Puritan Projections In Nathaniel Hawthorn's "The Scarlet Letter" And Stephen King's "Carrie"
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.21.1.5Keywords:
Puritans, guilt, witch, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Stephen King, CarrieAbstract
It is considered that the Puritans that populated New England in the 17th century left a distinctive mark on the American culture. The article explores some projections of Puritan legacy in two American novels of different periods – Nathaniel Hawthorn's The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Stephen King's Carrie (1974). After establishing a connection between the Puritan writings and gothic literature, the two novels are analyzed in terms of some Puritan projections, among which are the problem of guilt and the acceptance of an individual in the society. Some references regarding the idea of the witch and the interpretations it bears, especially in terms of the female identity, are also identified. Despite the different approach of the authors in terms of building their characters, those references are mostly used in a negative way, as an instrument of criticism and exposing inconvenient truths.
References
Adams, G. A. (2008). The Specter of Salem. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226005423.001.0001
Anastasova, M. (2019). The Suspense of Horror and the Horror of Suspense. Cambridge Scholar Publishing.
Aqeeli, A. (2020). A lost Lady: A Narrative of “Manifest Destiny†and Neocolonialism. English Studies at NBU, 6(1), 111-126. https://doi.org/10.339191/esnbu.20.1.5
Bercovitch, S. (1991). Investigations of an Americanist. The Journal of American History, 78(3), 972-987. https://doi.org/10.2307/2078798
Bloom, H. (Ed.) (2011). Bloom’s Guides: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter - New Edition. Infobase Publishing.
Boyer, P. & Nissenbaum, S. (1974). Salem Possessed. Harvard University Press.
Collar, C. (2017, September 25). Puritans, Periods, and the Patriarchy. Medium. https://medium.com/s/secret-history-of-feminism-in-film/puritans-periods-and-the-patriarchy-fbcd12fe28cd
Demos, J. (2004). Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England, updated edition. Oxford University Press.
Dymond, E. J. (2013). An Examination of the Use of Gendered Language in Stephen King's CARRIE. The Explicator, 71(2), 94-98, https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2013.779224
Edwards, J. (2000). Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. In McMichael, G. & Levenson, J. C. (Eds.), Anthology of American Literature (pp. 283-300). Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Fiedler, L. (1960). Love and Death in the American Novel. Criterion Books.
Filipov, P. (2017). Voynata - tamnata stranitsa na choveshkata istoria vav voennite proizvedenia na Lev Tolstoy. [The War – the Dark Page of the Human History in Leo Tolstoy’s War Works]. Ezikov svyat, 15(2), 98-102.
Freud, S. (1996). Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices. In Grimes, R. L. (Ed.), Readings in Ritual Studies (pp. 212 – 217). Prentice Hall.
Ghasemi, P. & Abbasi, P. (2009). A Thematic Analysis of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. K@ta: A Biannual Publication on the Study of Language and Literature, 11(1), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.9744/kata.11.1.1-17
Gilligan, J. (2003). Shame, Guilt, and Violence. Social Research, 70(4), 1149-1180.
Grunenberg, C. (2016). The American Gothic Art. In Faflak, J. & Haslam, J. (Eds.), American Gothic Culture: An Edinburgh Companion (pp. 145-165). Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474401616.003.0009
Hawthorne, N. (1986). The Scarlet Letter. Penguin Classics.
Ingebretsen, E. S. J. (1996). Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell. Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King. M. E. Sharpe.
King, S. (1981). Danse Macabre. Warner Books.
King, S. (1992). The Shining, Carrie, Misery. Chancellor Press.
Madden, V. (2017). “We’ve Found the Witch, May We Burn Her?â€: Suburban Gothic, Witch-Hunting, and Anxiety-Induced Conformity in Stephen King’s Carrie. The Journal of American Culture, 40(1), 7-20. https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.12675
Magistrale, T. (2010). Stephen King: America’s Storyteller. Praeger, ABC Clio.
Magistrale, T. & Blouin, M. (2021). Stephen King and American History. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003045786
Ricoeur, P. (1968). Guilt, Ethics and Religion. Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures (2), 100-117. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0080443600010918
Strengell, H. (2005). Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism. The University of Wisconsin Press.
Taylor, E. (2000), Meditation 39 (First Series). In McMichael, G. & Levenson, J. C. (Eds.), Anthology of American Literature (pp. 175-176). Prentice-Hall Inc.
The New England Primer. (2000). In McMichael, G. & Levenson, J. C. (Eds.), Anthology of American Literature (pp. 120-127). Prentice-Hall Inc.
Waggoner, H. H. (1959). The Scarlet Letter. In Fiedelson, Ch., Jr. & Brodtkorb, P., Jr (Eds.), Interpretations of American Literature (pp. 3-30) Yale University.
Weller, G. (1992). The Masks of the Goddess: The Unfolding of the Female Archetype in Stephen King’s Carrie. In Magistrale, T. (Ed.), The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscope. Greenwood Press.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Maria Anastasova
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
All published articles in the ESNBU are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don't have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
In other words, under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license users are free to:
Share - copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt - remix, transform, and build upon the material
Under the following terms:
Attribution (by) - All CC licenses require that others who use your work in any way must give you credit the way you request, but not in a way that suggests you endorse them or their use. If they want to use your work without giving you credit or for endorsement purposes, they must get your permission first.
NonCommercial (nc) - You let others copy, distribute, display, perform, and modify and use your work for any purpose other than commercially unless they get your permission first.
If the article is to be used for commercial purposes, we suggest authors be contacted by email.
If the law requires that the article be published in the public domain, authors will notify ESNBU at the time of submission, and in such cases the article shall be released under the Creative Commons 1 Public Domain Dedication waiver CC0 1.0 Universal.
Copyright
Copyright for articles published in ESNBU are retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal. Authors retain full publishing rights and are encouraged to upload their work to institutional repositories, social academic networking sites, etc. ESNBU is not responsible for subsequent uses of the work. It is the author's responsibility to bring an infringement action if so desired by the author.
Exceptions to copyright policy
Occasionally ESNBU may co-publish articles jointly with other publishers, and different licensing conditions may then apply.
