Light Is The Symbol Of Truth In The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne

Poet James Russell Lowell once wrote, “Light is the symbol of truth.” The author of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, shares this same sentiment throughout the novel. The difference between darkness and light symbolizes the clash between truth and deception. The main characters illustrate how light connects to truth, and how truth ultimately leads to salvation.

Light means truth. Hester has been standing on her pedestal for quite a long time. Hawthorne states, “Such an interview, perhaps, would have been more terrible than even to meet him as she now did, with the hot, midday sun burning down upon her face and lighting up its shame” (Hawthorne 61). Hester has just spotted Chillingworth in the crowd. She is nervous that he will see

First, Hester had just been released from jail. When she was released from jail she has the scarlet letter on her chest and she is holding a baby. Hawthorne says, “She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the too vivid light of day; because its existence, heretofore, had brought it acquainted only with the gray twilight of a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the prison” (50). When Hester came out of prison Pearl faced away from the sun because she had just been living in a dark prison for her whole life. Pearls very existence represents truth. It represents the truth because now everybody knows that Hester was together with someone in order to have Pearl. Pearl being in the light of the day sun showed Hesters truth. Pearl was not able to hide because of the light. The light connects to Pearl. Pearl revealed the truth of Hester. Then, Hawthorne decides to talk all about Pearl. Hawthorne is giving a description of how Pearl is unique and magnificent. Hawthorne states pearl as, “So magnificent was the small figure when thus arrayed, and such was the splendor of Pearl's own proper beauty, shining through the gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a paler loveliness, that there was an absolute circle of radiance around her on the darksome cottage floor” (86). Pearl is so beautiful that she shines bright

Hawthorne is writing about how strange and beautiful Pearl is and states, ——— the intelligence that threw its quivering sunshine over the tiny features of this child! […] Man had marked this woman’s sin by a scarlet letter, which had such potent and disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her, save it were sinful like herself. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a lovely child, whose place was on that same dishonored bosom, to connect her parent for ever with the race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven