The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel 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,

In The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, readers are faced with the obstacles of hiding one’s true intentions. Through the lens of three characters, Dimmesdale the priest, Chillingworth the medic, and Hester the typical citizen, the audience is able to learn a valuable lesson. No matter how people may present themselves, if they have a duplicitous nature, this behavior will ultimately be exposed. No man or woman is able to hide who they truly are forever, because eventually people will know what their true motives are.

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

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.

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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was quite progressive for his time and his novel, The Scarlet Letter, is a wonderful example of this. Before he married his wife, Sophia Peabody, Hawthorne joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist group (Nathaniel Hawthorne). According to Merriam Webster, transcendentalism is, “a philosophy that emphasizes the a priori conditions of knowledge and experience or the unknowable character of ultimate reality or that emphasizes the transcendent as the fundamental reality” (“Transcendentalism”). Put simply, transcendentalists thought that intuition and knowledge of ourselves is more a more important reality than the scientific, sensual reality. As a group, these people held very progressive views on women’s rights, education,

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne summarizes Hester Prynne’s perspective of the forest in one phrase. Early in the book, as Hester leaves prison, Hawthorne describes the forest as “dark, inscrutable… open to [Hester], where the wilderness of her nature might assimilate itself with a people whose customs and life were alien from the law that had condemned her” (75). Hawthorne explains Hester’s connection to the evil, isolated, and free forest, which serves as the location for her conversations with Pearl, Dimmesdale, and Chillingsworth. In contrast to Puritan society, Hester Prynne not only identifies with the sinful nature of the forest, but also finds its isolation and freedom liberating.

The scarlet letter symbolizes a part of Hester’s past that she can never forget but also represents a sense of strength that she overcame all the hardship that was a result of her sin, though she still feels the pain of the letter when encountering Mr. Dimmesdale. In chapter sixteen, Hester plans to meet with the minister in order to discuss their plans about what to do with Roger Chillingworth, but also just to talk to somebody who understands her situation. Eventually, Pearl brings up the Black Man again when she describes how “he haunts this forest, and carries a book with him [...] and how this ugly Black Man offers this book [...] to everybody that meets him here [...] and they are to write their names with their own blood [...] then

What exists within often does not match what appears outside. This statement is especially seen in the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale commits adultery with Hester Prynne, but the Puritan community only knows, until the end of the book, that Hester committed adultery, but they do not know with whom. Arthur Dimmesdale therefore finds himself feeling guilty and attempting to repent himself before he dies. His actions, however, until the end of the book, are internal because of his internal conflict – confessing his sin to the community would alleviate his internal pain but could cause the community to disrespect or mistreat him. Dimmesdale therefore deals with his sin internally, but these effects are seen outside his skin. Arthur Dimmesdale demonstrates the relationship between individualism and society (the community) because his individual private actions and thoughts, those done internally, affect his societal public actions, those done externally and vice versa.

Morals are important; morals are the foundation for any society. The morals depicted in The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, clearly show that righteous acts, and not sinning are not the a deciding factor in a happy life. The novel suggests that sin should be addressed by the community at large and not solely by the individual. The Scarlet Letter professes that an individual cannot, and will not, live a successful and peaceful life without being an honest member of the community, as evidenced by Hester Prynne 's transformation while wearing the letter, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale’s eventual demise, and Sir Roger Chillingworth’s revenge-based life.

Everyone faces penalties for the choices that he or she makes. Nathanial Hawthorne, well-known dark romanticist and author of “Young Goodman Brown,” and “The Scarlet Letter,” displays a love for story and symbols. Goodman Brown in “Young Goodman Brown,” chooses to question his faith and sells himself out of everyone because he does not believe in anyone. Whereas Hester in “The Scarlet Letter,” was thrown away from everyone because of her actions. Hawthorne’s usage of light and dark imagery in both, “The Scarlet Letter,” and “Young Goodman Brown,” represents good and evil, and the difficulty man faces to differentiate between the two

Sin and innocence both are found evident in life, with one marking the dark transgression imprinted upon every aching being and the other embellishing the pure, lighter essence every creature has at birth. The two are sharp contrasts that may seem incapable of holding together a single complex being, yet are found in all humans and generally constitute the basis of morals and human nature. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter beautifully weaves a tale of blind revenge, unintentional hypocrisy, and mortal transgressions, presenting the characters’ penitence from said transgressions in the form of a constantly changing Hester Prynne who must face the retribution of her affair with a tormented minister. Through the development of the characters Chillingworth, Dimmesdale, and Hester, Hawthorne illustrates the naturally wicked and flawed, however benevolent and atoning dual nature within man.

Arthur Dimmesdale is a Puritan minister in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter. He is the man whom Hester has an affair with and is subsequently the father of Pearl. As the novel progresses, Dimmesdale’s true character is revealed and the reader follows him through several years of his life. Hawthorne utilizes a significant amount of symbolism to establish the character of Arthur Dimmesdale.

The main idea of The Scarlett Letter novel is “sin and its impacts” on both individual and society which is demonstrated through its characters Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth. This main idea hailed from the author’s deep rooted puritanism. Hawthorne illustrated different levels of his main idea through his three characters. Each of the main characters are guilty of one kind of sin such as sin of adultery (Hester Prynne), sin of hypocrisy (Arthur Dimmesdale) and sin of vengeance (Roger Chillingworth).