1st Period

11/30-12/01/09: Great Gatsby
Audio/Visual Alternate Interpretation Presentation

*NOTE: Any missing tests from 1st or 2nd nine weeks will be made up during this time.

11/24/09: Great Gatsby Test

11/23/09

The Great Gatsby

Choose two of the following topics and write a five-paragraph essay for each.

1. Women in the novel. Has Fitzgerald been fair in his development of female characters?
Review actions, speeches and remarks made about them (use page numbers for your examples). Should the novel have featured at least one ’sympathetic heroine’, or is there at least one who is?

2. Evaluate the structure of the novel. Could there have been more elaborate development
of some of the characters? Is Nick a reasonable narrator? What contrast is there to provide sharp focus on the more important elements of plot, setting and character? Use page numbers for your examples.

3. Expressionism in the novel. How are colors, names, and other symbolic ideas
presented? Do they wear thin or are they successful? Choose at least three items to write about, using page numbers for your examples.

11/ 20 /09

The Great Gatsby: Post-reading questions

Answer the following questions on a separate sheet of paper.

Ch. 1

1. How is Gatsby introduced as a character?
2. What is the difference between East Egg and West Egg?
3. Describe the Buchanans, as well as Jordan Baker, in detail.
Would you want to meet them?
4. How is Gatsby physically introduced?
5. Does Daisy know of her husband’s affair? Explain your opinion.

Ch. 2

1. Why did the narrator go to New York with Tom?
2. Why are Tom and Myrtle attracted to one another?

Ch. 3

1. What is Nick’s opinion of the opulence of Gatsby’s parties?
2. Does the man in the library remind you of someone mentioned previously in the novel?
3. How long would you stay at this party? Why?
4. How is the behavior of people at this party similar to that of the people at McKees
party earlier? What observations, if any, do you have about the people of the ‘Jazz Age’?

Ch. 4

1. Why has Fitzgerald written a list of the names of some of the partygoers?
2. Why is Nick so “overwhelmed” by Gatsby’s account of himself?
3. a) What are the highlights of Daisy’s background as revealed by Jordan to Nick?
b) Describe Daisy’s previous encounter with Gatsby.
4. What realization has Nick come to about Gatsby’s arrival in the neighborhood and how
did Nick come to that realization?

Ch. 5

1. Write a note on each of the following direct quotations. Include the meaning of the quotation in terms of the development of the novel’s theme, plot or character, as well as any personal reaction you may have to it.
a) “You don’t make much money, do you?”
b) “Who is ‘Tom’”?
c) “Gatsby, pale as death…was standing…glaring tragically into my eyes.”
d) “She’s embarrassed?”
e) “I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly laughter.”
f) “‘They’re such beautiful shirts!’ she sobbed”
g) “His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one”
h) “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly
heart.”

Ch. 6

1. How is Nick’s relationship with Jordan progressing?
2. Why does the author choose this point at which to reveal the facts about Gatsby?
What are these facts?
3. Why is Gatsby “catching his breath?

Ch. 7

1. Why did Gatsby dismiss his servants?
2. What does Gatsby mean by “her voice is full of money”?
3. What was on Gatsby’s mind, in your opinion, when Nick describes him as having “a
definitely unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable” look on his face?
4. What is ironic about Tom’s situation now?
6. Do you have any sympathy for Tom after the truth is heard? Why or why not?
7. Do you have any sympathy for Gatsby at this point? Explain.
8. Do you have any sympathy for Daisy?
9. How does Michaelis’ report speed up the plot?
10. How has Tom “set things up”?
11. Would it have changed matters at all for Nick to tell Gatsby what he knew about Tom
and Myrtle?
12. Explain the meaning of the last line in this chapter.
13. What story does Gatsby reveal to Nick in this chapter? Why did the reader hear about
it earlier?
14. In Nick’s assessment, what crucial error of judgment was made by Gatsby?
15. Is there a realistic explanation as to what caused Gatsby to become as deluded about
Daisy as he did?
16. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch of them put together”, says Nick to Gatsby. Do
you agree? Explain your answer.

Ch. 8

1. Make a list of the matters that are resolved for you in this chapter.
Include elements of plot, your suspicions about various characters (including
Nick), and your final assessment of Gatsby.

11/2009

The Great Gatsby – chs. 8-9

Chapter Eight
That night, Nick finds himself unable to sleep, since the terrible events of the day have greatly unsettled him. Wracked by anxiety, he hurries to Gatsby’s mansion shortly before dawn. He advises Gatsby to leave Long Island until the scandal of Myrtle’s death has quieted down. Gatsby refuses, as he cannot bring himself to leave Daisy: he tells Nick that he spent the entire night in front of the Buchanans’ mansion, just to ensure that Daisy was safe. He tells Nick that Tom did not try to harm her, and that Daisy did not come out to meet him, though he was standing on her lawn in full moonlight.
Gatsby, in his misery, tells Nick the story of his first meeting with Daisy. He does so even though it patently gives the lie to his earlier account of his past. Gatsby and Daisy first met in Louisville in 1917; Gatsby was instantly smitten with her wealth, her beauty, and her youthful innocence. Realizing that Daisy would spurn him if she knew of his poverty, Gatsby determined to lie to her about his past and his circumstances. Before he left for the war, Daisy promised to wait for him; the two then slept together, as though to seal their pact. Of course, Daisy did not wait; she married Tom, who was her social equal and the choice of her parents.
Realizing that it has grown late, Nick says goodbye to Gatsby. As he is walking away, he turns back and shouts that Gatsby is “worth the whole damn bunch [of the Buchanans and their East Egg friends] put together.”
The scene shifts from West Egg to the valley of ashes, where George Wilson has sought refuge with Michaelis. It is from this latter that Nick later learns what happened in the aftermath of Myrtle’s death. George Wilson tells Michaelis that he confronted Myrtle with the evidence of her affair and told her that, though she could conceal her sin from her husband, she could not hide it from the eyes of God. As the sun rises over the valley of ashes, Wilson is suddenly transfixed by the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg; he mistakes them for the eyes of God. Wilson assumes that the driver of the fatal car was Myrtle’s lover, and decides to punish this man for his sins.
He seeks out Tom Buchanan, in the hope that Tom will know the driver’s identity. Tom tells him that Gatsby was the driver. Wilson drives to Gatsby’s mansion; there, he finds Gatsby floating in his pool, staring contemplatively at the sky. Wilson shoots Gatsby, and then turns the gun on himself.
It is Nick who finds Gatsby’s body. He reflects that Gatsby died utterly disillusioned, having lost, in rapid succession, his lover and his dreams.

Analysis
Nick gives the novel’s final appraisal of Gatsby when he asserts that Gatsby is “worth the whole damn bunch of them.” Despite the ambivalence he feels toward Gatsby’s criminal past and nouveau riche affectations, Nick cannot help but admire him for his essential nobility. Though he disapproved of Gatsby “from beginning to end,” Nick is still able to recognize him as a visionary, a man capable of grand passion and great dreams. He represents an ideal that has grown exceedingly rare in the 1920s, which Nick (along with Fitzgerald) regards as an age of cynicism, decadence, and cruelty.
Nick, in his reflections on Gatsby’s life, suggests that Gatsby’s great mistake was in loving Daisy: he thus chose an inferior object upon which to focus his almost mystical capacity for dreaming. Just as the American Dream itself has degenerated into the crass pursuit of material wealth, Gatsby, too, strives only for wealth once he has fallen in love with Daisy, whose trivial, limited imagination can conceive of nothing greater. It is significant that Gatsby is not murdered for his criminal connections, but rather for his unswerving devotion to Daisy; it blinds him to all else even to his own safety. As Nick writes, Gatsby thus “[pays] a high price for living too long with a single dream.”
Up to the moment of his death, Gatsby cannot accept that this dream is over: he continues to insist that Daisy may still come to him, though it is clear to everyone including the reader that she is bound indissolubly to Tom. Gatsby’s death thus seems almost inevitable, given that a dreamer cannot exist without his dreams; through Daisy’s betrayal, he effectively loses his reason for living.
Wilson seems to be Gatsby’s grim double in Chapter VIII, and represents the more menacing aspects of a capacity for visionary dreaming. Like Gatsby, he fundamentally alters the course of his life by attaching symbolic significance to something that is, in and of itself, meaningless; for Gatsby, it is Daisy and her green light, for Wilson, it is the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. Both men are destroyed by their love for women who love the brutal Tom Buchanan; both are consumed with longing for something greater than themselves. While Gatsby is a “successful” American dreamer (at least insofar as he has realized his dreams of wealth), Wilson exemplifies the fate of the failed dreamer, whose poverty has deprived him of even his ability to hope.
Gatsby’s death takes place on the first day of autumn, when a chill has begun to creep into the air. His decision to use his pool is in defiance of the change of seasons, and represents yet another instance of Gatsby’s unwillingness to accept the passage of time. The summer is, for him, equivalent to his reunion with Daisy; the end of the summer heralds the end of their romance

Chapter Nine
Like insects, reporters and gossipmongers swarm around Gatsby’s mansion after his death. They immediately busy themselves with spreading grotesquely exaggerated stories about his murder, his life, and his relationships. Nick tries to give Gatsby a funeral as grand as his parties, but finds that Gatsby’s enormous circle of acquaintances has suddenly evaporated. Many like Tom and Daisy Buchanan have simply skipped town, while others including Meyer Wolfsheim and Kilpspringer flatly refuse to attend the funeral.
Nick tracks down Gatsby’s father, Henry C. Gatz, a solemn old man left helpless and distraught by the death of his son. Gatz shows Nick a book in which the young Gatsby kept a self-improvement schedule; nearly every minute of his day was meticulously planned. The only other attendee at Gatsby’s funeral is Owl Eyes, the melancholy drunk who was so astonished by Gatsby’s library.
Nick meets with Jordan Baker, who recalls their conversation about how bad drivers are only dangerous when two of them meet. She tells Nick that she and he are both “bad drivers,” and are therefore a treacherous combination. When Nick ends their affair, she suddenly claims to be engaged to another man.
Months later, Nick runs into Tom Buchanan on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Tom admits that it was he who sent Wilson to Gatsby’s; he shows no remorse, however, and says that Gatsby deserved to die. Nick reflects that Tom and Daisy are capable only of cruelty and destruction; they are kept safe from the consequences of their actions by their fortress of wealth and privilege.
Nick, repulsed by the shallow and brutal East, determines to return to the Midwest. He reflects that he, the Buchanans, Gatsby, and Jordan are all Westerners who came east; perhaps they all possess some deficiency which makes them unsuitable to Eastern life. After Gatsby’s death, the East is haunted, grotesque; the Midwest, by contrast, now seems as idyllic as a scene on a Christmas card.
Staring at the moon on his last night in West Egg, Nick imagines a primeval America an America made for dreamers like Gatsby. The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock is like the green continent of America, beckoning its legions of dreamers. Gatsby, for all his greatness, failed to realize that the American Dream was already dead when he began to dream it: his goals, the pursuit of wealth and status, had long since become empty and meaningless. Nick muses that contemporary Americans are “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”; any attempt to progress, to move forward, is ultimately futile.

Analysis
The final line of The Great Gatsby is one of the most famous in American literature, and serves as a sort of epitaph for both Gatsby and the novel as a whole.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Here, Nick reveals Gatsby’s lifelong quest to transcend his past as ultimately futile. In comparing this backward-driving force to the current of a river, Fitzgerald presents it as both inexorable and, in some sense, naturally determined: it is the inescapable lot of humanity to move backward. Therefore, any attempt at progress is only a conceit, the result of hubris and outsize ambition.
Nick, in reflecting on America as a whole, links its fate to Gatsby’s. America, according to Fitzgerald, was founded on the ideals of progress and equality. The America envisioned by its founders was a land made for men like Gatsby: it was intended as a place where visionary dreamers could thrive. Instead, people like Tom and Daisy Buchanan have recreated the grotesqueries and excesses of the European aristocracy in the New World. Gatsby, for all his wealth and greatness, could not become a part of their world; his noble attempt to engineer his own destiny was sabotaged by their cruelty and by the stunted quality of their imaginations. Fitzgerald’s America is emphatically not a place where anything is possible: just as America has failed to transcend its European origins, Gatsby, too, cannot overcome the circumstances of his upbringing.
Though Nick worships Gatsby’s courage and capacity for self-reinvention, he cannot approve of his dishonesty and his criminal dealings. Gatsby, both while he is alive and after his death, poses an insoluble challenge to Nick’s customary ways of thinking about the world. Nick firmly believes that the past determines who we are: he suggests that he, and all the novel’s characters, are fundamentally Westerners, and thus intrinsically unsuited to life in the East. The West, though it was once emblematic of the American desire for progress, is presented in the novel’s final pages as the seat of traditional morality an idyllic heartland, in stark contrast to the greed and depravity of the East.
It is important to note that the Buchanans lived in East Egg, and Gatsby in West Egg; therefore, in gazing at the green light on Daisy’s dock, Gatsby was looking East. The green light, like the green land of America itself, was once a symbol of hope; now, the original ideals of the American dream have deteriorated into the crass pursuit of wealth. In committing his extraordinary capacity for dreaming to his love for Daisy, Gatsby, too, devoted himself to nothing more than material gain. In Fitzgerald’s grim version of the Roaring Twenties, Gatsby’s ruin both mirrors and prefigures the ruin of America itself.
o

11/19/09

The Great Gatsby
· Quiz on Chapter 7.

1. Who do we meet for the first time at the Buchanan’s house in Chapter 7?
Tom and Daisy’s child (Pammy)
2. Who drives Gatsby’s car into town?
Tom
3. Who tells Tom that Daisy never loved him?
Gatsby
4. How does Tom say Gatsby got his money?
Bootlegging
5. Who is killed in Chapter 7?
Myrtle
Chapter Seven summary: Now, when curiosity about Gatsby has reached a fever pitch, he ceases to throw his Saturday night parties. The only purpose of the parties was to solicit Daisy’s attention; now that they are reunited, the parties have lost their meaning. Nick, surprised that the revelry has stopped, goes over to make certain that Gatsby is all right. He learns that Gatsby has fired all of his former servants and replaced them with a number of disreputable characters who were formerly employed by Meyer Wolfsheim. Daisy has begun visiting him in the afternoons, and Gatsby wants to make certain that she will not be exposed to any of the lurid gossip about his life and his past.
On the hottest day of the summer, Daisy invites Gatsby, Nick and Jordan to lunch. Daisy has the nanny exhibit her infant daughter, who is dressed in white, to the assembled guests. Gatsby seems almost bewildered by the child he has been, until this moment, entirely unable to conceive of Daisy as a mother. Tom is full of his usual bluster, remarking that he read that the sun is growing hotter; soon, the earth will fall into it, and that will be the end of the world. During the luncheon, Tom realizes that Gatsby and his wife are romantically involved. Gatsby stares at Daisy with undisguised passion, and Daisy recklessly remarks, within earshot of Tom, that she loves Gatsby. Tom, unsettled, goes inside to get a drink, and in his absence Nick remarks that Daisy has an indiscreet voice. When Nick goes on to say that Daisy’s voice also has an indescribably seductive quality, Gatsby blurts that her voice is “full of money.”
Tom, desperate to pick a fight with Gatsby, forces the entire party to drive into New York. Gatsby and Daisy drive in Tom’s car, while Nick, Jordan, and Tom drive in Gatsby’s. On the way, Tom furiously tells Nick that Gatsby is no Oxford man. They stop for gas at Wilson’s garage. Wilson tells them that he’s decided to move his wife out west, since he recently learned that she’s been having an affair; he does not yet, however, know who her lover is. Upon leaving the garage, they see Myrtle peering down at the car from her window. She stares at Jordan with an expression of jealous terror, since she has assumed that Jordan is Tom’s wife. Feeling that both his wife and mistress are slipping away from him, Tom grows panicked and impatient. To escape from the summer heat, the group takes a suite at the Plaza Hotel. There, Tom finally confronts Gatsby, mocking his use of the phrase “old sport.” Tom accuses Gatsby of never having been at Oxford; Gatsby replies that he did, in fact, study there for five months after the end of the war. Tom regards Daisy’s affair with the lower-class Gatsby as one of the harbingers of the decline of civilization: soon, Tom hisses, there will even be intermarriage between the races. Gatsby tells Tom that Daisy doesn’t love him, and has never loved him; he informs him that he’s “not going to take care of Daisy anymore.” Tom calls Gatsby a “common swindler” and reveals that he has made his fortune in bootlegging. Daisy, in her shallowness and snobbery, sides with Tom, and refuses Gatsby when he pleads with her to say that she has never loved her husband. As the confrontation draws to a close, Nick realizes that today is his thirtieth birthday.
In the valley of ashes, Nick, Jordan and Tom find that someone has been struck and killed by an automobile. The young Greek, Michaelis, who runs the coffee house next to Wilson’s garage, tells them that the victim was Myrtle Wilson. She ran out into the road during a fight with her husband; there, she was struck by an opulent yellow car. Nick realizes that the fatal car must have been Gatsby’s Rolls-Royce. Tom presumes that Gatsby was the driver.
Chapter 7 Analysis:
The reunion of Gatsby and Daisy is the novel’s pivotal event; it sets all the subsequent events into inevitable motion. In Chapter VII, the story of their romance reaches its climax and its tragic conclusion.
Gatsby is profoundly changed by his reunion with Daisy: he ceases to throw his lavish parties and, for the first time, shows concern for his public reputation. In the past, Gatsby has simply ignored the vicious rumors circulating about him; for Daisy’s sake, however, he must now exercise some discretion. Daisy, by contrast, is extremely indiscreet with regard to her romance with Gatsby. Inviting Gatsby to lunch with her husband would be a bold, foolish move under any circumstances; when one takes Tom’s snobbery and intense suspiciousness into account, Daisy’s decision seems to border on madness. Tom is profoundly insecure, obsessed with both his own inevitable downfall and the downfall of civilization itself. It is important to recognize that, for Tom, they are the same thing: he believes that he, as a wealthy white male aristocrat, is Western civilization’s greatest achievement. This odious mindset is borne out by his choice of reading material, which views the end of the world and interracial marriage as being equally catastrophic.
The confrontation between Gatsby and Tom serves to reveal the major flaws and motivations of both characters. For Tom, the affair between Gatsby and Daisy is evidence of the decline of civilization; he seems less disturbed by his wife’s infidelity than by the fact that she is involved with a man of an inferior social class. Tom’s gross misogyny and hypocrisy assert themselves here: he obviously does not regard his affair with the lower-class Myrtle Wilson in the same apocalyptic light. As Nick remarks, Tom moves “from libertine to prig” when it suits his needs. Tom uses the fact of Gatsby’s criminal activity to humiliate him before Daisy. Tom, for all his crudeness, possesses a subtle knowledge of his wife: he realizes that Daisy’s innate snobbery is ultimately identical with his own. She would never desert her aristocratic husband for “a common bootlegger” regardless of the love she felt for the bootlegger in question. Daisy refuses to submit to Gatsby’s pleas, and will not say that she has never loved Tom. Gatsby is ultimately unable to recapture his idyllic past; the past, the future, and Daisy herself ultimately belong to Tom.
The distinction between “old” and “new” money is crucial here: while Gatsby earned his fortune, Daisy is an aristocrat, a woman for whom wealth and privilege come effortlessly. As Gatsby himself remarks, even her voice is “full of money.” This is what he loves in Daisy’s voice, and in Daisy herself: for Gatsby, Daisy represents the wealth and elegance for which he has yearned all his life. Gatsby thus loses Daisy for the same reason that he adores her: her patrician arrogance. The introduction of Daisy’s daughter provides incontestable proof of Gatsby’s inability to annul the passage of time. He does not believe in the child’s existence until actually confronted with her; even then, he regards her with shock and bewilderment. Daisy, for her part, seems scarcely to regard the girl as real: she coos over her as though she were a doll, and seems to leave her almost entirely in the care of a nanny. The selfish and immature Daisy is essentially a child herself, and is in no position to be a mother.
Daisy remains characteristically passive throughout Chapter VII; she is only a spectator to the argument between Gatsby and Tom. Her weakness is particularly important here: Tom and Gatsby fight over who can possess Daisy and provide for her. Gatsby, tellingly, does not say that Daisy is leaving Tom, but that Tom is “not going to take care of her anymore”; both men regard her as being incapable of independent action.
Daisy’s carelessness and stupidity eventually lead to the death of Myrtle Wilson, and Gatsby is forced to leave the scene of the accident and to hide the fatal car simply to protect Daisy’s fragile nerves. His decision to take responsibility for Myrtle’s death reveals that his love for Daisy is unassailable; her cruelty has changed and will change nothing. Gatsby, despite his criminal activities, remains essentially noble: he is willing to sacrifice himself for the woman he loves.
Finish novel for Friday

11/18/09
The Great Gatsby
Quiz over chapter 4 (concerns Jordan’s story about Daisy and Gatsby as she relates it to Nick).
1. Where did Daisy grow up?
2. What did Daisy do on her wedding day that almost stopped the wedding?
3. What did Tom do immediately after returning from their honeymoon?
4. Who was the Army officer that Jordan saw in Daisy’s car the year before she got married?
5. Why did Gatsby buy the house on West Egg?
Read chapters 5 and 6 aloud.
Chapter Five:
One night, Gatsby waylays Nick and nervously asks him if he would like to take a swim in his pool; when Nick demurs, he offers him a trip to Coney Island. Nick, initially baffled by Gatsby’s solicitousness, realizes that he is anxiously waiting for Nick to arrange his meeting with Daisy. Nick agrees to do so. Gatsby, almost wild with joy, responds by offering him a job, a “confidential sort of thing,” and assures Nick that he will not have to work with Meyer Wolfsheim. Nick is somewhat insulted that Gatsby wishes to reimburse him for his help, and so declines Gatsby’s offer.
It rains on the day that Gatsby and Daisy are to meet, and Gatsby becomes extremely apprehensive. The meeting takes place at Nick’s house and, initially, their conversation is stilted and awkward. They are all inexplicably embarrassed; when Gatsby clumsily knocks over a clock, Nick tells him that he’s behaving like a little boy. Nick leaves the couple alone for a few minutes; when he returns, they seem luminously happy, as though they have just concluded an embrace. There are tears of happiness on Daisy’s cheeks.
They make their way over to Gatsby’s mansion, of which Gatsby proceeds to give them a carefully rehearsed tour. Gatsby shows Daisy newspaper clippings detailing his exploits. She is overwhelmed by them, and by the opulence of his possessions; when he shows her his vast collection of imported shirts, she begins to weep tears of joy. Nick wonders whether Gatsby is disappointed with Daisy; it seems that he has made of her a goddess, and though Daisy herself is alluring she cannot possibly live up to so grandiose an ideal.
Gatsby has Ewing Klipspringer, a mysterious man who seems to live at his mansion, play “Ain’t We Got Fun” (a popular song of the time) for himself and Daisy:
In the morning, in the evening
Ain’t we got fun!
Got no money, but oh, honey
Ain’t we got fun!
As Klipspringer plays, Gatsby and Daisy draw closer and closer together; Nick, realizing that his presence has become superfluous, quietly leaves.

Analysis:
The exchange between Nick and Gatsby that opens this chapter highlights the uncertainty at the heart of their relationship: is Gatsby’s friendship with Nick merely expedient that is, is he merely using him to draw closer to Daisy or is he genuinely fond of him?
The question cannot be absolutely decided: while it becomes clear that Gatsby has great affection for Nick, it is also true that he uses his money and power as leverage in all of his personal relationships. Gatsby, in his extreme insecurity about class, cannot believe that anyone would befriend him if he did not possess a mansion and several million dollars a year. Fitzgerald seems to bitterly affirm this insecurity, given the fact that Gatsby was abandoned by Daisy because of his poverty, and remains ostracized by the East Eggers even after his success. In the world of the novel, only Nick does not make friendships based upon class.
The gross materialism of the East and West Egg milieus explains the obsessive care that Gatsby takes in his reunion with Daisy. The afternoon is give over to an ostentatious display of wealth: he shoes Daisy his extensive collection of British antiques and takes her on a tour of his wardrobe; Gatsby himself is dressed in gold and silver. His Gothic mansion is described as looking like the citadel of a feudal lord. Nearly everything in the house is imported from England (the scene in which Gatsby shows Daisy his piles of English shirts is one of the most famous scenes in American literature). Fitzgerald implies that Gatsby is attempting to live the life of a European aristocrat in the New World of America. This, Fitzgerald suggests, is a misguided anachronism: America committed itself to progress and equality in abandoning the old aristocracy. To go back to such rigidly defined class distinctions would be retrograde and barbaric as is implied by the fact that the major proponent of such ideas is Tom Buchanan, who is clearly a cretin and a brute.
This chapter presents Gatsby as a man who cannot help but live in the past: he longs to stop time, as though he and Daisy had never been separated as though she had never left him to marry Tom. During their meeting Nick remarks that he is acting like “a little boy”: in Daisy’s presence, Gatsby loses his usual debonair manner and behaves like any awkward young man in love. Gatsby himself is regressing, moving back in time, as though he were still a shy young soldier in love with a privileged debutante.
Nick describes the restless Gatsby as “running down like an over-wound clock.” It is significant that Gatsby, in his nervousness about whether Daisy’s feelings toward him have changed, knocks over Nick’s clock: this signifies both Gatsby’s consuming desire to stop time and his inability to do so.
Daisy, too, ceases to play the part of a world-weary sophisticate upon her reunion with Gatsby. She weeps when he shows her his collection of sumptuous English shirts, and seems genuinely overjoyed at his success. In short, Gatsby transforms her; she becomes almost human. Daisy is more sympathetic here than she is at any other point in the novel.
The song “Ain’t We Got Fun” is significant for a number of reasons. The opening lyrics (“In the morning/ In the evening/ Ain’t we got fun”) imply a carefree spontaneity that stands in stark contrast to the tightly-controlled quality of the lovers’ reunion. This contrast is further sharpened by the words of the next verse, which run: “Got no money/ But oh, honey/ Ain’t we got fun!” It is bitterly ironic that Gatsby and Daisy should reunite to the strains of this song, given the fact that she first rejected him for his poverty.

Chapter Six:
A reporter, inspired by the feverish gossip about Gatsby then circulating in New York, comes to West Egg in the hopes of obtaining the true story of his past from him. Though Gatsby himself turns the man away, Nick interrupts the narrative to relate Gatsby’s past the truth of which he only learned much later to the reader.
His real name is James Gatz, and he was born to an impoverished farmer in North Dakota rather than into wealth in San Francisco, as he claimed. He had his named legally changed to Jay Gatsby at the age of seventeen. Though he did attend St Olaf’s a small college in Minnesota he dropped out after two weeks, as he could not bear working as a janitor in order to pay his tuition. Gatsby’s dreams of self-improvement are only intensified by his relationship with Dan Cody, a man whom he met while working as a fisherman on Lake Superior. Cody was then fifty, a self-made millionaire who had made his fortune during the Yukon gold rush. Cody took Gatsby in and made the young man his personal assistant. On their subsequent voyages to the West Indies and the Barbary Coast, Gatsby became even more passionately covetous of wealth and privilege. When Cody died, Gatsby inherited $25,000; he was unable to claim it, however, due to the malicious intervention of Cody’s mistress, Ella Kaye. Afterward, Gatsby vowed to become a success in his own right.
Several weeks pass without Nick’s seeing Gatsby. Upon visiting Gatsby at his mansion, Nick is shocked to find Tom Buchanan there. Tom has unexpectedly stopped for a drink at Gatsby’s after an afternoon of horseback riding; he is accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Sloane, an insufferable East Egg couple who exemplify everything that is repellent about the “old rich.” Gatsby invites the group to supper, but Mrs. Sloane hastily refuses; perhaps ashamed at her own rudeness, she then half-heartedly offers Gatsby and Nick an invitation to dine at her home. Nick, recognizing the insincerity of her offer, declines; Gatsby accepts, though it is unclear whether his gesture is truly oblivious or defiant.
Tom pointedly complains about the crazy people that Daisy meets, presumably referring to Gatsby. Throughout the awkward afternoon, he is contemptuous of Gatsby particularly of his acceptance of Mrs. Sloane’s disingenuous invitation.
The following Saturday, Tom and Daisy attend one of Gatsby’s parties. Tom, predictably, is unpleasant and rude throughout the evening. After the Buchanans leave, Gatsby is crestfallen at the thought that Daisy did not have a good time; he does not yet know that Tom badly upset her by telling her that Gatsby made his fortune in bootlegging.
Nick realizes that Gatsby wants Daisy to tell Tom that she has never loved him. Nick gently informs Gatsby that he can’t ask too much of Daisy, and says, “You can’t repeat the past.” Gatsby spiritedly replies: “Of course you can!”

Analysis:
Nick begins the story of Gatsby’s past by saying that Gatsby “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.” In order to understand this statement, the reader must remember that the “Platonic conception” of a person or thing refers to that thing’s ideal form. That is, the Platonic form of an object is the perfect form of that object. Therefore, Nick is suggesting that Gatsby has modeled himself on an idealized version of “Jay Gatsby”: he is striving to be the man he envisions in his fondest dreams of himself. Gatsby is thus the novel’s representative of the American Dream, and the story of his youth borrows on one of that dream’s oldest myths: that of the self-made man. In changing his name from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby, he attempts to remake himself on his own terms; Gatsby wishes to be reborn as the aristocrat he feels himself to be.
It is significant that Gatsby leaves college because he finds his work as a janitor degrading. This seems a perverse decision, given the fact that a university education would dramatically improve his social standing. His decision to leave reveals Gatsby’s extreme sensitivity to class, and to the fact of his own poverty; from his childhood onward, he longs for wealth and perhaps more importantly for the sophistication and elegance which he imagines that wealth will lend him. His work as a janitor is a gross humiliation because it is at odds with his ideal of himself; to protect that ideal, he is willing to damage his actual circumstances.
Fitzgerald uses the character of Dan Cody to subtly suggest that the America of the 1920s is no longer a place where self-made men can thrive. Cody, like Gatsby, transcended early hardship to become a millionaire; also like Gatsby, he is remarkably generous to his friends and subordinates. Cody takes to drinking because, despite his wealth, he remains unable to carve out a place for himself in the world of 1920s America. It is important to note that Cody’s death is brought about, at least in part, through the treachery of the woman he loves; this foreshadows the circumstances of Gatsby’s death in Chapter VIII.
The painfully awkward luncheon party at Gatsby’s mansion underlines the hostility of the American 1920s toward the figure of the self-made man. Both the Sloanes and Tom Buchanan treat Gatsby with contempt and condescension, because he is not of the long-standing American upper class. Though Gatsby is fabulously wealthy perhaps wealthier than Tom himself he is still regarded as socially inferior. For Fitzgerald, nothing could be more inimical to the original ideals of America. The first Americans fought to escape the tyrannies of the European nobility; Tom Buchanan longs to reproduce them.
This chapter makes it clear that Daisy, too, is a part of the same narrow-minded aristocracy that produced her husband. For Gatsby, she became the symbol of everything that he wanted to possess: she is the epitome of wealth and sophistication. Though Gatsby loves this quality in Daisy, it is precisely because she is an aristocrat that she cannot possibly fulfill his dreams: she would never sacrifice her own class status in order to be with him. Her love for him pales in comparison to her love of privilege.

11/17/09

The Great Gatsby

Chapters 1-2

Ch. 1:

· Synopsis: Meet main characters
· Tom
· Daisy
· Nick
· Jordan

· Literary Focus:
· Gatsby is a presence rather than a real person
· What is the “secret society” Tom & Daisy belong to? (cynicism, sarcasm)
· Daisy’s “thrilling” voice
· What does Fitzgerald say about the voice? (full of promise to men)
· What does “full of promise” mean?
· “single green light”
· We will see it again.
· Think about what it means to Gatsby.

Ch. 2:

· Synopsis: Meet Myrtle
· Horrible party with Myrtle’s sister & the McKees

· Literary Focus:
· “valley of ashes”
· symbolic of the wasteland America has become
· What wasteland? (vapidness of chasing money)
· “eyes of Dr. T.J. Ecleburg”
· What do they symbolize? (God?)
· Tom’s attack on Myrtle represents what? (the views he and Daisy have for the rest of the world: everyone is beneath them)

The Great Gatsby

Chapters 3 & 4

Ch. 3

Synopsis
· Nick meets Gatsby at one of his parties.
· Why doesn’t Gatsby introduce himself to Nick when they first sit down together? (wants to see if they will say something about him)
· Nick begins spending time with Jordan.
· What does he have to do before they can become more involved?
· (break up with girlfriend back home)

Literary Focus
· Does Nick’s first meeting with Gatsby make him more or less mysterious?
· Gatsby’s smile/artificiality (formal speech)
· Rumors about Gatsby.
· Jordan is careless in both her driving and speech.
· This prepares us for later events.

Ch. 4

Synopsis
· Nick has lunch with Gatsby in New York.
· Gatsby gives his bio? Is it all true? (doubtful)
· Nick meets Meyer Wolfsheim.
· What does this tell us about Gatsby? (shady associates)
· Revelations about Gatsby and Daisy (used to be together)
· Jordan asks Nick to invite Gatsby and Daisy for tea.
· Why doesn’t Gatsby ask Nick himself? (insecure? Aloof?)

Literary Focus
· Why the list of names of Gatsby’s summer visitors?
· Why do so many of them have tragic ends?
· Why do you think Gatsby carries “evidence” of his past?
· What is the “San Francisco/Midwest” thing all about?
· How does Jordan’s telling of the Gatsby/Daisy romance make Gatsby more real for Nick?

Read Chapters 5 and 6

11/16/09

The Great Gatsby

· Intro: Read “1920’s Economy” (see attached)

· Things to look for as you read the novel.

· “The American Dream”
· What is it? (discuss)
· Discuss American attitudes toward wealth and poverty.
· As you read, take note of the different characters’ chasing of the American Dream.

· Parties
· Much of the action takes place at parties.
· As you read, compare the different parties and think about what the events of each reveal about the characters and participants.

· Themes
· Love
· Dreams and Aspirations (Gatsby)
· Have you ever had a dream you held on to for a long time and then had it come true?
· Is the reality as good as the dream?
· How does it feel when you don’t have a dream to pursue anymore?
· As you read, pay attention to Gatsby’s dreams, whether or not they come true, and the effect each has on him.
11/13/09: The Great Gatsby

1920s; Jazz Age, Roaring 20s; Economy
Read chapters 1 and 2 for Monday.

11/06 – 11/13/09

The Scarlet Letter
Critical Analysis Guidelines

· 3 typed, double-spaced pages
· Works Cited page
o 3 sources (one must be The Scarlet Letter)
· Internal Documentation
· Follow MLA guidelines
o http://webster.commnet.edu/mla/index.shtml

Final paper is Friday, November 13th.

11/04/09: Scarlet Letter Test

11/03/09: Scarlet Letter Test Review

10/29/09

The Scarlet Letter
Chapter XXII – XXIII

Writing Assignment

The scaffold is the focus for key moments in both of these chapters. Hester is ensconced by people who wish to see her scarlet letter as she stands by the scaffold remembering another time when she was humiliated in that very spot. Dimmesdale’s admission of his sin occurs at the scaffold and he dies there. It is obvious that Hawthorne intended the scaffold to be symbolic. Write a 5-paragraph paper. Entitle it The Symbolism of the Scaffold. Here is a rough outline for your five paragraphs:

I. Introduction – Explain what a scaffold is and what it was used for in Puritan times. Introduce Hawthorne’s use of the scaffold in The Scarlet Letter.

II. Hester Prynne’s time at the scaffold – List the times when Hester has stood on the scaffold. Don’t forget the night she stood with Pearl and Dimmesdale as a meteoritic red flame lit up the sky. What do you think the scaffold experiences have meant to her? How have they shaped her life, scarred her, made her wise?

III. Pearl’s time at the scaffold – Mention the times when she was a baby, when she stood with her mother and Dimmesdale at night, and when she kissed Dimmesdale at his death. How has the scaffold shaped Pearl’s life?

IV. Arthur Dimmesdale’s time at the scaffold – Refer to the time when he stood with Hester and Pearl in the night, contrasting it to his death on the scaffold during the day. What is the significance of daytime and nighttime at the scaffold? Also consider Chillingworth’s words (page 230) “Hadst thou sought the whole earth over..there was no one place … where thou couldst have escaped me save on this very scaffold.” Has Dimmesdale at last escaped Chillingworth by climbing the steps of the scaffold? Explain this.

V. Conclusion – Wrap up Hawthorne’s use of the scaffold as a symbolic tool around which the novel has been focused. Is it coincidence that the plot begins and ends there? Probably not. Explain why. Be sure to write a clincher sentence at the end that is a summary of all you have said in your paper.

This will be your final writing assignment for The Scarlet Letter. Make it a good one!! Do your very best.

Summary—Chapter XXI: The New England Holiday
Echoing the novel’s beginning, the narrator describes another public gathering in the marketplace. But this time the purpose is to celebrate the installation of a new governor, not to punish Hester Prynne. The celebration is relatively sober, but the townspeople’s “Elizabethan” love of splendor lends an air of pageantry to the goings-on. As they wait in the marketplace among an assorted group of townsfolk, Native Americans, and sailors from the ship that is to take Hester and Dimmesdale to Europe, Pearl asks Hester whether the strange minister who does not want to acknowledge them in public will hold out his hands to her as he did at the brook. Lost in her thoughts and largely ignored by the crowd, Hester is imagining herself defiantly escaping from her long years of dreariness and isolation. Her sense of anticipation is shattered, however, when one of the sailors casually reveals that Chillingworth will be joining them on their passage because the ship needs a doctor and Chillingworth has told the captain that he is a member of Hester’s party. Hester looks up to see Chillingworth standing across the marketplace, smirking at her.
Summary—Chapter XXII: The Procession
“Mother,” said [Pearl], “was that the same minister that kissed me by the brook?”
“Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!” whispered [Hester]. “We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.”
The majestic procession passes through the marketplace. A company of armored soldiers is followed by a group of the town fathers, whose stolid and dour characters are prominently displayed. Hester is disheartened to see the richness and power of Puritan tradition displayed with such pomp. She and other onlookers notice that Dimmesdale, who follows the town leaders, looks healthier and more energetic than he has in some time. Although only a few days have passed since he kissed her forehead next to the forest brook, Pearl barely recognizes the minister. She tells Hester that she is tempted to approach the man and bestow a kiss of her own, and Hester scolds her. Dimmesdale’s apparent vigor saddens Hester because it makes him seem remote. She begins to question the wisdom of their plans. Mistress Hibbins, very elaborately dressed, comes to talk to Hester about Dimmesdale. Saying that she knows those who serve the Black Man, Mistress Hibbins refers to what she calls the minister’s “mark” and declares that it will soon, like Hester’s, be plain to all. Suggesting that the Devil is Pearl’s real father, Mistress Hibbins invites the child to go on a witch’s ride with her at some point in the future. The narrator interrupts his narration of the celebration to note that Mistress Hibbins will soon be executed as a witch.
After the old woman leaves, Hester takes her place at the foot of the scaffold to listen to Dimmesdale’s sermon, which has commenced inside the meetinghouse. Pearl, who has been wandering around the marketplace, returns to give her mother a message from the ship’s master—Chillingworth says he will make the arrangements for bringing Dimmesdale on board, so Hester should attend only to herself and her child. While Hester worries about this new development, she suddenly realizes that everyone around her—both those who are familiar with her scarlet letter and those who are not—is staring at her.

Analysis—Chapters XXI–XXII
These chapters set the stage for the dramatic resolution of the plot. Tension is created by the text’s establishment of a number of conflicts between outward appearances and inward states. We await the inevitable collision and collapse of external and internal, public and private. In her final hours of wearing the scarlet letter, Hester has begun to anticipate her imminent freedom from shame, yet the crowd is quick to remind her that the letter has not yet lost its power of public proclamation. Their transfixed stares emphasize the badge’s persistent visibility, even though, by this point in time, one would no longer expect it to draw much attention. Such gazes continue to exert great force over Hester, and her feelings of escape from them prove premature. Meanwhile, Dimmesdale’s outer appearance of health, though it may accurately reflect his joy at the thought of his plan with Hester, fails to convey the shadow of past suffering that surely continues to haunt him. While he prepares to pronounce one of the most powerful sermons of his life, his holy words issue from an inner state of what the Puritan elders would consider sin. All of the primary characters in the book, save perhaps Pearl, maintain a secret, something they are hiding as they stand in the public realm of the marketplace. The revelation of these secrets will bring the plot to its climactic explosion.
The pageantry that marks the Election Day festivities provides an appropriate backdrop for the plot’s suspense-building events. The loud music, the costumes, and the display of power are all reminders of the hypocrisy at the heart of Puritan society. The Puritans came from and shunned Elizabethan England, a culture that loved and yearned for ostentatious opulence. It seems that the Puritans’ repression of their own desires for extravagant displays may have only intensified the power images have over them. The exceptionally straightforward revelry serves to highlight the fact that the desire for splendor has always existed. In effect, the Puritans have re-created the aesthetic of the society from which they tried to escape.
Hester, the sailors, and the Native Americans are meaningful symbols of subversion. Because the sailors are perceived as facing grave terrors on the open sea, society tends to overlook their eccentric behavior, and they can carry on in active defiance of convention. The presence of the Native Americans, who are positioned at an even greater distance from mainstream colonist society, adds more weight to the novel’s social critique. Unaware of the story behind the scarlet letter, they think its wearer is a person of great importance. Their reaction highlights the arbitrary nature of this important sign.
Yet, these figures of subversion in the marketplace ultimately serve to suggest the absence of any true alternatives. To the Puritans, the holiday display, the sailors, and the Native Americans constitute the exceptions that prove the rule of Puritan social order. The return of the action to the novel’s initial setting—the public space before the scaffold where Hester originally received her punishment—foreshadows the fact that Hester’s physical and moral emancipation will be thwarted. As Hester stands apart from her fellow Bostonians—no one wants to stand too close to her—she once more becomes an example to keep others in line. Unable to exercise her free will as a human being, Hester stands no chance for escape. Chillingworth and the town elders are part of a larger, self-serving evil that can overcome any challenges by assigning them new meanings to fit its own purposes. Dimmesdale, too, becomes once more a part of this dominant order; hence Hester’s sense that he seems “remote.” Dimmesdale, like the other townspeople, reminds Hester that resistance is futile.

Summary—Chapter XXIII: The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter
Dimmesdale finishes his Election Day sermon, which focuses on the relationship between God and the communities of mankind, “with a special reference to the New England which they [are] here planting in the wilderness.” Dimmesdale has proclaimed that the people of New England will be chosen by God, and the crowd is understandably moved by the sermon. As they file out of the meeting hall, the people murmur to each other that the sermon was the minister’s best, most inspired, and most truthful ever. As they move toward the town hall for the evening feast, Dimmesdale sees Hester and hesitates. Turning toward the scaffold, he calls to Hester and Pearl to join him. Deaf to Chillingworth’s attempt to stop him, Dimmesdale mounts the scaffold with Hester and Pearl. He declares that God has led him there. The crowd stares. Dimmesdale leans on Hester for support and begins his confession, calling himself “the one sinner of the world.” After he concludes, he stands upright without Hester’s help and tells everyone to see that he, like Hester, has a red stigma. Tearing away his ministerial garments from his breast, Dimmesdale reveals what we take to be some sort of mark—the narrator demurs, saying that it would be “irreverent to describe [the] revelation”—and then sinks onto the scaffold. The crowd recoils in shock, and Chillingworth cries out, “Thou hast escaped me!” Pearl finally bestows on Dimmesdale the kiss she has withheld from him. The minister and Hester then exchange words. She asks him whether they will spend their afterlives together, and he responds that God will decide whether they will receive any further punishment for breaking His sacred law. The minister bids her farewell and dies.
Summary—Chapter XXIV: Conclusion
[T]he scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world’s scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, and yet with reverence, too.
The book’s narrator discusses the events that followed Dimmesdale’s death and reports on the fates of the other major characters. Apparently, those who witnessed the minister’s death cannot agree upon what exactly it was that they saw. Most say they saw on his chest a scarlet letter exactly like Hester’s. To their minds, it resulted from Chillingworth’s poisonous magic, from the minister’s self-torture, or from his inner remorse. Others say they saw nothing on his chest and that Dimmesdale’s “revelation” was simply that any man, however holy or powerful, can be as guilty of sin as Hester. It is the narrator’s opinion that this latter group is composed of Dimmesdale’s friends, who are anxious to protect his reputation.
Left with no object for his malice, Chillingworth wastes away and dies within a year of the minister’s passing, leaving a sizable inheritance to Pearl. Then, shortly after Chillingworth’s death, Hester and Pearl disappear. In their absence, the story of the scarlet letter grows into a legend. The story proves so compelling that the town preserves the scaffold and Hester’s cottage as material testaments to it. Many years later, Hester suddenly returns alone to live in the cottage and resumes her charity work. By the time of her death, the “A,” which she still wears, has lost any stigma it may have had. Hester is buried in the King’s Chapel graveyard, which is the burial ground for Puritan patriarchs. Her grave is next to Dimmesdale’s, but far enough away to suggest that “the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle, even in death.” They do, however, share a headstone. It bears a symbol that the narrator feels appropriately sums up the whole of the narrative: a scarlet letter “A” on a black background.

Analysis—Chapters XXIII–XXIV
This third and final scaffold scene serves as a catharsis, as all unsettled matters are given resolution. Pearl acquires a father, Dimmesdale finally confesses, and Chillingworth definitively loses his chance for revenge. Moreover, despite the fact that the resolution takes place before the assembled townspeople, the Puritan elders have no power to judge or punish in this situation. Instead, Dimmesdale serves as his own prosecutor and judge. He apparently wills his own death, thereby breaking away from Puritan morals. He also provides a commentary on them, addressing the novel’s main themes of sin, evil, and identity within society. One might think that the people’s shock at their minister’s secret life would provoke them into contemplation of their punitive system. That is, if Dimmesdale is capable of such a sin, then surely every individual must be; perhaps sinfulness should be acknowledged as an inescapable element of the human condition.
However, no such reconsideration takes place. The old order regains control soon after Dimmesdale’s death. Although many claim to have seen a scarlet “A” on Dimmesdale’s chest, others read the minister’s confession as an intentional allegorical performance. It is this latter group, which argues that Dimmesdale meant to deliver a lesson on sin and was not confessing to any actual wrongdoing, that reestablishes the old ways. In their view, Dimmesdale meant to teach his parishioners that all men have the potential for evil, not that evil is a necessary part of man. Correspondingly, the conservatives believe, society need only renew its vigilance against evil rather than reconsider its very conception of evil. Even in his defiance, then, Dimmesdale is appropriated by the Puritan system as a means of reinforcing its pre-established messages.
However, this victory for the entrenched ways seems to be only temporary. It is no surprise that Chillingworth dies, because the “leech’s” source of vitality has been removed. Hester’s and Pearl’s fates are more complicated. Given an “earthly father” for the first time, Pearl finally, according to the narrator, becomes “human.” It is as though Pearl has existed up to this point solely to torment her parents and expose the truth—she is, after all, the direct result of their sin. The final acknowledgment of that sin has freed her. It has “developed her sympathies” and made her an autonomous and fully “human” being. Pearl returns to Europe and marries into an aristocratic family. Notably, she does not go to England, which is the society against which the Puritans define themselves. Pearl opts out of this binary altogether, finding a home in a place where the social structure is well established and need not rely on a dogmatic adherence to rules in order to protect its existence.
Unlike Pearl, Hester can never escape her role as an emblem of something larger. She leaves Boston, presumably to give her daughter a better chance at a happy life, but in so doing ensures that her scarlet letter will become a “legend” and take on a kind of existence of its own. Having sacrificed her humanity and her individuality to her child, and to the letter on her chest, Hester now becomes a spokeswoman for larger issues. She becomes an advocate for women and takes on a role in the community similar to that of a minister: she cares for and attends to the spiritual needs of her fellow human beings. Hester’s burial speaks to the eventual sacrifice of her private self to her public, symbolic role. Although she and Dimmesdale are together at last, the distance between their graves and the design of their shared headstone seem to call out for interpretive readings. The simple romantic relationship between them is overshadowed by its larger representations.
By the time Hester dies, the meaning of the scarlet letter on her chest has become confused and ambiguous. While it gives her authority and even respectability among some people, it will always mark her as guilty of what society still considers a sin. The fates of the other characters also suggest that it is not always easy to differentiate between hate and love, between essential identity and assigned symbolism, or between sin and righteousness.

10/28/09

The Scarlet Letter
Chapters XX – XXIV
Due at end of class

Answer the following questions in complete sentence form.

1. How do Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl plan to leave Boston?
2. Why does Dimmesdale consider it fortunate that they will not be leaving for four days?
3. What have crowds of people gathered in the market place to witness?
4. What piece of unwelcome news is Hester made aware of in the market place?
5. How does Dimmesdale appear as he leaves the church after his triumphant sermon?
6. According to Chillingworth, what is the one place where Dimmesdale could have successfully escaped him?
7. What about the novel’s conclusion was satisfying? What made you feel unsatisfied?
8. Do you think it possible that Hester would feel a twinge of regret at the thought of leaving the scene of her humiliation and giving up the scarlet letter? Locate a passage from the text to support your answer.
9. What do you think Dimmesdale means when he describes his an Hester’s actions as violating “our reverence each for the other’s soul?”
10. How is the theme of redemption fulfilled by Hester, Dimmesdale and Chilingworth?
11. No real cause of death is given for either the minister or the physician. It would appear the driving force that gave them life no longer exists once the secret is exposed. How does this make their deaths ironic?
12. Why, do you suppose, does Hester return to Boston.

Answer the following in paragraph form.

13. The townspeople present at the ministers’ revelation do not agree on exactly what they saw on the scaffold or on its significance. When have you interpreted an event differently from others? How can you account for differing views in you personal experience? How can you account for them in the novel?

10/27/09

The Scarlet Letter

Chapters XVII – XIX
Choose one of the following:

1. Writing Assignment – ch. 17
Reverend Dimmesdale speaks the following words:

“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart,
at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!”

Write a 5-paragraph essay explaining what you think Dimmesdale may have meant by these words and discussing what such words might mean coming from someone living today.

2. Writing Assignment – ch. 18
Hester and Arthur found that they thought quite differently. Hester was willing to “break with tradition” while Arthur patterned his every move after what was expected of him. Consider the following passage from page 183 of our text:

“Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been (Hester’s) teachers – stern and wild ones – and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss. The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an experience calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally received laws.”

Title your paper Contrasting Thoughts of a Sinner and a Minister.
Write a paper consisting of four paragraphs.
The first should introduce your topic – the contrasting thoughts of Hester and Arthur. Reference the quote here.
The next paragraph should explain what you think Hester’s manner of thinking includes. Discuss how it has taken her away from the exact and accepted teachings of the Puritan faith.
The third paragraph should discuss Dimmesdale’s manner of thinking. Remember that he is a minister quite steeped in the traditions of the church, so much so that he is punishing himself severely for having once broken a law of God. Though God forgives, Dimmesdale’s religion does not allow him to accept the forgiveness without overwhelming penance.
Write a fourth paragraph contrasting the two ways of thinking. Be sure that you end with a conclusion (clincher) sentence that will summarize both points of view.

10/26/09

The Scarlet Letter

Chapters XIII – XIX

Answer the following questions in complete sentence form on a separate sheet of paper.

1. By this time, what do many townspeople now say the “A” represents?
2. Why does Hester feel she is to blame for Dimmesdale’s poor condition?
3. Why does Hester pity Chillingworth?
4. What is Dimmesdale’s initial reaction when Hester reveals Chillingworth’s true identity?
5. How does Hester transform herself during the encounter with Dimmesdale?
6. What suggestion does Hester make to Dimmesdale to relieve his misery?
7. Describe Pearl’s reaction when she sees Hester with Dimmesdale.

Answer the following questions in paragraph form on a separate sheet of paper.

1. Having now seen Hester and the minister in a more intimate setting, what is your prediction for their success as a couple?
2. “The scarlet letter had not done it’s office.” This statement appears near the end of chapter XIII. Review the paragraphs that precede it. What is Hester’s state of mind? What do you think Hawthorne means by that statement?
3. Provide three examples from these chapters of Pearl’s insightful observations or questions that indicate an awareness of the connection between her mother and both the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth.
4. How is the forest with its many element (sunlight, brook, and windblown trees) symbolic of the lives of Hester and Pearl?
5. Dimmesdale says “Of penance, I have had enough! Of penitence there has been none!” Explain how penance and penitence are different. What penance has the minister undergone?
6. Chapter XVII provides readers with their first glimpse into the couple’s perspective on their indiscretion. How do they view it after seven years?
7. Why do you think that Pearl is so upset to find that Hester has removed the scarlet letter from her dress?
8. What effect does putting the scarlet letter back on her dress have on Hester?

10/26/09

The Scarlet Letter – chapters XVII – XIX

Summary—Chapter XVII: The Pastor and His Parishioner
In the forest, Hester and Dimmesdale are finally able to escape both the public eye and Chillingworth. They join hands and sit in a secluded spot near a brook. Hester tells Dimmesdale that Chillingworth is her husband. This news causes a “dark transfiguration” in Dimmesdale, and he begins to condemn Hester, blaming her for his suffering. Hester, unable to bear his harsh words, pulls him to her chest and buries his face in the scarlet letter as she begs his pardon. Dimmesdale eventually forgives her, realizing that Chillingworth is a worse sinner than either of them. The minister now worries that Chillingworth, who knows of Hester’s intention to reveal his secret, will expose them publicly. Hester tells the minister not to worry. She insists, though, that Dimmesdale free himself from the old man’s power. The former lovers plot to steal away on a ship to Europe, where they can live with Pearl as a family.
Summary—Chapter XVIII: A Flood of Sunshine
The scarlet letter was [Hester’s] passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, —stern and wild ones, —and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
The decision to move to Europe energizes both Dimmesdale and Hester. Dimmesdale declares that he can feel joy once again, and Hester throws the scarlet letter from her chest. Having cast off her “stigma,” Hester regains some of her former, passionate beauty, and she lets down her hair and smiles. Sunlight, which as Pearl has pointed out stays away from her mother as though it fears her scarlet letter, suddenly brightens the forest. Hester speaks to Dimmesdale about Pearl and is ecstatic that father and daughter will be able to know one another. She calls their daughter, who has been playing among the forest creatures, to join them. Pearl approaches warily.

Analysis—Chapters XVII–XVIII
The encounter in the forest is the first time the reader sees Hester and Dimmesdale in an intimate setting. Hester is moved to call the minister by his first name, and the two join hands. They refer to the initial days of their romance as a “consecration,” which suggests that they see their “sin” as having been no more than the fulfillment of a natural law. Up to this point, the narrator withheld any sentimental and tender aspects of the couple’s relationship from the reader, which enabled him to focus on issues of punishment and social order. Now that the reader has had time to develop a strong feeling about this society’s way of dealing with its problems, the narrator begins to complicate his treatment of sin as a theme. In previous chapters, the narrative has begun a subtle reevaluation of what constitutes sin. Hester and Chillingworth have discussed blame and responsibility, Mistress Hibbins has been introduced, and the narrator has provided commentary throughout on the hypocrisy of various figures. Here, though, Dimmesdale posits a hierarchy of sin, as he directly proclaims that Chillingworth’s vengefulness is far worse than any adultery. This is the first official recognition in the text of any sort of alternative to the Puritan order, be it natural or intellectual.
Because of her alienation from society, Hester has taken an “estranged point of view [toward] human institutions.” She has been able to think for herself, thanks to the scarlet letter and its dose of “Shame, Despair [and] Solitude.” She seems to have developed an understanding of a sort of “natural law,” and it is according to her instinctive principles that she decides that she, Dimmesdale, and Pearl should flee to Europe. A distinction is made between “sin” and “evil.” Sin, as represented by Hester’s past, constitutes an injury against the social and moral order but not against other human beings directly. Although it leads to alienation, it also leads to knowledge. It is a breaking of the rules for the sake of happiness. Evil, on the other hand, can be found in the hearts of those like Chillingworth, who seek no one’s happiness—not even their own—and desire only the injury of others.
Dimmesdale reacts with “joy” to the planned escape, but it is unclear whether they have made the right decision or are entering into further sin. Because their two sets of principles differ drastically, Pearl’s analysis of Hester and Dimmesdale is important in these chapters. Uncontaminated by society, Pearl is strongly associated with the natural world and therefore with truth. Hester believes that Pearl will provide the cement for her illegitimate relationship with Dimmesdale because, as their child, she naturally connects them. Yet, when Hester beckons Pearl to come to her, the child does not recognize her own mother. With her hair down and the letter gone, Hester doubtlessly looks different, and Pearl may read her mother’s abandonment of the scarlet letter as an omen of her own abandonment. As Pearl is the one character in the narrative who has access to “truth,” her unwillingness to respond to her mother suggests that there is something wrong with Hester and Dimmesdale’s plan. One could view the couple’s planned escape to Europe as a defeat—they have succumbed to the society that polices them and to the “sin” that has constantly threatened to overtake them.

10/23/09

The Scarlet Letter – chapters XV – XVI

Summary—Chapter XV: Hester and Pearl
As Chillingworth walks away, Hester goes to find Pearl. She realizes that, although it is a sin to do so, she hates her husband. If she once thought she was happy with him, it was only self-delusion. Pearl has been playing in the tide pools down on the beach. Pretending to be a mermaid, she puts eelgrass on her chest in the shape of an “A,” one that is “freshly green, instead of scarlet.” Pearl hopes that her mother will ask her about the letter, and Hester does inquire whether Pearl understands the meaning of the symbol on her mother’s chest. They proceed to discuss the meaning of the scarlet letter. Pearl connects the letter to Dimmesdale’s frequent habit of clutching his hand over his heart, and Hester is unnerved by her daughter’s perceptiveness. She realizes the child is too young to know the truth and decides not to explain the significance of the letter to her. Pearl is persistent, though, and for the next several days she harangues her mother about the letter and about the minister’s habit of reaching for his heart.

Summary—Chapter XVI: A Forest Walk
“Mother,” said little Pearl, “the sunshine does not love you. It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom. . . . It will not flee from me; for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!”
Intent upon telling Dimmesdale the truth about Chillingworth’s identity, Hester waits for the minister in the forest, because she has heard that he will be passing through on the way back from visiting a Native American settlement. Pearl accompanies her mother and romps in the sunshine along the way. Curiously, the sunshine seems to shun Hester. As they wait for Dimmesdale by a brook, Pearl asks Hester to tell her about the “Black Man” and his connection to the scarlet letter. She has overheard an old woman discussing the midnight excursions of Mistress Hibbins and others, and the woman mentioned that Hester’s scarlet letter is the mark of the “Black Man.” When Pearl sees Dimmesdale’s figure emerging from the wood, she asks whether the approaching person is the “Black Man.” Hester, wanting privacy, tries to hurry Pearl off into the woods to play, but Pearl, both scared of and curious about the “Black Man,” wants to stay. Exasperated, Hester exclaims, “It is no Black Man! . . . It is the minister!” Pearl scurries off, but not before wondering aloud whether the minister clutches his heart because the “Black Man” has left a mark there too.

Analysis—Chapters XV–XVI
These chapters return the reader to the romance world of preternaturally aware children and enchanted forests. Pearl has cleverly discerned the relationship between her mother’s mark of shame and the minister’s ailment, which share one obvious characteristic—their physical location upon the body. None of the townspeople has made the connection that Pearl now makes because they would never suspect their pastor to be capable of such a sin. Again, we see the problem with the Puritan “reading” of the world: intent on preserving the functional aspects of their society (i.e., the minister as an icon of purity), the people of Boston refuse to make what would seem to be an obvious set of connections between Hester’s situation and the minister’s mysterious torments. Pearl is too young to understand sex, adultery, or shame, but she is not blind, and she has intuitively understood the link between Hester and Dimmesdale for some time. She devises her green “A” as a deliberate test of her mother because she does not know why her mother is shunned and wants an explanation.
The best explanation Hester has for her daughter is to tell her that she has indeed met the “Black Man” and that the scarlet letter is his mark, as the old woman has said. The discussions in the last four chapters of the identity of the “Black Man” suggest a profound confusion among the characters about the nature of evil, the definition of which is an important theme in this book. Hester comes to a realization that her sins have resulted partially from the sins of others. For example, Chillingworth’s willingness to manipulate a young and naive Hester into marriage has led to the present hardness of her heart. Sin breeds sin, but not in the way the Puritan divines would have it. Sin is not a contamination but, at least in Hester’s case, a response to hurt, loneliness, and the selfishness of others. Thus, the sources of evil are many and varied, as Pearl demonstrates in her identification of both Chillingworth and Dimmesdale as potential incarnations of the “Black Man.”
The figure of Mistress Hibbins further complicates the picture of sin and evil in these chapters. As a witch participating in midnight rituals that directly invoke the “Black Man,” one would expect her to be the very embodiment of sin. But it is possible that Mistress Hibbins is representative not so much of pure evil but of the society she initially appears to be subverting: although she knows she will eventually be executed as a witch, at this point Mistress Hibbins is reaping the benefits of Puritan society’s hypocrisy. It is notable that she appears in the background of each of the scenes in which Hester faces some sort of crisis. She symbolizes this society’s tolerance of, and even need for, malevolence. We are meant to see that her transgressions are simply more extreme versions of the evils done by men like her brother and Reverend Wilson. The fact that her behavior goes unpunished forces the reader to question whether it is Hester’s lovemaking or the deeds of figures like Mistress Hibbins that really constitutes the greater threat to social stability.
Both Mistress Hibbins’s late-night activities and Hester’s and Pearl’s soul-searching are set in the forest, a place that surrounds and yet stands in opposition to the town. The woods are wild and natural, unbound by any man-made rules or codes. Additionally, the forest is a place of privacy and intimacy, which contrasts markedly to the public spaces of the town. For these reasons, it is appropriate that Hester chooses to meet Dimmesdale in the woods, through which he will pass in transition between two human extremes—the repressed, codified Puritan town and the comparatively “wild” and “natural” Indian settlement. As an intermediary between the two, the forest serves as a space between repression and chaos, between condemnation and total liberty. It should provide a balance that is ideal for a reasoned exchange between the former lovers. Nature itself, however, seems to be signaling that what is to take place will not be a simple illumination of truth. The sunlight seems to be avoiding Hester deliberately as she and Pearl walk through the forest. If, as it frequently does, light symbolizes truth, then this strange natural phenomenon appears to be suggesting that Hester is avoiding, or will not find, the “truth” that she seeks to convey to Dimmesdale. Indeed, the next chapters will show this to be the case.

10/22/09

The Scarlet Letter
Chapter XIV
Writing Assignment:

Consider the following passage:

In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a
striking evidence of man’s faculty of
transforming himself into a devil, if he
will only, for a reasonable space of time,
undertake a devil’s office. (page 155)

Do you agree or disagree? Why or why not? Write a five-paragraph essay entitled:

Becoming What You Do

Be sure to make reference to the above-mentioned quote. Then move to modern day examples of how one might become what he or she does. Close with a clincher sentence to wrap it all up.

10/22/09

The Scarlet Letter – chapters XIII – XIV

Summary—Chapter XIII: Another View of Hester

Seven years have passed since Pearl’s birth. Hester has become more active in society. She brings food to the doors of the poor, she nurses the sick, and she is a source of aid in times of trouble. She is still frequently made an object of scorn, but more people are beginning to interpret the “A” on her chest as meaning “Able” rather than “Adulterer.” Hester herself has also changed. She is no longer a tender and passionate woman; rather, burned by the “red-hot brand” of the letter, she has become “a bare and harsh outline” of her former self. She has become more speculative, thinking about how something is “amiss” in Pearl, about what it means to be a woman in her society, and about the harm she may be causing Dimmesdale by keeping Chillingworth’s identity secret.

Summary—Chapter XIV: Hester and the Physician

Hester resolves to ask Chillingworth to stop tormenting the minister. One day she and Pearl encounter him near the beach, gathering plants for his medicines. When Hester approaches him, he tells her with a smirk that he has heard “good tidings” of her, and that in fact the town fathers have recently considered allowing her to remove the scarlet letter. Hester rebuffs Chillingworth’s insincere friendliness, telling him that the letter cannot be removed by human authority. Divine providence, she says, will make it fall from her chest when it is time for it to do so. She then informs Chillingworth that she feels it is time to tell the minister the truth about Chillingworth’s identity. From their conversation, it is clear that Chillingworth now knows with certainty that Dimmesdale was Hester’s lover and that Hester is aware of his knowledge.
A change comes over Chillingworth’s face, and the narrator notes that the old doctor has transformed himself into the very embodiment of evil. In a spasm of self-awareness, Chillingworth realizes how gnarled and mentally deformed he has become. He recalls the old days, when he was a benevolent scholar. He has now changed from a human being into a vengeful fiend, a mortal man who has lost his “human heart.” Saying that she bears the blame for Chillingworth’s tragic transformation, Hester begs him to relent in his revenge and become a human being again. The two engage in an argument over who is responsible for the current state of affairs. Chillingworth insists that his revenge and Hester’s silence are “[their] fate.” “Let the black flower blossom as it may!” he exclaims to her. “Now go thy ways, and deal as thou wilt with yonder man.”

Analysis—Chapters XIII–XIV

Identity emerges as an important theme in this section of the novel. The ways in which a society tries to define a person are often at odds with the way that individual defines him- or herself. As the community reinterprets the scarlet letter, Hester once again has an identity thrust upon her by her fellow townspeople. The meaning of the letter can vary with the desires and needs of the community, because the letter does not signify any essential truth in itself. Like the meteor in Chapter XII, it simply serves to reinforce popular opinion.
Hester’s improved reputation among the townspeople would seem to speak to the community’s generosity of heart, its wisdom and compassion. Yet, because Puritan doctrine elevated faith and predestination over good works, no amount of good deeds can counteract sin; one must be ranked among the chosen. Thus, in a religious context, Hester’s work in the community is futile. Although the community may acknowledge her intentions as good, it will never consider her divinely forgiven, and thus its members cannot forgive her in their own hearts. In the end, this is a society that privileges a pure and untainted soul above an actively good human being. Taken to an extreme, a doctrine that prizes faith over good works may mean that, in terms of everyday life, the pursuit of a transcendent heaven results in a hell on earth.
The town’s reevaluation of Hester is also significant for what it says about Hester herself, about the change she has undergone in earning it. The people of Boston believe that Hester’s charitable behaviors are the result of their system working properly. They think that their chosen punishment for her, the scarlet letter, has effectively humbled her as planned. In reality, “the scarlet letter [has] not done its office.” Hester has become almost an automaton: unwomanly, cold, and uncommunicative. The scarlet letter has not led her to contemplate her sin and possible salvation. Rather, it has led her to unholy speculations—thoughts of suicide and ruminations about the unfair lot of women. In fact, Hester’s protofeminist thinking has led her to realize that she need not accept or pay attention to the town’s assessment of her at all. She refused to flee Boston when Pearl was an infant because at the time she did not believe that her fellow men and women should have the power to judge her. Now, Hester refuses to remove the scarlet letter—she understands that its removal would be as meaningless as its original placement. Her identity and, she believes, her soul’s salvation are matters that are between her and God.
Hester’s new insight into society’s right to determine the lives and identities of individuals is emphasized in her conversations with Chillingworth. Hester feels that her soul is committed to Dimmesdale rather than to Chillingworth, even though Chillingworth is legally her husband. She believes that a deeply felt interaction between two people is more “real” than the church ceremony that bound her to Chillingworth. She and Dimmesdale are bound by mutual sin, and although this may seem a “marriage of evil,” it also unites them in their common humanity. Chillingworth, on the other hand, views his actions as necessitated and sanctioned by his church and by his God. In direct contrast to Hester, he sees the social and religious orders as supreme.

10/21/09

The Scarlet Letter – Chapters X – XII

Summary—Chapter X: The Leech and His Patient
The inwardly tortured minister soon becomes Chillingworth’s greatest puzzle. The doctor relentlessly and mercilessly seeks to find the root of his patient’s condition. Chillingworth shows great persistence in inquiring into the most private details of Dimmesdale’s life, but Dimmesdale has grown suspicious of all men and will confide in no one. Chillingworth devotes all of his time to his patient. Even when he is not in Dimmesdale’s presence, Chillingworth is busy gathering herbs and weeds out of which to make medicines.
One day Dimmesdale questions his doctor about an unusual-looking plant. Chillingworth remarks that he found it growing on an unmarked grave and suggests that the dark weeds are the sign of the buried person’s unconfessed sin. The two enter into an uncomfortable conversation about confession, redemption, and the notion of “burying” one’s secrets. As they speak, they hear a cry from outside. Through the window, they see Pearl dancing in the graveyard and hooking burrs onto the “A” on Hester’s chest. When Pearl notices the two men, she drags her mother away, saying that the “Black Man” has already gotten the minister and that he must not capture them too. Chillingworth remarks that Hester is not a woman who lives with buried sin—she wears her sin openly on her breast. At Chillingworth’s words, Dimmesdale is careful not to give himself away either as someone who is intimately attached to Hester or as someone with a “buried” sin of his own. Chillingworth begins to prod the minister more directly by inquiring about his spiritual condition, explaining that he thinks it relevant to his physical health. Dimmesdale becomes agitated and tells Chillingworth that such matters are the concern of God. He then leaves the room.
Dimmesdale’s behavior has reinforced Chillingworth’s suspicions. The minister apologizes for his behavior, and the two are friends again. However, a few days later, Chillingworth sneaks up to Dimmesdale while he is asleep and pushes aside the shirt that Dimmesdale is wearing. What he sees on Dimmesdale’s chest causes the doctor to rejoice, but the reader is kept in the dark as to what Chillingworth has found there.

Summary—Chapter XI: The Interior of a Heart
Chillingworth continues to play mind games with Dimmesdale, making his revenge as terrible as possible. The minister often regards his doctor with distrust and even loathing, but because he can assign no rational basis to his feelings, he dismisses them and continues to suffer. Dimmesdale’s suffering, however, does inspire him to deliver some of his most powerful sermons, which focus on the topic of sin. His struggles allow him to empathize with human weakness, and he thus addresses “the whole human brotherhood in the heart’s native language.” Although the reverend deeply yearns to confess the truth of his sin to his parishioners, he cannot bring himself to do so. As a result, his self-probing keeps him up at night, and he even sees visions.
In one vision, he sees Hester and “little Pearl in her scarlet garb.” Hester points “her forefinger, first at the scarlet letter on her [motbosom, and then at the clergyman’s own breast.” The minister understands that he is delusional, but his psychological tumult leads him to assign great meaning to his delusions. Even the Bible offers him little support. Unable to unburden himself of the guilt deriving from his sin, he begins to believe that “the whole universe is false, . . . it shrinks to nothing within his grasp.” Dimmesdale begins to torture himself physically: he scourges himself with a whip, he fasts, and he holds extended vigils, during which he stays awake throughout the night meditating upon his sin. During one of these vigils, Dimmesdale seizes on an idea for what he believes may be a remedy to his pain. He decides to hold a vigil on the scaffold where, years before, Hester suffered for her sin.
Summary—Chapter XII: The Minister’s Vigil
Dimmesdale mounts the scaffold. The pain in his breast causes him to scream aloud, and he worries that everyone in the town will wake up and come to look at him. Fortunately for Dimmesdale, the few townspeople who heard the cry took it for a witch’s voice. As Dimmesdale stands upon the scaffold, his mind turns to absurd thoughts. He almost laughs when he sees Reverend Wilson, and in his delirium he thinks that he calls out to the older minister. But Wilson, coming from the deathbed of Governor Winthrop (the colony’s first governor), passes without noticing the penitent. Having come so close to being sighted, Dimmesdale begins to fantasize about what would happen if everyone in town were to witness their holy minister standing in the place of public shame.
Dimmesdale laughs aloud and is answered by a laugh from Pearl, whose presence he had not noticed. Hester and Pearl had also been at Winthrop’s deathbed because the talented seamstress had been asked to make the governor’s burial robe. Dimmesdale invites them to join him on the scaffold, which they do. The three hold hands, forming an “electric chain.” The minister feels energized and warmed by their presence. Pearl innocently asks, “Wilt thou stand here with Mother and me, tomorrow noontide?” but the minister replies, “Not now, child, but at another time.” When she presses him to name that time, he answers, “At the great judgment day.”
Suddenly, a meteor brightens the dark sky, momentarily illuminating their surroundings. When the minister looks up, he sees an “A” in the sky, marked out in dull red light. At the same time, Pearl points to a figure that stands in the distance and watches them. It is Chillingworth. Dimmesdale asks Hester who Chillingworth really is, because the man occasions in him what he calls “a nameless horror.” But Hester, sworn to secrecy, cannot reveal her husband’s identity. Pearl says that she knows, but when she speaks into the minister’s ear, she pronounces mere childish gibberish. Dimmesdale asks if she intends to mock him, and she replies that she is punishing him for his refusal to stand in public with her and her mother.
Chillingworth approaches and coaxes Dimmesdale down, saying that the minister must have sleepwalked his way up onto the scaffold. When Dimmesdale asks how Chillingworth knew where to find him, Chillingworth says that he, too, was making his way home from Winthrop’s deathbed.
Dimmesdale and Chillingworth return home. The following day, the minister preaches his most powerful sermon to date. After the sermon, the church sexton hands Dimmesdale a black glove that was found on the scaffold. The sexton recognized it as the minister’s, but concluded only that Satan must have been up to some mischief. The sexton then reveals another startling piece of information: he says that there has been report of a meteor falling last night in the shape of a letter “A.” The townspeople have interpreted it as having nothing to do with either Hester or Dimmesdale. Rather, they believe it to stand for “angel” and take it as a sign that Governor Winthrop has ascended to heaven.
Analysis—Chapters XI–XII
These chapters mark the apex of Dimmesdale’s spiritual and moral crisis. Dimmesdale has tried to invent for himself an alternate path to absolution, torturing himself both psychologically and physically. The nearly hysterical fear he feels when he imagines his congregation seeing him on the scaffold is a reminder that the minister has not only himself but also his flock to consider. His public disgrace could harden his followers, or even lead them astray. However, the events in these chapters suggest that Dimmesdale must publicly confront the truth about his past. He has a strong impulse to confess to his congregation, and, although he resists it, his attempts at private expiation begin to bring him closer to exposure.
The scaffold is an important symbol of the difference between Hester’s and Dimmesdale’s situations. It helps to establish an ironic contrast between her public torments and his inner anguish. Dimmesdale’s meeting with Hester and Pearl atop the scaffold echoes Hester’s public shaming seven years earlier. This time, however, no audience bears witness to the minister’s confession of sin. In fact, it is so dark outside that he is not even visible to Reverend Wilson when the latter walks past.
When Dimmesdale refuses Pearl’s request that he stand with her on the scaffold in broad daylight, she refuses to share what she knows about Chillingworth. Pearl thus makes a statement about the causal connection between Dimmesdale’s denial of his own guilt and his incomplete understanding of the world around him. As long as he hides the truth about himself, he can never discover the truths of others. Increasingly, Dimmesdale’s hallucinations seem more real than his daily encounters. His visions never wholly delude him, however, and he remains painfully aware of his reliance upon fictions.
The Puritan world of The Scarlet Letter survives through convenient fictions. In the communal mind of the townspeople, Hester is the epitome of sinfulness, the minister is the embodiment of piety, and Mistress Hibbins is the governor’s sister and thus cannot possibly be a witch, despite all clues to the contrary. Within this reductive system of thought, everyone fits into a category that enables him or her to be read as an illustrative example that reinforces a coherent order.
Yet, unlike his society, Dimmesdale recognizes that such categorizations can be fictions. In fact, it is his acute awareness of the dichotomy between his public image and his private self that leads him to new levels of insight, enabling his preaching to become ever more powerful and persuasive. Dimmesdale can speak of the ravages of sin because he lives them. He brings to his sermons sympathy for others and a strong sense of the daily terror to which a sinful life can lead. He understands that the worst consequence of sin is, practically speaking, separation from one’s fellow man, not separation from God. This more complicated definition of sin is one of the important themes of the novel.
Curiously, while Dimmesdale sees the dangers of formulaic reductions and distortions of reality, he does little to overturn them—either those he himself lives by or those upheld by his community. Much of his daily misery is caused by the willingness of those around him to play God, to stand in judgment, and, in the case of Chillingworth, to mete out punishment.
Although none of the characters explicitly challenges the Puritan order, several events within these chapters do offer an implicit rebuke. The structural juxtaposition of Governor Winthrop’s death with Dimmesdale’s crisis is significant. Winthrop was one of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its first governor. As one of the men responsible for the beginning of Puritan society, he would naturally have had to insist upon a strict adherence to Puritan ideals. His death signals the passing of an older order and suggests that the Massachusetts colony has existed long enough that a strict and literal observance of the rules is no longer necessary to ensure the colony’s survival. Perhaps someone like Hester no longer constitutes a threat to social stability in this no longer new—and thus no longer as fragile—community; perhaps the policing of others is no longer critical to the colony’s well-being.
Winthrop’s death and Dimmesdale’s guilt are jointly marked by the meteor’s “A”- shaped path. To faithful Puritans, signs, particularly natural ones, were of the utmost importance, and were read as symbols of divine will. Unlike those found in most literature, symbols in the Puritan sense do not signify in complicated or contradictory ways. Instead, they tend to serve, particularly for the characters in this novel, as reinforcements of things that are already “known.” The narrator makes a point of this by often juxtaposing his own, literary interpretations of signs—which tend to be more philosophical or metaphorical—with the Puritan community’s more “confident” or “concrete” interpretations. Here, as the narrator recognizes, the meteor physically and figuratively illuminates Dimmesdale, Hester, and Pearl, and it exposes their relationship to Chillingworth. Yet the Puritan characters see the event as definitive “proof” of their governor’s ascent to Heaven. While the characters’ more fixed symbolic interpretations provide the reader with little insight into the true nature of the celestial “A,” they nevertheless speak volumes about the minds from which they spring. Thus Dimmesdale reads the “A” in the sky as his own, divinely sent scarlet letter. His constant burden of guilt taints and controls the way he sees the world. So, too, does the community’s reading of the “A” as standing for “Angel” testify to its mindset. The townspeople see only what they want to see, a tendency that is reaffirmed the following morning when the sexton invents a story to prevent the discovery of Dimmesdale’s glove from seeming suspicious.
As we will see, the deliberate rereading of Hester’s scarlet letter that takes place in the following chapters will, like Dimmesdale’s glove, bring together this practice of stubborn misinterpretation with one of its consequences: the reduction of human beings to one-dimensional functionaries in an inflexible social order. Just as Dimmesdale must remain an example of piety—no matter how one has to stretch the facts—so, too, must Hester remain either a scapegoat or a negative example. She is not allowed to receive forgiveness.

10/21/09

The Scarlet Letter
Chapters IX – XII

Quiz:

1. Who suggests that Chillingworth and Dimmesdale lodge in the same house?

2. What occurs when the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale tells his congregation that he is the worst of sinners?

3. What does Dimmesdle do in penance for his sins?

4. Where have Hester and Pearl been before they arrive at the scaffold?

5. What does the minister reply when Pearl asks him if he will stand on the scaffold with them tomorrow in broad daylight?

6. How do the townspeople who see the red “A” in the sky interpret it?

Answer the following questions in paragraph form on a separate sheet of paper. Five sentences minimum per paragraph. Due at the end of class.

1. What is your opinion of Arthur Dimmesdale through chapter xii?
2. “Leech” is an old word for physician, and also means “a bloodsucking worm formerly used by physicians in bloodletting,” and “one who clings to another to get what he can from him.” Explain the irony involved in using this word in the titles of chapters ix and x.
3. Dimmesdale’s room is hung with tapestries depicting the Biblical story of David, Bathsheba, and Nathan the Prophet. King David committed adultery with Bathsheba. He then ordered that her husband be sent to certain death in battle. Nathan warned the king that he will be punished (2 Samuel 11 – 12). Why is it ironic that these scenes should be decorating Dimmesdale’s rooms? What effect is the constant sight of them likely to have on the minister’s sensibilities?
4. How dos the discovery Chillingworth makes (at the end of chapter x) change the relationship between the minister and him?
5. What frequent gesture of Dimmesdale’s foreshadows the presence of something beneath his vestment? Locate a passage in the novel (page #; paragraph) where the reader can deduce what Chillingworth saw on his patient’s chest. What do you think in on Dimmesdale’s chest?
6. Pearl appears to know intuitively that Dimmesdale is her father when she asks him whether he will stand with her mother and her on the scaffold in daylight. What previous indications have there been that she feels a special bond with the minister?

10/20/09: Drop back and punt

10/19/09
The Scarlet Letter

Chapters VII–IX
Summary—Chapter VII: The Governor’s Hall
Hester pays a visit to Governor Bellingham’s mansion. She has two intentions: to deliver a pair of ornate gloves she has made for the governor, and to find out if there is any truth to the rumors that Pearl, now three, may be taken from her. Some of the townspeople, apparently including the governor, have come to suspect Pearl of being a sort of demon-child. The townspeople reason that if Pearl is a demon-child, she should be taken from Hester for Hester’s sake. And, they reason, if Pearl is indeed a human child, she should be taken away from her mother for her own sake and given to a “better” parent than Hester Prynne. On their way to see the governor, Hester and Pearl are attacked by a group of children, who try to fling mud at them. Pearl becomes angry and frightens the children off.
The governor’s mansion is stuffy and severe. It is built in the style of the English aristocracy, complete with family portraits and a suit of armor, which the governor has worn in battles with the Native Americans. Pearl is fascinated by the armor. When she points out her mother’s reflection in it, Hester is horrified to see that the scarlet letter dominates the reflection. Pearl begins to scream for a rose from the bush outside the window, but she is quieted by the entrance of a group of men.

Summary—Chapter VIII: The Elf-Child and the Minister
Bellingham, Wilson, Chillingworth, and Dimmesdale enter the room. They notice Pearl and begin to tease her by calling her a bird and a demon-child. When the governor points out that Hester is also present, they ask her why she should be allowed to keep the child. She tells the men that she will be able to teach Pearl an important lesson—the lesson that she has learned from her shame. They are doubtful, and Wilson tries to test the three-year-old’s knowledge of religious subjects. Wilson resents Pearl’s seeming dislike of him, and Pearl’s refusal to answer even the simplest of questions does not bode well.
With nowhere else to turn, Hester begs Dimmesdale to speak for her and her child. He replies by reminding the men that God sent Pearl and that the child was seemingly meant to be both a blessing and a curse. Swayed by his eloquence, Bellingham and Wilson agree not to separate mother and child. Strangely, Pearl has taken well to Dimmesdale. She goes to him and presses his hand to her cheek. Vexed because Hester seems to have triumphed, Chillingworth presses the men to reopen their investigation into the identity of Hester’s lover, but they refuse, telling him that God will reveal the information when He deems it appropriate. As Hester leaves the governor’s mansion, Mistress Hibbins, the governor’s sister, pokes her head out of the window to invite Hester to a witches’ gathering. Hester tells her that if she had not been able to keep Pearl, she would have gone willingly. The narrator notes that it seems Pearl has saved her mother from Satan’s temptations.

Analysis—Chapters VII–VIII
These chapters link Pearl even more explicitly to the scarlet letter. Hester dresses her daughter in “a crimson velvet tunic of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold thread.” Pearl and the embroidered letter are both beautiful in a rich, sensuous way that stands in contrast to the stiffness of Puritan society. Indeed, the narrator explicitly tells the reader that Pearl is “the scarlet letter endowed with life.” The narrator tells us that Hester has worked to create an “analogy between the object of [Hester’s] affection and the emblem of her guilt and torture.” This reinforces the contradictory nature of both the letter and Pearl, for just as Hester both loves and feels burdened by Pearl, her thoughts regarding the scarlet letter seem also to contain a touch of fondness. Certainly her attitude toward it is not one of uniform regret, and she may even harbor pleasant associations with the deeds that the letter symbolizes. The sin itself was both a guilty act and an act of affection, a problematic combination of love and “evil.”
The letter and the child also hold a dual meaning for the town fathers. They understand that both child and badge function as reminders of sin and as protections against further sin. Dimmesdale momentarily acknowledges this in his speech, but the purpose of his words is not to ponder ambiguities but rather to point to these ambiguities as proof of the futility of all interpretation. Pearl, he says, came from God, and therefore must be intended as Hester’s companion. According to Dimmesdale, any attempt to interpret her presence otherwise would be in vain because no one has knowledge of God’s intentions.
Governor Bellingham’s mansion is rich in symbolic detail. The narrator tells us that it replicates an English nobleman’s home, and Bellingham proudly displays his ancestors’ portraits. Puritans certainly didn’t seek to reject English culture as a whole, but it is nevertheless important that Bellingham has chosen to re-create a piece of the old world in the new. Bellingham’s ties to the world that the Puritans supposedly left behind suggest that he has brought with him the very things the Puritans sought to escape by leaving England: intolerance and a lack of freedom. The state of the governor’s garden implies that such translations of old into new may not be as seamless as the governor wishes. The garden, planted in the English ornamental style, is in a state of decay. The decorative plants have not taken root, and the garden’s creator appears to have given up. Cabbages, pumpkins, and a few rosebushes are all that has grown there. The English ornamental plants serve as symbols of the principles and ideals of the old world, which cannot be successfully transplanted to America.
The decaying garden can also be read in other ways. Its need of maintenance suggests that Bellingham is not capable of nurturing things—including the society he is supposed to govern. The fertility of the cabbages and the pumpkins hints at the fundamental incompatibility of ideals with the necessities of life. The garden was intended to provide a pleasing aesthetic experience, but it ends up serving only a practical purpose by growing food. The one aesthetic object that does grow in the garden is a rosebush, which explicitly links ideals to pain—every rose, after all, has its thorn.
The governor’s suit of armor is another meaningful item. It is suggestive of war and violence, but while describing the armor, the narrator takes the opportunity to mention that Bellingham trained as a lawyer. In the same way that war requires soldiers to leave their jobs and fight for their country, the “exigencies of this new country” led Bellingham to take on the roles of statesman and soldier. Such a comparison suggests that Bellingham may be incompetent in his newly adopted careers, or at least that he has overextended himself. The armor also functions as a distorting mirror, and Hester’s out-of-scale reflection signifies her unnatural place in society.
The final paradox of the governor’s house is Mistress Hibbins, the acknowledged witch who is Governor Bellingham’s sister. Something is clearly awry in a society that allows a woman who admittedly engages in satanic practices to remain a protected and acknowledged member of the community, while it forces Hester, who has erred but once, to live as an outcast and in danger of losing her child.
It is Pearl who points out many of these disturbing and significant images. In these scenes, she shows herself to be not only a spiritual help to her mother but also a kind of oracle of truth. Accurately sensing the sinister aura of the place, she tries to escape out a window. Most important, she shuns Wilson and clings to Dimmesdale, exhibiting what we will later understand as a profound subconscious insight: her instinct leads her away from the representative of her “heavenly father” and toward her true, “earthly” father. Her impulse also reflects on the relative characters of the two men. Wilson, as she senses, is not to be trusted, while Dimmesdale, although he refuses to acknowledge his guilt, will ultimately remain loyal to her and her mother.

Summary—Chapter IX: The Leech
By renaming himself upon his arrival in Boston, Chillingworth has hidden his past from everyone except Hester, whom he has sworn to secrecy. He incorporates himself into society in the role of a doctor, and since the townsfolk have very little access to good medical care, he is welcomed and valued. In addition to his training in European science, he also has some knowledge of “native” or “natural” remedies, because he was captured by Native Americans and lived with them for a time. The town sometimes refers to the doctor colloquially as a “leech,” which was a common epithet for physicians at the time. The name derives from the practice of using leeches to drain blood from their patients, which used to be regarded as a curative process.
Much to the community’s concern, Dimmesdale has been suffering from severe health problems. He appears to be wasting away, and he frequently clutches at his chest as though his heart pains him. Because Dimmesdale refuses to marry any of the young women who have devoted themselves to him, Chillingworth urges the town leadership to insist that Dimmesdale allow the doctor to live with him. In this way, Chillingworth may have a chance to diagnose and cure the younger man. The two men take rooms next to the cemetery in a widow’s home, which gives them an opportunity for the contemplation of sin and death. The minister’s room is hung with tapestries depicting biblical scenes of adultery and its punishment, while Chillingworth’s room contains a laboratory that is sophisticated for its time.
The townspeople were initially grateful for Chillingworth’s presence and deemed his arrival a divine miracle designed to help Dimmesdale. As time has passed, however, rumors have spread concerning Chillingworth’s personal history. Even more ominously, the man’s face has begun to take on a look of evil. A majority of the townspeople begin to suspect that Chillingworth is the Devil, come to wage battle for Dimmesdale’s soul.

10/16/09

The Scarlet Letter
Chapters V – IX
Choose one of the following:

ChapterV: Writing Assignment:

Pages 73 and 74 lead the reader into a discussion as to why Hester did not flee New England to escape the sentence placed upon her (to wear the scarlet letter.) The text gives us three possible reasons:
1. It is human nature to stay where an event occurred that marked a person’s life.
2. The person with whom she was in love lived here.
3. She hoped by wearing the scarlet letter to be purged from her sin.

Write a five-paragraph essay discussing Hester’s decision to stay in New England.

The first paragraph should briefly explain Hester’s sin and her punishment. Be sure to include the interlocking of Puritan law with religion. Introduce Hester Prynne as if the reader has never heard of her. Briefly mention the three points that you plan to discuss in this introductory paragraph.

The second paragraph should discuss the first of the three points in more detail. Use quotes from the book to support your statements. The third paragraph should discuss the second of the three points. Again, use quotes and examples from the text for support.
The fourth paragraph should discuss the last of the three points, supported by examples and quotes.

Note: be sure to discuss the three points in the same order as they were introduced in the introductory paragraph. This makes for a better organized paper.

The last paragraph is the conclusion. This should be a summation and wrap-up of the points presented. Mention each specific point again and make them “tie in” or relate to one another in the overall perspective – and conclusive arguments – of the essay.

Your general outline should look something like this:

Hester Prynne Stays in New England
I. Introduction
II. Held by a marked event
III. Captivated by an unknown love
IV. Determined to be purged by accepting her punishment
V. Conclusion

Chapter VIII Writing Assignment:

Authors often use foreshadowing as a means of giving hints as to a story’s outcome. Use a dictionary to define foreshadowing. Then re-read pages 106 and 107. What elements of foreshadowing do you find? Make a guess as to what the reader might expect to happen before the book’s close. Write at least 150 words. Your paper should be set up as follows:

The Foreshadowing of Chapter 8

Foreshadowing is (definition) . Hawthorne uses foreshadowing in Chapter 8 of Scarlet Letter to make the reader aware of certain potential outcomes. (Discuss what you find on pp. 106-107. Then write a conclusion that ties it all together.)

Chapter IX Writing Assignment:

Consider the following quote:
A man burdened with a secret should especially avoid the intimacy of his physician. (page 114)

Write a 5-paragraph essay discussing this statement. Select an interesting title for your paper. Then write an introductory paragraph where you set forth the topic. Follow this with three paragraphs that expound upon what you set forth in the first paragraph. Support your opinion with both modern day suppositions and examples from text. Close with a conclusion paragraph.

10/16/09

The Scarlet Letter
Chapters V – IX

Answer the following questions in complete sentence form on a separate sheet of paper.
Due at end of class

1. What reasons does Hawthorne give for Hester’s remaining in Boston where she is an outcast?
2. What is one occasion for which Hester is never asked to make clothing?
3. What is the first object Pearl seems to be aware of as an infant?
4. When Governor Bellingham demands to know what Hester can teach Pearl concerning the “truths of Heaven and Earth” what does Hester reply?
5. How has Chillingworth’s appearance changed since Hester last saw him?
6. How does Arthur Dimmesdale come to the aid of Hester and Pearl?
7. Is Pearl’s behavior really unnatural for a child, or does Hester just imagine that it it? Explain.
8. How is the name of Hester’s child symbolic?
9. Explain how Hester’s “sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts” affects her.
10. How does Hawthorne characterize the disciplining of children in the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony? How do you think Pearl would have behaved if Hester had taken this disciplinary approach?
11. Summarize the Reverend Dimmesdale’s argument for allowing Hester to keep Pearl.
12. At the conclusion of this “conference” on Pearl’s welfare, what is Chillingworth’s chief interest?

10/15/09

The Scarlet Letter – chapters V – VI

Summary—Chapter V: Hester at Her Needle

The narrator covers the events of several years. After a few months, Hester is released from prison. Although she is free to leave Boston, she chooses not to do so. She settles in an abandoned cabin on a patch of infertile land at the edge of town. Hester remains alienated from everyone, including the town fathers, respected women, beggars, children, and even strangers. She serves as a walking example of a fallen woman, a cautionary tale for everyone to see. Although she is an outcast, Hester remains able to support herself due to her uncommon talent in needlework. Her taste for the beautiful infuses her embroidery, rendering her work fit to be worn by the governor despite its shameful source. Although the ornate detail of her artistry defies Puritan codes of fashion, it is in demand for burial shrouds, christening gowns, and officials’ robes. In fact, through her work, Hester touches all the major events of life except for marriage—it is deemed inappropriate for chaste brides to wear the product of Hester Prynne’s hands. Despite her success, Hester feels lonely and is constantly aware of her alienation. As shame burns inside of her, she searches for companionship or sympathy, but to no avail. She devotes part of her time to charity work, but even this is more punishment than solace: those she helps frequently insult her, and making garments for the poor out of rough cloth insults her aesthetic sense.

Summary—Chapter VI: Pearl

Hester’s one consolation is her daughter, Pearl, who is described in great detail in this chapter. A beautiful flower growing out of sinful soil, Pearl is so named because she was “purchased with all [Hester] had—her mother’s only treasure!” Because “in giving her existence a great law had been broken,” Pearl’s very being seems to be inherently at odds with the strict rules of Puritan society. Pearl has inherited all of Hester’s moodiness, passion, and defiance, and she constantly makes mischief. Hester loves but worries about her child.
When the narrator describes Pearl as an “outcast,” he understates: Pearl is an “imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants.” Pearl herself is aware of her difference from others, and when Hester tries to teach her about God, Pearl says, “I have no Heavenly Father!” Because Pearl is her mother’s constant companion, she, too, is subject to the cruelties of the townspeople. The other children are particularly cruel because they can sense that something is not quite right about Hester and her child. Knowing that she is alone in this world, Pearl creates casts of characters in her imagination to keep her company.
Pearl is fascinated by the scarlet letter and at times seems to intentionally torture her mother by playing with it. Once, when Pearl is pelting the letter with wildflowers, Hester exclaims in frustration, “Child, what art thou?” Pearl turns the question back on her mother, insisting that Hester tell her of her origins. Surprised at the impudence of a child so young (Pearl is about three at the time), Hester wonders if Pearl might not be the demon-child that many of the townspeople believe her to be.

Analysis—Chapters V–VI

Chapter V deals with one of the primary questions of the book: why does Hester choose to stay in Boston when she is free to leave? The narrator offers several explanations. Hester’s explanation to herself is that New England was the scene of her crime; therefore, it should also be the scene of her punishment. The narrator adds that Hester’s life has been too deeply marked by the things that have happened to her here for her to leave. Additionally, he adds, Hester feels bound to Pearl’s father, who presumably continues to live in Boston. But there seems to be more to Hester’s refusal to leave. Were she to escape to Europe or into the wilderness, Hester would be acknowledging society’s power over the course of her life. By staying and facing cruel taunts and alienation, Hester insists, paradoxically, upon her right to self-determination. Hester does not need to flee or to live a life of lies in order to resist the judgment against her.
Each time she interacts with Pearl, Hester is forced to reconsider the life she has chosen for herself. Pearl is both the sign of Hester’s shame and her greatest treasure—she is a punishment and a consolation. Pearl reminds Hester of her transgression, of the act that has left Hester in her current state of alienation. And Pearl’s ostracism by the community recalls Hester’s own feelings of exile. Yet, Pearl’s existence also suggests that out of sin comes treasure. This idea is reinforced by Hester’s needlework: out of necessity born of shame, luxury and beauty are crafted.
It is fitting that Pearl is fascinated by the scarlet letter, as the child and the emblem are read similarly by society. Like Pearl, the letter inspires a mixture of contempt and strange enchantment. Both also invite contemplation: people—even the narrator, some two hundred years later—feel compelled to tell the story behind the two relics.
The children of the townspeople are as cruel as their parents in their treatment of Hester and Pearl. In their “play,” the underlying attitudes of the community are revealed. The Puritans-in-training make believe they are scalping Native Americans, they mimic the gestures of going to church, and they pretend to engage in witchcraft. They mirror the true preoccupations of their parents, just as Pearl reflects the complex state of her exiled mother. Indeed, Hester frequently uses Pearl as a mirror, watching her own reflection in the child’s eyes.
It is in these chapters that the book’s romance atmosphere emerges. (The term “romance” here refers to an emphasis on the supernatural, the unrealistic, or the magical in order to explore alternatives to the “reality” of human existence.) Hester’s cottage on the edge of the forest functions as a space where the mores of the town do not wield as much authority. As we will see later, the forest itself represents even greater freedom. Pearl seems to be a kind of changeling—a surreal, elfin creature who challenges reality and thrives on fantasy and strangeness. This world of near-magic is, of course, utterly un-Puritan. At times it seems almost un-human. Yet the genius of Hawthorne’s technique here is that he uses the “un-human” elements of Hester and Pearl’s life together to emphasize their very humanness. The text suggests that being fully human means not denying one’s human nature. By indulging in dream, imagination, beauty, and passion, one accesses a world that is more magically transcendent.

Read chapters VII-IX for Friday

10/14/09

The Scarlet Letter: read and discuss chapters 3-4 in class

Read chapters 5-6 for Wednesday

10/12 – 13/09

The Scarlet Letter

Introductory – The Custom House
Summary
The Custom House is largely an autobiographical sketch describing Hawthorne’s life as an administrator of the Salem Custom House. It was written to enlarge the overall size of The Scarlet Letter, since Hawthorne deemed the story too short to print by itself. It also serves as an excellent essay on society during Hawthorne’s times, and allows Hawthorne to pretend to have discovered The Scarlet Letter in the Custom House.
Hawthorne was granted the position of chief executive officer of the Customs House through the President’s commission. His analysis of the place is harsh and critical. He describes his staff as a bunch of tottering old men who rarely rise out of their chairs, and who spend each day sleeping or talking softly to one another. Hawthorne tells the reader that he could not bring himself to fire any of them, and so after he assumed leadership things stayed the same.
Hawthorne describes the town of Salem as a port city which failed to mature into a major harbor. The streets and buildings are dilapidated, the townspeople very sober and old, and grass grows between the cobblestones. The Custom House serves the small ship traffic which goes through the port, but is usually a quiet place requiring only minimal amounts of work.
The connection between Salem and the Puritans is made early on in the text. Hawthorne’s family originally settled in Salem, and he is a direct descendent of several notable ancestors. He describes his ancestors as severe Puritans decked out in black robes, laying harsh judgment upon people who strayed from their faith. When discussing his ancestors, Hawthorne is both reverent and mocking, jokingly wondering how an idler such as himself could have born from such noble lineage.
Much of the story then deals with long descriptions of the various men with whom he worked in the Customs House. General Miller, the Collector, is the oldest inhabitant, a man who had maintained a stellar career in the military, but who has chosen to work in the Customs House for the remainder of his years. The other man described by Hawthorne is the Inspector. Hawthorne writes that the job was created by the man’s father decades earlier, and that he has held the position ever since. The Inspector is the most light-hearted of the workers, constantly laughing and talking in spite of his age.
The upstairs of the Custom House was designed to accommodate a large movement of goods through the port, and is in ill-repair since it soon became extraneous. Hawthorne says that the large upstairs hall was used to store documents, and it is here that he finds an unusual package. The package contains some fabric with a faded letter “A” imprinted on the cloth, and some papers describing the entire story behind the letter. This is the story that Hawthorne claims is the basis for The Scarlet Letter.
Three years after taking his job as Surveyor, General Taylor was elected President of the United States, and Hawthorne received notice of his termination. Hawthorne remarks that he is lucky to have been let go, since it allowed him the time to write out the entire story of The Scarlet Letter. He finishes the The Custom House with a description of his life since leaving his job as Surveyor, and comments that, “it may be, however…that the great-grandchildren of the present race may sometimes think kindly of the scribbler of bygone days…”
Read chapters 1 and 2 aloud

Chapter 1
Summary
A large crowd of Puritans stands outside of the prison, waiting for the door to open. The prison is described as a, “wooden jail…already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front.” The iron on the prison is rusting and creates an overall appearance of decay.
Outside of the building, next to the door, a rosebush stands in full bloom. Hawthorne remarks that it is possible, “this rosebush…had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison door.” He then plucks one of the roses and offers it to the reader as a “moral blossom” to be found later in the story.
Analysis
This opening chapter introduces several of the images and themes within the story to follow. These images will recur in several settings and serve as metaphors for the underlying conflict.
The prison represents several different symbols. Foremost it is a symbol for the Puritanical severity of law. The description of the prison indicates that it is old, rusted, yet strong with an “iron-clamped oaken door.” This represents the rigorous enforcement of laws and the inability to break free of them.
The prison also serves as a metaphor for the authority of the regime, which will not tolerate deviance. Hawthorne directly challenges this notion by throwing the name Ann Hutchinson into the opening pages. Hutchinson was a religious woman who disagreed with the Puritanical teachings, and as a result was imprisoned in Boston. Hawthorne claims that it is possible the beautiful rosebush growing directly at the prison door sprang from her footsteps. This implies that the Puritanical authoritarianism may be too rigid, to the point of obliterating things of beauty.
The rosebush is a symbol of passion. As will later become obvious, Hester Prynne’s sin is one of passion, thus linking her crime to the image of the rosebush. Hawthorne also indirectly compares Hester with Ann Hutchinson via the rosebush, and again makes the same parallel in Chapter 13, Another View of Hester.
Hawthorne cleverly links the rosebush to the wilderness surrounding Boston, commenting that the bush may be a remnant of the former forest which covered the area. This is important, because it is only in the forest wilderness where the Puritans’ laws fail to have any force. Thus the image of the rosebush serves to foreshadow that some of the passionate wilderness, in the form of Hester Prynne, may have accidentally made its way into Boston.
The rosebush in full bloom indicates that Hester is at the peak of her passion. This parallels the fact that Hester has just born a child as a result of her passion. The child is thus comparable to the blossoms on the rosebush. Hawthorne’s comment that the rose may serve as a “moral blossom” in the story is therefore actually saying that Hester’s child will serve to provide the moral of the story.
Synopsis:
The reader’s focus is directed to an old churchyard, cemetery, and jail. A rosebush grows just outside the prison door.

Vocabulary:

1. The Word: edifice

In Context: “A throng of bearded men … assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak and studded with iron spikes.” (p.45)

2. The Word: Utopia (sometimes not capitalized)

In Context: “The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery…” (p.45)

3. The Word: sepulchre

In Context: “…they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson’s lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King’s Chapel.” (p.45)

4. The Word: inauspicious

In Context: “Finding it (the rose bush) so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers…” (p.46)

5. The Word: portal

In Context: “Finding it (the rose bush) so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers…” (p.46)

Writing Assignment: 10/13/09
In the very first chapter, we see Hawthorne’s ability to use symbolism. Consider this passage that refers to the rose bush outside the prison door:

Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom that may be found along the track or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.

Hawthorne was a master of symbolism. In this passage, he not only uses the rose to symbolize the mingling of sweetness with sadness, but he uses foreshadowing in the last sentence to prepare us for a story of “human frailty and sorrow.”

Write a four-paragraph paper. The first paragraph should be an introduction that opens up the subject of an author’s use of symbolism and foreshadowing as literary tools. The second paragraph should define symbolism. The third should define foreshadowing. The last paragraph will be a conclusion paragraph where you summarize what you have presented. An outline would look something like this:

Literary Tools of Symbolism and Foreshadowing

I. Introduction
II. Symbolism
III. Foreshadowing
IV. Conclusion

Chapter II: The Market-Place
Summary—As the crowd watches, Hester Prynne, a young woman holding an infant, emerges from the prison door and makes her way to a scaffold (a raised platform), where she is to be publicly condemned. The women in the crowd make disparaging comments about Hester; they particularly criticize her for the ornateness of the embroidered badge on her chest—a letter “A” stitched in gold and scarlet. From the women’s conversation and Hester’s reminiscences as she walks through the crowd, we can deduce that she has committed adultery and has borne an illegitimate child, and that the “A” on her dress stands for “Adulterer.”
The beadle calls Hester forth. Children taunt her and adults stare. Scenes from Hester’s earlier life flash through her mind: she sees her parents standing before their home in rural England, then she sees a “misshapen” scholar, much older than herself, whom she married and followed to continental Europe. But now the present floods in upon her, and she inadvertently squeezes the infant in her arms, causing it to cry out. She regards her current fate with disbelief.
Analysis—Chapters I–II

These chapters introduce the reader to Hester Prynne and begin to explore the theme of sin, along with its connection to knowledge and social order. The chapters’ use of symbols, as well as their depiction of the political reality of Hester Prynne’s world, testify to the contradictions inherent in Puritan society. This is a world that has already “fallen,” that already knows sin: the colonists are quick to establish a prison and a cemetery in their “Utopia,” for they know that misbehavior, evil, and death are unavoidable. This belief fits into the larger Puritan doctrine, which puts heavy emphasis on the idea of original sin—the notion that all people are born sinners because of the initial transgressions of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
But the images of the chapters—the public gatherings at the prison and at the scaffold, both of which are located in central common spaces—also speak to another Puritan belief: the belief that sin not only permeates our world but that it should be actively sought out and exposed so that it can be punished publicly. The beadle reinforces this belief when he calls for a “blessing on the righteous Colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine.” His smug self-righteousness suggests that Hester’s persecution is fueled by more than the villagers’ quest for virtue. While exposing sin is meant to help the sinner and provide an example for others, such exposure does more than merely protect the community. Indeed, Hester becomes a scapegoat, and the public nature of her punishment makes her an object for voyeuristic contemplation; it also gives the townspeople, particularly the women, a chance to demonstrate—or convince themselves of—their own piety by condemning her as loudly as possible. Rather than seeing their own potential sinfulness in Hester, the townspeople see her as someone whose transgressions outweigh and obliterate their own errors.
Yet, unlike her fellow townspeople, Hester accepts her humanity rather than struggles against it; in many ways, her “sin” originated in her acknowledgment of her human need for love, following her husband’s unexplained failure to arrive in Boston and his probable death. The women of the town criticize her for embroidering the scarlet letter, the symbol of her shame, with such care and in such a flashy manner: its ornateness seems to declare that she is proud, rather than ashamed, of her sin. In reality, however, Hester simply accepts the “sin” and its symbol as part of herself, just as she accepts her child. And although she can hardly believe her present “realities,” she takes them as they are rather than resisting them or trying to atone for them.
Both the rosebush and Hester resist the kinds of fixed interpretation that the narrator associates with religion. The narrator offers multiple possibilities for the significance of the rosebush near the prison door, as he puzzles over its survival in his source manuscript. But, in the end, he rejects all of its possible “meanings,” refusing to give the rosebush a definitive interpretation.
So, too, does the figure of Hester offer various options for interpretation. The fact that she is a woman with a past, with memories of a childhood in England, a marriage in Europe, and a journey to America, means that, despite what the Puritan community thinks, she cannot be defined solely in terms of a single action, in terms of her great “sin.” Pearl, her child, is evidence of this: her existence makes the scarlet letter redundant in that it is she and not the snippet of fabric that is the true consequence of Hester’s actions. As Pearl matures in the coming chapters and her role in Hester’s life becomes more complex, the part Hester’s “sin” plays in defining her identity will become more difficult to determine. For now, the infant’s presence highlights the insignificance of the community’s attempt at punishment: Pearl is a sign of a larger, more powerful order than that which the community is attempting to assert—be it nature, biology, or a God untainted by the corruptions of human religious practices. The fact that the townspeople focus on the scarlet letter rather than on the human child underlines their pettiness, and their failure to see the more “real” consequences of Hester’s action.
From this point forward, Hester will be formally, officially set apart from the rest of society; yet these opening chapters imply that, even before her acquisition of the scarlet letter, she had always been unique. The text describes her appearance as more distinctive than conventionally beautiful: she is tall and radiates a natural nobility that sets her apart from the women of the town, with whom she is immediately juxtaposed. Hester’s physical isolation on the scaffold thus only manifests an internal alienation that predates the beginning of the plot.
This is the first of three important scenes involving the scaffold. Each of these scenes will show a character taking the first step toward a sort of Emersonian self-reliance, the kind of self-reliance that would come to replace Puritan ideology as the American ideal. In this scene, Hester confronts her “realities” and discovers a new self that does not fit with her old conceptions of herself. Puritan doctrine views “reality” as merely an obstacle to a world beyond this one; Hester’s need to embrace her current situation (in part by literally embracing her daughter) implies a profound separation from the ideals of that ideological system. From now on, Hester will stand outside, if still surrounded by, the Puritan order.

10/08/09: Poetry Test

10/07/09

American Poetry Test Review

Write the basic definition of each term on a separate sheet of paper.
If the term is not in the Literary Terms Handbook in your textbook, you may have to use the glossary or index.

1. Allusion
2. Analogy
3. Apostrophe
4. Dramatic Monologue
5. Fireside Poets
6. Free Verse
7. Imagery
8. Imagism
9. Irony
10. Lyric Poem
11. Meter
12. Narrative Poem
13. Onomatopoeia
14. Paradox
15. Parody
16. Personification
17. Realism
18. Rhythm
19. Satire
20. Slant Rhyme
21. Sonnet
22. Spiritual
23. Stanza
24. Theme
25. Tone

· You will also need to be able to discuss the time period, themes, characteristics and goals of the Transcendentalists, Fireside Poets, Realists, Imagists, Modernists, and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance.

Time: mid 19th century
Themes: truths about life and death can be found only by going beyond the
world of the senses, spiritual understanding, power of nature, visions
and ideals, being true to oneself, self-reliance, imagination, finding
God in nature
Characteristics: strong imagery, formal stanzas
Goals: for every individual to rise above the physical world and know something
of the ultimate spiritual reality, to reform society

Fireside Poets: (Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, Whittier)

Time: mid 19th century
Themes: purpose of life, power of nature, patriotism, spiritual growth, memories,
time
Characteristics: optimistic, easy to read, inspiring, use of personification
Goals: to commemorate and comment on American life and its people in a
simple, enjoyable way

Realists: (Robinson)

Time: late 19th and early 20th century
Themes: social class, dreams, frustration, drama and tensions in everyday life,
descriptive
Characteristics: use of irony
Goals: to present life and people as they actually are, including the negatives

Imagists: (Pound, Williams, H.D.)

Time: early 20th century
Themes: modern art, imagination, joy of life, simple pleasure, observation,
unexpected beauty
Characteristics: fragmented, an image rather than a description, free verse
Goals: search for new art

Modernists: (Eliot, Stein)

Time: early 20th century
Themes: workings of the human mind, memory, disillusionment, loneliness,
identity
Characteristics: stream of consciousness, free verse, imagery
Goals: to capture the bewilderment of modern life

Harlem Renaissance: (Toomer, Cullen, Hughes)

Time: early 20th century
Themes: beauty, brotherhood, the black experience, dreams and ideals,
Characteristics: imagery, personification, compare and contrast
Goals: to explore and chronicle the experiences of black America

10/06/09

Modern Poetry

· Read “Mirror” on page 1216

· Read “In a Classroom” on page 1217

· Read “The Explorer” on page 1218

· Read “Frederick Douglass” on page 1219

· Read “Runagate Runagate” on pages1221-1222

o Discuss Theme
Connotation

· Read “For My Children” on pages 1241-1242

· Read “Bidwell Ghost” on pages 1243-1244

· Read “Camouflaging the Chimera” on pages 1245-1246

o Discuss Lyric Poetry

Assignment:
Answer questions 1-10 on page 1223 in complete sentences
Answer questions 1-8 on page 1247 in complete sentences

10/05/09

20th Century

· Read “Gold Glade” on pages 1050-1051
· Read “The Light Comes Brighter” on page 1052
· Read “Traveling Through The Dark” on pages 1053-1054

· Read “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper” on page 1132
· Read “Most Satisfied by Snow” on page 1133
· Read “Hunger in New York City on page 1134
· Read “What For” on pages 1135-1137

· Read “Losses” on page 1209
· Read “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” on page 1210

Assignment:
Answer questions 1-7 on page 1055
Answer questions 1-5 on page 1138
Answer questions 1-8 on page 1211

10/02/09

20th Century

W.H. Auden

Read “The Unknown Citizen” on pages777-778

Wallace Stevens

· Read “Of Modern Poetry” on page 794.

· Read “Anecdote of the Jar” on page 795.

Archibald MacLeish

· Read “Ars Poetica” on pages 796-797

Marianne Moore

· Read “Poetry” on pages 798-799

Assignment: Read question 9 on page 800. Write a 5-paragraph essay in which
you choose another art form (writing, art, music, film, or a subset within) and discuss what characteristics make a “good” version.
For example, what makes a “good” expressionist painting; what makes a “good” country song, what makes a “good” horror film.
What makes a “good” novel? Choose something you feel you know about.

0/01/09

20th Century

Carl Sandberg

Read bio on page 838

Read aloud “Chicago” on page 841
· Discuss: Discuss:

· Theme
· Speaker
· Personification
· Imagery
· Apostrophe

Read “Grass” on page 842

Read “Jazz Fantasia” on page 435 (old book) (play “Black and Tan Fantasy by Duke Ellington from “The History of Jazz: The Early Days” PLATCD712, track 15, while reading)
· Discuss:

· Theme
· Rhythm
· Onomatopoeia
· Colloquial Language

· Read “Cool Tombs” on page 1141 of Norton’s.

Robert Frost

Read bio on page 880

Read “The Road Not Taken” on handout
· Discuss:

· Theme
· Rhyme
· Symbol

Read “Fire and Ice” (handout) and “Acquainted with the Night” on page 892.
· Discuss:

· Theme
· Metaphor
· Symbol
· Sonnet

Read “Nothing Gold Can Stay” on handout.
· Discuss:

· Theme
· Metaphor
· Allusion
· Rhyme

Read “Stopping by Woods…” on page 885.
· Discuss:
· Theme
· Rhyme (chain-link stanzas)

Read “Desert Places” on handout.
· Discuss:

· Theme
· Repetition
· Imagery

Read “Mending Wall” on page 886.
· Discuss:

· Theme
· Speaker
· Symbol
· Blank Verse
· Characterization

09/30/09

ee cummings

Read bio on page 772.

Read aloud “old age sticks” on page 775 and “anyone lived in a pretty how town” on page 775.

· Discuss:
· Theme
· Analogy
· Form
· Free Verse
· Personification
· Hyperbole

· Hand out “grasshopper” and have students translate.
· Translation on screen

· Read and enjoy poems from Norton’s

Assignment:
Choose and object or a creature that has a characteristic motion, and write a poem in which you capture that motion by playing with words and their visual appearance on the page, as “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” does.

09/29/09:

American Poetry

Imagists
Read bios on page 724-725
Read Imagism on 725

Pound
· Hated traditional poetry
· Did not like rhetoric, generalities, long lines, national chauvinism (Whitman)

Read poems on pages730-732
Read “L’Art, 1910” from Norton’s
· Discuss:
· Imagery
· Rhyme
· Metaphor

· Even though he hated traditional poetry, he felt the need to prove he could do it so he began writing Cantos.
· First, however, he had to apologize to the man he thought was the worst of the old.
· Read “A Pact” and discuss Pound/Whitman.

Williams
Read poems on pages 733-734
· Discuss meaning of each poem as it is read
· Discuss:

· Imagism
· Free Verse
· Imagery
· Realism
· Form
· Speaker
· Tone

H.D.
Read “Pear Tree” and “Heat” on pages 735-736
· Discuss:

· Theme
· Imagism
· Form
· Symbol
· Free Verse

Stein
Read “I Am Rose” and “A Sound” from old textbook

· Discuss:
· Repetition
· Theme
· Juxtaposition

Play “It’s the End of the World as we know it (and I Feel Fine)”.

09/28/09:
County Wide Essay

09/25/09

American Poetry

Harlem Renaissance (jazz, blues and poetry)
Read pages 910-911 aloud

Langston Hughes

Read bio on page 942.

Read “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” on page 926

Read “I, Too” on page 929

Read “Dream Variations” on page 930.
· Play “Swingmatism” by McShann from “The History of Jazz: The Swing Era” PLATCD714, track 20.
· Discuss:

· Theme
· Repetition
· Imagery

Various

Read “From the Dark Tower” on page 938

Read “A Black Man Talks of Reaping” on page 939

Read “Storm Ending” on page 940

Read “Morning After” on page 1740-1741 in Norton’s.
· Play “Your Feet’s Too Big” by Fats Waller from “The History of Jazz: The Swing Era” PLATCD714, track 10.

Assignment:
Timed Writing Lesson on page 943
Follow instructions.

09/24/09

American Poetry
Modernism & Imagism

Modernism
T.S. Eliot
Read bio on page 714.
Read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Peacock” pages 716-720

· Discuss:

· Dramatic Monologue
· Speaker
· Tone
· Personification
· Main Idea
· Irony
· Imagery
· Image Pattern
· Theme
· Allusion
· Symbol

09/23/09:

Early 20th Century

· Read page 658 aloud
· Discuss speaker

· Read “Luke Havergal” on page 661
· Read “Richard Cory” on page 662
· Answer Critical Reading questions aloud

· Read “Lucinda Matlock on page 663
· Answer Critical Reading questions aloud

· Read “Richard Boone” on page 664
· Answer Critical Reading questions aloud

Assignment:

2) Choose a famous deceased person and write a poem in their voice.
What would they have to say to their contemporaries today?
Minimum 15 lines

09/21 – 22/09

19th Century: Spirituals

· Read aloud page 496
o Discuss refrain

· Read “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” pages 498-499
· Answer Critical Reading questions aloud

· Read “Go Down, Moses” page 500
· Answer Critical Reading questions aloud

· Read page 650 aloud

· Read “Douglas” on page 653
· Read “We Wear the Mask” on page 654
· Answer Critical Reading questions aloud

Assignment:

1) Bring in a song (lyrics) that is personally inspiring (not comforting).
Does not have to be religious; prefer it not be.

09/18/09

American Poetry

Walt Whitman

· Read bio on page 438.
· Discuss Free Verse

Read “Song of Myself” on pages 442-445
· Discuss: Free Verse
Diction

· Answer Critical Reading questions on page 445 aloud

Read “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” on page 446

Read “By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame” on page 447
· Answer Critical Reading questions on page 447 aloud

Read “I Hear America Singing” on page 448
· Answer Critical Reading questions on page 448 aloud

Read “A Noiseless Patient Spider” on page 450
· Answer Critical Reading questions aloud

Assignment: Answer questions 1-8 on page 451

09/17/09

A New Nation

Ralph Waldo Emerson

· “Concord Hymn” (page 395)
· Read Aloud.
· Discuss:

· Theme
· Alliteration
· Imagery
· Stanza Form

· Answer Critical Reading questions aloud.

· “The Snowstorm” (pages 397-398)
· Read aloud.
· Answer Critical Reading questions aloud.

Emily Dickinson
· Read bio on page 424

· “Because I Could not Stop for Death” (pages 426-427)
o Read aloud.
o Answer Critical Reading questions aloud.

· “I Heard a Fly Buzz – When I Died” (page 429)
o Read aloud and discuss.
o Answer Critical Reading questions aloud.

· “There’s a Certain Slant of Light” (page 430)
o Read aloud and discuss

· “My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close” (page 430)
o Read aloud and discuss

· “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” (page 431)
o Read aloud and discuss

o Answer Critical Reading questions aloud

· “The Brain- is Wider than the Sky” (page 432)
o Read aloud and discuss

· “There is a Solitude of Space” (page 433)
o Read aloud and discuss

o Answer Critical Reading questions aloud.

· “Water, is Taught by Thirst” (pages 434)
o Read aloud and discuss

o Answer Critical Reading questions aloud.

Assignment: Questions 1-6 on page 435

09/16/09: Since most of the class went on a field trip, no assignment.

09/15/09

AMERICAN POETRY – THE FIRESIDE POETS

· Read Fireside Poets piece on pages 272

· Longfellow
· Read aloud “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls” (pg. 275).
· Discuss

· Theme
· Repetition
· Personification

.
· Bryant
· Read aloud “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant
· Discuss:

· Theme
· Personification
· Main Idea
· Metaphor
· Meter

· Holmes
· Read aloud “Old Ironsides” on page 281
· Discuss:

· Theme
· Metaphor
· Personification

· Whittier
· Read aloud “Snow-Bound” on pages 283-288.
· Discuss:

· Theme (main idea)
· Word Choice
· Imagery
· Speaker

· Assignment:
· Answer Critical Reading questions 2-6 on page 276.
· Answer Critical Reading questions 2-5 on page 279.
· Answer Critical Reading questions 2-4 on page 281.
· Answer Critical Reading questions 2-4 on page 288.
· Answer questions 1-6 on page 289.

09/11 – 14/09

American Poetry

· Puritan Ideals

· “Huswifery” Edward Taylor (page 94)
· Read aloud and discuss.
· Discuss:
· Image
· Theme
· Speaker
· Main Idea
· Answer Critical Reading questions verbally.

· “To My Dear and Loving Husband” Anne Bradstreet (page 96)
· Read aloud and discuss.
· Discuss:
· Theme
· Rhyme Scheme
· Compare and Contrast
· Speaker
· Main Idea
· Answer Critical Reading questions verbally.

· Colonialism

· Read Wheatly bio on page 180
· “An Hymn to the Evening” page 182
· Read aloud and discuss.
· Answer Critical Reading questions verbally.

· “To His Excellency, General Washington” (pages 184 – 186)
· Read aloud and discuss.
· Discuss:
· Heroic Couplet
· Personification
· Theme
· Speaker
· Symbol
· Allusion
· Rhythm and Parallelism
· Main Idea
· Answer Critical Reading questions verbally.

Assignment: Answer questions 1-6 on page 187 in complete sentences.

09/10/09
Nonfiction Test

NONFICTION TEST REVIEW 09/08/09

Using your textbook, write the definitions for the following terms on a separate sheet of paper:

1. Transcendentalism
2. Tone
3. Theme
4. Suspense
5. Style
6. Rhythm
7. Plain Style
8. Point of View
9. Persuasion
10. Parallelism
11. Oral Tradition
12. Narration
13. Metaphor
14. Irony
15. Imagery
16. Foreshadowing
17. Folk Literature
18. Figure of Speech
19. Figurative Language
20. Exposition
21. Essay
22. Characterization
23. Autobiography
24. Allusion
25. Analogy

In order to pass the test you will need to do the following:
Take notes on the following topics (use a separate sheet of paper) that you can turn into an essay when asked.

· Understand influence the Puritan writings had on American ideals and values as evident in the writings of William Bradford and Jonathan Edwards.

· Know what it means to be an American according to the Declaration of Independence and the writings of Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, Fredrick Douglas, and Abraham Lincoln.

· Know what Ralph Waldo Emerson’s and Henry David Thoreau’s writings tell us about the Transcendentalist ideas about individualism and one’s place in the world.

· Understand how Carson McCullers and Anna Quinlin feel about American society’s expectations.

· Understand what William Faulkner means by “real writing” and if William Safire and Ian Frazier practice that.

09/04/09

20th Century

· Read and discuss “The Development of American English” on page 712.

· Read and discuss Faulkner’s “Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech” p. 875-876.

· Read JFK’s Inaugural Address on page 1228

· Read MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail on page 1232

09/03 – 04/09

Modern Non-Fiction

Read “Onomatopoeia” on pages 1146-1147
Answer questions on page 1147 aloud

Read “Coyote v. Acme” on pages 1148-1152
Answer questions on page 1152 aloud

Read “Loneliness…An American Malady” on pages 1153-1155
Answer questions on page 1155 aloud

Read “One Day, Now Broken in Two” on pages 1156-1158
Answer questions on page 1158 aloud

09/02/09

Nonfiction

Twain and the West

Read Mark Twain info on pages 572-573; 574

Read from “Life on the Mississippi” by Mark Twain (pgs. 576 – 580).

Discuss:
Autobiography
Tone
Setting
Contrast
Description
Theme
Imagery
Purpose
Colloquial Language
Tone
Irony
Style
Metaphor
Comparisons
Audience
Cause and Effect
Jargon
Dialogue

Read “Heading West” on pages 608-

Read “I Will Fight No More Forever” on page 614

Students answer questions 1-5 on page 615 in complete sentences.

08/31 – 9/01/09

Civil War

Frederick Douglas

· Read from “My Bondage and My Freedom” on pages 507 – 512
· Discuss:
o Autobiography
o Tone
· Answer Critical Reading questions on page 512 aloud.

Robert E. Lee

· Read bio on page 530
· Read “Letter to His Son” on pages 534 – 535
o Discuss:
o Letter Writing
· Answer Critical Reading questions on page 536 aloud.

Mary Chestnutt

· Read from “Mary Chestnutt’s Civil War” on pages 550 – 553
· Discuss:
o Diary and Journals

Abraham Lincoln

· Read bio on page 530
· Read “Gettysburg Address” on page 532
o (Edward Everett spoke for two hours before Lincoln got up)
· Discuss:
o Speeches
o Diction

Assignment:
Write a speech paying tribute to an important event. It may be from the distant past or a more recent time period. Do not give us a list of facts, but concentrate rather on the impact and meaning this event had for those who experienced it and those who came after, including yourself.

08/27 – 28/09

Transcendentalism

Emerson:

Transcendentalism: American philosophical and artistic attitude based on the belief that
the most fundamental truths about life and death can be reached only by going
beyond the world of the senses.
Knowledge of this kind comes not through the mind’s logic, but through a deep free intuition – the ‘highest poser of the Soul’.

Students read aloud pages 384 – 385.

Read, “What is Transcendentalism?” essay

Read aloud Emerson bio on 388.

Read first part of “Nature” from old book.

Have students read remainder of “Nature” on pages 390 – 391.

Discuss following:
· idea of viewing natural world with unobstructed vision is transcendentalist
· personification: nature is a being
· metaphor: “transparent eyeball”
· occult here means hidden or not easy to discover
· main idea: nature and the human soul produce what we see as natural beauty.

Answer questions on page 392 aloud.

Have students read aloud “Self-Reliance” on pages 393 – 394.
Finish reading aloud from old book
Discuss following:
1st par. – Main Idea – people understand their place in the universe and
must act accordingly.
Purpose – believe in individualism and practice it by asserting their
own strengths
Metaphor – belittles need for continuity between past and present
Yesterday’s judgements may not be appropriate for today
2nd par. – Style (contrast) life of rose vs. self conscious life of people

Answer questions on page 394 aloud.

Thoreau

Read aloud Thoreau bio on page 404.

Have students read from “Walden” on pages 407-415 silently.
· Discuss:
· Simplicity
· Self-reliance
· Individuality versus Conformity
· Visions and Ideals
Answer questions on page 415 aloud.

Give Transcendentalism Quiz.

Assignment:
Make a list of 5 things that Thoreau would say
are complicating our lives. For each item, list one way we could change the way it works or the way we use it in order to make our lives simpler.

08/26/09

Expanding the Country

· Discuss Louisiana Purchase:

The Louisiana Purchase was the acquisition by the United States of more than 529,000,000 acres of territory from France in 1803, at the cost of about 3¢ per acre.
The French territory of Louisiana included far more land than just the current U.S. state of Louisiana. The lands purchased contained parts or all of present-day Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota west of the Mississippi River, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, New Mexico, northern Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, the portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Rocky Mountains, the portions of southern Manitoba, southern Saskatchewan and southern Alberta that drain into the Missouri River, and Louisiana on both sides of the Mississippi River including the city of New Orleans.
The land included in the Purchase comprises 22.3% of the territory of the modern United States.
The United States was afraid they would lose the use of New Orleans, so they offered to buy just the city and surrounding areas.
The American negotiators were prepared to spend $10 million for New Orleans, but were dumbfounded when the entire region was offered for $15 million. The treaty was dated April 30, 1803 and was signed on May 2nd. On July 14, 1803 the treaty reached Washington D.C. The Louisiana territory was vast, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to Rupert’s Land in the north, and from the Mississippi River in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west. Acquiring the territory would double the size of the United States at a cost of less than 3 cents per acre.
France then turned New Orleans over to the United States on December 20, 1803. On March 10, 1804, a formal ceremony was conducted in St. Louis, to transfer ownership of the territory from France to the United States of America.
Effective on October 1, 1804, the purchased territory was organized into the Orleans Territory (most of which became the state of Louisiana) and the District of Louisiana, which was temporarily under the control of the Governor and Judges of the
When purchased, the boundaries of “Louisiana” were not defined, and the land itself was generally unknown (which led to the Lewis and Clark expedition). In particular, not wanting to anger Spain, France refused to specify the southern and western boundaries.
The tributaries of the Mississippi were held as the boundaries. Estimates that did exist as to the extent and composition of the purchase were initially based on the explorations of Robert LaSalle.

Read “Commission of Meriwether Lewis” on pages 293-294.
· Answer questions 1 – 7 on page 295.

Read aloud “Crossing the Great Divide” on pages 299 – 300.
· Answer Critical Reading questions on page 300 aloud.

Read aloud “The Most Sublime Spectacle on Earth” on pages 301 – 305.
· Answer Critical Reading questions on 305 aloud.

08/25/09
American Literature
Non-fiction (Franklin/Henry activity)

· Everyone take a note card and write down the three values that you wrote about in yesterday’s essay.

· Take up note cards.

· Call out one value and have students raise their hands if it was theirs.
o Ask one student to explain the value.
o Ask another student to give examples of how the value is followed in our society.
o Ask a third student to give examples of how the value is not followed in our society.

· When finished, give the following assignment:

Take the three values you chose in your essay, and convince me in writing they are necessary to be a “real” American.
Devise and write down ways in which each value can be reintroduced into our society.

08/21 – 24/09

Henry, Jefferson, and Paine

Patrick Henry
Discuss:
· Colonialism
· Growing unrest in colonies
· Speeches

Read aloud “Speech in the Virginia Convention” on pages 203 – 206.
· Discuss details
· Answer questions on page 206 aloud.

Declaration of Independence

Read Declaration of Independence aloud (pages 170 – 173)

Notes:

· D.O.I. is an example of a persuasive document – attempts to sway the reader to think or act in a particular way.
· Jefferson’s goal is to convince other colonists and the rest of the world that revolt must occur in the colonies.

Page 170:
1st paragraph: enlightenment. Tone articulates the belief that humans can shape
their own destiny.
2nd paragraph: parallelism: sentence structure adds conviction to the list of truths
of which Jefferson seeks to persuade his readers.
Tone: calm, reasoned
Straightforward adjectives – absolute, unalienable
Discuss unalienable rights
Evocative nouns – abuses, usurpation
Evocative verbs – reduce, throw off (create pictures, you can see the king
abusing the colonies and them throwing him aside)
End of 2nd paragraph: identifies audience as the world to get other nations to help

Page 171:
Persuasion: Jefferson repeatedly uses the word “He” to reinforce the idea of the
king as a tyrant. Personalizes the argument.
Repetition of the word “for” emphasizes reasons for revolt.

Page 172, 4th paragraph:
Style – writer’s characteristic way of writing determined by his diction,
imagery, tone and choice of literary devices.
Jefferson shifts from objective, legal language to strong verbs such as
“plundered” and “ravaged” Why?
Theme: people’s natural right to freedom and a voice in government

Page 173
Last Paragraph:
Persuasion – adds power of righteousness
If they didn’t agree before, you can’t argue with God.
Theme: numbering and listing American rights combines with unalienable ones

08/22/09

Thomas Paine

Discuss Revolutionary War (colonists losing at first)
Read “The Crisis: Number 1” on pages 174 – 176)
Discuss details

Assignment:

1) Using “Poor Richard’s Almanac”, Ben Franklin’s “Autobiography”, and Patrick Henry’s “Speech in the Virginia Convention”, write a five-paragraph essay giving three qualities every American should possess. Use one quality from each of the above works.

2) Write a paragraph or two in which you find three themes or ideas in “The Crisis Number 1” that can be directly traced to the themes of “The Declaration of Independence”. Due by end of class.

08/20/09

Benjamin Franklin

Ø Give brief history of colonial life including French/Indian War.
Ø Discuss colonial and British relations.
- Tax structure
- Keeping soldiers in homes
- No representation in Parliament
Ø We need to understand how people viewed themselves in the colonies.
Ø We do that through the literature.
Ø Most was political in nature

· Read bio on page 140.
· Read aloud from “The Autobiography” on pages 142-147.
- Discuss Virtues (p. 143) and Scheme of Employment (p. 145)

· Read aloud from “Poor Richard’s Almanac” on pages 148 – 150
· Figurative Language: language not meant to be taken literally
· sinking ship = accumulating debt
· Vivid dramatization

· Parrallelism: repetition of phrases or sentences so that parts are alike
· in structure or meaning
· “keep thy shop…”
What other? “For want of…” “to err…”

Themes: self-reliance, thrift (Puritans), self-improvement

Assignment:
Answer questions 1-7 on page 151

08/19/09

Jonathan Edwards

Read aloud from “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (pages 102-106)
[use excerpt from old book]
· Discuss:

· Page 41:
· What words in the 1st paragraph identify the attitude of God toward “natural men”?
(provoked, anger, arbitrary will, incensed)

· What does such language suggest about Edwards’ view of God?
(frightening, capricious, implacable, unforgiving, impossible for humans to understand)

· Page 42:
· What must each person undergo in order to please God?
(a “great change”)

· What does Edwards mean by a great change?
(realization of human frailty and dependence on God’s mercy)

· Page 43:
· What does Edwards say Christ has done for poor sinners?
(flung open the doors of mercy and forgiven them their sins)

· Why does Edwards create such a terrifying image of God and then follows it with such a forgiving image of Jesus Christ?
(terrifying people makes them more receptive to and grateful for
Christ’s mercy)

· Discuss Puritan values and ideals
· Discuss persuasive writing (use infomercials)

Assignment:
Answer questions 1-10 on page 107.

08/17 – 18/09

Non-fiction

· Christopher Columbus
· Read “The Journal” aloud (pages 58-62)

· Discuss:
· Purpose (p. 60)
· Journal (p. 61)

· Answer Critical Reading Questions on page 62 aloud.
Assignment:
Answer questions 1-10 on page 63 in complete sentences.

· John Smith & William Bradford (pages 68 –86)
· Read “The General History of Virginia” on pages 70-75

· Discuss
· Narrative Accounts (p. 72)

· Answer Critical Reading Questions on page 75 aloud.

· Read “Of Plymouth Plantation” on pages 76 – 83

· Discuss:

· Narrative Accounts (p. 80)
· Discuss Critical Reading Questions on page 83

Assignment:
Answer questions 1-9 on page 84 in complete sentences

08/14/09
CLASSROOM PROCEDURES Mr. WARD 2009-2010

· Be in your seat before the bell rings.

· Remain in your seat for the entire class period.

· Keep any conversation in class to a minimum and relevant to current class topic.

· Pick up all trash and place in trashcans at the end of class.

· You are not dismissed by the bell. The bell is to inform the teacher it is time to stop teaching. Students are dismissed by the teacher. Please remain in your seat until the teacher dismisses you.

· Turn your cell phones off before entering the classroom. If your cell phone is confiscated, your parents will have to claim it at the office the next day.

· All other rules, including dress codes, listed in the student handbook will be enforced. If you are seen with any non-allowable item you will give that item to the teacher upon request.

· Demonstrate the same respect and courtesy for others as you wish to receive.

· You are responsible for bringing your own materials to class.

· Place assignments in corresponding boxes at the beginning of each class.

· You will find previous days’ assignments in notebooks if you are absent.

· Use blue or black ink only for all assignments; including quizzes, tests, and essays.

· Assignments will be turned in on white paper. Use college ruled paper for essays.

· Late assignments will lose 10 points per day.

· Extracurricular activities, including athletic events, club events and after school jobs do not excuse students from deadlines. All procedures regarding late assignments will apply.

· If you turn in an assignment on time and are dissatisfied with your grade, you may redo the assignment and turn it back in the day after it is returned to you.

· You have 5 days following your last day absent to make up any work.

· Quizzes cannot be made up. If you are absent on the day a quiz is given, you are excused from it and it will not count against you.

· Any missed tests will be made up before or after school by appointment within five days.

· Fold all assignments lengthwise.

· Assignments need to have the following heading printed on the outside fold:
· Name: First and Last
· Class: English II, English III, etc.
· Period: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.
· Date: month/day/year (08/14/07)
· Assignment: Essay Title, Page #s, etc.

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