Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne

The children In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter play a major role in the Puritan society. With their honest opinions of Hester and Pearl, the children are presented as more perceptive and more honest than adults. Due to their innocence, children are capable of expressing themselves without constraints; there are no laws or regulations that they are bounded by. As an adolescent go through the stages of life and grow older, they begin to be more conscious of the how they act as they are more aware of society and the things that are occurring in the world, creating a filter for their actions. When they remain as the children, on the other hand, are adventurous; they are still exploring the universe that seems to fill with mysteries that are bound to be solved. They tend to attach to the truth and they are not afraid to speak it freely. Children differ from adults in their potential for expressing these perceptions. With their obliviousness to the things that are actually going on around the town, children therefore react differently compared to the adults, who are more knowledgeable. Perceived to be immature, young children are presented as more perceptive and more honest than adults due to their innocence, how they are unaware of the reality and the crimes that are presented in society by the adults enables them to be blithe and not afraid of saying what they feel like. Due to their naivety, when they express what they perceive to be true, they do not get punished,

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a study of the effects of sin on the hearts and minds of the main characters, Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, Roger Chillingworth. Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth. Sin strengthens Hester, humanizes Dimmesdale, and turns Chillingworth into a demon.

Guilt and shame haunt all three of the main characters in The Scarlet Letter, but how they each handle their sin will change their lives forever. Hester Prynne’s guilt is publicly exploited. She has to live with her shame for the rest of her life by wearing a scarlet letter on the breast of her gown. Arthur Dimmesdale, on the other hand, is just as guilty of adultery as Hester, but he allows his guilt to remain a secret. Instead of telling the people of his vile sin, the Reverend allows it to eat away at his rotting soul. The shame of what he has done slowly kills him. The last sinner in this guilty trio is Rodger Chillingworth. This evil man not only hides his true identity as Hester’s husband, but also mentally torments

As great effect as emotions can have on someone, even greater is the effect of how one reacts to his emotions. Arguably the two most influential of these emotions are guilt and anger. They can drive a man to madness or encourage actions of vindication. Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale are subject to this very notion in Nathaniel Hawthorne 's The Scarlet Letter. Hester simply accepted that what she had done was wrong, whereas Dimmesdale, being a man of high regard, did not want to accept the reality of what he did. Similar to Hester and Dimmesdale, Roger Chillingworth allows his emotions to influence his life; however, his influence came as the result of his anger. Throughout the book, Hawthorne documents how Dimmesdale and Hester 's

Why is sin important? It is believed that sin is important to people because their deity places guilt on their wrongdoings to show that those actions are not to be repeated. In contrary to this belief, there are people with religious views that hold no importance with sin. Depending on the individual’s religious views, sin can be a conflict between oneself and a “higher” being or it can not affect the individual at all. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Dimmesdale is an ordained Puritan priest that had committed a grave sin in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He had committed adultery with a married woman, Hester, the woman that is married to Roger Chillingworth. After Chillingworth has heard about this news, he seeks

All of the major characters in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne are dynamic and go through some form of character development. Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, who are at the forefront of the central conflict in the plot of the novel, are no exception. While their respective evolutions in character were noticeably different, each was emphasized by the three scaffold scenes. The differences of Hester and Dimmesdale’s respective character developments are highlighted and emphasized by the three scaffold scenes in the novel.

The novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, many of the main characters suffer from toils of sin. Especially Arthur Dimmesdale, the local puritan clergyman who has committed adultery and can 't admit to the people of the town in Boston what he has done. He lived under a strict society where the system and all of its components were based on God. He suffers from this because he values the Puritan way. Arthur Dimmesdale does not come out for many reasons and that isn 't right, which makes him a coward throughout the novel.

The Scarlet Letter is rich with many symbols and themes. A prominent theme throughout the book is the themes of internal and external pain. Nathaniel Hawthorne creates a parallel between hiding secrets and your outward appearance. Those who hide great sin deteriorate until there is barely anything left of them. The more severe the secret, the more their exterior is mangled. Those who hold smaller secrets do not reap the severe punishments of those who have committed great sin against God. Hester Prynne holds the secret of Chillingworth’s true identity, Arthur Dimmesdale holds the secret of his sin of adultery, and Chillingworth hides his horrible sin of revenge. Characters in The Scarlet Letter that keep secrets suffer the outward expression of their sins.

In the Scarlet Letter there are characters that are important to the novel; however there is one specific character that relates to the topic of the story is Arthur Dimmesdale. The character Arthur Dimmesdale is a respected minster in Boston. However even though, Arthur Dimmesdale is a minister and preaches against sin to his congregation, he commits the ultimate sin with a young married woman named Hester Pryne. For punishment Hester Pryne becomes pregnant and shunned from public society, Dimmesdale is forced to live with guilt and later in the novel dies from the same sin within his body. Critics that have read the Scarlet letter would argue that Dimmesdale is a weak or ennobled character because he didn’t tell the community of his sinful crime. Another characteristic that critics would agree on is that Dimmesdale was a hypocrite. Arthur Dimmesdale is a character that is weak and hypocritical to his own belief.

Hester Prynne -- adulteress and sinner, but also strong, courageous and kind. She lives with the first two words as her identity, with the scarlet “A” as her name tag; A reminder to everyone and herself of her sins. In The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne; Hawthorne expresses his belief that everyone has an equal potential for sin, what causes people to be different from each other is how they react to their sin. The sins committed by people can affect them differently than how it may affect another person. Sin is not something that everyone feels the same way about. Lucius Annaeus Seneca makes a point saying that: “The first step in a person's salvation is knowledge of their sin”. There is no way we can resolve our sins alone. We can only acknowledge our sin and repent; We can try to be the best versions of ourselves but sin does not just disappear. It is a daily trouble everyone’s life, sin changes every person from the individual they are supposed to be. For example, Hester accepts what she has one and tries to move on and redeem herself by helping the poor and raising her daughter. On the contrary, Chillingsworth dwells in his sins and submits to what he had done making him become dark and satan-like. He no longer can recognize admirability, he has a focused on revenge and hate. There are also people comparable to Dimmesdale, who hide their sins in shame of what they have done, unable to move on.

The Scarlet Letter showed that sin corrupts the human soul and motivates evil actions. This can be proven in the cases of Dimmesdale, Hester, and Chillingworth. Dimmesdale, Hester, and Chillingworth were all corrupted with sin, which determined all of their actions in The Scarlet Letter. Hester’s sin occurred before the story began. She sinned by letting herself love a man other than her husband, After the sin of loving another man she went further down the path of sin by having an affair with Dimmesdale.

The Scarlet Letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne was set during the 1600s in a New England town during what is now known as the Puritan past of America. In the novel, the Puritan religion was not only observed but criticized as well. During this time, the Puritans were an extremely religious group of Protestants that were known for their intolerance of other religions and their strict guidelines for a righteous lifestyle that often lead to violence or cruel forms of punishment. Nathaniel Hawthorne is a perfect portrayal of a Puritan historian because he himself was born as a Puritan and witnessed first-hand the extreme pressures associated with the Puritan religion to include arguments about the Puritan society and the treatment endured within the religion. Although The Scarlet Letter was set in the 1600s, the novel was written in the 1840s and dealt with issues during the Antebellum Era specifically when it came to the Women’s Movement and the Second Great Awakening.

“On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold-thread, appeared the letter A.” (40) Every aspect of the story of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, The Scarlet Letter, whether it be major or minor, stems from this line. From beginning to end, the scarlet letter has a major bearing on the unfolding of the plot. Hester Prynne, an adulteress, has been spared death for her sin, but she must wear a scarlet letter “A” for the rest of her life. Her husband, who has been living with Native Americans for the past two years, arrives in town just in time to see her holding a baby and being publicly humiliated for the crime of adultery and vows to get revenge. As the story unfolds, Hester and Pearl continue with their day to day lives while Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, Pearl’s father, struggles with the sin that he has committed. It later becomes public knowledge that Pearl, Hester’s daughter is the child of the beloved reverend. Hawthorne uses the themes of adversity resulting in joyfulness, presenting to the reader that even though everything at the present may be hopeless, there is something that will come about and make all the suffering seem petty, and freedom from captivity, allowing the reader to consider that while a burden may not seem like such, once it is removed, the effect is similar to that of a bird being set free from a cage. These lead to the production of the novel that is

Pearl is the product of Hester’s, Dimmesdale’s and Chillingworth’s suffering and their actions. Like how humanity has been formed to the state that it’s currently in from the actions of the righteously wholesome and that of the despicably evil men of history, all of which comes from their suffering and how they dealt with said suffering. The actions of men reflect the actions and ethos of their gods. The suffering of history all lead to discovering the Americas, the puritans going to live there and then orchestrate the witch trials. Nathanial was shaped by this history of which his father was the magistrate. The hall of history lead to Nathanial Hawthorne writing The scarlet letter, the mirroring of this history and Hawthorne’s redemption for what his ancestors did. Pearl is the representation of the salvation of Hester Prynne, she is the representation of what Hester went through, she is a representation of the sin between Dimmesdale and Hester, and the scarlet letter is a representation of Hawthorne’s attempted redemption for the actions of his ancestors.

In The Scarlet Letter, the perception of sin deviates from person to person. The deviation occurs on the severity of the sin that was committed and who committed the sin. Focusing on Hester and Dimmesdale, it is easy to compare the consequences of coping with the perception of their sins, on a private and a public level. The outcome of dealing with their sin is extremely different. The theme of morality affects Hester and Dimmesdale as well. They have varying levels of morality and this changes during the course of the novel.