Author Question: What motivates Parker to get the tattoo on his back? How does he expectSarah Ruth to respond to it? ... (Read 154 times)

EY67 · **on:** Jul 20, 2018

What motivates Parker to get the tattoo on his back? How does he expectSarah Ruth to respond to it?

What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

Hawthornes story is set in Salem, Massachusetts. What historical associations does this setting suggest to the reader?

What will be an ideal response?

jamesnevil303 · **Reply #1 on:** Jul 20, 2018

Answer to Question 1

Parker only has one place on his body without a tattoohis back. Unlike all his other tattoos, this is the first time Parker wants to acquire more pictures on his body to please someone other than himself, as he thought: He visualized having a tattoo put there that Sarah Ruth would not be able to resista religious subject (par. 79). He is so disappointed that she will not look at his other tattoos that he wants something on his body that will bring her to heel (par. 80). He seems to honestly think that his wife will be happy to see art on the only place he lacks it. In this sense, a sympathetic reader may feel pity for such blindness.

It is a measure of how far Parker is from understanding his wifes religious views that he can for even a moment entertain the notion that she will be pleased by the tattoo of Christ on his back. From their first meeting, Vanity and Idolatry have been among her favorite exclamations and she seems to enjoy describing the judgment seat of God for her husband (par. 77). She believes that any pictorial representation of Jesus is idolatryworshipping an image rather than God himself. She is fanatical on this point of theology. No man shall see his face, she remarks as she adamantly declares that God is only spirit (par. 185). When she, of course, despises the tattoo and barely looks at it, Parker was too stunned to resist the beating that she gives him with her household broom.

Answer to Question 2

Some initial discussion of the storys debt to American history may be helpful; most students can use a brief refresher on the Salem witchcraft trials, in which neighbor suspected neighbor and children recklessly accused innocent old women. The hand of the devil was always nearby, and it was the duty of all to watch for it. From Cotton Mathers Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), Hawthorne drew details of his imagined midnight Sabbath. In revealing to Brown the secret wickedness of all the people he knew and trusted, the story seems to illustrate the Puritan doctrine of innate depravity. Humankind was born tarred with the brush of original sin and could not lose the smudge by any simple ritual of baptism. Only the electthe communicants, those who had experienced some spiritual illumination which they had declared in publiccould be assured of salvation. Browns unhappy death at the end of the story seems conventional: Puritans held that how one died indicated his chances in the hereafter. A radiantly serene and happy death was an omen that the victim was heaven-bound, while a dour death boded ill.