun to account for unsuspected moral, cognitive and social skills in children; since they have been traditionally investigated from overly rigid methodologies and based on disabling assumptions that make these competencies invisible.

The field of childhood in The Scarlet Letter: The invisible child, the forbidden child, the subject child

Recently, historiography has shown that the current conception of childhood is closely linked to modern rationality and ways of life and, in particular, to school and family. For both institutions one of their main purposes was to ensure the survival, training and physical and moral hygiene of the children. The cultivation of childhood began to be conceived as a task full of nuances and challenges, based on the principles of modern Childcare, Pedagogy, Pediatrics and Psychology. The school and the family, with the support of these disciplines, had to protect and correct the children, since they are characterized by an incomplete rationality. In addition, the risks of contagion between them are high, especially if it is a family or social environment seen as unhygienic in material and moral terms.

In the case of the family, the model of socialization of childhood has been based, in general, on the seclusion in the intimacy of the home, the parental authority and the safeguard with respect to external influences. In The Scarlet Letter, this model has not been completely lost, but rather has been replaced by a strong institutional presence, expressed in the interest of the State for the normalization of childhood, through compulsory schooling and the development of a socio-legal system of child protection. In Chile, the latter is made up of a network of public and private bodies that is based on the action of the courts (of minors and family) and is aimed at those who are in one or both of the poles of the abandoned child-delinquent child.

The current centrality of childhood in modern societies is characterized by a dual dynamic: they are preferred objects of protection, control and study, situating in them the maximum potentiality of progress or the decline of society, but at the same time children and adolescents tend to be invisible or opaque, in terms of their interpretations of reality and their ability to influence their environments. This paradox can also be seen in social policies, in areas such as health and education, which have had children and adolescents as their main targets. However, its link with children is rather indirect and compartmentalized, with children being fragmented and made invisible by the categories of beneficiaries with which these sectors operate. In contrast, the aforementioned socio-legal protection system directly guides its action towards childhood. However, this visibility of children and adolescents is made by declaring their danger or disability before a series of areas of decision and action relevant to social life.

In The Scarlet Letter children seem to be developing, at the same time, new values. Due, in part, to the influence of the media and the phenomena of cultural globalization, such as those related to respect for nature and the rights of people and non-discrimination. In The Scarlet Letter, for example, the notion of children's rights is being incorporated into their language and becoming, in some cases, a tool for vindication. This occurs with children who, by their own means, or resorting to the support of other adults, are denouncing their parents for physical abuse or their schools for discrimination, when these do not allow them to maintain their personal aesthetics or sexual preferences.

3.3. Pearl – innocent or demonic character?

As we read The Scarlet Letter, we see that the narrator does not fail to demonstrate in Pearl how the innocent pay for the sorrows and disappointments of adults. The situation she faces in the plot of history and the transformations she undergoes denounce the inhumane way in which that Puritan community has generated and raised her children. For a moment, Pearl was caught in the bonds of society, along with her mother. But as it grows, it gains its freedom by relating more and more to the world and therefore perceiving the limits imposed upon them. Because it is the fruit of adultery between Ester and the Reverend Dimmesdale, Pearl will find it difficult to live in Salem. Isolated by the evil society in which she lives, her mother, at a very high cost, will develop an independent character during the course of history. Pearl follows everything very closely. The reading of the plot leads us to think that she seems to be more of Esther's daughter than of Dimmesdale since Pearl does not live with her father: "All that rancour and passion, Pearl had inherited them, by inalienable right, from the heart of her mother , Ester. Mother and daughter were associated within the same circle of estrangement from human society "(Hawthorne, 1993, p. 87).

It is quite true that Esther sometimes doubts the identity of the daughter because of the child's great vivacity and imaginative capacity. "Heavenly Father – if you are still my father – what is this that I have played in the world?" (Hawthorne, 1993, p.88). But if we make a psychological analysis of the work, we may even say that it is Pearl who saves Esther from the damaging consequences she had suffered within that city full of dogmas and rules. Pearl represents Esther, as if through a kind of mirror of the time when one day she – Esther – was happy, before committing the "error". One day, Esther was happy and joyful as Pearl as a child. Hawthorne's narrator did not miss the opportunity to present Pearl as a character who all the time reacts hostile to the castrating and repressive procedure of the residents of Salem. As a child, she does not have the idea of ​​the code of laws that exists in that city, and her reactions often go against what her judges preach. His impulses of life and death, joy and sadness, are evident and impregnated, of course, in his human nature. Pearl is watched every day by Ester, her overprotective mother, even though she allows him, often, to act in favour of her own infantile impulses instead of making use of austere discipline.

Often, Pearl reveals herself as someone who accepts her loneliness – other children do not play with her. Considered as a small spirit, and even a demon, or a kind of amulet worn by a master of evil, among other references, Pearl customarily chastises little children with their cries and acts coldly before magistrates, who want to take her from her mother. A contrast between Esther and Pearl is also notorious: a child can not be subject to rules as his mother is. But for Puritan leaders, Pearl grows as a graft of evil, the fruit of sin and emblem and the product of error, not being seen well and not having the same right as other children. The irreverent character – as a child – puts at stake the whole dogmatic wall of Puritanism. The magistrates want to give it the nickname of being created in the image and likeness of the devil, however. The context in which Esther is inserted and in the circumstances in which she finds herself, leads her to ask a thousand questions and seek signs that help her improve her understanding of the Pearl. Pearl's disposition, revealed by her fanciful mind and her deprivation of the company of other children, made her develop her imagination even more. It is no coincidence that Pearl pays much attention to the scarlet letter stuck in her mother's breast, as she hears it telling her that it was God who sent her. Pearl also notices the secretive manner in which Dimmesdale behaves at the same time that she distrusts the affectionate way in which her mother refers to Dimmesdale when they talk in the forest. The growth of Pearl brings with it questions about its future. History shows us that it is being created by a sinful woman and therefore – as the narrator of the text translates about the opinions of the magistrates of Salem – unable to offer her an education under the religious principles of the community. On the assumption that Pearl, as we have already hinted, was of demonic ancestry, these good people argued, not without reason, that Christian zeal, which they felt for their mother's soul, demanded of them that the stumbling woman walk away from the unhappy woman.

If, on the other hand, the child was really capable of being educated morally and religiously and finally able to save himself, then, undoubtedly, in order to enjoy all these advantages, he would only profit from being transferred to a guard more knowing and virtuous than that of Esther Prynne. (Hawthorne, 1993, p. 91). The risk that this possibility brought to Esther made her, when she went to the palace of the governor of the colony to deliver the gloves that had ordered her, to seek to speak with some authority about the case. Aware of her right as a mother, she had been granted an audience with the governor, and given her ostentation of her residence, she had her feeling of guilt and defeat shaken. The game of mirrors, the reflections they see in the armour and decorations of the governor's hall are in charge of reinforcing this. Esther looked condescendingly at her daughter and noted that due to the particular effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet letter appeared in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, giving the impression of being the most prominent feature of its figure. […] Pearl pointed equally upward at an identical frame on her helmet and smiled at her mother with that intelligent expression of mischief that was peculiar to her. Also, this look of malicious satisfaction was reflected in the mirror, with such intensity of effect, that Esther judged not to be the image of her daughter, but rather to some urchin that had slipped into Pearl's garb (Hawthorne, 1993, p. 95).

Esther is taken from an insecurity constrained by her poor moral influence that comes to fear the custody of the child. Despite being the image of her sin of adultery, the girl is the only good thing she apparently brings with her after the tedious day of her punishment. The great opulence found in the governor's house further reinforces the character of a false and visible morality existing in New England. The old clergyman, raised in the rich bosom of the English church, had long had a taste for all good and comfortable things. […]But it is a mistake to suppose that our harsh avenges-though accustomed to speak and think of human existence as a state of pure trial and strife, and though sincerely disposed to sacrifice goods and life for duty-felt scruples to reject such means of comfort, or even luxury, when they had them at their disposal "(Hawthorne, 1993, p. 97). In the midst of this ostentatious atmosphere, concerns about the future of the young child lead the magistrates to raise an argument with Ester about Pearl's education. It is the dramatic effect as it is reported the conversation between the governor, the magistrates and Ester that makes clear the ability of the narrator to be under control of the whole scene. The reader follows everything, aware of the presence of all the characters during the moment of interrogation.

Bellingham, the Rev. Wilson, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth represent the upper classes of Salem: politics, the church, and science. They discuss what's best for Pearl's social welfare. The governor understands that Esther is not fit to continue with the daughter since she is a woman who does not defend good reputation in Salem. Ester Prynne, "he said, fixing his gaze naturally grim on the bearer of the scarlet letter," a great deal has been debated in recent times about you, namely, whether we, persons of authority and influence, will do well, discharging our consciences into a soul immortal, like that of your daughter, to someone who has practiced foolishness and allowed himself to be caught in the trap of this world (Hawthorne, 1993, p.99). Finding resistance in Esther's arguments about the natural right to raise her daughter and the sheer willingness to give in, the governor sought help from the church. He invited Reverend Wilson to assume that moment of persuasion. "Good Master Wilson, I beg you to examine this Pearl – for this is her name – and see if you know the Crest doctrine, as befits a child of your age" (Hawthorne, 1993, p.99).

Reverend Wilson, finding no favour in the eyes of Pearl who ironically refused to speak to her, understood that Pearl's posture was sufficient to confirm that the girl would need other care in order to grow in the faith they preached. "Poor woman! exclaimed the old minister softly, "the child will be well treated!" – much better than you can do! "(Hawthorne, 1993, 100). But Esther, not withstanding the pressure, was suddenly taken on impulse to ask young Dimmesdale to defend her, since he was her shepherd. Esther, in a deeper tone than the others can understand, denounces loud and clear that Dimmesdale knows what goes on in his heart more than anyone else. He is her partner in this error. He will be forced to leave his normal silent posture and speak. He has to defend it. "Speak for me! – shouted. He is my shepherd, he has my soul in his charge, he knows me better than these men "(Hawthorne, 1993, p. 101). At that moment the others were in complete silence except Roger who silently whispered some words in the magistrates' ears. Dimmesdale's weak, pale stance with his hand in his heart denounced the hypocrisy in which he lived-he was the child's own father. He who preached against adultery and every form of sin forgot to take his own mistake. Only he and Esther knew the truth. If the magistrates knew what was going on inside Dimmesdale, they would be sentenced to death. Thus, in his world of suffering, he defends the cause of that poor mother and convinces them that that daughter should belong to the mother entirely. It was a necessity of nature.

"What Esther says is true, how true is the feeling that inspires her! God gave him the child, and gave him, as well, an instinctive knowledge of the nature and requirements of the same child, as no other mortal can possess "(Hawthorne 1993: 101). The defence made Chillingworth stand out, as if he knew that Dimmesdale was the father of the child, the too serious way Dimmesdale protected Ester. In Chillingworth 's words the reader finds its vengefulness. He was the husband who had been betrayed by Esther and no one else knew. "But with what strange seriousness you speak, my friend, said old Chilingworth with a smile "(Hawthorne, 1993, p. 102). But Dimmesdale's cowardice is accentuated by the realization that he, even knowing who the father is – himself – still mentions the difficulty in which the child's father must live, away from his path and affection. "At this point the sinful mother is happier than the sinful father" (Hawthorne, 1993, p. 102). At the end of that scene, Pearl turns to her father as though she were spiritually oriented towards it, and strokes her hand with care, as never before. The moment was followed by a kiss and a tremendous joy on the part of Pearl. Reverend Wilson thought it best to make all men show brotherly tenderness toward the child and to give the solution of that questioning to providence. Replying to Chillingworth, he says: It would be sinful on such an issue, to be guided only by the guiding thread of profane philosophy, "said Reverend Wilson. – It is better to fast and pray for this purpose; preferable, perhaps, to leave the mystery as we find it, until it pleases providence to unravel it (Hawthorne 1993: 103). Although to the Puritans of Salem Pearl typifies Esther's sins of adultery and pride, they forget that she can also represent "God's mercy" in that context – since they are religious Christians.

Pearl can function for Esther as a means of "God's grace" in this way. It is she who seems to make sense of her mother's life and also reflects the struggle waged by Esther in her heart. In conversation with the governor and the leaders of the Puritans, Dimmesdale warns of the role his daughter has over her mother: believe that she solemnly acknowledges the miracle that God worked by giving birth to her daughter. And she also feels – and I think she is in the Truth – that this divine gift is destined, above all else, to keep alive the soul of the mother, to keep her from falling into the black abysses of sin (Hawthorne, 1993, p. 103) Somehow, Pearl contrasts with the pessimism that dominates that community. His personality comes to play the sad monotony of life in which it is inserted in the form of hope: it does not allow itself to be carried away by the feeling of inferiority and the low self-esteem that dominates the people of that place. It presents the optimistic side of the world and the man, facing the life that oppresses him.

Would Pearl be the representation of a new generation of citizens of that society, this time free from the dogmas and rules that hypocritically controlled that people? The narrator makes it clear that Pearl is precious because it was generated at a great price and at a high cost. Isolated by the society in which she lives, Pearl can demonstrate affection and affection towards Dimmesdale and Ester, her mother. She seems ready to love and be loved, unlike the other characters in the novel. As we may say, the presence of Pearl also suggests that it is the result of the death of the first Esther, the one that had been condemned on the scaffold of the square. Esther's care for Pearl – the way she dresses her with multicoloured clothes and embroidery – indicates a kind of desire to live, beyond any circumstance, in a pure, free, affective and natural way. Pearl not only reflects Esther's moral transgression – as the residents of Salem want – but also represents all the strength that Esther has to fight. Pearl is a kind of armour that Esther uses in her favour in society. Flanked by her mother, until she becomes an adult, Pearl will seek her own way, this time away from the walls of Salem, yet taking with her all the psychological ills she had inherited from the Puritan world. At the end of the reading of the novel we realize that Hawthorne uses Esther to assert the same truth that he declared in The House of the Seven Towers (1848): no error in our mortal sphere will ever be repaired (Hawthorne, 1960).

Speaking of this irony, Ousby and Lessing write, it is the "negative mystique of the ages without God" (1993, p.114), which constitutes the attitude truly able to ensure the objectivity of the novel that seems to be realized in the unrealizable. To conclude this part of the study – regarding the posture of the characters we have just analyzed in The Scarlet Letter of Hawthorne – and to illustrate its importance, we bring to our memory an important quotation offered by Bakhtin (1998), about the novel: One of the main inner themes of the novel is precisely the theme of a character's inadequacy to his destiny and his situation. Man is either superior to his destiny or inferior to his humanity. […] Man is not fully embodied in the historical socio-historical substance of his time. There are no forms that could fully embody all human possibilities and demands, where he could give his all to the last word – as the epic hero. […] There is always a surplus of unrealized man. […] The character of the novel, as a rule, is ideological in a lesser or greater degree. But what can not be denied is the presence of love – Eros – since time immemorial in the North American regions of New England. This "love" is so old when the existence of the first human being on the surface of the earth. It is good to know that the arrows that struck Esther and Arthur have the same origin of the arrows that today affect people in the modern world as well – if we can say. Let us read, then, what we have to say about the performance of Eros in the life of the Salemites, and especially in the lives of our two main heroes: Esther and Dimmesdale.

The concept of childhood oscillates between the demonic and the divine. The child was fundamentally "a gift of God", and its divine origin, made any rejection considered a "sacrilege". That being of divine origin came, however, charged with "bad impulses" that had to be "dominated with tenderness but firmly" and against whom there was no need to give up, because any triumph in this sense would lead to misfortune. Although the child was the responsibility of the parents, it was the mother who was directed, almost always, the advice on how to treat it. (Bakhtin, Iswolsky, 1998: 223). We have said previously that the child has to be under the orders and needs of the adult, because it is considered as an imperfect being to be corrected, hence the importance that arises from the teachers in terms of the education of these incomplete beings, because infants were considered mouldable clubs that were given a coherent order to perform well in society, this need to educate (or rather domesticate) the child at an early age, was to make him a being of well and achieve perfection. "Parents, teachers and priests appear as the educating trinity of the time and are those pillars in which society deposited the responsibility of perfecting those malleable and imperfect, unreflective and fragile beings and channelling them along the path of rational and Christian life" ( Piedrhita, 2003, page 61)

Continuing with the theme, in America, the conception of childhood specifically in the city of Bogotá was considered as: "the demonic or divine child, angel or devil, immaculate flower, morning dew, tree that must be taken care of and prevented from tabula rasa in which we must print the benefits of the adult world "(Piedrhita, 2003, page 53) but in the middle (1930-1950) has an evolution, the child is already taken into account, his needs begin to be respected and given an own space where it can be developed properly if it is allowed. In the sixties, the upbringing had an evolution in the method of formation, because the dialogue that previously did not take place in the families happens to make a fundamental fact in the family nucleus, where the child would not be a stranger living together under the same roof , but will become part of this, as Pifer (2000) says "The balance of the child begins to associate with the high degrees of emotion, affection and love within the family nucleus, being able to demonstrate the affective revolution that should be live (…) "(Pifer, 2000: 163). These parenting dynamics were based or influenced by the North American methodologies where they were adapted according to the needs of society, in the magazine Your New Baby that was published regularly in the newspaper The Time, this one focused mainly on the "topic of the early childhood in a stable nuclear context … ". The new parenting dynamics that were received and established in American society meant that the child had more to do from the moment of his birth, since he was already thinking about his sensitivity, the development of his senses, his diet, his sleep, the sexual life and until the time that should be dedicated to the infant. These new guidelines, in a certain way begin to question parents and their skills in raising children. That said, from the family environment begins to think and reflect on education, because an early initiation in education makes the child develop skills that enrich their experiences.

Parents, who were previously unaware of their children's education and training, are now physically as well as emotionally involved, moving away from the time when the child was considered an imperfect object, mouldable, without needs, to win the trust of the child. small by means of dialogue and understanding of this. The mothers who remained most in relation to the child were asked to "once they discovered discomfort in the children they had to look for the causes of the same" (Pifer, 2000: 66). Due to this event the concept of mother also changes since she is no longer considered an educated mother but as a mother knew, because she had scientific knowledge about feeding, nurturing, education and health. All these changes reverberated so that the concept of childhood changed, as had been said previously, the thought and desire to have a perfect child begins to fade, opening the way to a free and independent childhood.

From this change, appears the protection of the infant in charge of the municipal, departmental and national institutions. The education that was previously of religious orientation becomes a bilingual education, the games went from performing in the mansions to go out and parks, all this thanks to this evolution of childhood concept in which "The family and the school they became operating models and replaced the convent and barracks of the beginning of the century "( Pifer, 2000: 63).

Childhood and its relationship with the sinister

Now we know that childhood is a fundamental stage for the physical and emotional development of the child; where this is seen as something pure, innocent, vulnerable, smiling, (among other qualities), but if you only talk about childhood from this point of view, you would be denying that part where childhood is also pain, terror, anguish , uncertain, destructive, violent and sometimes evokes death, where "Childhood is the time where the unnameable arises, where the terror of the uncertain covers the child's body, and language gives it the place of psychic structuring" (Jentsch, 2010, p. 71).

Ernst Jentsch (1997) calls the sinister as that which is unknown and novel, where there is an intellectual uncertainty in which the subject can not locate or orient itself, but Freud indicates that not everything new and unfamiliar is terrifying, so that this happens he has to add something to that unfamiliar that leads him to do "ominous"; an example that comes to the case and quoted by Freud of E. Jentsch is the following: "the doubt about whether a being apparently alive is animated, and conversely if a certain inert thing can not have a soul" (Freud, 2017), since the uncertainty of knowing whether it is alive or not is an element that adds to the situation and makes it become or become ominous, which should be mentioned the relationship between the text of E. Jentsch and E.T.A. Hoffmann with regard to the figure of the automaton in his work "Der Sandmann" (The Sandbox), because in this story we can find a wide variety of detonating elements that fit within the concept of the "sinister" where childhood collects such images and they are located in the unconscious thus generating traumas; For one of the greatest fears of childhood that has a great impact on adulthood is to be in contact with inanimate objects that seem to have their own movements, such an example is when young Nataniel falls in love with a beautiful woman named Olimpia, the daughter of the old Spalanzani mechanic, in which later Nataniel discovers that his beloved was always a mechanical being, an "automaton", generating a fact of total anguish and ending with the fatal suicide of the young lover.

Freud also mentions Hoffmann emphasizing a traumatic event that is relevant within the concept of the sinister, since he affirms that the fact of the loss of the eyes is an action that marks the unconscious of the human being, because "The psychoanalytic experience reminds us that hurting one's eyes or losing one's sight is an effect of terrible infantile anguish. This fear persists in many adults, to whom no mutilation frightens as much as the eyes (…), the fear of being blind is a frequent substitute for the anguish of castration”.

CONCLUSION

The Scarlet Letter is a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, written in 1850. It is framed in the puritan New England of the early seventeenth century. It tells the story of Hester Prynne, a woman accused of adultery and condemned to carry in her chest an "A" letter, of an adulteress, that marks her. She does not reveal the identity of her daughter's father, and tries to live in an unjust and hypocritical society with dignity. In the novel, Hawthorne deals with the themes of divine grace, justice and punishment.

The historical context and the religious-spiritual climate in which the story unfolds have a more than remarkable importance in the unfolding of the facts and in the evolution of the characters, whose lives take place in very specific historical circumstances, perfectly known by the author of the novel. In the first place, the chronological arc and the geographical place in

which the events take place: in Boston, in the colony of Massachusetts, between 1642 and 1649; that is, in the territory of New England. The first stable settlement of the English in North America took place in 1607, in Jamestown, by the hand of John Smith, north of Cape Hatteras, calling Virginia that first colony, in honour of Elizabeth I Tudor, the "virgin queen"

The moral and religious concern occupies prominent place in the work of the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. This characteristic has been the main guide of the writer's criticism, leading to often reductionist approaches to his writing. Thus, the most common tendency has so far been to read Hawthorne as a mere proponent of Puritan ideals. Such a tendency shows itself to be reductionist in that it neglects the influence of another stream of thought on the writer's work: transcendentalism. If on the one hand, for Hawthorne Puritanism represented ancestry and tradition, on the other, transcendentalism was the possibility of renewal of moral and individual values. In this way, it is perceived that Hawthorne lived between two worlds, sometimes flirting with the past (Puritanism), or with the future (transcendentalism). This position allowed him, often, to act as an observer and critic on both sides. In the short stories "The Artist of the Beautiful" and "The Wooden Image of Drowne," Hawthorne reveals his progressive side and assumes the critical posture of Puritanism or, as Stuart Pratt Sherman suggests, "a critic of Puritanism from the point of view transcendentalist. "(MILLS, 1948, p. 72) This position can be confirmed by analyzing divergent points between the two schools of thought regarding the subject of creation. The relevance of this theme lies in its various implications from the biblical perspective of Genesis, among which I cite the sin of pride or pride, the doctrine of inherited sin, and the view of women as a threat to morality. According to some critics, Hawthorne shared these Puritan principles.

As a brief conclusion we can say that childhood and the concept of it had a transformation throughout history, since childhood was seen as something that should be corrected, repaired and shaped, where emotions of fear and Anxiety was present in the children but perhaps they should be repressed in order to fulfil the expectations of the adults; but not as a being who felt and had rights that determined him as an autonomous and independent person capable of analyzing and making his own decisions. This look begins to be attributed to the child when he recognizes natural aspects as his own.

SECOND PART: LESSON PLAN

1. Aims and objectives

1. While reading Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter students will consider the issues of crime and punishment, morality vs. legality, and personal responsibility.

2. Students will demonstrate their understanding of the text on four levels: factual, interpretive, critical and personal.

3. Students will define their own viewpoints on the aforementioned themes.

4. Students will gain a better understanding of Puritan theocracy and its effects on ordinary citizens.

5. Students will study the use of symbolism in The Scarlet Letter.

6. Students will be given the opportunity to practice reading aloud and silently to improve their skills in each area.

7. Students will answer questions to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of the main events and characters in The Scarlet Letter as they relate to the author's theme development.

8. Students will enrich their vocabularies and improve their understanding of the novel through the vocabulary lessons prepared for use in conjunction with the novel.

9. The writing assignments in this unit are geared to several purposes:

a. To have students demonstrate their abilities to inform, to persuade, or to express their own personal ideas

Note: Students will demonstrate ability to write effectively to inform by developing and organizing facts to convey information. Students will demonstrate the ability to write effectively to persuade by selecting and organizing relevant information, establishing an argumentative purpose, and by designing an appropriate strategy for an identified audience. Students will demonstrate the ability to write effectively to express personal ideas by selecting a form and its appropriate elements.

b. To check the students' reading comprehension

c. To make students think about the ideas presented by the novel

d. To encourage logical thinking

e. To provide an opportunity to practice good grammar and improve students' use of the English language.

10. Students will read aloud, report, and participate in large and small group discussions to improve their public speaking and personal interaction skills.

2. Methods and strategies

Materials used

It is important for the teacher to find accessible and interesting material that will help in achieving "parallels between the trajectories of fiction and the trajectories of an individual life" (Showalter 89). Using the teaching methodology along with authentic material will help on creating a communicative session that will incorporate both sides, teacher and students. Taking into consideration the issue of coverage and time, Chambers and Marshall say that "it is less time-consuming to direct students to some explanatory source material when possible rather than explain something fully oneself" (178). As a result, the teacher's use of teaching material will help the teacher save time, engage students, and deliver the message. The materials that will be selected to teaching Hawthorne's book are then:

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

A Teacher's Guide to the Signet Classic Edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter by Elizabeth Poe

List of adjectives that start with the letter "A"

Red cardboard letter "A", and pins

The way the listed materials will be used in class will be demonstrated in the activities section of the paper.

According to Beach et al, an important factor that affects the choice of activities is the background of the students (71). It is essential to figure out where the students come from, and how they might respond to a certain text that reflects a certain issue. In a case like teach ing The Scarlet Letter to non-American high school students, Lebanese in particularly, it is quite essential to find an activity that will help the students relate to the text since culture can be a very difficult barrier in letting the students get engaged. The Letter "A" that Hester Prynne wears will be a core to the activities that will be used in class through letting the students guess the meaning of the letter, in addition to letting them wear it out of experience. The activities are discussed in details in the Appendix. The Penguins Teachers' Guide to The Scarlet Letter also contains many "Before you read" questions that can be used in order to create a debate during the first phase of teaching the novel.

3. Stages of the lesson

In planning a literature lesson or class, coverage of information seem to cause an anxiety to the teacher, as Elaine Showalter suggests: "amount of literary knowledge and the finite amount of academic time come together in worries about course coverage" (12). It is, then, a crucial decision to decide how many sessions will be specified for a certain text, taking into consideration the quantity and the quality of teaching. The teaching of The Scarlet Letter will be divided into three phases, each phase takes certain number of sessions, knowing that time given for literature teaching is 4 hours per week. The first phase (one session) will introduce the book and the historical period when the book was written. The second phase (three sessions) will explore the themes of the novel and will focus on debates. The third phase (one session) will feature extraction of conclusions and response of students, in addition to paper assignment.

Evaluation and Assignments

The third phase of teaching The Scarlet Letter features a final recap on the novel by the teacher where conclusions will be drawn by the students. Yet, assessing the students will be a simple issue. Beach et al. emphasize that "[i]n evaluating students, [the teacher is] judging their performance based on what [he or she] value[s] in their ability to understand and produce literature and media texts" (224). The assessment stage should then be done by comparing the results to the objectives set in the lesson plan, and accordingly, evaluating the students should be selected upon the results. It is a benefit for the student that literature has no correct or wrong answers, but such an issue is not easy for the teacher who has to be fair in evaluating their students away from the criteria of right-or-wrong. A good way to avoid this issue is giving the students an essay writing that reflects their understanding and critical analysis of the given text. In the case of The Scarlet Letter, the students will get an essay as an assignment. However, there will be no one question to answer; and the students will pick the question that they think is the most suitable for them. However, the essay will be evaluated by the teacher according to: retelling the events of the story; or explaining characters' actions; the criteria the students will use in comparing and contrasting characters; link the studied work to a work they might have studied earlier in the course; using references from the novel; and their logical and persuasive techniques in discussing their ideas. Oral discussion is also as important as the written one. Students will also be assigned topics to present orally in class in pairs. The evaluation of their performance will be based upon their communicative skills; sequencing of ideas; content of the presentation; and critical persuasive techniques.

4. Annexes

Teacher's Name:

Course:

Class: Grade 10 Number of Students:

Students with Special Needs: None

Lesson: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Estimated Time: Five Sessions

Objectives:

By the end of this chapter, the students will be able to:

Critically discuss and defend their positions and opinions.

Build a coherent and logical arguments and opinions

Know the social and religious structure of 17th and 19th century America

Have their own perspectives on the different themes of the novel

Use new words in complete and meaningful sentences

Material

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

A Teacher's Guide to the Signet Classic Edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter by Elizabeth Poe

List of adjectives that start with the letter "A"

Red cardboard letter "A", and pins

Lesson Outline

Phase One (One Session approx. 2 hours)

Motivating Activity (15 minutes): The teacher will pass for the students a list of adjectives starting with the letter "A". Each student will be asked to pick up an adjective that they think it relates to them, and justify why. Upon answering, each student will get a red cardboard made letter "A" and will get to pin it on their chest.

Before You Read Questions (30 minutes): In a whole class discussion, the teacher will discuss with the students the following questions excerpted and inspired from A Teacher's Guide to the Signet Classic Edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter by Elizabeth Poe:

Perhaps some of you have heard of The Scarlet Letter or even read it. If so, what have you heard about the novel?

Have you ever heard about someone who was branded with a letter or an adjective?

What is adultery? Where have you heard of the term? And what is your personal position of it?

How would you describe the difference between a "sin of passion" and a "sin of principle"?

Do you believe that someone might be right while the whole socie- ty might be wrong?

Answers of the questions may vary according to students. Each question will be given approximately 6-7 minutes of discussion.

Discussing the Historical Era of the Puritans in America (20 minutes): The teacher will introduce some of the main principles and characteristics of the Puritans in America.

Introducing Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Background of writing The Scarlet Letter (20 minutes): The teacher will give a brief on Hawthorne's biography in addition to the circumstances that governed his writing of the discussed work.

Introducing the themes of the novel and discussing them with the students (30 minutes): In a whole class discussion, the teacher and the students will discuss the three main themes of the novel, linking them to the students' own personal experiences.

Alienation: Ask if any of the students have ever felt neglected or alienated.

Appearance vs. Reality: Do the students believe that things are not always as they seem to be?

Breaking Society's Rules: Should we as humans abide to the rules of the society? Is the society always right and individuals wrong? What is the students' position with respect to sexual relationships and what governs them?

Assignment: For next session the students will be assigned to:

Read the first six chapters of The Scarlet Letter

Write a one-paragraph response of what they have read.

Phase Two (Three Sessions approx. 6 hours) Session One (2 hours)

A Fast Recap of the introductory session (5 minutes): The teacher will ask students about what happened during the previous session and what they have covered in class.

Listening to the Students Response of the first six chapters of The Scarlet Letter (35 minutes): The teacher will randomly select 7 students to read their assignment and response to the first six chapters of the book. The teacher will discuss with the student reading what he or she has written, and encourage other students to compare their ide- as with their colleagues.

Reading Important Excerpts from the first six chapters of The Scarlet Letter (40 minutes): The teacher will assign important passages and excerpts from chapters 1-6 from the book. During the reading the teacher will ask the students to explain a certain passage and to give their own opinion about what the passage is about. During the reading, the teacher will ask the students to underline new words.

Vocabulary Group Work to extract meanings of new words (25 minutes): In group of three, the students will be given ten minutes to extract the meaning of new words using a dictionary. The next fifteen minutes will be used to list the meaning of new words. Students presenting will be asked to use the new words in a meaningful complete sentences.

Assignment: For the next session, the students will be assigned to:

Read Chapters 7-14 from The Scarlet Letter

Underline new words and extract their meaning to present them in class in the next session.

Write one paragraph discussing the Character of Chillingworth and their own response.

Session Two (2 hours)

A Fast recap of the introductory session and the first six chapters of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (10 minutes): The teacher will ask a few students to pre- sent a recap of what they have learned so far.

A brief synopsis of the assigned chapters (5 minutes): The teacher will select students to tell the class what they have read in the assigned chapters (7-14).

Reading Important Excerpts from the chapters 7-14 of The Scarlet Letter (40 minutes): The teacher will assign important passages and excerpts from chapters 7-14 from the text. During the reading the teacher will ask the students to explain a certain passage and to give their own opinion about what the passage is about. The importance of the setting in the novel in relation to the psychology of the characters will be highlighted by the teacher using the excerpts.

Vocabulary Homework discussion and activity (20 minutes): The teacher will ask the students about the words they have found difficult and for their meanings. The students will use the words in meaningful sentences.

Discussing the character of Chillingworth (30 minutes): The teacher will select stu- dents to read their response on Chillingworth. Then in a whole class discussion, the class will discuss whether they believe that Chillingworth has the right to do what he is doing and why.

Assignment: For the next session, the students will be asked to:

Read the final chapters of The Scarlet Letter

Write two paragraph discussing whether Hester has turned to be a good or a bad person to the students and why.

Session Three (2 hours)

A Fast Recap of all what have been covered so far (10 minutes): The teacher and the students will discuss together what they have covered so far.

Reading Important Excerpts from the final chapters of The Scarlet Letter (45 minutes): The teacher will assign important passages and excerpts from the remaining chapters from the book. During the reading the teacher will ask the students to explain a certain passage and to give their own opinion about what the passage is about. Hawthorne's use of symbolism will be discussed by the teacher during this phase.

Evaluating Hester Prynne (40 minutes): The teacher will ask students to come and present the paragraphs they have written on Hester. The teacher will open the floor for debates between students to discuss whether Hester is considered to be "Good" or "Bad" and why.

In Class Activity (20 minutes): Students will be given 10 minutes to write a short paragraph discussing whether they believe that the adjective they yielded to them- selves in the introductory session is still of importance to them. The remaining ten minutes will be yielded for in class discussion of the written paragraphs.

Graded Assignments:

The Students will be asked to write an essay on one of the following topics:

Discuss the importance of the setting in reflecting the psychological development of Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth.

Do you think that Hester would have survived in 21st century Lebanon? Elaborate with examples and valid discussion.

Discuss Hawthorne's use of symbolism in The Scarlet Letter.

Prepare an oral presentation on one of the following topics:

Religion and Human Individualism

Belief vs Extremism

Literature as a mirror of the society

Phase Three (One Session approx. 2 hours)

Extracting Conclusions and Responses (20 minutes): The teacher will ask students to sum up and draw conclusions from The Scarlet Letter. The students will also be asked to give their final and overall response to the novel in brief.

In Class Presentations (100 minutes): The remaining time will be yielded to the Stu- dents' oral presentations. The written assignments will be collected by the teacher at the end of the session.

The written assignments will be graded according to: retelling the events of the story, explaining characters' actions, the criteria the students will use in comparing and con- trusting characters, link the studied work to a work they might have studied earlier in the course, using references from the novel, and their logical and persuasive techniques in discussing their ideas.

Oral Presentations will be graded according to the students': communicative skills, sequencing of ideas, content of the presentation, and critical persuasive techniques.

REFERENCES

Arendt, Hannah. "The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man." (2009).

Arendt, Hannah. The jewish writings. Schocken, 2009.

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich, and Helene Iswolsky. Rabelais and his World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.

Bourdieu, P. (1998). The distinction. Judgment and social bases of taste. Madrid: Taurus.

Burman, E. (1994). The deconstruction of evolutionary psychology. Madrid: Viewer

Carli, S. (2002). The memory of childhood. Buenos Aires: Paidós.

Chevalier, Jean, et al. Dictionary of symbols. Barcelona: Herder, 1995.

Coale, Samuel Chase. In Hawthorne's shadow: American romance from Melville to Mailer. University Press of Kentucky, 2015.

del Pino, Carlos Castilla. Introduction to psychiatry: Psycho (duck) logy. General problems Alliance, 1993.

Feidelson, Charles. "Symbolism and American literature." (1954).

Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: The 1905 Edition. Verso Books, 2017.

Fullerton, Kemper. "Calvinism and capitalism." Harvard Theological Review 21.3 (1928)

Giberti, E. (1997). Childhood and politics. In E. Giberti (Comp.), Policies and childhood (pp.23-113). Buenos Aires: Losada

Goodenough, Elizabeth, Mark A. Heberle, and Naomi B. Sokoloff, eds. Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature. Wayne State University Press, 1994.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The scarlet letter. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Jeftanovic, Andrea Mariana. The representation of children in Ibero-American literature: the cases of La Troppa, Fagundes Telles, Lispector, Lobo Antunes. University of California, Berkeley, 2005

Jellinek, Michael S., Schuyler W. Henderson, and Steven I. Pfeiffer. "The gifted: Clinical challenges for child psychiatry." Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 48.8 (2009)

Jentsch, Ernst. "On the psychology of the uncanny (1906)." Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 2.1 (1997)

Jones, Edward Harrell, ed. Outlines of Literature: Short Stories, Novels, and Poems. Macmillan, 1968.

Mayall, B. (2002). Towards a sociology for childhood. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

O’Toole, Kevin, and Anna Macgarvey. "Rural women and local economic development in south-west Victoria." Journal of Rural Studies 19.2 (2003)

Ousby, Ian, and Doris Lessing. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English: Forewoerd by Doris Lessing. Cambridge Univ Pr, 1993.

Pasternac, Nora, Writing the childhood, The College of Mexico, 1996.

Pifer, Ellen. Demon or doll: images of the child in contemporary writing and culture. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.

Rousseau, George. Nervous acts: essays on literature, culture and sensibility. Springer, 2004.

Schiller, Friedrich. On the naive and sentimental in literature. Carcanet New Press, 1981.

Stewig, John W. Children and literature. GNP Crescendo, 1980

Wordsworth, William. The Poems of William Wordsworth. Edward Moxon, 1847.

Wright, Bradley E. "Public-sector work motivation: A review of the current literature and a revised conceptual model." Journal of public administration research and theory 11.4 (2001).

Xirau, Ramón. Introduction to the history of philosophy. Unam, 2000.