Hester Prynne In The Scarlett Letter

Personally, I did not care for this book as I found the story to be quite predictable. However, when we had in-class discussions I often found myself becoming more engaged in the material after listening to various extensive arguments made about the morality of certain characters. One discussion we had concerning Arthur Dimmesdale’s character piqued my interest as the average response to the question of his character was that he was a cowardly man that lacked redeeming qualities. The general consensus about Hester in that same discussion was that she was a woman who didn’t need a man as she raised Pearl with diligence and that she was a personification of the feminism movement. I quietly raised my hand to respond to the arguments being made

Her past before her judgment at the scaffold is referred to in passing, but it is inferred from the quote “since her happy infancy. Standing on that miserable eminence, she saw again her native village, in Old England, and her paternal home; a decayed house of gray stone, with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining a half-obliterated shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility. She saw her father’s face, with its bald brow, and reverend white beard, that flowed over the old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff; her mother’s, too, with the look of heedful and anxious love which it always wore in her remembrance, and which, even since her death, had so often laid the impediment of a gentle remonstrance in her daughter’s pathway” (Hawthorne p 49) that she had a decent upbringing outside of Puritan influences. However, her life was not entirely innocent as she was forced into a marriage with Roger Chillingworth as a young teen. Hester suffered from being forced to grow up too fast, and this is evident as when she is mocked at the scaffold she “Reminiscences, the most trifling and immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever was gravest in her subsequent life; one

It is later revealed that he is the father of Hester’s child, Pearl, and that he hide his sins from his pious community. As a minister, he was well educated and regarded by all to be “a young clergyman, who had come from one of the great English universities, bringing all the learning of the age into our wild forest-land. His eloquence and religious fervor had already given the earnest of high eminence in his profession” (Hawthorne p 55). Historically, the infallibility of the pope has been abused, for example, Pope Leo X sold indulgences to gain funds to reconstruct St. Peter’s Basilica. Dimmesdale unconsciously commits a similar sin in his Puritan community as they even believe that his sermons are godsend “[this is a comment made by the narrator in regard of the public’s opinion of Dimmesdale’s sermons] Therefore, so far as his duties would permit, he trode in the shadowy by-paths, and thus kept himself simple and child-like; coming forth, when occasion was, with a freshness, and fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as many people said, affected them like the speech of an angel” (p 55) Ironically, the truth behind the power of his sermons is because he suffers from the guilt of his sins so greatly, and like the corrupt Leo X he uses his position to serve his own purposes. For example, in chapter eleven he used his position to feel as though he was absolving himself, “His