Scarlet Letter Hester Condemnation Quotes

Convicted, Damned, and Doomed Condemnation. The act of being condemned. Punished, criticized, sentenced, denounced. Feeling trapped, trapped within physical confines, trapped within emotions, trapped within thoughts, trapped within one’s head. The privilege to do what one desires- it’s stripped away. Lacking that freedom begins to make one’s life change drastically, their actions begin to change, their mannerisms begin to take another form. Condemnation often has severe effects on those who go through its dreadful processes. It often allows for those who end up completing their sentence to not only change the way they think or look at life, but also lead to them making decisions to move beyond their boundaries that they wouldn’t do before.

Hester is a committer of the sin adultery. She receives a letter with an A on it, which is meant to represent her sin. Hester is free to go wherever she wants with her letter, but she decides to stay within the boundaries of her Puritan town: “Kept by no restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the Puritan settlement...” (Hawthorne 73). Hester has a newfound sense of pride in the letter she wears, even though that letter is her reason for her own personal condemnation. She doesn 't have any restrictive boundaries, but she feels like her letter is that line that keeps her in her town where she will constantly be judged by others. Constantly criticized, evaluated, and assessed. Hester appears to have a negative mental state caused by her mental condemnation due to the adverse diction when she’s addressed through use of words such as sin, dark, or inscrutable. As her condemnation continues on, she (unlike Jake) changes her subjective thoughts into ones that represent pride and acceptiveness. She turns her views on life into ones that are happier and more accepting, since she has already gone through so much. Condemnation often changes how one might go through processes mentally, but those do not always have to be awful. Most see the restrictiveness in the actions of being condemned, yet new ideologies on how one

These decisions are often made after one has a shift in morals after being condemned. Hester from The Scarlet Letter not only changes her mental thoughts, but she begins to break out of her initial condemned state since she feels that she has already broken all the rules that she could. As a Puritan, Hester was advised to not head into the forest since the Puritans saw it as a dark and sinful area. She was also a woman, and no woman was said to even come near the forest: “But Hester Prynne... outlawed, from society... she had wandered into a moral wilderness... The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dare not tread” (Hawthorne 180). Her letter has already given her all sinful traits associated with it, such as shame, despair, and solitude. She knows she has nothing to lose by visiting the forest, so she decides to break out of her Puritan hometown condemnation she’s set for herself due to her letter giving her a new sense of bravery. These daring decisions have also been represented in her previous choices of staying in her town. Hester is aware that she could face consequences if she is caught in the forest, and she knows that she is the subject of ridicule from most people in her town. Her condemnation has allowed for her to grow more fearless as a human not only mentally, but she has