Fictional Works
In Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic 1850 romance novel The Scarlet Letter, set in 17th century Puritan Boston, the lead character Hester Prynne is led from the town prison with the scarlet letter “A” on her breast. The scarlet letter "A" represents the act of adultery that she had committed and it is to be a symbol of her sin for all to see. Originally intended as a badge of shame, it would later take on different meanings as her fictional life progressed in the story.
The 1916 silent film The Yellow Passport, starring Clara Kimball Young, was also known as The Badge of Shame when it was reissued in 1917.
In the 2006 film, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander) is seen using as a fireplace poker, a branding iron with the letter "P" that he used to impart the "pirate's brand" seen on the right forearm of Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). According to the backstory, Sparrow was branded a pirate by Beckett for refusing to transport slaves for the East India Trading Company.
In the film Inglourious Basterds the protagonists carve swastikas into the foreheads of surviving Nazis, to make their malfeasance known to all in the future.
Read more about this topic: Badge Of Shame
Famous quotes containing the words fictional and/or works:
“One of the proud joys of the man of letters—if that man of letters is an artist—is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world’s memory.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall now or at any time hereafter make schoolbooks of my works and make me hated as Shakespeare is hated. My plays were not designed as instruments of torture. All the schools that lust after them get this answer, and will never get any other.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)