Response To The Scarlet Letter

Response Paper In the novel, The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a great inspirational book. This novel symbolizes how the puritans were really like back then. The puritans strongly believed that in their religion, so if someone committed a sin, they would be punished terribly. I am really glad that I chose this novel to read because it was very realistic and historical. One reason why I enjoyed reading this book because Hawthorne named the character by their personalities, for example, Chillingworth was very cold-hearted and his name begins with chill which means cold. In the beginning of the novel, there was many words that I did not know, which was very tedious because I had to kept looking up what they meant but other

My favorite character was the protagonist, Hester Prynne because even though her life was a huge mess in the novel she still remained always positive. Hester was always trying to be the best mother for her daughter, Pearl. Even though, she committed a sin by cheating on her husband, I liked her because she recognized she did a mistake and owned up to it. Hester always wore the scarlet letter on her because she did not want to be executed. While I was reading this novel, I started to believe that she actually liked wearing the scarlet letter. In the novel, Hawthorne states, “But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and self-devoted years that made up Hester’s life, the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world’s scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too” (244). Basically, Hawthorne is saying that the scarlet letter represented as a sin then but in Hester’s life now, the scarlet letter represented her a lot of memories that she enjoyed. She was my favorite character because she always turned a negative situation to a positive

He was very mean and very unfair to Hester. Roger Chillingworth was the husband Hester cheated on, but he had left her two years ago. In my opinion, if he had her left, she had no choice to move on and be with someone that made her happy. When Roger came back, he wanted to seek revenge, but I felt like he had no right to. Another reason, why I do not like him was because Hester asked him for forgiveness but he refused to accept her apology. I think Roger also had some fault into this whole thing, if he would have never left, Hester would have never cheated on him. In the novel, Hawthorne states, “In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man’s faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil’s office. This unhappy person had effected such a transformation by devoting himself, for seven years, to the constant analysis of a heart full of torture…” (164). In other words, Hawthorne is saying that Chillingworth was wasting him time seeking revenge because it was turning him to such a cold-hearted person. I disliked him so much because he wanted to seek revenge for something that could easily been prevented if he never left