A person’s reaction to sin can be more damaging than sin itself depending on how they react. The Scarlet Letter clearly integrates the idea that how a person handles sin determines the outcome of their character. Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth all have different reactions to sin throughout the Scarlet Letter and this affects their character and their outcome.
Hester throughout the Scarlet Letter has a variety of reactions to sin. At first the community shames and alienates Hester, this enables Hester to become a freethinker. Her loneliness lets her often ponder and question many aspects of the community. However, later in the story, Hester becomes a compassionate and maternal figure. She makes sure her choices won’t get Pearl taken away from her. When Hester makes decisions, she puts Pearl into consideration and this shows the readers Hester’s maternal figure come forth. Hester also shows a maternal figure towards her community. She does a lot of charity work by bringing food and clothes for the poor. Hester throughout the book feels guilty and gets used to blaming herself. For example, when Hesters sees Chillingworth she blames herself for causing Chillingsworth for becoming an evil man. Hester before she sinned with Dimmesdale had traces of compassion, defiance, and honesty but the scarlet letter brings it out in a greater extent. Hester ends up agreeing to run away with Dimmesdale and start a new life. However, things don't work out the way they expected and Hester leaves Boston for a short time but comes back and is seen as a bold figure in the community.Towards the end of the seven year time period, the women ignore her sin and comes to her for shelter against many inequalities they face. The scarlet letter’s meanin...
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... occurred in the face of sin. Chillingworth’s reaction to sin is not to seek justice but instead to obtain revenge. Chillingworth’s life eventually begins to revolve around ways to get revenge on Dimmesdale. Unlike Hester and Dimmesdale’s sin, Chillingworth’s is deliberately intended to cause harm. When Dimmesdale eventually dies, Chillingworth has no reason to live since he based his whole life around seeking revenge on Dimmesdale. Therefore, Chillingworth dies within a year of Dimmesdale’s death.
The Scarlet Letter is trying to get across to the readers that sin can have either a positive or negative result depending on how that person chooses to react to sin. As long as there is sin, people will react to it in different ways; some will hide it, some will embrace it, some will rot from it. But no matter how the sin is dealt with, it will always leave it's mark.
The fact that revenge destroys both the victim and the seeker is another theme presented in the Scarlet Letter. Dimmesdale is the victim of Chillingworth’s revenge upon Hester and whoever her lover happened to be. Dimmesdale, beside his self-inflicted harm was also not helped by the fact Chillingworth enjoyed watching him waste away. However, Chillingworth is also subject to this destiny as evidence by his change in the novel. Chillingworth was considered wise and aged in the beginning of the novel, although, later he is seen as being dusky and evil.
Sin is a major theme in The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In The Scarlet Letter, sin is practiced throughout a few of the characters. The only difference amongst them is the way that they try to atone for it or be completely enveloped by it. Sin can take control of a person and devour them completely to the point of no return.
Hester feels the hatred that the people of the village have put upon her. At the beginning of the book she walks with "natural dignity and force of character" towards the scaffold as she holds her sin, the baby. She takes her punishment with humility; and does not act out against the people of the village by becoming a witch or creating havoc in the town. Hester works in her little hit making clothes for the rich and the poor. She refuses to hide her letter because she refuses to let it define her, “the scarlet letter has not done its office.” Gradually throughout the book Hester turns cold, suicidal and
The Scarlet Letter is a story about human reaction to circumstances and the justification behind these actions. Each of the central characters in the novel represents a side of an extremely serious situation, adultery. Each of the characters has a certain amount of justification behind their actions and each searches for a way to rise out of his/her condition.
"To be fully human is to balance the heart, the mind, and the spirit.'; One could suggest the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, that one should not violate the sanctity of the human heart. Hester was well ahead of her time, and believed that love was more important than living in a lie. Dimmesdale’s theology and his inclinations render him almost incapable of action; Chillingsworth dammed himself, along with Dimmesdale. Hester was “frank with [Chillingsworth].';
The narrator notes her change in morals and beliefs: “She had wandered… much amiss” (180). This passage describes Hester’s state of mind and morals after seven years with the scarlet letter. Compared to Dimmesdale, Hester is much wilder, yet also much better adjusted to the weight of her guilt. She has accepted what happened and uses that acknowledgment to shape her views. She has become stronger, more untamed, and more removed from society. Not only does society reject her, but her crime forces her to question morals and dive into her wilder nature. Religion and law no longer work as simple guidelines for her life. Her act is considered a sin, but out of it she got freedom, love, and Pearl. After being cast out, she now looks at society and its rules—the things most people conform to—from a more negative, outsider perspective. The letter gives her a chance to be independent and find what she believes in as opposed to what she's been told to believe in. She rejects society through both these rebellious views, and also through her actions upon coming back to the community. She helps women in the community by offering support and counselling. In such a male dominated society, this is an important step both towards feminism and away from the
Hester's sin is that her passion and love were of more importance to her than the Puritan moral code, but she learns the error of her ways and slowly regains the adoration of the community. For instance, 'What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other! Hast thou forgotten it?';(Ch.17: 179). Hester fully acknowledges her guilt and displays it with pride to the world. This was obvious by the way she displays the scarlet letter with elaborate designs showing that she is proud. Furthermore, she does not want to live a life of lies anymore when she states 'forgive me! In all things else, I have striven to be true! Truth was the one virtue which I might have held fast, and did hold fast, through all extremity save when thy good--the life--they fame--were put in question! Then I consented a deception. But a lie is never good, even though death threaten the other side!';(Ch.17: 177). Hester learns from her sin, and grows strong, a direct result from her punishment. The scarlet letter 'A' was as if a blessing to Hester changing her into an honest person with good virtues. Fittingly, she chooses to stay in Boston with Pearl although Hawthorne admits, ';…that this woman should still call that place her home, where, and where only, she must needs be the type of shame';(Ch.5: 73). She is trying to stay and face her consequences instead of running in the other direction. Most people would leave a town where they are looked upon as trash the scum of society. Finally, the colonists come to think of the scarlet letter as '…the cross on a nun's bosom';(Ch.
The story develops when Hester Prynne commits the sin of adultery. Even though Hester's mistake was driven by innocent passion for Dimmesdale, the puritans took this seriously. By wearing the scarlet letter A on her chest, the village people look at her as an outcast. The puritans don't look at the sin as an act of love but instead as the work of the devil. However, Hawthorne makes it so that Hester's sin seems less serious than that of Chillingworth. Hester's sin seems more innocent because it was driven by her affection for Dimmesdale rather than of the intelligence. Her sin can also be considered less serious because Hester is willing to accept her sin and deal with the consequences publicly.
It slowly changes from bad to good as the story progresses. Hester uses the scarlet letter and the pain and grief it brings her to become a better person. Hawthorne describes this learning through pain, saying, “Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed, from society, had habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness.... The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers,—stern and wild ones,—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss” (180). While many people would give up hope upon receiving a scarlet letter and all the despair, grief and isolation that comes with it. Hester is an iconoclast in this sense because she has the ability to use an almost irreversible mark of shame to teach her how to be a better person. The changing of the symbol also becomes a point of hope for others who have sinned. They see it as an example that they can change who they are. Hawthorne explains the effect the scarlet letter has on others after Hester returns, saying “Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet to be her penitence. She had returned, therefore, and resumed,—of her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate of that iron period would have imposed it,—resumed the symbol of which we have related so dark a tale. Never afterwards did it quit her bosom. But ... the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world's scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, and yet with reverence, too.” (234). The symbol of the scarlet letter evolves from one of disgrace and shame, to a sign of hope and remembrance. It reminds people not to sin but
At the beginning of the Scarlet Letter Hester Prynne is labeled as the “bad guy”. The townspeople demand the other adulterer’s name, but Hester denies this revelation. She does not reveal it because she knows that the information will crumble the foundation of the Puritan religion and the town itself. “‘But, Hester, the man lives who has wronged us both! Who is he?’ ‘Ask me not!’ replied Hester Prynne, looking firmly into his face. ‘That thou shalt never know!’(Hawthorne 52). Hester knows that finding out that the father of the child, the Minister that is leading the town, will diminish credibility for the church and for Dimmesdale, the Minister. During her punishment, Hester decides to move out near the woods and make a living as a seamstress. Hester is regarded as an outcast from Boston, but she still gives back to the society that shuns her. ‘“Do you see that woman with the embroidered badge?’ they would say to strangers. ‘It is our Hester, —the town's own Hester, —who is so kind to the poor, so helpful to the sick, so comfortable to the afflicted!’”(Hawthorne 111). Her acts of kindness, helping the sick and comforting the afflicted, toward the society that makes her an outcast shows the inner goodness of a person. Throu...
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, there are many moral and social themes develped throughout the novel. Each theme is very important to the overall effect of the novel. In essence, The Scarlet Letter is a story of sin, punishment and the importance of truth. One theme which plays a big role in The Scarlet Letter is that of sin and its effects. Throughout the novel there were many sins committed by various characters. The effects of these sins are different in each character and every character was punished in a unique way. Two characters were perfect examples of this theme in the novel. Hester Prynne and The Reverend Dimmesdale best demonstrated the theme of the effects of sin.
The Scarlet Letter, a novel based in Boston with Hester Prynne, Roger Chillingworth, and Arthur Dimmesdale as the main characters, focuses on sin and its repercussions. Adultery and Hypocrisy are two such sins that are the main focus of the plot. Some think that adultery is the sin that the book is concerned with, but if that were so it would pervade through the entire novel on a less superficial level that it does. Hypocrisy, on the other hand, has a constant and repetitious under light in the entire novel that leads to the conclusion that the novel is not teaching about adultery, but hypocrisy with an underlying idea of adultery.
The strict Puritan code in the mid seventeenth century is evident in The Scarlet Letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The novel addresses the issue of adultery and the intensity of the sin. Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale commit the sin of adultery and face challenges inflicted upon them by the Puritan society and personal values. Nathaniel Hawthorne centers the plot of his novel The Scarlet Letter on the four major characters, Hester Prynne, Pearl, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth, analyzing their physical appearances, personalities, and roles.
In The Scarlet Letter guilt, punishment, revenge, and sin are all very prominent. They show us just what can happen when you choose to carry unconfessed sin and guilt. Hester Prynne, Roger Chillingworth, and Arthur Dimmesdale all experience these terrible consequences. In this novel you will see the consequences of sin while having to under go the feeling of guilt.
4. The Scarlet Letter was written and published in 1850. The novel was a product of the Transcendentalist and Romantic period.