The Scarlet Letter On The Bosom And The Thorn In The Breast

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds are two love stories written in different times, in different countries. Yet they have many similarities in the setting of religious backgrounds, the arrangement of the plot, the selection of the characters and the shaping of their characteristics and so on, especially in the themes they try to convey. As the abstract formulation of the author's vision of the meaning of life, themes are the essence of literary works. And characters are the carriers of the themes.This paper is trying to discover the authors' value orientations revealed in the two works by analyzing the characters in them. First this thesis introduces the authors and the two novels. Afterwards it examines the similarities and differences between the four groups of correspondent characters in the two novels. Based on this, the thesis examines the two authors' outlooks on man's religious faith, women's position in the society, sweets and bitters in life, good and evil in human nature, and the like, aiming at evoking the readers to contemplate on such universal themes as faith, life, love, fate, and so on.