Inner Struggles In The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne

Inner Struggles Throughout the novel, Hawthorne uses the symbols of light and dark to depict good and evil among the characters Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth. In The Scarlet Letter, there is a constant battle between good and evil, saint and sinner, and light and dark. This was a difficult book to read because of the type of language used and how hard it was to get into. Both Hester’s light and dark sides are represented by sunlight. Pearl noticed, “All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees” (Hawthorne 186). This means that God has finally forgiven her of her sin. She takes off her “A” and the sunlight touches her once again.
Hawthorne said, “The sunshine shall not touch her” (168) The sunshine represents God in this quote. The “A” represents sin and God will not touch the sin. Hester has many light qualities that are not easily seen through her sin.
Hawthorne says, “The young pastors’ voice was sweet, rich, deep, and broken” (63). This means that he is respected and loved by all the towns’ people. They all look up to him because he has sinned just like them and that makes him relatable. Later, the people in the town said later that “The saint on Earth alas, he discern such sinfulness” (Hawthorne 132). In this quote, the towns’ people turn on him for sinning and turning his white soul red. Everyone in the town believes him to be a hypocrite. Before, Dimmesdale was seen as a perfect saint to everyone else, but nobody is perfect and when the town seen that, he was unfairly turned