A Harmonious Society

As American writer Hawthorne's greatest literary achievement,The Scarlet letter has aroused century-long concerns and criticism in the American field of literature due to its smooth and graceful writing,deep-going description of the characters' innermost psychology,ambiguous symbolism,and the dramatic conflicts of moral values.In China,the research on The Scarlet Letter didn't start until the end of the Cultural Revolution.In recent years,feminist literary criticism becomes a new direction for the study of The Scarlet Letter,while,few is familiar to newly-developed ecofeminist literary criticism.This thesis aims at a penetrating study on The Scarlet Letter with the newly developed theory----ecofeminist literary criticism.Ecofeminist literary criticism is a combination of ecological or environmental criticism and feminist literary criticism,focusing upon all the dominations within culture:racism,sexism,class oppression,and the exploitation of nature.The analysis in The Scarlet Letter uses ecofeminist literary criticism,from the perspectives of nature,gender and race,to reveal Hawthorne's ecofeminist consciousness applied in The Scarlet Letter and its limitations and compromise in The Scarlet Letter,to expose the patriarchal puritan society as the root of oppression to woman,nature and Indian, to probe the interconnection of the problem of nature,gender and race,to explore the theme of the novel----establishing a Utopia----a harmonious society with equality for all.