Week Twelve - Glogster and Annotated Bibliography #3

Glogster in place of difficulty paper #3:
http://jeanettem11.glogster.com/hesterafeminist/

Annotated Bibliography:

Brownson, Orestes. "From Brownson's Quarterly." The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings. A Norton Critical Edition ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2005. 250-53. Print.

In his criticism, 19^th Century critic Orestes Brownson, from Brownson’s Quarterly, does not care to praise Hawthorne on his writing, instead he criticizes Hawthorne’s portrayal of morals in the story. Brownson says:  

The adulteress suffers not from remorse, but from regret, and from the disgrace to which her crime has exposed her…The minister, her accomplice, suffers also, horribly…but not from the fact of the crime itself, but from the consciousness of not being what he seems to the world…Neither ever really repents of the criminal deed; nay, neither ever regards it as really criminal, and both seem to hold it to have been laudable, because they loved one another…Mr. Hawthorne in the present case seeks to excuse Hester Prynne, a married woman, for loving the Puritan minister, on the grounds that she had no love for her husband…sin is sin, and that it is pardonable only through the great mercy of God. (p.251)

Brownson’s whole criticism is spent on criticizing Hawthorne’s portrayal of morals in The Scarlet Letter. He does not like the fact that it seems that Hawthorne justifies Hester’s sin by the fact that she and the minister loved each other. He says that Hawthorne does not understand Christianity, remorse, and confession at all. He does not offer one word of praise for Hawthorne and even ends his criticism with that.