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The Forest In The Scarlet Letter Essay

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Kira Newell
Honors American Studies P3
9/22/14
Prompt #2 The Forest Is Your Oyster Amidst the emotionally stagnant and vengeful atmosphere of 17th century Boston, society rarely acknowledges the raw and transparent passion of the nature around them. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter, the emotions characterized by the surrounding forest acts as an antithesis to the strict rules of puritanical society. The citizens associate sin and evil with the daunting unknown forest while others find it to be a sanctuary of solitude forgiveness. Hester Prynne is forced to wear an A on her chest to represent her sin of adultery. To escape the harsh and endless judgments of the other citizens, she moves to a cottage near the edge …show more content…

When asked who her father was and where same from she replied "she had not been made at all, but had been plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses that grew by the prison-door" (Hawthorne). This bush represented Hester's sin of passion and thus shows that Pearl's very roots were planted with sin and passion. Although Hester struggled between a life in the forgiving woods or in a judgmental society, Pearl only grew up with one half of the argument. She had a strong " trait of passion . . . The child could not be made amenable to rules. The mother's impassioned state had been the medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral life . . . Above all, the warfare of Hester's spirit, at that epoch, was perpetuated in Pearl." (Hawthorne 83). This is why the society views Pearl as a devilish child. She is born with all of the qualities that are found in Nature. Born out of honesty and passion she fits in the forest well. During one of their trips in the forest the brook was described to "whisper tales out of the heart of the old forest whence it flowed . . . the streamlet kept up a babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy, like the voice of a young child that was spending its infancy without playfulness" (Hawthorne). The narrator describes this forest scene almost as if it were an unguided child, just like Pearl. Society doesn't accept Pearl because she is a child of

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