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Hester's Identity In The Scarlet Letter

911 Words4 Pages

2/28/2018 Jake Curran

THe Relation between the scarlet letter “A” and Hester’s Identity

Hester Prynne’s strength is the most intriguing thing of her character. The author doesn’t give away anything really about Hester’s life before her conflict with the letter, but he does show that she constantly lives through humiliation and torment as a result of her living in a Puritan society. Hawthorne shows how the scarlet letter ends up ruling her life and becomes a part of Hester’s identity. It shows how she can’t get away from her mistake, it follows her throughout the whole book and how it really affects her.

What Hawthorne does in fact tell of Hester’s early life is that she came from a “genteel but impoverished English family” (Hawthorne …show more content…

The author even points out that she has such amazing hair noting, “dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam” (Hawthorne ). She is mentioned as being so stunning Hawthorne reciting, “her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped” (Hawthorne ). But when she is met with her gruesome penance of 7 years for her sin, her beauty is outshone by the shame and guilt she deals with because of the scarlet letter that was sewn to her bosom. For example, Hester hides her luscious dark shining hair beneath a cap. The cap and the letter resemble her shame showing through and how she is struggling to deal with her crime of adultery. In Chapter 13, we see her become the radiant beauty she was several years earlier when she frantically removes her cap that is covering her beautiful hair and the scarlet letter sewn to her bosom. In this action, we can see Hester light up as she tears the letter away from her bosom and we see her really happy for the first time in the book, this shows the physical and psychological torment that the letter causes her. Hester only has a brief feeling of freedom and empowerment though, as Pearl ballistically demands she returns the letter back to her bosom. While the punishment over her sin effects her physical beauty, it has a much more massive effect on her internal identity. Even though Hester possesses this great beauty she is overlooked because of the letter She is only known as the immoral woman who committed adultery, she is still known as the woman possessing the scarlet

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