In today’s transgression of a religious or moral law, especially when deliberate. Set in seventeenth-century Puritan Massachusetts, the novel Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, centers on the travails of Hester Prynne, who gives birth to a daughter Pearl after an adulterous affair. Hawthorne’s novel focuses on the effects of the affair on specific characters human behavior, such as lust, sloth, and wrath rather than the affair itself. In the novel, the author uses the characters Hester, Chillingworth, and Reverend Dimmesdale to exemplify the different variety of sins and their effects on human behavior. Reverend Dimmesdale’s life and sickness symbolizes the sin known as sloth. In the characters’ religion, sloth is one of …show more content…
Sloth most commonly means physical and spiritual negligence, however it includes failing to do things that should be done. The Reverend feels guilty about not revealing himself as Hester’s lover and the father of Pearl. However instead of announcing “I, your pastor, whom you so reverence and trust, am utterly a pollution and a lie” he keeps his secret to himself (134). Need to expand and make longer. Hester’s adultery is a superb example of lust, another of the sins represented in The Scarlet Letter. Dictionary.com defines lust as an intense desire, usually food, money, power, fame, or sex. When Hester’s husband, Roger Chillingworth, sends her ahead of him to Boston, she has an affair with the town minister Reverend Dimmesdale. The affair leads to Hester giving birth to her child, Pearl. Hester’s life after her act of adultery exemplifies a great representation of what lust can do to someone’s life.