Hester's Sin In The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hester and Dimmesdale have a very unique love for eachother. Their love is reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet in the way that they are not able to pursue it. They are people who have been hardened and hurt by their past mistakes. They share that connection with each other unlike anyone else. Hester and Pearl go to meet up with Dimmesdale in the forest in complete effort to keep their relationship a complete secret.
Sin in puritan times was not taken lightly. Ignominy was how sinners were punished, and in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the protagonist Hester Prynne was no exception. She was publicly shamed, and forced to wear the letter “A” on her chest. Everything that was meant to be ugly in Hester’s life, turned into something beautiful.
In the book The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne portrays the transgressions of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale and the consequences of adultery and revenge. Roger Chillingworth, a physician and the secret spouse of Hester, torments Dimmesdale to his death. There is a substantial amount of evidence that Chillingworth’s sin is greater than the minister’s; but in reality, Dimmesdale has committed the greater sin. The common perspective is that Chillingworth commits a tremendous sin by torturing Arthur Dimmesdale to the verge of death.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter takes place in the Massachusetts Bay colony during the 17th century. The story revolves around a young woman, named Hester Prynne, who is forced by her community to bestow a scarlet “A” on her chest for the rest of her life in order to remind her of the adulterous sin and crime she has committed. As her punishment, in the form of public humiliation, Hester is constrained to stand upon a scaffold in the town square while holding her illegitimate baby, Pearl. In the midst of the townspeople, she recognizes a familiar face; her long, lost husband who had been presumed dead at sea.
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.
Although publicly admitting to sin can be a challenging task, time will heal the initial pain. Hester Prynne, of the Scarlet Letter, lives this lesson as she commits the sin of adultery. Her punishment for the sin is to wear the letter “A” on her bosom until she is allowed to remove it by the Puritan authorities wishes. Initially, Hester feels guilt and shame as she wears it. As Hester’s character grows in strength, she overcomes the letter’s original purpose of punishment.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne is an extreme outcast in her society following her public ignominy and being sinfully branded as the adulterer. Succeeding Hester’s removal of the “A” from her chest, she initially believes that “the burden of shame and anguish departed from her spirit” (182). Hester feels as though the removal of the “A” has removed the stigma pertaining to the “A”, as well as the constraints and disregard society has cast upon her. But whether or not Hester contains a physical marker of her ignominy, she will be abandoned within society. After seven years of being accustomed to Hester’s sin, townspeople still believe Hester was “dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy” (203).
Punishment of Puritans for their sins occurred harshly and frequently, and these punishments ranged from fines, branding, and severe whippings to hanging and death. Many of these penalties involved public humiliation of some kind, which made it extremely difficult for townspeople to accept by their peers after they had sinned. Because the Puritans believed religion was immensely important, the community was often reluctant to allow citizens that exhibited sinful behavior to achieve redemption (Cox). However, in the case of Hester Prynne, an adulterer in Nathaniel Hawthorne 's The Scarlet Letter, the townspeople eagerly made amends with her. This novel narrates the life of Hester Prynne, who committed adultery and courageously accepted the repercussions
Hidden vs Expressed Sin Destroyed from the outside in or suffering for years on end; neither represents a favorable consequence, but one can lead to a rebirth. Consequences of sin can vary, because hidden sin and exposed sin express themselves in different ways. Hidden sin can eat away at a person, while expressed sin rehabilitates a lost soul. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, two main characters, Dimmesdale and Hester, demonstrate their own dealings with sin. The two had committed adultery, but only Hester’s sin revealed itself to the community.
Hester and Dimmesdale each are equivalent in the sin that they commit, but their lives and fates are different because Hester had to repent for her crimes while Dimmesdale bottled up his guilt inside. The indirect result of Dimmesdale’s concealment of the truth was Chillingworth’s torture, which played a large role in Dimmesdale’s untimely death. Chillingworth snapped when Hester did not reveal Dimmesdale’s crimes. Hester, in part, helped Dimmesdale in
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the tale of sin, revenge, and punishment, Hester Prynne involves herself in self-deception due to being caught up in a fraudulent interpretation of her sin and lives in an opaque concept of a better life. Hawthorne 's emotional and psychological drama revolves around Hester Prynne, who is convicted of adultery in colonial Boston by the civil and Puritan authorities. She is condemned to wear the scarlet letter "A" on her chest as a permanent sign of her sin. Consequently, Hester is complicated by her own interpretation of the letter and is embittered by the fact that she deems her punishment and the trials of her punishment will disappear along with the removal of the Scarlet Letter revealed by the characterization of her attitude in the novel. In the beginning, Hester attempts to prove that she does not care about what other people think, but later becomes paranoid and wants to escape from being the product of wrongdoing that the town perceives her as.
The novel The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850, focuses on the life of a young woman named Hester Prynne, who is tried and convicted of adultery. In the beginning of the book, Hester is seen on the scaffold, clutching a baby. Throughout the first three chapters, the baby is mentioned, but not given a very prominent role. However, her character truly adds an inside look into the chapters. The first time the baby appears is in chapter two, when Hester is walking up to the scaffold.
Combining two field is not always easy, but for Johannes Kepler it was. The astronomer is most famous for discovering the three laws of planetary motion. However, discovering them was not an easy process. It took quite some time and would have been unachievable without the influence of theology on Kepler’s and previous astronomer’s work. The combination of astronomy and theology may seem far fetched, but the two had to go hand-in-hand for Kepler to achieve as much as he did.
Hester's punishment was a judicial sentence; however, being forced to stand on the scaffold for three hours, and to wear the scarlet letter "A" for the rest of her life. It was socially humiliating. Hester was sent to prison for committing adultery. Hester was forced to live with the consequences by wearing the scarlet letter "A". Hester is physically and emotionally reminded of her sin, while wearing the scarlet letter "A".
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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