English Task 4, Japanese Proverb, Scarlet Letter, to Kill a Mockingbird

Tom Traficante 10/6/11

English Ms. Bryan

Task 4

"If the wind will not serve, take to the oars." This Japanese proverb, meant for motivation, can be interpreted as that if one is not given what they want then they should work for it. This is a good moral to live by, and can be applied to both novels To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is set in a Puritan colony of Massachusetts. The main character Hester Prynne is accused of committing adultery. She is pregnant with her daughter Pearl, by a man of whom she is not married, and as punishment she must wear an "A" on her chest. This was supposed to be for embarrassment, but she made the "A" beautiful and extremely noticeable. The fact that it was so outstanding was like Hester getting back at society, since they were not allowed to have such fancy clothes. A conflict that Hester encounters is the possibility of losing her daughter Pearl because the authorities (including the man she committed adultery with, Reverend Dimmesdale) believe that either Pearl is bad for Hester, or that Hester is not fit to raise Pearl. But, Hester fights and acts out of passion by threatening Dimmesdale. Hester's husband, Roger Chillingworth, is determined to find out who the father is. Hester would not tell him, and nobody else in the colony knows. So he became obsessed for years, and finally found out that Dimmesdale was the father. '

The novel To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee depicts the life of a young girl named Scout, her brother Jem, and their father Atticus Finch as they live through a small part of their lives. The setting of this story is a mostly white, southern town in the early 1930s. Therefore, many of the people are harshly racist. Atticus, being a lawyer, was appointed to defend a black man by the name of Tom Robinson under a false charge of rape. Most of the white people in town hated the fact that he was going to defend a black man, and that is exactly why he accepted the job and did it to his fullest. He wanted society to change because he didn't see why people discriminated. This characterizes Atticus as a "do-it-yourself" kind of man. Another example of Atticus "taking to the oars" is when the diseased dog is loose and needs to be killed. He decided to shoot the dog himself after the sheriff said that he can't make the shot. A final example would be the conflict at the jailhouse. Atticus knew that a group of racist whites were going to attack Tom Robinson at the jailhouse one night and Atticus guarded it. If it wasn't for him, Tom Robinson might not have lived to go to trial. So Atticus acted to his ideal outcome at the jailhouse, a reality.

"If the wind will not