“She had wandered, without rules or guidance, in a moral wilderness: as vas, as intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest” (180). Nature plays an essential part in this American Romance novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter. The forest is a prominent factor symbolizing many ideas about nature’s relationship with man, as an individual and a society. The narrator does so by simply narrating about events and characters before, during and after the forest scenes. The narrator also displays the people’s feelings towards the forest and nature in general. The forest as a symbol helps the book develop the literary devices of theme, mood, and irony in The Scarlet Letter.
The forest represents a refuge from society for Hester Prynne and Minister Dimmesdale. At the same time, it symbolizes nature’s role as a shelter from society. This adds to the themes that society as a whole is morally deprived and nature is essentially good. It becomes a place where they are unshackled from Puritans’ strict law that is corrupted. Once under the forest’s shelter, they are then permitted to meet and speak heart fully to one another. Moreover, Prynne resides in the outskirts of Boston in the forest area. By doing so, Prynne is demitting everyday direct contact with the other town’s people. This adds to the two themes by making the readers view the forest as a mother trying to protect Hester and Dimmesdale from society’s wickedness.
The forest additionally symbolizes the relationship in which native serves as a place of empowerment for individuals. This also adds to those the themes. The forest is a symbol of Prynne and Dimmesdale’s empowerment in the truth, hope and love. Upon their meeting in the forest, both feel positively changed as qu...
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... Pearl the reader is reminded that Pearl is a mystic character. She leads the way towards the truth with her words and actions. Pearl in the forest knows that Dimmesdale must confront the townspeople with his sin. She foreshadows this truth by not accepting happily Dimmesdale’s affectations by means of kissing Pearl. Reaffirming the forest as a symbol of truth, the narrator uses the forest to develop the characters of Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl.
The forest is a key part of the novel as the serving as a symbol. It symbolizes nature’s relationship with man as a place of refuge and as a place of empowerment. The forest in the book symbolizes hope, love, and truth. Utilizing the forest, Hawthorne is able to develop the literary devices: theme, mood, irony, and character.
Works Cited
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York: Bantam, 1986. Print.
When Hester and Dimmesdale meet in the forest, they discuss their true feelings about their experiences since Hester was branded with the scarlet letter. Hawthorne describes how, “No golden light had ever been so precious as the gloom of this dark forest” (192). The rare presence of light in this otherwise dark situation symbolizes the relief both Hester and Dimmesdale feel after sharing the truth about Dimmesdale’s torturous guilt and Hester’s marriage to Chillingworth. In every scene previous to this one, the forest is associated with witchcraft, evil, darkness, and secrets. This prior association is contrasted by the shedding of sunshine on the sinful pair after releasing the last of their secrets. This scene is a turning point in the novel and shows how despite Hester and Dimmesdale’s sin and the consequences they’ve had to suffer for it, they are able to find some peace in the fact that they have confided in each other and fully admitted their
The main character describes the trees in their current backyard as four little elms. The trees in this story symbolize growth and beauty. The family one day imagines their house to be filled with breath taking large trees, but as of right now the trees in their yard are hideous. This portrays the element of growth because throughout the story the family possibly could be able to accomplish this dream of a beautiful back yard. Another element of symbolism in this short story is the nun. A nun is a lady of a religious community who is living under vows. Nuns are supposed to act like Godly women to all they meet. When the nun encounters the main character, the nun is judgmental. The nun symbolizes that not everyone is who they may seem to
Of all the symbols in The Scarlet Letter, the forest is one of the most important. By providing an escape from the overbearing nature of puritan life, the forest allows characters to be presented in a different backdrop, it can serve as a place of both light and darkness, but above all, liberty. For every character that visits it, the forest is freedom, protection, and peace. Without it, there would be no contrast with the village as well as puritan society, and Hawthorne?s message would not be as convincing.
...their insatiability and material yearnings. The trees were marked with their names, and in the wake of tumbling to the ground the fallen angel utilized them for kindling, symbolizing the demons accumulation of their souls to heck. The trees, depicted by Tom, were "reasonable and thriving without, however spoiled at the center" like that of the societal patriarchs that on the outside seemed to have everything, yet within they were abhorrent lively heathens. The trees fell when the men's souls were asserted and taken by the demon. Insatiability was symbolized all around the story. One of the unanticipated cases of this.
The forest is also a setting where characters find the truth about themselves. Most settlers to the forest are people who are outsiders from society. They are untainted by the views of the townspeople and can see beyond the lies and hypocrisy of the townspeople. The experiences of the people on the scaffold and in the forest lend themselves to a higher issue, reality vs. perception. In the Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne shows how people create their own reality with what they see.
The Scarlet letter is full of symbolic scenes that all tie to the basic nature of human beings. "In the dark night-time, he calls us to him, and holds thy hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder! And in the deep forest, where only the old trees can hear, and the strip of sky see it, he talks with thee, sitting on a heap of moss!” That particular quote is said by Pearl but it ties Dimmesdale to the antics of nature. Nature frees the soul and when Dimmesdale meets Hester and Pearl in the woods he finally feels free to show his true feelings towards the two of them. The woods free him from the judgement and possibly ruins of the town that they live in. Although it shows that Dimmesdale is a coward it also shows that deep
Since the beginning of the society, the forest has been portrayed as a place filled with darkness, and inhabited by the devil and other unworldly creatures. The rumors that were formed about what could be lurking in the forest were created to fill the void of knowledge of what was in the woods and to give them something to believe in. In reality, what lurked in the forest was still unknown to most people. The mystery of the forest was what people were so scared of.
Knowles foreshadows the boys’ loss of innocence through the war, and their constant jumps from the tree. While getting ready for the war the boys practice and show off their skills on the tree by the Devon River. These jumps are done for fun yet the boys see them as a routine, something that has to be done. Knowles brings the theme of the loss of innocence in the novel for the first time by portraying Finny as the defender who gets the boys out of trouble by saying they had to jump out of the tree (22). This foreshadows how the innocence of the boys will be banished from themselves and their world. The tree also symbolizes the Forbidden Tree of Knowledge. Just like it is forbidden to eat the fruit, jumping from the tree was not allowed as well. By jumping from the tree the boys symbolically accept their loss of innocence, just like Adam and Eve accepted theirs.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic The Scarlet Letter, nature plays a very important and symbolic role. Hawthorne uses nature to convey the mood of a scene, to describe characters, and to link the natural elements with human nature. Many of the passages that have to do with nature accomplish more than one of these ideas. All throughout the book, nature is incorporated into the story line. The deep symbolism conveyed by certain aspects of nature helps the reader gain a deeper understanding of the plight and inner emotions of the characters in the novel.
At the beginning of the book, the reader is introduced to a dark and gloomy town that had first built a prison and a cemetery. Amidst the depressing landscape, is a beautiful rosebush. “But on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-hush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.” (Hawthorne 10) This rosebush represents a change, beauty, and hope for the prisoners awaiting their freedom. Being bright and beautiful, the rosebush is shockingly different from the depressing gloom of the rest of society. “In the contrast of the wild rose bush, with its flowers turned into gems, and the prison, turned metaphorically into an unnatural flower - the black flower of civilization -Hawthorne sets his conflict between prisoner and prison (or prisoner and crowd) into a much larger context. The rose bush is beautiful, also wild and natural; the black flower is ugly, also civilized and unnatural. Nature has a heart to pity and be kind; civilization, apparently, does not.” (Baym 6)
The forest is a symbol of the test of strength, courage, and endurance. Aside from “Young Goodman Brown,” forests carrying a negative or challenging connotation have been featured in other stories. For example, in the folk tale The “Three Bears”, Goldilocks encounters the cottage of the three bears in a forest; in Hansel and Gretel, the children's father takes them off into the forest to abandon them and they have to find their way back out; in Red Riding Hood, the little girl has to travel through the forest to her grandmother's house. There has always been an association between forests and evil because of its dark and gloomy nature. The forest further goes on to represent evil in “Young Goodman Brown” because Faith asks Goodman Brown not to go into the forest on his mysterious errand. What is his errand? Hawthorne never says, but clearly Goodman Brown has planned for it. He knows that the aim of his journey is less than wholesome, for he feels guilty at leaving Faith on such an errand (1264). Despite Faiths protest, Brown goes on his quest anyway. Thus, faith was not able to achieve the desired outcome. This means his faith tried least and got the least, for it was apparently weak. When faith is weak, not only it cannot control desires, but also it needs protection, for it could be lost at any time. That was what made faith beg Brown to put off his journey and stay with her th...
The forest represents symbols of being lost morally or spiritually. It could also be seen as the unknown and the beauty of life in a way. A good example of this would be in the first chapter with the rosebush. Throughout the story we realize Dimmesdale has lost his way spiritually and Hester in the beginning lost her way morally. Hester was also compared to that of a forest as well when Nathaniel compares Hester's outcast to a forest: "She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest," and Dimmesdale has lost his way spiritually thanks to the sin he committed with Hester, so he begins to demonstrate his own form of
Hawthorne manages to create many metaphors within his novel The Scarlet Letter. The rose bush outside the prison door, the black man, and the scaffold are three metaphors. Perhaps the most important metaphor would be the scaffold, which plays a great role throughout the entire story. The three scaffold scenes which Hawthorne incorporated into The Scarlet Letter contain a great deal of significance and importance the plot. Each scene brings a different aspect of the main characters, the crowd or more minor characters, and what truth or punishment is being brought forth.
...e village represents the strictness of Puritan society, while the forest symbolizes the wildness of the human heart. The wildness of the human heart is revealed once it is removed from the strict Puritan society. Overall, the edge of the forest is the boundary between civilization and repression to truth and human emotions.
Hawthorne shows this when he writes about a forest that has intriguing qualities. “ ‘See!’ answered Hester, smiling. ‘Now I can stretch out my hand, and grasp some of it.’ As she attempted to do so, the sunshine vanished” (Hawthorne 176). When Hester and Pearl were in the forest near their home, Pearl claimed that the sunshine would not touch her mother because of her scarlet letter. The sunlight, considered to be a symbol of purity, would not touch something impure. The forest was also where Hester found peace, because she was not judged by her scarlet letter there. Dimmesdale and she could also show their love for each other in the forest without anyone’s knowledge. The sun and forest are examples of how romantics gave nature supernatural and human