Comparison of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter" and Roland Joffé's filmic adaption (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,5, University of Regensburg (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: American Literature I: From the Beginnings Through the 19th Century, language: English, abstract: I have chosen to examine one of the latest filmic adaptions of "The Scarlet Letter", made by Roland Joffé and the main distinctions to Hawthorne's version. If you delve deeper into the matter, you recognize that the Hollywood director has placed various personal focuses on different parts of the novel, especially on the most important protagonists.

Furthermore, in large parts he totally rolled up the gist and used different perspectives on certain things. That is why it can be called an extremely free conversion of Hawthorne's historical fiction into a love story with a dramatically romantic background. By using several filmic devices, he finally attempted to turn the three strong main characters into a sinful but "happy family" who are in search of a peaceful life.

The book "The Scarlet Letter" is one of America's most important pieces of literature, written by the author Nathaniel Hawthorne in the year 1850. The story about Puritan life and the subject of settling down in a "new world" has engaged the interest of numerous generations of readers up to now.

However, Hawthorne's classical work has not only caught the attention of normal literature lovers but it has also inspired a lot of artists, like producers and directors to convert the historical content into motion-pictures. What comes out in the end is often very surprising; for some critics the result is more positive, for others it is rather negative and unsatisfactory material. In this case, it always depends on what expectations you have of such a medial remake. Do you intend to get delivered a complete one-to-one transformation or are you open-minded enough to accept a creative and free modification of the original basic script? This could be sometimes a highly controversial question among reviewers.