"Scarlet Letter" (Hawthorne) paper

        'What is one man's poison...is another's meat or drink,' Beaumont and Fletcher wrote in one of their plays. Almost everything in the world is interpretable in at least two conflicting ways. In The Scarlet Letter, the Puritan society shuns a character named Pearl, yet the author, who lived in the Romantic period, views her with awe and reverence. Nathaniel Hawthorne's use of nature imagery in The Scarlet Letter reflects Pearl's wild, capricious character …

…Puritans and whose eccentricity reminds Hester of her sin. The Puritans seem negative and ignorant. Everything that they can not explain is evil to them. The Enlightenment caused people to think rationally, so in Hawthorne's time, many things that the Puritans knew nothing about were understood and people were able to view the world more optimistically. Pearl's character is a perfect example of something that is completely different when seen from two points of view.