What questions were raised for you in Chapter 1? 
In chapter 2?  What was confusing?

Could there be any figurative or symbolic significance to the physical setting described below? If so, what?

The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than any thing else in the new world. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

What does the below passage suggest about the narrator's possible purpose in telling this story? What about with whom his sympathies are likely to lie?

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it,--or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,--we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.


What characters did you meet in each chapter? What were your impressions of them?

What do you notice about the cultural setting?

What about the physical setting?

What vocabulary words that you find challenging?

Are there places where you feel the text invites you to read for figurative/symbolic meaning? Where?  Why?

What do you think of the narrator? What are your initial impressions? How would you describe him? What makes him trustworthy or not?  Do you think he is essentially Hawthorne or a creation of Hawthorne's? Why?

Handout chapter 1-4 vocab

HW: Read SL ch 3-4 (41-53)

Write two text-based discussion questions (inferential) for tomorrow