Hester's 'Moral Ambiguity In The Scarlet Letter'

Terence Martin makes an intriguing point in this discussion of Hester in Chapter 18 when he asserts his claim that “seven years of ignominy have left her a resolute priestess of a private cult”. (Martin) This is an intriguing assertion because it shows the dangers of moral ambiguity. Hester “wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest”, (Hawthorne 399) and like the forest that the Puritans so greatly fear, Hester has made a pact with the Black Man in the forests of moral ambivalence. Perhaps Hawthorne would say that Hester has transcended the moral confines of the archaic and hypocritical Puritans, but clearly Hester’s venture into the moral badlands have bestowed upon her a false moral compass fashioned from “seven years of ignominy” (Martin) and guilt.

Dimmesdale, “never having gone through an experience calculated to lead him beyond the scope of” (Hawthorne 401) traditional and honorable laws that he is enticed by the malefactress and seductress Hester Prynne as she spreads her newfound moral cancer into the mind and soul of a once pios paragon of the populace and transfiguring him into a sanctimonious heretic, while simultaneously extirpating any prospect he had at sanctification. Hester and Dimmesdale boldly tread together as heretics into the “unredeemed, unchristianized, lawless region” (Hawthorne 403) of their lives with great gaiety and termarity as Hester casts aside her scarlet letter, the talisman that was both her redemption and her