This thesis seeks to analyze the novel The Scarlet Letter which is regarded as a major work of modern English literature and its movie adaptation, posing the problem, and searching for an alternative. Focusing on commonality is accordingly the first approach to analysis, and the difference is the next for more analysis and criticism recognizing that they are isolated respectively containing each creativity. Not directly criticizing Puritanism, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel indirectly looks on problems with a critical eye through the protagonist Hester Prynn. It is generally accepted that Roland Joffe’s movie generally follows the novel faithfully in terms of background, characters, motifs, and the story’s structure. There are some differences regarding adapted details between the novel written by pen and the movie created by camera. Within reason, literary theory deals with the points of the movie directly by audaciously exposing things by reading between the lines in the novel. Presenting the context such as the time period, the 17 Century, the place, New England, and the paradigm Puritanism is followed by the bilateral analysis between the characters’ personalities and their social relations in the two works. Doing so, it tries discern the synchronic sympathy with the works. It furthers lists the differences between them and comes to a comprehensive analysis and eventually poses questions and makes criticisms as a critic. Furthermore, it simultaneously pursues diachronic criticism and its alternative. This goes further than previous criticisms that mostly stayed within the work. Perspectives are expanded and contrasts and comparisons can be made between characters in different works such as Colin Wilson’s The Outsider or Albert Camus’ The Stranger; the extroverted criticizing way to the very religion of Martin Luther’s 95 theses, the attitude embedded in the work with the point of view that the Bible is literature, etc.. Through which the potential possibility of demand and pressure from the outside of the work is also searched for. Eventually the direction points to that those two works are commonly silent about squarely criticizing the Puritanism per se results in the fundamental issue. Comprehending the problems raised and presenting questions, the findings indicate that literature should take social, particularly religious, responsibility for presenting criticism, restraint, or its alternative. That can also be applied to Martin Luther’s age of Reform, the Joseon or Koryo period, and the enlarged modern concept of religion or belief including civil religion as well as the traditional concept of religion like Puritanism. Expanding the topology of thinking, the same research is seemingly possible enough by establishing the temporary hypothesis that the Reform of Joseon Confucianism or religious change caused by contemporary literature could have presented Joseon with an alternative to maintain society in a prosperous manner. So for the third alternative generalized to solve the problems mentioned above, a hypothesis of the socio-religious responsibility of literature takes a position to provide the feasibility and its rational and reasonable basis. As an applied example for this issue’s extension to solve the problem of religious illiteracy, the necessity of non-confessional religious education in an applied category particularly draws a strong possibility of non-confessional English Bible Study with English literature like The Scarlet Letter. By which this article’s criticism tries to expose a face of fundamentally limitless possibility of literature with proof hopefully expecting it to be a well-established theory.
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Dec 24, 2019
Dean Flemming 
Open Access