The Influence Of Hester Prynne In The Scarlett Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne

To understand how the character of Hester Prynne was created one has to understand the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s own Puritan family heritage. He was the third great grandson of the unyielding Puritan William Hathorne. This ancestry has a direct influence on the context of The Scarlet Letter and how Nathanial Hawthorne portrayed the characters. In 17th century Boston there is a strict hierarchy held in the village and the rule was strictly Puritanical, with harsh laws and severe religious regulations. The patriarchs of the society created this system to protect a new world that they hoped would be the epitome of a utopian community. In this small village lives a young woman who is married to an absent husband. She emerges from the prison with a scarlet “A” on her bosom to signify that
she has broken the law of marriage. She has initiated a ripple in the water of utopia and must be made an example to prevent further transgressions by other members of the village. She is banished and shunned by her peers. Hester Prynne does not belong to anyone except little Pearl the product of her adultery. She attempts to belong but for every gesture of goodwill she meets silence. The silence is deafening for her and yet she is the face of courage, independence and maintains a resolute attitude. This is where the contradiction occurs for the two main characters.
Hester is treated like a pariah, yet Arthur Dimmesdale (who is her lover) is not. Dimmesdale as the village minister is obliged by nature and his religion to love the truth and detest the lie. This obligation sets the scene for the internal torment he experiences from the moment Hester appears with Pearl at the prison door. He loathes his miserable polluted self and wants to set his guilty conscience right. He torments his own mind with this guilt and attempts to rectify his lies, not only for the internal damnation he experiences, but also because of the adoration he experiences from members of his congregation. He knows that the public veneration is based on a lie and he is wracked with guilty torment. Ultimately, Arthur Dimmesdale is exposed in a scene filled with drama and angst. Standing below the scaffolding his parishioners turn a blind eye to his naked sin which truly exposed him for “a false and sin-stained creature of the dust”(Hawthorne 224). Hester Prynne is not granted such a reprieve in her life and is relegated to maintaining her sin with her held up as no eye was ever turned away from her
sin.