Characters:
- Hester Prynne was a beautiful, young woman living in Amsterdam with her husband, Roger Chillingworth. He sent her you America alone while he finished his business. In America she met Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale who she had a love affair with. Pearl was the name of their child. When the townspeople found out about her sin, they punished her by making her wear a scarlet letter ‘A’ ,standing for adultery, on her bosom.
- Dimmesdale was a young reverend of the community. The people loved him, because of his emotional ways of speaking. He was Hester’s secret lover. He couldn’t live without being punished for his sins. Finally, he confess publicly, as soon as he did he died.
- Chillingworth was Hester’s husband. While traveling to America to join his wife he was capture by Indians. He finally reached America 2 years later. When he got there, Hester was already standing on the scaffold. He was seeking revenge on Dimmesdale, so he pretended to be his good friend trying to think of ways to torture him.
- Pearl was Hester and Dimmesdale’s daughter. She was given her name because she was precious and valuable. She was very clever, imaginative, and bratty. Pearl was a very significant character, because she reminded Hester of her sins and love affair.
- Governor Bellingham was like the political authority in Boston.
- Mistress Hibbins was Governor Bellingham’s sister. She was known as an evil witch. She had a bitter temper, because she worshiped the devil.
Summary:
“The Scarlet Letter” begins in the seventeenth century in Boston. Back then Boston was a Puritan settlement. Hester Prynne is being escorted out from the town’s prison with her daughter, Pearl. Hester had a scarlet letter “A” on her bosom. Someone watching from the crowd was telling someone else that she is being punished for adultery.
Hester’s husband sent her to America, while he finished some business in Amsterdam. While Hester waits for him, she obviously had an affair and a child with her lover. She won’t tell anyone who her lover is. And her punishment is to wear the scarlet letter along with public humiliation for her sin and secret. Later, she is taken to the town scaffold and scolded by the town fathers. She still refuses to tell who the father of Pearl is.
Hester’s missing husband, now known as Roger Chillingworth, is now living in Boston as a doctor to take revenge on Hester‘s secret lover.
After Hester is caught for adultery she is trialled for her punished. “ This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die, Is there not law for it?” ( Hawthorne 47). The quote says she has committed a serious crime and people want her to die. This means that people are going to ashamed for knowing Hester. The fact that she makes people feel ashamed demonstrates that Chillingworth would not want people to know he is Hester’s husband and even that he knows her. Therefore he wants to get his justice back by finding out who her lover is.
Pearl is a symbol of Hester’s transgressions and even has similar qualities as the sin which she represents. Pearl’s life and behavior directly reflects the unacceptable and abnormal nature of Hester’s adulterous sin. Hester is plagued with more than just a letter “A”; she is given a child from her affair who is just as much a reminder of her sin as the scarlet letter. Ultimately Hester overcomes the shame associated the scarlet letter and creates a sense of family for herself and Pearl. This relationship is integral to the theme of this novel and the development of its characters.
Hester's daughter, Pearl, functions primarily as a symbol. She is quite young during most of the events of this novel—when Dimmesdale dies she is only seven years old—and her real importance lies in her ability to provoke the adult characters in the book. She asks them pointed questions and draws their attention, and the reader's, to the denied or overlooked truths of the adult world. In general, children in The Scarlet Letter are portrayed as more perceptive and more honest than adults, and Pearl is the most perceptive of them all.
Hester is a youthful, beautiful, proud woman who has committed an awful sin and a scandal that changes her life in a major way. She commits adultery with a man known as Arthur Dimmesdale, leader of the local Puritan church and Hester’s minister. The adultery committed results in a baby girl named Pearl. This child she clutches to her chest is the proof of her sin. This behavior is unacceptable. Hester is sent to prison and then punished. Hester is the only one who gets punished for this horrendous act, because no one knows who the man is that Hester has this scandalous affair with. Hester’s sin is confessed, and she lives with two constant reminders of that sin: the scarlet letter itself, and Pearl, the child conceived with Dimmesdale. Her punishment is that she must stand upon a scaffold receiving public humiliation for several hours each day, wearing the scarlet letter “A” on her chest, represe...
Years ago, Hester promised Chillingworth to keep his identity a secret, thus allowing him to do evil to Dimmesdale. Chillingworth believes that it was his fate to change from a kind man to a vengeful fiend. He believes that it’s his destiny to take revenge and thus would not stop until he does so.
Chillingworth, the injured husband, seeks no revenge against Hester, but he is determined to find the man who has violated his marrige: “He bears no letter of infamy wrought into his garment, and thou dost; but I shall read it on his heart.” Chillingworth comments: “Believe me, Hester, there are few things.
The Scarlet Letter starts off by throwing Hester Prynne into drama after being convicted for adultery in a Puritan area. Traveling from Europe to America causes complications in her travel which also then separates her from her husband, Roger Chillingworth for about three years. Due to the separation, Hester has an affair with an unknown lover resulting in having a child. Ironically, her lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, is a Reverend belonging to their church who also is part of the superiors punishing the adulterer. No matter how many punishments are administered to Hester, her reactions are not changed. Through various punishments, Hester Prynne embraces her sin by embroidering a scarlet letter “A” onto her breast. However, she is also traumatized deep within from everything she’s been through. Nathaniel Hawthorne depicts this story of sin by using rhetorical devices such as allusion, alliteration and symbolism.
Both committed adultery but have suffered in different ways. Hester’s punishment composed of public shaming on the scaffold for all to behold, but afterwards she did not suffer from guilt because she confessed her sin, unlike Dimmesdale, who did not confess, but rather let his sin become the “black secret of his soul” (170), as he hid his vile secret and became described as the “worst of sinners” (170). He leads everyone to believe of his holiness as a minister and conceals the, “Remorseful hypocrite that he was [is]” (171). Hester, a sinner too, however, does not lie about how she lives and therefore, does not suffer a great torment in her soul. While she stays healthy, people begin to see Hester’s Scarlet Letter turn into a different meaning, of able or angel, and they view her in a new light, of how she really lives. Dimmesdale however, becomes sickly and weak after “suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and tortured by some black trouble of the soul” (167). He hides behind a false mask as he is described as possessing, “Brilliant particles of a halo in the air about his head” (300), and perceived as the most honorable man in New England. People do not see him as truly himself, but rather who he hides
Hester Prynne is the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's romantic novel, The Scarlet Letter, which is set in seventeenth-century Puritan New England. As a young woman, Hester married an elderly scholar, Roger Chillingworth, who sent her ahead to America to live but never followed. While waiting for him, she had an affair with a Puritan minister named Dimmesdale, after which she gave birth to Pearl. Found guilty of adultery (through the absence of her husband and the birth of Pearl), Hester is punished by being forced to wear a scarlet lette...
As a living reminder of Hester’s extreme sin, Pearl is her constant companion. From the beginning Pearl has always been considered as an evil child. For Hester to take care of such a demanding child, put lots of stress onto her life. Hester at times was in a state of uncontrollable pressure. “Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her knees, and cried out with an agony which she would fain have hidden, but which made utterance for itself, betwixt speech and a groan, ‘O Father in heaven- if Thou art still my Father- what is this being which I have brought into the world!’” (Hawthorne, 77).
Hester Prynne, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, the Scarlet Letter, faces a crucible. She commits adultery with Reverend Dimmesdale and becomes pregnant with a daughter, Pearl. She is isolated from the community and the general public except for when she must stand upon the scaffold for three hours as part of her punishment for her sin. She must also wear a scarlet letter “A” for adultery on her breast. The town looks at her differently because of her sin but Hester stays true to her personality. Hester fairs her life by honoring her punishment and her mistakes, as well as taking care of Pearl and teaching her to be kind.
Chillingworth saw Hester, after emerging from a great period of solitude, as a symbol of life. He regarded her as almost a savior. ...
The third main character, Roger Chillingworth, is a pretty innocent man in the beginning of this book. He comes to America to be reunited with his wife, Hester, but soon comes to find out that she has committed adultery.
Although Pearl is looked at as the result of Hester’s sin, she is a blessing to her mother as well. Her name, “Pearl,” is fitting because of what she means to Hester. For instance “Hester names her”Pearl” because she has come to great price, and Hester believed that Pearl is her only reason for living,” (Johnson: Understanding The Scarlet Letter pg.1). Pearl motivates her mother to keep on going when she is tempted to give up. In the novel, Mistress Hibbins asks Hester to join her in a witches gathering, but she declines saying if she had lost Pearl, she would have gone.
Hester’s role in the story is described as sleeping with a priest and got accused of committing adultery and got punished by having to wear a scarlet letter “A” on the breast of her gown (Hawthorne 71). Hester Prynne’s punishment is to go to prison and then with her child, Pearl, go and stand out on the platform in front of everybody wearing her scarlet letter on the breast of her gown (Howells). Hester...