Rappaccini's Daughter- Nathaniel Hawthorne

In today's class, we watched the end of the short story "Rappaccini's Daughter" and discussed what Hawthorne wanted to tell us with this story. As he was a transcendentalist, he criticized  science as he shows the result of  Dr. Rappaccini's work and experiments which caused his own daughter's poisoning. Furthermore he says that everyone in the world can do what he/she wants? What he meant by saying this is not really clear for me...

Thesis

The thesis statement must be arguable and specific. You should avoid statements that are so broad as to be meaningless. Furthermore the readers must be able to agree or disagree with the statement. The author's job is to offer support.

The Scarlet Letter Chapter 13 Another view of Hester

In today's class we read Chapter 13 of The Scarlet Letter. This Chapter describes the change of Hester's position in the Puritan village over a long period of time. Hester is no longer beautiful as she used to be. She either cuts her hair or wears in under a hat so nobody can see it. As the time passes she gets more and more respected in the village and people forgive her for her sin. When strangers come to the village the people show them Hester and tell them how nice and kind she is. Since Hester lives outside the village she has a lot of time to think about her life and she realizes how she cares about Dimmesdale. She feels responsible for him and wants to help him. Since Chillingworth kind of terrorizes Dimmesdale, she decides to talk to him. The leaders of the village, however, still do not really forgive Hester for her sin. A reason therefore might be that they take their role as a leader very serious and do not want other people think they could do the same what Hester did and "only" get disrespected for a few years.

The Scarlet Letter Group Work

Today in class we were divided in groups. Each group got for the same amount of chapters of the Scarlett Letter we have covered so far. In my group I am responsible for the Chapter 15 (Hester and Pearl). We are supposed to put anything on a sheet of paper which makes the rest of the class remembering what the chapter was about. Therefore I drew a scene on the piece of paper we were given with a short dialog between Hester and Pearl which hopefully will make the rest of the class remembering what this chapter was about.