A Comparison Of Hester Prynne In The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Puritan society deems Hester Prynne an unchaste woman, Arthur Dimmesdale a saint, and Roger Chillingworth a valued member of society. However, Hawthorne turns their interpretations around and suggests his own, ultimately presenting Hester as a broken woman with emotions and feelings; Dimmesdale as a minister who’s not very saint-like sin consumes him with guilt, and Chillingworth as an unmerciful husband who is the farthest away from salvation. Hawthorne’s interpretations suggest contrasting with the views of Puritan society, that Hester Prynne is a woman who takes regret in her actions, searching for holy redemption through the object of love that came out of her sin; Arthur Dimmesdale is a man of cowardice and weakness, a cannot own up to his actions of sin; and that Roger Chillingworth’s quest for revenge transformed him into a malevolent being. Hawthorne uses symbols, such as imagery with the colors black and red, to illustrate his characters as the embodiment evil and sin, as well as the embodiment of holy redemption. Hawthorne associates Chillingworth with the color black to directly represent him as the “Black Man”. After arriving in Boston, the townspeople

Hester wears the scarlet A on her chest, to publicly atone for her sin and receive redemption in the light of God. She mirrors this in Pearl’s attire, as she dresses her in a “crimson velvet tunic of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold thread” (69). Hester’s sin and Pearl are both guilty acts, but were also both acts of affection. Hester dresses Pearl in a beautiful scarlet dress, in attempt to create an “analogy between the object of [Hester’s] affection and the emblem of her guilt and torture” (70). Hester tries to show that Pearl is another physical representation of redemption of the sin that the scarlet letter