Puritan Symbolism as Tattoo Designs
Source/Author: Natalie Updike, Upper School English Teacher
October 01, 2021
Shorecrest Upper School’s eleventh grade American Literature course, taught by Ms. Updike, encourages students to creatively contextualize the historical realities of Puritanical life and the Salem witch trials during the study of Hawthorne's “The Scarlet Letter.”
In a recent assignment, students were asked to identify symbols within Hawthorne's novel as well as Jonathan Edwards' seminal sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." The Chargers worked in small groups to design Puritan "tattoos" utilizing symbols they found. This activity helped students explore rhetorical paradoxes, demonstrate analysis-based thinking with imagery, and interact with the brutal truth of religion and science within seventeenth-century Colonialism.
Some of the images included rose bushes, prison doors, spider webs, the hands of God, fire and brimstone, pearls, and the scarlet letter "A" itself.
Pictured are Sara Rose '23, Graci Silverthorn '23, and Emma Silverthorn '23 presenting their tattoo design.
