Hester Prynne In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

Hester Prynne lives in an era in which people strive for moral perfection, and trample wild passion and freedom in the process. She is like a rose among weeds in The Scarlet Letter, portrayed by Nathaniel Hawthorne as a beauty of nature that stands out from the strict uniformity of Puritan society. However, her wild passion tempts her to fall in love and commit adultery. Hester is forced to wear a scarlet letter A for the rest of her life, and she is banished from society for her sin. The townspeople regard her as a living ignominy, and even young children taunt her with stones and mud. Though Hester undergoes immense emotional pressure and moral confusion in the seven years after her sin is revealed, she manages to learn and grow from the effects the scarlet

Her punishment has unique effects: “The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread” (Hawthorne 207). Already a standout from her society, Hester’s thoughts wander as freely as her spirit. Her separation from the town has the effect of expanding her view on the society she came from, and allowing her to judge its values. Through the years of her exile, “she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticizing all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel” (207). Hester’s distance from society allows her to judge the rules of the clergy and Puritan government with an unconventional degree of freedom. When Hester meets Dimmesdale in the forest and proposes an escape plan, he is shocked by her freedom of thought. In Dimmesdale’s view, “ Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage an and activity, and for so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed, from society, had habituated herself to such a latitude of speculation as was altogether foreign to the clergyman” (207). Restricted by