Honors English 10 A 2/9/23 Scarlet Letter Have you ever noticed that in life there is evil wherever you go? A perfect example of this is in a story, The Scarlet Letter, written in the 1800s by Nathaniel Hawthorne about a story placed in the 1600s. This story is of Hester Prynne, the protagonist in the story, who gives birth to Pearl, a bastard child, with Dimmesdale in a highly religious puritan society and must live with the sin of adultery by wearing a scarlet letter. In his novel, The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne uses a Wild Rosebush, Pearl, and Hester’s Cottage to show that it is natural to have good and evil to be in balance together. First off, Hawthorne uses the Wild Rosebush to show that everything in nature is at a balance between good …show more content…
Hester is viewed by the community as inferior because of her scarlet letter A which she must wear as a constant reminder of her horrid deed. The letter A which she wears stands for her sin of adultery and the color scarlet stands for the sexiness and evil which the sin is. Hawthorne narrates, “On the breast of her gown in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A” (Hawthorne 59). This quote is used in the story to show that the letter is meant to stand out and be a reminder of this terrible sin. As the story continues, the views on Hester by the Puritan society change drastically. As the townspeople start to look deeper into Hester, they realize the good she does to do right by her sins. The people saw the service she provided to the community such as caring for the sick and poor and the selflessness bouncing off of her. When you have sinned you must stand atop a scaffold in the center of the town, during the story Hester accompanies Dimmesdale on the scaffold where a meteor flies across the sky creating the letter A. Instead of believing that the A stood for adultery, the townspeople believed that the A stood for Able. Hawthorne explains, “Such helpfulness was found in her,—so much power to do, and power to sympathize,—that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength” (Hawthorne 196). In this, it can be seen that there has been a shift in attitude towards her and the sympathy felt towards Hester. This symbolizes the good in life because it shows her striving to make up for the sin by servicing her community and balancing this evil with being