Scarlett Letter Essay

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The book I read is “Scarlett Letter” a novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and based on an 1850’s romantic work of fiction in a historical setting. A story talks about adultery in the 1850’s and a woman that has committed what back then is considered one of the worst crimes. The story main character is Hester Prynne and the characters surrounding her in the story are Pearl, Roger Chillingworth, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, Governor Bellingham, Mistress Hibbins, and Reverend Wilson. Hester has been scorned for committing adultery and these surround characters make up the people that are a big part of what is happening in the story. The story begins in seventeenth-century Boston in a Puritan settlement. Hester Prynne is led from the town…show more content…
The former lovers decide to leave and go to Europe, where they can live with Pearl as a family. They will take a ship sailing from Boston in four days. Both feel a sense of release and Hester removes her scarlet letter and lets down her hair. The day before the ship is to sail the townspeople gather for a holiday and Dimmesdale preaches his best sermon ever. Meanwhile, Hester has learned that Chillingworth knows of their plan and has booked passage on the same ship. Dimmesdale, leaving the church after his sermon sees Hester and Pearl standing before the town scaffold. He impulsively mounts the scaffold with his lover and his daughter and confesses publicly exposing a scarlet letter on the flesh of his chest. He falls dead as Pearl kisses him. Frustrated in his revenge, Chillingworth dies a year later. The story ends with Hester and Pearl leave Boston and no one knows what has happened to them. Many years later Hester returns alone still wearing the scarlet letter to live in her old cottage and resume her charitable work. She receives occasional letters from Pearl, who has married a European aristocrat and established a family of her own. When Hester dies she is buried next to Dimmesdale. The two share a single tombstone which bears a scarlet “A.” This was over all a good book very hard to understand at first
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