Inspiration and Influence
According to popular tradition, the gravestone of Elizabeth Pain in Boston's King's Chapel Burying Ground was the inspiration for Hester Prynne's grave. Scholar Laurie Rozakis has argued that an alternate or additional source for the story may be Hester Craford, a woman flogged for fornication with John Wedg.
In various film adaptations of the novel, Prynne has been portrayed by actresses such as Lillian Gish, Sommer Parker, Meg Foster, Mary Martin, Sybil Thorndike, Senta Berger and Demi Moore. In the cult television Series Twin Peaks the name was also adopted as a pseudonym by the character Audrey Horne. Another literary figure using the surname Prynne is a woman who had an adulterous relations with a pastor in the novel A Month of Sundays by John Updike, part of his trilogy of novels based on characters in The Scarlet Letter. In the musical The Music Man, Harold Hill refers to Hester Prynne in the song "Sadder but Wiser Girl." He sings that he wants a girl with a "touch of sin." remarking "I hope, I pray, for Hester to win just one more A."
Read more about this topic: Hester Prynne
Famous quotes containing the words inspiration and/or influence:
“What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The woman who can’t influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)