Okay, so for Paper 1, I have to come up with some sort of debatable claim. I've never really been much good at making arguments, but I guess, being an English major, I don't have much of a choice, so here goes:
I am going to focus my paper on the contradictory ideas of beauty in nature as is seen in Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Nature" Chapter III: Beauty, and from there, I am going to apply Emerson's contradiction to text in The Scarlet Letter in Chapters 14 - 19. I'm not quite sure as to how yet… Perhaps I will argue that the beauty of nature in The Scarlet Letter is what confuses the reader into believing that nature itself is associated with temptation and the Devil.
I like this approach, Alexi. Pearl is also beautiful, and she's closely tied to nature, yet she is also a voice of moral authority in the novel )as when she repeatedly asks Dimmesdale to hold her hand and Hester's hand in public). So beauty can't be all bad. (Consider also the five women, the youngest/prettiest of which has the strongest disgreement with the oldest/uglieest. There are several passages that talk about Hester's womanly beauty, too.) I look forward to seeing how this idea develops, as you start gathering evidence.