Essay On Hester And The Minister In The Scarlet Letter

       Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter seems to be created around Hawthorne's obsession with the forbidding quality of the scarlet "A", the symbol from which the novel takes its title. Rrom the rose-bush which Hawthorne selects a flower from as an offering to the reader(1) to the "elfish" child Pearl, every aspect of the story is drenched in this letter's scarlet hue. Perhaps this repetition reflects Hawthorne's own repressed desires, as some critics suggest(2). However, what seems more compelling is the function which the symbol serves for Hester Prynne and the community which has condemned her. For Hester the symbol is clearly a literary one; she fashions the scarlet "A" to

Hester names her daughter Pearl because of her beauty and intelligence, however also because she is Hester’s treasure. It mays seem contradictory, however, the one thing that causes her immense pain is also her greatest gift. Pearl has a innocent, independent, and non judgmental personality yet loyalty bold with wise outlooks on the world (76). The other children stare and tease Pearl for her unique circumstances that have taught her different struggles. For example, Pearl makes do with her confinement by making scrapes her playthings to fight the loneliness; a pine tree branch or weeds from the garden was used. One day, as an infant, Pearl grasps at her Mother’s “A” and smiles it it, causing Hester distress, however, this only reflect

In Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, he intricately demonstrates how one woman can be labeled as a saint and a sinner. In the 17th century New England there is a woman named Hester Prynne who is forced to wear a scarlet A upon her chest to display that she is an adulteress. Hester displays herself as a Goddess of light while Roger shows that he is truly the angel of death while Dimmesdale is a mere mortal caught in the middle.

He wants to go here because that is where Hester was humiliated for hours. He is slowly loosing his mind over his sin. He needs to confess of them. As he stands up on the scaffold, he just begins yelling. He realizes how bad it will look for the reverend to be at this spot repenting of something. Luckily, nobody hears him yelling.

Hawthorne develops Hester as a sympathetic woman who passively suffers her agony, kindly helps those less fortunate than she, and patiently waits for her life to improve. The basic goodness of her character helps to sustain her during her time of trial and to help Dimmesdale in his distress. In her public and private suffering, symbolized by the scarlet letters in her life, Hester remains a pillar of strength. Hester Prynne committed adultery out of passionate love, needless to say it was a sin to conceive a child, but is sin from passion worse than sin from revenge?

the "iron arm" of the law "held her up." Unable to free herself of the

Imagine yourself on display in front of your whole town, being punished for cheating on your husband or wife. Today adultery is looked down on, but in reality nobody makes a huge deal out of it. Sin can affect a person in many ways, but whether it’s good or bad only time can tell. In the old days, religion and law were looked at as one, and Hester Prynne just so happened to sin, which in turn caused her to break the law. In the novel, Hester displays that how a person deals with sin has a lasting impact on the people around her, and most importantly those that are the closest to her.

At the end of this story Hester and Dimmesdale tell everyone in the marketplace that he's the father, reason why they're forgiven. This novel states that every person and every sin can be forgiven. The text says “After exhausting life in his efforts for mankind's spiritual good, he had made the manner of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite Purity, we are sinners all alike” which supports this claim.

If someone is convicted of a crime, it is to be assumed that they do not want to have every single other person in society judging them. They want to possibly forget what they’ve done, and move on with their lives. Sometimes, however, this is not possible; because society has the vague idea that because something happened around them, they have full rights to discuss the matter and openly judge the “criminal” as they please. We first meet Hester outside the prison door, when she is first released from prison. Though at first she was a bit hesitant to openly display the scarlet letter embroidered on her gown, she figured it did not matter, for even if she had hidden the letter, there was still a three-month-old baby in her arms, reminding her

Hester's main role in the novel was the protagonists. As the protagonists we see that even through the thick and the thin, we see how strong, kind, and honest of a women she really is. When first introduced in chapter 2, she holds her head up with the scarlet letter "so fantastically embroidered and illuminated" upon her chest. As a character, she affected everyone around her in a negative and a positive way. When around the townspeople, they see her as a disgrace. They even show their children that she is an example of what not to be. They look down on her. Hester sets aside her extra time of her day to give and help to those in need, such as to the poor or the governor and they still don't show the same kindness in return. By being

1. It was an exceptional story but it has gotten very confusing at many times. The main characters seem to be either the mother Hester or the son Paul. The perspective changes between the two a few times. I’m also not sure want is going on throughout the story.

The blossoming roses (Pearl) and the treacherous thorns (Hester) present on the rose bush symbolize the dark isolation they both face from society. Hester tries to provide the best for her precious daughter by suiting her with the “richest tissues” (80) in order to prove that her daughter is not “clad in rustic weeds” (80) in the attempt to show the value and purity that she sees in Pearl, much like roses. Dressing Pearl up to resemble beautifulness and riches, like the roses she symbolizes, is done to distinguish between the sinner and the gift from God. Yet as one had to forever live amongst the sins and shame, the other was able to break free from the strict and judging Puritan society. Pearls ability to do so supports the idea that she

The moment Hester Prynne walked out of the prison door wearing that scarlet letter, she was doomed to be labeled as an Adulterer for the rest of her life. Because of this, the reader associates Hester with the letter A which originally means adulterer. Up until chapter 13, titled “Another View of Hester,” our protagonist, Hester, was thrown into this box labeled adulterer, where people would stand on the outside, looking down on her from their pedestal of puritan purity. Even the young children of their small town, not knowing what she had done to earn that scarlet letter, would say to Hester and the spawn of her crime walking together would say amongst themselves, “...let us fling mud at them!” (92). But Hawthorne uses the letter A in

“Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love…” (Hawthorne 145). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s historical fiction novel, The Scarlet Letter, is a story of a woman in the 1850s living in a Puritan colony and the struggles she faces living as an outcast, hated by all, but still becomes a caring and kind person. Hawthorne’s tenacious and forgiving protagonist character Hester Prynne defies the Puritan community; her recognition of the sins she has committed and the actions she takes afterward prove that transgressions do not delineate personality.

Prynne’s character drastically changes when she takes off the letter, "She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom" (182). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book The Scarlet Letter gives a glance of the Puritan life in the 1600s. The suspenseful drama of adulteress Hester Prynne tells the heavy weight of shame in the Puritan society. Hawthorne intertwines powerful symbolism throughout the entire story allowing the reader to understand the deeper meaning of shame that Prynne endures. As punishment for adultery, the community forces her to wear a scarlet A for life. The townspeople shame her along with her baby Pearl. No matter what, Prynne refuses to name the father of the baby. During this time, her actual husband, Roger Chillingworth, makes an appearance in town after being gone for years. Once he learns about the situation, Chillingworth set out on his quest for revenge to find Prynne’s lover. Hester Prynne has several conflicts, and as these are resolved, her character is revealed.