Hawthorne uses the imaginative and symbolic form of the romance to veil the impression of the serious themes in his novel. The young woman Hester Prynne is the main character in The Scarlet Letter. She is accused of adultery, and because she does not confess who the father of her illegitimate child is, she gets sentenced to wearing a scarlet letter on her breast as a sign and reminder for her and the Puritan community she lives in. Expelled from the community, she lives on the edge of the village as an outcast and has to find her own way. Other important characters in the novel are Hester´s daughter Pearl, Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth.
Unlike the girls in Salem, Abigail is not submissive which is why her uncle is suspicious and even more because she’s rebellious. That alone was considered filthy and impure. In Act one, Abigail states these words, alluding about her past affair with Proctor. “I look for John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my heart! I never knew what pretense Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men!
Because she lived in such a God driven and puritan town, the judicial system of the settlement had decided for her to acknowledge her sin by embroidering a vibrant scarlet letter “A” onto her dress to symbolize adultery. She was often ostracized from the rest of the town since she was forced to wear the crimson “A” everywhere she went. As well as the letter to remind her of the wrong she had done, the affair had left her with a fatherless daughter named Pearl. Later in the novel we discover the father is the Reverend of the town, the admirable Arthur Dimmesdale. Through pain, remorse and agony the novel reveals that it is better to tell a harmless lie then to confess a hurtful truth.
Madi Seigler Mrs. Beitz AP Language 20 October 2011 The Greater Sin The novel The Scarlet Letter tells of Hester Prynne’s sin and how it affects her and the town she lives in. She has committed adultery which is a capital sin in her Puritan town; however someone else had to take part in that sin. But no man ever confesses, so he remains a mystery to the town. All except for Roger Chillingworth, who is Hester’s husband. He is able to figure out that it is the preacher in the town, Arthur Dimmesdale.
They shared a tombstone with only one marking: a red letter A on a simple black slate. Even after Hester Prynne’s life ended, she was still branded as a sinner. The magistrates wanted to fill her life with sorrow and misery, and that is exactly what it did to her. She was an exile to the people who were once her neighbors, and was treated like she was inferior to everyone else. Through all this, Hester still held her head high.
Symbolism in The Scarlet Letter The Scarlet Letter is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous works. It is about the complex struggle among Hester Prynne (a condemned adulteress), Arthur Dimmesdale ( one of the community’s ministers) ,Roger Chillingworth ( Hester’s estranged husband) and Pearl ( Hester’s daughter). The story begins with the public punishment of the young woman Hester Prynne in mid-17th century Boston. She is forced to wear a scarlet letter “A” over her breast, so that everyone can know about her adultery- she becomes pregnant during her husband’s long absence. No matter how the public despise and exclude her, Hester is always refusing to reveal the name of Pearl’s father and keep doing good things for the pubic and finally win respect from others.
Faint is representing honesty; God and the old representing wisdom corrupt the Devil. As he and this mysterious old guy meet and moving further into the dark forest Brown starts to see all of the evil his family did in the past. That was where he had to make the choice to if he was going to be part of that passes or if he would make his own future. He continues on the road seeing and seeking for more information about that pass. He had seen so many people that he considered exemplary Christians and he seemed doubtful of what he should chose his wife Faith over the road that is ancestors had taken.
Curley's wife can be seen to represent a few different things. The first being the painful weight of dreams. Curley's wife represents what happens when dreams fail and the burden this weight places on the individual. She is a sad character because she believes that she could have been something more than she actually is. Her hopes to be in "pitchers" are similar to the men on this ranch, who also have their own dreams.
Even if it’s merely a vision or nightmare Brown has, the evil still infects people. Faith, Goodman Browns wife, is symbolic because she is not only named Faith, but she is Browns faith, faith in the church as well as faith in others. She gets taken from Brown in the forest, so Brown loses his faith. He loses faith, but I think he loses his sanity as well when she is taken from him. My reasoning for thinking this is because in the end it is shown that it was only a dream that Brown has when he falls asleep in the forest.
Hester Prynne was forced to wear the letter “A” on top of her heart for the rest of her life. But it was almost as if there was a letter “A” engraved in Dimmsdale’s heart causing him great pain and suffering internally. We know from Dimmsdale himself that he was suffering because when he was trying to exhort the truth out of who Pearl’s father was in front of the entire community he said: “… speak the name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer.” This quote foreshadows to when we find out that Dimmsdale is the “fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer.” We also know that Dimmsdale suffered from when Hester refused to speak his name and he placed his hand over his heart, as if in excruciating pain. Dimmsdale endured something far worse than Hester, and he practically begged her to take him out of his misery because he couldn’t do it himself. He said he would rather be standing on the scaffold alongside Hester and his child than be broken down by guilt.