In the following essay, the critic examines the relationship between sex and the law as treated by Hawthorne and Updike in their respective novels The Scarlet Letter and S.

In the following essay, Daniel examines Nathaniel Hawthorne's personification of nature in The Scarlet Letter as a rhetorical device.

[Arthur Dimmesdale is] Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter revisited—to no apparent purpose. Dimmesdale, you'll remember, is the Puritan minister tortured by his association with the sin for which Hester Prynne wears the scarlet letter "A" on her breast. Larson's Dimmesdale, however, is an explicit adulterer who gets Hester with child and damns both; his suffering afterwards is mental (a Puritan conscience and hell-fire fear inflamed beyond balm) and physical (stigmataȁ...