Guilt In The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote the famous American Classic, The Scarlet Letter, in 1850. The Scarlet Letter takes place in the 1600’s in a puritan town. Hawthorne portrays the main character, Hester Prynne, as a beautiful European woman who was sent to live in a Puritan American town with her husband, known as Roger Chillingworth. Sadly for Hester, her husband never made it to American land. Thinking that her husband had died traveling across the ocean, Hester slept with the Puritan minister, Mr. Dimmesdale and became pregnant with his child, Pearl. Labeled an adulterer, Hester Prynne, and her daughter Pearl, an imp like child, lived life on the outskirts as outcasts because of Hester's sin. Hester was sentenced to wear a scarlet letter on her chest

To begin, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses a scaffold to convey the feeling of guilt that many of the characters amid the book are feeling. Throughout the novel, Hawthorne describes the scaffold as a place where people come and face their guilt, then later feel better about the sins that they have committed, due to the fact that the sin is out in the open. The scaffold is described as this horrid, and haunting place where people come to accept their punishments. Hawthorne portrays the scaffold as being in the center of the marketplace. By placing the scaffold in the middle of the marketplace, Hawthorne infers that the harsh puritan town revolves around the punishment of the guilty. In the beginning of The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne, along with her baby, Pearl, emerge from the prison so that Hester can face her punishment on the scaffold. Hester and her child are sent to the marketplace where they must stand on the large platform, to own up to the sin that Hester has committed. Hawthorne narrates the scaffold as, “That the mildest and

Additionally, Chillingworth, the villain of this story, is described as a crooked walking, death bringing, and awkward looking man. In the beginning of the novel, Chillingworth and Hester decided to pack up and move to the Puritan town. Instead of taking the same boat, Chillingworth was on a later shipment than Hester, which had crashed along the way. For years, Hester believed that her husband had died in the crash, since he had not been seen or heard from. While Hester is in the puritan town, Chillingworth is held captive by Native Americans, and practices native along with European medicine. Later, Chillingworth meets Hester and Pearl, and vows that he will torture the man that did this to her. Chillingworth finds out that the father of Hester’s baby is Dimmesdale, becomes his roommate, and later his leech, sucking every ounce of happiness left in Dimmesdale. Hawthorne renders, “He attached himself to him as a parishioner, and sought to win a friendly regard and confidence from his naturally reserved sensibility” (Hawthorne Pg. 118) Hawthorne is describing Chillingworth as a leech since he has attached himself in every aspect of Dimmesdale's life. Chillingworth lives in the same town, goes to the same church, and lives in the same house as Dimmesdale, making his friendly regard impossible for Dimmesdale to escape. Chillingworth's