Buildings in Scarlet Letter

Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” describes a stone barrier that two neighbors visit each year for repair. The wall is used as a metaphor for how we place barriers between each other, which is far easier to deal with, but is a loss in the long run. Buildings and structures have long been used to symbolize abstract ideas in literature. Hawthorn uses the prison, cottage, and scaffold as concrete representations for the rigid society, the …

…World Trade center was a symbol of American wealth and power much as the structures in and around Boston serve as thematic figures. The Twin Towers were such important motifs of American society, that those who harnessed an unbridled hatred for this democracy went to such heinous lengths to see them collapse. Whether proven through a novel or by the recent events, physical structures can sometimes serve a greater purpose than just their tangible means.