Scarlet Letter Forest Symbolism

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne expels herself to the forest after being convicted of adultery in order to remove herself from the public eye. In the forest, Hester allows herself to live peacefully without the fear of judgment for her crimes. Being away from the scene of her crime allows Hester to eventually learn to live with her mistakes. Later in the story, Hester's peers also leave the Puritan town in search of nature for similar reasons. Each of the characters seeks the forest with feelings of confinement and oppression, only to have their worries exonerated upon entry. Within The Scarlet Letter, nature serves as an outlet for social outcasts to escape the confinement of their puritan lifestyle by giving them

To Puritans, the forest represents a place of pure evil. A scary “black man” who keeps a book of the names of everyone who has ever sinned is just one example of the evils that inhabit the forest. The forest is a place for criminals and sinners alike to live in exile, separated from the puritan's seemingly untainted society. To people like Hester, who stand out from the Puritan society, the forest is a place where they can be their natural selves. Being in the forest allows Hester to act upon her natural tendencies, and not have to worry about what people think of her actions. In chapter 5, Hawthorne depicts Hester's feelings towards the forest when he writes, “… kept by no restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the Puritan settlement, so remote and so obscure… and having also the passes of the dark, inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness of her nature might assimilate itself with a people whose customs and life were alien from the law that had condemned her…” (71). The forest is antithetical to Puritan society. Within the forest exists a community where pure human instinct drives individuals to exist innately. This inevitably means that within the town, citizens see human instinct as an unnatural occurrence. Puritan views force followers to conform to a lifestyle opposing the choices that

The town is made up of a series of guilty, hypocritical individuals. Many of the townspeople, although unproclaimed sinners themselves, judge Hester Prynne for her sinful behavior. Within the town, leaders closely monitor the citizens, never allowing them to step out of line. Although this may appear to be a miserable existence, the text provides many clues as to why people remain in this seemingly negative situation. Throughout the novel, the narrator introduces the idea that one should stay at the scene of their crimes for the duration of their punishment. Therefore, the townspeople, being sinners, should remain in the town until they are able to open up about their mistakes. In chapter 5, the narrator explains why Hester remains in New England after being freed from the prison, “...there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given color to their lifetime…” (71). Since all the townspeople are sinners, as we know from Dimmesdale's sermons, they feel obligated to stay in the town where their crimes were committed. The townspeople are forced to wake up every day, surrounded by the places where their terrible crimes occurred. The town symbolizes punishment for the