The Importance Of Nature In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Hester and the World Around Her Hester is swayed by many forces that she cannot control, the most important being the natural settings that are direct and indirect to her. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter uses lots of instances of nature to affect Hester Prynne and the other characters around her. Nature and the wilderness are very prevalent topics in the book. The book takes place in seventeenth century Salem, so the town is very small with a vast wilderness around Salem. Hester Prynne is controlled in her emotions and actions of nature that take place within the book which makes nature very important. Nature adds a deeper layer to the book, instead of just reading the words on the page one is able to look further inside the story

Some aspects of nature give messages to the reader to feel a certain way about an element in nature. While Hester was walking through to forest with Dimmesdale Pearl had told her “Mother, the sunshine does not love you. It runs away and hides itself because it is afraid of something on you bosom.” (174). One can infer that the sunlight is freedom and forgiveness, while the shade is sin. So there is a message to the reader that as long as she is wearing the Scarlet Letter, she will always be a sinner in her ways. Without nature a reader could not infer that which is why Nathaniel Hawthorne needed it to be able to send a message to the reader about Hester’s sin. Another important reason why Nathaniel Hawthorne needed nature is to be able to add feeling to material objects. Along with character emotions nature is also used to represent how a reader should feel about objects. It gives different connotations to objects intentionally placed in the book. In chapter one Hawthorne represents prisons as the “black flower of civilized society” (46). Hawthorne is able to give a negative connotation to the word black by relating it to sin and that the Black Flower would not grow without the sin of others which it is its nutrients. Being able to have connotations make the reader much more connected to the book which in

Nature gives The Scarlet Letter a second underlying layer to the book that would not be there otherwise. This layer is important because without it there would be less to read into in the book. Throughout the book there is motif of night and day. Night is where people are able to speak about their sins freely, but during this time no one can see them. While in the daytime people do not confess anything but people are able to see their sins. In the end of the book this is opposed and Dimmesdale was able to confess his sin during the day for everyone to see, eventually dying upon the scaffold, “That final word came forth with the ministers expiring breath. The multitude silent till then, broke out in a strange deep voice of awe and wonder, which could not as yet find an utterance, save in this murmur rolled so heavily after the departed spirit.” (243). Without these underlying themes Dimmesdale’s confession would have been much less important because it wouldn’t have broken the motif. It would have just been another scene in the story to finish up the plot without a deeper