Scarlet Letter Good Vs Evil

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne epitomizes the concept of good versus evil through the use of characterization. John Locke and Thomas Hobbes have two extremely opposing viewpoints on human nature. Locke believes that human nature is innately good, but on the other hand, Hobbes believes that human nature is inherently evil because human nature knows right from wrong. Nathaniel Hawthorne uses juxtaposition and light and darkness to portray the good and evil inherently within mankind. The beginning of the book starts with a dark, gloomy vibe due to the description of a forbidding prison door with heavy oakwood and iron spikes. The prison door symbolizes the darkness that is naturally in every mankind but has a wild rosebush next

He has a mask; On the outside, he is known as the “mouthpiece of Heaven’s messages of wisdom, and rebuke, and love,” but behind the mask is a face of weakness and sin (Hawthorne, 98). He does not seek for peace as his inner guilt leads him to torture himself. He struggles between his id and superego; it forces him to sin to satisfy his needs and leads him to reveal his secret. After he gives his last sermon, his public confession gives him the light of sunshine.

Roger Chillingworth is a cold-hearted doctor and a “Black Man.” He represents the true evil and “kills” his identity to transform to a “devil figure.” He even “withdrew his name from the roll of mankind” (Hawthorne 122). Darkness is always associated with him because he “haunts this forest and how this ugly Black Man offers his book and an iron pen to everybody that meets him here; and they are to write their names with their own blood” (Hawthorn

She is depicted as evil to believe that she came from sin. Pearl’s abnormal behavior refers her to as “elf-child,” “imp of evil,” and “airy sprite” when compared with the “Christian infants” (Hawthorne 88). The name of Pearl is significance as it is one of a kind like an pearl in a oyster. At the end, she is pure person married to a European aristocrat with her own family. The novel is an allegory as Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale represents the story of Adam and Eve. Hawthorne’s use of abstract diction: “A fatality, that it has the force of doom; the darker the tinge that saddens it” symbolizes the sin between Hester and Dimmesdale, as well as Adam and Eve. The fatality is the Devil, who was Chillingworth, but is the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Hester and Dimmesdale meet in the dark forest, symbolic of sin, and their guilt is reflected in the darkness of nature. Mankind is not either inherently good or evil but both. As Rousseau’s believes that we are good by nature but corrupted by society. There is a capacity for both good and evil within each person. Hawthorne shows that “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it” through The Scarlet Letter (John 1.5). Good always triumphs over