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Hester Prynne Pride Quotes

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My first introduction of Hester Prynne, from what the author described, showed that she wore the Scarlet Letter on her chest with pride and she showed no sense of remorse on her face. “In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople and neighbors.” (pg.46) My response would be “how could she commit an act so unholy as a mother, and display pride?” The comparison and contrast that Hawthorne makes between Hester and her baby is that her baby is a sin-born infant but never committed an act of adultery. The baby is forever shamed and sinned …show more content…

“They should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne’s forehead.” (pg.45) “This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die.” (pg.45) Other responses to her embroidering the scarlet letter on her chest were …show more content…

In the beginning, the husband was trying to calm her passion. “Drink it! It may be less soothing than a sinless conscience. That I cannot give thee. But it will calm the swell and heaving of thy passion, like oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous sea.” (pg.62) His response to her disloyalty was that he believed it was partially his fault for thinking that a beautiful woman would love him for his intelligence and overlook his physical deformity. “What had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own! Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I deformity in a young girl’s fantasy!” (pg.63) “Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay.” (pg.63) His response was also to seek revenge on the man who wronged them both. “Think not that I shall interfere with Heaven’s own method of retribution,or, to my own loss, betray him to the gripe of human law. Neither do thou imagine that I shall contrive aught against his life, no, nor against his fame; if, as I judge, he be a man of fair repute. Let him live! Let him hide himself in outward honor, if he may! Not the less he shall be mine!” (pg.64) Hester’s own response back at Roger was that she never felt love for him and never pretended to. “Thou knowest that I was frank with them. I felt no love, nor feigned any.” (pg.63) Her response to him wanting revenge was that she was never going to tell

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Because of this, she’s expected to love him no matter what. The reasons stated within the passage would make no sense to any ordinary person, and would not be recognized as reasons to love someone. “She loved him for the way he sat loosely in a chair, for the way he came in a door, or moved slowly across the room with long strides. She loved the intent, far look in his eyes when they rested on her, the funny shape of the mouth”(pg 2). In order to justify her servitude to him, she unconsciously attempted to look for valid reasons to love him, which didn’t exist, which resulted in these inadequate

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Honest with himself, he was however misleading with the congregation from the fear of facing the punishment and the shame he knew he would face from them. He knew he had done wrong, it was obvious in the penance he imposed on himself, yet he was deceitful with the townspeople giving evidence to the lack of integrity his character had within. It took him seven years and a call of death to finally come clean with his fellow worshippers. It was too late to gain any form of dignity, and if anything he would only be seen as a coward for just dying after his confessed his sin.

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Hester Prynne refuses to be defined by her sin and instead chooses to embrace her identity as an individual. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne says, “The past is gone! Wherever should we linger now? See! With this symbol, I undo it all, and make it as it had never been!”

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Edward Said wrote, “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience.” Hester Prynne cheated on her husband with the head minister of the town and had a bastard child. In 16th century Puritan Massachusetts, this is essentially one of the worst possible things you can do. As a result, the town forces Hester to wear Scarlet A on her chest and shuns her. She worsens the situation by refusing to tell anyone who is the father of the bastard child.

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In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the illustration of guilt as portrayed as a feeling of responsibility or remorse for a wrong doing. In the novel, it exemplifies different types of guilt, such as guilt being cause by physical activity, someone doing wrong to God or religion, and a situation of something having intentions on doing harm to someone. For example, Dimmesdale commits a sinful act of adultery with Hester, who later leaves Hester and Pearl to suffer alone while he remains known as a hero in his village. By Dimmesdale not confessing his guilt and internalizing it for a long period of time, he ultimately ends up impairing his life for not confessing and admitting his deadly sin. Guilt has three attributes as to how it can

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We are all sinners, no matter how hard we try to hide our faults, they always seem to come back, one way or another. Written in the 19th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne shows us Hester Prynne and how one sin can change her life completely. Hester Prynne changes a great deal throughout The Scarlet Letter. Through the view of the Puritans, Hester is an intense sinner; she has gone against the Puritan way of life committing the highest act of sin, adultery. For committing such a sinful act, Hester must wear the scarlet letter while also having to bear stares from those that gossip about her.

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In The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne tells the story of Hester Prynne, a puritan woman living in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the year 1642. She lived in a community where religion and law were almost inseparable. She is known for committing an adulterous crime that is punishable by both religion and law. After moving to Boston from England without her husband, Hester engaged in an affair and had a child named Pearl. After refusing to reveal the father of her child, Reverend Dimmesdale, she is sentenced to wear a mark of her crime on her clothing for the rest of her life.

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Yet, despite the heavy burden she has to bear, she acts more civil than most of the characters do in the entirety of “The Scarlet Letter”. Instead of her guilt and shame tearing her down, she chose to rise above it as seen in this quote; “she [Hester] repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity and force of character, stepped into the open air, as if by her own free will.” (50 Hawthorne) No doubt at this time, Hester’s heart is filled with pain and worry. After all, these were people she has known for some time and perhaps has even befriended.

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Society has had a long history of belittling both people and their individuality, and also not allowing people to reach their full potential. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hawthorne is constantly talking about society in a negative way. Hawthorne himself is a transcendentalist who views society as a terrible institution and a way to stop people from reaching their true potential. Hawthorne's view of both puritan society and society during his time plays into his view and characterization of Hester Prynne. Hester Prynne is a fictional character who committed a sin and was publicly shamed and shunned from society because of it.

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Throughout The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne exposes the blindness of the Puritan people through the treatment of Hester, Chillingworth, and Dimmesdale’s external characters. Hester Prynne is labeled as an adulteress and mistreated by society because of their unwillingness to see her true character. Chillingworth, the husband of Hester, leads the town to believe he is an honorable man and skillful doctor, when his true intents root from his vindictive nature Finally, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester’s lover and the father of her baby, acts as the perfect man therefore the town views him as an exemplar model, while he is truly a sinner. In the novel, Hawthorne portrays Hester as a strong, resilient woman, though the members of her community

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The townspeople “[began] to look upon the scarlet letter as a token, not of that one sin, for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance, but of her many good deeds since.” This quote exemplifies how sin is not a death sentence for Hester. Through hard work and charity it allowed the rigid Puritan society to see her as something different, and as someone who would not let society define who she was. Hester, thus, was not only able to change herself, but also the image in which society viewed her by working hard to benefit the public. Likewise, the scarlet letter which was supposed to represent sin was instead “fantastically embroidered with gold thread, upon her bosom.”

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From the beginning of the story we learn that Hester is the first person who openly admits her role in the original sin of adultery. Hawthorne uses the character Hester to show the effect of acceptance to sin. In chapter 13 of the book Hawthorne says , “Some

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She wanted revenge, so she started spreading lies, ultimately

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In his Novel, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne suggests that the likeness of his main character, Hester Prynne, holding her baby bears semblance to the ever famous image of the Divine Maternity, an image depicting the virgin Mary holding her divinely conceived child. The two images are severely juxtaposed as Hester Prynne has been convicted of committing Adultery (in the process, she conceived an illegitimate child) and is now atoning for her sin whereas The Virgin Mary is widely recognized as a pure being free of sin who was blessed with divine conception. This stark contrast serves its purpose as such, however it also further exemplifies Hester's physical beauty and could possibly foreshadow certain aspects of her personality. In addition,

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In the “Scarlet Letter,” Nathaniel Hawthorne portrays hypocrisy of the Puritan society, where the protagonist Hester Prynne face many consequences of her actions and the how she tries to redeem herself to the society. During the seventeenth puritans believe that it is their mission to punish the ones who do not follow God’s word and it is their job to stop those from sinning. Therefore, the hypercritical puritan society punishes Hester harshly for committing adultery, but in Hester’s mind, she believes that what she did was not a sin but acts of love for her man. Eventually, she redeems herself by turning her crime into an advantage to help those in need, yet the Puritan society still view her as a “naughty bagger.” (Hawthorne 78)

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