Essay On Hester Prynne In The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne

"On a field, sable, the letter A, gules,” is the closing sentence of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a fictional story centered around real histories from Puritan New England. Hester Prynne, the main character of the story, conceives a child through an affair with an unknown man. She is publicly shamed for her act of adultery but refuses to reveal the name of her lover, despite the humiliation she must endure alone. Everyone wanted to see the fallen woman as the beadle, an officer of the church, parted the crowd, “Make way, in the King’s name! Open a passage; and, I promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be set where man, woman, and child may have a fair sight of her brave apparel.” (page 56). The townspeople see that on “the breast of
One of the disagreements they had with the Church of England and the Catholic Church was that the Puritans believed in a type of predestination, the belief that Jesus Christ came and died to save us from our sins, but only a select few would make it to heaven. This was because of the sin of Adam, original sin. They believed that the sins that people committed during their life were evidence of their predestination for heaven or hell. God could, however, change his mind if one led a sinless life or did penance while on earth. The ministers had no regrets about administering harsh punishments, believing that any earthly punishment would be better that an eternal punishment. The punishment of an individual was also meant as an example for others, and this was the basis of the scarlet letter. To have a scarlet A emblazoned on one's chest was a real Puritan punishment and there are at least two accounts of it historically (Lanzendorfer 2014). In Hester Prynne’s case her sin was brought into the public eye with her pregnancy. She was commanded to wear the sign of an adulteress as an outward sign of her sin for the rest of her life, but Hester said that having Pearl was enough to remind her of her guilt. However much Hester may have suffered, she grew through her suffering to be an extremely compassionate and forgiving person. She worked with the poor, sick, and suffering, “Therefore I tell
These three people, bound together by their knowledge, are completely different in how they react to it. Dimmesdale and Chillingworth were respected members of the community, while Hester was an outcast and publically shamed, though her sin was no greater. Upon Roger Chillingworth’s death, a year after the Reverend’s, Hester and Pearl left for a time; Pearl had inherited all of Chillingworth’s land in England, making her very wealthy. But, one day, Hester was suddenly back in her old cottage outside of town. Where was little Pearl? She was by now all grown, with children of her own; Hester could be seen embroidering little gowns for them that were decorated “with such a lavish richness of golden fancy as would have raised a public tumult, had any infant, thus apparelled, been shown to our sobre-hued community.” (page 272). Why did Hester return? She would never feel as though she fit in anywhere else, for “Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet to be her penitence. She had returned, therefore, and resumed…