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Essay On The Scarlet Letter And Dimmesdale's Secrets

410 Words2 Pages

Secrets have the power to destroy reputations and endanger people’s livelihoods. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne has an affair which leads to her having a child. However, she refuses to ever reveal the identity of the child’s father and has to face all punishment on her own. Roger Chillingworth arrives in Boston the day Hester has to stand on the scaffold, but decides to not expose that he is her husband from Europe that everyone thought was dead. Lastly, readers discover that Reverend Dimmesdale is the father to Hester’s child, but he does not announce this until years later. Throughout The Scarlet Letter, Hester, Roger, and Dimmesdale keep secrets and deceive the public and, because of this, their lives are changed forever. Hester is …show more content…

The scarlet letter “A” blazes in front of everyone’s eyes as they solemnly watch the woman face her punishment. When she is confronted by Governor Bellingham, Reverend Wilson, and Reverend Dimmesdale and asked to confess who the father is, Hester refuses. She claims that her “child must seek a heavenly Father; she shall never know an earthly one” (Hawthorne 49)! However, this means that all of the blame is thrown on to Hester’s shoulders to carry, forcing her into a life of solitude and loneliness. After leaving prison, she settles down in a cottage secluded from the rest of the town where she makes a living with her extremely intricate needlework. Whenever Hester walks through the town, the people harshly judge her or their children attack her by throwing mud, for example (Hawthorne 71). The only life Hester now knows is one of seclusion and desolation; her sole true happiness takes form in her now older child, Pearl. However, because the townspeople believe Hester is an unfit mother, they try to take Pearl away. Ultimately she keeps her child, but the citizens reiterate that in their eyes Hester will always be the woman that had an illegitimate child with a father that remains unknown. The only person that avidly searches for the identity of this mysterious father is Hester’s former husband, Roger

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