Quotes On Hester Prynne

I am kind of on the fence with Hester Prynne's way of handling her punnishment. It was incredibly brave of her to own her mistakes; however, her child will have to live like an outcast just his or her mother.

Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale dealt with their sin in different ways due to their personalities, their positions in society, and their ability to hide their crime. Hester and Dimmesdale’s differing personalities were one reason why they dealt with guilt differently. Hester, like her daughter was rather passionate, bold, and prideful. Hawthorne characterizes Hester through her daughter (6-83). This quote portrays Hester to have a gloom and temper.

Hawthorne’s message about obtaining salvation through the means of being open and true to yourself, is shaped by the contrasts of consequences the characters Hester Prynne, who publicly acknowledges her sin, and Arthur Dimmesdale, who hides his sin, face. In Hester’s case, she was publicly shamed for her sin from the beginning and was forced to wear the symbol of her sin, the scarlet letter “A” representing adultery, to isolate her from the rest of society. She had the opportunity to leave the town and begin a new life free from the scarlet letter, but she decides to stay as, if she were to run away or remove the scarlet letter, she would be admitting to the shame of her sins. Her staying, shows she wants to change the scarlet letter to not represent her sin, but her as a character.

English Protestants created a large group of people in the 16th and 17th centuries called the Puritans. These people advocated strict religious discipline along with a strong beliefs and worshipping. The Scarlet Letter reflected on Puritan Society in several ways, from religion to discipline and punishment. Religion seemed to control everyone, the reverend was the person that everyone looked up to, and the community, as a whole, believed in fate and destiny. Puritan relationships were very restricted, therefore making adultery a terrible sin in the eyes of the community. In the 17th century, Boston was extremely strict and the laws were strongly enforced, making Hester’s sin a great

To begin with, Hester’s sin drove the story, but after the community established her as a sinner, she overcame her sins but she still struggled through other characters. Instead of depicting Hester’s inner turmoil directly to Hester, Hawthorne portrays her tumult through other characters in her life such as Dimmesdale, Chillingworth, and the community. Dimmesdale proclaimed to Hester, “If thou feelest it to be for thy soul’s peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be made more effectual to salvation, I charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne expresses how sin causes guilt through Hester’s, Chillingworth’s, and Dimmesdale’s actions and emotions. Hester Prynne was the main sinner in the story, and she felt

The Scarlet Letter is about a woman named Hester Prynne and her crime of adultery. She had a baby with man who is not her husband, and she will not reveal who that man is. Throughout The Scarlet Letter Hester represents social injustice just as the Salem Witch Trials in The Crucible do, and this injustice becomes accepted and leads to acceptance. Furthermore, Hester’s case represents injustice in the fact her case was unjustified and she was imprisoned on unfair judgement, just like the people convicted of witchcraft in Salem had been accused based off of opinion, not fact. Both have endings of acceptance of their “sin.”

In the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hester Prynne is portrayed as an adulterous woman, having a child out of wedlock. She is forced to display her terrible sin publicly by wearing a letter A the color of scarlet. Though she is seen by the Puritans as sinful, she displays many of the virtues stated in Proverbs 31. Hester Prynne shows moral excellence as well as righteousness and goodness despite being wrought with sin.

In The Scarlet Letter there are differences between how certain people in the Puritan community handled sin. Some of the Puritan’s weren’t thought of as well because of their sin, and some didn’t even want to admit their sin. In the book there are two characters that particularly struggled with sin, Hester Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale. The way these two characters handled their sin is different from each other. Hester Prynne is one of the characters that are seen in the book that has struggled with sin.

Hester Prynne’s ability to sustain her stability and strength of spirit is the express result of her public guilt and penance. She was Arthur Dimmesdale’s partner in adultery, but she is used by Hawthorne as a complete foil to his situation. Unlike Dimmesdale, Hester is both strong and honest. Walking out of prison at the beginning of the novel, she decides that she must “sustain and carry” her burden forward “by the ordinary resources of her nature, or sink with it. She could no longer borrow from the future to help her through the present grief” (54). Hester openly acknowledges her sin to the public, and always wears her scarlet letter A. In the forest scene, she explains to Dimmesdale that she has been truthful in all things except in revealing his part in her pregnancy. “A lie is never good, even though death threaten on the other side” (133). Even Dimmesdale himself realizes that Hester’s situation is much healthier than his own when he states, “It must needs be better for the sufferer to be free to show his pain, as this poor woman Hester is, than to cover it all up in his heart” (92-93). This life of public shame and repentance, although bitter, lonely, and difficult, helps Hester retain her true identity while Dimmesdale seems to be losing his.

Through out the course of history, those who were considered sinners were often out casted from the society. This is much the case with Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. After a public trial, Hester is considered a sinner due to her birthing of a so called “devil child”. Hester is convicted to the life long bearing of a scarlet letter on her chest. The Scarlet Letter that Hester Prynne wears symbolizes the change in perception of sin through out the novel. Due to the revelations of the governor Winthrop and the reverend Dimmesdale, the way sin is perceived changes from one of shame to the idea that every one is a sinner in their own right.

     As many know the shape of the Scarlet Letter was a letter “A”, and that the original meaning was to mean adultery. This was true throughout many chapters of the book, and became evident by how the Puritans treated Hester. Once again, even from the start of the book. In the first chapter all the towns people wait for Hester to come out from the huge iron doors. And even though they have yet no clue as to who or why someone is behind that door, the presence of hatred for whatever is behind the door is apparent. When they finally do see that Hester is the culprit, and wearing the Scarlet Letter, they proceed to badger her along with everyone else, and even the guard shows a sign of hatred. “___________________________________________”. Once again though, the Puritans eventually go back on these feelings, like they never even had them in the first place. By chapter thirteen Hester is seen no longer by the Puritans as a sinner, but almost as a holy figure. “How’s that?” Well, by this time Hester has done numerous deeds for the rich and the poor, and due to this fact the letter

However, this doesn’t always happen. Some characters, like Dimmesdale, never get the chance to redeem themselves, which forces them to live with their guilt and sin for the rest of their life. The Scarlet Letter deals with the acts of sin committed by the novel’s main character, Hester Prynne. She commits what the Puritan society believes is the worst sin any person can commit, adultery. Though Hester believes what she did isn’t that bad, her society views her actions as the work of the devil.

‘The Scarlet letter’ is meant to be a symbol of shame for Hester, and instead it becomes a symbol of identity. As Hester’s character develops the Letter ‘matures” along side her . As it ages, it shifts from meaning “Adulterer” to stand for “ Able”.. Hester bonds to the letter as much as she bonds to little Pearl, by choosing to keep them both. She could have given Pearl to the minister and she could have fled New England and left the letter far behind her and moved on with her life, instead she chooses to embrace her punishments. The letter is almost insignificant beside Pearl as a symbol of the sinful act commited by Hester, and helps to point out the meaninglessness of the community’s system of judgment and punishment. The ineffectiveness of this course of action is reinforced in chapter seven “...and the bond-servant, perhaps judging from the decision of her air and the glittering symbol in her bosom, that she was a great lady in the land, offered no opposition.”

"In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it" (Hawthorne 52). As Hester Prynne, the main character, is put through hardships from her sinful nature, she faces the rough times sin gave her and the way she endures the lives of the people closest to her. Nathaniel Hawthorne explains how a small Puritan village gets through sin and the way it took over their lives in The Scarlet Letter. Light and dark imagery, alluding to the larger conflict between good and evil, is present throughout the novel in the characters of Hester Prynne, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, and Roger Chillingworth.