Loneliness In The Scarlet Letter

The scarlet letter, the judgement from the public, and the seclusion all combined to take away something from Hester that she may never get back. Seven years after she is forced to withstand public humiliation for many hours, a sad transformation overcomes Hester. Hester’s emotional transformation is so drastic that it makes her less of a woman. The seclusion that Hester has been living in for the past seven years has resulted in her losing her ability to love, the emotion that makes you the most woman. “It was due in part to all these causes, but still more to something else, that there seemed to be no longer any thing in Hester’s face for Love to dwell upon; nothing in Hester’s form, though majestic and statue like, that Passion would ever dream of clasping in its embrace; nothing in Hester’s bosom, to make it ever again the pillow of Affection” (Hawthorne, 1994, pp. 112). However, it is apparent that this needed to happen to Hester in order for her to survive what had happened to her. “Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or… crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more.” (Hawthorne, 1994, pp. 112). The reader watches Hester slowly become less and less of herself, making this transformation exceedingly difficult to

Hester Prynne of Nathanial Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter defies the Puritan belief system through her rebellion and compassion. Hester defies the Puritan belief system through her rebellion. Hester Prynne, while in Boston waiting for her husband to come from Amsterdam, commits the crime of adultery and gives birth to a child, causing her to be punished. Hawthorne describes her crime in dialogue between Hester’s husband, who has just arrived in Boston and is unaware of Hester’s circumstances, and a towns member who infers as to what she has done and how much of an uproar it has caused, during her public punishment, in the government forces her to stand on a scaffold for three hours and condemned to wear an A on her chest

This ridicule has a trickle down effect on Hester as she too is banished from her own community for committing adultery. The comparison between Hester and Hawthorne defines the external struggle for the reader to fully understand the effect of opinions from society on them Although reluctant to allow Hester to leave prison, the members of the town suggest that her punishment be to wear a scarlet red letter A on her bosom, thereby allowing all to know of her crime. The scarlet letter “ was red-hot with infernal fire, ” (Hawthorne 81) and defined the state she was currently in, that being eternal hell. Though she was forced to marry an older man at a young age, her rebellion to have an affair is not seen as an internal struggle that she overcame; rather, it is merely seen as a woman who sinned, a woman who shall therefore endure the punishment for the sin, rather than a woman who was never given a say in what she wanted with her life. Time and again, Hester Prynne is seen defying society by allowing herself to stand out from societal norm just as the roses “with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner“ (Hawthorne) did. Instead, she returns to the community and is observed aiding those in need, all with seven year old Pearl by her side.

  "What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us," stated Oliver Wendell Holmes. This eventually proves to be especially true for Hester Prynne, the main character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne, a fair young maiden whose husband had disappeared two years prior to the opening of the novel, has an affair with the pastor of her Puritan church, resulting in the birth of her child Pearl. Because of this act of adultery, Hester Prynne is branded by the scarlet letter "A," which she is forced to forever wear upon her attire. The plot thickens as Hester's former husband returns to New England and becomes

Believed by many writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, society corrupts and conforms the individual, and it is the individual who breaks from consistency and conformity that is most free. Hester Prynne, a woman punished for adultery, is isolated by herself and her community, but breaks free from strict Puritan society. Roger Chillingworth, the husband of Hester, isolates himself which leads to the destruction of himself and the community. Hester Prynne and Roger Chillingworth experience different types of isolation, and while Hester chooses to transcend Puritan laws and live a purposeful life regardless of how it affects her, Chillingworth decides to become infatuated with the sin of Arthur Dimmesdale and live in revenge outside of Puritan

Nathaniel Hawthorne communicates through his novel The Scarlet Letter that some dogmatic attempts by society to label a person by his or her actions in the past will fail. Subjectivity across the community and throughout time changes the meaning of a symbol society implements to control an idea. The scarlet letter “A” Hester Prynne wears exemplifies this. The town wants the object to arouse feelings of ignominy towards Hester; however, not everyone who meets Hester interprets it the same way. The town originally regards the letters as a signification of ignominy, but this interpretation soon switches to ability, and, finally, to honor as Hester’s action prevail in the subjectivity across time. Subjectivity also leads the scarlet letter to

For centuries written language remains the most common form of passing information and ideas. Society greedily uses it for its own purposes of persuasion and assertion upon impressionable youths. Nathaniel Hawthorne uses this platform to express his rightfully negative feelings about the Puritan lifestyle through The Scarlet Letter as a way of persuading himself of separation. His purpose is to shed the guilt he ancestrally bears from the witch trials in the feministic, romantic tale of Hester and Dimmesdale. The self-proclaimed romantic author of The Scarlet Letter uses the letter attached to Hester’s bosom as a symbol of Alienation intensely exploited through himself, Hester and Dimmesdale.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne while courageous and loyal, is foolish. Hester is the protagonist of the novel, an adulteress with a daughter as the result of her sin. Besides serving jail time and going on the scaffold, she has to wear the letter ‘A’ on her chest for the rest of her life as a reminder of her sin. Even while facing her punishments, she refuses to confess her lover’s identity. When her husband, Roger Chillingworth, enters her Puritan community and is faced with her infidelity, he vows to discover who her lover is.

First and foremost, Hawthorne uses several literary devices such as metaphors when he says, “She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine” (The Scarlet Letter 50), and “With a perfect figure of elegance on a large scale” (The Scarlet Letter 50), to lucidly show the readers of what most thought of Hester Prynne, as she walked through those prison doors. It is necessary to point out that the townspeople were not fawn of Hester due to the sad

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is about a woman named Hester who committed adultery and had to face society consequences. This novel contains an amount of symbolism that impacts the whole story. While reading this novel it was necessary to keep track of all the images that symbolized something to understand the novel. Although allegory uses symbols it is different from symbolism. Allegory deals with what a character or special event might stand for and symbolism is what an image represents.

BibliographyThe SCARLET LETTER, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, LONDON:PUBLISHED J.M. DENT & SONS Ltd.. NEW YORK, E.R. DUTTON & CO

Hester Prynne is a protagonist in the novel " The Scarlet Letter" She is described as a young tall women, with dark and glossy hair. So beautiful that "her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped." Hester Prynne suffers public humiliation, forced to wear the scarlet letter for the sin she has done. She then hides her beauty and sin underneath a cap for seven years. All the people who surround her look down on her and shame her, but after a long while. People begin to feel bad for her, telling her to remove the scarlet letter. Though, Hester disagrees and keeps the scarlet letter on. Leaving her with a burden on her back reminding her and the people for what she did. Hester continues with her

Roger Chillingworth begins the book by devoting “himself earnestly and unreservedly” (118) to find the secret lover of Hester Prynne. This devotion is later shown to ruin his charisma as later in the book it is noted that he is “transforming into a devil” (266). His transformation shows how his double life has affected his life, and not for the better. Due to his devotion to the mystery of Hester’s lover, Chillingworth’s desirable features of being an “intellectual and studious man” had been depleted and “had altogether vanished” (266). The struggles of Chillingworth occurred because of the seven years he spent looking for the man who wronged him and because in order to attain this goal, he had to wear a disguise in public. The internal struggle that Chillingworth faced because of his double life proves that Hawthorne is correct that a person who wears a mask in public will experience strife underneath the

Hester Prynne was changed for her entire life after society condemned her of adultery. Things were never the same from her point of view, and the scarlet “A” given to her shows out on her chest more than anything else. It is especially noticeable to Hester when Hawthorne wrote, “… and she saw that, owing to the peculiar effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet letter was represented in exaggerated and gigantic proportions,” which was at the governor’s mansion. Society became so involved in her life that she stayed there for most of her younger life, maybe for Dimmesdale, and she even came back to Boston as a much older woman with the “A” still on her chest like she couldn’t live away from that society. She must have felt sinful denying the fact that she had committed adultery, and she wasn’t being punished for it. This effect on her mentality kept her from living without that society; Hester was only able to live

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American author that lived in the 1800’s. Hawthorne was also part of the anti transcendentalism movement. Do to the fact that his great uncle was John Hathorne, Hawthorne became somewhat obsessed with the Puritan time of the 1600’s.  This was a time period in which as his books are written in, including his most famous The Scarlet Letter. In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne uses the symbolism of Pearl, Hester's Cabin, and Dimmesdale to contribute to the overall theme of imperfection.