Sin is something we are all guilty of, however some let their sin affect them negatively and never learn from their mistakes. The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, tells the story of Hester Prynne who is found guilty of adultery. The Puritans of Boston force her to wear a scarlet letter “A” on her chest, symbolizing that she is an adulteress. Hester is married to Roger Chillingworth, a fact she hides. As a result of their sin, Hester and Dimmesdale have a child, Pearl who constantly reminds them of their immorality. The letter greatly changes Hester, and causes her to be publicly shamed and outcasted, yet also helped her grow closer to the society. The impact of the scarlet letter causes her to be disgraced by the society.
The Scarlet Letter is about a woman named Hester Prynne and her crime of adultery. She had a baby with man who is not her husband, and she will not reveal who that man is. Throughout The Scarlet Letter Hester represents social injustice just as the Salem Witch Trials in The Crucible do, and this injustice becomes accepted and leads to acceptance. Furthermore, Hester’s case represents injustice in the fact her case was unjustified and she was imprisoned on unfair judgement, just like the people convicted of witchcraft in Salem had been accused based off of opinion, not fact. Both have endings of acceptance of their “sin.”
This story is about two people committing a sin. The sin that was committed was adultery, but there were only one person the confess about committing the sin. Pearl was the science experiment they got out of adultery. Hester had to wear a scarlet letter A on her bosom that stood for adultery. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne strengths the theme of secret sin and guilt, through Hester Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale.
Forbidden love, hidden guilt, mischievous characters, and stringent religious beliefs are strong themes in the Puritan community. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne, a young wife restarts her life, without her older husband, in Boston. Eventually she falls in love with a man, and they conceive a child together. However since she’s already married the conception is labeled as Adultery. For her sin, Hester must wear a Scarlet Letter on her chest, for all to see that she is an Adulterer. In an unfortunate turn of events, her husband returns, determined to take revenge on her lover. Now she not only must keep her lover’s identity a secret, but her husband's identity as well.
Hester Prynne, the main character of the book "The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, commits adultery, is considered a hussy, and has a child as the result of her sin. She cheats on her husband while he is absent from town and receives a harsh punishment for her behavior already. Hester is forced to wear a scarlet letter “A” on her bosom for the rest of her life. It is now on debate on whether or not Pearl should be taken away from her mother’s guidance. This is due to the fact that she is a sinner and might not be a qualified mother for her child.It is true, that no matter what you did in the past, a child is a blessing and parents change due to the love they have for their children. Therefore, Hester
As Hester settled into her new home she befriended a young man, Reverend Dimmesdale. They developed a companionship over a period of two years after Hester had arrived in the new country. This union turned into an affair, which left Hester pregnant without anyone knowing the father’s identity. Hester’s husband was “lost at sea” so everyone knew that Hester’s affair was out of infidelity. The town turned against Hester and accused Hester of adultery. Hester lived in a community of Puritans who had very strick rules. Adultry was a very big sin that when committed could be resolved in death. For Hester's punishment she was lead up on the schfold in front of the whole town. It was as if she was in a trile but had nobody defending her. As she had her baby Pearl in her arms she was asked who the father was, but she would not say. Soon the reader finds out that the father is Reven Dimmesdale. During Hester's trile her was very nervous that she would tell. If she would have told he would have been sentenced to death. To the end of her trile she did not say who was the father but she could only live because of her baby and she has to wear a letter A on her cloths for now
In “The Scarlet Letter,” Hawthorne presents the consequences of sin as an important aspect in the lives of Hester Prynne, Roger Chillingsworth, and Arthur Dimmesdale. The sin committed, adultery, between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale had resulted in the birth of their innocent little girl, Pearl. This sin ruined the three main characters’ lives completely in different ways. With the sin committed, there were different ways the characters reacted to it: embracing the sin, concealing the sin, and becoming obsessed and consumed with it. With each reaction to the sin there were also different actions of redemption.
We set our scene in a Puritan town in 1600s New England. Nathaniel Hawthorne weaves a tale of imperfection, guilt, and secret sin. In the strict town, resident Hester Prynne stands upon a scaffold with a baby and a Scarlet Letter upon her bosom, both tokens of her sin. The intricate letter “A” stands for her very sin of adultery which lead to the birth of the child in her arms. The townspeople cannot help but stare at symbol of imperfection, but they cannot stare at what is underneath it all. Hidden and locked away was the same imperfection hidden on the town’s own reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. A man of God with a burden to bear, the guilt would seep into his soul. Him, the father of Pearl, the baby born into
“Reality is easy. Deception that's the hard the hard work” -Lauryn Hill. In the novel the Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses literary elements such as symbolism, irony and conflict to show deception and secrecy can lead to self-destruction. This relates to the Scarlet Letter because in the book the protagonist character commits an act of sin that was more than just frowned upon. Not only does the community gossip and turn their cheek to the sinner but a sickness comes along from keeping a secret from the community.
Though their crime of adultery was mutual, Hester’s pregnancy forced her sin into the spotlight, and in Puritan society, the sin of having an illegitimate child was one of the worst a woman could commit. As punishment for her crime, Hester Prynne is forced to wear a scarlet letter “A” upon her chest as a sign of her wrongdoing. Because of this, Hester was forced to acknowledge what she has done and accept the repercussions of her crime, which ultimately makes her a stronger person and supports Hawthorne’s claim that it is “better for the sufferer to be free to show his pain” (Hawthorne 76). Hawthorne reveals Hester’s acceptance of her crime and her guilt the moment she walks out of the prison with her daughter in her arms, explaining that, “In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople and neighbors” (Hawthorne 31). Because of her crime, many people expect Hester to tremble with fear upon being revealed to the town, but instead she holds her head high and embraces the punishment for her sin. This in turn allows Hester to appear stronger, more beautiful, and more dignified, and choosing to portray Hester in this way shows Hawthorne’s belief that it is better to confess one’s sin and live with it rather than deal with the
Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne committed the sin of adultery. Hester couldn’t hide this sin because she had Pearl, and she couldn’t get rid of her. Dimmesdale on the other hand was capable of hiding this sin because he wasn’t the one that got pregnant, and Hester wasn’t going to tell everyone what he did. So Dimmesdale hid his sin until the end of the book. The result of this however wasn’t a good one.
out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take
In the world of The Scarlet Letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I Hester Prynne have been forced to assign relative blame to Chillingworth, Dimmesdale and myself. It is distasteful for one of us to assign blame to all seeing as though we would all approach it differently and I can never know the true feelings of my counterparts. The blame I shall assign is who among us is most responsible for the misconduct in the puritan society we lived in.
The scarlet letter is the Puritan’s method of broadcasting Hester’s sin to the world, but it also has an internal effect on Dimmesdale. Puritanism is a strict religion where pleasure is strictly forbidden and is punishable. When Hester Prynne is discovered to have committed adultery, she is forced to wear a scarlet A, which is short for ‘adultery’. When this is first revealed, Hester stands in the jail carrying baby Pearl and, with the people jeering, is asked by Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale if she would tell the world who the Pearl’s father is; Dimmesdale is relieved when the answer is ‘no’– and it is later revealed that Dimmesdale is the father. Over the course of the novel, Dimmesdale’s
In the stories of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, the antagonist characters display parallel story lines through their searches for the enemy. Roger Chillingworth, the former husband of Hester Prynne and the antagonist of The Scarlet Letter, works against his wife in order to find her untold second lover. Frankenstein is a contrasting story in which an unnamed monster is the antagonist towards his human creator, Dr. Frankenstein. Yet despite quite different story lines, the two characters possess traits that exibit parallels between them. In the novel The Scarlet Letter, Roger Chillingworth displays the startling passionate characteristics of an unwavering drive to seek out his foe, madness as his focus on his search takes over his entire being, and terrible anguish when his task is unexpectedly over, all of which are reflected in the daemon created at the hand of Dr. Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley 's novel Frankenstein.