Aesthetic Modality And Cultural Diversity

Pan Jinlian in The Outlaws of Marsh and Prynne Hester in The Scarlet Letter share life experience in common: they committed adultery to escape from the unhappy marriage. However, their fates turned out to be widely divergent: Jinlian degenerated into an unpardonable intrigante; Hester, on the contrary, exuviated into the incarnation of the true, the good and the beautiful.Shi Nai'an, the author of The Outlaws of Marsh, lived in the period of the alteration of Yuan Dynasty and Ming Dynasty. The given times branded itself into the author's moral concepts, value judgement and outlook on feminie. Hence, shackled by asceticism, he completely denied flesh and blood, and always depicted a world without humanity. Whereas, as the writer of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in the nineteenth century's America. On the one hand, he was deeply influenced by Puritanism and considered Hester's adultery guilty. On the other hand, he was affected by the approval and eulogization of love and humanity since the Renaissance, and identified with Hester's adultery.Likewise, different fates of the two heroines could be attributed to the diversity existing between Chinese culture and western culture. Jinlian's tragedy is caused by Chinese cultural background in which females have lower social status than males; the thought that the beautiful woman is the cause of the mishap overruns, and love is often neglected. Furthermore, the radical cause of her fate lies in the fact that ethics...