Hester Prynne’s Road from Shame to Love and Pride in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s the Scarlet Letter
Hester Prynne’s Road from Shame to Love and Pride in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850 and is Hawthorne’s most famous novel. The majority of his work has America’s Puritan past as its subject, but The Scarlet Letter uses this material to greatest points. Hester Prynne is the writer’s best known and the most talked about protagonist. Hester “was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale” (Hawthorne, 81), she had long, abundant and dark hair, “so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam” (Hawthorne, 81) and her face “besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes” (Hawthorne, 81). The Scarlet Letter’s compelling story is about this beautiful, not an everyday young woman, Hester Prynne, her innate character more precisely about the exploration of the influencing factors that shape her and the transformations those factors cause in her. One and the most important of these factors is the scarlet letter, which meant to be a symbol of Hester’s adultery sin, a symbol of shame, but instead it becomes a symbol of identity, something to be proud of. Her toleration and attitude, between the feelings of shame and pride toward the letter ‘A’, deserves all the recognition and are very honorable. Hester had to proceed along a very struggling road from the feelings of shame to be proud of the scarlet letter. I will demonstrate this through three main parts of the novel, which in my opinion are the most essential in Hester’s “journey”. As I have said, Hester felt shame because of the letter, which was because that reminded her about the affair with Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, about her sin. When the young woman—the mother of this child—stood fully revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly
The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850 and is Hawthorne’s most famous novel. The majority of his work has America’s Puritan past as its subject, but The Scarlet Letter uses this material to greatest points. Hester Prynne is the writer’s best known and the most talked about protagonist. Hester “was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale” (Hawthorne, 81), she had long, abundant and dark hair, “so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam” (Hawthorne, 81) and her face “besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes” (Hawthorne, 81). The Scarlet Letter’s compelling story is about this beautiful, not an everyday young woman, Hester Prynne, her innate character more precisely about the exploration of the influencing factors that shape her and the transformations those factors cause in her. One and the most important of these factors is the scarlet letter, which meant to be a symbol of Hester’s adultery sin, a symbol of shame, but instead it becomes a symbol of identity, something to be proud of. Her toleration and attitude, between the feelings of shame and pride toward the letter ‘A’, deserves all the recognition and are very honorable. Hester had to proceed along a very struggling road from the feelings of shame to be proud of the scarlet letter. I will demonstrate this through three main parts of the novel, which in my opinion are the most essential in Hester’s “journey”. As I have said, Hester felt shame because of the letter, which was because that reminded her about the affair with Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, about her sin. When the young woman—the mother of this child—stood fully revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly