The Scarlet Letter of the Law: Hawthorne and Criminal Justice

1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Hanft Korobkin
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Law

Utilitarianism and the Criminal Law in Colonial India: A Study of the Practical Limits of Utilitarian Jurisprudence

1994 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 739-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kartik Kalyan Raman
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
British India ◽  
Local Society ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Penal Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
Common Observation ◽  
The One

The role of legal tradition in the reformist rhetoric of Benthamite Utilitarianism presents us with a contradiction. On the one hand, there is the common observation that Utilitarian jurisprudence was necessarily ahistorical and rejected the past as a source of concepts for reworking the criminal justice system existing in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For philosophic reformers such as Bentham, contemporary British criminal justice was to be replaced by a scientific jurisprudence, abstract, universal, and secular in outlook, and antipathetic to the more conservative insistence that the foundations of the penal law continue to be tradition-based. ‘If society was to see any improvement, its law must be reformed; if its law was to be reformed it must be burned to the ground and rebuilt according to a new and rational pattern.’ On the other hand, we find that the very same Utilitarian thinkers, in works describing the state of the law in British India, were concerned with local rather than universal conceptions of criminality. In his 1782 Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation, Bentham, for instance, urged the philosophic reformer to temper change in India by fitting Utilitarian judgments about the law to the frames of local society.

Pearl: 1850–1955

PMLA ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 72 (4-Part-1) ◽  
pp. 689-699 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Garlitz
Keyword(s):  
Moral Order ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
The Past ◽  
Natural Goodness ◽  
Natural Beauty ◽  
Moral Indifference ◽  
The One ◽  
Good And Evil

Pearl would seem to be the most enigmatic child in literature. Soon after The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850 Pearl was called both “an imbodied angel from the skies” and “a void little demon,” and time produced no unanimity of opinion. In the past hundred years she has been variously described as “most artificial and unchildlike,” and as possessing “the natural bloom… of childhood,” as a creature “of moral indifference, as one not born into the moral order,” and as an illustration of “that law which visits the sins of the fathers upon the children.” For some critics she performs the function of “a symbolized conscience,” but for others she is simply “a darksome fairy” or “the one touch of color in a sombre picture.” To one writer she typifies “a disordered nature torn by a malignant conflict between the forces of good and evil,” but to another she is an example of Rousseauian natural goodness. In the past five years Pearl has been found a symbol both of “unnatural isolation” from society and of the organicism of nature as opposed to the mechanism of society, a symbol both of the id and of “man's hopeful future.” Several critics have called Pearl a child of nature, but to one she is a symbol of wild uncivilized nature outside the realm of grace, to another an example of prelapsarian innocence, and to a third “an object of natural beauty, a flower,” and like nature, amoral, “not good or bad, because… not responsible.” Criticism of Pearl almost forces one to conclude that her character is an unfathomable maze, or of such an involved richness that it can become all things to all men.

scholarly journals The Unavoidable Suffering in Selected Literary Texts: Poems and Novels

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amal Nasser Frag
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Allen Ginsberg ◽  
Scarlet Letter ◽  
Minor Characters ◽  
The Scarlet Letter ◽  
Modern Psychology ◽  
Main Reflection ◽  
To Come ◽  
Almost All

The unavoidable suffering is an outstanding theme which has its impact to almost all literary texts. Typically, unavoidable suffering is the supreme touchstone in life and literature. Poets used its presence incessantly. They are always conscious of its inevitability. Investigation of this theme gives the reader a panoramic view of vital issues that are unusually linked to some extent with suffering; such as religion, God, nature, love and immortality. In the poems discussed in this study, unavoidable suffering reflects the effect of modern psychology has had upon both literature and literary criticism. The main reflection of suffering which is implied in the characters presented reveal the very contradictions, absurdities and complexities of our life. The poets and novelists chosen in this paper portray suffering, as “an abstract force, in an attempt to come to terms with it as well as to fathom it.” (Gurra, 2019, p.5) In the inexorable quest to comprehend it, poets do not offer a final view of suffering because it remains for them the great unknown mystery. This paper, however, is an attempt to meticulously examine and critically analyze the images of suffering in minor characters presented in selected poems. The selected poems are of Robinson Jeffers, Allen Ginsberg, and Maya Angelou. The characters selected from different novels are minor ones. Characters like: Roger Chiilingworth from The Scarlet Letter (1850), Walter Morel from Sons and Lovers (1913), Zeena Frome from Ethan Frome (1911), and Rezia Warren Smith from Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Different kinds of suffering are disscussed in order to gain a better understanding of the writers’ perception of unavoidable suffering as well as to understand the western philosophy of it.

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