The Scarlett Letter

The Scarlet Letter is about a woman, Hester Prynne, who commits adultery. She is forced to wear a scarlet letter A on her chest while the identity of her partner is kept a secret. Her husband, who has been gone, arrives and asks that his identity be kept a secret so he doesn’t have to deal with the consequences of Hester’s sin. He swears that he will find out who her partner is. Meanwhile her partner, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, is feeling the consequences of his actions. His guilt is eating at him and ruining his health. The main character, Hester Prynne, whose sin was adultery, kept the identity of her partner a secret and the identity of her husband a secret. Hester, as a result of her sin had to wear the scarlet letter A on her chest to remind her and the community of her sin. “When strangers looked curiously at the scarlet letter, ….they branded it fresh into her soul.”(p.59) The wearing of the letter also had an effect on Hester’s appearance. “Even the attractiveness of her person had undergone a similar change. It might be partly owing to the studied austerity of her dress and partly to the lack of demonstrations in her manners.….there seemed to be no longer any thing in Hester’s face for Love to dwell upon; nothing in Hester’s form, though majestic and statue-like, that Passion would ever dream of clasping its embrace; nothing in Hester’s bosom, to make it ever again the pillow of affection.”(p.112) Hester becomes an outcast of the community. Though she has everything she needs to take care of herself and her daughter. “ Lonely as was Hester’s situation, and without a friend on earth who dared to show himself, she, however, incurred no risk of want. She possessed an art that sufficed, even in a land that afforded comparatively little scope for its exercise, to supply food for her thriving infant and herself. It was the art… of needle work.” (p. 56) Her daughter is also a reminder of her sin. The Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale is